The elders of the Yoruba Unity Forum (YUF), and before them the Young Turks of the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), have stridently complained about the indefensible marginalisation of the Southwest. The YUF has even gone ahead to publish a two-page advertorial in the newspapers spelling out precisely some of the areas in which the Yoruba in the Southwest are marginalised. The details are very disturbing. The advertorial indicates that no Yoruba is represented in the first 12 top positions that constitute the country’s power hierarchy, yet other powers in the country flow from these 12 positions. It also says that the Yoruba head only three of the 36 MDAs (ministries, departments and agencies), yet these MDAs constitute the principal economic and financial agencies in the country. In addition, says the publication, no Yoruba is represented in the controlling echelons of the judiciary and anti-corruption agencies, and many more, including alarmingly the security agencies. On top of these, says YUF, some ministers, such as that of Aviation, have specialised in sacking the Yoruba from agencies under their control and replacing them with favourites from their preferred ethnic groups.

The question of Southwest marginalisation became a debatable issue last year, and the presidency cannot claim to be ignorant. When eventually the President Goodluck Jonathan government deigned to respond, it chose the unlikely agency of the melodramatic Dr Doyin Okupe to speak on the issue. But in the context of allegations of unhealthy deployment and recruitment in the Army and Immigration, it was expected that when these complaints began to come to light, the presidency would take urgent steps to study and, if required, remedy the problems. Instead, the problems and the controversies have been left to fester, and the government now unfortunately comes across as parochial, insensitive and divisive.

And so, instead of indicating that the Jonathan government is determined to take targeted and responsive steps to tackle the alleged marginalisation of the Yoruba, Okupe prefers to lay the blame on the Yoruba themselves. Hear Okupe’s warped logic: “The issue of marginalisation of the South-West was a political misadventure and political accident, brought about by the Yoruba themselves. If you would recollect, the Yoruba were supposed to produce the Speaker of the House of Representatives, which is the number four position in Nigeria. Due to political mishandling of the leadership of the Yoruba and also the sabotage of the Yoruba people by Yoruba leadership elsewhere, I am talking of the ACN now, the Yoruba leadership in the ACN conspired against the Yoruba people and allowed that position to be taken away. That was the beginning of the marginalisation. You see, when people sit down to share what is not enough and you don’t have anybody to speak for you, there is a problem.”

Okupe also suggested that the marginalisation of the Yoruba could not be blamed on Jonathan. As he put it: “It is not President Goodluck Jonathan’s problem. I am not saying it is not his problem; the President is sympathetic towards the Yoruba people. It is not true that the president hates the Yoruba people; that is not correct. It is our (Yoruba) own making that the election of the House of Representatives was badly handled by the leadership of the Yoruba in the PDP. And also the conspiracy of the Yoruba in the ACN for personal interest and wickedness and evil plotted against their own men. This was the beginning of our problem.” Not being a judicious man, Okupe is of course never given to moderation in speech or thought. As I have noted in this place more than once, the eminent medical practitioner and politician can defend the two sides of the same coin with perfect equanimity, conviction and subversive joy. His conclusion that the Yoruba brought this misfortune on themselves is both crassly political and an indication of deeper underlying malaise in the Southwest. Indeed, because there are many like him running riot with that heresy, Okupe’s statements deserve closer examination.

In presenting their petitions before the president and the public, neither the ARG nor the YUF argued that the Yoruba were responsible for the orchestrated discrimination against the Southwest. In this first part, this column will limit itself to Okupe’s injudicious conclusion. The statistical proof presented by the two Yoruba organisations is of course unimpeachable. If it had been riddled with errors or demagoguery, the Jonathan presidency does not lack attack dogs to punch holes in them and to present a suitable counterpoise. It says a lot about the temper and disposition of the president himself that such shocking discriminatory practices go on unchallenged under him. Even if he didn’t know that the Southwest was so discriminated against in his government, it calls to question his own competence, the diligence of his aides who should keep a tab on things, and the bureaucratic perverseness of many of his appointees who have become indifferent to the factors that predispose the country to crisis and disunity.

Dr Okupe says Jonathan does not hate the Yoruba, in spite of the glaring evidence to the contrary. Well, there is no evidence that he loves them either, or that he harbours no malice against them. During the 2011 governorship campaign, the president was in Lagos to bolster the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chances of winning the state. On the soapbox, he said a few things that should have cost him even the presidency itself. He told the crowd of supporters that if the other ethnic groups (that is, the non-Yoruba) came together, their electoral weight would be of such significance that they could unhorse the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) candidate. That was not just a puerile play of the ethnic card; it opened a window into the ethnically-prejudiced mind of the president. In addition, during the fuel subsidy protests of January 2012, the president was unsparing in condemning those he described as the arrogant elite of Lagos who owned three or more cars and whose pampered underage children cruised around in luxury cars. Again, this was not just a harmless opposition to Lagos’ protest culture; it was an exhibition of unadulterated bitterness against a people.

In spite of Jonathan affording us a peep into his closed mind, many people still thought his statements had no disturbing implications, or perhaps they put them down to both his desperation to help PDP take Lagos State and his discomfort with the unrest that threatened his shaky government. I saw more than that, however. His statements were obviously a Freudian slip that helped us measure the level of his statesmanship and competence. When he made those insensitive statements, I immediately concluded that the country was unlikely to prosper or unite under him. I have been proved right. The country is in turmoil today.

More, there is no element of veracity in Okupe’s opinion that Jonathan does not have a grudge against the Southwest. Not only does the president nurse a grudge, he has pretended not to notice the discrimination his government is promoting against the Yoruba. Moreover, he seems embittered by the criticalness of the zone, its holier-than-thou attitude, and the insufferableness of its business and political elites, including the region’s untameable and effervescent press. I go as far as saying that the president’s main headache is not even the ongoing insurrection in the North, but the censoriousness of the Southwest.

If the president is afflicted by lack of insight into how a modern and complex society should be governed, and also lacks the temperament to bring groups together and forge a harmonious whole out of them, Okupe is even much worse and infinitely more mischievous. He argues that the Yoruba are responsible for their own marginalisation. The only proof he tenders is that a faction of the PDP in the Southwest and the entirety of the ACN voted for Hon. Aminu Tambuwal for the position of Speaker House of Representatives, when in fact the position had been zoned to the Southwest, and one Hon Mulikat Akande-Adeola had offered herself for the position. Okupe argued that this amounted to betrayal and wickedness. He glossed over the fact that the Reps were in a fever to checkmate the influence of the executive and its undisguised attempt to impose a candidate on the lower chamber. Jonathan’s candidate, as well as Obasanjo’s, was Hon Mulikat. Not only did the lower chamber feel insulted that the executive wanted to manipulate and control the legislature, many of them also felt Obasanjo was too narrow-minded and unpopular to impose anyone on the Reps. To vote Hon Mulikat was to give in to the malfeasances of the executive and Obasanjo.

But it is even needless defending the Reps’ choice of Tambuwal, notwithstanding Okupe’s obfuscatory arguments. As far as the marginalisation of the Southwest goes, and as far as the observable bias against the zone is concerned, the position of Speaker is just one tiny block in the Jonathan government’s architecture of discrimination. If Okupe is promising presidential action to redress this major wrong, he is only trying to help the president against what is certain to be electoral debacle in 2015. But no matter what the president does between now and the next election, it will be too little too late. The zone is competent to tell the difference between righting a wrong for electoral reasons and knowing Jonathan for who he really is. I do not think the zone can be fooled. From start to finish, they know Jonathan has not done any major work in the zone. Instead, he has caused more division, displayed unmanageable temper and made incendiary statements when the subject is the Southwest, insulted the zone’s elites, and on top of these, refused to appoint anyone from the zone into notable or sensitive office.

Yet, Okupe gives the impression the president may be unaware of the marginalisation of the Southwest. Does Jonathan not meet with his men? What faces does he see? Who are the people in his inner caucus, and what amperage of insularity do they display? Is he apprised of the country’s history, and does he have a comprehensive and holistic grasp of the issues troubling the people he pretends to govern? I suspect the president is mixed up with the wrong aides who can’t offer him qualitative or educated advice. Yet he needs a qualitative crowd around him to mitigate the damaging effects of his obvious shortcomings, nay, his provincialism.

But why is it always easy to discriminate against the Southwest, marginalise it, or as the YUF sentimentally alleged, purge the Yoruba from key positions in government without fear of repercussions? I will attempt some explanations next week, for these explanations are even more relevant to understanding the current pressures the Yoruba face than the seemingly nugatory exercise of merely drawing attention to any perceived discrimination against them or debating who is or who is not responsible for the marginalisation.

To be concluded next week

Dr Doyin Okupe, the Senior Special Assistant to the President on Public Affairs, lit a fire under the buttocks of squirming Yoruba leaders about 10 days ago when he blamed them for engendering the marginalisation of their region. It was a beguiling view that upset this column last week. On the surface, he was right to blame the Yoruba for authoring their own woes, but a thorough examination would show the foundation of his argument to be absolutely weak. Let me quote him again: “The issue of marginalisation of the Southwest was a political misadventure and political accident brought about by the Yoruba themselves. If you would recollect, the Yoruba were supposed to produce the Speaker of the House of Representatives, which is the number four position in Nigeria. Due to political mishandling of the leadership of the Yoruba and also the sabotage of the Yoruba people by Yoruba leadership elsewhere, I am talking of the ACN now, the Yoruba leadership in the ACN conspired against the Yoruba people and allowed that position to be taken away. That was the beginning of the marginalisation. You see, when people sit down to share what is not enough and you don’t have anybody to speak for you, there is a problem.”

Of course, every political observer is sensible enough to know that Okupe was wrong to have located the genesis of Yoruba marginalisation in the controversial election of Hon Aminu Tambuwal as Speaker of the House of Representatives. Marginalisation of the Southwest, which appears orchestrated under President Goodluck Jonathan, quite clearly predated the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) support for Tambuwal or the repudiation of Hon Mulikat Akande-Adeola. Okupe’s conclusion also glossed over the political complexities that convulsed the House of Representatives’ leadership election in 2011, and unthinkingly simplified the intrigues and motivations integral to the appointment and placement of public and security officials in Nigeria. Even if Hon Mulikat had been elected Speaker, and assuming that by some deft machinations she held on to that post for as long as Tambuwal has, few would be convinced she could blunt the factors that have led to the marginalisation of the Yoruba, which factors the Yoruba themselves apparently misunderstand and mishandle.

Okupe is not the first to polemicise the Yoruba marginalisation claim, even though his observation, on the surface, appears irreproachable. The YUF and the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), both of which broadly speaking represent two contradistinctively ideological pressure groups in the Southwest, have also made similar observations. That the Southwest is deeply marginalised is, therefore, not in doubt. What is in dispute is the cause of the problem. Okupe’s arguments foundered badly when he placed the blame on the ACN’s repudiation of Hon Mulikat. The YUF took a different point of departure in identifying the factors responsible for the problem. Both by the speeches of some their leaders and the communique issued at the end of their Thursday meeting, YUF suggested that lack of unity was responsible for the region’s marginalisation. Perhaps this partly accounts for why the group has Unity embedded in its name.

But YUF also insinuated that in view of the political realignments going on in the country, Southwest politicians needed to avoid deceit in acquiescing to mergers. We can only guess what YUF meant when it talked of unity. For reasons quite unrelated to the objectives of cooperation, the Forum is generally unenthusiastic about Southwest regional integration, which would have been a solid basis for the kind of unity they envision, assuming they truly think unity is a driving force in checkmating marginalisation. And since it is only the ACN from the Southwest that is in the process of merging with other parties, the warning issued by YUF could only have been meant for that party. However, both by its warning against merger and its lack of enthusiasm for integration, the YUF unwittingly lends credence to the existence of political and, maybe, too, ideological divisions in the region, which divisions it perhaps unknowingly exacerbates, if not endorses. YUF may in fact see Yoruba unity as one in which leading Yoruba political and business elites queue behind the Forum or at least pay allegiance to Ikenne, the home of the late sage, Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

But as I have argued in this place many times, that kind of unity is nothing but a chimera. It was never existent even in Awolowo’s time, and it may never happen. Moreover, it is doubtful whether it is desirable. Stripped to the bones, it is hard to see how lack of unity could have fostered marginalisation if other factors were not at play, or if the national political leadership had not been deliberately manipulative, mischievous, insensitive and even incompetent. If the presidency knew its onions, and had taken to heart lessons about how conflicts predispose countries to disintegration, it would have been proactive in promoting power balance, fair play and justice among ethnic and regional groupings in the country. Must Abuja be told what grave consequences often follow deliberately orchestrated power asymmetry, especially when power is skewed for purely parochial reasons or as a punitive exercise to undermine troublesome and exuberant opposition?

Let me state it once again that there will never be unity in the Southwest whether demographically, ideologically, religiously or politically in the sense being advanced by YUF. It is enough that the Yoruba are culturally united, and as a result, and to a large extent, are generally progressive. But their progressivism does not even rise to the level of ideology, and need not, for they are a people at bottom fractious, disputatious, and made up in many disturbing parts of pockets of unprincipled and subversive individuals and entities. They are the only people capable of producing a winner in Chief MKO Abiola, and creating the counteracting forces of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s enviousness and Chief Ernest Shonekan’s betrayal. They are the only people capable of producing the insightful and gifted Awolowo, and nurturing the equally gifted but contumacious Chief Ladoke Akintola. Indeed, as the living Awolowos will recall, the opposition to their patriarch was so insidious at a point that it seemed the whole Yoruba political and judicial elite united against him. I fear that YUF is tilting at windmills. They speak of unity and warn of treacherous mergers; but they had attempted to prop up Governor Olusegun Mimiko of Ondo State as the counterforce to the prevailing political leadership in the Southwest, in spite of his formless political and developmental visions, general lack of fidelity to noble ideas and principles, and lack of foresight.

If the marginalisation of the Yoruba is to be understood, it is certainly not in terms of unity or the lack of it of the people, and not in terms of their ideologies and political affiliations. There is no part of the country that is united, whether Southeast, South-South, or even the seemingly monolithic North. Yes, the Yoruba are to a large extent responsible for the marginalisation of their region, but it is not in the sense Okupe argued, nor in the sense proposed by YUF, nor yet in the sense analysed by most commentators. After all, if we must talk of political unity, it is only Ondo State that is out of the ACN column in the Southwest. Surely no one expects that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the Labour Party (LP) must merge with the ACN in the region for unity to exist or for the region to escape marginalisation.

The single most important factor in the marginalisation of the Southwest is probably the image of itself projected by the region. That image, though a little complex, is actually unflattering. Many observers have suggested, with good reason, that if Abiola had hailed from the North, and the head of state at the time of the 1993 elections had been an army general from the Southwest instead of Gen Ibrahim Babangida, not only would it have been difficult to annul the presidential election of that year, it would have been even more difficult to appoint an interim replacement. This logic may be simplistic and far-fetched, but it was easy to undermine Awolowo in 1963, easy to replace Abiola in 1993, and even easier to recruit those who connived at their replacements and colluded with the national leadership of the day to thwart their political victories.

Pursuant to this observation, I think the Southwest projects the image of an irresolute and long-suffering people in the face of external oppression and machinations. Just as they produce brilliant non-conformists and political juggernauts, they also produce enterprising reactionaries and subversive heavyweights. Babangida had on many occasions insinuated that the annulment of the 1993 presidential election was at the instance of highly placed personalities, some of them from the Southwest. He also added that we would be shocked if we knew the identities of the conspirators. Before then, as if troubled by his conscience, Obasanjo had said the heavens would not fall as a result of the 1993 poll cancellation. And for effect, he added that Abiola was not the messiah we longed for. Conspiracy and treachery are not the exclusive preserve of the Yoruba. But they have managed to turn both into an art. This was why it was not difficult to find Southwest judges to put Awolowo away and stymie his political ambitions. This was also why Obasanjo actively endorsed the infamy of 1993. And this is why Nigerian leaders always find ready accomplices among the Yoruba to subvert the aspirations and principles that have ennobled the Southwest for many generations.

But the image of group envy, group subversion and fractiousness projected by the Yoruba to the outside world is not a recent phenomenon. It predates colonialism. It manifested in Afonja’s rebellion when he took Ilorin out of the orbit and protection of the Oyo Empire in 1817; and when Ibadan for economic and political reasons attempted to address that historical anomaly, it took fellow Yoruba states working in concert to undermine that effort in the late 19th century. The talent to undermine one another is evergreen in the region. YUF, I think, sees unity in terms of its own goals and ambitions. If Mimiko resists friendship with ACN, it is not because he really fears that the progressive party’s hegemony would be destructive, but because his horizon is limited and is therefore unable to key in to wider regional economic and political aspirations. It should not surprise anyone that the much-ballyhooed Southwest regional integration effort is stalling. The region’s governors are not operating on the same wavelength, do not share the lofty vision of integration equally, do not have the capacity to clearly see the shape of the future, and cast wary glances at one another, fearing to be outdone or to be outshone.

In all this, the Yoruba, in spite of their principles, progressivism and civilisation unfortunately give the impression of a weak and exploitable people who crave for unity on the surface but are at bottom committed to undermining their own leaders, regional goals and survival. President Goodluck Jonathan simply does not feel threatened by them as he feels threatened by, say, the North. If he attempts to appoint a few more Yoruba into key offices, it will be nothing more than sheer tokenism designed for electoral gains, or a belated attempt to correct his own leadership shortcomings for having presided over such indefensible lopsidedness.

There are some countries you will think twice before attacking; and there are ethnic groups a leader will think twice before marginalising. The Yoruba do not project that deterrence, that implacable force and power that would make it unattractive for anyone to marginalise them. They are marginalised because their enemies sense their weaknesses, their isolation, their instinctive ethnocide. In their plaintive cry of marginalisation, they cut a pitiable figure of a people burdened by centuries of character flaw, of a people unable to subordinate their individual ambitions beneath their transcendental group objectives, and of a people so terribly buffeted by enemies that in the past few decades they have begun to doubt their own strengths, compromise their own foresightedness, and for the first time actually face a dilemma so cruel that their leaders have to seem to disavow their ‘Yorubanness,’ like Abiola and Obasanjo did, to win a major election.

Concluded

The return of Chief Tony Anenih as PDP Board of Trustees (BoT) chairman is the most potent indication of the torment and crisis of confidence facing the ruling party. It was a terrible act of desperation to exhume the Edo dinosaur. But it is even more shocking to expect that the mothballed dreadnought, this Samson shorn of his hair, can return to service and dazzle like before. His assignment, it seems, is to ensure that Jonathan returns as PDP candidate for the 2015 presidential election. They must be encouraged to make that dream come true. For, given the extraordinary conjunction of political events in the country today, the opposition will find it more rewarding battle Jonathan than any other candidate. I think it is in vain that the president and his party chairman romanticise the exhumation of Anenih and repose abundant hope in his talisman.

It may be too early to begin to speak in superlatives about the All Progressives Congress (APC), a party still in formation but comprising some four political parties determined to challenge the dominance of the PDP. Last Thursday, nine governors and one deputy governor belonging to the four parties in the APC met in Maiduguri, Borno State, the hotbed of Boko Haram fundamentalist violence, for talks on their proposed merger. The meeting, which was third in the series of meetings being held for the special purpose of unification, was successful. The APC probably shifted the venue to Maiduguri because President Goodluck Jonathan was yet to visit the unsettled state. It was a deft political move. In fact, it was a move that stole the thunders of both Jonathan and the PDP.

The APC governors pressed home their advantage by moving round some parts of the city to soak in the adulation of the wearied but grateful Borno people. They also very significantly donated N200m to succor victims of Boko Haram violence. And with an eye on the main chance, they told the press at the end of their meeting that they came to Maiduguri to show solidarity with the people and to prove that leaders needed to show courage in the face of danger. The message was not lost on Jonathan’s government. Cut to the quick, presidential aides quickly announced that the president had planned to visit the state on March 7, and that the APC leaders merely preempted the president.

Planning to visit is unfortunately not the same as actually visiting. By meeting in a city wracked by sectarian and socio-economic uprising, APC has indicated it is capable of thinking on its feet. In addition, the party, even before it is registered, is exhibiting the advantages of nurturing another party to shake the PDP out of its complacency. It will no longer be business as usual. Not only is the polity gradually transiting into a two-party system, it is also evident that the race to 2015 has really begun. Many elements favour the APC already, including dominance in critical regions. If the party can overcome its teething problem, get its zoning arrangement right without the constraints that shackle the PDP, and conducts rancor-free primaries to produce credible and popular candidates, it is hard to see them losing the next polls, or winning by a margin that is less than assertive.

But far beyond whooping for a political party, Nigerians must begin to think less partisan by ensuring that real democracy is enthroned through the availability of credible choices. The way to begin is to defeat the rather incestuous PDP in the coming polls, give a new party with a different set of developmental and socio-political paradigms the opportunity to preside over the country, and let the people have the satisfaction of knowing that waiting in the wings every election year is another beautiful bride in a brilliant, lawful and luxuriant polygamy.

After the vicious cut and thrust of the past 10 days in the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), few within and without the association now expect it to remain the same, either as influential as it was before, or as cohesive as it had hoped when it was founded. It may be premature to write it off, considering that the convulsion tearing it apart is essentially trivial and limited to disagreements within the ruling party, but in the long run it is really hard to see it retaining the kind of relevance that thrust it to the forefront of national politics. Indeed, with the creation of the Peoples Democratic Party Governors’ Forum (PDP-GF), after the Governor Amaechi-led NGF refused to yield to the entreaties of the President Goodluck Jonathan government, it will take some doing to bring the governors back to the sort of unity they were accustomed to. For in fracturing, the governors did not just go their separate ways, they went about it acrimoniously using words that neither dignified their offices nor showed the kind of character many naively thought inhered in state executive mansions.

For NGF, fame has become a double-edged sword. Founded in 1999, the Forum only became notable when it played prominent role in abating the constitutional crisis triggered by the illness of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua. Since then, the body has flexed its muscles on a number of exigent national or party issues including the election of party chairmen, excess crude account, constitutional reform, and electoral reform, among other things. Until now, it had also been fairly stable, with no overt leadership squabbles. So far, too, it has been chaired by five governors, including the long-serving former Governors Abdullahi Adamu and Bukola Saraki of Nasarawa and Kwara States respectively. Before the presidency took the Forum apart using the willing hands of a few governors, in particular, Governors Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom and Ibrahim Shema of Katsina, the public thought governors reasoned more expansively and with admirable depth. Their supposedly copious rationality was thought to be a bulwark against the meddlesomeness of higher powers, including the presidency.

The reason given by the presidency for undermining the unity of NGF is that the association had become a trade union. According to the Special Adviser to the President on Political Matters, Ahmed Gulak, “The leadership of Amaechi in that forum has completely gone contrary to what PDP expects a PDP governor to do. The Nigeria Governors’ Forum has really become a trade union. Some elder statesmen have really come out to explain things in that perspective. For instance, about three weeks ago, Prof. Jubril Aminu came out publicly to say the NGF was not supposed to be a trade union. It is supposed to be an association of governors coming together to discuss common challenges in the country, not to hold the country to ransom.”

While it is true the NGF has been forceful in championing certain causes, even appearing to act as an opposition party to the ruling party, dismissing the Forum as a trade union masks the imperceptible undercurrents in the PDP and in the polity. First, there is a general feeling of dismay that the Jonathan presidency, with its sometimes baffling pronouncements, its mystifyingly uninformed policies, its general lethargy and incompetence, its wastefulness, and its gross inability to inspire the country into innovation and greatness, is unable to rise to the occasion the times demand. The NGF is not inoculated against these frustrations, nor, even if it sympathised with the ruling party, could it pretend to be indifferent to the country’s massive drift towards aimlessness. There is also a limit to how the NGF could promote the interest of the PDP or pull its punches when the ruling party is overreaching itself. After all, the NGF is an umbrella body of 36 governors, not a PDP creation for PDP governors.

Second, much more than merely reacting to what the presidency described as Amaechi’s boisterousness and opposition politics, one of the chief reasons for the president’s hostility is Poll 2015, an ambition that would be endangered if the NGF consistently wrong-foots the presidency. In addition, presidency officials rightly or wrongly believed Amaechi himself nursed presidential ambition, and was probably using the NGF platform to boost both his leadership credentials and countrywide appeal. Amaechi in fact did not help matters by playing the revolutionary. He had a highly publicised disagreement with the president’s wife in Rivers State in 2010, and openly disagreed with the president on a number of issues including disputed oil wells situated between the borders of Rivers, his state, and Bayelsa, the president’s home state. The Rivers governor in fact began to come across as Amaechi the Just, or even Amaechi the Revolutionary. And if left alone, perhaps, he could, in the secret opinion of the Jonathan presidency, start to come across as Amaechi the Great.

But having created those heresies and infused them into Amaechi, the PDP leadership and the presidency committed themselves to burning the new wizard at the stakes. It is no small matter that the Rivers governor himself provided the fuel for the lynch mob. He often spoke candidly when circumspection would have been sufficient. He thought aloud instead of silently, though his thoughts were nothing but alarming revolutionary heresies. And he seemed incapable of stopping at simply playing David to the presidency’s Goliath; but must paint by his words, connotatively or denotatively, a Goliath that is clumsy, vacuous and intemperate. Worse, he seemed to enjoy the new role circumstances thrust upon his shoulders, for he was trusted by his colleagues in the Forum, and they knew he was earnest and honest in his utterances and predilections. Everything about Amaechi, however, drove Jonathan and his aides up the wall.

At any time, there will always be many governors in Nigeria and in the NGF (if it survives) who think rationally and patriotically. They will resist the coercive and corrosive influences of the presidency, and their pride, as well as their natural inclinations, will make them abjure the tendency by the presidency to corral the entire country into one lobotomized whole. Unfortunately, however, there will also be a few governors who think rather obtusely, whose convoluted patriotism is interpreted in terms of the private yearnings of the president, and whose definition of unity and example of duty are rooted in monarchism and focus primarily on a servile relationship between the president and his subjects.

Last week, in the final hours of the collapse of NGF resolve, it was thought only six or seven governors believed Amaechi led the association improperly or imperially. Suddenly after a meeting with the president on Tuesday, and for reasons reporters only speculated, about 16 governors had been persuaded to vote for partisanship over common sense. Thereafter, Akwa Ibom’s Akpabio exuberantly rationalised the creation of PDP-GF and talked of kicking out the Judases within the PDP governors’ ranks. The PDP national chairman, Alhaji Bamanga Tukur, also exulted about a new spirit sweeping through the party, which spirit he believed would engender greater things and open a limitless vista of achievements for the party. It wasn’t apparent to both gentlemen that their newfound enthusiasm could in fact be a reflection of puerile politicking or of betrayal of general and party principles, values and virtues.

It was expected of Tukur, as party chairman, to grandstand unscrupulously before the country in favour of the president, for the president had provoked an earthquake in order to crown and canonise him. On the other hand, the same ingratiation was not expected of Akpabio, for he is legally recognised as chief executive of a state, with rights and immunity vouchsafed to him by the constitution almost as powerfully as the same constitution has done for the president. That he chose to forswear those powers and instead read the politicking in the NGF through the president’s prism was a matter of choice to him. More, however, they were also an indication of a major flaw in his character. By speaking gutsily and with striking imperturbability against Amaechi, Akpabio gave notice of his capacity to listen to his heart rather than his head. That single embrace of the presidency, and the risible justification he lent his action, has probably defined and tarred his politics for all time. It is an action he may not be able to live down.

The turbulence in the NGF was inevitable. The association was indeed becoming more powerful than even opposition parties, and its leadership, when it was personified by a Saraki or an Amaechi, had bigger halo than both party and national leadership. Its strength and ascendancy were underscored by the corresponding weakness and decline of a mediocre presidency. A clash was, therefore, unavoidable. And such a clash, thankfully, always helps to sharpen contradictions and expose leaders and politicians overrated by their accomplishments rather than rated by their lack of virtue and character. This is why I think that while NGF’s future is in doubt, the dismal future and political retrogression of both Akpabio and Shema are not. All it takes sometimes is just one wrong turn to consign a politician to the dustbin of history.

Given the central position the Northeast occupies in Nigeria’s insecurity map, it was expected that once the crown settled over his ears, President Goodluck Jonathan would dash to the region unsettled by Boko Haram insurgency to pacify it, or at least meet minds with stakeholders to devise a way out of the seething cauldron. He did nothing of such, preferring apparently to live in denial of the problem and its horrendous effects. He had wearied himself sending condolences to the dead and dying, and issuing ‘strongly-worded statements’ promising to ‘bring to book’ those instigating the killings in the affected states. It got to a point that even words seemed to fail. Then, finally, he appeared to resign himself only to ruminative contemplation of the scale and scope of the killings, waiting for the day in which both the killers and the killed in the Boko Haram states would exhaust themselves and foreswear both violence and victimhood.

But just when living in denial seemed the perfect strategy for the president to engage the Northeast drama, out came nine ‘meddlesome’ and ‘politicking’ All Progressives Congress (APC) governors embarking on a daring and timely visit to the hot spots of the Boko Haram insurgency. The visit, which came amidst bomb explosions, was conducted with some defiant pageantry. The governors strolled through Maiduguri’s main square and market, waved to crowds of beleaguered north easterners who thought the rest of the country had forgotten about them, and issued mocking statements deploring presidential paralysis in the face of crippling insecurity. Cut to the quick, the presidency replied with unexampled insolence, equally denouncing the governors it claimed had specialised in enunciating policies and actions that were nothing but caviar to the general. It was clear that for the presidency, and given the intensity of the fight in the Northeast, discretion was the better part of valour.

And so, after almost two years of issuing boring press releases and tepid, repetitive condolences, the president finally stirred himself and visited Borno and Yobe States, the epicentres of the Boko Haram insurgency. The APC governors had, according to a columnist with this newspaper, stolen the president’s thunder, but not to visit the region at all would have been even more provocative and indefensible than the poor judgement of visiting after the nine governors prompted a rethink of presidential tactics. For two days last week, therefore, the president shuffled around the two states, promising nothing and getting no commitments in return. If his recent manoeuvres within the ruling party, which led to the enthronement of dinosaurs like Chief Tony Anenih, presaged his interest in 2015, his utterances during his Northeast visit all but indicated he had given up on that entire region. The region had given him the worst headache, such that some of his aides and Niger Delta supporters believed an ethnic conspiracy was afoot to deny him the ‘enjoyment’ of his presidency. If the headache graduated from secret plots to open loathing, the president probably reasoned, it was merely a reflection of the region’s violent character.

Jonathan’s visit was expected to trump the visit of the nine APC governors in financial and material succour, soothing words, empathy, and peace initiatives. He needed to speak peaceably with them. Instead, perhaps because of the said sour relationship between the president and the region, Jonathan unapologetically exchanged diatribe with the zone’s elders. There were no peace initiatives, and there was scant empathy. Indeed, he left the region so infuriated by his brusque remarks and dismissive, if not sardonic, characterisation of their requests that the states’ elders would have preferred he didn’t come. On the real reason the Borno Elders asked for the withdrawal of the Joint Military Task Force (JTF) from Borno and Yobe streets, which is connected with the alleged indiscriminate reprisal killings by soldiers, the president feigned ignorance. All the president deigned to say (See Box) was this: “Let me be very frank, because the analogy that oh, when one soldier is killed the soldiers come and kill scores of people, we have always been admonishing that. We always tell the soldiers to conduct themselves because they are doing internal security job that ordinarily soldiers are supposed not to be involved in.” What about promising investigation into the actions of soldiers who breached the rules of engagement? Nothing. How about sparing a thought and a modicum of human feeling for those extra-judicially murdered? Also, nothing. Sadly – and the president should know better – he seemed to have given the JTF carte blanche to rewrite the rules of engagement. He gave the impression that he felt more for soldiers who died in combat than civilians caught in the crossfire, as if one was any less a Nigerian than the other. Worse, he appallingly and scornfully downplayed the allegation that JTF carried out unlawful killings.

More humiliating to the elders was the president’s direct response to the request for JTF’s withdrawal from Borno State. He incredulously wanted the elders to indemnify him against any loss of life once the JTF was withdrawn. The president puts it very inelegantly in his convoluted lexical fashion: “If the elders agree now to come and sign agreement with me that I should move out all the JTF, but if anybody dies in Borno State, I will hold them responsible. I will sign and I will move, and I will do it. If somebody dies, yes, I will take you. I am going to remove the JTF, but come and sign and I will remove the JTF and you guarantee the safety of life and property of individuals. When you do that today, as I am going, the JTF will start moving to their barracks. But you must guarantee, if anything happens to anybody, that you must be held responsible.” Not only did the president imply that the elders had the power to guarantee peace, he also gave the impression that he could cavalierly withdraw security agents from Borno simply because a few elders gave their word. Were this the way the world fought crime and governed their people, anarchy would have since taken over.

Perhaps the most ominous statement the president made was his reaction to the killing of security agents. Why and how he thought anybody believed he celebrated the death of a security agent by showing restraint is hard to fathom. This is what he had to say on the subject: “I have given the directive to security services, I don’t want to hear that one soldier is killed in the Niger Delta; I don’t want to hear that one security officer is killed in the South East kidnapping; I don’t want to hear that one soldier is killed in Borno State or any part of this country. I cannot preside over this country as a president and my security officers are killed. This people leave their families, stay on the roads and the bush so that we will sleep and I will not want to hear that one of them is killed. We will not allow it and I will not celebrate death of one security officer anywhere in this country…We will not, and I repeat, will not accommodate it.”

Now, Borno Elders probably understand why the president delayed his visit. He was obviously too angry to visit before now; and the visit when it finally came was to read the riot act, not only to the Boko Haram states, but to any other state where security agents are killed. His priority is, by implication, to guarantee the lives of security agents. So, now, will the president begin applying the Odi method perfected by Chief Olusgeun Obasanjo, and which he himself condemned as ineffective? If anyone still holds out hope that Jonathan has the depth and judgement to rule a complex nation, especially one facing dire ethnic and religious challenges, I offer to the optimist the president’s view on the consequences of killing security agents. And if anyone thinks we are not in even deeper trouble than we imagine, I offer the same presidential remark as an example. Let every community in the country beware; even their deviants cannot afford to bite a soldier, protest against police tyranny, or fight a security official to the death.

After the president’s visit, Borno and other states oppressed by Boko Haram terror now know where they stand. They stand alone; and the peace overtures they faintly hoped the president would bring, consequent upon the salutary visit of the APC governors, has become a chimera. Dr Jonathan has all but abdicated his responsibility as a president. He thinks that that responsibility lies with the people and leaders of the states groaning under Boko Haram terror. He probably believes that if the elders tell the fundamentalists to sheathe their swords, the militants would instantly do so. Nigeria would be a paradise the day a few elders had such sweeping moral and political force to command obedience from the populace. What is indeed clear from the president’s visit is that he has absolutely no idea left on how to solve the Boko Haram menace. Worse, he has served notice that state application of terror as a response to fundamentalist terror would henceforth serve as effective deterrence. God help Nigeria as Jonathan embraces Lord Lugard’s Indirect Rule and prepares the ground for fascism.

Considering all these troubling things, it is tempting to ask who the president’s advisers are, and what kind of advice they give him. In fact, more appropriately, we should ask who Jonathan really is; what his mind is made of; and whether in 2011 we didn’t after all buy a pig in a poke.

From what I gathered from the governor of Yobe during my visit, the problem is coming down (abating). It is coming down in Adamawa, in Gombe, in Bauchi and in Niger. But in Borno, we still have some problems. So, if you elders will not condemn it, you will continue to suffer under the terror of Boko Haram, because without peace, we cannot develop Borno. Myself and any head of the security agencies do not want to pay one day allowance to anybody… We need that money to do other important things that will change the economy of this country. We need that money to fund agriculture and to create wealth across this country, including Borno State.

“We are not happy to be spending so much money in the Niger Delta, keeping the JTF there. We are not happy to be spending so much money keeping the JTF in Borno State and other places. Definitely, we are not. In fact, if the elders agree now to come and sign agreement with me that I should move out all the JTF, but if anybody dies in Borno State, I will hold them responsible, I will sign and I will move, and I will do it. If somebody dies, yes, I will take you. I am going to remove the JTF, but come and sign and I will remove the JTF and you guarantee the safety of life and property of individuals. When you do that today, as I am going, the JTF will start moving to their barracks. But you must guarantee, if anything happens to anybody that you must be held responsible. If the circumstances that brought the soldiers are no longer there, that day, they will all leave.

“Let me be very frank, because the analogy that oh, when one soldier is killed the soldiers come and kill scores of people, we have always been admonishing that. We always tell the soldiers to conduct themselves because they are doing internal security job that ordinarily soldiers are supposed not to be involved in. But because of the calibre of weapons the militants are using, the police alone cannot stand. And government will never sit down quietly and wait for insurgents, for some people to take up arms and take a part of this country. Never.

“Whether it is in the Niger Delta, and I have given the directive to security services, I don’t want to hear that one soldier is killed in the Niger Delta, I don’t want to hear that one security officer is killed in the South East kidnapping, I don’t want to hear that one soldier is killed in Borno State or any part of this country. I cannot preside over this country as a president and my security officers are killed. This people leave their families, stay on the roads and the bush so that we will sleep and I will not want to hear that one of them is killed.

“We will not allow it and I will not celebrate death of one security officer anywhere in this country, whether it is in Bayelsa State, whether it is in the Niger Delta, Anambra State, South East, South West, North West, North Central, anywhere. We will not, and I repeat, will not accommodate it. So, if we the elders of Borno State will not condemn it, we will continue to suffer under the terror of Boko Haram, and without stopping Boko Haram, without peace in Borno State, we cannot develop Borno State. Who will come and invest in Borno State? You award road contracts, who will come and work? Nobody! So, let us not play to the gallery.”

It is easy to miss the Saturday Sun’s interview with Col Ahmadu Ali (retd), a former chairman of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and also former Minister of Education. Often, no wisdom is gained by reading some interviews, not to talk of the flagrant manner the interviewees sometimes concoct approbation for themselves. But thankfully, I saw the Ali interview and read it. As expected, Ali said many things about himself and the great work he did as a three-time cabinet minister and resilient party chairman. If his brilliance did not endure or was not recognised, he blamed the iconoclasts that succeeded him, and the ungrateful barbarians that undid the country with their narcissism.

But for such an eminent self-confessed tactician and public servant, it is surprising that Ali didn’t notice his views, as harsh on others as they might seem, gave an unflattering impression of himself as Chief Olusegun Obasanjo’s zany. Now, he probably is not such a person, only that he gave that impression of himself. However, he thinks the world of Obasanjo, and describes him in superlative terms. “Obasanjo is sitting down there,” he began with a fulsomeness that matches his political obscurantism. “He is a bundle of knowledge for this country. If you have any difficulty and you cannot go to him and say come, how did you do it? This is my problem. You are wasting your time. All the people hanging around all these people (in public office) are just bootlickers. They are not advising properly. Obasanjo is the only person who has been Head of State three times in this country.” Ali’s depiction of Obasanjo reminds me of Nebuchadnezzar.

The high point of the interview was when Ali portrayed the Yoruba as a totally ungrateful people on account of their rejection of Obasanjo both as a leader and as an icon. “This man, (Obasanjo) kept faith and voluntarily handed over to civilians,” Ali gushed. “He could have said he wasn’t going. What can anybody do? After all, it is the gun that got them there. And you people still don’t recognise him, especially the Yoruba people who are totally ungrateful kind of people in this country.” That may be a very sweeping dismissal of the Yoruba, but Ali is entitled to his views, even if it indirectly underscored his idolatrous fondness for someone the Yoruba are unlikely to ever respect, let alone embrace.

Ali took his worship of Obasanjo to dizzying heights when he brutally eviscerated the Yoruba in terms that should make a sober man wince. Ali’s interviewer had suggested that the Yoruba could not forgive Obasanjo for robbing a fellow Yoruba, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, of the presidency in the 1979 election. Ali was incensed, and thundered in response: “Don’t talk rubbish. You are talking rubbish. That is the stupidity of the press and the self-appointed Yoruba leaders who are failures in their various fields of endeavour. They are just a total failure. How can you say, in an election where one candidate scored 12 million and showed presence in more than 12 states out of 19 and another candidate scored five million and showed presence in only five states, you then give it to the second person? What is democracy about?…Yoruba are another character.”

The problem is not that Ali harbours such a disconcerting view of the Yoruba, and was not wary of going public with it. The problem, as the malevolently discriminatory Goodluck Jonathan presidency is showing, is that there are many more people in high places who entertain such horrendous prejudices against the Southwest, perhaps angered by the region’s sanctimoniousness, crusading disposition on civil liberties, including press freedom and activism, and their irritating superior airs. Do the Yoruba themselves know how rampant these sentiments against them are in other ethnic quarters? If they do, why do they not moderate their internal schisms to enhance their survivability?

Ali’s fulminatory portrayal shows very clearly why most Yoruba politicians are apologetic about their Yorubaness: like Obasanjo, they believe they must be ethnically masochistic to be relevant in national politics. In a country brimming with perverse deductions and analyses of political behavior, it is not enough for a politician to be an exponent of fairness and justice; for the Southwest in particular, he must also deny his background and culture to be electable. Yet, what we need are not politicians who deny their Hausaness, Igboness or Ijawness, but those who in spite of their ethnic affiliations can be relied upon to be uncompromisingly fair and just, no matter whose ox is gored.

I do not expect President Goodluck Jonathan to reverse or revisit the executive clemency he granted his former boss, former Bayelsa State Governor Diepreye Alamieyeseigha, last week. He will ride out the storm of controversies generated by the pardon and other pardons; and he will likely grant a few more, equally or surpassingly controversial, before his time in office is over. So, let us ignore the controversies surrounding the pardons, such as the presidency’s poor recordkeeping that led to the late Gen Shehu Yar’Adua being pardoned twice, or the controversies swirling around the list of the pardoned, which we all know was expanded probably as an afterthought to legitimise the main beneficiary of the Jonathan pardons. Let us instead focus our attention on the pardon granted the former Bayelsa governor and the undue emotionalism surrounding the issue.

It is a given, as former United States president Bill Clinton argued in 2001 when he tried to defend the 140 pardons he granted on his last day in office, that “The exercise of executive clemency is inherently controversial.” I, therefore, do not expect that Jonathan would grant pardons without eliciting some controversies or attracting attacks, some of them vicious. Nor do I expect that considering the general nature of pardons, they would be extended only to less grievous offences or less recognisable individuals. I have no problem with the lawfulness of the pardons Jonathan has granted, though it is a different matter altogether whether he adhered to the rules and regulations governing the exercise. But whether the president followed established procedures or not, he has the constitutional right to grant pardon, irrespective of the nature of the crime, and whether it is murder or fraud.

Unlike the United States that has a copious history of controversial pardons and commutations, Nigerian leaders have been fairly laid-back, even stingy like Preisdent Barack Obama, in granting pardons. Surprisingly, it is the same US that first took potshot at Jonathan’s pardons. According to a twitter posting by a US embassy spokeswoman in Nigeria, Deb Maclean, the US was deeply disappointed by the pardon granted Alamieyeseigha. This was followed by another terse statement from a US State Department spokeswoman, Victoria Nuland, who warned ominously that the pardons could cause the US to reassess the kind of assistance it granted Nigeria in the latter’s anti-corruption war. She, however, stressed that no sanctions or punitive measures were being undertaken against Nigeria. However, Nigeria has in turn deplored the meddlesomeness of the US in its internal affairs and even invited the US Deputy Chief of Mission in Abuja to receive the Nigerian protest.

Interestingly, the Alamieyeseigha pardon is not even half as controversial as some of the pardons and commutations granted by Clinton. In the case of Clinton, and with references to the clemency granted the oil mogul, Marc Rich, and the commutation of the sentences of 16 members of the Puerto Rican terrorist organisation, FALN, who set off bombs in New York and Chicago leading to the death of six people and maiming of dozens of others, a bitter US Congress investigated the pardons but found no wrongdoing. Marc Rich had been jailed for tax evasion to the tune of $48m and 51 counts of tax fraud. Like the Marc Rich case, the Alamieyeseigha pardon is without prejudice to any ongoing investigations or future fraud cases the authorities might bring against him.

But as Clinton wrote in 2001 in his defence of the pardons he granted, “The reason the framers of our Constitution vested this broad power in the Executive Branch was to assure that the president would have the freedom to do what he deemed to be the right thing, regardless of how unpopular a decision might be. Some of the uses of the power have been extremely controversial, such as President Washington’s pardons of leaders of the Whiskey Rebellion, President Harding’s commutation of the sentence of Eugene Debs, President Nixon’s commutation of the sentence of James Hoffa, President Ford’s pardon of former President Nixon, President Carter’s pardon of Vietnam War draft resisters, and President Bush’s 1992 pardon of six Iran-contra defendants, including former Defense Secretary Weinberger, which assured the end of that investigation.”

I have no doubt that Jonathan acted within his powers. However, he was not as altruistic as his aides seemed to suggest. His prime objective, it seems to me, is driven by both political calculations for 2015 and the fact that Bayelsa and a large swathe of the South-South are covered by an ethical fog influenced by Niger Delta militancy and decades of appalling degradation of the oil regions. Both the ethical fog and the environmental degradation suffered by the oil regions, as well as the contumaciousness that these have unleashed, all but guarantee that the definition of financial cum political morality in Nigeria will vary from one region to another. Expectedly, Jonathan is not immune to the influences of his background, nor has he been able to extricate himself from the sometimes narrow and short-sighted uses of presidential powers and the even narrower cultural confines and prejudices of his adolescent years.

Critics have slammed the president for pardoning Alamieyeseigha, thereby jeopardising his government’s anti-corruption war. But the criticisms ignore two important facts. One is that the former Bayelsa governor, who is sometimes referred to as governor-general of the Ijaw, is immensely popular in his region. Jonathan is not unmindful of that popularity, and he apparently seeks to take political advantage of it. Even in the days when Chief Olusegun Obasanjo troubled Alamieyeseigha, militants came to his rescue by denouncing the rest of the country and the media for singling out their hero for abuse. He had not done a fraction of what others did, his supporters grumbled.

Second is that, except I err gravely, the Jonathan government has never really embarked on any anti-corruption war, whether in part or in whole. He has not even verbally campaigned against corruption, partly because he is not as hypocritical as the Obasanjo government that either selectively campaigned against corruption, using his enemies as case studies, or believed that corruption was something others, particularly non-PDP members, indulged in. Unlike Obasanjo who could defend good and bad with equal passion and plausibility, Jonathan is realistic enough to appreciate that the present configuration of Nigerian politics does not conduce to a corruption-free society or any high-sounding moralising campaign. His boyish innocence makes him fundamentally uncomfortable with any anti-corruption sloganeering.

Neither the political uproar nor the moral outrage that has visited the Alamieyeseigha pardon will produce presidential contrition. The reason is not because the constitution is defective or that it grants more powers to the president than he can judiciously use. Indeed, it is for people like Alamieyeseigha that the clemency provision is interred in our constitution. If not Jonathan, then some other president will use the provision on a hypothetical tomorrow to achieve some controversial ends. The reason the president will not be contrite is also not because his natural tendency is to underpin his policies and actions with questionable ethics, for he seems altogether shorn of any ethics, preferring instead to moralise on the minor political and constitutional issues of the day while dodging the great issues capable of defining his presidency.

Rather than seethe with anger on an anti-corruption war the president has shown absolutely no inclination to fight, seeing that no one could imbue an inexistent war with a grand notional purpose, the country should instead concentrate on the more nuanced national crisis that the pardons have seemed to underscore. That national crisis centres on the poor judgement Nigerian presidents have exhibited over the decades. Jonathan could have waited until the closing days of his presidency, whether he wins reelection or not, to grant as many controversial pardons as pleases him, but he chose to do it now perhaps because of political desperation or pressure. The 2015 polls will show whether he has shot himself in the foot or not. He has been accused of half-heartedly waging war on corruption; but by pardoning his former boss, he goes beyond half-heartedness to confirming he has no interest in any war except one that would furnish him victory in the polls at all cost.

I see no point in all the uproar over the pardons, except to note the depressing fact that it manifests the president’s poor judgement and perhaps incapacity to take great decisions. In this controversy of state pardons, Jonathan will conveniently and excusably hide behind the constitution. It is in fact those who rail against the president’s pardons that inadvertently give the impression they are vengeful and unforgiving, and confirm why Nigeria’s penal system and penal institutions pursue a criminal to his grave rather than reform him. The uproar also shows that Nigerians have only one view of a criminal: that once he is crucified by the law or by public emotions, his soul is forever damned. If the president has good PR managers, he will turn the table against his critics. But if the critics emphasise the point that the president’s choices are nearly always fallible, they may not be saying anything new, but they will be reiterating the sombre view that whenever Jonathan displays firmness and shows initiative, he unalterably fails to rise to the occasion.

I see Chinua Achebe differently from how others see him. Some see him rightly as the grandfather of African fiction, and others simply but also accurately see him as the father of African literature. Yet others remember him as the hard-hitting literary critic that in 1975 disembowelled Joseph Conrad for his book, Heart of Darkness. But most people, whether critics or plain connoisseurs of great books, remember him as the delightful author of Things Fall Apart, an incomparable book that has sold more than 10 million copies and has been translated into more than 50 languages. Chinua Achebe (1930-2013) lived well and died at a ripe old age after bidding his country goodbye with a rousing, controversial book, There Was a Country. In a literary career spanning more than 50 years, Achebe churned out scores of works in nearly all areas of literature.

Achebe’s death on Friday morning is of course bound to elicit great obituaries from gifted editorial writers, many of them enchanted by the literary giant’s life and times. The death will also unleash a cornucopia of reviews and criticisms of his works, complete with projections of how relevant he would be in the decades and centuries to come. Most of the reviews will of course focus on his five novels, some of his essays, and his controversial non-fiction memoir on the Nigerian civil war viewed from the Biafran perspective. A few may attempt comparisons with contemporary writers, and others will unearth salient themes from his works to enrich future generations and provide cultural and political anodynes for a country in distress. Of course, too, most of the analyses and tributes will attempt a balanced examination of the writer, his on the one hand weighed against his on the other hand. Indeed, barely hours after his departure, tons of essays on the legend, many of them probably prepared beforehand, have been broadcast or published.

Shortly before There Was a Country was released, I had written a short but questioning review of the controversial book. The review was limited, as it concentrated on a small aspect of the book released by the publishers to tease the public. It turned out in the end that that teaser was central to considerations of the book’s strengths and weaknesses. In my limited review, I was careful not to use it as a measure of Achebe’s literary endowment, whether that endowment is constricted or expansive, or use it as an indication of his life and times. That would have been most inappropriate, for a man of such copious output and prodigious talent could not be sensibly dismissed or characterised by one book, let alone a section of that book. I am not also going to pretend to use all or nearly all his works to define his essence, for that would also be a presumptuous endeavour. Nor would I attempt to compare one of his books with another, say, the gentle accessibility and simplicity of Things Fall Apart with the brilliance and complexity of Arrow of God.

Whatever anyone may say of Achebe’s learning and worldview, whether he was deep or needed to be deeper, or whether he was thematically narrow in range or breathtaking, or whether he was controversial and disagreeable as a person or open-minded, gregarious, agreeable and universalist as an author, the important thing for me is that he had character and, needless to say, a curious and familiarly exciting point of view. There is no point trying to examine his literary competence. By every yardstick, he was an exquisite and exceptional writer, and he contributed immeasurably in birthing and giving fillip to the African perspective of literature. There are many fine writers the world has forgotten, or with time will forget. But there are a few who, regardless of the classicalness or mundaneness of their works, will be remembered for a long time. Like politicians and conquering generals, there are always a few additional and indescribable intangibles that qualify a man for greatness. Once these intangibles are absent, there is no amount of genius that can redeem the situation. And once they are present, there is no amount of ordinariness or lesser qualification that can attenuate it.

Achebe’s character can thus be viewed from two perspectives. One is in terms of his character as a person, and the other is in terms of his character as a writer. What I find impressive about Achebe is how passionately he exuded both characters, as a person and as a writer, shorn of contrivances. Indeed, it seems to me that the leitmotif of his life and work could not be divorced from his Igbo identity. However, embracing that identity was a matter of choice for him, not compulsion. It coloured some of his works, just as his politics could not transcend it. It may be too early to determine what influence that identity would have on his legacy now or in the future, but it made Achebe the enigmatic and mercurial person he was. It didn’t matter to him that critics pointed out the dissonance between his lofty image as a great writer and the limiting parochialism of some of his pet views; all that mattered was that he summoned the fortitude to stick to his views. He had an unquenchable zeal to be himself, and he had the talent to nurture and sustain that zeal.

As a writer, he cared even less what reservations anyone might have about the messages he furnished in his works or how trenchantly he projected his point of view. He belonged to the old school of great writers who despised taking refuge behind harmless, defanged words and imageries. His criticism of Conrad, for instance, was strident and, in some parts, downright abusive. In the same manner, his characterisation of some of the key political players during the Nigerian civil war was sweeping, exuberant and pugnacious. You may not agree with him, but you could not ignore him, for he had a poignant way of conveying his views. You may disagree vehemently with him, but you had a sense of his presence, his convictions, and his character. After all, I disagree with the American poet and critic, Ezra Pound’s impressionable theory of economics, and find his admiration for fascism shocking, but who could deny or resist the exquisiteness and brilliance of his poetry, particularly the Pisan Cantos, notwithstanding the circumstances in which the poem was penned shortly after World War II?

Achebe was a pathfinder, and, as I indicated in this place when I wrote a short review of his latest work, his reputation as a writer is secure, notwithstanding the multiple indiscretions of indulging in historical fallacies. As much as the inimitable Mark Twain tried to philosophise in some of his works, notably The Mysterious Stranger, and as classical and supremely engaging as many of his works were, such as Huckleberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Old Times on The Mississippi, and Innocents Abroad, he never rose to the level of a philosopher of any appreciable talent. Achebe, too, never quite made it as an original thinker, nor perhaps ever tried. But he achieved greatness as a writer of immense ability, as the general editor of the Heinemann African Writers Series, and as a mentor, literature teacher and trailblazer.

His books did not win as many prizes as he probably coveted or merited. But those books are with us for all of eternity to help sustain his huge legacy. His aspirations for Nigeria were left unfulfilled, and he even spurned the half-hearted attempt by the Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan governments to honour him, but he departed these shores with the consolation that he repudiated his country’s maladies as vigorously as he could manage and as cathartically as he felt he needed to mitigate the injury occasioned in his mind by widespread leadership incompetence.

It is no mean achievement that Achebe departed at 82, the second of the famous literary quartet God bestowed on Nigeria, Christopher Okigbo having achieved immortality ahead of the rest. As the many panegyrics written in honour of Okigbo have proved, absence really does make the heart grow fonder. From now on, many panegyrics will be written to the departed Achebe. Britain may no longer have its Dickenses, nor Russia its Dostoyevskys, nor France its Molieres, nor Ireland its Shaws, for the world has become a parched or at best middling literary landscape, but at least we still have our Wole Soyinka and J.P Clark, the two surviving members of the quartet. What we do with them is up to us.

Achebe’s life and death symbolise the continuing mockery of our inexistent national identity. There is no poet’s corner in Abuja to bury the legend, or any other legend for that matter, for neither do we have a national identity to subdue individual ethnic identities, nor do we have leaders with a sense of history to conjure symbols that could underscore that identity. Achebe will probably be buried in his hometown, the final act in his repudiation of a country that has neither proved itself worthy of its great sons nor risen to an enviable height by the cumulative and stirring effects of the accomplishments of its great daughters.

Less than a decade after most African countries got their flag independence, some of their leaders became acutely aware of the corrosive effects of neocolonialism. To counter this problem, they attempted a cocktail of cultural, economic and political policies to neutralise the negative effects of colonialism up to as far back as the curse of the Berlin Conference of 1884-85. Leaders of Africa’s independence movements knew, and to some extent accepted, their limitations in trying to redraw the debilitating maps drawn arbitrarily by the Berlin conferees, but they didn’t entirely give up. They were not only passionate about their countries; they were also largely well-educated, cerebral and innovative. To supplant the destructive impact of colonialism on the African mind, these leaders promoted the ideals of pan-Africanism in order to give the continent an identity, instil confidence in young Africans, and give them a reason to look forward to a greater tomorrow where they could stand tall and equal with the young of any other continent, especially Europe and America.

Barely half a century after independence, however, all hope of a greater tomorrow has virtually evaporated. Not only are the continent’s current leaders half-educated daydreamers and cannot, therefore, tell the difference between colonialism on one hand and neocolonialism on the other hand, they are simply too desensitised to the dangers of harmful external influences to care what happens to the continent or how its peoples are regarded by the rest of the world. It wasn’t too long ago that great minds walked on the continent, minds like Julius Nyerere, Kwame Nkrumah, Tom Mboya, Amilcar Cabral, Kenneth Kaunda et al, but their walk was both too brief and sometimes inexpert to help create enduring ideological and institutional legacies for Africa’s freedom and economic independence. Yet, for all their faults, it was never said of them that they were too stupid not to comprehend the denigrating impact of foreign influences.

In contrast today, there is hardly any African leader with the depth of understanding, political ingenuity and moral fortitude needed to galvanise the continent away from the looming apocalyptic path of recolonisation. West Africa has become a barren landscape of short-sighted leaders who can’t tell the difference between leadership and feudalism. Even when a few honest leaders come along, they lack the rigour to reclaim and promote the visions of past continental leaders. Ghana’s present leaders, for instance, are the beacon for the sub-region, but beyond offering their country technocratic competence, there is precious little else. Whatever they call vision today can’t hold the candle to Nkrumah’s vision. Both Sierra Leone and Liberia fought senseless civil wars, in spite of their poverty, and Cote d’Ivoire and Mali needed their former colonial master, France, to restore stability and order. And self-destructive Nigeria is, of course, boiling with largely self-inflicted and man-made sectarian cum socioeconomic revolt.

Southern Africa was a hotbed of apartheid, but when they finally emerged from servitude one after another, only Nelson Mandela exhibited the character of a leader. Sam Nujoma had to be pressured not to amend Namibia’s constitution to serve tenure extension, and geriatric Robert Mugabe has become a burden greater than apartheid upon his people. Successive leaders of Angola and Mozambique have also not been too inspiring, while Central Africa is probably the worst served by incompetent leaders. Since Britain’s MI6 plotted the death of Patrice Lumumba using the façade of Belgian, French and local forces, the hapless country has grappled with a succession of inept rulers, including the two Kabilas, Laurent and Joseph. Central African Republic (CAR), which is embroiled in non-ideological, distasteful and interminable rebellions, has not fared better.

While ethnic groups in Rwanda nearly exterminated one another, and Uganda reels under rebel attacks, and Burundi stagnates, it took spectacular incompetence, as Mo Ibrahim observed, for Sudanese leaders to infuse religious dogmas into their country’s body politic thereby destabilising and fragmenting it. East Africa is also entrapped in rebellions and poverty. Ethnically and religiously homogenous Somalia is just emerging from state failure begun in 1991 and orchestrated by local rebels, Ethiopia and Libya working in concert. And Ethiopia, Eritrea and Djibouti at the horn of Africa oscillate between pointless wars and horrifying famine.

The retrogression in Africa is so numbing and so nearly complete that whispers are beginning to be heard in many European capitals that what is needed is a complete takeover, a recolonisation. (See Box, and note the factual inaccuracies). The consequence of the massive retrogression is that future generations of Africans will become humiliatingly less globally competitive than their European, American and Asian counterparts. The gap is widening into a chasm, and it is only a question of time, if things are left unchecked, before active calls for recolonisation receive favourable attention in many key world capitals. Except the continent puts behind it the effects of the trans-Saharan slave trade (which are factors in the Mali turmoil), the even greater evil of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and the most crippling effects of colonialism that virtually distorted the economy, culture and thinking of the colonies, the continent’s problems will worsen and predispose it to recolonisation.

Indirect rule made it difficult for Britain to retain a strangulating hold on its former colonies. It consequently could not actively pursue the establishment of military bases in Africa as successfully as France has done in more than half a dozen of its former colonies. But it nevertheless has advisory presence in Kenya and Sierra Leone. France’s colonial policy of assimilation facilitated the insidious subjection of its former colonies. From Central Africa to West Africa and even to the Horn of Africa and the Maghreb, France has sustained its military presence and bases, and intervenes when the need arises. The relationship between France and its former colonies goes beyond military, however. In foreign policy and the economy, the former colonies still look up to France. China is doubtless elbowing its way in. But many analysts suggest that the disturbances in Mali, CAR and the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and especially the promptness and assertiveness of France in those trouble spots, could not be detached from the rising economic profile of China in many African countries.

During the Cold War era, many African countries were cajoled into taking sides with the Eastern or Western bloc. In the Berlin Conference, which was chiefly triggered by the quest for raw materials to feed European industries, Africa had no say on how its internal borders were drawn. The fresh campaigns for the recolonisation of Africa can also not be detached from economic reasons. For instance, all seven French West African countries are connected to the French Central Bank. The fall of former Ivorian leader, Laurent Gbagbo, was partly a consequence of his dispute with France over Cote d’Ivoire’s external reserve. Niger is as important to France economically (supply of uranium) as Nigeria is important (oil) to the United States. France, Britain and the US are now engaged in strategic military cooperation involving deployment of drones. On another side, China is also steadily and aggressively pushing in into Africa for raw materials to feed its massive industrial complexes and huge population. To facilitate this push, China deploys financial and other kinds of assistance to needy African countries. It may not be too far-fetched to say that China and the West have begun a new scramble for Africa, as the September 2011 election in Zambia proved, and as the creation of the US African Command (AFRICOM) is also indicating.

If the creeping recolonisation of Africa is not to become a fait accompli, Nigeria must experience revolutionary changes in order to offer the leadership necessary to reclaim Africa from its local and foreign oppressors and reposition its peoples for greater competitiveness in the coming decades. If things remain as they are for much longer, the image of the continent will be battered and its chances of securing a glorious future compromised. Fundamental changes must come to Nigeria, for it is the only country with the potential to offer that leadership, not South Africa, not Ghana, and not Egypt. Sadly, in spite of the momentous events happening around it, Nigeria has remained silent, phlegmatic, inept and docile. It lost confidence in handling the Mali conundrum, ignored the CAR troubles, and has said little on DRC. It is high time visionary and ideological African leaders emerged, leaders who have the depth, intellect and passion to create and drive technological advancement, cultural renaissance and new and sustainable democratic paradigms.

The ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) cannot midwife the necessary fundamental changes Nigeria and Africa need. On its part, it is anticipated the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) will whittle down its ideological purity and political idealism to stand a chance of birthing a new party (say, the All Progressives Congress) capable of beating the PDP. I am, however, not too optimistic that within the existing Nigerian political structure and given the nature of party politics, the changes the continent desires and deserves can be achieved.

First published on December 30, 2012, this essay is reprinted today as a reminder of the salient contributions made to national and world affairs by Mandela, Bush and Thatcher. The three leaders, one of whom has just honoured the last call, bade us long goodbyes when they were hospitalised about the same time late last year. With the passing of Baroness Thatcher, it is time to remind ourselves once again what the three stood for, good or bad, and how their transformative and charismatic administrations underscored the salience of strong leadership, especially one imbued with sound judgment and unexampled patriotism

It was an unplanned but remarkable coincidence around the Christmas holiday period. Nelson Mandela, 94, Margaret Thatcher, 87, George H. Bush, 88 all found themselves in hospital to receive medical attention. Mandela went in to treat a stubborn lung infection, Bush the Elder to treat a fever and other associated ailments that kept popping up one after the other, as his doctors ruefully observed, and Thatcher to remove a growth on her bladder. The Iron Lady, as Thatcher was nicknamed by a Soviet Defence Ministry newspaper in 1976 even before she became prime minister, had in 2001 and 2002 suffered mild strokes. Even though all three leaders are alive and may yet live on for many more years, they are, however, enfeebled by age and are facing a countdown in the closing chapters of their lives. I therefore find it hard to resist the temptation of making a few observations on these iconic leaders whose idiosyncratic rule exemplified the leadership panache and resilience of the last century.

In a way, however, and no matter how much we still want the three leaders with us, I think they have started to say their long goodbyes. They left power a long time ago, and so their final departure may not have the same dramatic impact their exit from office had, but there is no doubt that much more than their countries, the world will be sad to see them go. They were not just iconic, brilliant, prescient and charismatic – Mandela and Thatcher more so – the breadth and content of their leadership, the visionary quality of their administration, and the continuing relevance of their policies, ideas and styles have combined to imbue them with a freshness and permanence that belie their age and health. Thatcher vacated office 22 years ago, Bush Snr 19 years ago, and Mandela 13 years ago. But it seemed like only yesterday.

The health of the three leaders will be monitored closely and carefully by both analysts and doctors: by the former because of the relevance of the leaders to the health of their countries; and by the latter because of the personal health of the three leaders themselves. Clearly, the more important of the two types of health conditions is the relevance of the leaders to their countries’ wellbeing. Leaders are seldom measured by their personal longevity, but by either longevity on the throne or, more appropriately, the quality and impact of their policies, and sometimes, too, their ideas. As a former US President, Richard M. Nixon, succinctly observed many years ago, “When the curtain goes down on a play, members of the audience file out of the theatre and go home to resume their normal lives. When the curtain comes down on a leader’s career, the very lives of the audience have been changed, and the course of history may have been profoundly altered.” This observation is true of Mandela, Thatcher and Bush the Elder.

But I am drawn into writing about the three ailing leaders today in the hope that serving Nigerian leaders would learn a thing or two about leadership mystique and relevance from those who have personified the two attributes so inimitably and so daringly. Mandela’s successors obviously do not take after the great man, perhaps because by having him so close to them, they have taken him and his qualities for granted. Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s immediate successor, for instance, could hold himself anywhere in the world intellectually, but he exhibited none of the charisma, joie de vivre and general humanism that hallmarked his predecessor’s leadership. In addition, his detached and sometimes woolly style, his seemingly non-partisan politics of expressive sombreness that grated on the ears of the South African rabble contrasted with the welcoming, lively and eccentric style of his successor, Jacob Zuma.

Mandela in office sometimes seemed a paradox, with a half of him oozing gravitas, and the other half skirting close to an inscrutable form of libertinism that made him contradistinctively sociable and prudish. But the real paradox of South African politics is the unexampled fashion Mbeki took Mandela’s cerebral endowment without the redeeming and tempering influence of the great man’s sociableness; and Zuma took and embellished Mandela’s love for life without the catalysing and uplifting influence of Madiba’s deep longing and respect for knowledge. But much worse are the Nigerian parallels. Had ex-President Umaru Yar’Adua not been hobbled by illness, he in fact seemed the only Nigerian leader since independence capable of grasping the weight and content of the challenges the country faced. Either because of his nature or poor health, even he proved absolutely destitute of the high principles and nobility that underscored Mandela’s life and politics. Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, it will be recalled, was advised or indirectly encouraged by those who installed him in office to embrace the Mandela option of serving for only one term. If he had the good sense to do that, we would not have known how unprincipled he was and still is. But at least, he would have become a statesman par excellence and a reference point for continental and regional leadership. Instead, he chose to amass wealth and to open himself to the corrosive influence constitutional subversion naturally denotes.

Of the three great leaders, Mandela is probably the most solid and respected, Thatcher the most impactful and iconoclastic, and Bush the most measured and influential. Thatcher was not just the longest serving British prime minister of the 20th century, she remains the first and only woman to have occupied that office. Neither of the two achievements can be belittled. Like Churchill, she understood very quickly the ideological temper and irredentist proclivities of the Soviet Union, and from day one cobbled together a foreign policy designed to respond harshly to the menace she believed the Russians represented. More than that, it is doubtful whether since Churchill any prime minister had projected British confidence and power as brilliantly as she did. Recall the Falklands War of 1982, barely three years after she assumed office, and the surefootedness with which she approached the disagreement between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands. Faced with the prospect of fighting a war thousands of kilometres away against an enemy fighting next door, she retained admirable sang-froid throughout the period the dispute lasted and even confidently declared that the possibility of defeat for British arms did not exist.

With the exception of former head of state, Gen Murtala Mohammed, no Nigerian leader has projected Thatcherite confidence of any significance. However, Thatcherite policies were underlined by incredible astuteness, sensible economic policies that remoulded British industry and enterprise, and sound judgement, particularly in politics and foreign policies, that yielded fruit without dissipating British power. Compared with most of his successors, Murtala was indeed a detribalised and unfettered patriot, and a confident leader who would probably have achieved a different and better outcome had he seen his transition programme through. But his appreciation of external responses to his domestic and foreign policies was fairly idealistic. That poor judgement cost him his life and handed over the rest of the transition programme to the far less ethically resolute Obasanjo.

Bush the Elder gives us a signal lesson in restraint, which habitually meddlesome Nigerians may be culturally unsuited to appreciate. By making no public attempt to influence George W. Bush’s government on the question of Iraq, the senior Bush was merely underscoring the advancement of the American constitution and system. Indeed, as we gleaned from the statements made by the recently deceased General Norman Schwarzkopf, the US allied commander during Gulf War I, the presidency of Bush the Elder was unsure of the propriety of overthrowing the government of Saddam Hussein, unsure whether the implications of such an overthrow had been fully studied or whether such an overthrow would not create a chain reaction that would be difficult to manage. This was why during Gulf War II, Schwarzkopf declined to support the regime change Bush the Younger had enunciated. He and Bush the Elder have been proved right.

Nigerian leaders rarely appreciate that their country is like a political, economic and cultural smorgasbord so complex and variegated that it requires a deep grounding in logic and history to decipher. Obasanjo made an unpardonable mistake by failing to lay a solid and ethical foundation for the Fourth Republic. And though Ibrahim Babangida did the country so much harm by failing to seize the opportunities offered by the 1993 general election, the wobbly foundation of the Fourth Republic is the sole responsibility of Obasanjo. Like South Africa’s Zuma, Obasanjo was so entranced by the frills of office that he could not gauge its responsibilities, and too fixated with the scaffold to pay attention to the creaky building. Even the more sensible Yar’Adua surrendered to base passions and allowed the country to drift and be held hostage as a result of his poor health. As incompetent as Nigerian leaders have been over the decades, nearly all of whom cite extenuating circumstances to justify their lack of administrative acumen and futuristic thinking, that ineptitude has worsened over the years, unmitigated by the passage of time or the advancement of science and knowledge.

Going by the remarkable conjunction of three ailing leaders around the Christmas holiday season, Mandela, Thatcher and Bush may already be saying their long goodbyes. This fact gives the world an opportunity to begin reflecting on the unremitting leadership failure confronting us today. By American standards, one-term presidents seldom rise to greatness, but Bush the Elder provided leadership at a time Americans needed it, even if for economic reasons, and exercised restraint at the right moment and place. Two-term President Bill Clinton made the world to love America as Bush senior and junior could not manage, but it is a matter of debate whether he has been as impactful on the world as Bush the Elder. Since 1990, Britain has struggled with leadership. Thatcher’s immediate successor, John Major, proved middlingly insecure, and both Tony Blair and Gordon Brown, in spite of their best efforts, neither rose to inspiring level nor were they able to hold the candle to the Iron Lady.

With each passing day, Mandela has seemed to loom even larger than most world leaders, becoming an example of a statesman growing in stature and relevance, like a good wine, as his years out of power increase. He embodies the aphorism popularised by the US Army General, Douglas MacArthur, that old soldiers never die, they just fade away. More and more, as Africa produces mediocre leaders by the dozen, the power and nobility of Mandela are reinforced by his canniness in foreshadowing the problems of multiculturalism in a way even Europe has not come to terms with. Imagine if the superficial Zuma had taken over from F.W. de Klerk! Indeed, the long goodbyes of the three statesmen speak more to the leadership tragedy faced by Africa in general and more poignantly to the appalling refusal, not to say criminal negligence, of Nigerian leaders to learn both from the ancient history of their country and the modern history of the world in relation to the issues and phenomena that drive, sustain and shape great leadership.

After what seemed like eternity, the two brothers alleged to have planted the bombs that killed three people and injured more than 180 others at the finish line of the Boston Marathon on Monday have been apprehended. The older of the two, Tamerlan Tsarnaev, 26, reportedly died in a shoot-out on Friday morning, while the younger, Dzhokhar, 19, was arrested in the evening after a manhunt that shut down the Watertown section of the city. Though the two brothers hailed from Dagestan, a Russian republic that shares borders and, to some extent, religious ideology and militancy with Chechnya, they had migrated to the United States more than 10 years ago and lived there legally. This fact was probably responsible for why President Barack Obama said the government would be seeking answers to a lot of questions concerning the background of the two brothers and why they suddenly took to militancy. The US will get all the answers it wants if the severely injured Dzhokhar survives.

Though Anzor Tsarnaev, father of the two brothers, believed his sons were framed, there is no doubt that for him and his wider family this is both a family and generational tragedy. In fact, their home country and fellow Dagestanis are already primed to disown the bombers. When it first appeared that the Boston bombers were linked to Chechnya, that country’s President was quick to disclaim the fact. He suggested that American investigators should look into the Tsarnaev brothers’ upbringing in the US for explanations on their radicalism. Said the Chechnya President, Ramzan Kadyrov: “Any attempts to draw the link between Tsarnaevs (even if they are guilty) and Chechnya are in vain. They grew up in USA and their views and beliefs were formed there. One needs to seek the roots of evil in America. All the world should be fighting terrorism together. We know it better than anyone else. We wish all those who suffered to get well soon and we share the feeling of sorrow with Americans.”

But if Dagestan and Chechnya could promptly disown the Tsarnaev brothers, their anguished family would not find it easy to do same. Not only have the brothers brought the family name to national and international opprobrium, the scale of the brutal assault in Boston is bound to make many seek explanations for the two brothers’ radicalisation both in their family and in the US as a whole. In addition, the impact of the bombings and the many lives they have wrecked, not to talk of the novelty of the attacks, are certain to keep the unfortunate incident in public memory for a long time. Nigeria and the Abdulmutallab family face the same humiliation every time there is a mention of the Christmas Day bomber.

It will be recalled that under the influence of Yemeni members of al-Qaeda terror group, a 23-year-old Nigerian, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, with plastic explosives strapped to his underwear, attempted to blow up an American aeroplane over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009.

Shortly after, on January 10, 2010, this column attempted an explanation of the Abdulmutallab problem. The analysis raised a number of issues that are today even more pertinent as the world ponders the tragedy that has just befallen the Tsarnaev family. An excerpt of that piece is reproduced below, and though it was published before the northern part of Nigeria exploded in violence, it anticipated Boko Haram militancy. If only the North had listened.

AbdulMutallab meets Gavrilo Princip,

January 10, 2010

“…Notwithstanding our defiant posture and wounded pride, the fact is that we have been foolish and hypocritical in our approach to urgent national issues such as religion, culture, ethnicity and politics. Unfortunately, all these issues have impacted negatively on the country to the point of producing monstrosities like Farouk. Terrorism is not exclusive to any religion, just as there is no single cause of terrorism. But in the case of Farouk we must go beyond the fact of his schooling in Togo, London, Dubai and Yemen to find out what predisposed him to acute explosion of rage and violence. There are many like him who schooled abroad even at a tender age and who shunned hateful ideologies. American psychologists may be able to piece together the jigsaw and come out with answers to what went wrong with the young bomber…

“When he was 19 years old, Farouk had expressed the frightening and myopic opinion that he fantasised the waging of another major Jihad in which Islam would achieve victory and establish a world empire. It never occurred to him that even if that happened, that victory could not be sustained for all time. But with such foundational belief that forceful proselytisation was permissible, which sadly many clerics in Nigeria hold to be true, it was a matter of time before he became a tool in the hands of demagogues. It is a fact of our recent history that many violent proselytisers, many of them quite ignorant of Islam, and some of them hiding behind politics attempt to create an immiscible broth of religion and politics. Conventional explanations that suggest fanaticism and violence result from poverty must be examined again in the light of Farouk’s wealthy background so that the North can begin to rebuild confidence and establish an atmosphere where peace and harmony reign.

“Given our past experiences the wise political option should have been for Nigeria to move in the direction of robust secularism in which the state would hands off religion. This has not happened partly because many states cannot seem to make up their minds over the instinctive theocracy of their fantasy, as Farouk indicated, and the stability and realism that secularism offers in a multi-ethnic and multi-cultural society. Except we deceive ourselves, Middle East is in turmoil because countries in the region are locked in a battle between secularism and theocracy, and between contending factions of theocratic sects. Sudan, Iran, Iraq, Turkey, among others should serve as examples of the dangers an increasingly vulnerable Nigeria faces. We must not assume that these problems will vanish automatically.

“Disturbing as the backlash against Nigerians abroad is, the answer is not in the hysteria that has gripped the country, nor in the clumsy attempt to distance ourselves from our young compatriot. Whether we like it or not, Farouk is our son, and though by his education he is a citizen of the world, he is still our son. His family values might have failed to tether him to reality, but we must not ignore the fact that those values served his other 13 siblings well. Most families often have one black sheep anyway. It is the poor luck and personal tragedy of the urbane senior Mutallab that his errant son chose the world stage to display his waywardness. We must also not ignore the fact that the unhealthy mix of politics and religion in the North has engendered more religious violence in that region than anywhere else. And we must not downplay the danger of disintegration which our refusal to do something urgent and drastic about the unhealthy mixture could precipitate.

“We may not have all the answers regarding the transformation of Farouk from a gentle and pious boy into a suicidal and venomously spiteful man, nor it seems does he himself. But we must begin the search. The magnitude of his fantasy and the sheer scale of his ignorance should tell us something about ourselves, our family values, our politics and the long years of pussyfooting over religion…”

Anzor Tsarnaev, father of the two Boston bombers, said his children were framed, pointing out in particular that his younger son “is a true angel.” According to him, “Dzhokhar is a second-year medical student in the US. He is such an intelligent boy. We expected him to come on holidays here.” That may be the much he knew about his sons. The question parents must ask themselves is how much they know their children, or whether in fact they know them at all, given the penchant of the young ones to always spring a surprise. This column also examined this treatise on April 1, 2012 when it responded in this place to the deplorable tweets written by Liam Stacey to the huge consternation of his distraught mother. Hereunder is an excerpt of that column to help instigate a fresh appreciation of the subject in the light of the incredulity and grief of the Boston bombers’ father.

Liam Stacey’s racist tweets and the dilemma of parenting, April 1, 2012

“…Recall also that I once wrote about the Abdulmutallabs here. Except you are a parent, you may never fully appreciate that family’s sadness and horror as their son, Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab, attempted to bomb an airline over Detroit on Christmas Day in 2009. The tragedy of realising that they had raised a son who embraced terrorism was bad enough in a worrisome way, for the eyes of the whole world, and the even more censorious and withering look of their countrymen was truly damning. But much worse is the continuing tragedy of watching helplessly as that son stays in the limelight for the wrong reasons, tormented by the destructive finality of long years in prison, his life completely wasted, as are the hopes and investments of the family on him. It is impossible not to feel the family’s pain.

“Imagine, therefore, what horror befell the British family of the Staceys last week, as their son, Liam, hugged the Twitter limelight for the wrong reason, trolling the tweeting public with deeply nauseating racist remarks on Fabrice Muamba, the Bolton footballer who collapsed on pitch during a soccer match with Spurs. Liam, a Swansea University biology student, explained in court that he trolled under the influence of alcohol, but he did not quite convince anyone his racist tweets did not reflect what he harboured secretly in his heart. As he was being tried and sentenced to 56 days in jail, reports indicated his mother wept bitterly, ashamed of the negative publicity her otherwise mild-mannered son had attracted to himself, and the fact that he had achieved notoriety that would haunt his present and future, truncate his education and career, and ostracise him in civilised communities everywhere for a long time.

“No family is so strong and so cohesive as to be immune to the consequences of the obnoxious behaviour of its member. Increasingly, as the Twitter generation is showing, younger people are coming under the inordinate strains of modernity. Such strains sometimes manifest in the digital and communications revolution, in music, particularly rap and hip-hop, and in many other modern trends such as the shifting concepts of family, parenting, urbanisation, and the ideology of culture, economy (business) and politics. The problem is of such magnitude that families now depend on miracles and happenstances to keep themselves together and establish some semblance of order and harmony…

“But the greatest challenge facing parents is not how to obviate the stupidities of their children, but how to raise children whose view of society is balanced, children who are neither misanthropic, like petty criminals, sadists and serial murderers, nor moral monsters who grow up unable to differentiate between the healthy predilections of a political and religious ideologue and the antinomian excesses of terrorists and extremists who espouse ethnic or racial genocide…

“The challenge of any parent is to develop a continuum of coherent and relevant worldviews anchored on the key elements of lofty principles, great character and unimpeachable morality. That template of ethical continuums must, however, be such that members of the family, particularly the children, can express and fulfil their individualisms in ways that do not threaten the family or the society. It is never easy, especially because generational shifts and conflicts often periodically impose new and sometimes taxing realities upon families. But the danger of not establishing a family paradigm upon which children could anchor their lives and ideas is to create a vacuum in which all manner of ideas and cultures would thrive, many of them anti-social, and others inimical to the image of the family and the wider society.

“To prevent the sort of tragedies Liam Stacey and Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab brought upon their families, the first priority for any family is to set a tough code of ethics for themselves. Top on the list of that code, of course, is character, that most difficult and yet most beautiful of all virtues that inculcates a sound philosophy regarding the sanctity of human life, courage in the face of adversity, intelligent appreciation of issues, and a sound knowledge of one’s purpose in life. If a parent does not set this code for his children, and does not do it in such a way as to make the code adaptable to the present and the future, strangers, perhaps with malicious intent, will do it for them. After all, it is the sum of positive family values that determines how stable and prosperous a society becomes…”

In the next few days or weeks, we may get a better insight into what radicalised the Tsarnaev brothers and motivated them into becoming mass murderers. Does it have to do with their conversion to Islam? If so what kind of preaching were they listening to, and who were influencing them? Or does it have anything to do with Dagestan’s campaign for independence or the sufferings of Chechnya? Whatever the reasons, the Boston bombings place greater urgency on the need for more realistic, adequate and intelligent parenting.

“…Let me be very frank, because the analogy that oh, when one soldier is killed the soldiers come and kill scores of people, we have always been admonishing that. We always tell the soldiers to conduct themselves because they are doing internal security job that ordinarily soldiers are supposed not to be involved in. But because of the calibre of weapons the militants are using, the police alone cannot stand. And government will never sit down quietly and wait for insurgents, for some people to take up arms and take a part of this country. Never.

“Whether it is in the Niger Delta, and I have given the directive to security services, I don’t want to hear that one soldier is killed in the Niger Delta, I don’t want to hear that one security officer is killed in the South East kidnapping, I don’t want to hear that one soldier is killed in Borno State or any part of this country. I cannot preside over this country as a president and my security officers are killed. This people leave their families, stay on the roads and the bush so that we will sleep, and I will not want to hear that one of them is killed.

“We will not allow it and I will not celebrate death of one security officer anywhere in this country, whether it is in Bayelsa State, whether it is in the Niger Delta, Anambra State, South East, South West, North West, North Central, anywhere. We will not, and I repeat, will not accommodate it…”

Two Fridays ago, soldiers of the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) swooped on Baga, a fishing town on the shores of Lake Chad, Borno State, leaving in their wake some 185 people dead, many of them, according to locals, women and children. The casualty figures are disputed, with the MJTF arguing that not more than 35 people or so died, and the locals insisting that in fact more than 200 people perished in the military assault. The military have given very colourful but hard-to-believe story of the assault. They insist they got intelligence information that Boko Haram militants were massing in a mosque in the town. A patrol was sent to assess the threat, but the patrol was met with extraordinary firepower during which an officer was killed, in fact beheaded. The MJTF reinforced and descended on the town, but was again met with great firepower. This time, however, said the military authorities, they were ready, and scores of civilians and militants were killed.

Going by the worldwide condemnation of the excessive firepower deployed by the soldiers, the Jonathan presidency has ordered full-scale investigation into the assault, with a promise that offending soldiers who breached the military rules of engagement would be punished. Not only are we not told what would happen to the Chadian and Nigerien troops in the MJTF, there may be nothing to indicate by what proficiency the MJTF managed to sustain only slight injuries. No soldier died in the reprisal raid itself.

Baga locals, however, gave a different account. They insisted the problem actually began at a cinema house where a misunderstanding between cinema goers led to some shootings that drew the attention of a nearby patrol. Unfortunately, an officer was killed, hence the reinforcement and the savage reprisal. When the reprisals began, said the locals, the militants had long gone, while most residents of the town who bore the brunt of the MJTF revenge were not even aware of the severity of the commotion at the cinema.

Whether the government and National Assembly inquiries will reveal the truth, including accurate casualty figures, is difficult to say. But many people suspect that the reprisal was inspired by Jonathan’s intemperate remarks in Borno and Yobe States when he visited both places in March. (See right). This column had warned at the time that the president’s undignified remarks could return to haunt him in the months ahead. The suspicion is that that has now happened, a fact that has prompted calls for the president and offending soldiers to be dragged before the International Criminal Court (ICC). Palladium had on March 10 concluded: “So, now, will the president begin applying the Odi method perfected by Chief Olusgeun Obasanjo, and which he himself condemned as ineffective? If anyone still holds out hope that Jonathan has the depth and judgement to rule a complex nation, especially one facing dire ethnic and religious challenges, I offer to the optimist the president’s view on the consequences of killing security agents. And if anyone thinks we are not in even deeper trouble than we imagine, I offer the same presidential remark as an example. Let every community in the country beware; even their deviants cannot afford to bite a soldier, protest against police tyranny, or fight a security official to the death.”

Shortly before the inauguration of Nigeria’s Fourth Republic, I travelled by public transport to Ilorin. Somewhere in Ibadan, we came upon a band of Odua Peoples Congress (OPC) toughs wielding various weapons including automatic guns, short machetes and axes. Their leaders/commanders wore various specially embroidered clothes that harked back to the era of the Yoruba wars. Apart from small gourds strapped to their jumpers, they also wore red wrist or head bands with cowries stitched to them. They stopped traffic majestically and defiantly, and strolled across the road with not a care in the world. A few kilometres down the main road to Ilorin, we again encountered another band, this time in a convoy of beat-up cars and perhaps a pick-up van, if my memory serves me well. They drove fiercely and menacingly, some sitting on top of their cars, and others popping their heads out of the windows as their vehicles bobbed and weaved through the choked traffic.

This was in the late 1990s, barely a few years after the 1994 Rwandan genocide raged in all its atavistic and sanguinary fury. Using the autocratic regime of Gen Sani Abacha as pretext, Yorubaland began to regress into anomie and idolatry. While still in traffic, and as OPC militants were strutting their stuff, I became both troubled and humiliated. Was this what the Southwest had become? Was the region’s civilisation so tenuous that it took just one destabilising incidence to demolish its accomplishments and send the region lumbering abjectly into the embrace of undemocratic and impulsive bands of area toughies? The OPC may no longer be brazen and daring as it was, but it has kept its structure fairly intact, and continues to attract mainly those who, like cultists, want a sense of adventure and meaning to life.

The Southwest was somewhat lucky to have understood very early the pitfalls of putting its hopes and trust in an ethnic militia. Given the cold shoulder in polite circles, the OPC quietly morphed into a militia of local enforcers and security consultants. These jobs were needed to keep them busy in place of the revolution they, and many people, believed loomed in the 1990s and early 2000s. After reading about the Rwandan genocide and watching a documentary on it, not to talk of the post-Tito Yugoslavia that dissolved into civil war, it was easy to make up my mind about the dangers of indulging ethnic militias, whether among the Yoruba or in Boko Haram territory. The Yoruba were lucky the OPC experienced considerable attenuation over the years; the North is not so lucky in the hands of Boko Haram, which they at first indulged, then lamely opposed, and finally watched with quiet dismay and resignation from afar.

For those who naively put their trust in the OPC as the saviour, backbone and standby militia of the Yoruba, the ongoing struggle for pipeline security contracts and leadership supremacy between Frederick Fasehun and Gani Adams can be very disillusioning. Sometime in April, Dr Fasehun had delivered a broadside on Mr Adams for attempting to match him wit for wit and brawn for brawn. But he also acknowledged that he had bidden for a pipeline security contract because the six million youths in his militia deserved the federal government’s economic patronage, just as Niger Delta youths are beneficiaries of very lucrative federal government contracts. No one knows where he got the outlandish figures of OPC membership. But responding to the ACN spokesman’s criticisms that he bade for the contract in order to fund a political party and turn it into a destabilising counterpoise to the region’s dominant party, Fasehun offered a most peremptory and non-ideological argument indicating that in his political world everything boiled down to money. That this materialism subverts the lofty principles of the Southwest, especially the lodestar of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN) he is presumptuously trying to revive, is immaterial to him.

I have read many opinions on the contract bid by the OPC leaders, and find them humbling. In defending Fasehun, most of the views quite illogically ignore the contradictions between propping up oneself as a saviour or defender of the Yoruba and being a federal government contractor. The Tompolos, Boyloaf and Dokubos of the Niger Delta have never tried to sound principled or ideological. From their antecedents and their current standing, they give the firm impression they need financial empowerment more for its own sake than for any esoteric reasons. They are not driven by any principle of democracy, federalism, human rights, or any other lofty values that ennoble humanity. If the right contracts are dispensed to them, it becomes an incentive to work with and give support to the government of the day. In this they are at least honest, for they do not attempt the disingenuousness their OPC counterparts have now become famous for. How Mr Adams and Fasehun, for instance, hope to get pipeline protection contracts from the Jonathan presidency and in the same breath defend the values that have characterised the Yoruba for centuries is a puzzle. More puzzling is the fact that they do not see the tragedy of outsourcing security to ethnic militants and repentant bigots.

But the dishonesty of the OPC leaders and their self-serving philosophy do not end there. They are not squabbling over ideology, or over political orientation, or even over societal reengineering. These self-appointed defenders of the Yoruba race are squabbling over two things only: contract from the government, and leadership position in the OPC. It is a surprise that it has taken so long for many Yoruba elites to see through the gimmickry of the militia. While the contracts have not yet been awarded, Fasehun has spoken condescendingly of subletting less than one-third of the contract’s value to Mr Adams’ faction of the OPC. The latter, inured to the paradox of Yoruba defenders fighting for crumbs from a potential enemy, is asking for nothing less than half of the total value of the contract. This, he says, is because he leads about 90 percent of the membership of the OPC.

The dissembling duo already has projects in the pipeline. While Dr Fasehun is attempting to revive the defunct UPN, Mr Adams, less pretentious, less ambitious, but perhaps more practical and self-important, simply wants to keep his boys engaged and happy. Both suggest that the Southwest deserves it, for the ACN, according to them has proved incapable of taking care of the welfare of the region. On April 18, Fasehun published a rambling and innuendo-ridden advertorial in which he attempted to rationalise the revival of the UPN. The best in the advert is his exaggerated affectations on democracy. But it would have been better if he had not published anything, for it is clear that in spite of his activist years, he lacks both the depth and character to preach democracy to anyone or offer leadership to any group.

Fasehun assumes that merely invoking the name of UPN is enough to bring back the glory of the Chief Obafemi Awolowo era. He forgets that it was not the party that ennobled Awo; on the contrary it was Awo through his brilliance, depth, passion and discipline, not to say contempt for federal handouts, that ennobled the party. What virtue will Fasehun bring to the party he seeks so cavalierly and comically to resuscitate? I can see none. And what on earth has come over opinion writers and analysts that they give Fasehun a hearing, he that recently asked for Major Hamza Al-Mustapha to be pardoned, he of doubtful ideology and of hidden motives? Had the ferment in the country graduated into a revolution and any of the two OPC leaders assumed prominence, imagine what terrors, poor judgement and mediocrity would have been unleashed on the region.

As Mr Adams said in his provocative response to Fasehun’s angry and disrespecting characterisation of his rival, the two OPCs are perfectly irreconcilable. But much more than the struggle for leadership of the ethnic militia, the pipeline contract controversy has exposed the superciliousness of the older man and the superficiality of the younger claimant. The elites and opinion moulders in the Southwest must surely have taken the measure of the two pretenders to the Yoruba throne. They are first and foremost contractors, a duo of self-serving and ambitious leaders without the farsightedness, discipline, sacrifice and competence to interpret the past and decipher the tangled skein of Nigeria’s future, let alone embody the values and virtues that have stood the Southwest out for centuries.

“We wish to say for the umpteenth time that the land matter had been taken out of context in the public domain, to create an impression that Dame Patience tried to take over a land previously allocated to Hajia Turai. The fact of the matter is that this was not the case, as we have consistently explained. The land, as clarified by former FCT Minister, Aliyu Moddibo Umar, in the Daily Trust edition of Thursday, August 2, 2012, was originally allocated to the African First Ladies Peace Mission during the tenure of Hajia Turai Yar’Adua, as President of the Peace Mission in 2008.

“By some curious circumstances, which have been explained by the FCT Administration, the piece of land was re-allocated to Hajia Turai Yar’Adua’s NGO (WAYEF), under another plot number. It is this anomaly, considered an administrative error, which the FCT had tried to rectify.

“Let it be known that the FCT took what it considered a legitimate course of action to rectify the error, which Hajia Turai challenged in court, having turned down several efforts to get her NGO another piece of land.

“Our office had repeatedly stated that the land, which had been subject of litigation, was between the FCT Administration and Hajia Turai Yar’adua’s NGO, and neither the African First Ladies Peace Mission, even though it is the original allotee of the land, nor Dame Patience Jonathan, who is the sitting President of the continental body, was joined in the suit.

“For purposes of emphasis, we wish to reiterate that the land in question was first allocated to the African First Ladies Peace Mission, according to records available to us, during the tenure of Hajia Turai Yar’Adua as President of the Mission. If in leaving office she had decided to depart with the land, the FCT HAS TAKEN APPROPRIATE LOGICAL ACTION to retrieve the said plot for the ORIGINAL allotee and purpose.”

“To this extent, we wish to state categorically that the judgment referred to in the media was not against the person of Dame Patience Jonathan, and we will like the public and well-meaning Nigerians to put the matter in its proper perspective for the purpose of accurate record and common good.”

Theoretically speaking, no one is certain that the death toll from the clash between the Multinational Joint Task Force (MJTF) and Boko Haram insurgents in Baga, Borno State is as high as locals say or as low as the military authorities swear. But whether the 36 dead declared by the Army or the 185 dead asserted by the locals, the circumstances of the clash and the furore that followed it indicate that something deeply troubling happened in that community. Following the outcry that greeted the high death toll and the thousands of houses allegedly burnt during the nearly two-day operation, the military quickly empaneled a team of officers to investigate the clash. Its report was not substantially different from the initial account given by the commanders of the Baga operation. They insisted there were fewer than 1000 houses in Baga, thereby questioning the account of locals who said more than 2000 houses were deliberately torched by the rampaging soldiers.

Nigerians met the military investigation reports with deep cynicism. Senator Maina Ma’aji Lawan, whose constituency includes Baga, has denounced the military statistics as an infernal lie. He swore that a massacre occurred in the town. He also suggested that in fact much of the town was sacked, not in fighting, but in reprisal. There are a few other teams of investigators empowered to look into the clash. They are expected to give less colourful and more believable accounts. But meanwhile, a US-based rights group, the Human Rights Watch (HRW), has unexpectedly supplied satellite images of the destroyed town before and after the clash, thus proving that a huge swath of the town was indeed sacked and burnt. It further analysed that the conflagration could not have been triggered by small arms and light weapons, as speculated by the military.

The military authorities are yet to reply to this new evidence. But it is fast dawning on everyone that in the face of modern science, there is no hiding place for anyone or atrocity. If the HRW satellite images stand, and there is no reason they should not, the officers who endorsed the military report may have imperiled their integrity and commission. They and President Goodluck Jonathan who was quick to embrace the report will be surprised to know that even in Africa things are changing, and the atrocities connived at in the past have become anathema.

The National Human Rights Commission of Nigeria (NHRC) will also be investigating the clash. But it has implausibly and precipitately cautioned that the Baga incident should not be politicised. Absolute nonsense. Of course, no one is politicising the massacre. The fact is that everyone is too shocked by the scale of killings that it smacks of gross insensitivity and even snobbery for the government and the NHRC to suggest someone might be politicising the issue. Let us hope that the NHRC’s hasty caution does not prejudice the outcome of its report. As for the president and the military, they seem quite desperate to downplay the incident. But even if 36 were killed, it still amounts to crime against humanity if the victims were defenceless civilians instead of armed militants. Surely, the government and the military can tell the difference.

After more than two years of nasty controversy over the revocation and reallocation of a prime land in Abuja, and an embarrassing court battle between two First Ladies over the same land, an Abuja High Court has resolved the matter, at least for the moment. Though the spokesman of the First Lady, Mrs Patience Jonathan, said the land battle was between Turai Yar’Adua, widow of the former president, Umaru Yar’Adua, and the Federal Capital City (FCT), everyone knows that the bitter fight was between the two First Ladies. While it is true Dame Patience was not joined in the case when Hajiya Turai headed for the courts, it was widely known that by being the beneficiary of the land reallocation, she was by far the most interested party in the tripartite land dispute. Not only did she defend the reallocation in her scabrous but expansively entertaining style, she left no doubt whatsoever that what she planned to do with the land would summarise her legacy.

During the presentation of the PDP Women-In-Power 2013 Calendar in February, she had this to say: “The wife of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, Maryam, built the National Women Centre while the wife of Gen. Sani Abacha, Maryam, also built the National Hospital. None of them (former First Ladies) left with the buildings. I am not the owner of the AFLPM, and when I leave, I will not take it away. It is not a pet project of anyone.” The land in question is situated in the Central Business District in Abuja. In February 2010, it was allocated to the Women and Youth Empowerment Foundation (WAYEF), a Non-Governmental Organisation (NGO) run by the immediate past First Lady, Hajiya Turai. However, in November 2011 the FCT minister, Bala Mohammed, revoked the allocation and transferred ownership of the land to African First Ladies Peace Mission (AFLPM) now led by Dame Patience. The First Lady had planned to build the headquarters of the AFLPM on the land, and for which the ingratiating FCT controversially budgeted about four billion naira.

Though Ayo Osinlu, the First Lady’s spokesman, has attempted to present what amounts to a fresh case in the newspapers to sway the public, Justice Peter Affen was emphatic that he gave judgment based on the facts before him. It is, however, possible that some of the facts available to Mr. Osinlu and his bosses were not available to the judge. But that can be explained, as Mr Osinlu himself acknowledged, by the fact that the case was not between Hajiya Turai and Dame Patience; it was between the former First Lady and the FCT. The FCT has indicated interest in appealing the decision. It is entitled to push the matter even up to the Supreme Court, though it is hard to see Affen’s decision being overturned. What the continuation of the case will do, however, is to further prolong Dame Patience’s misery, open the government to more ridicule, and damage the little reputation the President Goodluck Jonathan government pretends to have for taking dispassionate views of issues – as if the Rotimi Amaechi case is not enough refutation.

When the AFLPM met in July last year in Abuja, the land battle was still unresolved and the budget allocation for the AFLPM was yet to be sorted out. But through the intervention of the Attorney General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Mohammed Adoke, Dame Patience, surrounded by a bevy of other First Ladies, managed to lay the foundation stone for the AFLPM’s permanent secretariat. It takes unusual gusto and indifference to the law and propriety to circumvent legal and administrative objections with such flourish. Dame Patience doubtless has a fighting spirit. If only it could be harnessed for irreproachable causes.

But the First Lady is not all defiance. She was probably emboldened to fight for the land based on the testimony of former FCT minister, Aliyu Moddibo Umar, who told the Voice of America radio service that the idea for the AFLPM’s permanent secretariat was actually his own, not even Dame Patience’s or Hajiya Turai’s. He had secured the land, prepared a C-of-O for it, and had a structural drawing for the project done, all in 2008. He added that he thought it would be a legacy project for Hajiya Turai. But after he vacated that office, his successor, Senator Adamu Aliero, was said to have reallocated the land to Hajiya Turai’s NGO, an action, Dame Patience insisted, the current FCT minister was trying to correct.

Thrice the trial judge gave the disputants opportunity to settle the matter out of court, and thrice they spurned the chance to act reasonably. According to Hajiya Turai’s lawyers, the land offered the former First Lady was either too small or it was situated in undeveloped area. In the end, the judge decided that the land should not have been revoked or reallocated. The main problem with the land battle, however, is not whether Hajiya Turai was right, as the law has now affirmed, or whether FCT/Dame Patience was wrong, going by the court decision. The problem is that the two First Ladies opened up the country to ridicule. It is inconceivable that the African First Ladies that attended the foundation laying ceremony of the secretariat last year did not hear or read about the unseemly struggle over the choice land in Abuja. They probably shrugged their shoulders, satisfied that they were not the ones making a mockery of their position or their countries. If Nigerians felt shameless about such matters, it was the least of the problems of the other First ladies.

The blame for the intractable land dispute should be put squarely at the feet of Jonathan. It was wrong of him to allow the case to fester openly for so long to the point that Nigeria became a spectacle. It is okay for him to affirm his respect for the rule of law, and to accord the law the widest latitude in resolving conflicts, but in this instance, as in nearly all instances, it was better the case had not gone to court at all. Even if Hajiya Turai was wrong, greedy and duplicitous, for the sake of the country’s image and the high esteem many hold the presidency of Nigeria, Jonathan should have insisted the AFLPM looked for another piece of land, whether prime or not. After all, the FCT is still developing and expanding.

There are times when tenacity is a virtue; but there are also times when it is unhelpful. The disputed land exemplifies tenacity as a vice. Jonathan should have put his foot down to avert the court dispute. He is not only president in fact, he is president in law, and he is supposed to embody the country’s self-esteem and approximate its self-belief. When he acts nobly, it rubs off on everyone; when he acts disreputably, it also tars everyone with the same brush. It is unnerving that that distinction escaped him in the dispute between Dame Patience and Hajiya Turai. How many more such distinctions will escape him before his term is finished?

Now, the damage is done, and it is incalculable. If Jonathan had made the AFLPM to forgo the land, he could have appropriated to himself and his government a nobility far in excess of what he has exhibited so far or is in fact capable of. But even if he were to win the case on appeal, it could not mitigate the public relations damage the original loss occasioned, for many would see his importunate government as rapacious and vengeful. But if the FCT/government/Patience should lose again, it would be the ultimate humiliation they could not hope to live down. In other words, damned if they win; and damned if they lose.

The president may again pretend to his usual detachment on this embarrassing legal battle, but the unavoidable fact is that the buck stops at his desk. He can either pick the buck and throw it away in denial, or remove his desk and declare with quixotic relish he had vanquished the phantom, or act with the wisdom expected of his office. What he cannot afford to do is stand still, pretend the nuisance battle is strictly legal, and hope the problem would resolve itself in the near future.

The suspicion in many quarters is that President Goodluck Jonathan actually thinks he has done substantially well enough to justify his party presenting him for re-election in 2015. Kingsley Kuku, the Special Adviser to the President on Niger Delta, and Mujahid Asari-Dokubo, leader of the Niger Delta Peoples Volunteer Force (NDPVF), a militant group physically but not psychologically repentant, think so too, and have reiterated that fact in very unpleasant and annoying language. While the president has kept prudently but disingenuously silent on his records and 2015 ambition, Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State has spoken imprudently loud about his well-known enemies, their Abuja backers, and the subterfuge perpetrated by the presidency in the riverine state.

Reacting to the massive disapproval that greeted his statements warning of economic sabotage and war if Dr Jonathan was not re-elected, but enjoying every bit of the publicity and attendant notoriety, Asari-Dokubo has goaded the public with yet more boastful and provocative comments. He could not be arrested, he threatened conceitedly, because the last time he was arrested and detained, oil production was cut down by a significant margin. This time, he thundered, his arrest would bring oil production to zero. Such buffoonery! There is no doubt that there are lots of troublemakers in the country, many of them lacking in restraint and sense of proportion, but the many silly remarks Asari-Dokubo made showed him to be a halfwit who should be noted but ignored.

Hon. Kuku, who also heads the well-funded Presidential Amnesty Programme, was even more loquacious, insulting and conniving. “It is true that the Presidential Amnesty Programme has engendered peace, safety and security in the sensitive and strategic Niger Delta,” he began incongruously. “It is only a Jonathan presidency that can guarantee continued peace and energy security in the Niger Delta,” he concluded. He also managed to attempt to blackmail the United States warning them that if they fail to support Jonathan’s re-election it could threaten national stability and oil and gas exports. Unlike Nigeria, which is being blackmailed into precipitous appeasement of all sorts of malcontents, the US never likes to be arm-twisted. By now, after hearing all the careless talk by close aides and advisers of the president, foreign powers will have taken the measure of Nigerian rulers’ minds. They will not be surprised that Nigeria is embroiled in crisis.

But much worse is the proxy war between the president himself and the governor of Rivers State. It is a turf war in which two leading politicians are fighting for supremacy. But the war is unsettling the state, promoting animosity, undermining the constitution, and worsening the tension that has enveloped the country from North to South. While the president’s men are fighting for control of the state in order not to lose it in 2015, Amaechi’s men tamely clutch only to the law and the constitution in a desperate struggle to stay afloat. It is not certain how the struggle will be resolved; whether the constitution will be sustained, or whether federal might will destabilise or even overwhelm the state.

Whatever the situation in Rivers, and however the looming apocalypse in the Northeast, and now North-Central, plays out, the country should prepare for tough times ahead. The president can lower the temperature if he wants to. But there is no proof he knows how to or why he should, or more critically, the consequences of aggravating the turmoil in the country.