Judging from the way he talks, gestures and ruminates, sometimes angrily and at other times dismissively, President Goodluck Jonathan often gives the impression his pressing problems should be laid at the doorsteps of Nigeria’s boisterous and sometimes cantankerous media and the political opposition. The media is deeply judgemental, probing and censorious, and it has given Jonathan’s presidency no quarters. But it has always been all these, and will continue to be much more well after the Jonathan government; for even before independence, it never suffered fools gladly, not the white man and not his docile and colluding black servants. It is pointless for anyone to think that the media can now be tamed or diminished both by legislation and by brute force. Not only will such efforts remain undesirable, it will be ineffectual. On its own, the opposition, whether during military rule or civilian rule, is grounded on constitutional and cultural approbation. To attempt to put a leash on it is to try to make water flow uphill. It is as unrealistically unnatural as it is deliberately quixotic.

It is, therefore, time for the Jonathan presidency to take the predilections of the media and opposition parties as a given and try to locate the problems, weaknesses and limitations of his troubled government elsewhere. Since he assumed the presidency, Jonathan has been suffering from insufficient appreciation of the country’s structural imbalances and disequilibrium, poor policy coordination, unprecedented security challenges gradually metamorphosing into full-scale insurgency, rampant militia activities such as the proselytising Ombatse cult in Nasarawa State, schismatic ethnic politics, and a self-inflicted underachieving cabinet, among others. Singly or collectively, these problems have caused and nurtured instability in the Northeast, dislocated the economy, created a frustrated and destructive army of unemployed youths, rendered Jonathan’s government desperate and insular, and pushed the country firmly towards the precipice. The media merely reports these issues, and opposition parties merely capitalise on them. Neither group has infringed the law or common sense. And neither has acted improperly or with less circumspection than is generally required to keep the president and his government on their toes.

The Jonathan government is not underperforming because these problems are unique, unprecedented or severe. He is not failing because anyone wants him to fail or because he was programmed by legal and constitutional strictures to falter. And he is not confused because the problems are complex and interwoven. The Jonathan government is lost in a self-created labyrinth because he either lacks the capacity to grapple with the problems that mass before him, or he is naturally uninspiring, and so can no more inspire anyone than he can eat or converse with aristocratic finesse. It is well known that governments in Nigeria win elections against the run of play and in defiance of their appalling records. Perhaps Dr Jonathan hopes to capitalise on that historical antecedent by winning elections undeservedly, achieving unplanned breakthroughs, and solving crises either by avoiding them or ignoring them. If he embraces any of those options, he will have it tough going. For, this time, given the intensity of the socioeconomic and sectarian revolt in the North, it is hard to see how his customary pussyfooting and policy inexactitude would guarantee the survival of the country beyond the portentous 2015 an American military think tank warned a few years ago.

Dr Jonathan needs to reinvent himself along the lines his flashes of verbal brilliance and candour indicate. In his many public engagements, he sometimes spoke with simplicity and honesty, almost with engaging bipolarity, as if he always needed to subordinate his real self to his public self, his tortuous and perhaps contrived Christian consciousness to his more popular and secular nonconformism. Not only is it time for him to determine who he wants to be, it is also time to ask himself whether he really wants to save his presidency and what is left of his reputation. He came into politics without having had the opportunity to define politics in terms of the values that shaped his life and upbringing. And from the time he became deputy governor, through the frenetic pace of his meteoric ascendancy, and up to the time he mounted the highest throne in the land, Jonathan did not appear to have paused to define his politics, what he intended to do with power once he got it, and what sort of country he hoped to mould out of its riotous disparateness.

The national crises that weigh on his soul and grieve him endlessly call on him to vote one way or the other. That vote has been long in coming. Since he came in unprepared, he did not have a prepared template to face the problems. If he does not now take a walk in the wilderness and commune with his own soul, it will be difficult for him to make a choice, let alone the right choice. Worse, instead of scientifically and methodically confronting the evils threatening to undermine his presidency and even plunge the country into anarchy, he may find himself conceiving and administering ad hoc solutions. A president must come to the epiphanic realisation that he needs to change himself first before he can attempt to change the country.

But rather than the hard and productive way of changing himself in order to change the country, inspiring himself in order to inspire the country, acquiring knowledge in order to lead the country from a position of knowledge, Dr Jonathan may be embracing all over again the unproductive and hackneyed method of summoning his security chiefs or cabinet whenever he faces an outbreak of crisis. In the past two years or so, the insurgency in the North and militia activities in other parts of the country have combined to unleash a steady stream of bloodletting on the country. The bloodbath never stopped for a moment; but the president has had to cut short his visit to parts of Southern Africa to attend to the killings in Bama, Borno State, and a village near Lafia in Nasarawa State. What initiatives does he hope to bring to the table? Indeed, what initiatives has he brought to the table in the past few months when horrendous killings took place?

Cutting short his visit to Southern Africa is a mere public relations stunt. He had no choice than to do that, for not to do it would have compounded the blame he continues to receive for his inability to stanch the flow of blood in the country. But nothing serious will come from the renewed attention the president is giving the present crisis. His style and approach to the crisis will not change until he changes himself. When he changes, he will no longer go to the scene of rebellion and pass the buck to the elders of blighted communities, or make utterances that inflame passion, alienate the people, and aggravate the insurgency. And he will not also endorse the bloated impression the security forces have of themselves: that their uniforms somehow make them superior, invincible and untouchable. Now that militias and insurgents have defied his warning that no security agent should be murdered without eliciting a disproportionate response from the state’s awesome security machine, what does he intend to do to avenge the Nasarawa killings? Wipe out the entire state?

The country is exploding into many theatres of war. It is time Dr Jonathan took the right and urgent steps. First, he needs to reinvent himself, discover who he is, what kind of politics he wants to play, and what concrete vision of a strong, free and democratic country he wants to have, enunciate and bring about. He cannot discover himself by simply sitting at the head of the table in situation rooms and listening to the same jaded ideas from his incompetent aides, misguided advisers and overwhelmed security chiefs.

Second, he needs to take very bold steps to restructure the country if it is to survive beyond 2015. The first step here is to cause the devolution of the security structure away from the current unitary system. The more he delays, the more likely the kind of ugly incident that occurred at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital between grieving policemen, doctors and morgue attendants will repeat itself. That unfortunate incident is a pointer to the fact that nerves are getting frayed and patience is snapping dangerously. It is only a matter of time before the unimaginable happens. Worse, even if perpetrators of the Nasarawa killings are caught and dealt with, it does not mitigate the fact that more and more groups are defying the state, demystifying the security agencies, and signifying that the country is fast running out of time.

Third, it is incredible that the president does not know he is actually the one playing politics with insecurity, wrongly accusing the media of insensitivity and sensationalism, and unfairly denouncing the opposition for warning of disintegration. It is in fact Jonathan that needs a new, invigorated, bold and effective cabinet. Apart from unadvisedly surrendering a crucial part of his responsibilities to one or two powerful ministers in his cabinet, the president has unfortunately surrounded himself with what a columnist with this newspaper described as ethnopolitical zanies, most of whom don’t know their left from their right, and whose preoccupation is greed and parochialism.

The country is not decaying beneath a welter of crises, much of it sectarian, sanguinary and disruptive. The country is in fact decaying beneath a lack of leadership, uninspiring, insensitive, glacial, but deceptively bellicose, leadership. Dr Jonathan is lucky to be faced with the crises assailing his government. His problem is not that the crises are many, terrible and complex. His problem is how he is responding to them. So far, those responses have not been stirring. But they need to be if he is not to go down into 2015 a failure hoping to be rewarded with a second term for having led his country into chaos and decay.

It requires a huge dose of optimism to trust President Goodluck Jonathan’s instinct in declaring a state of emergency in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States. I confess I do not have such an endowment, and I am not careful to hold a contrary position on this very controversial issue. Majority of Nigerians, perhaps 99 percent, favour emergency, and either abusively denounce those who don’t or equate opposition to emergency with support for Boko Haram insurgency. They are entitled to their opinion. The more supporters of emergency work themselves up into a fever over the few of us who see through the president’s manoeuvres, the more convinced I am that both the president and his supporters are misguided and intolerant.

A day after Jonathan took the plunge and committed the Northeast angrily into emergency, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) spontaneously denounced the declaration and pointed out that the president was in fact playing politics with the issue of insecurity. But one day later, after having had the chance to reflect on the delicate matter and to measure the weight of their courage in the face of massive public endorsement of emergency, the party mellowed its stand from asking the National Assembly to reject emergency to asking them to examine it cautiously. I do not pretend to any of the party’s luxuries. I understand the need for the party to cast a wary, indeed longing, eye on the next general elections, and must therefore be careful not to distance itself too inappropriately from the herd grazing on emergency. But I have no vote to seek, and if I wish, I may even have no vote to cast in 2015.

Of course the ACN, much more than any other party, did well to publicise its initial opposition to emergency even before it understood which way the cats were jumping. That it has had to quickly modify its original stand merely reflects that its leaders are realists who must watch the ballot box with a defensive keenness that exceeds its vaunted predatory instincts. The scale of support for Jonathan’s emergency declaration must have stunned northern leaders themselves into whooping for the measure, I suspect, against their better judgement. Indeed, in the north, whether among former heads of state or among leading politicians, all we hear is a mellifluous chorus of support for emergency. Obviously, at a time like this, discretion is the better part of valour.

The dispute over emergency, it must be reiterated, is not about whether Boko Haram needed to be fought and defeated or whether it should be tolerated and pampered. Everyone, except the sect’s members, agrees that the killings in the north needed to be halted. The dispute, therefore, is essentially about methods, not goals. The southern part of Nigeria never liked Boko Haram for one minute, and minced no words in vociferously deploring its methods and objectives, even at the constant and irritating risk of accusing the north of supporting the sect. A corollary of that assumed convergence between the north and the sect is the south’s dismissive characterisation of every northerner who proposes a different perspective of tackling the insurgency as a Boko Haram supporter. Indeed, in my view, the northern part was at first ambivalent to the sect, even seemingly indulgent, and only belatedly horrified and shaken by the huge scale of atrocities the militants were perpetrating.

Readers of this column will recall my trenchant view of Boko Haram, my opposition to amnesty, except for the sect’s foot soldiers, and only because of the administrative cost of prosecuting every sect member, and my unalloyed support for secularism and democracy. Boko Haram should be fought, and the military should lead the battle. But we must be careful to plan beyond military victory. The question to ask is whether emergency will help the government and the military to explain why they failed to defeat the sect and pacify the region. I suspect it will not. Dr Jonathan’s state of emergency does not only reek of politics, it seems to me a facile and fatuous strategy to divert attention from serious issues pertaining to the long-running campaign against terror in Nigeria, such as the Baga killings. Emergency also conceals the general disinclination of the Jonathan presidency for rigorous thinking and scientific governance and foreshadows a rising dictatorship.

The Nigerian constitution places the responsibility for security squarely on the shoulders of the president, not in the hands of governors. If anyone was, therefore, remiss in his responsibility for security in the Northeast, it was the president. In fighting Boko Haram, there has been no presidential initiative to deploy forces that the states or local governments disagreed with. Dr Jonathan had the unlimited power to add to and subtract from the number of troops deployed in the war front. He took no input from the governors about tactical deployment, and there was no part of the affected states from which federal forces were barred. Does Jonathan therefore need a state of emergency to raise troop strength? What is he doing now that he couldn’t do without declaring emergency? Warrant to search? Suspension of habeas corpus?

Section 305 of the 1999 constitution broadly describes the procedure for the proclamation of a state of emergency. As the ACN pointed out in its initial position, emergency was already in force in many parts of the Northeast, but was ineffective. Nobody ever questioned the government’s deployments and even rights abuses until Borno elders began to notice strange killings. In fact, there are no powers granted by emergency proclamation that the people had not already vouchsafed to the president in view of the drastic circumstances of insecurity in those regions. It is, therefore, necessary for to be cautious about emergency and admonish Nigerians on why the proclamation should be considered carefully side-by-side with Sections 33 and 35 of the constitution dealing with the rights of the people. It may even be necessary to draw attention to the entire Chapter IV of the constitution for the public and the National Assembly to appreciate those rights that, in emergency, are or should be non-derogable.

The proclamation has been sent to the National Assembly, and the two chambers have scheduled a discussion for Tuesday. It is important they remove the fears of the people that Section 305 as applied will not be used inappropriately and narrow-mindedly to derogate the rights of the people under emergency. The legislature must not allow itself to be carried away by popular emotions, nor be blackmailed by the reckless and aggressive support most Nigerians have offered the president. They must carefully determine whether the cause of peace would be served by the liberty the president wishes to take over a war he has largely bungled and prolonged by his dithering.

By declaring emergency, it seems to me, Dr Jonathan gave the impression that someone else, perhaps the governors of the affected states and their conniving political elite, was to blame for insecurity and Boko Haram. The governors’ economic and social policies probably contributed to the beginnings of the revolt and undoubtedly aggravated it, but it is inconceivable that emergency should be expected to remedy the problem and stamp it out permanently. The president also needed emergency to deflect censorious attention from the alleged atrocities that took place in Baga, Borno State in April. The matter was being probed, until emergency was declared. Not only will the probes now be compromised, it is certain that with emergency, no other probe elsewhere will be entertained. Frightened by the countrywide unanimity of approval for the president’s extraordinary measures, northern leaders have, against their better judgement, abandoned the hapless people of the three states to be sandwiched between the extreme measures of the Nigerian security forces and the brutal fanaticism and extortion of the Boko Haram sect.

This abandonment is anchored on the indefensible argument, advanced mainly by the south and the presidency, that the people of those states had a duty to expose the sect. In other words damned if they rat on the sect, and damned if for fear of their lives they don’t. I feel for them, and wish we had a more informed, more empathetic and more reflective president. The campaign against Boko Haram failed not because we didn’t have the troops and the logistics to fight the sect, but because the security forces failed to fight a winnable and moral war, and win the confidence of the local populace, as indeed other victorious armies in the world take care to do. It is instructive that while Nigerians were hailing the president’s show of force and firepower in the Northeast, it took a visiting British general, Robert Fry, a former deputy commanding general of the coalition forces in Iraq, to caution against the use of excessive force in the Northeast. But Nigerians would rather those states were smashed to smithereens, and the local populace blamed themselves for not pushing out the militants in their midst. It seems we have lost our senses.

President Jonathan, I have argued, does not need a state of emergency to take the measures he has just adumbrated. But none in the National Assembly will have the heart to tell him that. I am persuaded that indeed the proclamation reeks of offensive politicking. The Northeast is anti-Jonathan, and will stay so until 2015 and beyond. The president does not have any emotional attachment to those states, and could care less what they feel, as he said when he reluctantly visited them in March. Judging from his anger as he read his speech in a tremulous voice on Tuesday, Dr Jonathan was evidently tormented by his private demons, and was intemperate, unstatesmanlike and full of unnecessary fury. His supposed fierce mien was not, as some imagined, a ploy to display presidential toughness; it instead betrayed his boyish instinct for sophistry, his rustic impulsiveness, and his burgeoning ruthlessness and dictatorial tendency.

Future generations will recall how, on the excuse of battling insurgency and saving the union, we abandoned to the federal rampage our kith and kin in the Northeast, a majority of whom are law-abiding, and for whom sadly and mortifyingly the rest of the world feels more fellow-feeling than Nigerians. By whooping hysterically for war, rather than for a clinical and brilliant campaign to take out the offending rascals destabilising the union, we seem to say that the problem, whose roots are deeper than military defeat can extirpate, can be destroyed with a massive military blow. Nothing can be further from the reality. Military victory may be achieved in the near future, but it remains to be seen whether the fiery and indecipherable logic of the rebellion and the sect’s promotion of borderless war can be subdued permanently by conventional military tactics.

But more saddening are those who argue that the president should have sent the governors and their legislative houses packing either for being the cause of this imbroglio or for worsening it. This is simply senseless. Are we so undisciplined that at the first hint of a major trouble we are willing to whimsically dishonour some of the provisions of the constitution, or select which part to obey and which to ignore or downgrade? Strangely, among those who make this nonsensical argument are lawyers and academics who should know better. But it is not only lawyers who are losing their heads, that is, after Aso Villa’s melodramatic buck-passing, even journalists and editorial writers have gone completely irrational. They have not only endorsed Dr Jonathan’s questionable decision to impose emergency, they, who should be the bastion of civil rights and free speech, have issued dire warnings to opposition parties to fall in line behind the president. Already, of course, and as the brusque declaration of curfew in Adamawa showed, executive, judicial and legislative powers have been abridged by the military. The governors will be ceremonial leaders throughout the emergency, even as the affected states may be coaxed into parting with a part of their monthly allocation to the war effort.

It is necessary for the National Assembly to scrutinise the president’s proclamation very closely and tame it. If, without emergency, the Baga incident elicited so much controversy, what should we expect with the leeway emergency proclamation confers? The legislators must understand that with the events in Rivers State, where federal might is being immoderately and perversely deployed, and the unsupportable and capricious inclusion of Adamawa in the emergency declaration, we are well on our way to a brutal dictatorship. We recall how miserably we fared when we feebly confronted the dictatorship and arbitrariness of the Chief Olusegun Obasanjo presidency; it is up to us if in the face of Dr Jonathan’s political dubieties we begin to prevaricate or, worse, wilt. We should not blame Boko Haram for exposing our poor mettle or northern leaders who failed to rally against the sect. If another president takes us for a ride again, and in the end corrupts and weakens the fabric of our democracy, we have ourselves, our weak legislature and our impressionable press to thank.

If anything indicates very starkly the hard temper of Nigerian democracy, last Friday’s election of chairman of the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) showed why and how. A day to the election, indeed hours before, no one, not even any of the governors, was sure who would win the election, in view of the base emotions that sometimes propel Nigerian politics. But it was always clear that whoever won would find it difficult to rally all the governors behind himself. Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State won by 19 votes to Plateau State’s Jonah Jang’s 16 votes, showing how divided and divisive that pressure group has become and how keenly the election was fought for a post that carries no constitutional significance, and is indeed superfluous to the needs of the country, not to talk of the desperate needs of the people of the 36 states.

It was not as if the sorely tried winner was intrinsically divisive or even controversial. The problem with him, and which his victory evinced, was how, due to no fault of his, he was perceived in the presidency as an upstart and a troublemaker. In saner climes, his commitment to development, his doggedness, his courage and his eloquent grasp of issues should make him a rising star in his party. It is indeed no credit to the image of President Goodluck Jonathan that he and his men virtually demonised the Rivers governor, cast him in the shape of a radical and rebellious outcast, and were prepared to gleefully and unconstitutionally subvert Rivers State and deliberately divide and destroy the NGF.

The import of the NGF election is not that some governors are miffed by their candidate’s loss, or that the president’s objectives seem for now to have been truncated. (Dr Jonathan is famous for not taking no for an answer). The import is that much more than the president, the country’s 36 governors theoretically form the bulwark of Nigerian democracy, yet many of them have become ardently contemptuous of the elementary principles of democracy. Though they represent the country’s collective political achievement and ideological stability, they have shown a disgraceful incompetence to manage an election in which only 35 people voted. How could a group of top politicians who find it difficult to summon the common sense to win or lose a small election with dignified calmness superintend state and national elections in which tens of millions of Nigerians would vote? How could a group of senior politicians who find it difficult to acknowledge their colleagues’ point of view find the grace and wisdom to tolerate dissent in their own states?

It does not bother me who won or lost, though, because of the president’s meddlesomeness, I would rather his candidate lost; but I am worried that the governors played infantile politics, politics without principles, politics without nobility, politics without character. I am in fact deeply disturbed that a man of Governor Godswill Akpabio’s moderate accomplishments and admirable eloquence (he talks nineteen to the dozen) should lend his exertions and modest gifts to anomalous and ignoble ends. Where is his soul, and can he call it his own even if it were thrust under his nose? Not only is he disputing what was apparently a transparent election, he has taken incredible and laughable steps to make the NGF self-destruct. Had he offered himself entirely to, say, a great president, we would still have condemned his servility; but at least his faults would be redeemed by the great and noble purpose he wilfully and reckless spent it on. Unfortunately, he has devoted his every talent to the wrong cause and the wrong man.

Amaechi has won, but I fear he will not be able to unite the association behind himself, nor be able to deploy the group for any meaningful democratic end. I also fear that the presidency, which has become a vindictive and sterile bastion of futile politics, will rededicate itself to destroying Amaechi. Nineteen governors voted for Amaechi; he will be lucky to get more than 20 to stand with him whenever he needs them. More, because of 2015, and because Dr Jonathan cannot rise to a profound level, the presidency will make Amaechi’s remaining years in office a living nightmare. And given the shallowness of the Nigerian mind and the immaturity of their politics, it is not guaranteed that Amaechi will find the kind of support his hard work as a governor and his character as a person merit. And contrary to what he thinks, his victory has not tested and proven Nigerian democracy. His victory, which cannot be divorced from the politics that preceded it or the shenanigan that followed, has only shown how irresponsible and reckless most of those who govern the country have become.

Riding on the crest of a wave of popular approbation on the declaration of emergency, President Goodluck Jonathan is all the more convinced that he took the right step in his effort to pacify the restive Northeast region. The details of the proclamation, which were not immediately available but came many anxious days later, show conclusively how far-reaching the provisions are, and how fateful they could become in the coming months and years for the sustenance of democracy. Notwithstanding which part of the divide we find ourselves – for or against emergency – or how uncritically we embraced the panacea even before we knew the details of the proclamation, it is time for us to move on to even more germane but troubling matters, especially considering that emergency has become a fait accompli.

I suspect that the president took a few more days than he planned to transmit the proclamation to the National Assembly because he was astounded by the overwhelming support Nigerians gave him. He probably felt he would not injure his goals, whatever they were, if he tweaked the provisions of the proclamation to tighten his hold on the Northeast. Any sound democrat – and there are few of them in Nigeria – or sound thinker should be alarmed by the provisions of the proclamation. Sadly, neither the public which whooped for emergency nor the National Assembly saddled with the greater responsibility of safeguarding democracy, has shown any disquiet or even discomfort with the details. The mostly conservative Senate has raised barely a whimper against emergency, and the often populist House of Representatives has only offered feeble protests.

So, for now, we are stuck with emergency in the Northeast, even as fears grow in sane quarters that given Dr Jonathan’s constant immoderation and propensity for brinkmanship, he could yet widen the areas under emergency proclamation. Before the details of the proclamation were made public, this column had concluded that the governors of the affected states would become ceremonial rulers and the military commanders the de facto rulers. This observation flies in the face of the president’s pronouncement that he had not tampered with the democratic structures in the three states, and that the governor, Houses of Assembly and the local government areas were intact. It was inconceivable that the said democratic structures could function in the teeth of emergency, I warned. Surprisingly, lawyers, academicians and newspapers argued that by leaving the democratic structures in place, the president was jeopardising the success of emergency and prolonging the misery of the Northeast.

Such undisciplined reasoning was not totally unexpected, considering that there had been a progressive attenuation of disciplined thinking and research in Nigeria for many years. I had nothing to base my suspicion on, of course, other than my intuitive distrust of Dr Jonathan’s bona fides, whether in relation to his depressing political pragmatism, his lack of ideological persuasion, or even his annoying abjuration of the role and place of philosophy in the government of any society, ancient or modern. When he finally publicised the details, it was clear that Dr Jonathan, like his superficial mentor, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, had unlimited contempt for the principles and practice of democracy. He entertains the quaint belief that it is sometimes necessary to destroy a thing in order to save it. The unsuspecting National Assembly, the bewildered public, and the querulous press apparently agree.

In the proclamation, Dr Jonathan has completely and undisguisedly subordinated the governor, local government chairmen and, by implication, the Houses of Assembly in the affected areas to the military commanders in the three states. The military commanders, as emergency rule in Ekiti showed in 2006, are in turn subordinated to the president. In short, Dr Jonathan has the distinguished Lugardian honour of imposing indirect rule in Borno, Yobe and Adamawa States. The National Assembly’s harmonised version of the proclamation tried to circumscribe the subordination of governors and LG chairmen to the president’s whims by limiting the orders he could issue to matters relating to “maintaining and securing peace, public order and public safety in the emergency areas.” The reality is, however, far different, and this needn’t be argued.

But if this was the only evidence of power grab in the Northeast, it could be pardoned. In another far-reaching provision in the proclamation, the president is empowered to utilise the funds of the affected states for the purpose of executing the state of emergency. The president’s original proposal to spend state funds is truly frightening. But the National Assembly’s harmonised version futilely attempts to limit the usage of the funds to “provide for the protection, documentation, return, re-integration, resettlement, rehabilitation, compensation and remuneration of persons affected by this order.” It is hard to know exactly what was on the minds of the framers of this provision, for the responsibilities listed in that clause are actually much better performed by the states and LGs than the federal government, let alone a military commander. In fact, it is clear that the president originally intended this provision to underwrite the cost of the emergency itself.

This column had warned last week that, “The governors will be ceremonial leaders throughout the emergency, even as the affected states may be coaxed into parting with a part of their monthly allocations to the war effort.” That warning was neither prescient nor comprehensive enough. There is nothing in Dr Jonathan’s proclamation or the legislature’s harmonised version to indicate the degree of tampering allowed the president. The governors are already browbeaten, and the public mood against them unsparing. They will, therefore, tamely submit to all forms of violation and indignity.

The president already has enormous powers to do anything he wishes with the country, and is more powerful than any democratically elected president anywhere. Unfortunately, since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, no president has been circumspect or innovative in the use of those powers. Emergency in the Northeast now indirectly deposits more powers in the hands of the president than he used to have. He will henceforth begin to see all sorts of possibilities in accreting in influence and control in hostile states. He now understands how to grab power and how to fund that grab, irrespective of what positive ends he puts the grab to. Technically, he now knows what to do to extend emergency rule, and he will not be incommoded by shortage of funds, nor, quite embarrassing to every Nigerian, will he be in short supply of support.

The Joint Task Force has proudly announced its troops have completely overrun Boko Haram camps in the emergency states. No less was expected. It would be stupid of the militants to stay and fight. The only time they did so in 2009, they were worsted, and their leader, Mohammed Yusuf, extra-judicially murdered. Since then they have adopted guerrilla tactics and war of attrition that enervate even the most sophisticated army. When emergency was proclaimed it was expected that the Boko Haram militants would flee their camps, regroup at a future date, re-strategise, and re-launch their terror war in more lethal fashion. It is that uncertain and sanguinary aftermath that the JTF and the Jonathan presidency should be worried about.

I restate my perspective once again that Dr Jonathan’s leadership style is inconsistent with the highest ideals and principles of great leadership. State of emergency is superfluous in the circumstances of the rebellion in the Northeast, as it was superfluous in Plateau and Ekiti States under Obasanjo and in the defunct Western Region under Tafawa Balewa. If Dr Jonathan had not taken a dim view of the matter by embracing melodrama, he would have discovered that deploying additional troops and pacifying the region did not need the agency of a state of emergency, not to talk of needlessly and surreptitiously weakening democratic structures in the affected areas and indeed everywhere, tampering with the fundamental principles of federalism by proposing to spend state and LG money, and unjustly and unfairly blaming and subordinating elected governments to military commanders.

Moreover, there is a gross misunderstanding of the nature of the crisis facing the country in the Northeast. The rebellion in that region may have socio-economic undertones and a veneer of politics, but it is also much more disturbingly a potpourri of sectarian and class revolts rooted in malformed medieval ideologies. Such revolts, which often come and go within a generation, do not respond to force as facilely as many hope. But to the consternation of the sober and the mirth of the hysteric, Dr Jonathan has reacted to the crisis simplistically and imprudently. On its own, the National Assembly, in particular the Senate, has failed to react to the president’s prognosis with the kind of legislative aplomb a modern and activist legislature should summon.

Giving free rein to the president’s subversion of democratic structures in the affected states is bound to have repercussions in the near and distant future. Obasanjo was not checked in 2006, though he never imposed emergency in more than one state at a time. Now, Jonathan has imposed emergency in three states at once, and seems set to foment trouble in a fourth, Rivers. And by harshly and abruptly discarding the little progress the country has made in consolidating democracy, and by stifling opposition efforts to propound alternatives, the president and his supporters have injured the body politic much more obnoxiously than Boko Haram is ever capable of doing.

Just before it yielded command to a new army division expected to take over its functions in the Northeast, the Joint Task Force (JTF), which has been combating terrorism in the region, announced to a bemused country that Boko Haram leader, Abubakar Shekau, might have died from gunshot injuries sustained in a firefight with security forces sometime in June. They offered no proof except circumstantial evidence from unstated and probably untested sources. They themselves were careful not to sound definitive. So, why did they feel the urgency to make the announcement, given the importance of the topic? They didn’t say, and they offered no clue. However, it is possible that the JTF simply wishes to depart in a blaze of glory. I was one of the worst critics of JTF operations in the Northeast, but even I must acknowledge that they had cleaned up their acts and fought a much cleaner war after the controversial Baga revenge killings. Even without evidence of Mallam Shekau’s death, the JTF still deserves plenty of accolades.

Both the presidency and the Defence Headquarters (DHQ) are chary of being drawn into the controversy. They needn’t feel queasy. In Nigeria, when government’s lies are exposed, no one is punished, and apparently even the voters do not exact revenge on their deceivers in subsequent polls. So, the government and its agencies can safely lie without fear of retribution. And, as the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) has discovered, no one flinches when the government unabashedly and routinely dishonours its word.

In the matter of Mallam Shekau, deceased, living or injured, I think the JTF merely allowed itself the luxury of deductive reasoning. Apart from other sources which told of Mallam Shekau’s death, the most potent, to me, appears to be the last YouTube video released by the sect. In it, Shekau stated he could never be captured. Now, not even Osama bin Laden, the late Al-Qaeda leader, ever made such a boast, not even as a confidence building tactics. I therefore deduced from Mallam Shekau’s supremely confident assertion that since he is/was not a ghost, he could not say so confidently he was above capture, if he was not already dead.

If another YouTube video does not surface in the next few weeks showing clear proof that the Boko Haram leader is alive, we may have no choice but to respect the JTF’s deductive reasoning and come to the same unproven conclusions as they hastily did last week. Nonetheless, the departing JTF, the incoming army division, the presidency and anyone who has analysed the Boko Haram phenomenon surely understand that killing the leader of a terrorist group does not amount to extirpating the menace. It is often no more than a morale booster, especially when not accompanied by a mass arrest or interdiction of its other leaders.

As the months grind on towards the 2015 general elections, the true nature and character of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) will begin to unfold. I expect the party to endure, of course, and if democracy is to be preserved, we must hope the party will find ingenious ways to sustain itself and even flourish as a great political party. In other words, I do not wish the party bad, nor do I yearn for its collapse. But there is simply no way it can retain its present character, for its present character is neither progressive, as we understand the term, nor conservative, as its members, leaders and well-wishers dare hope. In reality, and unknown to the many so-called progressives within its ranks, such as the highly adaptable Ebenezer Babatope, the party is unequivocally reactionary.

There is a way reactionary politics tends to mask ideological differentiation. Radicals, it is well known, can also be reactionary, just as conservatives sometimes do not quite appreciate when they slip from ordinary conservatism to extreme conservatism. What is clear about the PDP today – and we do not need to hate them for their choices or unusual taste – is that its leaders are rigidly opposed to any serious or major shift in the political and economic structures of Nigeria. They want the police to remain as they are, education to limp along ponderously, health and aviation to involve nothing more than cosmetic renovation of buildings, and economy to be simply a case of prudent management of resources in line with World Bank standards.

Though the presidency of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo was not inspiring at all, and its policies showed little imagination and coherence, the presidency of Goodluck Jonathan has proved to be even much worse. Chief Obasanjo’s policies have not only been sustained, its negative tendencies have been exacerbated by the dithering of Dr Jonathan. Chief Obasanjo ripped the party’s innards apart when he imposed imperial rule on the country and party; Dr Jonathan has allowed the injuries to become gangrenous, with horrifying consequences for the ruling party and the country’s laws and constitution. We remember how besotted Chief Obasanjo was to his brain trust and how inexpertly he sometimes redacted their poorly digested and contradictory policies; but Dr Jonathan’s languidness has laid the country prostrate beneath the hurtful policies of his predecessor and opened her up the more to the fiddling of his own even more insular brain trust.

As we hurtle towards 2015, the country will, therefore, be torn between taking a chance on the newly formed All Progressives Congress (APC) and its eight-point agenda for the country, and resigning itself to the jaded policies and politics of the PDP. To be sure, the APC is not exactly the immaculate progressives of our theoretical fascination. The party comprises clearly discernible elements of both progressivism and conservatism. But if party leaders can find the right chemistry to bond them together, they may not be as immiscible as sceptics fear. The country must remind itself that the last time progressives won an election (in 1993) under the aegis of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), they were certainly not as ideologically coherent as their label misleadingly gave the impression. But they were doubtless the more committed to change, however change is defined, and closer to progressivism on the ideological spectrum than its opponent, the National Republican Convention (NRC).

Today, the fault lines in Nigerian politics are becoming even more pronounced. The country faces its most trying times ever, and in many ways exhibits a frightening tentativeness in governance as well as in policymaking. By the admission of government, the country loses nearly as much revenue through oil theft as it makes through lawful sales. As a result of the natural lethargy of the Jonathan presidency and its many misguided and contradictory policies in combating crimes, the country is being laid waste by kidnappers and other criminals who would love the roof to collapse on everybody. And in spite of the strong-arm and sometimes vacillating tactics against the ongoing sectarian and socio-economic revolt in the Northeast, we are no nearer peace than when the fight broke out in 2009. In short, there are clearly no major initiatives from the PDP government to tackle these alarming problems other than tinkering at best and helpless indifference at worst. The party is exhausted, its ideas jaded, and its leading lights obviously war-weary and punch-drunk. If it gets another endorsement in 2015, there will still be no initiatives, major or minor, and the party’s leaders will suffer predictable paralysis.

To win, the PDP will rely on the frustratingly bizarre dynamics of Nigerian politics, which involves a crazy mix of exploitation of ethnicity, religion, age-long prejudices, and fraud. Given the proclivities of the old warhorses being assembled by Dr Jonathan for the battle ahead, the PDP may find itself inexorably drawn to underhand tactics. As it is, the party is itself not idiosyncratically averse to unorthodox tactics in winning elections. The party will also attempt to tar some of the leaders of the APC with the brush of religious fanaticism and political dogmatism. More crucially, the PDP will eagerly exploit the political ambivalence of the Southeast, a region that has perched on the horns of ideological dilemma for so long. Under the Dr Jonathan government, the Southeast has enjoyed a golden age like never before. It is hard to see the region turning its back on Dr Jonathan in 2015. This is more so because when the country faced a choice between a broadly conservative party and a sketchily progressive party in the 1993 presidential election, the Southeast narrowly opted for conservatism, excepting Anambra which the SDP won with over 57 percent of the votes cast.

The PDP will steer discussions and politics away from issues in the 2015 polls for the simple reason that it fares very badly in that department. It has no concrete ideas to project, and when ideas are nevertheless thrust under its nose, it has neither the patience to grasp them nor the industry to steal and adapt them, nor yet the assiduity to logically take them apart through careful and diligent denigration. Apart from avoiding issues, the PDP will also talk less about its records. Instead, it will dwell more on extenuating reasons for either nonperformance or tardy performance. Dr Jonathan’s aides have denied his government ever attempted to exploit ethnic or religious differences. Not only has it remorselessly done so, its desperation in the coming months will see it embrace the politics of prejudice, perhaps even more shamelessly.

And here precisely is where the APC stands a good chance. In place of the stultifying policies and administrative paralysis of the PDP, the new party, which is more accurately an amalgam of old parties, has already boldly offered a major and radical shift in the kind of thinking needed to heal, restore and renew the country. I am fascinated by its embrace of the decentralisation of the police – an idea that should have come more than two decades ago – devolution of power to states, independence of anti-corruption and electoral agencies, among a number of other serious policies and issues. I think its determination to create one million jobs annually is far-fetched, and its preparedness to remove qualified executive immunity nugatory. On the whole, the party is at least offering sensible steps and policies to remake the country. Even if Nigerians love punishment and are inured to the policy sterility of the PDP, and mistrust the policy initiatives of the APC, it is still necessary to make a change at the highest level of government in order to strengthen democracy and underscore the power of the electorate to change government at will, whether thoughtfully or whimsically.

By 2015, the PDP will have been in power for 16 years. Sadly, those 16 years have worsened the plight of the common man, virtually destroyed education, impoverished and alienated the youths, predisposed the country to unremitting instability and criminality, exacerbated corruption, opened the country to insidious foreign military influences and creeping intervention, and shown the world how mediocre Nigeria has become in nearly all areas of life. The truth is that if the country does not change direction in 2015, the chances of its survival, not to talk of its growth and development, will be made much harder, if not clearly impossible. The rot is too much and the stakes too high to ignore how urgently we need to embrace change in the coming elections.

In spite of the regrettable back and forth over the selection of the APC candidate for November’s Anambra governorship poll, I had hoped for the sake of Anambra State and the good of Nigerian politics that we would see a showdown between the cerebral Charles Soludo, former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, and the charismatic Chris Ngige, a senator and former governor of the state. From all indications, Dr Ngige, who seems increasingly built for the state house than for the senate, will still emerge as the APC candidate, notwithstanding the party’s indiscretion in announcing his candidacy without the conduct of primaries. Unfortunately, it is hard to see how Professor Soludo could emerge the candidate of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA). The party not only unnecessarily embarked on a barren screening exercise, it has left the sanctimonious Governor Peter Obi in a position where many are insinuating he is secretly directing choices from behind closed doors.

My pain is that we would now not see a classical showdown between brains and charm, a sorry miss for Anambra, and a terrible distress for Nigeria. I do not, of course, imply that Dr Ngige has no brains. He certainly does. But Professor Soludo is not only an academician, he is fevered by his enthusiasm to conceive and enunciate policies, even as he seems to have excess of that endowment. Dr Ngige clearly outdoes most governors in Nigeria today in the charms department with his stately good looks, which for a short man is quite remarkable, with his suave performance on the soapbox, with his administrative acumen, with his intrepidity, and with his instinctive grasp of issues.

The choice between Dr Ngige and Professor Soludo would have represented the age-old dilemma man faces in choosing his spouse: would he go for a brainy or beautiful lady? Sociologists would have been pleased to get an answer from the pace-setting Anambra electorate as an indication of how men think. After all, it is already settled that women do not set great store by how well a man looks, but by the content of his… Ah, why do I want to provoke a war?

It is not clear what logic is behind the thinking that demolishing kidnappers’ properties would be an effective deterrent to kidnapping. But whether it is a deterrent or not, a few states have unthinkingly enacted laws empowering their governments to demolish or confiscate kidnappers’ properties. Interestingly, some of these states don’t even wait for the courts to prove the guilt of kidnappers before their properties are brought down. Timidity and perhaps also ignorance have not allowed the victims to test the validity of the laws in the courts, or if not the validity, then at least the processes. For even if the laws were valid, and I doubt if they are in light of the constitution, there is no kidnapper’s property that has so far been demolished in accordance with due process.

One of the kidnappers involved in the abduction of Professor Kamene Okonjo, mother of the Minister of Finance, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, was demolished shortly after he was arrested. The courts had not yet heard nor judged the case when the government hastily brought the property down. Chief Bonaventure Mokwe, the detained proprietor of the Upper Class Hotel in Onitsha is in court to prevent the Anambra State government from confiscating his property. It was brought down after some dry skulls were found in the hotel premises. He is yet to be found guilty of the crime, but the government has gone ahead anyway to demolish the hotel.

In neighbouring Delta State, the Uncle P Guest House, estimated to be worth about N150 million, and owned by a retiree, Mr Pius Ogbeni, was also brought down, allegedly on the orders of the state government, for harbouring a kidnapper. The suspect had lodged in the hotel, like any other guest, for five days before checking out. His alleged victim was said to have been rescued in very controversial circumstances from the hotel. Today, no one is even sure where the victim was rescued from. But while the case was yet to be heard, let alone tried, the hotel was brought down.

Kidnapping is of course a very serious crime that should not be condoned. But so, too, are murder and armed robbery. If the last two do not cause an abridgment of due process, there is no reason not to subject kidnapping to the ambits of the law. Apart from the dubiousness of the kidnapping law itself, and the indefensible, if not immoral, haste with which the governments demolish properties, there is a clear lack of rigour in the anti-kidnapping law. Has the death penalty curbed or eradicated armed robbery?

In light of the abduction of Mike Ozekhome, a prominent Nigerian lawyer, it will be hard to counsel restraint in tackling kidnapping. But counsel I must. Let the states, which have passed laws on kidnapping, take a second and more reasoned look at the laws. More importantly, let them follow due process and not jump ahead of the law in their populist desire to fight kidnapping. I suggest that victims of government’s arbitrary application of the law test the matter in court, and test it to its limits. I doubt they can lose if there are still enough judges who can call their souls their own, and who understand the deeper import of law and justice.

Governor Danbaba Suntai was obviously in pains as he disembarked from the aircraft that brought him back to Nigeria last Sunday. He is doubtless still recuperating, perhaps agonisingly slowly, from the injuries he sustained when the small plane he piloted crashed near Yola, Adamawa State last October. But whether that recuperation is fast or substantial enough to enable him resume his duties as governor is now mired in acrimonious debate. Neither at the airport nor anywhere in his state has Mr Suntai directly addressed the public. Instead, he has offered a few minutes of unconvincing taped video message to his state and the public.

While Tarabans were still trying to make up their minds on how to view their governor’s return, and while the acting governor, Speaker of the State House of Assembly and a majority of the state’s lawmakers were steeling their nerves to resist the governor’s obsession with power, the controversy became even more intense and convoluted. Sixteen lawmakers, together with the Speaker and the acting governor, insisted there was no way the governor would be allowed to resume duty. He still needed medical attention, they said. He manifested clear symptoms of brain injury that would take a long time to heal, some medical specialists averred. Some Tarabans even concluded that the governor and his minders’ manoeuvres reminded them of the chicaneries of the late President Umaru Yar’Adua who was also too unwell in his last months in office to function as president, but was exploited by a cabal to wreak havoc on the country.

If the Taraba drama were limited to the caricature it has become, we would safely enjoy it from the comfort of our homes. But with the determination of the anti-Suntai forces to unhorse the governor growing into a bitter struggle for power, and the pro-Suntai forces clinging desperately to power, the struggle could plunge the state into a violent and embarrassing confusion. On account of what he has manifested since his return, I really doubt whether Mr Suntai can still function as governor. He needs more care than he and his minders care to admit. However, the constitution contains provisions for resolving such difficult matters. I find it appalling that the House of Assembly, which obviously musters a majority to back the Speaker’s anti-Suntai point of view, evades due process and seems to embrace strong-arm tactics. Instead of tomfoolery, let the legislature constitute a medical panel to examine the governor’s ability to continue in office. I doubt whether in such an open case the empanelled doctors would betray their oaths by telling open lies. Nor do I think their conclusion would be any less self-evident than the clear incapacity of the hapless governor to perform the most gentle and menial of tasks.

There is no indication Maurice Iwu, former chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), will read this piece. He says that having learnt from former President Olusegun Obasanjo the resentful and vexatious habit of not reading Nigerian newspapers, he feels disinclined to read what people have said and still say about his management of the 2007 general elections. Given the way he vigorously put it, even if we could find someone to read this piece and freely redact its highlights for his spurned consideration, he would still be unresponsive to a habit that has stood many enlightened people well since newspapers became a staple of modern civilisation. “This is my first public function since I left office as INEC chairman,” he began with a disagreeable hint of self-importance. “I learned one thing from my former boss Olusegun Obasanjo never to read newspapers or watch news…That is the only way to focus on what I am supposed to do.”

For a professor who is presumably an expert on something, and whose life and works are supposed to be devoted to blowing up the delusions of the ignorant majority, it is curious what lessons, and what examples, his bizarre tastes are inexorably drawn to. To him, newspapers represent a distraction rather than a resource tool. By his admission, since he needs to focus on his tasks, which he paints grandiosely in the nothingness of imprecision, it is strange that as a former public official he does not recognise that one of those tasks is to respond to public assessment of his stewardship. But if he says he loathes reading newspapers, we must allow him the liberty of stewing in the juice of his own ignorance. This, however, will not deter us from judging his time in office or commenting on his remarks whenever he indulges in sophism, as he did last week.

Indeed, he made a few tendentious remarks last Tuesday in Abuja during the public presentation of Amanze Obi’s book, Delicate Distress. For a professor who wishes to be left alone to focus on his job, it is surprising that he was unable to interpret properly what his main task was in 2007 when he umpired the general elections of that year. Said he: “In 2007, Nigeria didn’t want elections. It wasn’t about giving Nigeria an election. It wasn’t about who won or how ballot boxes were snatched. The challenge I had was to ensure that Nigeria remained one indivisible country. We did that and many people thought it was easy.” I will return to his dubious conclusion that Nigerians didn’t want elections in 2007, a claim he offered absolutely no proof to substantiate. For now, let us instead consider his interpretation of his brief in 2007. There is nothing in the provisions of the electoral act relating to his office or his responsibilities that grants him the exalted task of safeguarding the unity of the country. Instead, he was simply expected to deliver a free and fair poll. It is apparent that that singular misinterpretation of his assignment was at the bottom of the multiple malfeasances associated with his regulation and moderation of the general elections of that year. The challenge of sustaining Nigerian unity, as he inelegantly and conceitedly put it, was one he assigned himself. No one, not the constitution, not his paymaster, nor yet the electoral act gave him the job he so gratuitously defined for himself.

Professor Iwu specialises in pharmacognosy, a branch of science that has nothing to do with politics, except of course metaphorically. It is a rather direct science and a branch of pharmacology dealing with the study of natural drugs or active substances found in plants. If he needs to apply logic in his speciality, it is certainly not the kind of intricate logic familiar to social scientists who deal with subjective and often imprecise human behaviour. On the contrary, plants offer very precise and clearly distinguishable morphologies, irrespective of whether we are dealing with its anatomy or its external nature. It is, therefore, not surprising that Professor Iwu has had to rephrase his assignment in terms familiar to his expertise, and in ways that suited and excused his abject surrender to the whims of his employers.

Dissatisfied with not letting bad enough alone – and he would have done well to emulate his other illustrious predecessor, Humphrey Nwosu, who waited for about 15 years to make peace with his equally troubled conscience – Professor Iwu wondered why instead of criticising his performance Nigerians did not celebrate his ‘achievement’ of keeping Nigeria one. How grossly mistaken can one be! Not only did his criminal miscarriage of the 2007 polls gravely threaten the unity and stability of the country, it set the country back by many decades and still continues to dog its march to democratic nirvana. If Nigeria remained one after the 2007 electoral debacle, it was not because Professor Iwu advanced the cause of unity, or even knew how to, but because Nigerians were themselves either determined to stay together notwithstanding the multiple provocations from the Iwus and Nwosus of this world, or had surrendered to the insuperable and paralysing resignation Britain’s manipulations had brought upon them since independence.

It is truly numbing how Professor Iwu excused his failings. He said the 2007 polls were not about who won or lost, or about how ballot boxes were snatched. If he had not recast his assignment in terms of the unexampled arrogance he was accustomed to throughout his five-year tenure, all the while pretending there was a nexus between his office and Nigerian unity irrespective of his failings, he would have understood perfectly that his job was to ensure Nigeria held a free and fair election; and that unity, often a by-product of a fair election, was not his to procure or guarantee. In his Abuja remarks, Professor Iwu reminded his audience it was not easy transiting from one elected government to another. He should be reminded that that transition took place without the help of his puny talents, twisted logic, and the recklessly flawed election he superintended.

The most shocking remark he made last Tuesday was that in 2007, Nigeria didn’t want an election. We may never know why the professor told this awkward lie to himself. Would Nigerians have furiously fought and defeated Chief Obasanjo’s third term agenda if they didn’t want an election? Would they have turned out in their millions if they hated the ballot box as the professor suggested? If they didn’t want an election that year, but wanted Chief Obasanjo out of office, what replacement did they have in mind given the constitutional provision of term limit? It took 15 years after the June 12, 1993 presidential election for Professor Nwosu to summon the courage to admit the truth of the election he supervised. Perhaps eight years is still too early for Professor Iwu to admit the truth of the election he bungled, and his conscience not seared enough to push him into reconciling with the oath he took and into making peace with the country he betrayed.

It speaks volumes, however, that last Tuesday the professor spoke fondly of Chief Obasanjo as the mentor from whom he learnt the execrable habit of living in denial and deprecating media accounts of contemporary events. Indeed, we hope that sometime in our lifetime, Professor Iwu will be prodded into remorse by the shrill wailing of the agitated scruples left in him, as Professor Nwosu was unable to stay silent in the face of the loud protestations of his conscience.

The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has not yet imploded; but it could do so in the coming months if the cracks in the party are further widened by insensitivity and mismanagement. As a few of its leading lights have warned, the crisis in the party could lead to its disintegration. It is not yet known whether those alleged by President Goodluck Jonathan camp to be behind the crisis anticipate the severity of the cracks and the turbulent course it is taking; what is, however, evident at the moment is that the disquiet felt by party leaders when the drama began is gradually yielding to panic as the disagreement worsens and spreads further afield than they initially foresaw. The president is thoroughly miffed by the crisis and is getting increasingly desperate; chairman of the party, Bamanga Tukur, who had long acted as a medieval tyrant, but is now talking like a modern autocrat, has become even more censorious; and other party elders have either seemed to snicker behind closed doors or chafe hypocritically to convey impression of concern.

It is hard to determine right now whether the PDP will survive this turbulence, the worst since its formation, or since the party and its leadership were hijacked by the former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, and his scheming and fawning aides. What is apparent, however, is that even if it survives, the party is unlikely to retain the ferocious determination that has seen it talk and act recklessly against the constitution and public interest. A few of its leaders suggest the party will emerge from the present crisis stronger and more united. But already, its confidence has been shaken, and party bosses, like autocrats everywhere, have spoken temptingly of using the security forces against the breakaway factional leaders whom they describe as traitors and common felons. Given the points on which the two camps disagree, and the violent rhetoric deployed by them in digging in their heels, a rapprochement would almost certainly involve a loss of face on either side, if not political suicide.

The war in the PDP may still be at its infancy, and may not yet manifest definite frontlines, but the demands of the two camps are at least candidly self-centred enough to enable a fair assessment of what the problem is and where the crisis seems headed. The breakaway faction led by former Vice-President Atiku Abubakar and Kawu Baraje demands the ousting of the party chairman, Alhaji Tukur, the resolution of the Nigeria Governors Forum (NGF) in favour of the Governor Rotimi Amaechi faction, cessation of EFCC harassment, and the exclusion of Dr Jonathan from the 2015 presidential race. The Jonathan/Tukur faction disdainfully declines to negotiate Dr Jonathan’s right to contest in 2015, and more peremptorily demands the dissolution of the Atiku/Baraje faction and subjection of the faction to PDP rules and conflict resolution mechanisms.

On the surface, it would seem these mutually antagonistic positions are the bane of the current PDP crisis, or civil war, as some have colourfully put it. After many interventions by top party officials and former presidents, and perhaps some cynically disinterested discussions between the warring camps, the stalemate has remained unbroken. No one had the right to insist Dr Jonathan could not exercise his constitutional right to run for the presidency in 2015, the president’s aides and supporters said forcefully. The Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) could not be prevailed upon not to perform its lawful functions, others said in response to the demands of the Atiku/Baraje camp. Alhaji Tukur could not be sacked without recourse to due party process, his camp said triumphantly. As hardline as these positions are, they are, in my view, neither the cause nor the trigger of the current PDP crisis, nor yet the reasons for the trenchancy of the disagreements and the irreconcilability of the two positions. They are merely symptoms of a deeper, underlying morass that has eroded the foundation of the party and corroded the fabric that previously knit its members together.

The party has not only split temporarily, and its top leaders shown little interest in reconciliation, it is also reported, subject to final corroboration, that seven governors, about 20 senators and 57 members of the Lower House have also indicated they were breaking ranks with the Jonathan/Tukur camp. This may be unsettling and irritating to the Jonathan rerun agenda. But even if reconciliation were to be secured in the coming weeks in spite of the undeniable acerbity of the two camps, it would still not solve the structural and leadership anomalies eating up the party and making it dysfunctional. Sooner or later the party was bound to implode. That that implosion seems to be coming earlier than expected merely underscores the gravity of the contradictions within the party, contradictions that were conceived, enacted and reinforced during the Obasanjo years. Three fundamental reasons account for the severity of the PDP crisis, and may explain why the crisis may be intractable at best or insoluble at worst.

The first is that once Chief Obasanjo and his aides supplanted the moral minority that formed the core of the party, and vitiated the principles and practices that were designed to ennoble the party and make it formidable, the party began to list dangerously. Some of the party’s early chairmen were not perfect, and in fact a few of them lent themselves to be used to validate Chief Obasanjo’s unprincipled and dishonest grab for absolute power. But they at least exuded a breath of fresh air and embraced the general principles of democracy. Even in the giddy early years of the PDP, it was hard, for instance, to imagine a Solomon Lar or an Audu Ogbeh act like a proponent of electoral chicanery of the first rank similar to the flip-flopping Vincent Ogbulafor or the ingratiating Ahmadu Ali. Within Chief Obasanjo’s two undistinguished terms in office, the party transformed from a gentle and grasping conservative group, gingerly upholding its own moral and ideological principles, to an aggressive, remorseless and fanatical reactionary animated by, and even proud of, electoral fraud and all the base emotions and practices humans are capable of.

Second is the simple fact that the anomalies and distortions first grafted into the country’s political system by Chief Obasanjo have been underscored, for 16 years, by varying degrees of political and especially electoral malfeasances which his successors perpetrated, from the wearied but now deceased Umaru Yar’Adua, to the distracted but disguisedly ruthless Dr Jonathan. By any stretch of imagination, it is hard to remedy 16 years of unbroken filth and falsehood. Indeed, as fate would have it, since 1999, Nigeria has been gifted three gentlemen who dedicated themselves, or were dedicated by their aides, to adding to the country’s misery. The present PDP crisis is, therefore, a culmination of 16 years of misery in the party, not just a haggle over 2015 presidential poll. I do not exaggerate.

Third and most important factor exacerbating the PDP crisis is the unqualifiedly misshapen Jonathan government, which seems more adroit in worsening bad things than in bettering good things, whether they are principles, values or honour. Like Chief Obasanjo before him, he has done nothing spectacular about roads worth anyone ascribing the label of a legacy, but of course his argument will always be that he was not the architect of the decay. He has not offered the country a specific vision of what education should be, nor has he bettered what he met. Instead, he has met the decline in education with his idiosyncratic lack of honour, refusing to uphold the agreement his predecessor and himself entered into with the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) in 2009 and 2010. It would ground the country, his Information minister said apocalyptically. Dr Jonathan has done much worse, of course. Not only is he himself uninspired, he has not inspired anyone, and has had little interaction with artists, poets, scientists, social scientists, and other noteworthy intellectuals, local and international.

It is this unremitting dullness of his government that has instigated revolt against him and the party, especially when patriots recoil in horror as they contemplate another four years of the Jonathan nightmare. Alhaji Tukur, I emphasise, is a mere cipher in the disagreement. I believe that if the Jonathan government had been spectacular in many respects and charismatic in more ways than one, few brave hearts would have had the courage to rise against him: indeed, it would have been suicidal. For then we would have had brilliant and unprecedented use of men and material, the forging of a stirring national identity that transcends tribe, religion and class, and the enactment of great policies driven by far-reaching visions of democracy, federalism, rule of law and public probity. Sadly for Dr Jonathan, any revolt against him now invariably acquires the distinct aura of patriotism, and rebel leaders, whether they fail or succeed, are likely to be canonised in the consciousness of the people. Rather than be chastened by the massiveness of the revolt against both his government and his person, Dr Jonathan and his doting aides appear set to go for broke by wielding state power against his opponents in absolute disregard of the constitution and elementary restraint and common sense.

But even if he were to overwhelm his opponents and the dissenters within his party, there is nothing he can do— partly because he is not capable of it – to mollify the rage against himself and his government. Worse, because the modest amount of principles and values that made the PDP to cohere in its early days have been denuded by years of incompetent rule, it is unlikely that victory over his enemies will be sufficient to snatch the party from the jaws of confusion and disintegration. I had hoped that for the sake of democracy we were on our way to a two-party system, especially with the formation of the All Progressives Congress (APC). And though I concluded two weeks ago that the PDP was exhausted, I had nonetheless hoped that the muted patriots within its ranks could somehow rise up to retrieve the party from the hands of its charlatans. Now, I fear greatly that my hopes were misplaced, and that perhaps we would need to seek another party to duel with the APC, if the PDP and its leading lights cannot shake off the suicidal instinct to which their incompetence and sycophantic relationships seem to be leading them.

If not checked on time, the silly campaign to arm the ragtag militia formed by young, unarmed civilians in the Northeast to fight the Boko Haram Islamic sect could reach a crescendo and even persuade this sometimes brash government to accede to the request. Already, the Civilian JTF receives military escorts to conduct operations against members of the sect. It has achieved some notable successes, and there is hope in government and military circles that it could do much more if encouraged. For very sound reasons, I have never supported militias anywhere. I am unlikely to do so even now.

It is bad enough that the Civilian JTF is receiving military help to conduct police operations, itself an admission of frustration by the military and a late concession to what many of us had argued was unproven allegations of large-scale support by the Northeast people for the violent sect. But to now suggest, as Mike Okiro, former Inspector General of Police and current Chairman of the Police Service Commission, does that the vigilantes be armed and kitted and placed under local police commanders is both derisory and irresponsible.

The presence of the vigilantes is a reflection of the failure or inadequacy of the country’s security system. Mr Okiro opposes state police, but his call for the arming of the vigilantes and their placement under local police commanders is nothing but a call for the decentralisation of the police. Moreover, with all the training and discipline soldiers and policemen have received, they have sometimes worryingly displayed unmitigated cruelty and carried out extra-judicial killings. How would the country fare under armed and recognised vigilantes? In light of the activities of Niger Delta militants, openly repentant or surreptitiously active, and the Rwandan and Bosnian wars, could the Northeast vigilantes ever be successfully demobilised after the insurrection had ended?

The Northeast Civilian JTF has no doubt proven their patriotism, even displaying unusual and remarkable courage under fire, and from ongoing military investigations, might have been betrayed once or twice. I applaud their courage; but I oppose the involvement of militias of any kind in security operations. Their involvement may thrill security men now, but it is a short-sighted thrill. It will boomerang in the long run. Surely we are not so bereft of deep thinking and of carefully working our way through crisis as to become enamoured of quick fixes and dangerously flawed solutions.

What the Northeast revolt tells us is not just how inadequate our economic management is, but how anachronistic our security system has become. The revolt invites us to embark on urgent radical and comprehensive restructuring of the country; but we prefer to tinker. As the country’s leaders continue to dither, let us hope the day will not come when circumstances and other unforeseen dynamics would take the initiative from us and imperil our existence.

Last Wednesday, President Goodluck Jonathan suddenly and unexpectedly axed nine of his ministers, all of whom, it appeared, were appointed through those now ranged against him in political battle. It is instructive that when the president was finally persuaded to substantially reshuffle his cabinet, he did so in defence of private political objectives and in ways that baffled presidency watchers. We do not know whether Dr Jonathan appreciates the irony that dogs his presidency; but to many of us it is clear that whenever he projects power it is mainly to advance ignoble causes. Indeed, I add that anytime the president yields to his often overpowering inclination to do wrong, it is in spite of the loftiness of the cause before him and to the detriment of his imposing and outsized office. It was with characteristic surliness, for instance, that he deployed the military to crush the January 2012 nationwide fuel revolt when all he needed to do was placate the electorate and gain political capital as he grudgingly reduced the price of a litre of fuel from N145 to N97. In last week’s cabinet reshuffle, Dr Jonathan adds imprecision to surliness.

Perhaps tired of being punched and wrong-footed by his enemies, Dr Jonathan finally felt compelled to respond in a way that has left his aides struggling to rationalise what is obviously a baffling political move. Except newspaper reports quote presidency sources wrongly, it is known that the president and his aides are still negotiating with the Group of Seven governors and others sponsoring or inspiring them into intra-party revolt. But by moving against the G-7 nominees in his cabinet, it is not clear which the president values more: to root out those he suspects are disloyal to him; or to reconcile with the G-7 and restore peace and order in the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). His priorities, however, seem already self-evident. It is obvious he intends to continue indulging his counterproductive pugnacity, a contentiousness that has been given fillip by the gerontocrats surrounding, captivating and seducing him to war. The president has enormous powers, they say, and it is both presidential and fitting to use them in such a manner that no one will be left with the mistaken belief that Dr Jonathan does not understand the nuances of power.

Dr Jonathan does not interpret the grievances of the G-7 governors as proceeding from their exasperation with the leadership style of the PDP chairman, Bamanga Tukur. Nor does he think those grievances, even if they were substantial or potent enough, were genuine. Indeed, with the presence of the intrepid Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State in the ranks of the so-called rebels, the president is sufficiently persuaded to believe that rebellion, rather than grievances, was the bane of the party. The president also gives the impression, without saying so, that the rebellion is driven by a combination of irreverence (some call it rudeness), opposition machinations and deliberate contempt for his person and ability, all of which are summed up in the unflattering and insulting opinion that he is unfit to rule. But rebellion, as he and his aides also secretly hold and whisper in pianissimo tones, should be crushed rather than mollified.

When political battles are cast in military terms and symbols, such as Dr Jonathan and his brash aides have done, it portends danger for both the state and the combatants. For even harmless feints, which former President Olusegun Obasanjo is besotted to in his uncalculating and continuing obsession for relevance, can easily become a gritty test of wills from which it is impossible to climb down. Dr Jonathan has faced many tests since he assumed power some four years ago, but none of those tests has produced in him the maturity, reflection, astuteness and perspicuity great leaders acquire after passing through trials. On the contrary, every notable test he has faced and every dubious victory he has achieved has made Dr Jonathan more intransigent, less contemplative and given to romanticising brute power. Having thus allowed himself to be persuaded that he faced war against the rebel governors, and after having cast himself obliquely as a war leader who needed to take decisive and powerful steps to rein in dissent, Dr Jonathan has decided to go for broke.

While it is incontestable that the many haphazard and unthinking policies of Alhaji Tukur spurred rebellion in the party, and while the president was more careless in overseeing the affairs of the party than he has deliberately courted trouble and disaffection, it is fair to say that his current temper is a reaction to the impertinent goading of the G-7 governors. By coming out with an alternative power structure on the day the PDP held its special convention in Abuja, and doing so with such secrecy as ridiculed, if not humiliated, the presidency and its coercive agencies, few failed to notice that the G-7 governors had also gone for broke. Given the stiffness of their conditions for peace in the party, it seems inconceivable that the rebellious governors left room for any peaceful settlement now or in the future.

There is little doubt that the aggrieved G-7 governors drew first blood, and the president had to respond whether he liked it or not. What is in dispute, however, is whether in the circumstances the president has reacted with the decorum becoming his office and the restraint and circumspection he has claimed for himself for so long. By any standard, sacking nine ministers in one fell swoop is not only excessive and inexcusable, it is indicative of the president’s poor judgement in cabinet selection. It is also doubtful whether Dr Jonathan can convince himself, let alone the country, that the ministers he sacked were either incompetent or underperforming, or whether they were the only guilty ones. More crucially, even if he wishes to assemble a war cabinet for Poll 2015, as some now speculate, it is hard to see from where he would recruit those field officers who can deliver the easy victory he covets and who would not succumb to the rabidness and thoughtlessness of his man Fridays. Yet, it is well known in Abuja that it is his leadership style, not to say his lack of visionary depth, that predisposes his presidency to repeated mishaps, humiliation and crushing defeats.

Any rebellion, such as the one triggered by the G-7 governors, is not strange in politics. In fact many established democracies, which run the parliamentary system, have witnessed the kind of political rebellion that is making Dr Jonathan froth at the mouth with rage. There will, therefore, always be rebellion, and presidents and political leaders must have the common sense and moderation to tackle it when it arises. Sadly, Dr Jonathan has approached the rebellion in his party with unseemly and demeaning comportment. Because he and his predecessors unwisely personified party leadership and have accreted enormous party powers to the presidency, it has been difficult for him and his predecessors to confine party disagreements to party boundaries. Instead, they have formed the bad habit of transferring disagreements to the presidency and foisting a needless crisis on the country, thereby threatening not only good governance, or indeed governance of any sort, but also peace and stability.

Encouraged by sycophants, jobholders and some insensitive South-South political leaders and herdsmen of jaundiced votes, Dr Jonathan has embraced a fanatical and unyielding style of crisis management. We always knew he was not a democrat, nor, like Chief Obasanjo, can ever be, but his ham-fisted manner of conflict resolution and his monarchical approach to general politics have so polluted and prejudiced the atmosphere that for the first time, this column has started to fear that the foundation of Nigeria is threatened. The threat, it must be reiterated, is not because there is crisis at all, but because the men in power lack the reasoned agility to respond in ways that will reassure everyone that those in power are rational, patriotic and civilised people. One of the variables in the crisis is the 2015 presidential poll. Dr Jonathan, of course, has the right to contest in 2015, and that right can be advanced and defended intelligently; but his opponents also have the right to discourage him as much as they can without being subjected to unconstitutional, not to say autocratic, measures.

I suspect that no one but fate itself can restrain Dr Jonathan. He will fight everywhere and every person, and he will spare nothing, not even the constitution, in waging his self-inflicted war. Democracy and its spinoffs are dispensable to him, for after all, he has never shown he understands what they mean. He has a vague notion of the greatness of the country he presides over, but that notion does not include its peace, stability, growth or superiority over other African nations. He knows a thing or two about what the presidency stands for, but his perception is coloured by the traditional African system of hero-worship, superstition and idolatry. This was why, for instance, he and his men took umbrage when his opponents described his style as kindergarten. So, let us brace ourselves for the worst or be prepared valiantly to reclaim our democracy, or what is left of it, from the hands of charlatans. Dr Jonathan, it is clear, is incensed by the seemingly harmless effort to limit him to a one-term president. He will do everything to destroy his opponents, and if need be, the country, not only because he has taken the fight personally, but also strangely because, for a 20th century man, he views politics and leadership from an antediluvian prism.

Since the officious Rivers State police commissioner, Mbu Joseph Mbu, began to lend himself for political uses, neither he nor victims of his insubordination have slept peacefully. His career seems fated to crumble like that of Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) Raphael Ige, who in 2003 led the abduction of Chris Ngige, then governor of Anambra State, but what does he care? He is inured to history and its harsh lessons. He boasts a high level of education from reputable schools, but in all his doings in Rivers State, he has shown nothing of the learning and character required of an educated officer and gentleman.

But Mr Mbu, we all appreciate, could never on his own summon the courage or the recklessness to undermine the person or office of the governor of the state as he did last Thursday when he blocked the access of the governor and his august visitors to the State House. And like many of his colleagues, there is no incentive in the police conditions of service, nor flexibility in their training, to equip them with the character required to resist unlawful orders or to call their souls their own. Except I err gravely, I do not also think the urbane Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Abubakar, would give Mr Mbu orders to disrespect the Rivers State governor. If anything, I suspect that if it came to the crunch, the two, or any other police officer in their shoes, would simply and safely second-guess the presidency.

But whether they were ordered to disrespect and subvert the elected governor of Rivers or not, or they second-guessed the presidency with intent to curry favour or secure promotion or not, the important thing is that Mr Mbu has acted and presented himself as the real, not even alternate, governor of Rivers State. He proves increasingly that he has more real power than the governor, and could even ruffle the feathers of the governor, if not singe them altogether, if provoked. That we elected the defiant Governor Amaechi, not the snivelling and grovelling Mr Mbu, is, to the police officer, a small theoretical inconvenience. Given the way he speaks whenever he crosses path and arms with the governor, it is obvious that Mr Mbu has assured himself that what obtains in the state, and in which he is not disadvantaged at all, is what historians describe as contrapuntal paramountcy. Cheeky analysts may even describe the balance of terror in Rivers State as a sort of dual mandate, where Mr Mbu draws his insidious and destabilising power from Abuja, and Mr Amaechi draws his legitimate power from the long-suffering and sometimes confused electorate. To our collective dismay, we know that the real power resides in Abuja, not in some vague and indefinable electorate.

Someday, however, we will have a bright patriot as president. He will know what to do, and he will do them well. That day, alas, is not here yet.

UNTIL a few days ago, the federal government had done fairly well sustaining its unthinking indifference to the plight of tertiary education in the country and the ongoing Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike. It believed it had reached the end of its tethers in the negotiation with ASUU; it felt it had honourably discharged its obligations to tertiary education and could do no more; and it believed if anybody should be pressured, it ought to be the teachers whom it concluded had become heartless in their disregard of the pains the strike was causing everyone. In fact, the public, feckless and gullible as always, had started to feel dismayed that the wronged parties in the struggle to rebuild tertiary education were the government, which it believed had conceded so much by offering N140bn to the teachers, and the grounded students who are predictably torn between embracing the strike in their honest pursuit of quality education and enduring the frustrations of idling at home.

However, speaking at a press conference last Tuesday, the Information minister, Labaran Maku, suggested that those who negotiated the 2009 FG/ASUU agreement did not take into cognisance its cost implication before signing it. This is probably the concealed heresy some ministers and presidential aides had refused to voice out until Mr Maku daringly shouted it from the rooftops. The agreement, totalling some N1.5trn, has been peremptorily described by the co-ordinating minister of the economy as totally unrealistic; and even the Senate President, David Mark, has described those who negotiated and signed it as ignorant. Some members of the team that negotiated the agreement are still alive; I expect they will answer for themselves. At any rate, ASUU will not allow Messrs Mark and Maku to have the last word on an issue that is promising to become very controversial as the strike drags on.

If the acerbic Senator Mark, who has implausibly been mandated by the Senate to wade into the strike but appears to have made up his mind on what opinion to hold, was scurrilous and unsparing, Mr Maku was even more gratuitous. If, as he said, the federal government delegation didn’t work out the cost implication of the agreement, a fact hard to defend, who was Mr Maku, seeing that he is not a member of ASUU, to suggest that ASUU was also ignorant of the implications?

More importantly, after the federal government’s negotiating team reported back to the government the details of the agreement, why did the government not scrutinise the agreement before approving it, on the basis of which the 2009 strike was called off? The slothfulness now referred to in egregious terms by Messrs Mark and Maku is a distressing and worrisome indication of the incompetence that suffuses the Nigerian corridors of power, and explains why the country is comprehensively misgoverned. How many more agreements, policies and decisions have been taken with heedless indulgence and jauntiness by an inept federal government? And why is the government not discomfited by how easily and imperturbably it breaks and dishonours agreements?

Rather than be beguiled by the government’s argument and the misapplication of logic by Messrs Mark and Maku, the public should focus on the carefree refusal of the government to fulfil key parts of the agreement since 2009, not on the scarifying N1.5trn said to have been agreed between the government and ASUU to fund education over five years. Crucially, too, Nigerians should ask the Goodluck Jonathan government what great vision he has for education, a vision capable of motivating him into calling for both a huge national sacrifice and revolutionary efforts to remedy years of decline and decay over which he has self-righteously and repeatedly claimed exoneration.

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Fresh from his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and still overwhelmed by what he saw in the Holy Land, Governor Godswill Akpabio of Akwa Ibom State has called for a day to be set aside as the National Day of Prayer. He probably means this in the symbolic sense. But whether a day or week of prayer, it is hard not to support such a call, for in a country so engrossed in religiosity, everyone truly needs prayers. Chief Akpabio’s effusive religiosity is, however, difficult to place in view of the scriptures he is very familiar with.

First is the fact that any prayer not preceded by deep contrition is completely sterile. And second is the plain fact that God would rather have obedience than sacrifice. The reason prayer in Nigeria remains sterile, and the country is in such a huge mess, is simply because leaders have either managed to draw a thick line between their wicked actions and God’s laws or inoculated their faith against propriety. What prayer, for instance, could a governor who rejected and subverted a small election among fellow governors offer to God without repentance?

Europe hardly prays, and many churches are empty, but their countries are so well run that life expectancy keeps rising. Let Nigeria’s pilgrims and praying governors take a cue from Europe rather than present us the atheistic dilemma of choosing between faith and works. Indeed, it is hard to understand why the enthusiastic profession of religiosity by governors and other elected officials has never for once lured them into the decency and propriety that many who do not fear God or man have long had the common sense and judiciousness to embrace.

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On October 15, Justice Isa Ayo Salami retired from the Appeal Court as its fifth president, thus finally bringing to a close what many describe as the most infamous case of injustice perpetrated by the government and the society against a judicial officer. During a valedictory court session held in his honour last Thursday, the Justice recounted the torment he underwent in the hands of a scheming government and a conniving National Judicial Council (NJC) for refusing to compromise justice in the Sokoto Election Tribunal.

He didn’t need to say a word, though it was good he reminded us once again how the NJC turned coward and the Goodluck Jonathan presidency enacted what could easily pass as the most enduring wickedness ever in Nigeria’s judicial history. The injustice against Justice Salami is now etched in stone, not with hand, but by iconoclastic posterity which is certain to remember him for his judicial valour, and the Jonathan presidency and the NJC for their judicial infamy.

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Given the combativeness with which the House of Representatives Committee on Aviation began its probe of the overpriced bulletproof cars bought by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) early last week and other ancillary matters, the conclusion of the sitting, during which the Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, gave her presentation turned out to be an anti-climax. Not only was nothing virtually said about the inflated prices of the cars, the last day of the sitting was so anticlimactic that the panel even began to harry the other top witnesses from the NCAA for misleading the minister – almost as if the buck no longer stopped on the table of the minister. I do not of course expect the committee’s conclusions to be weakened by their seemingly contrived inability to smoke the truth out of the witnesses, nor do I expect them to be swayed by the minister’s obvious insolence when she was riled, flattery when the spirit seized her, and tendentiousness when she launched into clear mendacity. The country expects the committee to do a good job, and we’ll just have to wait and see.

For those who have followed the so-called reforms Ms Oduah undertakes in the ministry, the scandal that oozed out of NCAA even took too long in coming. The scandal is open enough, undisguised in substance, clear in ramifications, and shocking in its brazenness. But in long and winding prefatory statements, the minister kept harping on enemies trying to unhorse her, media attempting to try the scandal on the pages of newspapers, and other nameless villains she swore were after President Goodluck Jonathan’s transformation agenda. She treated the responses made by aviation officials who tried to clarify issues before her intervention with extreme condescension. The coordinating spokesman (an imprecise, nugatory and annoying role) for the agencies under her ministry, she said with self-righteous dismissiveness, didn’t quite do right by suggesting the scandal was just a rumour. Then she excused her own media aide who should know, and who virtually confirmed the minister needed the cars for her safety, on grounds that he suffered from honest and innocent misapprehension. And she gave a slap on the wrist to the new Director-General of NCAA for throwing a red herring before the baying and inquisitive public.

After inundating the committee and the public with these excuses, probably the only and last time her responses would be civil, she simply launched into abuses, condemnatory analyses of her critics’ motives, and other uncivil extrapolation. Her critics were either detractors, she said proudly, or they were “entrenched, corrupt or profligate.” Even the “false accusations and trial in the media,” she added petulantly, might have affected the committee’s sense of outrage. It is a tribute to the tolerance and resilience of the committee members that they sat glumly through the withering attacks on their bona fides.

It is not certain whether the committee asked for a background briefing on the running of the agencies under Ms Oduah, or on how she put only people she could trust in positions of authority, and on how she ran the supposedly autonomous agencies with dictatorial insouciance only a special or highly connected minister could attempt. If they did, they would understand why in spite of the obvious infractions of the law in the NCAA, and other malfeasances, she rose to the agency’s defence, describing it as being “conscious of its obligations” under the Appropriation Act. And in spite of having committed the NCAA to extra-budgetary spending, Ms Oduah could still say hyperbolically that “The NCAA is therefore conscious of its obligations relating in particular to appropriation and will never spend monies that have not been appropriated by the National Assembly.”

The minister’s view of financial commitment is strangely out of this world. She seeks to persuade the committee that as long as the amount due on the loan facility taken from the First Bank to buy 54 cars does not exceed what the minister had powers to approve, no law had been broken. Indeed, she even tried to bamboozle the public with the concept of the “Medium Term Expenditure Framework (MTEF),” which she argued incredulously justified the humongous amount for which she gave anticipatory approval to finance the cars, bulletproof and ordinary. She was of course silent on why she approved the purchase of 54 cars instead of 25 appropriated by the National Assembly. Perhaps the same MTEF would explain the arithmetical wizardry. And while the financing bank insisted that the facility granted NCAA was a loan, and which was documented, Ms Oduah kept insisting it was a lease, and that in any case the dynamics of the transaction made a lease equivalent to a loan. For a minister who strived to distance herself from the scandal, it is not certain whether the point was lost on the committee that her spirited defence of NCAA amounted to guilt by association. After all, would she ever defend what she abhorred?

Then, of course, too, she tried to rewrite the principles of finance by describing the N643m loan granted the NCAA by First Bank as a mere understanding that could be revoked anytime. For many of us who had at one time or another taken a bank loan, we know that banks do not trifle with their money. They are often brutal and merciless. Ms Oduah gave the impression the deal between the NCAA and First Bank was a mere understanding, not an obligation. If so, let her prepare for lawsuits. In reality, we know she is merely evading the truth. She and her agents in the NCAA and other aviation agencies know the true transactions that had been concluded, and how those transactions undermined the law. Whether the House of Representatives committee got to the bottom of the case remains to be seen. We’ll also have to await the report of the president’s administrative panel, and then see what the rather distant EFCC is capable of doing to end the rot in the ministry and its agencies, which rot she has repeatedly tried to dignify as reform and transformation unequalled in the history of aviation.

Ms Oduah reiterated that the NCAA and the ministry had not spent money not appropriated. Yet the NCAA wrote First Bank to pay the vendors of the cars. She tried to put emphasis on the fact that the bank had retained a copy of vehicle documents and spare keys. Could it have been otherwise? Or does that vitiate the commitment to the deal, the weight of the loan, or the import of the extra-legal spending entered into by NCAA? No matter how semantically clever the minister tried to be, it is clear 54 cars were bought, among which were two bulletproof cars; and money not appropriated was spent, whether it had translated into cash for the creditor or not.

As to the biggest issue surrounding the unlawful spending by NCAA, that is, the person for whom the bulletproof cars were bought, Ms Oduah gloatingly announced that the cars were neither registered in her name nor yet allocated to her office. Next time whistleblowers want to go public, let them wait for the murder to be committed, not the murderer to aim the gun. But more seriously, does anyone expect an official car to be registered in the name of the person to whom it is allocated? Would a cash-strapped agency like NCAA commit itself to nearly a billion naira in spending, let alone buy two bulletproof cars, without the express approval, if not instigation of the minister?

But by asking these questions, by doubting her fidelity to facts, by questioning her spending habits, and by denouncing the excesses of her ministry and its agencies, Ms Oduah dares to call us names in return, describing us as “purveyors of rot and corruption fighting back every inch of the way,” and dismissing us as a people perversely dedicated to fighting progress. In other words, we the victims are to blame for everything just so that Ms Oduah could continue to indulge her fancies and recreate a national carrier against common sense and every economic objection. Worse, she now has an army of tribal defenders who, like Niger Delta militants and Ms Oduah herself, are too blinded by sentiments to see the truth and pursue the cause of justice. If in the end, among the myriad agencies probing the scandal, we can’t find one to convict her and the offending officers in the agencies under the Aviation ministry; and if we can’t find a president scandalised enough by the rot to give Ms Oduah the treatment Julius Caesar gave his wife suspected of unfaithfulness, then it will be firmly time to give up on the country.

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The plan by Osun to issue N10bn Islamic bond called sukuk has predictably come under fire from Christians in the state and, as expected, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). By some global estimates, Islamic finance, a $1.2trn market, is growing at some 50 percent more than conventional banking and could rise to become a $2.7trn market in the next three or four years at its current rate of growth. Sukuk runs on sharia principles, prohibiting interest and instead offering stakes in investments. If the bond is successfully raised, Osun will become a leader in the patronage of Islamic finance in Nigeria.

The Director of Publicity, Research and Strategy of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in Osun, Kunle Oyatomi, was indeed right to point out that sukuk does not invariably translate into an agenda to Islamise the state, especially considering the fact that the United Kingdom is also planning to issue sovereign sukuk of about $323m. I also think that those who issue or buy sukuk have the forcible conversion of any state or people to Islam as the last thing on their minds. It is simply an economic activity whose profile is rising in the international financial market for its durability and ability to withstand global fluctuations.

However, Mr Oyatomi’s rebuke of Christians and the opposition PDP over the sukuk matter gives the worrisome impression that the state is both unduly combative whenever it encounters opposition to its policies, and also fanatically desirous of winning every argument. But in a pluralistic society, elected officials thrive only when they are able to persuade the opposition by reason, not by browbeating them. For, indeed, whether the party in office is right or not, opposition exists to win over the electorate. After all, in the end, everything in a democracy boils down to winning votes.

More crucially, Osun officials appear to have a rose-coloured idea of what governance is all about. Whether in the case of sukuk or the declaration of Hijrah holiday or the schools reform being undertaken by the state, Osun officials have approached matters legalistically, and have, perhaps inadvertently, further ossified the growing sectarian fractures in the state. They seem unable to appreciate that the problem is not that they are wrong to reform schools, or declare holidays as they deem fit, or take sukuk bonds at no interest in order to finance infrastructural development. The problem is that these issues all have religious overtones, are controversial, as Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood’s failure to raise sukuk showed, and follow hard on one another. In a country where religious sensibilities have been stretched to breaking point, elected officials have a responsibility to weigh lawfulness against expediency.

Osun gives the impression it has the courage of its convictions, and is determined to strive at all times to do what it believes is right. There is a sense in which this kind of approach to governance is refreshing, edifying and noble. But the state must not be surprised by the opposition it attracts now, or will attract in the coming months, as the public begins to bellicosely exercise its right to judge whether by being the first to daringly declare a holiday for traditional religion worshippers and adding a Hijrah holiday to other national Islamic holidays (among other things like schools reform), the state is not elevating courage disproportionately over wisdom and restraint.

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Last Sunday, the Divisional Police Officer (DPO) of Asokoro Police Station, Abuja, CSP Nnanna Amah, disrupted a meeting of the G-7 governors holding at the Kano State Governor’s Lodge in Abuja. He claimed to be acting under instruction. The incensed governors, one of whom was so enraged he could have tackled the impudent police officer had he not been gently restrained by a fellow governor, resisted the attempt and dared the invading policemen to arrest them. The policemen backed down. The embarrassed governors described the police invasion as impunity. I do not think so; we passed the stage of impunity months ago when the public and the National Assembly failed to take firm and clear action to leash the insubordinate and rampaging policemen of Rivers State led by the obstreperous Mbu Joseph Mbu.

Though the House of Representatives will be inviting the Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Abubakar, to explain who instructed Mr Amah to disrupt the governors’ meeting, I doubt whether any serious effort will be made to arrest Nigeria’s slow but sure drift towards fascism. However, it will be interesting to find out who sent Mr Amah and why. Until the IGP explains himself, it is at least evident that the DPO invaded the meeting of the G-7 governors last Sunday, behaved most unpleasantly and irresponsibly, tarried at the venue for much longer than propriety demanded, and gave the impression, as Mr Mbu still does in Rivers State, that Nigeria is not under constitutional rule but is a police state.

The Abuja invasion is a logical progression from the anomy being engendered in Rivers State by the police. If the Amah-led invasion is not made the last of its type, it will continue and even become worse. For all his insolence, Mr Mbu has either deliberately or inadvertently avoided direct contact with the Rivers State governor, Rotimi Amaechi, not to talk of giving him unlawful orders, as Mr Amah tried to give the five governors in Abuja when he ordered them to disperse. Whether the National Assembly has enough understanding and courage to put effective restraints on the police, and by implication the presidency, is hard to say. But if they don’t, the blame for whatever happens to Nigerian democracy will fall squarely at their feet. The executive couldn’t be blamed, for Nigerians are accustomed to their malfeasances and constitutional infractions, not to talk of their limited perspectives on democracy, rule of law and very poor vision of what kind of country Nigeria should be.

The judiciary could also not be blamed, for in their limited way, and notwithstanding their sometimes curious judgements on political disagreements, sober and courageous judges now and again rise up to the challenge of dispensing justice without fear or favour. On the other hand, the legislature has indescribably tremendous powers, both at the state and national levels, that it is unimaginable they have failed to use them. Instead, and perhaps for business or other reasons, legislators at all levels prefer to ingratiate themselves with the executive. If the police have not apologised for their open indiscretion in Rivers, it is unlikely they will apologise in the case of the Abuja invasion. But, if against all expectations they do, it will be insincere and offer no guarantees that future violations of the constitution would not occur. The reasons are twofold.

First is that, increasingly, the police are displaying less and less character than their predecessors who enforced the law in the early decades after independence, and the bond and trust that existed between the people and their police have all but been denuded by years of enthusiastic subversion of both the dignity of the people they are paid to protect and the constitution they swore to defend. Mr Mbu, for instance, could not claim to misunderstand the provisions of the constitution or the demands and application of common sense. His problem is more likely to be a damning want of character than anything else. Were he inclined to disobey unlawful orders, for which at any rate he holds no private or public affection, he knew exactly what the punishment would be. It is of course impossible that the want of character, which did not tempt him to stand up against unlawful orders, could by some miracle become strength of character enabling him to withstand the vagaries of unemployment to which he was certain to be sentenced by his superiors whose orders he had questioned.

However, what compounds Mr Mbu’s eager insubordination and want of mental and moral fortitude is not simply the humiliation of executing unlawful orders, at least for someone who claims to be a graduate of political science from a prestigious university. His dilemma, if indeed it can be so described, is the men by whom the distasteful orders come to him. For it is abundantly clear that even though his superiors in the police force also suffer a despairing lack of character, and could not stand up to the machinations of presidency forces, Mr Mbu appears compelled to carry out orders emanating from lesser men hovering around the corridors of power anxious to please President Goodluck Jonathan. Neither the top hierarchy of the police nor minions like Mr Mbu and Mr Amah would attempt to question what direction the unlawful orders were coming from nor for what purpose they were meant.

The second reason is the president himself, a man who has proved infinitely less circumspect about the law or the constitution than his predecessors, whether the boisterously ineffective but still somewhat sensible Olusegun Obasanjo, or the sedate but obviously more sensible and sober Umaru Yar’Adua. Dr Jonathan is a man given to much pontification on the rule of law, democracy, constitutionalism and peaceful co-existence. But no one is as adept as he is at knocking tribal heads against one another, subverting the rule of law, and propounding constitutional rule only when it glorifies and glamorises presidential office.

To a more circumspect president, the defiance of Mr Mbu in Rivers will be viewed with the considerable alarm any sensible democrat and convinced federalist would feel at so open and shocking a display of disobedience never before seen in these parts, not under the military, and not even under the iconoclast, Chief Obasanjo, who loved to humiliate his opponents. A reflective president would be worried that instigating Mr Mbu against a governor, or Mr Amah against five governors at a time, could lead to a bitter exchange between those saddled with protecting the governors and the invading policemen. Does the president not foresee this danger? And in future, could security aides of governors not be fooled by assassins dressed in police or military uniforms purporting to carry out orders from above, as indeed is already happening at checkpoints and highways?

My suspicion is that Dr Jonathan has pretended not to appreciate the dangers involved in these matters because of two reasons. One, the wholesale subversion of his enemies favours him, and he might have been advised to use strong-arm tactics if he hoped to retain his seat in 2015; and two, simply because he sadly has no role model either in the Nigerian presidency or elsewhere in the world to look up to. Had the Nigerian presidency been occupied at one time or the other by great statesmen like say, No 10 Downing Street and the American White House were, the photographs of such illustrious predecessors adorning the walls of the exalted office would peer down on an offending president with the withering censoriousness their great acts in times of trouble would tantamount to.

What great and noble deeds, it may be asked, was Chief Obasanjo noted for, or any of his predecessors? What inspiring vision of country or even leadership could be attributed to any of the gentlemen who ruled Nigeria? And as a country, against what standard do we judge our rulers? Is it against Gowon’s dishonoured promise to hand over the reins of power; or against Babangida’s interminable political and economic experimentations; or against Abacha’s larcenous and hedonistic rule; or against Ironsi’s indefensible naivety, among others? Dr Jonathan has no role model and no example to look up to. Unwilling to create a legacy worthy of emulation, he has both enacted and permitted series of subversive activities against democracy and the Nigerian constitution he swore to protect and defend. He has created a police state in which no one is sure who is governor anymore. And he has surreptitiously begun laying the foundations for fascism from which it would be difficult to extricate the country if a halt is not put to it now, if the stupefied National Assembly would not eschew sentiments to build a solid rampart in defence of our hard-won freedoms.

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