If all the politicians in the Southeast, including the very interesting and amusing but often hyperbolic Rochas Okorocha of Imo State, Chris Ngige seems to me to be the most colourful. On Saturday, he hopes to defeat 29 other candidates in the Anambra State governorship election. Analysts think the election will be a four-way race between Dr Ngige of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Willie Obiano of the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA), Tony Nwoye of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), and Ifeanyi Ubah of the Labour Party (LP). I had hoped the race would be a titanic two-way race between Dr Ngige and former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Charles Soludo. With the manipulation of Professor Soludo out of the race in APGA and the official sanction of Mr Obiano as candidate by the state governor, the only credible, independent person of substance remaining in the race is Dr Ngige, irrespective of what his chances are.

Mr Obiano is clearly Governor Peter Obi’s favourite, and the governor has undisguisedly tried to advance his candidature. But if the APGA candidate has any fine attributes, and it is likely he has many, not least his banking background and his District Officer looks, they are, however, buried beneath the controversies that accompanied his enthronement as the ruling party’s candidate. He speaks well, and has a fair understanding of financial issues. But he is a dour and incomparably unexciting politician, and he lacks the charisma, rigour, excitement and independence that make both Dr Ngige and Professor Soludo tower head and shoulders above virtually all politicians in the Southeast. Mr Obi himself is not a colourful politician, nor is he anything more than merely pragmatic and somewhat businesslike. He probably sees much of Mr Obiano in himself, much more than the fact that the candidate who comes from Anambra North satisfies the party’s zoning ambition.

Comrade Nwoye is a latecomer to the race, having only last week secured the Supreme Court nod to be fielded as the PDP candidate. He has a union background and is a dyed-in-the-wool PDP politician. But in a race as tight as Anambra’s, and with a surfeit of eminently qualified candidates, anchoring a divided house on him and entering the race barely 10 days to the election are hardly the kind of credentials that dispose to victory. And like Obiano, he will rely on his party to create an artificial whirlwind to procure victory for him. Should he win, he will bring no experience and no special talent to the office. Mr Ubah is a businessman who is willing to put his enormous money where his mouth is. But beyond that, and his zestful face and longing eyes, the state will be as undeserving of him as it is undeserving of both Mr Nwoye and Mr Obiano.

That leaves the irrepressible Dr Ngige. I have been a longstanding fan of this witty, colourful and politically passionate senator form Anambra Central. He was governor between 2003 and 2006, after the scheming Chris Uba, an unscrupulous businessman, procured a misbegotten governorship victory for him. But two months after being sworn in, Dr Ngige simply dismantled his godfather, denigrated him openly, and created such a din as no governor had ever done before him, nor is ever likely to do after him. The manner of his fight with Mr Uba, not to say the panache with which he secured victory in that deathly struggle, was as entertaining as the manner his enemies, led by the avaricious Mr Uba, tried in 2003 to unhorse him using a maudlin policeman, Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) Raphael Ige. I of course do not crave entertainment from an Ngige governorship. The plain fact, however, is that though there is no dull moment with Dr Ngige, he is always careful not to subordinate brilliant governance to entertainment.

While Dr Ngige can be foresighted and diligent, as indeed he seems configured to be all his life, his years in office showed he is also a very practical politician, where practicality can sometimes be defined as not being averse to heroics that borders on outright mendacity. (Imagine if he had not led Uba on before the 2003 poll, and then undid him so spectacularly and dramatically to the relief of all Anambrarians and the mirth of every Nigerian!). I have no trouble whatsoever in endorsing Dr Ngige as governor of Anambra, notwithstanding his anonymity in the Senate where he sat in lugubrious and painless solemnity. He will come to the office of governor with plenty of useful experience and exuberance, uncommon vision, a great deal of joie de vivre far surpassing those of his three main rivals, and certain to put the state in salutary spotlight. Should Dr Ngige lose…no, no, perish the thought.

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Finally, the United States of America has declared the Nigerian Boko Haram Islamic sect a terrorist organisation. The US has its reasons. But it is instructive that for more than two years, Nigeria stoutly refused to let the sect be declared a foreign terrorist organisation. The country claimed that such a declaration would negatively affect innocent Nigerian travelers who would automatically become suspects anywhere they travelled to in Europe and America. This time, however, there has been no objection to the US declaration even though nothing has changed. The sect has remained consistently bloody and undiscriminating in its campaigns. It still treats its victims with as much contempt as it has done since 2009. And it has neither reduced nor expanded its objectives.

What has changed, in fact, is that the Nigerian government has finally been overcome by self-made frustrations. While it previously and indefensibly believed it could secure some sort of deal with the sect, such hopes appear to have now evaporated. In spite of the appalling bloodletting at the Northeast epicenter of the revolt, and in spite of the killing of many of the sect’s leaders, the violence has seemed to worsen, especially in its total lack of discrimination.

To be certain, the fault for the late declaration of the sect as a terrorist organisation is not that of the US. It is strictly that of Nigeria. The country’s leaders have shown no imagination or good judgement in its war against the sect. It unwisely allowed the revolt to take root and spread before it belatedly declared war on it. While the sect controlled barely one local government in the early days of the revolt, the government was apparently unimpressed and failed to take the firm measures required to knock the problem into a cocked hat. Unimaginably, the government waited until, in its own words, the sect controlled more than 10 local governments in Borno and Yobe states before it felt it appropriate to declare what this column has described as an unnecessary state of emergency. Now, it seems as if the insurgency has become a war of attrition in which neither side appears eager to achieve victory or concede defeat.

Neither the US declaration of Boko Haram as a terrorist organisation nor the declaration of state of emergency will bring the insurgency to an end. With the anomie being sponsored and nurtured by the Jonathan presidency as he continues to undermine the constitution and impose authoritarian rule, and his demonstration of absolute mala fides in the practice of democracy, it is unlikely his efforts to restore peace in a part of the polity will be rewarded. Worse, it does appear that in tandem with its helplessness in dealing with the sectarian nightmare in the Northeast, the Nigerian government appears willing to open the country’s airspace and security (including intelligence, telephone security et al), not to say sovereignty, to US influence and drone activities.

Four more years of Dr Jonathan’s unexciting and undemocratic rule will push Nigeria to the cliff. This has nothing to do with where the president comes from, his party’s zoning policy, or whether it is the North’s turn or that of the Southeast or any other zone for that matter. The problem is absolutely one of competence, which this president or the two before him have not demonstrated in part or in whole. It is frustrating that the issue of who rules Nigeria is every time obfuscated by the ethnic or religious background of those aspiring to be president.

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What makes the death of Festus Iyayi deeply wounding is not simply the fact that he had an accident, as indeed anyone can have, or that he died in the almost hopeless quest of securing better university education for Nigerian students. Every death diminishes us, but none more so than the one procured in the hands of either an unimaginative person, such as an anarchist Boko Haram Islamic sect fighter, or an unimaginative state government, such as Kogi State government richly illustrated last week. Professor Iyayi, writer and former president of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) died in an auto crash on the Lokoja-Abuja highway when, according to preliminary reports, the bus in which he was travelling with other ASUU officials was struck by an escort vehicle in the convoy of Kogi State governor, Idris Wada.

As if admitting guilt, and as if remorseful that Kogi State convoy drivers had needlessly avoided Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC) training programmes, the governor has quickly offered to release his drivers for training. It took the death of Professor Iyayi to convince Kogi to do what is right. According to the corps marshal, Osita Chidoka, three accidents in as many months involving the Kogi government convoys were not even enough to get the governor amenable to the Road Safety training programme. Nor was another convoy accident involving the governor himself, in which he sustained a broken limb, enough to make the governor do something about his reckless convoys.

The state has tried to shift the blame to the victims, but some sources allege that the governor’s convoy is to blame. If investigations prove the convoy’s culpability, the governor will not only be sued for damages, he will also doubtless be stigmatized for causing the death of the renowned professor and for failing to get his convoys to act responsibly on the highways. Indeed, if the governor cannot be trusted to responsibly restrain his drivers from embarking on what looks like joyriding, how can he be trusted to administer the affairs of his state with the responsibility, consideration, fairness and moderation his office required?

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The question the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Mohammed Abubakar, was asked to respond to by the House Committee on Police Affairs was simple: who ordered the Asokoro Divisional Police Officer, Nnana Amah, to invade and disrupt the G7 governors’ meeting at the Kano governor’s lodge some two weeks ago? The answer was equally simple though downright disturbing. No one sent Mr Amah, the IGP replied. The DPO was simply doing his job, he deadpanned.

It will be recalled that two Sundays ago, Mr Amah had led dozens of policemen to invade the G7 governors’ meeting in Abuja. According to a source at the meeting, the DPO had asked the governors to disperse or be arrested. The governors, five of whom were present at the meeting, would not disperse, but instead dared the DPO to arrest them. The invasion led to an altercation in which a chafing governor would have taken the unprecedented step of pushing the DPO out of the meeting had he not been restrained. The invasion alarmed the country, and was widely condemned by everyone with a sense of decorum. However, like all who dare to oppose the Jonathan presidency, the chafing governor is today under siege, with two of his sons detained for alleged financial malfeasance.

If Mr Amah’s effrontery alarmed the country, the response of the IGP was even more troubling, and the inability of the House Committee to pin him down with poignant and unnerving questions did in fact signpost the decline of Nigerian democracy. According to the IGP, “The DPO was not sent by anybody…As the officer-in-charge of the area, he had the right to know what was going on in his domain…He is the DPO of the area; if anything happens, he would be held responsible. He was doing his job.” He further explained that what the rest of us described as disruption of meeting was in fact nothing of the sort, and that we were all misled by media reports of the event. Alas, the IGP pretends to teach us English by redefining the word ‘disruption.’

Worse, by making light of Mr Amah’s grievous assault on civil liberties, the police boss attempts to rewrite the constitution, remould Nigerian democracy, and redefine the charter on human rights. But the IGP’s not-so-clever response shows very clearly why Nigeria is now a police state, why the police commissioner in Rivers State willfully defies the state governor without fear of retribution, why increasingly the police’s view of liberty is at variance with whatever liberty is vouchsafed to citizens by the constitution. And by handling the IGP last Thursday with kid gloves, the House Committee on Police Affairs also indicate clearly how complicit the National Assembly has become in the subversion of the constitution by a resentful and vindictive Jonathan presidency.

The fact is that though the IGP honoured the House invitation, he provided no explanation to show by what authority the police could disrupt the governors’ meeting or embarrass them, even if it was clear the governors met to ensure President Goodluck Jonathan did not contest in 2015, or if he did, not to win a single vote. The police, Dr Jonathan, and the faceless and shameless power mongers pulling the strings behind the thick presidency cloak of Aso Villa remind us of Germany in the 1920s and 1930s as Adolf Hitler’s Nazi party prepared the ground for fascism. The IGP is obviously no longer in full control of the police, for he seems to us a man of much grander character than the actions the police evince today. More and more, he will find himself justifying his men’s lawless actions, perhaps assured that in the process, and irrespective of what he thinks or not think, believes or not believe, he is pleasing the presidency and defending his increasingly untenable position.

More humbling, and faced with a fascist presidency, we have on our trembling hands a considerably weakened National Assembly without a full understanding of the role of a legislature in combating autocracy. For whatever this weapon in our hands is worth, the Senate seems to have lost its zest for lawmaking and for checking the excesses of the executive; and the House of Representatives has sensed the futility and loneliness of rising up stoutly in defence of civil liberties. They could not question the IGP to get his understanding of what the duties of a DPO were, and whether those duties included in any way the assault on the people’s liberties as contained in the constitution. They let the IGP off lightly by refusing to get him to quote the relevant parts of the constitution that empowered his officers to insult democracy and deny or circumscribe lawful association and assembly of the people.

Last year we started with a defiant commissioner of police proving to be more powerful than a state governor; now we have one DPO looking five governors in the face and telling them to shape up or ship out. Under the military, such effrontery could never be countenanced. In a democracy, it should never be imagined. But under the nose of a president who took oath to defend and protect the constitution, we are experiencing these clear and catastrophic assaults on civil liberties. Who can tell what will happen as the 2015 general elections draw near, when a desperate president egged on by faceless fascists take on everybody and the constitution? Who can tell what other abuses the president’s men will enact, and what other institution, other than the police, they will destroy or render contemptible?

Already, the campaign for state police has become almost unchallengeable, even unanimous. Whether a sovereign national conference is held or not, it is certain that the enthusiasm with which the police have lent themselves to be used to undermine the constitution has ensured that they cannot survive as they are constituted today. It is a question of time before the police are decentralized. When that happens, it will be good riddance to bad rubbish. For with the appalling excesses of the Jonathan government, no one is persuaded that a state government is likely to behave more unreasonably with the police than the federal government now heedlessly does.

Whether the already enfeebled National Assembly, which embraces partisanship to the detriment of the sanctity of the constitution, survives the impending Jonathan onslaught remains to be seen. They failed to understand the issues involved in the Rivers affair, where a few members of the House of Assembly plotted against the majority and then somehow manipulated the National Assembly to employ disingenuous neutrality instead of principled engagement. More and more, Nigerians are beginning to understand that this certainly isn’t the kind of legislature the country needs. Whatever they earn, if they could at least be firm and principled, the country would be grateful that though they cost a pretty penny they are nonetheless useful. Today, however, they look like an appendage of the executive, frightened, cowering and shell-shocked.

Mr Amah is likely to get away with his audacious challenge to the country’s democratic tenets. After all, his senior counterpart in Rivers is getting away with murder. In the face of such distressing exhibition of partisan policing, the IGP hides under semantics, and the National Assembly feigns ignorance, if not sickening amusement. Maybe, in quiet resignation, we should wait for the other shoe to drop. When that happens, let us hope it will not be too late to stir ourselves, too late to reclaim the country from the hands of those intent on destroying it, and too late to feel alive once again and be proud of this corner of the earth the good Lord has placed in our clumsy hands to tend.

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Nearly one month after President Goodluck Jonathan set up a panel to probe the scandal surrounding the two overpriced bulletproof cars allegedly bought for the Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, by the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), and more than one week after the panel reportedly submitted its report, the president has not said a word. No matter what his aides say about his fidelity to both the truth and the anti-corruption war, Dr Jonathan is clearly reluctant to act on the matter, for Ms Oduah is said to be a favoured minister, one quite important to the president’s election in 2011 and his re-election plans in 2015. But act he must, notwithstanding speculations that he seeks a way out for the embattled minister. This column has no inkling what the panel’s findings are, but whatever happens, and given what we already know, the president will be demonstrating unparalleled audacity not to give Ms Oduah more than a slap on the wrist.

As far as Dr Jonathan is concerned, and in spite of his often buoyant sermonising in speeches and in churches, his presidency has formed a pattern of never meaning what he says, and of damning the whole world when his critics become too impassioned against his puny virtues. To be fair to him, he has not been inspiring in waging war on corruption, but he at least gestures in that direction and frequently pretends to be earnest in facing the problem squarely.

As if to reinforce the perception of the moral aimlessness of the Jonathan presidency, his Special Adviser on Political Matters, Ahmed Gulak, last week explained why Dr Jonathan turned down the invitation by the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) to deliver a keynote address at its Sokoto retreat. According to Alhaji Gulak, the president turned down the invitation because he did not recognise the NGF led by Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State. The president, he said unashamedly, recognised a faction of the NGF created and led by Governor Jonah Jang of Plateau State.

In May, the NGF had conducted its leadership election in which Mr Amaechi emerged winner with 19 votes to Mr Jang’s 16. Many observers saw a direct and uncomplicated election; but the president chose to recognise the loser who was his candidate. Other than the 16 governors who recognise Mr Jang as NGF chairman, no other sensible person does. But what does the Jonathan presidency care? He sees no paradox in lending presidential weight to open indiscretion. If he finally and reluctantly chooses to punish Ms Oduah for her errors and lies, it will not be because he thinks it is the right thing to do; it will be because he has no choice. As for the NGF, don’t ever expect him to recognise the truth, no matter what loathsome impression it creates of his presidency. He abhors the upstart Mr Amaechi too much to give a damn. After all, in these parts, the impression presidential aides have of presidential power is that no president must ever lose an argument to anyone, let alone lose a deathly political struggle with a lowly governor. In their view, democracy endows a president with far more power and glory than a monarchy or outright dictatorship.

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The forces malevolently interested in the November 16 Anambra governorship poll were much stronger than the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) could withstand or manage. No matter what INEC did, the election was bound to fail; for the stakes in that poll were so high that even if the electoral body had mustered enough administrative acumen and integrity to superintend the election, the political dynamics in both the state and the country had already spawned too many sinister factors capable of undermining the poll.

Much attention has been paid to INEC’s failings in that election as an explanation for the almost comprehensive failure of the governorship poll. Because of this failure, the INEC chairman, Attahiru Jega, has himself been described as a failure. In addition, many have called for the cancellation of the poll since it could not be guaranteed that the pollution and manipulation noticed in some polling areas had not affected the entire process. Professor Jega himself acknowledged that in some parts of the state, his men sabotaged the election. He was thoroughly disappointed, he said, that in spite of all the preparations for that poll, the election still miscarried badly. And though he didn’t quite say it, it appeared that the sabotage he talked about was aimed at the feisty All Progressives Congress (APC) candidate, Chris Ngige.

The Anambra poll miscarried for two main reasons. But before considering the reasons, it is important to make one or two observations about the election. First, I think it was unwise of Professor Jega to have drafted so many top level INEC staff to supervise the poll, and also encourage the overwhelming policing of the same poll. By taking these extraordinary steps in the hope that he would deliver a near perfect election, he robbed himself and his commission of the opportunity to know how they would have performed were the 2015 polls to be held all over the country on November 16. In 2015, it is evident that neither the commission nor the security agencies would have the benefit of the number and stature of the officials deployed in Anambra for the inconclusive governorship poll of two Saturdays ago. The poll should have been used as a dress rehearsal for the 2015 polls. Second, by now Professor Jega and the frustrated electorate will have realised that it takes more than an INEC chairman’s well-meaning disposition and the deployment of overwhelming force to deliver a free and fair election.

The failed Anambra poll can be explained in two ways. First is the simple fact that the Jonathan presidency has no interest whatsoever in ensuring a free and fair poll, notwithstanding its repeated homilies on the sanctity of the electoral process. Judging from the spectral silence of the presidency on the obvious and deliberate sabotage of the poll, and the effusive and exuberant praise of the same poll by the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), it was clear that from the perspective of the Jonathan presidency, the goal of the election was to defeat Dr Ngige, not to ensure fair poll or give victory to the PDP candidate. The obsession against Dr Ngige is in turn informed by the overall strategic interest of the ruling party to checkmate the rising profile of the APC and stall, if not completely weaken, the opposition’s increasingly shrill and critical voice. This explains why the PDP was eager to endorse the misshapen poll and give the impression of being detached from crass partisanship, though its candidate lost in questionable circumstances.

As part of this strategy of weakening, stalling or reversing the power of the APC, the PDP will next year attempt to take at least one state from the APC in the Osun and Ekiti elections and ride that momentum towards the 2015 polls. Two main factors underscore the strategy against the APC. One is the fact that Dr Jonathan himself lacks the intrinsic depth and vision to remake the country as a virile, progressive and pacesetting nation. Two is the fact that deliberately or accidentally, Dr Jonathan has managed to assemble a group of Machiavellian advisers and close aides who have gross loathing for principles. They are adept at reading the lips of the president and sabotaging every law and constitutional provision militating against the president’s re-election. Therefore, between Dr Jonathan’s surrender to devious politics and the energetic enthusiasm of his aides to foment trouble, everything, including the laws and constitution, not to talk of elections in particular, is fair game for subversion.

The second reason the Anambra poll miscarried is the connivance of the state’s elite. No one denies the atrocious manipulations that undermined the integrity of the poll. But to remedy these atrocities, INEC plans a supplementary election slated for the end of this month. While there are calls for total cancellation of the poll from among a not-so-substantial number of Anambrarians and an overwhelming number of non-Anambrarians, the state’s elite have indicated the poll is not so irredeemable that a supplementary poll cannot correct. In media comments and television discussions, as well as jurisprudential expositions, the said elite have struggled to justify the poll and denounce the APC, its candidate, and any other person bold enough to dismiss the election as a sham. It is not surprising that such connivance offers endorsement for the electoral chicanery of two Saturdays ago and also provides adequate grounding and philosophical underpinning for the subversion of the electoral process.

One of those philosophical underpinnings was the incredulous argument that Dr Ngige represented the face of the Southwest’s expansionist agenda. The state’s ruling party, the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), was the only surviving Igbo party that must not be humiliated, they said. It no longer mattered that APC’s Dr Ngige was their son, or that he had ruled the state meritoriously and can probably do much better than his rivals, or that his competence could not be doubted at all. The unabashed suggestion that Dr Ngige represented outsiders harked back to the Yoruba/Igbo rivalry of the 1950s and 1960s, and gave the impression that little progress had been made in Southwest/Southeast relationships. To these conniving analysts and amateur philosophers, it does not matter how the APGA candidate wins.

But such dangerous reasoning carries equally dangerous drawbacks. It shows that the Southeast has learnt nothing, forgotten nothing, and has all along been an impassive observer of the changing dynamics of Nigerian politics and geopolitics. Even though Dr Ngige’s candidature was the best opportunity for the Southwest to build a credible and durable bridge to the Southeast, it was even a much better opportunity for the Southeast to expand its reach nationally and also break the implacable iron curtain that has seemed to divide the Southwest and the Southeast. For a region desirous of winning the presidency in the years ahead, it is strange that the lessons of MKO Abiola’s victory in the 1993 presidential election are lost on them.

It is also surprising that they fail to understand that while the Southwest intelligently preferred Olu Falae in the 1999 presidential election, Olusegun Obasanjo enjoyed the better crossover appeal which propelled him into Aso Villa. More crucially, it must be understood that the seeming consensus that appeared to produce a Yoruba president in 1999 could not be divorced from the 1993 presidential election annulment. Such a consensus is unlikely to be built again, and each party and ethnic group will have to explore sensible and multipronged strategies to win the presidency.

If the partial results already sanctioned by INEC are taken into cognisance, and given the way they are skewed against the APC candidate, it is hard to see Dr Ngige winning. If he loses, it will not be because he failed to run a credible and efficient campaign, or because the electorate didn’t vote for him. It will be because he ran against a manipulative and amoral federal government, an unscrupulous Governor Peter Obi who pays only lip service to democracy, a short-sighted and parochial elite anxious to protect imaginary boundaries, and an unconscionable public who can’t seem to understand the fuss over an unfair electoral process or the principle of fighting for and defending truth and justice.

It is also quite remarkable that some of those who denounce the APC in the Anambra election and turn a blind eye to the corruption that accompanied it come from the Southwest. Their reasons are totally unrelated to the noxious details of the electoral manipulations observed in the Anambra poll by everyone. Indeed, the unusual Southwest support for injustice is merely a reflection of the divisions that have now become integral to Southwest politics, one in which everyone defines progressivism according to his taste and embraces it according to his whim. The bitter political struggle in the Southwest, which always spills over to other parts of the country, will continue for some time to come, for it has become burdensome and discomfiting for those who had associated with Obafemi Awolowo in the First and Second Republics, and long ago passed themselves off as progressives, to mollify the pangs and reproof of conscience triggered by their betrayal of democratic principles.

Those who suggest that the Anambra debacle presages a catastrophic 2015 are right. The Anambra poll failed because there are fewer people today in the country with the character and principles that conduce to good electoral behaviour. Anambra has probably sealed its fate. But the buck-passers of INEC, the vicious and amoral presidency of Dr Jonathan, and the shallow and sentimental analysts crawling all over Nigeria with spurious logic will guarantee that this long-suffering country, not just Anambra, inexorably moves closer to meeting its fate in two years’ time.

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After almost 15 years of unremitting political provocation, Nigerians are about to enjoy some relief from the tedium a succession of bad or incompetent leaders have subjected them to. Kawu Baraje, the chairman of the new Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) that has just fused with the All Progressives Congress (APC), enthused last week that President Goodluck Jonathan should begin to prepare his handover notes. His effervescence is a reflection of the hopes elicited by the migration of five PDP governors into the APC, and the possible wholesale migration of the national legislators of the five states into the opposition party. If the migration is carried through in the National Assembly, it will mean an immediate and drastic alteration of legislative power. In addition, it will also mean in theory that the electoral vote-rich Southwest, Northwest and Northeast zones will go to the APC column. Political analysts recognise the impossibility of winning the presidency in Nigeria without two of these three blocs.

It is hardly necessary to explain why the PDP could not keep the five governors, and why it may still lose a few more to the opposition. But it is important to state that the reason is not really the desire of the North to reclaim the presidency, after being shut out for a cumulative period of almost 13 years. The real reasons are the uncontrollable and spiteful internal dynamics of the PDP, and the almost absolute incompetence of the Jonathan government to engender progress and development and to facilitate peace. If Dr Jonathan had been a listening and charismatic president, the opposition against him would have been feeble. But now the opposition is potent and growing, and it is likely to succeed if it plays its cards well. More importantly, the country is an overripe pimple ready for a new party to take office, and new men, no matter their ideological disposition, to implement new political and developmental paradigms.

But the expanded APC should not have illusions about its reach, power and readiness to take office. Its unity will remain testily brittle, and its ideological core will in the foreseeable future continue to be a kitchen midden of multifarious and sometimes conflicting worldviews. While the PDP has seemed to achieve some form of unity based solely on its long years in power, the APC will have to confect its own unity based on its members’ shared desperation to take power. Neither party’s unity will be contextually superior to the other, nor will one party’s style be less morally reprehensible than the other. The ageing PDP is a longstanding opportunist; the new APC is a latter-day opportunist. However, and more crucially, while the old opportunists have become inured to change and progress, and have even openly embraced fascism, the new opportunists, themselves idealists and theorists, appear genuinely interested in change, democracy, progress and stability. The choice facing the country is, therefore, clear and easy.

Given the awful record of the PDP in government and the appalling characters that have seized governance and entrapped a willing Dr Jonathan, I have no hesitation in recommending change. Nor do I have hesitation in making the hyperbolic statement that four more years of Dr Jonathan would ruin the country. The signs are clear. But the APC must appreciate the kind of politics Nigerians play and why that sort of politics has held us in thraldom for so long. Dr Jonathan’s strength remains the fact that he is viewed in the Christian middle belt with a fondness and wistfulness that belie his unsuitability for the post he has held for nearly five years. In addition, many seem to find his consistent lack of composure and charisma, as well as his lack of profundity, both engaging and beguiling. (I have struggled to use inoffensive words for a man who merits the harshest adjectives for plunging the country into retrogression and chaos).

In the South-South, neither his incompetence nor dullness matters to the single-minded voters of that zone. What matters are that he hails from their zone, and that the North, which they describe as parasitic, is once again annoyingly hankering after the plum post. I confess that such mechanical consideration of politics can be off-putting and is a dangerous path to follow for a country passing through trying times. If APC is to take the presidency, it will have to select its standard-bearers with considerable aplomb by avoiding sentiments and jaded calculations, take a little of the South-South and North Central as much as it can manage, and sweep the Southwest, Northeast and Northwest. The arithmetic of the next elections, not to say the dynamics of the National Assembly, favours the opposition party. If the opposition does not underestimate the fanatical ruthlessness of the Jonathan government, if it manages its own diversities well, checks its fissiparous tendency, and puts up a winnable ticket, Nigeria will be rid of the confusion and disaster that have bedevilled it for more than a decade.

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I shudder to think what intensity of anguish Nigeria’s eminent vice-chancellors endured as they reportedly sat glumly through last Friday’s meeting with the supervising minister of education, Nyesom Wike. Mr Wike, as everyone knows, is a man of many parts. Bold, dogged and energetic, the Ikwerre, Rivers State politician has made a huge impression on his followers, and, as it is obvious, is also now making a monstrously bigger impression on many Nigerians. The vice-chancellors who attended the meeting with him would doubtless have left his presence dumbfounded by the quirkiness of university education that produced such an impertinent man who many years ago defied the force and natural inclination of nature to leave a notable mark on his local government as an administrator and grassroots mobiliser.

Not only was Mr Wike twice chairman of the now controversial Obio/Akpor local government, he performed with such distinction that he managed to win the confidence of Governor Rotimi Amaechi to become his Chief of Staff. Graduating with a law degree from the Rivers State University of Science and Technology, Mr Wike also developed a well-honed style of politics that saw him become an implacable force in both local and national politics. He even evaded the censorious gaze of the avuncular Peter Odili, a former governor of the state, to win his support at the initial stage of his political career. And he also managed to fool the feisty and sometimes impatient Mr Amaechi to earn the juicy and powerful post of Chief of Staff and later director-general of the Amaechi re-election campaign. He has now seduced President Goodluck Jonathan, who more and more finds solace in the arms of fixers and enforcers serenading him with sweet talk and bombast.

It is important to understand Mr Wike’s background in order to find explanation for his hardline stand in the five-month-old Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) strike. He has a law degree, is streetwise, aggressive and gregarious. But those who know him and have worked with him insist there is little in his character or education, not to talk of the logic and judgement that sets an educated man apart from an illiterate, to justify the degree he is brandishing. He is a practical politician who is effective and skilful in herding votes. But at bottom, he is a man who conceals his unimpressive intellectual endowment beneath a morass of public works projects. Such a man is more likely to resent his betters when they meet in forums that require logic, thoughtfulness, restraint and cultured language and diplomacy. Mr Wike precisely found himself at one such forum last Friday when he encountered his betters, vice chancellors and former university teachers whom he gloated over.

To a deep and lettered man, such a meeting would lead him inexorably to the veneration and modesty that the knowledge imparted to him in his university days should naturally elicit. But to one plagued by doubts and inferiority complex, such a meeting could only trigger in all its fury the resentment his intellectual failings have dammed in his angry soul over the years. Like former President Olusegun Obasanjo who under Gen Murtala Mohammed took perverse delight in purging the universities and demystifying the super permanent secretaries who mocked his inadequacies, Mr Wike has issued orders to his former teachers which no reasonable man should ever give and which even under the military no one could hope to enforce. Sadly, the Jonathan government is populated by many such upstarts who read politics into every dispute.

Acting on behalf of the Jonathan presidency, and after opening another war front in the president’s many battles, Mr Wike has ordered the deployment of policemen in universities to secure those who would heed the command to resume work. After all, of what use is power when it cannot be used? He has also ordered the vice-chancellors to reopen the universities, when in reality it was ASUU’s withdrawal of services, not the shutting of the campuses by school administrators, that paralysed the universities in the first instance. Those who fail to resume work, Mr Wike commanded the National Universities Commission (NUC), should be sacked, notwithstanding the fact that the universities have neither the resources nor even the available pool of qualified teachers to fill more than 40,000 vacancies already existing. In the opinion of Mr Wike, force should solve a problem that neither logic nor diplomacy could resolve in five months. As far as he understood, and based on the Kano meeting of the university teachers less than two weeks ago, at least 60 percent of them already indicated willingness to resume work. Of course Mr Wike’s foolish order and outburst are bound to unite the teachers once again, for they are nobody’s fools.

It is a worrisome indication of the incompetence of President Jonathan’s men that a crisis nearing resolution could be allowed to fester once again, thereby snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. The president has himself not demonstrated brilliant statecraft, nor shown any indication he has the steady hands to propel the country to greatness. But by surrounding himself with devious and vacuous advisers and aides, he is more likely to take more wrong-headed steps capable of dooming his presidency. The president sees foreign destabilising agents, when nothing of the sort exists. Those who trouble him and the country are his ministers and aides. They are the ones who instigate him into hardline position, who alarm him with imaginary enemies, and fill his mind with anachronistic ideas of the powers and perks of a president. Thus they tell us that Dr Jonathan is the first president to engage the ASUU in 13 hours discussion, as if it is a regrettable thing, or as if his job is limited to effusing power without a corresponding acknowledgement of the burdens and responsibilities of office.

The few outstanding issues in the ASUU strike were the warehousing of the first tranche of promised financial interventions, making the agreement already reached ironclad, and paying salary arrears. I find it difficult to see how these should be a problem. Instead, Dr Jonathan, Mr Wike and other supposedly educated officials who snivel around the presidency think it is an affront to doubt the president. Were there not enough reasons to doubt the presidency before now? Had that office not been desecrated before, and is it not now being desecrated by the thuggish characters that deface its hallowed corridors? As an adviser, I would have asked the president to approach ASUU’s new doubts (not new conditions, by the way) with the kind of self-deprecating humour US President Barack Obama is famous for.

Answering a question on ASUU strike during his last media chat in September, Dr Jonathan said that in the heady days of the Ghanaian ‘revolution’ President J.J. Rawlings closed down universities for a long time in order to reorganise the education system. Though he added he was not thinking in that direction, it was embarrassing and insulting that his mind even wandered in that direction. If he thought nothing of closing down public universities because many around him didn’t have their children attending them, would he also close down private universities if he had his way? By now it must be obvious to everyone that we are dealing with a fascist government, not an elected presidency. (See box). They have begun to see external saboteurs and internal collaborators. They are bypassing a somnolent National Assembly and simply directly deploying the increasingly fascist police force to undermine the constitution and take away people’s rights.

In the weeks ahead, and as the political noose tightens around his neck, a desperate Dr Jonathan will attempt extraordinary measures to keep himself in office. For all patriots, this is the time to abandon neutrality, a time to stand firm against fascism. The challenge before us then is how to guide this rampaging, paranoid bull through the country’s china shop lest we all come to grief. Indeed, the hysterical Mr Wike has managed to run the Jonathan government into a cul de sac. But if history is a guide, it is hard to see the government succeeding in its self-destructive course of action against ASUU. Not only are there no university teachers anywhere to recruit, Nigeria is hardly the right place for any competent teacher to come and offer his services, let alone for pittance and with no equipment to do the job. We are close to an election year; yet, Dr Jonathan is toying with the electorate and displaying unparalleled contempt for the youth. But perhaps we should wait to see what talisman he hopes to mesmerise us with in 2015.

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Convinced that the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) was being needlessly intransigent and combative in its strike, President Goodluck Jonathan and the supervising minister in the Ministry of Education, Nyesom Wike, have become even more openly bellicose. Would to God they had been bellicose against Stella Oduah’s malfeasances. The latest stalemate began when the leaders of ASUU sought written assurances that the federal government would keep its own side of the bargain. First to meet the university teachers with discourteous outburst was Mr Wike himself, Dr Jonathan’s redoubtable man Friday. There would be no written assurances whatsoever, he shut back in anger, nor any assurances for that matter. The president’s word was good enough, he claimed. Thereupon he launched into the most obscene and fawning rhapsodies of Dr Jonathan’s attributes and the incontestability of presidential powers.

Dr Jonathan himself, inflamed by his aides’ rhapsodies and sweeping and uncouth denigration of his opponents, summarily and unprecedentedly declared that ASUU had become subversive and a tool in the hands of the opposition. If the presidential hysteria was not embarrassing enough, Mr Wike, still breathing imprecate against the government’s phantom enemies, reviewed the December 4 ultimatum he gave the striking teachers to resume or be sacked. They should now resume work on December 9 or get the boot, he thundered as one completely ignorant of the way universities are run.

It is sad that a matter about to be resolved has become complicated by the insensitivity of the Jonathan presidency. Could university teachers, as enlightened and diverse as they are, offer themselves to be used by a political party? Is the decay in universities not apparent enough? And had teachers not gone on strike over the years, who could guess how much worse the rot would have been? Clearly the country is in need of being saved from the hands of Dr Jonathan and his fawning aides. If Dr Jonathan is still capable of listening, would former presidents please gently remonstrate with him to stop embarrassing the country he has misled for the past five years or so?

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It was an unplanned but remarkable coincidence around the Christmas holiday period of 2012. Nelson Mandela, 94, Margaret Thatcher, 87, George H. Bush, 88 all found themselves in hospital to receive medical attention. Mandela went in to treat a stubborn lung infection, Bush the Elder to treat a fever and other associated ailments that kept popping up one after the other, as his doctors ruefully observed, and Thatcher to remove a growth on her bladder…

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

Mandela’s successors obviously do not take after the great man, perhaps because by having him so close to them, they have taken him and his qualities for granted. Thabo Mbeki, Mandela’s immediate successor, for instance, could hold himself anywhere in the world intellectually, but he exhibited none of the charisma, joie de vivre and general humanism that hallmarked his predecessor’s leadership. In addition, his detached and sometimes woolly style, his seemingly non-partisan politics of expressive sombreness that grated on the ears of the South African rabble contrasted with the welcoming, lively and eccentric style of his successor, Jacob Zuma.

Mandela in office sometimes seemed a paradox, with a half of him oozing gravitas, and the other half skirting close to an inscrutable form of libertinism that made him contradistinctively sociable and prudish. But the real paradox of South African politics is the unexampled fashion Mbeki took Mandela’s cerebral endowment without the redeeming and tempering influence of the great man’s sociableness; and Zuma took and embellished Mandela’s love for life without the catalysing and uplifting influence of Madiba’s deep longing and respect for knowledge…Of the three great world leaders, Mandela is probably the most solid and respected, Thatcher the most impactful and iconoclastic, and Bush the most measured and influential…

With each passing day, Mandela has seemed to loom even larger than most world leaders, becoming an example of a statesman growing in stature and relevance, like a good wine, as his years out of power increase…More and more, as Africa produces mediocre leaders by the dozen, the power and nobility of Mandela are reinforced by his canniness in foreshadowing the problems of multiculturalism in a way even Europe has not come to terms with. Imagine if the superficial Zuma had taken over from F.W. de Klerk! Indeed, the long goodbyes of the three statesmen speak more to the leadership tragedy faced by Africa in general and more poignantly to the appalling refusal, not to say criminal negligence, of Nigerian leaders to learn both from the ancient history of their country and the modern history of the world in relation to the issues and phenomena that drive, sustain and shape great leadership.

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Because of the urgency required to address Senator Ike Ekweremadu’s stinging heresy, I am postponing till next week my comment on the passing of the great icon, Nelson Mandela. Senator Ekweremadu is deputy president of the Senate and chairman of the Senate Committee on the Review of the 1999 Constitution. By virtue of his three positions as a senator, deputy president of the Senate and chairman of the constitution review committee, the 51-year-old lawyer and three-time senator occupies a pivotal position in the National Assembly. He is not only an influential Southeast politician, it is safe to conclude that when he talks and acts, he does so with a fair degree of responsibility and deliberateness. This is why I am reluctant to let his discourse on single term and 2015 elections go unchallenged for more than a few days. To ignore his alarming views for more than a week would be unacceptable, if not unpardonable.

Distilled into its essential elements, Senator Ekweremadu’s discourse falls under two main headlines judging from an interview redacted by The Punch newspaper – his proposition for a single tenure of either five or six or even seven years for the executive; and his preparedness, enthusiasm even, to countenance postponement of the 2015 elections by two years both as a sop to restless executive power mongers and as a fail-safe measure to take the sting out of the succession battles certain to accompany the next polls. Drawing inspiration from other jurisdictions, as he put it, the senator advocates amendment of the constitution to accommodate the changes he believes would stand the country in good stead, even if the constitution had to be amended again to what it was before the first amendment.

Senator Ekweremadu simplistically explains the electoral nightmare he thinks the country is certain to encounter in the next polls. Says he: “I believe that the way it could work is, now, people have been elected for four years; let everybody complete the four years tenure for which he or she is elected. And then, through the doctrine of necessity, or a sort of jurisprudential approach, do some kind of transition of two years. In which case, the present occupiers like the President and state governors, who are completing their tenures, maybe, will now do another two years that would end in 2017. You can see that those who are fighting the President, their complaint is that, if the President gets his second term when they are gone, he would start to chase them. So, if we all agree that that is a way to solve the problem, after two years, both the President and other governors will now exit, I believe that the fear would not be there and there would not be much pressure on the polity.”

If his approach is adopted, suggested the senator, it would be a win-win situation. He did not explain how a hideous attack on the constitution could accord to sensible politics, or how refusal to confront our demons would amount to a win-win. As a lawyer, he talks glibly of jurisprudential approach. But how does yielding to the greed of politicians for power strengthen both the law and constitution? If the power mongers are accommodated today, would there be no other reasons on some hypothetical tomorrow to yield some more in order to sate the pleasures of unconscionable politicians? Senator Ekweremadu holds a disturbingly capricious view of the constitution, and is not averse to having the great document turned hither and thither simply to accommodate the undisciplined politicking of Nigerian leaders. But he gives no guarantees that the experimentation would stop at a determined point. Nor can he.

It should occur to any lawyer of modest talent, let alone one who has a masters in law and has been thrice elected into the Senate, that law and order in Nigeria is undone not by copious strictures, legal or administrative, but by an undisciplined refusal to advance the cause of justice. As a lawyer, he should understand that. But he seems to have resigned himself, perhaps unconsciously, to the Nigerian president’s inimitable power to whimsically turn the instruments of state against opponents. It is a fact that they do so, as amply demonstrated by Presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan. But rather than campaign to turn the Senate into a bulwark for the defence of our freedoms, Senator Ekweremadu advocates creative bastardisation of the law to excuse national indiscipline and lack of will. The senator assumes quite cavalierly that the governors are fighting the president because many of them will be out of office in 2015 and fear they could become victims of politically motivated witch-hunting. His solution, therefore, is to reward their fears rather than dispel them, while at the same time taking the unpleasantness out of the president’s desire for more time in office by adding two unconstitutional and unsolicited years to the warring executives.

But even this dubious solution is not half as repulsive as his argument that the two years bonus would serve as a breathing space for the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), and free the electoral body from the pains of organising a cumbersome election into all elective offices at once. Indeed, this stupendous suggestion comes barely three weeks after INEC proved conclusively in the Anambra governorship poll that its problem is not time or magnitude of work, but simply one of competence and staff collusion. Until INEC finds a creative way to run elections, checkmate the tendency of its staff to collude with vested interests, and structure polling in such a way as to enhance transparency which even the law enforcement agencies would not be able to corrupt, elections would continue to fail disastrously.

In all, Senator Ekweremadu’s suggestions are obviously self-serving. They involve undermining the constitution and rewarding or pacifying the president. Though he tried to spread a veneer of patriotism on his suggestions, the hidden objective is clear. As everyone knows, the president has hungered for either an extended tenure or a second term. Barely a few months after he won election in 2011, Dr Jonathan curiously began a campaign for single-term tenure of seven years without bothering to convince us of the arithmetic benefit of gaining an additional three years in office without the restraining influence of re-election. All he said at the time was that re-election was divisive and costly, but gave no corresponding consideration of the unbearable cost of three additional years in the hands of an incompetent president. Senator Ekweremadu has merely modified the argument by predicating the avoidance of re-election or second term on the disruptive political battles between fearful governors and an imperious and petulant president.

Senator Ekweremadu has couched his suggestions in altruistic and independent terms. No one is fooled. Not only are the grounds of his argument specious and absolutely unconvincing, they are equally naïve, mischievous and dangerous. The arguments are escapist, for they make the country avoid confronting and solving its problems. More disturbingly, as the Jonathan presidency finds the opposition to his re-election tightening, he and his sounding boards in the states and the national legislature are more likely to embark on subterfuges, many of them so brazen as to be downright annoying, cynical and puerile.

The Senate, it is clear, and as this column has asserted repeatedly, has become reactionary and imprudently pro-Jonathan. It no longer has a soul it can call its own, and it has become so morally enfeebled by its lack of conviction and strength of character that its leaders poll-parrot the ultra-conservative and anti-people views of the president. The legislature is supposed to be a distinct arm of government, serving as a check on the executive; instead, the Nigerian Senate has become indistinguishable from the presidency and has offered accommodation and camaraderie to the government rather than the restraint and moderation the constitution and even common sense should inspire in them. The senate president, David Mark, a few months ago spoke and behaved disingenuously over the national conference issue, quibbling and genuflecting; now his deputy, Senator Ekweremadu, is engaged in similar conniptions designed to scare us into granting Dr Jonathan and his man Fridays political waivers alien to the constitution.

Let the inventive Senate keep its troubled peace, and let Dr Jonathan quietly prepare for his party’s primaries. If he wins, as his party’s glowing habit of oppressing the weak makes us to expect, let him boldly stand for election in 2015, losing the poll as our innermost yearnings lead us to hope, for his government has in the past five years led the country to such lows of despair that no literary fecundity can conceivably make worse, not even with the grandest prose.

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When Winston Churchill died in 1965, some 112 world leaders or their representatives from around the globe attended his funeral. When Charles de Gaulle died in 1969, and in spite of leaving instruction his burial should be a private ceremony, some 63 leaders brushed aside his request to honour him. By universal acclaim, Nelson Mandela was one of the world’s greatest leaders. About 100 world leaders were at his memorial service last Tuesday. The announcements of their deaths were as equally prosaic and memorable as the great number of dignitaries that attended their burials. Queen Elizabeth II described Sir Winston in the following words: “The whole world is the poorer by the loss of his many-sided genius while the survival of this country and the sister nations of the Commonwealth, in the face of the greatest danger that has ever threatened them, will be a perpetual memorial to his leadership, his vision, and his indomitable courage.” The then prime minister, Harold Wilson, was even more vigorous: “Sir Winston will be mourned all over the world by all who owe so much to him. He is now at peace after a life in which he created history and which will be remembered as long as history is read.”

But nothing exceeds French President Georges Pompidou’s description of De Gaulle’s death in succinctness and brevity. “General de Gaulle is dead. France is a widow.” And while President Jacob Zuma was also apt on Mandela, saying, “Our nation has lost its greatest son. Our people have lost a father,” perhaps the most memorable would be the US President Barack Obama’s pithy though hardly original tribute to Mandela. “He belongs to the ages,” said the US president. Both in the offer of tributes and the delivery of tributes at the memorial service itself, few could have matched Mr Obama, who by his mere appearance, which the crowd at the stadium looked forward to, and his oratory, simply shone like a gem.

By universal acclaim, Mr Mandela was one of the world’s greatest leaders. As gleaned from the tributes to the great icon, he showed the way to peace, unity, forgiveness and reconciliation in a world riven by wars and hatred. In the words of Ban Ki-Moon, Secretary General of the United Nations, “Nelson Mandela was more than one of the greatest leaders of our time. He was one of our greatest teachers. He taught by example, he sacrificed so much, and was willing to give up everything for freedom, equality and justice. His compassion stands out most.” Mr Obama ended his tribute to Mandela last Tuesday asserting that “We will never see his likes again.”

Most commentators agree on the qualities that made Mr Mandela to number among the greatest world leaders. They are not wrong. Having stayed in prison for 27 years and refused to compromise on the ideals he lived for and was prepared to die for, as he said during the 1964 Rivonia Trial, and having saved his country from disintegration and reconciled them and moulded them into one of the world’s leading multicultural societies, his greatness appeared complete and unquestionable. While I think his greatness indeed encompassed these facts and many more, as declared by many world leaders, I believe there are other more pertinent reasons for his greatness.

The most elementary proof that shows that Mr Mandela numbers among the world’s greatest leaders is provided, not by the tributes of world leaders, but by former President Richard Nixon’s observations in his book, Leaders. According to him, “When the curtain goes down on a play, members of the audience file out of the theatre and go home to resume their normal lives. When the curtain comes down on a leader’s career, the very lives of the audience have been changed, and the course of history may have been profoundly altered.” No one doubts that because of Mr Mandela, the lives of his people have been changed and South African history has been altered perhaps for ever. Indeed, every analyst and historian agrees on this. However, I want to focus on three unusual and overlooked factors that explain Mr Mandela’s greatness, for all the fine things said about him merely indicate other deeper, more profound things lying within him.

First, Mr Mandela, like any other great leader, was specifically equipped for leadership by forces beyond himself, and with a healthy measure of attributes that conduce to great leadership which neither he nor anyone else could fully explain. Thabo Mbeki, Mr Mandela’s successor, is firm, brilliant and blessed with administrative acumen, but he lacks Mandela’s judgement, instinctive love for people bordering on populism, and what some writers have described as the intuitive iconoclasm a liberator needs to challenge the authorities of his day irrespective of the threat to his own life, future and well-being. Mandela had it in abundance, and so did Martin Luther, George Washington, and several others. We can identify these unusual qualities when great leaders exhibit them; but we are unable to account for why one leader has it and another does not. To suggest these attributes are simply idiosyncratic is to beg the question.

The lofty principles displayed by Mr Mandela, his strength of character, his almost unerring judgement, his implacable will, and his supreme inner confidence are evident. But how did he get to that point? I once suggested in this place that the books a great leader reads might trigger some of these attributes, but even this explanation does not fully account for the presence of leadership attributes in a person. Nor is Shakespeare of any help in Twelfth Night when he said that “Some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon ’em.” In fact, for a leader to be listed among great leaders, he must not only be born with it, he must work (achieve) for it, and then circumstances must conspire to make (thrust upon) him great.

One of Mr Mandela’s daughters recently made an oblique reference to the second factor accounting for a leader’s greatness. A leader must either cultivate aloofness or be naturally detached from people and circumstances around him, even seeming to be cruel. Makaziwe Mandela, the icon’s oldest surviving child once told the press she was not sure that their father loved them, a feeling she said was shared by the children. According to Dr Makiziwe, politics had fully taken their father’s time, and his letters to them, even while he was in prison, were cold and distant. Even the considerably uxorious letters to Winnie appeared in retrospect to be a means of escape from the harshness and drudgery of prison life.

De Gaulle was not a romantic, but he showed emotions for his handicapped daughter, Anne who had Down syndrome. Churchill put politics first before his wife, Clementine, but was fond of his children only as a reaction to his own father’s indifference to him. Suleiman the Magnificent thought nothing of the wholesale murder of most of his children to pave way for his successor, Selim II, in 1556, and Stalin, apart from his well-known cruelty to millions of Russians, virtually exterminated his relatives, not to talk of the harsh treatment he meted out to his wives and children. Napoleon virtually abjured the tender things of life, notwithstanding his clumsy on and off relationship with the unfaithful Josephine, his long-term wife and mistress, and Julius Caesar was almost cursory in the way he threw out his wife Pompeia for her indiscrete, not adulterous, relationship with a young patrician, Publius Clodius Pulcher, gifting us the expression “Caesar’s wife must be above suspicion.” Space will not permit mention of Lincoln whom many parents accused of being insensitive to the slaughter of thousands of their children who served as soldiers during the American civil war. Or of Alexander the Great (356 BC – 323 BC) and Genghis Khan (1162-1227) who pushed their armies to the limit in their quest for glory and amid unexampled human slaughter. Or of Peter the Great (1672-1725) who, as I once indicated here, tortured his son, Alexis, to death for plotting his overthrow.

But whether detachment or aloofness, these great world leaders brought the two attributes to the service of either empire building or statecraft, or both. Mr Mandela sometimes reflected on his own aloofness, wondering guiltily whether he was not to blame for the troubles and deprivations his wife and children endured. But it was clear his family life was sacrificed for the higher good of liberating South Africa from apartheid. His sacrifices came full circle when he surrendered completely to the struggle, when he declared his preparedness to die, when he gave up his family and attendant pleasures, when he gave up power in 1999 after judging it was the right thing to do, and when he even gave up his own black people in their unstated quest for either some form of revenge or at least some form of reckoning, preferring instead, reconciliation and the establishment of a multicultural society.

The third reason for Mandela’s greatness must be the historical conjuncture President Nixon wrote about in one of his books. No matter how brilliant and equipped a leader is, the time and place must be right to propel him to great heights. In short, history must conspire in his favour by producing the local and international circumstances to make the liberator or agitator a great man. What if Mr Mandela had been killed a few years into his incarceration? What if his white jailors had behaved with the lack of humaneness Nigerian jailors are accustomed to? Not only would Mr Mandela be dead and stone dead, South Africa itself might probably never have the chance to enjoy the peace and reconciliation only a Mandela could have nurtured after the collapse of apartheid. A leader must meet his moment; not too soon, lest he falter and even fail, or too late, lest he succumb to discouragement or even die unfulfilled. Circumstances met Mr Mandela, and they kept him alive until he fulfilled his destiny. According to President Nixon, there was hardly a great leader he knew who did not have that inscrutable expectation which they called by various names. Some called it luck, others called it hope, and yet others called it destiny. Whatever name it is called, it plays a crucial role in both the emergence of a leader and his promotion into the pantheon of greats.

It was perhaps the acute awareness of this fact that made President Obama, who by much study understands the essential elements of greatness and power, to conclude that we would never see the likes of Mandela again. Mr Obama knows there is little a leader can do to furnish the conditions under which his greatness would manifest. Lincoln did not create the conditions necessary for the American civil war. But he met it with character, courage and great principles, and anchored all three on a deep and unyielding philosophical conviction about human dignity. Imagine for a moment that Napoleon Bonaparte’s coup of Eighteenth Brumaire in 1799 had failed; imagine if General Hindenburg had had Adolf Hitler shot after the latter’s Beer Hall Putsch of 1923 failed; imagine if Churchill had been killed when he was being captured in 1899 during the Boer War. And would the world have had an Augustus Caesar had his great-uncle Julius Caesar not been assassinated in 44 BC, or, since he was sickly, had he succumbed to the illness that plagued him as a youth before he wormed his way into power?

If President Goodluck Jonathan understood some of these things, he would not have spoken the way he did during last Sunday’s memorial service organised in honour of Mr Mandela, nor would he rule with the spectacular incompetence former President Olusegun Obasanjo has alleged against him. Gen Ibrahim Babangida could of course not be a Mandela, but he stood on the threshold of honour and history in 1993, and failed the test. The sanctimonious Chief Obasanjo had the best opportunity next to Mandela to be an African legend, but he was unfortunately too unknowing to understand what history was telling him in a still small voice during his boisterous eight years as president. See, also, what great chance Gen Yakubu Gowon fluffed in 1973 when he abandoned his transition to civil rule programme. We must acknowledge that once a leader does not have the qualities of greatness in him, in full or half measure, he cannot even begin to climb to the mountaintop, let alone see the Promised Land, or imagine how to get there.

It is futile to preach to Dr Jonathan the principles and practice of leadership. He does not have it in him; for these things are innate in a leader. More, they are sublime and indefinable values that grate on the nerves and senses of a leader irritated by his own constant misapprehensions. There was nothing anybody could do to discipline or caution Chief Obasanjo as he frittered away the great chance history threw upon his undeserving laps; and there was nothing anyone could have done to make Generals Gowon and Babangida see the future beyond their fateful actions of 1973 and 1993 respectively.

Once a great leader comes along in Nigeria, Nigerians will know. And they will see in the stars and in the signs of the age indisputable proof. When that happens, they will not fear he would misfire and make irredeemable mistakes, for though he is human, he would have the intellect, intuition and judgement to do what is right at grave moments. When he comes, he will beat the swords of our ethnic and sectarian disagreements into ploughshares of development, and the spears of political mediocrity into pruning hooks of democracy, peace and good governance. He will also cause the arithmetical madness in the Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF) to cease, and the constitutional folly exemplified by the police in Rivers State to come to end. And from Abuja shall come forth the law to govern the people and make crooked places straight.

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While Nigerians were still grappling with the damning and highly censorious content of Chief Obasanjo’s letter to President Jonathan, a letter that seemed to capture the mood of the country, especially in its dismissive characterisation of the president as dangerous, dishonourable and incompetent, the former president’s daughter, Iyabo, a Ph.D. holder, also wrote her own very damning letter to her father. In the letter published by the Vanguard newspaper last week, Dr Obasanjo described her father as manipulative and hypocritical. Though she stressed that the timing of the letter was not designed to benefit Dr Jonathan in his deathly struggle with Chief Obasanjo, nor meant to exculpate the president on account of the moral incompetence of his traducer, it was clear she timed it to wound and undermine her father most tellingly and at his most vulnerable moment.

It is, however, doubtful whether Dr Obasanjo’s almost regicidal letter could lessen the impact of Chief Obasanjo’s fiery denunciation of the president. The country, it seems, has made up its mind to separate the content of Chief Obasanjo’s letter from his person, no matter how repulsive many commentators feel his character is. Everyone is used to Chief Obasanjo’s obnoxiousness, they say, and he can be very sanctimonious and foul-mouthed, but that does not in any way undermine the integrity of his observations about Dr Jonathan. It can, however, not be denied that Dr Obasanjo’s letter was timed to receive the most attention and inflict the most damage.

I read the letter very closely, just as I read that of her father very closely. As the main piece above shows, I refuse to be swayed by the almost universal sentiment to separate the content of Chief Obasanjo’s letter from his person. But I also insist that while his person remains eternally offensive, the content of his letter, other than the few unsubstantiated allegations that require no comment, are germane and his conclusions about the person and competence of Dr Jonathan not misplaced at all. While it is also important to deflate Chief Obasanjo’s air of self-importance, I have argued in the main piece that it is also urgent to denounce Dr Jonathan and compel him, as democratically as possible, to forswear further interest in the presidency.

Both from his letter to the president and his daughter’s letter, Chief Obasanjo comes out incomparably damaged, while his daughter surprisingly shows more sensibleness, passion, compassion and patience. Though her withering letter appears to lack propriety, and indeed even violates African culture, she comes out smelling of roses. It seems to me that the unusual letter offers the most definitive insight into the frenzied mind of Chief Obasanjo, blows up the blowsy delusions that have harried him since his youth, shows in bold relief the demons that tormented him in his public life, and explains why and how he failed so disastrously as president and head of state.

Dr Obasanjo’s letter is even more definitive than its tone and content reveal. It is now clear that Chief Obasanjo’s family is sadly dysfunctional. Not only can the family not be put together again, it is hard to see any reconciliation taking place now or in the future. The injury is deep on all sides. And for a man who does not have too much time left to make any fundamental amends, nor demonstrates the capacity to appreciate the gravity of the crisis he faces at home, he seems destined to take the confusion and bitterness in his family to the grave. But he elected to live that way, and is, alas, fated to exit the same way.

His previous letters were not always a model of grammatical rectitude, nor even of moral and philosophical correctness, but his latest to President Goodluck Jonathan, dated December 2, but leaked to the media weeks after, offends every rule known to man, whether of common sense or of morality, of grammar or logic, of religion or politics. A more temperate man would be capable of arranging his thoughts with more finesse and better control of emotions than former President Olusegun Obasanjo did in his angry and caustic 18-page letter. Indeed, only Chief Obasanjo, judging from his antecedents and misshapen worldview, could have presented salient and weighty issues in such an offensive manner that commentators are left in a quandary whether to separate the message from the messenger or to consider the two in their obvious inextricable interconnectedness.

Commentators have urged the separation of the message from the messenger. They hope that that would create a fair and unfettered understanding of the issues raised by Chief Obasanjo, and help promote the cause of peace, stability and good governance as the former president pretended to aim after in his letter. Already, Dr Jonathan is being pressured to respond to the issues raised in the controversial letter, and to discountenance the moral qualification of the letter writer. It makes a lot of sense to ask everyone to de-emphasise the moral qualification of the writer, for of all the living and dead presidents Nigeria has had in its chequered history, Chief Obasanjo appears to be the least qualified morally, politically or even philosophically to admonish, let alone censure, anyone. If no separation between the message and messenger is done, it is feared, the weight of Chief Obasanjo’s moral turpitude could considerably overshadow or attenuate some of the poignant points he raised in his letter.

In short, the country is being asked to do a fractional distillation of the letter: separate the message from the messenger and isolate all the issues, while at the same time distilling the points one after the other in such a way that none of those points, no matter how seemingly contradictory, is diminished by the other or by the letter writer himself. The problem, however, is that the former president stands imposingly and almost inextricably between every point he raised. No useful consideration of any point could be done without being choked by the inconveniencing obtrusion of the follies and foibles of the letter writer. The scheming of Chief Obasanjo is too evident in every point he raised to be ignored. He was disingenuous, as indeed he likes to pride himself, but there was absolutely no altruism in him; and even his disingenuousness, in the light of his previous letters to Dr Jonathan and other presidents, is questionable.

While it may seem more sensible to de-emphasise the failings of the letter writer, and instead focus more critically on the message he tried so futilely to convey, a much better approach would be to sift through the letter to identify areas for leadership improvement. For in the end, it is as important to curb Chief Obasanjo’s sanctimoniousness and end his unguarded and continuing meddlesomeness in national affairs as it is to extirpate the leadership mediocrity he has repeatedly helped to enthrone and which his letter has helped to draw attention to once again. Chief Obasanjo warned that he had a thick skin, and would simply disregard the criticisms, insults and sabre-rattling certain to follow the letter. By inference, he was also saying that anyone who seemed to have sympathy for the Jonathan camp or focused on the writer rather than his message would be engaging in a sterile exercise. We should not gratify him.

He is doubtless famous for his inurement to insults and criticisms, no matter how accurate, well-meaning or wounding. And having got away with murder, as it were, in his previous letters to past presidents and heads of state, some of whom came to grief soon after, he seems accustomed to having his way and getting commentators to draw a line between the message and the messenger. Nigerians apparently do not understand that the problems Chief Obasanjo complained of were caused by his own distorted theology, monstrous politics, appalling worldview and extreme narcissism. It is, however, time he was told he would not be allowed to toy with the country; that he could not impose bad leaders only to turn round to assail and condemn his hapless stooges; that he could not foment evil and bring disaster upon the country and turn round to present himself a knight in shining armour; that he could not lay mines in the country’s politics only to turn round to either amputate shattered limbs as a benevolent doctor or administer euthanasia as a mercy killer.

It is now more urgent than ever that the messenger must be demystified, disrobed and castrated if the country is to make progress. For he is not just integral to the country’s problems, as evidenced by his more than 30 years of anarchic intervention in national affairs, he is also in fact the architect of many of Nigeria’s recent woes. But while the demystification is going on, it is also urgent that as the architect is being led figuratively to the gallows, the social and bureaucratic monstrosities he has sired, his misbegotten political sons, and his eternal cocksureness must share his fate. So, commentators must dexterously weigh in balanced cadence the messenger and his message, the architect and his building, the creator and his creature, the hobgoblin and its spinoffs. Chief Obasanjo has wreaked so much havoc on the country by imposing mediocre leaders upon it, a point he casually gloated over again in his letter, that he should be denounced together with his creatures. If we spare him as he expects, perhaps for fear of diluting the intensity and gravity of his message, he will once again be left free to foment more trouble.

It is clear that most of the weighty statements and allegations in his letter, whether against individuals, Dr Jonathan’s government, or his political opponents, are geared towards only one thing – creating a new and wider political space for Chief Obasanjo to practise more chicanery, not for the country to be renewed or to help it foster a political system that is self-correcting and self-healing. Chief Obasanjo’s main objective is his determination to ensure that Dr Jonathan does not present himself for re-election, as if that would make the ambitious and intransigent president less undemocratic than he has become. Everything Chief Obasanjo said in his rancorous letter was aimed at forging a consensus against Dr Jonathan. No one is fooled. Was Chief Obasanjo himself not denied third term? And did he not out of spite saddle the country with misfits? Would a spurned Jonathan not be capable of worse mischief, especially seeing how quite desperate and tyrannical he has become under the pressures of the past few months?

Dr Jonathan is under pressure to respond. He apparently will. But it would be strange if the country were to be satisfied with his explanations, for whatever he has to say would be undermined by his constant vainglorious assertions and also be as misleading as the original letter from Chief Obasanjo. It is expected that pressure will be brought to bear upon the National Assembly to probe critical parts of the former president’s letter, such as the nefarious oil deals and alleged training and arming of death squads. The legislature may succumb to the pressure; but even then, given the impotence they have displayed over key national issues in the past few years, it is hard to see any probe from them amounting to anything. Nothing, of course, will be said on all the other futile and thoroughly acerbic parts of the letter. Apart from underscoring a strange and warped theology, arrogating ecclesiastical immunity to himself, and creating an unsustainable air of self-importance, those futile parts were meant to burnish the credentials of the former president.

Nigeria must be clear what to make of Obasanjo’s letter. Its value appears to be no more than having the truculent old warhorse on the side of the anti-Jonathan forces. His support, however, must be taken very gingerly, especially by the All Progressives Congress (APC) rainbow coalition, for every time he rallied to a cause, such as when he opposed former President Shehu Shagari or even General Sani Abacha, the outcome had never been salutary. His opposition to Jonathan will not be different, for his cause is not always the same as the country’s, nor should we entertain the presumption that our capacity for intrigues and malevolence matches Chief Obasanjo’s. The letter is futile; Dr Jonathan’s response will also be futile. Chief Obasanjo was and remains a cankerworm to Nigeria’s body politic; Dr Jonathan is tarred with the same brush. Even if the president’s nose is put out of joint, he will struggle in a two-horse race with Chief Obasanjo to impose another mediocre on the country, if we let them.

Nigeria must, therefore, look beyond Chief Obasanjo’s pompous letter. Given the Independent National Electoral Commission’s suggestion that elections might be difficult to organise in the Northeast in 2015, a region that has become a bastion of the opposition, the hurdles confronting those who wish to unhorse Dr Jonathan could become gargantuan. Neither Obasanjo nor Jonathan should be spared, notwithstanding the puerile threats by uninformed aides of the president to equate the call for Dr Jonathan’s impeachment with treason. Chief Obasanjo was not just an incompetent president with a very poor grasp of issues, as his latest letter shows to everyone’s dismay, his godson is even much worse. The message and the messenger do not deserve a decent hearing and should be thrown out, lest Chief Obasanjo should imagine he had scored a point with us. The country, if its enlightened citizens have any sense about them, should insist on taking on Dr Jonathan on their own, not at the behest of anyone, nor on the prompting of schemers. If we don’t, a much crueller fate than the lassitude our cowardice and misconceptions have brought upon us in the past one decade and more will befall us again in 2015.

In former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s blistering letter to President Goodluck Jonathan, there was no hint of the statesman or of lofty ideas; no show of stately language or of decorum; and nothing of the logical coherence or philosophical exactitude expected from great leaders. Indeed, it was full of rebuke, of sanctimonious gibberish, of offensive display of superior airs, and remorseless grandstanding. In my consideration of the letter last week, I suggested that when Dr Jonathan’s reply would finally come, it would be as inaccurate and full of drivel as that of Chief Obasanjo, and perhaps more pedantic. I have not been disappointed. In Dr Jonathan’s reply, there was absolutely nothing elegant; not of language nor of ideas, not of indisputable facts nor of moderation and restraint. Indeed, in the letters, the two leaders were united by their common atrociousness, a vice that invariably pulls them apart. Like poles, scientists say, repel.

Chief Obasanjo wailed that Dr Jonathan had become intolerably lax in combatting corruption. The president had no response, for his treatment of the Stella Oduah matter stands as a refutation of any claims he might have to the contrary. Whatever other things he had to say on corruption was trivial and vexatious, especially his silence over what steps were proper for Nigeria under him to take on the Halliburton and Siemens scandals. There was also the nonsensical exchange on Buruji Kashamu, the businessman extraordinaire. It was baffling that Chief Obasanjo raised the matter at all; it was all the more baffling that Dr Jonathan deemed it merited a response. It was pure balderdash. In paragraph after paragraph, Dr Jonathan showed how he and Chief Obasanjo were much alike, though he argued his predecessor was worse.

Many of those who read the letters suggest that on account of the severity of language use and the expletives, the two gentlemen would find it difficult to be reconciled. It is pointless to hazard any guess as to whether peace can be made between the two, for they are both sufficiently pliable and devoid of shame and moral compass to be eternally inflexible. They may have injured each other bitterly, and have abused themselves heartily, but the lies they tell, and the indifference with which they tell them, illustrate their common abhorrence of lofty ideals. Men such as these don’t fight for ever.

But something else stands out in the letters. Chief Obasanjo’s is the more vigorous and memorable. In lying, his letter told memorable lies; and in self-praise it was more grandiloquent. Such talents are a testimony either to his military antecedents or his fundamental badness, or both. Dr Jonathan’s is the more timid and undistinguished. He didn’t lie as egregiously as Chief Obasanjo; he simply evaded the truth and buried himself in foul language. It reflected his distracted and servile mind. It is a shame both gentlemen ever rose to leadership position.

In December 20, Governor Olusegun Mimiko led representatives of the Yoruba socio-cultural and political organisation, Afenifere, to visit President Goodluck Jonathan. The visit came some eight or so days after former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s venomous letter to Dr Jonathan was made public, and a few days before the president’s insipid reply was published. The president is under enormous pressure to opt out of the 2015 presidential race and to accept responsibility for what his critics describe as the unremitting dullness of his government. But he not only soldiers on valiantly, even if the opposition to his presidency increases and renders his hold on power tenuous, he also appears eager to clutch at any straw within his reach in order to give the impression things have not yet spiralled out of his control.

There are not many straws Dr Jonathan can clutch at in the near future, especially with the withering look he gets from the North, and the barely disguised contempt he attracts from the Southwest. But there is at least one straw he can clutch at gutsily outside the fawning regions of the South-South and Southeast where his canonisation remains unquestionable and irreversible: the Afenifere. The Afenifere, not the Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), of course, is not only irredeemably splintered, as everyone knows, it is also neither as ideologically coherent and consistent as before nor as relevant as it used to be when the Southwest was buffeted by Gen Sani Abacha’s oppressive machines and Gen Abdulsalami Abubakar unfurled his presumptive transition programme.

Dr Jonathan is by all considerations out of favour. His arch supporters in the oil rivers have seemed to exhaust their ethnic jingoistic cries, and were in fact dealt a massive blow by Chief Obasanjo’s letter which described the Jonathan government as mindlessly and unconscionably mining the region’s ethnic sewers. Whatever raucous noise they make henceforth in those forbidden creeks will continue to weaken into hoary whispers of disjointed support. His supporters in the Southeast stand ramrod, but it is not altogether clear on what foundations the region’s brazen support for him stands, or that given an accentuation of the bolt from the national political stables begun by the All Progressives Congress (APC), the region would not be tempted to burn the barn. The amperage of Dr Jonathan’s support in those parts may still be burning high, but it has not stopped the president from despairing or from showing signs of paranoia.

The Afenifere has a rich and enviable history of enduring pain and rejection. Indeed, in its long and proud years of existence, it always preferred complete ostracism than any romance with the forces of reaction and conservatism. If by its associations today it has appeared to jettison its historical principles, that fact is explained both by the philosophical makeup of its current leaders, most of whom are ordinary pragmatists relying more on common sense than any deep introspection, and the circumstances of its bitter loss to regional political rivals, particularly the All Progressives Congress (APC). For whatever pretences it makes, the fact is that Afenifere is much more political than cultural, and more sneakily autocratic than Yoruba history richly demonstrates.

It was, therefore, not surprising that Dr Jonathan and the Afenifere were driven into each other’s arms, the former because of the rejection and humiliation he suffered at the hands of Nigerians appalled by his government’s lack of initiative and charisma, and the latter by their regional loss, flat-footedness and poor political manoeuvrability. Dr Jonathan’s desperation is not surprising, nor does anyone expect him to spurn any alliance, no matter how opportunistic. What is really earth-shaking is the ease with which the Afenifere jumped into bed with a government that has all but transformed into fascism. Sometime in October, Chief Ayo Adebanjo, an Afenifere chieftain, seemed to have set the stage for the Afenifere romance with the Jonathan government when he declared his support for the convocation of a national conference before the modalities had been stated. That support remains intact even after it became clear that what Dr Jonathan had in mind is not exactly what the true proponents of national conference have in mind.

In the interview Chief Adebanjo granted a newspaper in October, he went as far as suggesting that if need be the constitutional provision of periodic election should be subordinated to the conference, for, in his opinion, a conference was more exigent than an election or a constitutional provision. It was no use, he argued, to hold an election when the country had not been restructured, and the fear of conflict not dissipated. On the surface, he would appear to be making a logical presentation. However, not only did he fail to question the motives of Dr Jonathan who was obviously driven by pressure and circumstances into yielding to a measure he once roundly loathed, Chief Adebanjo kept talking of sovereign conference as if the president had decided on making the conference sovereign.

In any case, when the president eventually put his so-called conference ideas into words, he preferred to use the word ‘national dialogue’ rather than conference, let alone a sovereign conference. Neither Chief Adebanjo nor his colleagues in Afenifere were dissuaded by their past political failures in seeking for proof of government’s sincerity in policy enunciations. In 1998, they accepted to fully participate in Gen Abubakar’s transition programme even without the promulgation of a constitution, when they could have forced major changes in the constitution given the peculiar circumstances of the time. It is the same constitution that is now in focus. Before the 2003 elections, they also uncharacteristically embraced ethnic politics by throwing in their lot with Chief Obasanjo who was clearly the wrong choice for the presidency, not to talk of his questionable democratic credentials and poor policy conceptions. Now, barely a decade after those egregious blunders, the Afenifere leaders are embracing Dr Jonathan who has no grain of democracy or liberalism in him, cares nothing for the constitution he swore to defend, especially seeing that he prefers a monarchical form of government, and is merely using the dialogue to ventilate the pressures on his uninspiring government.

There are rules guiding the postponement of elections. In October, Chief Adebanjo discountenanced those rules and turned the constitution into a capricious document with flexible provisions and timelines. The Mimiko-led Afenifere took the extraordinary step of denouncing before the president those who questioned the convocation of a dialogue at this point, especially the decision of the president to forward the outcomes of the dialogue to the National Assembly for their deliberations. Femi Okurounmu, chairman of the committee tasked with working out the modalities for the conference, described the conference as a dialogue in at least one sentence during the presentation of his committee’s report to the president. While Afenifere’s support for Dr Jonathan is no longer in doubt, a support that is however antithetical to their history and credo, it is hoped that they and the Jonathan government will have settled whether to call the conference a conference or a dialogue before the talks begin. At least, it is already known that it won’t be sovereign.

The incurable optimists of the Afenifere see nothing wrong or alarming in embracing the agenda of the Jonathan government. If Dr Jonathan’s hidden agenda do not frighten them, perhaps because they are too hopeful to see the dangers of having a major conference in what appears to be an election year, they should at least be worried by their own transformation from a progressive and principled organisation of a majority of Yoruba people to a bitter, opportunistic and unthinking organisation of a minority of Yoruba people. They should be alarmed by how rapidly they have descended from the Olympian height of supporting democrats and charismatic leaders in office to wholeheartedly and unscrupulously embracing reactionary non-performers in office. And while they copiously quoted the sage, Obafemi Awolowo, in the presence of Dr Jonathan, it is hard to explain why they failed to hear how ludicrously they sounded when they flattered their host as an offshoot of Chief Awolowo’s First Republic campaign prediction.

But it was not unexpected that Governor Mimiko would lead the woolly hairs of the Afenifere to meet minds with the distressed and increasingly forlorn Dr Jonathan. Before his re-election, the Ondo State governor had been projected by the losing groups in the regional political sweepstakes of the Southwest as the counterpoise to the feisty iconoclasts of the APC. When he won, the bitter and unforgiving rivals of the APC concluded that Dr Mimiko would serve as the new core of Yoruba politics. Since he won, they have begun to practicalise their aspirations. It, however, does not occur to them that they are merely giving a contemporary feel to the cancer that relentlessly gnaws at the sinews of the Yoruba, a cancer that sees the losing group forming an alliance with the political and cultural antagonists of the Southwest. This cancer saw a bitter Afonja align with Oyo Empire enemies; and it saw a bitter and frustrated Ladoke Akintola align with northern hegemonic leaders against the Western Region. It is certainly not a mistake that the majority of south westerners are in the APC. The reasons can be located in the disruptive inclinations and influences of the Obasanjo presidency, the obnoxiousness of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which offended the civilisation and sensibilities of the Southwest, and the absolute ineptitude of those who govern the country so uninspiringly and so loathsomely from Abuja. Why the Afenifere thinks this movement is a fluke is hard to explain. Why the Labour Party (LP), which at the moment stands for nothing, hopes to make itself the rallying core for the Southwest is also hard to explain.

It is, however, evident that history is being replayed in the Southwest. When Afonja entered into an alliance with the Fulani against the empire he was appointed to defend, it was to spite his people whom he ended up betraying. When Chief Akintola forged an alliance with the Northern Peoples Congress (NPC), it was to underscore his grievances against Chief Awolowo and the Action Group (AG). Now that the same spirit has been awakened and blended in the alliance between Dr Mimiko and the Afenifere, the stage is set once more for a replay of the regions’ bitter and violent past. If history is a guide, however, not only will the opportunistic alliance fail, and its contraptions collapse, the end can be foreseen clearly in the failure of those who prefer to dine with the enemy because they hate the false dentition of their compatriots.

As they took pictures with Dr Jonathan in their starched agbadas, in addition to making sarcastic and caustic remarks about their Southwest compatriots, a diligent person must doubtless appreciate anew what it feels like to deaden the censorious pangs of conscience during the act of betrayal. For it would be too optimistic to suggest that the romantics of the rump Afenifere visited Aso Villa and met the president without the reproof of conscience that the ordinary man experiences on a daily basis in the process of telling a small lie or coveting a neighbour’s property.

There is hardly any Nigerian who does not believe that 2014 is perhaps the most fateful year in their country’s history. It is not only the 2015 elections that will be decided by this year’s events, the country’s very existence, its peace, development, unity and stability also seem almost certain to be hinged on the political and social dynamics of 2014. But it is not certain that the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is as clear in their minds just how portentous the year is as the All Progressives Congress (APC) appears to show with their desperate political re-engineering designed to pip the ruling party to the post in the next polls. By its attitude and methods, the ruling party gives the impression that what needs to change is not how it has governed the country since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, but simply how it can retain power, assured that it is too big to fail, too inclusive to be pigeonholed, and too long in power to be dethroned.

On the other hand, and like the rest of the country, the APC appears to think that the ruling party’s methods have so undermined democracy, impoverished the people and stoked the fire of sectarian, ethnic and class revolts that the country seems assuredly headed for the precipice. It believes that the PDP suffers from intellectual paralysis and lacks the hunger to remould and redefine the country away from the mediocrity and stultification of the past years. I fear they may be right. My fear is worsened both by the low calibre of ministers President Goodluck Jonathan has assembled and the manner the president himself has subjected the presidency to unyielding policy inertness and lack of vision and innovation. If the APC should win the elections in 2015, there is a sense in which both the party and the rest of us expect radical changes that would permeate the entire body politic. But if the PDP should retain power, there is a sense in which they would see it as an endorsement of their jaded methods and sterile ideas.

Clearly, whichever fork in the road we take will have monumental repercussions on the future and destiny of the country. Indeed, given the paralysis and retrogression of the past 14 years, it is shocking to still hear some enlightened commentators argue for continuity. I am convinced that the age of active or passive neutrality has long passed. At the risk of being labelled partisan, I am today advocating drastic and urgent change with all the fibre in my being. The PDP has outlived its usefulness; it is time to try the APC. But here is the dilemma we must confront. The PDP is no longer able to govern; can the APC get its act together to win office, and if it does, will the process of winning leave the party with a substantially sound party structure and a reasonably coherent ideological rampart to satisfy national expectations?

I think 2014 will offer the PDP enough chance to demonstrate just how incapable it has become in governing, and enough room for the APC to prove that the process of cobbling a platform or a rainbow coalition together does not deprive it of the sound structure a party needs to win as a political party, and the rudimentary ideology it also needs to prepare a concise, practical and unique roadmap out of the hell the ruling party has driven the country into. The PDP needs little effort in reinforcing its infamous ways. The harder task lies with the APC, which has surprisingly managed to assemble under one roof what may pass as the most fractious, most disparate and probably the most cantankerous political leaders and followers Nigeria has ever seen. The party’s leaders must resist the temptation to see this observation as unduly harsh – for even their PDP opponents bank on the party’s centrifugal forces to manifest dramatically as the elections draw near – but as a challenge they desperately need to confront boldly and overcome with all the innovativeness, resilience and diplomacy nature endows.

As every rainbow coalition knows from experience, and as the fractiousness in the states is already showing, the APC won’t find its task of unifying rebels from other political parties easy at all. What is even worse is that rather than embrace and project a brilliant ideology indispensable to the remaking and revival of the country, the APC will find itself in the ghastly and uncomfortable role of embracing and projecting a single-minded grab for power. Even if it manages to cobble up a platform for the elections, it will not be because its members believe the ideals the party purports to stand for. Compromises will be necessary to create a semblance of unity in the party, no matter how tenuous and disingenuous. Members will block their nostrils just long enough until the party takes office, whereupon the logic of being in office will either compel obedience down the rank and file or produce a sound party leader who will begin the arduous and thankless task of gently nudging the party in the right ideological direction, softly and gingerly. Any attempt to put the cart before the horse would spell disaster. So, when next opponents and commentators ridicule the APC for being insufficiently ideological, they should take the insult in their strides, for it is not only a true reflection of the party’s current make-up, it is also a political exigency the party should be glad to have the opportunity of riding into office.

To win in 2015, the APC will have to overcome two main challenges, and either is capable of destroying the party or truncating its noble aspirations. The first is its ongoing effort to reconcile the contentious political structures forced by circumstances to coexist and cohabit in many of the states now under the party’s control such as Kwara, Kano and Sokoto, among others. The APC, it must be remembered, is an amalgam of three parties in its first layer, to wit, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Nigeria Peoples Party (ANPP). Even before this layer of contrasting linear expansivities coalesced into a solid foundation, wider and more transcendental political goals compelled the amalgam to bear the additional layer of defecting PDP governors and lawmakers, with all their idiosyncratic foibles.

The truth is that the APC is now indeed a boisterous and fragile mixture of incendiary elements with inadequate bonding electrons necessary to guarantee its stability. Whether its two or so mercurial leaders – both of whom are far more mercurial than anything we have ever seen in one party since the First Republic – can stabilise the party and steer it away from implosion remains to be seen. But the incentive to get it right is that if they do not manage the elements within the party well, subordinate their ambitions properly and also get other smaller party leaders to surrender their own ambitions for the common goal, they are unlikely to get another chance. Worse, their failure may also doom the country and render future coalitions difficult to cobble together.

The second main challenge, which is closely leashed to the first, concerns how the party would manage the ambitions of its leaders especially at the candidacy level. Who should be the presidential candidate of a party widely expected to take office in view of the abject failure of the PDP? What of the running mate? How should power be shared between the political zones? What are their heads telling them about the kind of leaders the country is willing to vote for as distinct from what their minds are saying? Assuming the country is ready to put them in office, are they capable of providing the young and dynamic faces the country wants? In my opinion, this will be the most difficult challenge they will face. I expect them to surmount the difficulty of uniting their party’s many factions. But I am less sanguine about how readily they can read the mind of the country, not to say how easily and quickly they can get their powerful and notable aspirants to submit to new realities.

However, I suspect that given the brilliance with which they have consistently wrong-footed the PDP, especially the Jonathan presidency, and the adroitness with which they have expanded the base of their party, not to talk of the uncommon passion with which they have approached the entire project of building a grand coalition capable of winning major elections, I am a little hopeful they will competently knit together a durable party structure ahead of the elections and balance the ambitions of their leaders to avoid a debacle. Their passion seems to suggest that their priorities, in descending order, are to legitimately defeat Jonathan in a free and fair election, take power from the PDP in order to effect change and foist new political and bureaucratic paradigms on the country, and put the right APC leaders in office. It is inevitable that such zeal should create the necessary conditions for the subordination of ambitions and the management of internal divisions and dissensions.

I think they have gone too far forward to look back or to allow personal interests to stand in the way of victory. They will now need to work on the more unmanageable and excitable substrata of the party leadership to imbue them with the spirit of sacrifice without which it would be impossible to unhorse the PDP. I think the APC leaders will pull through and win, even if by the skin of their teeth. And who knows, 2015 could even turn into a rout.

The presidency has not denied reports that President Goodluck Jonathan wants the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, to resign. Perhaps they wait to see how the kite they are flying over the matter would soar before a statement is made denying or confirming the stance of the president. There is, however, no doubt that the presidency was unhappy that a letter written by the CBN governor alleging that the NNPC failed to remit over $48 billion to the federation account was leaked to the media. After reconciling accounts and suggesting that only about $10 billion remained creatively unaccounted for, the presidency is sanctimoniously gunning for the head of Mallam Sanusi. It is doubly strange that a presidency that permissively winked at the huge indiscretion of the Aviation minister, Stella Oduah, over the scandalous purchase of two bulletproof cars can ferociously pursue a CBN governor that waited for almost three months for the president to compel the NNPC to explain its clumsy bookkeeping.

The Jonathan presidency is inoculated against logic, maturity and restraint. It has long appeared incapable of appreciating insults as it has been unable to understand how badly its officials, especially the president himself, damage the image and prestige of the presidency. It is still mired in the Ms Oduah scandal, and cannot extricate itself from the highly damaging impact of its misstep on the Justice Ayo Salami matter. Now it is plunging heedlessly into another self-created fray. If the president had immediately responded to the CBN governor’s September, 2013 letter and directed the NNPC and the Ministry of Finance to join Mallam Sanusi in resolving the matter, there would not have been a controversy, let alone a leaked letter. The Sanusi controversy is evidentially the creation of a slothful presidency.

To worsen a very bad situation, the president is leaning on the CBN governor, who is due to retire in June, to quit immediately. Mallam Sanusi has of course not emerged from the letter controversy unscathed. In writing a misleading letter to the president, he had acted most impetuously. However the public rebuke he has received and the interminable snigger his arithmetical flight of fancy has elicited have unnerved everybody and affected the huge respect he has accumulated since he assumed office and made the CBN top post a very visible one. It is likely the president guessed Mallam Sanusi had lost the respect associated with that office, and believed he had become so vulnerable as to be unable to resist a sack. But against a presidency completely shorn of respect and gravitas, one that is now without a moral compass of any sort, not to talk of democratic or social values, Mallam Sanusi was always likely to receive fairer hearing and support, if not benefit of the doubt.

The advisory unit of the Jonathan presidency and his entire cabinet are dismissed as third-rate. But even then, surely he could still have found a few among the uninspiring number to advise him against the misbegotten pursuit of the wounded CBN governor. From all indications, Dr Jonathan will end up appearing to persecute Mallam Sanusi. Neither he nor his cabinet, it is clear, had inspired anyone. Now, for a matter that should be left to resolve itself or die a natural death, this uninspiring government is set to make a bad situation worse and further rubbish the little prestige left in the Nigerian presidency. Indeed, if Mallam Sanusi does not heed the president’s advice to resign, it is inconceivable that Dr Jonathan can find the muscle to force him out, or secure the number in the fractured and dispirited Senate to unhorse him.

When lawmakers in the House of Representatives began to defect to the main opposition All Progressives Congress (APC), it was widely expected, or perhaps speculated, that the Speaker, Aminu Tambuwal, would soon enact his own spectacular crossing. He has not burnt his bridges yet. In view of the fact that the opposition now controls the lower chamber, and the ruling PDP has lost control of that chamber, the speculations have continued to rage. Fearful that the PDP could lose control of the Senate, thereby compounding the political tragedy gnawing at the soul of the ruling party, the Jonathan presidency and forces favourable to Senate president David Mark have advanced stories indicating that the seats of defecting senators would be declared vacant. It is not quite certain that those stories are official.

But it is at least clear that the takeover of the Senate, as is being plotted by the opposition, would not be as easy as that of the House of Representatives. And, apparently, it would not matter whether Senator Mark and his forces are on the right side of the constitution. They will defend their turf as brutally as President Jonathan defends his presidency – with single-minded unconstitutionality, if necessary. The resolve of the ruling party in the Senate is, therefore, likely to dampen the enthusiasm of the APC senators. In the House of Representatives, any attempt to declare any seat vacant in a legislature already fallen into the hands of the ‘enemy,’ will flounder very badly. In view of the political dynamics in the Senate, and the foul mood of the Jonathan presidency, it is important for the opposition to modify tactics by getting potential defectors to act like defectors without actually defecting – at least until the time is right.

Given the mood in the Senate and the predilection of the Jonathan presidency, it is expected that Alhaji Tambuwal might want to re-examine his options, if indeed he ever meant the story of his defection to be taken at more than face value. It is already known his heart and soul belong to the APC. Would it be necessary to defect before he could advance and protect the interests of the opposition? With him standing pat in the PDP and keeping the office of Speaker, defectors would not only have a fair deal, they would even flourish. In addition, it would not only be unwise for an APC majority to move against him, should he choose to stay in the PDP, it would be unnecessary and counter-productive. An APC move against the Speaker is unlikely to ever happen. The Speaker may allow the speculations about his intentions to continue, but neither he nor the APC should think anything of it; for the Speaker is as sure of his constituency’s support as he is sure of securing a majority anytime a vote is forced on the floor of the legislature.

The problem, therefore, is the Senate, where top legislators are speaking at cross-purposes, and many of us are unsure whether the stories and threats they issue are real or contrived. Since this column is in favour of all legitimate moves to whittle down the power and influence of the PDP and also ensure Dr Jonathan is unelectable in 2015, it will offer unsolicited advice to the opposition. The opposition must recognise that they can only second-guess the reactions of the PDP Senate and the Jonathan presidency with a limited amount of certainty. Nothing is sure, especially in the light of the desperation of the ruling party and its fear that it could go into the 2015 general elections greatly hobbled. Even with its control of the Senate and the security agencies, its chances of retaining power is less than sure. Knowing full well that it would be a nightmare for the party to go into the next polls with the Senate in the hands of the opposition, especially after the House of Representatives had been lost irretrievably, the ruling party would fight tooth and nail to ensure that that should never happen.

The best option for the APC is to assume that the Senate’s top leaders and the presidency would fight rough in order to maintain control of the upper house. If a fight ensues, as every statistician knows, the chances of winning and losing are even. If an already crippled ruling party enters the fight disadvantaged, a 50 percent chance is a good outcome for them. On the other hand, a 50 percent chance for the APC, which is on a high at the moment and is even feeling triumphant already, is not good enough. And what is the use of a frontal attack on the ruling party in the Senate when the opposition can engage in feints and intrigues whose outcomes can be salutary? Since the intended defectors are known, the APC should let them stay in the PDP, in body of course, while their hearts and souls are claimed by the opposition. This tactic will work because in every vote called on the floor of the Senate, the potential defectors will frustrate the PDP and short-circuit the ruling party’s plans.

I admit that if the defections are carried through it would be a morale booster for the opposition and a dampener for the PDP. But the APC need not be carried away by the aesthetics of politics. Every move it makes, and every scheme it engages in, must serve the purpose of winning the next polls, rather than painting the party in a boisterous and effervescent mould. The party already has seemingly insurmountable problems of forging a fit, united, fairly ideological and victorious army out of the disparate and cantankerous defectors it had welcomed into its fold. That task will not be easy, for long-standing party members will resent the presence of more aggressive and opportunistic newcomers. Such a daunting problem should therefore not be allowed to be compounded by a distracting war in the Senate over defectors whose seats the forceful chicaneries of the Senate leadership and a vindictive presidency could make untenable.

This is why I also suggest that Speaker Tambuwal should, in cognizance of political realism over political aesthetics, remain for now in the PDP and offer defectors in the lower chamber genuine cover. The run-up to Poll 2015 will see bitter and sanguinary battles for the control of the physical and spiritual manifestations of the levers of power. The APC should avoid being entangled in needless controversies and displays. It must unite its warring groups, new and old, forge a credible and winnable platform, avoid the Machiavelian entrapment the ruling party will weave along its path, for they are no pushovers themselves, and ensure that even if it kills them they manage to give the country a presidential ticket that is indisputably a winner.

The next one year or so will be the most stressful and harrowing for the opposition; it should rise to the occasion with purpose and determination. But that time will also be the most nightmarish for the ruling party, and the country must hope it cannot rise to the occasion. For, as all of us know, and as I indicated in this place last week, only change can save the country. Continuity is definitely not an option, not with the despicable and divisive use of sectarian politics now embarked upon by the PDP.

More than six months after the Court of Appeal in Lagos acquitted the former Chief Security Officer (CSO) to the late Head of State Gen Sani Abacha of the murder of Kudirat Abiola, the Lagos State Government has decided to challenge the judgement. According to a THISDAY newspaper report, however, that decision is raising ripples. Not only is the decision to appeal coming after the statutory time allowed for appeal, it is also happening at a time of major political realignments considered still too brittle to withstanding significant jolts. The governor of Kano State, Rabiu Kwankwaso, it will be recalled, recently defected to the All Progressives Congress (APC), the same party ruling Lagos. And al-Mustapha, who hails from Kano, was welcomed back home as a hero by the governor.

Quoting sources, the paper revealed that some leading members of the party fear that the decision to appeal a judgement celebrated in Kano a few months ago could dampen the acceptability of the APC in the state and perhaps weaken its chances in future polls. Both Lagos and Kano have not officially reacted to the decision to appeal and the suppositions woven around it. They are unlikely to do so directly, for the matter is a double-edged sword.

If Lagos had decided not to appeal, and it emerged sometime in the future that the consideration behind it was political, it could damage both the state and the party in the estimation of the state’s sensitive and discriminating electorate. For the public would naturally presume that both the party and the state habitually and whimsically subordinate issues of justice to matters of politics. But it is also true that pursuing the case against al-Mustapha, who was received back home a hero, could send signals to the people of the state that their new party was either intrinsically inquisitorial or had just become so in reflection and reinforcement of the country’s ethnic and political dichotomies.

However, the three parties to the al-Mustapha case – Lagos, Kano and APC – must determine by what standards they hope to be judged. Would they like to be seen as flexible, and therefore unprincipled, when pertinent issues of justice are being considered? Could they hope that such malleability would not endanger the principles their party stands for, and the values by which it hopes posterity would judge it? I think it is dangerous for the party to begin to entertain such expedient considerations. True, the case could cause a lot of problems for the party, and even create huge dissonance within the ranks. But at the risk of undermining its popularity in key states, whether those with huge or small electoral votes, it is more rewarding for the party to build its foundations on sound and incontestable principles and values.

The danger of following expediencies is how to determine when to embrace it and when not to. No party worth its salt would want to be associated with reprehensible political mores and tactics. If the APC hopes to be respected and be seen as a viable alternative to the highly protean Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), it must be prepared to make the sacrifices necessary to establish an enduring foundation for its future. The time to make those sacrifices is now, at its infancy, when the stakes are still very high. If it loses the opportunity now, it may never regain it. Lagos wants to appeal the al-Mustapha case; let it do so resolutely, and let the Supreme Court finally determine the suspect’s guilt or innocence. Major al-Mustapha himself should relish that final vindication, should it come. Meanwhile, neither Lagos nor Kano must give the impression that al-Mustapha’s freedom is more important to his admirers and sympathisers than the catharsis, justice and closure Alhaja Kudirat’s family demand from Nigeria.