In the 1999 presidential election, the two leading contenders hailed from the Southwest, deliberately so because there was a general feeling of pacifying the zone for its loss caused by the annulment of the 1993 elections and the tragic death of the winner of that year’s presidential poll, MKO Abiola. The Alliance for Democracy (AD) and the All Peoples Party (APP) reached an understanding to field Olu Falae, while the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) fielded Olusegun Obasanjo. Chief Obasanjo won, but the nature of his win and the timing of the victory hid the emerging trend in Nigerian politics. That trend, which began to mature in 2007 and reached full bloom in the 2011 elections, affected the Southwest in more incalculable ways than it exposed the North’s impotence in zonal (extrapolative) politics. Henceforth, no zone could single-handedly determine who wins. The North had long ceased to be monolithic, especially politically. For its candidate to win, he would need a huge dose of inclusive politics that reaches out far and wide. The failure of the Gen Muhammadu Buhari campaign underscored this point. By accident rather than by design, or the factor of incumbency, the victory achieved by Candidate Goodluck Jonathan showed clearly what a candidate must be like to win. While it is important to examine the shifting trends in Nigeria’s presidential politics, my main concern today is the Southwest’s apparently surprising realisation (or new paradigm) of what Nigeria’s presidential politics has become and how the zone can best retain relevance. We are, of course, familiar with the Southwest’s long-standing approach to presidential politics. Between the 1950s and 2007, the zone repeatedly tried to produce a candidate that was deeply intellectual, principled, humanistic, ideological and popular. The candidate and the entire zone itself were projected in a way that made both to be anchored on solid left-of-centre, progressive ideology. The zone then reached out with that sacrosanct ideology to either like-minded progressives in other zones or opportunists masquerading as progressives. Because that ideology, now roughly cast as immutable, showed strong hues of Yoruba culture and history, it was often difficult to attract popular and credible politicians from other zones. In a highly competitive political environment, they feared being dominated, humiliated or even obliterated. The Southwest, it now seems, has begun to realise that it must quietly mitigate its messianic orientation to politics, sugar-coat its dominant ideological orientation of progressivism to make it less offensive, and when necessary be prepared to sacrifice its ambitions for the larger good. This discovery is, in my opinion, largely fortuitous, even as the zone’s leaders as well as the previously dominant Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) appear to define the ‘larger good’ in broadly philosophical and abstract terms. I say fortuitous because when the ACN opted to support the candidacy of Aminu Tambuwal for the post of Speaker, House of Representatives, in 2011, that choice seemed less strategic than political. It is unlikely the party already conceived at that time the grand coalition that has today metamorphosed into the All Progressives Congress (APC), nor imagined that the rainbow coalition, including the peaceful mass defections in the House, would be partly facilitated by the party’s inclusive politics, relationship with Hon Tambuwal, and a host of other factors. But even if the grand coalition was already conceived as far back as 2011, the scale of its success, not to say the structure of the coalition itself, must surprise those who inspired it. Part of the misunderstanding between the Southwest’s leading politicians and groups can be traced to this emergent trend. There are on one hand those who are still nostalgic about the Obafemi Awolowo days; and there are on the other hand those disillusioned by the impotence of the politics of the past. The first group, broadly speaking, is made up of the rump Afenifere and many opportunistic elements in the Labour Party (LP). They either describe themselves as the only truly progressive politicians in the zone on account of their association with the heirs of the Awolowo dynasty, or they sometimes see themselves as another progressive group outside the ACN component of the APC. This group still hugs the illusion that it could present a puristic and traditional form of Southwest progressivism around which a national coalition could be formed. The second group, now fully ensconced in the APC, believes that the puristic form of progressivism has over the past five decades proved either inadequate or at least problematic as a vehicle for winning the presidency. Like some leading political parties in the US and Britain, some of which had had to rediscover and remould themselves in order to achieve greater electoral appeal, this second Southwest group believes it must broaden its progressive ideological base by, if necessary, mitigating its form and structure to make it appeal to a wider swath of the country, especially to groups and zones not terribly averse to any left-of-centre ideology. It reasoned that if ethnic politics and divides were to be transcended, supporting Hon Tambuwal in 2011 was a good way to begin. It hoped that when it came to national politics, the Southwest electorate would understand why Hon Tambuwal was a better option to tear to pieces the iron curtain of distrust that had separated the North from the South for so long, and why supporting his Southwest opponent, Mulikat Akande-Adeola, was nothing but offensive and retrogressive ethnic politics. The Southwest’s new paradigm for national politics, and in particular, presidential politics, is based on very sound but evidently futuristic suppositions. Like anything new and radical, this paradigm will bring with it teething problems, especially because many of its leading lights simply lack the depth and perspective to appreciate the implications and benefits the major realignment being midwifed by the zone’s political iconoclasts will trigger. Already, it would seem the increasing fractiousness of the crowd in the APC is the logical antithesis to the grand coalition’s possibilities, stability and survival. But if coalition leaders at national and state levels could subordinate their ambitions to the common good, and grasp through their minds’ eyes the nirvana they seem at the threshold of midwiving, they might succeed in reinforcing the new trends Nigerian politics needs to survive as a nation, democratic, stable and free. In the new reality, the Southwest appears to be the zone making the hugest sacrifice for very little profit. In time, however, the zones in the North will realise quite clearly what they now suspect: that the only way to guarantee stability and eliminate bigotry and prejudice is to embrace politics of inclusiveness. In time they will also realise, just like the Southwest did when it favoured Hon Tambuwal over Hon Akande-Adeola, that what the country needs is not for politicians to seclude themselves in, and reinforce, their ethnic cocoons, but to embrace healthy politics even if it seems illogical and unrewarding in the short run. In time, too, the Southeast will recognise that it must open up quite courageously as the Southwest is doing, build politicians with crossover appeal, and begin to practice the politics of inclusiveness. It is unlikely that a time will come when by common agreement the presidency would be surrendered to a Southeast candidate. The zone will have to work for it by taking the new dynamics of zonal politics into cognisance or, like Dr Jonathan, hope to take the presidency by default, with all the accompanying uncertainties.

Responding to President Goodluck Jonathan’s pussyfooting on the bulletproof cars scandal involving her and the Aviation ministry she heads, Stella Oduah has embarked on a frenzy of public relations propaganda to shift the blame away from the scandal to the doorsteps of her ‘enemies.’ It took nearly two weeks after the scandal was exposed before the president set up a panel to look into the disgraceful buck-passing enacted by Ms Oduah after it transpired she had knowingly sanctioned, some said inspired, the purchase of two armoured cars at inflated prices. It took more than two weeks after the panel submitted its report for the president to angrily acknowledge he had received the report. Now it is taking forever for him to do something about the report. Unlike the Justice Ayo Salami case, in which he agreed to suspend the jurist with alacrity, he is in no hurry to lay a finger on the special woman, Ms Oduah.

After it became clear the president would continue to dither with scant regard for the dignity and nobility that should accompany his office, Ms Oduah opportunistically launched attacks of her own against those she described as her long-standing enemies. The reprisal attacks are coming after many solid weeks of extraordinary lobbying to save Ms Oduah’s job. But if the president couldn’t save Bamanga Tukur’s job, even though his fault was nothing more grievous than serial indiscretions and tactlessness, it is hard to see the president saving Ms Oduah’s job when her failing is obviously one of atrocious disregard for truth, general and particular mischief in aviation matters, and obscene and indifferent embrace of luxury at a time of great national deficit and scarcity.

But it gratifies and promotes Ms Oduah’s spuriousness to confuse two entirely distinct issues. Only a confused mind could juxtapose the problem she has with her supposed enemies with the self-made scandal of flouting budgetary restrictions and corruptly inflating car prices. Hear Ms Oduah: “For over 38 years that our airports remained damning commentary on our status as part of the civilised world, or when our airspace existed without the modern and workable equipment and facilities to make the airspace safe, these category of persons saw no evil and heard no evil while they happily clapped their way to the banks. This group has carried on with bitter venom, throwing decency and honour overboard, lying and misleading the Nigerian populace even when they knew the truth, because my team and I changed the game in favour of Nigeria attaining her pride of place…They are the entrenched, corrupt and profligate individuals and entities that have caused the serious rot in the aviation sector.”

Having failed to lather her case with ethnic jostlings, she now refers to the implausible and arbitrary figure of 38 years ago, when both she and her traducers were probably just emerging from their teenage years. Whether Dr Jonathan likes it or not, Ms Oduah’s position is no longer tenable. She will have to go, of course without the honour that should normally accompany a decisive president, or the sense of shame a dignified woman should never lose. Ms Oduah is not plagued by enemies, for she is too insignificant to have any notable one; she is undone by shamelessness, an affliction that is now evidently an integral part of the Nigerian presidency.

“The president’s new ministerial list is not a reflection of the managerial competence of the appointees, or of the short time left in the president’s tenure; it is a reflection of the idiosyncratic belligerence of the president himself, his evasive and deceptive patriotism, his intolerable lack of fidelity to truth and lofty ideals.”

Last week’s tit for tat between the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) is a reminder of the biblical story of the altercation between Israel’s King Ahab and the most prominent prophet of the day, Elijah. Responding to Ahab’s spectacular misrule, Elijah had decreed very harsh repercussions on the country, prompting the king to accuse the prophet of troubling Israel. But the prophet simply retorted that on the contrary, Israel was troubled by the king and his household. The outcome of the struggle between the king and the prophet is too well known to require any analysis. Ahab and his family later came to grief.

Comparisons, the English say, are odious. But on Thursday, after the APC gave what amounted to a political ultimatum to President Goodluck Jonathan over his government’s increasing and rampant resort to undemocratic, if not entirely fascist, methods, and the PDP had retorted that the APC was attempting to truncate democracy, it was hard to resist comparing contemporary Nigeria under Jonathan with ancient Israel under Ahab. President Jonathan may not have taken anyone’s vineyard in the direct sense of the word, but he has done much worse by undermining democratic rule in Rivers State, involving himself in oil wells controversy, usurping state powers in favour of the police, and giving the general and depressing impression his sole idea of the presidency is to act and fight in favour of his party, supporters and people. It is difficult to explain why he is not unsettled and deeply nauseated by the brazenness of his methods in Rivers and the openness of the state police commissioner’s partisanship.

The president’s wife, Dame Patience, ever so replete with testimonies of God’s goodness in her life, continually proclaims peace, love and national harmony. But she has been accused of being a puppeteer in the Rivers crisis, with direct links to the state’s commissioner of police, the recalcitrant and fawning Mbu Joseph Mbu. The first lady has done little to refute the allegations of undermining peace and good governance in Rivers State; instead, she has spoken cynically and condescendingly of contributing to the progress of her home state, and has undisguisedly nurtured a hostile attitude towards the elected leaders of that state. Indeed, she speaks peace, and has even christened herself the mother of peace. But she acts war and, in the background, fights it. It is likely that to the very end she will indulge in interminable battles, never retreating, never surrendering.

It is against this alarming background that the National Executive Committee (NEC) of the APC met in Abuja on Thursday to review the state of the nation, particularly the condition in which the misrule of the Jonathan presidency has diluted the country’s democratic experience and weakened its foundational principles. It was no longer realistic, they said, to tamely endure the battering and buffeting of the ruling party, in Rivers as well as elsewhere. It had become clear, the opposition party said, that both the president whose proselytising tendencies on social and political issues have turned dull and vacuous, and the PDP whose implacable resolve to demolish the tenets of federalism has become all too obvious, merely paid lip service to peace, institution building, economic development and federal principles.

Having made these observations, and having been convinced that the ruling party had no interest whatsoever in conducting peaceful and fair polls in 2015, the APC has decided on a more activist path in pursuing its political objectives. It would block passage of bills, particularly the budget bill, and oppose the confirmation of the president’s men, including the service chiefs. Though it is not exactly clear how it hopes to achieve these delicate and draconian aims, the opposition party is doubtless able to discomfit the PDP in the Senate and the House of Representatives. The PDP has begun to fight back dirtily, as this column guessed it would. And if it is taken into cognisance that the opposition APC is still battling with fractiousness in its ranks, not to talk of the inelegant structural and policy distractions promoted by some of its more obstreperous and domineering state leaders, it seems clear that the auguries are not good at all.

As the APC put it: “Following the forgoing and in view of the joint resolutions of the National Assembly on Rivers State, and other constitutional breaches by the Presidency, the APC hereby directs its members in the National Assembly, to block all legislative proposals, including the 2014 Budget and confirmation of all nominees to military and civilian positions to public offices until the rule of law and constitutionalism are restored in Rivers State in particular, and Nigeria in general.

The NEC of the APC has now resolved that if these acts of impunity and lawlessness continued unabated and the Police persist in being as an enforcement arm of the PDP to the detriment of our members, it will have no alternative but to ask our teeming members all over the country, and especially in Rivers State, to take whatever steps that are necessary to protect their lives and property.”

Unmindful of their party’s unhealthy contributions to the country’s lifelessness, PDP spokesmen have suggested that the APC’s plans to respond forcefully to the ruling party’s misrule were deliberate attempts to truncate democracy, create chaos and cripple the economy. As its wilfully misleading tactics in the National Assembly show, the PDP is expected to embrace the worst forms of realpolitik as the 2015 general elections draw near. The party has ignored the law and the constitution so far in Rivers State, and in the National Assembly, judiciary and in many other states; it will continue to do so eagerly, unconscionably and remorselessly. The secret service and the police have become indistinguishable from Aso Villa general office staff; the president will continue to run the two law enforcement agencies as if they are nothing but appendages of the ruling party.

Going by the ministerial list awaiting confirmation, and in view of the extreme conservatism and pro-Jonathan inclination of the Senate, the president seems to be reinforcing his ‘war cabinet.’ He has the legitimate right to appoint ministers who will be an asset to him, and who could swing votes in his direction, but the appalling reality is that most of the president’s appointees have the same malicious and malignant mindset as Nyesom Wike, the Rivers State-born Minister of State for Education. The president’s new ministerial list is not a reflection of the managerial competence of the appointees, or of the short time left in the president’s tenure; it is a reflection of the idiosyncratic belligerence of the president himself, his evasive and deceptive patriotism, his intolerable lack of fidelity to truth and lofty ideals.

If the APC were to be reluctant to respond in kind to the PDP’s damnable tactics, it could be smothered by the continuing misuse of presidential powers and the mischievous interpretation of the law and the constitution. Nevertheless, the greater burden is on the APC. Unlike the PDP, which has a fairly long and stable tradition upon which to swivel, balance and launch ferocious and overarching attacks, the APC is just starting to accrete its partisan powers, define who it is, locate its strengths as well as recognise its weaknesses, and mould itself into a united and disciplined fighting force. The opposition party, it is clear, is a child born in wartime. It will require perceptive, brilliant and selfless leaders to help it reach adulthood quickly in one piece, not to talk of acquire the strategies and manoeuvres necessary to outfox such an indomitable and relentless foe as the PDP.

In the coming months, the country will find itself trapped between the PDP’s fiery lack of moderation and distorted nationalism at one end, and the APC’s intrepid and fanatical desire to challenge the ruling party, pound for pound, shell for shell at the other end. It would be chimerical to expect the country to fare very well between the two powers, not when the PDP can count on unnumbered and soulless state officials eager to betray every noble cause, including the country, and the APC can count on its Young Turks frazzled by intraparty contentiousness and weaned on harakiri.

If anything can be said for the national conference the Goodluck Jonathan government is organising, it is that the vacillation over what to call it – national conference, national dialogue or national conversation – has finally ended after many months of waffling. What have not ended are the debates over its relevance, whether to subject it to a referendum or not (which nuisance the government has passed on to the conferees themselves), uncertainties over the nomination process, and legal and constitutional issues surrounding its convocation and adoption. There are probably a few more uncertainties, but these will manifest as the conference gets underway.

The opposition to the conference is quite sizeable and vigorous, encompassing many interest groups and the main opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC). Their opposition is hinged on the nearness of the conference – clearly an afterthought to the Jonathan presidency – to the elections of 2014 and 2015. Too many political events will be taking place this year for a weighty conference designed supposedly to end all conferences to receive adequate attention. In addition, reports of past conferences, which had received copious attention and active involvement of pressure groups, have been ignored without explanation. Moreover, the National Assembly is itself undertaking major constitutional amendments; so, why another exercise?

But all these arguments have not swayed President Jonathan. He is determined to push through his effort to organise a fresh national conference. He is not interested in a new constitution and, alas, he has set the customary no-go areas for his own conference, but Nigeria’s unduly optimistic pressure groups are willing to give it a shot. More critically, the president has refused to be decisive on key issues capable of undermining the conference. He says conference decisions will be by consensus, but failing that, by 75 percent majority. What if neither general consensus nor 75 percent majority can be reached? And rather than determine the legal and legislative underpinnings for the conference’s decisions, the president has pushed that difficult, if not impossible, responsibility to the conference itself.

However, the booby trap is that, as he acknowledged before now, the conference decisions will be incorporated into the existing constitution. But there is already a modality for constitutional amendment, which no external force other than the legislature can tamper with. The president, however, knowingly and deceptively tries to take advantage of the ongoing constitutional amendment process expected to end by June. He obviously hopes that some of the conference decisions will find their way into the final work of the legislature. Failing that, but without saying so, he expects the conference delegates and the rest of Nigeria to put pressure on the legislature to do what some of Jonathan’s ministers sarcastically describe as the needful.

If the perverted nomination process enunciated by the government does not convince proponents of national conference that President Jonathan is playing ducks and drakes with the feelings of the country, and the unresolved and contentious issues surrounding the actual conference itself do not raise suspicion as to the president’s motives, then Nigerians must be indescribably inured to danger and to common sense. For instance, anticipating the fact that opposition states would decline nominating delegates, the president has accumulated the obscene power to carry out that responsibility on their behalf. If past conferences undertaken in fairly congenial atmospheres failed to see the light of day, what do we expect from a conference being hastily, if not feverishly, undertaken in an atmosphere of doubts, confusion, suspicion and sheer political chicanery and malevolence?

By every indication, President Jonathan is both unreflective on the conference and mischievous in his politics. The desire to restructure the country has unfortunately lured many Nigerians into embracing the president’s half measures and into ignoring the many booby traps he and his cynical aides have strewn all over the path. Since he assumed office, Dr Jonathan has not been able to fix anything tangible. Yet, he does not think it presumptuous that he is attempting to fix a weighty and elegantly nuanced matter as the restructuring of the country, when he has been unable to fix the plainest and most elementary of Nigeria’s problems, say roads or electricity.

The All Progressives Congress (APC) boasts an incredibly lofty political and social ethos it wants to midwife for the country. But if care is not taken, it could find itself entangled in pitfalls and traps of its own doing. The problem, it will be discovered, is not that the party has set goals too high to be accomplished. No, the problem is that it has so far been unable to structure its operations and ideas in such a way that the gap between its ideals and its identity is narrowed substantially for the electorate to embrace the party overwhelmingly. Unfortunately for the party, it has very little time to do the almost impossible; very little time to, as it were, shuffle the galaxies, tweak the earth’s magnetic force, and prevent any of the planets from spiralling out of orbit.

If Nigeria is to be saved, if the black race is to be redeemed – forgive the hyperbole – the APC must do the impossible in the next few months to save itself and the country. For if it fails, not only will the mega coalition it has cobbled together so gingerly be endangered, even the very notion of country which we have struggled over the years to sustain will itself be gravely imperilled. As for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its leaders, particularly those in power in Abuja today, I have long written them off as a total disaster, notwithstanding what jobholders and sycophants worming their ways around in Abuja say.

A good place to start in admonishing the APC – they should forgive my imperiousness – is the recent order they gave to their legislators in Abuja to stall President Goodluck Jonathan’s policies, bills, budget, and confirmation of service chiefs. Is the party justified in linking its cooperation to the president’s attitude and presumptions? I think it is, for if some pressure is not brought to bear on a president and party that have actually and irreverently spun out of control, that political lassitude could unwittingly encourage the ruling party and the president to entrench themselves in their anti-democratic misconduct. But is the APC wise to condition its legislative cooperation upon the president’s good behaviour? I seriously doubt it.

The first problem is that the party obviously misjudges the Nigerian voter to be highly enlightened and even somewhat idealistic. If he were enlightened, he would effortlessly appreciate that something drastic ought to be done about the creeping disaster and recklessness manifesting in Rivers State, a disaster given fillip by the president’s own lack of private and public scruples, and by the opportunistic alliances of Dame Patience, the meddlesome first lady, Nyesom Wike, the superficial and ingratiating Minister of State for Education, and Mbu Joseph Mbu, the conniving and servile police commissioner for Rivers. And if the voter were idealistic, he would understand that it was imperative to sacrifice a few legislative bills relating to our existential comfort in order to achieve the pristine and much higher goals of sustaining and nurturing the country’s infant democracy.

The APC must not forget that even in the United States, a point many commentators alluded to in newspapers in the past few days, the fairly well-educated voters in that developed democracy still spurned any attempt to play politics with their meal tickets. I wager that in any society, no matter what lofty principle is imperilled, issues of meal ticket will always predominate. The APC should, therefore, stop insisting on its legislators’ defiance in the National Assembly. It should also stop rationalising the orders it gave its lawmakers. The voter will not buy it, period. Nor does the party even need that tactics.

It is not certain that the party can even enforce its directive to its national lawmakers. But if it can, it will have to look for ways of surmounting a distressing backlash certain to follow the order. Does the party not appreciate that Dr Jonathan has thoroughly misruled the country, and his budgets, even when they seem to make some sense, have become worthless pieces of documents that fail every objective test of practicability, consistency and coherence? Dr Jonathan’s budgets have impoverished the country, and they do not work. Why would the APC want to be blamed for a budget designed to fail anyway? The party should publicly rescind its directives and let the lawmakers do their jobs dispassionately and professionally. Had the APC not intervened with its hasty directive, the budget would have naturally suffered searing and merciless reviews from the lawmakers. Now the legislators will have to be more accommodating so as not to be seen to be implementing APC’s order.

More crucially, it is now more urgent than ever for the APC to set up think tanks for the 2015 elections if the humongous goodwill it has accumulated with the electorate is not to be frittered away. I do not have the impression, for instance, that the party thoroughly debated its visit to former president Olusegun Obasanjo, let alone the decision to flatter the imperturbable aurochs. The ex-president is the most reviled politician in the country, hated by his enemies and friends alike, and in equal measure. It was completely needless visiting and coaxing someone so incorrigible and so absolutely unessential to the wellbeing of the country and its fledgling democracy. The party must resist the temptation to play emotive politics. It must encourage debate, seek out devil’s advocates when a position appears unanimous, and sleep over its decisions before making them public.

But perhaps the most difficult issue the APC will grapple with in the coming months is its presidential standard-bearer. If it gets it wrong, the campaign will at best be a huge struggle, and at worst be completely doomed. In electing its candidates, no matter what methods it prefers, whether open primaries or caucuses or a combination, it must not pretend to be ignorant of what and how the voters are thinking. Nigeria has changed, and with it, its politics too, perhaps in ways so frightening and threatening that it sometimes seems pointless for any principled man to offer himself for the thankless job of leadership. One of those changes concerns religion. The PDP, it is clear, has seized on religion as a campaign tool, and Dr Jonathan has already embarked on that dangerous journey with incomparable carefreeness and adroitness. The APC must not just condemn that dangerous folly, it must counter it, not defy it.

Without being told, the APC knows its aspirants who have been rightly or wrongly stigmatised as either fairly or completely bigoted. No matter how valiantly those stigmatised have worked for the mega coalition, no matter how popular they are, and no matter how electable they are in certain parts of the country, the party must resist the temptation to elect them as standard-bearers, not even on point of honour. There are younger, fairly accomplished and more connected politicians in the party, perhaps some of them not yet fully APC. The party must be flexible enough and ready to accommodate them. For, in the end, what matters most is not how honourably the APC has structured its politics, or how principled it has kept faith with its political and ideological views. Indeed, what matters most is winning the elections, regardless of the suspicions about the order of elections and the horrifying chicaneries of the ruling party.

The APC is on the threshold of a great and uplifting experience. It cannot afford to be careless, and its leaders must not allow themselves to be distracted by abuse, envious politicians mouthing strange historical heresies and inaccuracies, and political foes luring the party to commit blunders. They should go out there and make history, for history beckons to them.

President Goodluck Jonathan’s supporters and admirers think many of his critics are either deliberately offensive or are zealots of the opposition. They are wrong. His critics, who owe no one any apology, are simply disappointed with a politician they risked everything to support in his unsteady effort to claim the presidency when his predecessor was too sick to continue. The late Umaru Yar’Adua was of course a tested administrator and his mind sufficiently robust in terms of the ideals of politics to elicit profound admiration from both friends and foes, but his illness and the hijack of state power by shadowy figures led many to damn the consequences of trusting the untested Dr Jonathan with more powers than he ever countenanced in his meteoric and fairy tale rise to prominence.

The principles those who fought for Dr Jonathan in 2010 promoted are of course unassailable, and they would be as eager to fight for them today as they did many years back, notwithstanding the disillusionment only hindsight is capable of giving. But given his almost total lack of inspiration, not to say his bland and offensive manner of railroading inchoate policies through the legislature and the bureaucracy, those who fought for him in 2010 are now almost sorry they did. The problem, it occurs to them, is not that Dr Jonathan is intrinsically bad, especially in the light of his often likable bursts of bucolic homilies. The problem is that since he assumed office, Dr Jonathan has not for once given any indication of one statesman, living or dead, whose style or ideas he admired, shared or is competent to redact.

By training and by temperament, whether off the cuff or smuggled into his speeches by speechwriters, Dr Jonathan indeed only manages to give indication of someone who rose too rapidly politically to have the time to imbibe deep, noble and inspiring ideas of statecraft and leadership. Metaphorically speaking, his bones are perhaps too creakily dry to lend themselves to something delicate, lustrous and engaging. Other than his homiletic forays, no one has heard him declaim on any great issue with the depth, sagacity and nuance of a statesman. Could we therefore expect that far into his presidency and well into middle age, he is capable of the instinctive moulting familiar only to youths? I have my doubts. But this must not stop us from making recommendations to him.

Africa does not have a long list of statesmen and great leaders – perhaps only Nelson Mandela in the truest sense of the word – but Dr Jonathan lives in an era when science and technology have obliterated boundaries. He has an illustrious global list to pick from, if he is capable. He is a zoologist by training. He will have to adjust a little to begin studying man in greater detail than he is accustomed to, beginning with history. He does not have to have a military background to choose well, nor is he required to be a lawyer or political scientist. All he requires are the discipline and the passion to learn and to imbibe the lessons of time and history.

My private suspicion, frequently restated in this place, is that Dr Jonathan is too far gone to profit from this advice. Had he the gravitas and adornments that line the souls of great leaders, it is inconceivable he would have permitted, let alone perpetrated, the atrocious assault on the constitution still ongoing in Rivers State and elsewhere.

Last Sunday, Muslim protesters, many of them quite young, marched through Lagos streets campaigning for the right to wear hijab in public schools. The protest drew significant attention. But the state government continues to resist any attempt to create what it describes as distinctions in public primary and secondary schools. Tertiary institutions in the state and elsewhere do not bar distinctive dresses. Last week too, some students in Baptist High School, Iwo in Osun State took their campaign for dress distinction to a new height, perhaps flowing from the unresolved disagreement over the state’s controversial reclassification of schools. Christian and Muslim students not only wore distinctive dresses showcasing their religions, they insisted on conducting morning assemblies along distinct religious lines. A report suggested that even traditional religion worshippers in the same school wore dresses indicating their faith.

Religious differences mixed unhealthily with deep socio-economic cleavages have turned the north-eastern part of the country into a difficult place to live and work. The trauma is spreading steadily but insidiously into the Southwest, a zone hitherto recognised as an oasis of religious, ethnic and class tolerance. Indeed, many Christian groups have begun to question what they believe is the dominance of the Muslim political elite in the zone’s governmental affairs. They have, for instance, started to campaign for the election of a Christian governor in Lagos State, arguing that with the exception of the brief governorship of Michael Otedola, no Christian had been governor of the state since the Second Republic. The campaign is of course a psychological one, for no Lagos governor has been accused of sectarian bias in any form.

If sectarian differences are heightening in the Southwest, it is perhaps because the zone’s leaders have been unable to anticipate the problem and unsure how to handle the delicate issue. Lagos has been a little more assertive in sustaining the status quo, insisting that students in public schools wear the same uniform for the simple reason that public schools remain exactly that – public schools. Students in private schools are at liberty to wear regulation dresses and uniforms as their proprietors deem fit. It is, however, not clear how much longer Lagos can hold out, for the campaigns are unlikely to ease off without a major counter-campaign by the zone’s elite. The campaign to wear uniforms indicating one’s religious persuasion is gradually spreading in the zone. Indeed, Osun State is currently at the vortex of the crisis, having attracted controversy by making one concession after another to religious activists. Concessions, as everyone knows, beget even more concessions.

Going by the deeply disturbing sectarian killings, Boko Haram insurgency and other socio-economic revolts shaking the northern part of the country to its foundations, it is difficult to explain why the Southwest has refused to be proactive. When former Zamfara State governor, Sani Ahmed (Yerima), embraced religious distinction through what former President Olusegun Obasanjo called political sharia, I warned that the lights might be going out over Northern Nigeria. After mourning the collapse of secularism in the North where I grew up and schooled, I indicated that the region was beginning to spawn a brood of vipers with fatal consequences for both the elite and the underclass. I thought at the time that those consequences would be limited to perhaps some isolated cases of violence and terror attacks against secular or Christian targets. I never imagined we would experience the systematic conflagration triggered by the Boko Haram Islamic sect, nor did I even imagine that young, sometimes well-heeled individuals would embrace suicide missions.

The consequence of the carelessness of the northern elite, who rode on the back of religion to power or tried to use religion as their footstool, is that many parts of the North have become ‘Lebanonised’ and ‘Pakistanised’. Nigeria struggled against periodic outbreaks of Maitatsine revolts in the 1980s; now they are grappling with consistent sectarian insurgency, complete with genocidal tendencies and ethnic cleansing. I do not have the impression that the North has learnt the right lessons of how to leave religion quite out of politics and out of social life, and I really think the problem will get much worse than it already is before the society wakes up to the sinister consequences of mixing governance with religion.

I therefore expected the self-acclaimed enlightened Southwest to comprehensively understand the acute dangers of trifling with religion. They know the harmful effects sectarian controversies and violent disagreements have on development, yet they have puzzlingly decided to meddle with it, pretending they could tap its potentials and leash the genie. But we have the history of the Maghreb to learn from. In fact, the stalling of the Syrian revolt against Bashir Al-Assad’s rule, particularly the cold feet developed by the West in intervening in that country, is not unconnected with the complications introduced into the revolt by high-level sectarian overtone. Al-Assad has paradoxically turned out to be the defender of secularism, and his opponents are either affiliated to al-Qaeda or have developed their own peculiar hot brand of adulterated theocracy.

While Tunisia was struggling to retain some secularist flavour and Libya was trying to discover the identity it prefers for this modern era, Egypt under Mohammed Morsi plunged unadvisedly into non-secularist governance. The Egyptian military, still bathing under the hue of Nasserism, has constituted itself into a bastion of mild secularism. This was why it moved against Morsi’s government, rewrote the constitution by deleting expressly theocratic provisions, and seems bent now on installing one of its own in power both to pursue the peace that has eluded the country for months and to protect the country’s secularist principles. Turkey, until recently, also had a military that served as the protector of the country’s secularism, inspired by the iconic Ataturk who brilliantly and foresightedly drew a line between state and religion, including banning the hijab in schools and offices.

After the debacle in the North, from which the rest of Nigeria ought to draw lessons, it is sad that Southwest governors and political leaders have taken for granted the long-standing and enviable secularism of their zone. The cultural sinews that nourished and recommended the zone’s secularist tendency have today proved too fragile to keep the secularist principles instituted by the zone’s founding fathers. As a region and empire, the zone drew firm lines between its legislative, religious and executive components. The lines have been obfuscated not simply because of the march of time and civilisation, but because of the carelessness and meddlesomeness of the zones’ leaders. We cannot pretend that religious differences do not exist, but we can and should firmly and unrepentantly set boundaries for them. The heightening controversies and differences among the zone’s religious persuasions, which are already hardening into sectarian distinctions and enclaves, will not resolve themselves. The zone’s leaders must act now if the oasis of religious peace and interconnectedness that the zone has been for centuries is not to become a dangerous and seething mirage.

As the sharp differences in the Osun school shows, when the problem starts, no one is immune. If Osun does not carefully handle the controversy and treat the disease from its roots, it is a matter of time before violence becomes a part of the crisis. The time to act is now. And like Osun, it is hard to know what intentions lurk in the minds of parents in Lagos promoting religious distinctions in the minds of impressionable youths. This is dangerous and short-sighted. We all have a duty to promote togetherness among our young ones, no matter their religious persuasion. If the zone’s culture, civilisation and humanity are no longer strong enough to bind the people of the zone together, then it is headed for even much more trouble than the North is experiencing.

A few months ago, using Osun as the springboard for my analysis, I pointed out that political leaders in the Southwest needed to do something concrete about the incipient religious disharmony in the zone. The warning is still apposite today; for obviously the problem will not go away on its own. Instead, it will probably worsen if nothing is done beyond just appealing to religious leaders to maintain peace, and opinion leaders to refrain from stoking the embers of discord. Those sort of appeals profited the North nothing, apparently. They are not likely to profit anyone in the Southwest in any way. Governors and governments of the zone have an urgent need to stay away from religion almost totally if the zone is not to descend into a maelstrom of sectarian violence. Already the lights of peace and civilisation are flickering over Nigeria, the Southwest not excluded; we must not let them be extinguished altogether.

Consequent upon Dr Jonathan’s piquant but desperate cabinet reshuffle, it has been speculated that some of the vacant positions could be ceded to the Southwest. The president has apparently just woken up to the dire electoral circumstances his impending re-election campaign may face. And there are probably enough views and voices in the zone to encourage the president’s cold and cynical calculations.

But if the zone’s conservative leaders are taken in by Dr Jonathan’s permutations, they must be much blinkered than anyone has cared to acknowledge. Given their unreflective embrace of the national conference and their hopelessly romantic notion of its timing and utility at this point, it will not surprise anyone if they remark and applaud the president’s whimsical acknowledgement of the zone’s importance and value.

After all, did these leaders not wail over losing the battle for the leadership of the House of Representatives? Like everywhere else, even the Southwest has become depressingly susceptible to the mercantilist calculations of values and is now generally disposed to viewing justice and other noble values through the rose-coloured glasses of ethnicity and sectional parochialisms.

Before the third quarter of this year, the profiles of the two main political parties’ standard-bearers may become discernible. Pessimism should be deplored, but the chances of the two big parties presenting inspiring candidates are fairly remote. President Goodluck Jonathan is doing everything possible, notwithstanding the vitriolic denunciation and unease of former President Olusegun Obasanjo, to get himself elected as the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) candidate. If he runs, as he is almost certain to do, it will not be on account of any exemplary work he has done to remake and refit the country since he assumed office, or on the grounds of any inspiring image he has projected thus far. As far as both work and image are concerned, Dr Jonathan is an uninspiring and exaggerated blank.

If he runs, he will not base his candidacy on what he hopes to do, though he and his party will effuse a smattering of national or even ideological agenda encompassing social, economic and political issues. Nor will he feel the compulsion to demonstrate competence, savvy, charisma and consistency, all of which are components of strong and statesmanlike leadership. He has not shown a modicum of these attributes right from his assumption of office, and they are not intrinsic to him. It is therefore inconceivable that he will feel incommoded by their nonexistence in his character makeup. He will instead base his candidacy, as his political tutelage has taught him, on the geopolitics of his background, the support he can muster from his rabid followers and supporters, the voluble and recriminatory effusions of jobholders and paid party hawks, and on the potentials of his appointees’ muscle flexing.

When he assumed office, the convoluted process had nothing to do with him as a person, or on his background, or on his perceived competence. The people and the legislature were rightly concerned about issues of political decorum and the need to save and uphold the constitution. Concocting a so-called doctrine of necessity upon which Dr Jonathan rode into power was therefore as much a reflection of our concern for stability and continuity as it was an indication of the kind of polity we wished to nurture, one in which a person’s background, faith or social standing was irrelevant. But since he assumed office, Dr Jonathan has done especially little to burnish both his image and credentials. It is also clear that Chief Obasanjo’s reservations about Dr Jonathan has nothing to do with the president’s competence, for the former is himself famously regarded as a hugely distracted and anachronistic politician and leader.

But the tragedy does not appear to end with either Dr Jonathan or the PDP. As a matter of fact, there is little indication that the opposition party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), will itself present a remarkable paradigmatic difference. The party may not have tasted power at the centre to elicit assessment or comparison, but there is much already in it to present us ingredients for a fair conclusion of what direction the party may wish to follow. There are enough tested, charismatic and brilliant politicians in its fold, but its presidential candidate is unlikely to be judged by any of these great attributes or be produced with the peculiar and desperate needs of the country in view.

The truth is that if the party is not to come to grief in 2015, it must also focus on the geopolitical dynamics of the country, the campaign for rotation, the need to be sensitive to issues of religion, and the general safeness and acceptability of the candidate himself.

The party has promised a transparent process for electing its candidates; but that process will be modified and vitiated by exterior and even ulterior factors, leading to the selection of standard-bearers more safe than adequate for the country’s radical needs. But all may not be lost; for in the end, the performance of a candidate once he assumes office, and in particular for the APC, may be influenced by the internal competitiveness, ideological stature and general stamina and robustness of the party in power.

President Goodluck Jonathan may have eased out four members of his so-far uninspiring cabinet, and seems set to bring in more notable persons, but it is doubtful whether the reshuffle will have quite the remarkable momentum he hopes to create for his performance as president and his re-election campaign. His Chief of Staff, the much reviled and hated Mike Oghiadomhe, has been shoved out. So, too, were the haughty Stella Oduah of the Aviation ministry, the officious Caleb Olubolade of Police Affairs, the imperious Godsday Orubebe of the Niger Delta ministry and the relatively unknown Yerima Ngama, Minister of State for Finance. Having watched with macabre delight the effect the reshuffle was having on the country, the president, reports suggest, is now seized by a frenzy to draw more blood. Converted to bloodlust and energised by the sanguinary effect of sacking his men, the president will probably do a little more, if not at a high level, then at a more sober and lower level.

The president is believed to be prepared to bring in well-known persons, some of them retired generals, former governors, senators and technocrats. Many think his new team is more likely to be accurately described as star-studded, and he himself seems to have rediscovered the zest to tinker with things. He will also probably think he is in the process of assembling a team that will deliver the presidency to him once more, that is, if the truculent and bellicose former President Olusegun Obasanjo does not derail his wagon. My private thoughts are that Dr Jonathan’s cabinet reshuffle is motivated by wholly expedient reasons, nothing to do with performance, public morality, or even ideas.

His paradigms will not only remain the same, woolly and stifling as they have been since he assumed office, they will also fail as usual to achieve any significant purpose. The problem with the Jonathan government, as everyone knows, is not just a case of long-lasting policy inconsistencies, accentuated by bureaucratic in-fighting; it is a case of acute absence of a solid inner core around which his governing paradigms could coalesce. So, the reshuffle as well as the selection of new cabinet members will neither be dictated by any attempt to reinforce the ideas that underpin and propel his government nor be geared towards demolishing his image as a bumbling president and recasting him as a statesman or a charismatic leader. When he assumed office, there was no indication of a genuine conviction about what and how his government should look like; there is nothing at the moment to indicate such a conviction has been birthed.

As a matter of fact, Dr Jonathan has shown over the few years that his leadership style is marked by a noticeable reluctance to do what is right and a marked stubbornness to amend what is wrong. He waited almost forever to get rid of Mr Orubebe even after it had become obvious the minister specialised in fomenting animosities in the Niger Delta than making friends for the president. Dr Jonathan also demonstrated an unrestrained foul mood in disciplining Ms Oduah after her serial indiscretions had all but alienated virtually everyone in the Aviation industry, civil society, and an incredulous international community stupefied by our government’s slothfulness. It is not clear what Dr Ngama’s faults were, or why the president should skip the head of that ministry and hit upon the seldom-seen and little-known Minister of State.

Left to Dr Jonathan, and had circumstances not pushed him to act, there was no way he would have unhorsed Ms Oduah. He proved quite reluctant to do what was right when he stuck adamantly to Bamanga Tukur, the arcane gerontocrat who turned both the PDP and reason itself on their heads. Until it became impossible for him to ignore the uproar triggered by Alhaji Tukur in the ruling party, the president was determined not to touch the former party chairman. Whether now, in the past, or in the future, Dr Jonathan will neither act out of conviction nor out of principles. On many occasions in the past he had acted solely out of expediency, dithering and pussyfooting all the way; he will continue to do so until the end of his presidency, whether or not he gets a second term.

Closely leashed to his often expedient way of handling grave matters is the fact that the president always acts when it is too late. When he finally and reluctantly removed Ms Oduah, he had left the matter to fester every badly until there was no honour left for him in the ugly incident of the armoured cars scandal. It had been expected the president would act firmly and expeditiously by sacking Ms Oduah and sustaining the integrity of the presidency. Instead, he left the matter for far too long, and tongues to wag ceaselessly, before he stirred himself. Whether he convinced himself his re-election chances were threatened by his lack of principles and promptness, or others persuaded him he risked a second term by doing nothing, we may never know. But at least we know he is a skilful procrastinator, one with an eye perpetually on the main chance.

Some of the names bandied as candidates for ministerial appointments are gentlemen the country is familiar with. They are strong, may add value, even if nominal, to the Jonathan presidency, and are ordinarily not bad choices. But for a government devoid of positive qualities other than the character of nothingness it both embodies and engenders, and for a government that values expediency over principles, these ‘strong’ men may end up adding nothing to the government, not even in an election year, contrary to the president’s expectations. Indeed, we should expect more procrastination, more surrender to expediency, more sacrifice of everything valuable on the altar of politics, and less adherence to the cause of anti-corruption, justice, fair play and equity. These, in short, typify the essential character of the Jonathan presidency. This character will not change in a million years, and it must shock the rational mind that any talented politician should invest his accomplishment and person on a government whose primary and primordial notions take on life only when mediocrity and farce manifest.

When Governor Kashim Shettima of Borno State hurried to Aso Villa last week to warn the president and country what terrible dangers his state and the entire Northeast confronted in the Boko Haram menace, he said a number of things that gave the impression of a paranoid speaking in hyperboles. The Boko Haram insurgents, he said plaintively but with a lot of deliberate and calculated animation, wielded more sophisticated arms than those issued to our soldiers. In addition, he wailed, the insurgents were more motivated than our troops. He was an incurable optimist, he summed up, but that didn’t make him so stupid as to deny the reality on the ground in the Northeast. And that reality, he added, was deathly and ominous.

The governor’s frantic visits stand in contrast to the unimaginative, if not lackadaisical, approach of President Goodluck Jonathan to the anti-terror war. In the early months of the insurgency, the president had shown considerable ambivalence. He vacillated between strong-arm tactics one day and conciliation another day. On some occasions, he described the insurgents in flattering but quizzical terms, and on other occasions he painted them in petrifying colours. When sufficiently inspired, he promised to fight them with all he had, but in the face of the sect’s sanguinary determination to plunge the country down the red gullet of war, he cowered behind his Aso Villa redoubt to celebrate the country’s Independence Day.

No president ever gave such ambiguous, embarrassing and cowardly signals. And no president ever failed so disastrously to ready and inspire his people for a noble war. The consequence is what the country is facing today. Not only is the insurgency raging fiercely, the presidency and even a majority of Nigerians have failed to appreciate the urgency of the threats the country is contending with and the roots of the revolt. It is true that the Northeast is the poorest part of Nigeria, but it is a cumulation of years of neglect by regional and federal governments, a neglect they will have to combine to combat. However, it is even truer that the insurgency is given fillip by the government’s longstanding and dangerous neglect of justice in all its ramifications.

Shockingly, regional and federal governments have not learnt any lesson regarding the denial of criminal, social and political justice. They have not learnt any lesson on equity and fairness between religions and between peoples. The society is riven by conflicts and by deliberately sponsored bigotry. Hearing Boko Haram leader Abubakar Shekau declaim on religion and society recently, it became clear just how woefully leaders in those parts had failed to build a responsible society with the right values. With his governance style and now abrasive manners, Dr Jonathan is even doing much worse, nurturing and promoting a society completely shorn of justice, equity and fairness. How could his troops feel motivated to fight Boko Haram with as much dedication and decorum as Governor Shettima hopes, when they are not part of a society we all have reasons to sacrifice our lives for, a society where to serve as an example a Stella Oduah is promptly punished for infractions, and a Sanusi Lamido Sanusi is not unfairly cudgelled for stepping on powerful toes?

For the duration of his hyperactive and fairly controversial tenure, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi never quite won my unalloyed support for some of his critical policies as Central Bank of Nigeria governor. Under him, for instance, the CBN’s acts of charity rankled in many regards. His banking reform measures were also implemented with a flamboyance and uppityness that left me wondering whether his unduly feisty approach to banks and banking regulations was not more appropriate for tinseltown than for apex banking. Then he often talked nineteen to the dozen, when restraint and reticence would do, and projected himself as the ultimate Nigerian iconoclast, a sort of business and class egalitarian indifferent to the accoutrements of the wealthy as he was not incommoded by the lowliness of the classless.

Indeed, as some elements of the report prepared against him by the Financial Reporting Council (FRC) indicated, Mallam Sanusi, who was brusquely suspended a few days ago by President Goodluck Jonathan, might be inadequate in some respects and needed to painstakingly convince his traducers his integrity was not sullied by any identifiable form of financial and regulatory brashness. Perhaps he still will. But whatever might be said of the suspended CBN governor, no one could accuse of him of a lack of dignity and character. I had reservations about some of his policies as CBN governor, but I never stopped respecting him for what he stood for and how pluckily he fought for what he believed. He called his soul his own and displayed a robustness of principles seldom seen in public office in these parts.

In contrast to the dour integrity shown by Mallam Sanusi in public office, Dr Jonathan has handled power most obliquely and impiously, if not with the irritating absolutism of a monarch. The president claims to have suspended Mallam Sanusi and describes the process as innocuously routine, but everything surrounding the suspension indicated the dismissive finality of a sack. Not only was the former CBN boss removed, his temporary and permanent replacements were hastily named with a temerity that reeked of political insensitivity and unconstitutionality, and with such absolute lack of grace and class that leaves one wondering how it was possible for Dr Jonathan to demean the Nigerian presidency to such level of pettiness.

Again, in contrast to his dithering over the proven allegations against former Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, and in consonance with the subterfuge evident in the suspension of former President of the Court of Appeal, Justice Ayo Salami, Dr Jonathan has choked and undermined the constitution by removing Mallam Sanusi in contemptuous disregard for the law. The excuse he gave for sacking the former CBN boss is that he breached some financial rules. But in reality, the removal was probably due to the president’s exasperation with Mallam Sanusi’s volubility and irreverence. The suspended CBN boss had complained bitterly at least twice about the NNPC’s unorthodox bookkeeping methods and financial malfeasance. And the complaints had elicited intense controversies and triggered insinuations that the Jonathan presidency condoned corruption, body language and all. But the snag is that the oil agency reports to the Minister of Petroleum, Diezani Alison-Madueke, one of Dr Jonathan’s favourite cabinet members, if not the most favoured minister. Two attempts to reconcile the books of the NNPC merely reduced the gaps, not eliminated them, and gave impression the agency was nothing but a sinkhole and a conduit for funding the politics of the ruling party.

By peremptorily sacking Mallam Sanusi, Dr Jonathan has finally given indication he will henceforth not be distracted by the constitution in the pursuit of his ambition to govern Nigeria along absolutist lines. Though he was careful not to cite any constitutional provision in sacking Mallam Sanusi, perhaps knowing full well that no such provisions existed to back him, it was nonetheless clear that he gave indication his action was lawful. But there is no conceivable way of reading or interpreting the CBN Act, as amended, particularly the applicable Section 11, to back the president’s action. It is intriguing that any lawyer, not to talk of any rational person, could suggest that the said provision could be construed any other way. Section 11 is not only clear and direct; it is not ambiguous at all. The president himself knew this.

The CBN Act doubtless empowers the president to remove a CBN governor if necessary, but that power is circumscribed by and contingent upon the approval of two-thirds of the members of the Senate. The president completely discountenanced this provision and went ahead to do the unthinkable. We may not like Mallam Sanusi, but if executive, legislative and judicial actions are to be based on whom we like or dislike, we would have complete chaos. Dr Jonathan, it is clear, is besotted to some of his ministers. Anyone that challenges his favourites pokes a finger in his eyes. When Dr Jonathan suspended Justice Salami and we failed to get him to reverse himself, we unwittingly approved the president’s resort to self-help. If we fail in checking this new impeachable breach of the constitution, we should ready ourselves for more flagrant breaches of the constitution in a tension-soaked election year.

The sacking of Mallam Sanusi is not just a case of the president getting rid of a headache; it is an indication of the underlying methodology of the Jonathan presidency and an example of his dreadful unease and impatience with the restraining and civilising leashes of the constitution. Dr Jonathan, I have said repeatedly, lacks the depth and idiosyncratic understanding to appreciate the kind of democracy Nigeria should run, and the kind of country we should have, one that should serve as example and provide leadership to the rest of Africa, and one that should challenge even the most democratic country in the world. Lacking such understanding and discipline, Dr Jonathan has constituted himself and his government into a tyranny run by a camorra of friends, avaricious aides and petulant family members. We are in far worse trouble than we imagine, especially in an election year, for the president has more dangerous concoctions on tap.

If we look forward to any salvation, it will certainly not come from the presidency. Those characters in the presidency are too far gone to be redeemable. If we look to the legislature, we would have to ponder which direction to go: is it to the House of Representatives or to the Senate? If it is to the House, it is satisfying to note that that assembly of men is fairly radical and of some use. But the constitution does not give them the kind of powers that would make them tame the president in the face of a grovelling and ingratiating Senate. And if it is to the Senate we look, we would be seeing nothing but a chimera. The Nigerian Senate is a party to the conspiracy to undermine the constitution, blissfully unaware that they are in effect undermining their own very existence. They see themselves more like an arm of the ruling party, nay, a department in the Jonathan presidency. They will do nothing radical or altruistic; and they will not lift a finger in the defence of the people or the constitution.

Might the judiciary be of any help? Mallam Sanusi has already indicated he would be seeking help in its hallowed precincts. But litigation produces its own paradoxes. By going to court, Mallam Sanusi will be denying us a confirmation of the Senate’s infamy and conspiracy with the Jonathan presidency. The Senate will cite the case in court and decline discussions on the unlawful act of suspending the CBN governor. And since there is already an acting CBN governor, as it were, it would not matter whether the Senate declined to confirm the president’s nominee, Godwin Emefiele. The president can afford to wait it out. So, too, disingenuously, can the conniving Senate. In June, after Mallam Sanusi’s natural tenure expires, Emefiele’s confirmation will be done, and it will seem natural and unimpeachable.

I restate once again that the problem is not Mallam Sanusi’s competence or style. The problem is that he raised fundamental and disquieting concerns about financial disparities in that most disturbing of arcana, the NNPC, and the fact that the president in sacking Sanusi acted most precipitately and brutishly by assaulting the constitution. If we condone these infringements, we will not only be exhibiting our powerlessness in the face of intense financial impropriety on the part of government agencies, we would also be signalling to Dr Jonathan that his monarchical tendencies, his contempt for the constitution, his demeaning attachment to a few of his cabinet members and his lawless predilections will be winked at. Dr Jonathan has taken the first awful steps in the direction of Somalia, Central African Republic, Sudan/South Sudan and Democratic Republic of Congo. It is no exaggeration to say he has thus taken us closer to the precipice than at any other time in our anguished and chequered history, including the civil war era. Should we indeed be compelled to endure four more years of Dr Jonathan and his lawlessness, as some pundits are projecting, there is no telling what horrifying fate the country would meet.

Both President Goodluck Jonathan and President Yoweri Museveni of Uganda are generally classed as homophobic. But while the former has tended to avoid being pinned down openly on the issue, which both countries’ parliaments have passed laws on, the latter has been eager to place himself dialectically on record. And, boy, was he articulate on CNN last week! It does not matter which side of the divide you are, as far as polemics go, Mr Museveni put his arguments together cogently, logically and fearlessly. I admire such people, who whether they are wrong or right always have the courage of their convictions. We already know where he stands, but could the much less intrepid and less eloquent Dr Jonathan please put himself on record verbally in the noisome controversy?

Last week, I indicated in this place that the Nigerian Senate had unashamedly become a unit of the Jonathan presidency. I was led to that conclusion by the way senators spoke and behaved over the controversial removal of the CBN governor, not because any of them openly confessed to loving the unparliamentary tactics of hanging Sanusi Lamido Sanusi. But since I made what I at first feared was a sweeping conclusion, ranking senators have openly and proudly acknowledged their attachments to the Jonathan presidency, an identification they have neither bothered to conceal nor explain nor even anchor on any reasonable foundation.

We have both Senators Enyinnaya Abaribe and Victor Ndoma-Egba to thank for opening our eyes. If anyone should say Jonathan did not act within his powers in suspending Mallam Sanusi, argued Senator Abaribe disdainfully, they are making ‘spurious and self-serving’ arguments. Quite right, deadpanned Senator Ndoma-Egba combatively and with a barely disguised hint of exasperation. “Senator Abaribe is the official spokesman of the Senate,” he summed up. He obviously offered this reiteration for effect, in case anyone thought the jaunty senator spoke only his mind and not that of the majority of the Senate. Now that we know where the Senate stands, and how self-assuredly they array themselves against common sense and the people, it is up to us in the next polls to throw them out or watch our democracy get sucked into the autocratic vortex being created by the likes of Dr Jonathan.

The Sanusi affair is of course not the first time the Senate has acted with reactionary zeal and insouciance. They worked hand in glove with the president on the budget and confirmation controversy, and they angrily endorsed the president’s position on the Rivers State affair, even to the extent of turning a blind eye on the indignity meted out to one of their own, Senator Magnus Ibe. At first I thought there was no end to the Senate’s conservatism; now I think there is no end to its reactionary proclivity.

In a lengthy but uninspiring speech last Wednesday to mark Nigeria’s centenary celebrations, President Goodluck Jonathan indulged one of his curious and often contradictory theological explanations for the country’s nationhood. According to him, “I have often expressed the conviction that our amalgamation was not a mistake. While our union may have been inspired by considerations external to our people; I have no doubt that we are destined by God Almighty to live together as one big nation, united in diversity.” It is an incredible claim to make, an unfounded and annoying political theology and falsehood. Historians will be aghast that in this modern era, when time and space no longer circumscribe knowledge, any leader could still make spurious and anti-intellectual claims about the dynamics of history.

Had Dr Jonathan been president of the Soviet Union before its breakup in 1991, he would have sworn to the country’s destiny, attributed it to God, and threatened campaigners of separatism with death and destruction. Whoever wrote the speech for Dr Jonathan must suffer from an acute lack of rigour and understanding in the distasteful attempt to imbue Nigeria with an implacable and false messianic destiny. If God destined the existence of Czechoslovakia in 1918, who then destined its breakup in 1993? And when the country was a part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, who destined the existence of that empire in 1867, the excision of Czechoslovakia from the empire in 1918, and the split of the Central European country into Czech and Slovakia?

As far as theology goes, the Book of Daniel in Chapter 2 discusses the fearsome dynamics of world history through Nebuchadnezzar’s dream of the statue of four metals representing the morphing of major powers from one kingdom to another over centuries. Babylon fell, Medes and Persia also fell; so did Greece and Rome. Nigeria, which comprised many kingdoms and empires, was put together in 1914. Any historian of modest understanding knows it will not remain so forever. Borders will change, powers will change, indeed everything will change. Dr Jonathan quotes God casually without understanding Him or the forces of nature and history, as if God Himself is opposed to change.

But beyond Dr Jonathan’s poor understanding of history and his sometimes superficial analysis of theological doctrines, there is also the matter of his poor grasp of general issues. When the idea of celebrating Nigeria’s centenary was first mooted, this column took the government to task, denouncing the effort as a poor misreading of Nigerian history and a lack of political consciousness. We may not be able to rewrite history, Palladium argued, but neither the selfish motive behind the amalgamation, which Dr Jonathan cursorily glossed over in his Wednesday address, nor the even crueller story of colonialism that led to appalling mistreatment of our peoples and distortion of our values and society deserved celebration.

However, to demonstrate the irredeemable vacuity of the Jonathan presidency, its frivolity and waste, and its appalling lack of a sense of proportion, it produced a list of 100 people, living or dead, saint or sinner, tyrant and murderers on whom to confer centenary honours. And horror of all horrors, leading the list are our former overlords, the Queen of England, Lord Lugard and Lady Lugard; the first a representative of the thieving and conniving metropole; the second a highly contemptuous and quite cynical colonial master whose deplorable objectives ignored our pride and feelings; and the third, the idle consort of the field-based colonial master. On the occasion of Nigeria’s centenary, the largest black nation on earth deemed it appropriate to honour those who raped it. Such lack of a sense of history is nowhere to seek. Imagine the United States in 1876 honouring the British monarch of the day and, say, General Thomas Gage who commanded the colonial army in the American War of Independence.

It is depressing to live in these times, especially under the Jonathan presidency. The world laughs at us, ridicules us, and shakes their heads. I wonder what will be going on in the mind of the Queen of England herself, an intelligent woman who should naturally expect us to painfully endure the mocking vestiges of colonialism, such as the Commonwealth, rather than celebrate them, not to talk of conferring honours on their perpetrators. When did we decay intellectually to the point of producing a list of honorees that included our tormentors?

Contained in the list are our own homegrown tyrants and tormentors, including the hedonistic Gen Sani Abachja, and a host of other truce breakers and constitution destroyers, people who ordinarily should be completely ostracised from civilised society and polite circles. Knowing that Nigerians will stare at them in disbelief, the government has offered the incredulous argument that Gen Abacha merited top honours because he did wonders with the economy at a time of great scarcity. The statistics of general economic improvements cannot be controverted, I admit. But the general also murdered, stole, schemed madly, needlessly and ferociously to feed his paranoia, and also destroyed values on a scale that beggars belief. Whatever good he did with the economy is more than counterbalanced and vitiated by the huge scale of his enduring malfeasances.

Like all other honours Nigeria dishes out periodically, many of which have now become completely meaningless, the Jonathan presidency perfunctorily included in the list all past heads of state, three-quarters of whom undermined the constitution to seize power, and nearly all of whom recorded no meaningful industrial and political advancement for us to remember them by. Yet, Dr Jonathan last Friday even moaned that he found it arduous to pick the 100 honorees from a list of 500 candidates thrust under his nose. The 100 is disputed, let alone the 500. Much worse, the idea of a centenary itself could only have been conceived by usurpers with house negro mentality.

Dr Jonathan’s pathetic list of course included eminent sons and daughters of Nigeria. Unfortunately for him, however, were they to be alive, they would have violently declined to be listed among so many villains, not to talk of being honoured by a government that is unenlightened, misdirected, autocratic and clearly unpatriotic. Would a Chinua Achebe who all his life spurned their honour, and a Fela Anikulapo Kuti who rebelled against the suffocating madness that afflicted and still afflicts the country have welcomed the wasteful and inappropriate centenary honours? Would a Gani Fawehinmi in his grave not curse any family member purporting to represent him in collecting the honours? And what of the paradox of this needless mafficking at a time of great national mourning and angst represented by the mass murder embarked upon by Boko Haram and aggravated by religious, ethnic and political bigots of all shapes and sizes?

It is not lost on this columnist that scions of some famous families gladly and heedlessly accepted the honours. They are entitled to their imprudence. The sensible among us must, however, understand that those scions accepted the honours more as a consolation to themselves than to their illustrious forebears, and perhaps because they needed to nurture their political and economic interests at a time when ideological lines have become dangerously blurred. Their behaviour is in fact a reflection of how precariously those scions have stopped representing the values and principles their famous fathers and mothers stood for, and how far they have veered away from the struggles those patriarchs and matriarchs waged for a better society.

I note, of course, that the Soyinkas and Achebes simply ignored the charlatans, and the Fawehinmis and Kutis viciously lampooned the freak show artists and political contortionists. Alive, they proved it was not worth dignifying the nonsensical celebration with even a rejection of the honours. And dead, they proved that their legatees not only inherited the genes of their departed patriarchs, but that they have also imbibed the values that shaped and ennobled their struggles over the decades. Nigerians must thank this defiant set for giving us hope that all is not lost, and that whether by gentle deliberateness or by brutal accident, perhaps even a mutation, this country will someday fall under the hypnosis and influence of sensible leaders and people.

The Jonathan presidency is stubborn and imperious. Once their impressionable minds were set on that needless centenary distraction, there was nothing anyone could do to persuade them they were embarking on a foolish adventure. They have had their way, after voting taxpayers’ money to indulge themselves. They have refused to tell us how much they spent, and the National Assembly couldn’t be bothered. However, were our image as a people and our race as blacks not involved in that atrocious display of wealth and folly by this government, why, of course, it would not have mattered one bit whether they celebrated the transatlantic slave trade and conferred honours on the leading slave-holding and slave-torturing families of that era. For no matter how much you proved to this insensitive government that slave trade presaged the colonialism they now celebrate 100 years after and that colonialism in turn helped foster a racist ideology from which the continent still suffers, they are too hard of hearing to care.

Much more than the mileage the Jonathan presidency hoped to achieve with the emblazoning photograph of past Nigerian rulers wearing their medals and displaying their centennial award certificates late last month, the picture actually tells a far more poignant and iconic story. There were seven of them: Abdulsalami Abubakar, Muhammadu Buhari, Yakubu Gowon, Olusegun Obasanjo, Shehu Shagari, Ibrahim Babangida and Ernest Shonekan. Smack in the middle was, of course, President Goodluck Jonathan himself. Given his predilection for sham celebrations, it is surprising he did not seize upon the same argument of the centenary to award himself a certificate of honour. In any case, Dr Jonathan was the only one in the pictures published on March 1 newspapers not brandishing a certificate. Others dutifully wore their medals and/or displayed their certificates, thereby indicating their concurrence with the queer and questionable philosophy behind the centenary as well as the disgraceful rational for picking the honourees.

The photograph, though powerful and resonating, nevertheless tells the very depressing story of futile uniformity and lack of rigour. It tells the story of former rulers whose unquestioning perspective and fondness for the meretricious led them to embrace a project as wasteful as it is truly and totally mendacious. None of the seven questioned the ideological basis for the centenary, nor joined issues with the financially oblique accounting system that made the celebrations possible. None of them was politically conscious enough to appreciate the centenary’s distortionary effects on our history and identities. There was none of them with enough sagacity to disprove the base and conflicting logic that underlined the compilation of the list of honourees, thus indicating that the former rulers were insensitive to their own individual legacies and unable to disambiguate legacy as a word and concept.

The group photograph of former rulers should illustrate the power and glory of Nigeria, of our best men and leaders, of the rich custodians of our politics, culture and essence. Instead, the group photograph illustrated something so surrealistic it is a miracle the country has not collapsed under the weight of their collective obscurantism. They had no idea what our history says, of how we were humiliated and traumatised with a lasting injury by colonialism, of how Lugard’s foundational rule and years of self-misrule combined to misshape our values and enthrone a vicious form of mental and economic slavery. It was therefore okay by them to celebrate, and to carry out that sickening exercise in company with one another, the liar with the perjurer, the tyrant with the murderer, the inept with the experimentalist.

The photograph inferentially tells the numbing story of how and why the country decayed so badly for decades, and by their admission, now needs revolutionary work to salvage, if indeed, as one of them said, it can still be salvaged. If they could not question Dr Jonathan’s frivolity and rebuff it, if they did not understand the history of the country they led for decades, and if they were unable to share its pains and sorrows, how indeed could they fashion brilliant and workable plans for its development and greatness? How could they make it the pride of the black race? To participate in Dr Jonathan’s revelry, they must have gone to extraordinary lengths to muffle their consciences, and to shut the tap of remorse which a clear mind and ample soul sometimes lead a decent man and patriot to demonstrate.

The photograph of the eight men reminds us how our country was ruined. Gowon dishonoured his word and rendered it impotent; Shagari’s stolidity and indulgence clogged the national arteries until we choked; Buhari had little or no appreciation of the rights and freedoms of man, and how man is ennobled by these attributes; Babangida was the inappropriate watershed between the age of innocence and the age of vice, as he gave birth to the worst in us; and Shonekan was the bemused and amoral inheritor of a stolen legacy. Abubakar’s misguided and messianic reign produced the highly schizoid Obasanjo who had, and still has, no capacity for differentiating between truth and falsehood. And Obasanjo archetypically begat meddlesomeness in such a manner that the country’s ruin was complete under his predecessors.

Yes, it was just one simple photograph published in newspapers. But, alas, it told a million sad stories, unknown to the former rulers who lined up quizzically for the photograph on February 28, and perhaps unfeeling.

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All of a sudden, politics has become cerebral. With the unveiling on Thursday of the All Progressives Congress’ social contract with Nigeria, in which the leading opposition party spells out in detail how it would govern the country and what the fundamental underpinnings of that government would be, it is hard not to acknowledge that we have finally reached a political watershed. No matter what anybody does now, and notwithstanding the bellyaching and proclivities of the ruling party, political platforms and campaigns must henceforth acquire sophistication and depth. I confess that the APC surprised me. It was well publicised that the party would make some kind of public presentation of a Code of Ethics and what can be properly described as a manifesto, but few expected the exercise to rise above the routine and stultifying level the country had become accustomed to in the past few decades or so.

Divided into many segments, the presentation showed coherence, class, style and consistency. The organisers’ sense of timing was fluidly dynamic and business-like, accompanied by the sort of discipline seldom realised in these parts, no matter how hard the effort. There were a few transgressions to be sure, like the poetic rendition the organisers, not the lady who did the presentation, didn’t manage with maturity, but on the whole, I was shocked by the modernity of the entire exercise. The segments were in fact so finely synchronised and showed depth and undisputed grasp of issues that I thought the whole thing ventured so daringly into uncharted and unsustainable territories. I half expected them to flounder at any moment, but they didn’t.

The speakers were themselves quite exceptional, to a man. When the founders of the party spoke, they did so with gravitas, absolutely shorn of the overbearing carriage and grammatical lunacy that sullied and undid the politics of the past. The progressives had been accused of one-man show, both in the distant and recent past. But on Thursday, the APC carried out a dress rehearsal of the egalitarianism, fraternity and equality they promised would be the credo of their party. No one dominated proceedings; and no one was an underdog. Tom Ikimi wandered a bit in his contribution, struggling for the rousing snobbery that lathered his Third Republic politics, but in general he made his point stoically. Audu Ogbeh, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Bisi Akande and Atiku Abubakar spoke firmly and precisely of the foundations of the party and their hopes for Nigeria. And the laconic Mohammadu Buhari spoke tersely of what APC hoped to accomplish.

There was quite some excitement when the 16 progressive governors addressed the audience. Rochas Okorocha of Imo spiritedly set the tone. Some of the governors addressed the cortex of the audience, and others spoke to their midriff. But they never lost sight of the need to inspire and, in a quaint way, even to rouse. It is hard not to imagine what great things the lot could do if the leadership of the country fortuitously passed into their hands. I doubt whether any other party for now can surpass them intellectually and in political drama. Somehow, too, the party managed to pull off the segment on the 10-point programme presentation. Not only was the content coherent and remarkable, even by international standards, the impassioned discussants, including the boisterously lovable rascal Dino Melaye and the implacable Nasir el-Rufai were classical in their performances.

I thought the keynote lecture ought to have been delivered by a politician of great standing and rhetorical flamboyance, someone with a Clintonian flourish or the mesmerising profundity of the lawyerly Obama. But the APC gave the assignment to the dour and gritty Oby Ezekwesili, who though was brilliant and courageous, did not deliver her excellent ideas with an eye on politics or the excitement of a soapbox artist. Dr Ezekwesili needed to be patient with her audience and carry them along with the sufferance of an mesmerising politician. But when she appeared to be heckled at a point during her lecture she gestured and snapped, and was even impatient and reproachful, thereby creating an anticlimactic dissonance on the APC’s great moment.

What is, however, most remarkable about the APC presentation last Thursday is not even the content of the party’s 10-point road map, as innovative, comprehensive and daring as it is, or the calibre and depth of the party’s leading functionaries. What is most remarkable is the party’s overall show of political iconoclasm, its exemplification, if not embodiment, of new political dynamics anchored on clear, coherent thinking, energetic perspectives and great hopes for the future. The party’s presentation is also indicative of the new politics that is afoot, one in which a truly pan-Nigerian party not encumbered by ethnic and sectional bigotry can be formed and efficiently run. The greatest challenge they will face, however, is how such a party without a strongman as it were, a party whose strength is both its diversity and new egalitarian foundation, can deploy its new-found democratic apparatus to elect candidates capable of winning elections, especially at the presidential level. The APC must be prepared to resolve the conundrum of how to combine its remarkable manifesto and new identity with the ability to elect a winning ticket. The outcome is not always inevitable.

Given the party’s new form, it is no longer possible for it to engage in candidate selections, at least not substantially, nor visibly. It has a new life, a new enthusiasm, a new conviction about politics and about democracy in particular. It is already soaring in its own fancies, determined to replicate the best attributes of Western democracies. It is therefore expected to submit itself to the rigours of the quintessential democratic processes, from ward level to the convention floor, complete with signature campaign frills and lofty speeches, far better than what it displayed last week in Abuja. But when they subject themselves to the demands and strictures of the democratic process, would they have the assurance that the process can adapt to and accommodate the shifting mores of the land, which mores have ethnic, geopolitical and religious configurations and implications?

If APC leaders will be honest, and if they are as eager as some of us to see a new party in power, they must be entertaining some doubts already about the competence of the new processes they have triggered to produce such outcomes as would take the party into Aso Villa. I myself entertain some doubts, for as the Democratic and Republican parties in the United States sometimes show, not to talk of the Conservative and Labour parties in the United Kingdom, parties at times fail woefully in cobbling together the right platform for victory or producing the right candidates. No matter how brilliant the APC’s manifesto, and no matter how suave and democratic its intra-party processes, it is not guaranteed that it can elect a winning ticket; nor that its proboscises are sharp and sensitive enough to read the country’s mood correctly.

One thing that emerged from Thursday’s event in Abuja, however, is that the party has deftly wrong-footed the PDP and showed it up as a political dinosaur. But I have confidence that the PDP will respond forcefully and perhaps violently, for it appears to me to be a party which, in structure and philosophy, is dedicated to strong-arm tactics and is absolutely incapable of the dynamism, intellectualism and exhibitionism so positively and entertainingly displayed by the opposition party last Thursday.

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Last week, the Director of Defence Information , Maj Gen Chris Olukolade, accused politicians of making remarks capable of inciting troops battling the Boko Haram insurgency to mutiny. He did not expatiate. But he threatened that the authorities could invoke relevant provisions in the State of Emergency Act to bring offenders to book.

Even if it is true that anyone is inciting troops, the job of cautioning or prosecuting offenders should be left to the Minister of Defence to handle. The way he spoke and the content of his speech, however, show that the military rule mindset has not left the officers.

If the military is frustrated about its inability to quell the revolt, so are we. We are even more frustrated and worried, and fear that the military has not found the right mix of strategies and tactics to deal the insurgency an effective blow. Had we not criticised the military in its relationship with civilians in Baga, for instance, the improvement in psychological operations (Psy-Ops) that followed and won the populace over to their side would not have occurred.

The military top brass must appreciate public worries and find ways of reassuring and conciliating them. Threats are counter-productive. The army general should know that threatening or arresting the so-called inciters is like opening another major, needless and unwinnable front in the war against terror. Gen Olukolade should brief the public on the progress of the war and leave the minister the task of winning over the public and muffling criticisms and complaints.

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Like most other policies, including the flip-flop on rice import ban and the automotive policy, there is little debate, not to talk of deep, intellectual introspection accompanying the Goodluck Jonathan approach to fighting Boko Haram and terrorism in general. We are conversant with the endless presidential dithering on the menace, but finally, it seems, events and circumstances have compelled the government to stand and fight, instead of yielding, as its natural instincts always dictated. Horrifyingly, however, the government and the populace have decided to do nothing but fanatically fight the terrorist sect almost to the total exclusion of other measures. There is no discussion going on with the sect, as now seems obvious. And there is nothing beyond the trashed panel reports on the sect to show that both the government and the military have a minimal understanding of the sect’s social, political and ideological underpinnings.

This column has always maintained that the sect should be fought with single-minded resolve. But it has also always reminded the government of the need to address the factors that predisposed the Northeast in particular to the revolt, and urged the military to appreciate the kind of tactics required to defeat the sect and other revolts like it. I once reminded the military after the Baga, Borno State debacle that it must begin to furnish itself with the requisite knowledge needed to combat the multifarious challenges to stability and peace in the modern era. The country’s military doctrine, not to say our foreign policy doctrine, should be thoroughly revamped and modernised to take care of modern exigencies.

But given Dr Jonathan’s often inexplicable silence on the war and his reluctance to empathise with the victims, as well as the military’s sometimes exaggerated opinion of its understanding of the sect’s methods and what should constitute the rights and liberties of enemy combatants and victims of the war, it appears nothing is being done to ensure that when the war ends, the right lessons have been learnt and future reoccurrence made nearly impossible. There are a number of elements that show no lesson has been learnt. First, is the all-important matter of justice. Not only has the trial of the policemen who extra-judicially murdered the sect’s former leader, Mohammed Yusuf, been clumsily handled, even the trial judge recently threatened to discharge the suspects on account of state/prosecution apathy. The government is truly apathetic to justice.

Second, all those who contributed to the impoverishment of the region and other parts of the country continue to underplay their guilt and complicity. To show how distracted the federal government is, it managed to allocate two billion naira to address the devastation in the Boko Haram region. And third, and of course very significantly, the Northern political class that inherited the political mantle of the late Sardauna of Sokoto, Ahmadu Bello, without his wisdom, restraint and accommodation, have shown absolutely no contrition for perpetrating decades of religious discrimination that fostered the fanaticism being witnessed today. It was obvious to most Nigerians that they were at first silent over the sect’s bestiality, before waking up to the reality that extremism of any kind and within or outside any faith is absolutely intolerable. Do Northern leaders now have this clear understanding, learning, as it were, from the experiences of Iraq, Somalia and Afghanistan, among others?

The military has appeared to find its teeth in facing up to the Boko Haram madness. Hopefully the cessation of hostilities will not morph into scattered and intermittent suicide attacks on selected targets such as take place in Iraq, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Russia and now China. However, the factors that sparked and now feed the war can only be denied fuel if the injustices and short-sightedness that serve as its lifeblood are eliminated. Could we trust the federal government and the political elite to take the revolutionary steps needed to remake the northern society and build it into a beautiful tapestry of heterogeneousness, the kind conceived and administered by the late Sardauna of Sokoto? Could we, indeed, trust those saddled with the onerous responsibility of ruling a large and complex society like Nigeria to embrace reason rather than emotions in administering the affairs of the country?

I have my doubts. For, even after Boko Haram is defeated, the absence of a remade and re-engineered society, one anchored on the right mix of liberal values, could yet trigger sporadic outbreaks of sectarian and ethnic wars that may ultimately doom the polity. This is the time for the philosopher-king, if we can find one.

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It is difficult not to contemplate Ukraine’s Crimean crisis with an eerie sense of déjà vu. Jostling for strategic or religious influence in the Holy Land, Crimea and the Black Sea in the mid-19th century, Western powers in alliance with the weakened Ottoman Empire took on Russia in a bitter war that caused the death of more than 350,000 people and stymied Russia’s 200 years attempt to expand southwards towards the warm water trading and naval ports of the Black Sea around the Crimea. The Western powers alliance of Britain, France and Sardinia achieved the aim of halting Russian territorial expansion, securing Britain’s ambition in the eastern Mediterranean as well as gaining for France the control of the rights of Catholics in the Holy Land. Christened the Crimean War or the Eastern War, it was fought between 1853 and 1856, and was hallmarked by tactical and logistical incompetence memorialised in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s narrative poem, The Charge of the Light Brigade.

Today, borders may have been redrawn, and the reasons for disagreement may have changed considerably from religious to strategic and ethnic/nationalist, the general outlook of the conflict between the West and Russia on that peninsula has, however, ossified, in spite of the intervening variables of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation’s inroads into Eastern Europe. Crimea itself, the reason for the dangerous flexing of muscles going on between Russia on one hand and the West and Ukraine on the other hand, has the unenviable history of being occupied by many powers, and its ethnic pastiche altered often catastrophically, as the 1944 wholesale deportation of the Crimean Tatars showed. By the time the Tatars returned in 1991 after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Russians had become the dominant ethnic group in Crimea, constituting about 60 percent of the population. Tatar- and Ukrainian-speaking peoples constitute about 13 and 24 percent respectively.

Russia, however, never really stopped coveting Crimea principally because of the warm ports of the Black Sea where Russia’s Black Sea Fleet is based. It also has a declared policy of defending Russian-speaking people wherever they are, as it claimed to have done in Abkhazia and South Ossetia in 2008 during the Russo-Georgian War. It was against this background that the Ukrainian revolution was set, a revolution primarily designed to bring the country into the orbit of the European Union (EU), economically and politically. The revolution however, had the unintended consequence of accentuating the dichotomy between the Ukrainian- and Russian-speaking parts of the country. So, when on February 23, the Ukrainian parliament abolished the law of languages of minorities, which Russian-speaking Ukrainians and Russia itself felt was provocative, the stage for intervention was set. It no longer mattered that in 1953, the Ukrainian-born Soviet Leader, Nikita Khrushchev, had ceded Crimea to Ukraine, nor did it matter that Russia’s intervention violated international law. Nor, still, did it matter that the intervention was certain to draw the ire of the European Union, attract sanctions and engender a massive boycott of the G-8 summit expected to hold in the Winter Olympic city of Sochi on June 4.

While Russia has legitimate military concerns in the Crimea, it is difficult to excuse the invasion of the peninsula, or connive at the desperate intervention in Ukraine. Though the trigger for the February revolution was the EU deal the deposed president, Viktor Yanukovych, refused to sign due to Russian pressure, it is unproductive to analyse the Crimean crisis from the standpoint of one’s geopolitical preferences. Whether one supports or opposes Western powers and their values hardly matters as much as the legal, moral and political interpretation of international law, particularly the principle of non-intervention. Russia doubtless made efforts to influence Ukraine to remain within its orbit by offering juicy economic deals and loans, but the efforts failed to bear fruit. Hence the resort to force. But In the long run, force is more likely to poison relationships between the two countries than create atmosphere for friendship and trust. Given the ethnic composition of Crimea, the chances of future destabilisation and violent resistance cannot be ruled out should Russia annex the peninsula. Importantly, too, Russian insistence that it reserved the right to intervene wherever Russians outside of Russia faced a bad deal is a throwback to the destabilising nationalism that pushed the world into wars and conflicts in the 20th century. It will be recalled that Germany under Adolf Hitler used the pretext of the maltreatment of Germans in the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia to invade that Eastern European country. That fateful step pushed the world into war and cost the more than three million Germans living there to be whittled down to less than 160,000 after the war. It would be strange to use the German-speaking peoples of Switzerland and Austria as pretext for an invasion in this modern era.

There is, however, the possibility that Russia may be using the occupation of Crimea as a bargaining tool to win more concessions and gain firmer assurances of the neutrality of Ukraine. In other words, if Ukraine does not love Russia, it must not love the EU. And in the face of expanding NATO influence and incursion in Eastern Europe, Russia is determined that the line be drawn in the sands of Ukraine, as it drew the line in South Ossetia by balkanising Georgia during the Russo-Georgian War of 2008. But overall, for Russia to achieve enduring foreign policy goals and rebuild itself into a more durable superpower, it may have to find ways of concocting a worldview infinitely more appealing to its neighbours than it has been for centuries. This it can do by either designing an attractive ethical core for its foreign and domestic policies or by coaxing neighbouring and far-flung entities into its orbit through economic, social, cultural and other relations. In the long run, as history shows, including the history of Crimea itself, force does not prove as capable and adequate as more novel and indirect measures in creating lasting impressions, attraction and love in weaker or vassal states.

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