Robert Mugabe, the bellicose and tenacious nonagenarian President of Zimbabwe, gave Nigeria such a hefty piece of his mind during his birthday luncheon last week that many people were left nonplussed. A few Southern African leaders, including the late Nelson Mandela, often felt disgusted by Nigeria’s mediocre achievements, but until now they vented their frustrations behind closed doors. Last week, however, Mr Mugabe could no longer hide his exasperation. Said he while reproving Zimbabweans at the luncheon hosted by his country’s Service Chiefs and Public Commission: “Are we now like Nigeria where you have to reach your pocket to get anything done? You see, we used to go to Nigeria and every time we went there, we had to carry extra cash in our pockets to corruptly pay for everything. You get into a plane in Nigeria and you sit there and the crew keeps dilly dallying without taking off as they want you to pay them to fly the plane.”

Not quite one week after Mr Mugabe made the scathing remark about Nigeria’s well-known romance with corruption, President Goodluck Jonathan visited next door Namibia. Meeting with the Nigerian community in Windhoek, the country’s capital city, the president described talk of corruption in Nigeria as unduly celebrated. Corruption is everywhere in the world, he said tersely, but because Nigerians talk about it effusively (perhaps he meant to say report it), the country is stigmatised everywhere. Contemplate the president’s weird logic for a moment, if you can. His problem, it seems, is that talk of corruption is celebrated in Nigeria, not that it exists on the scale the world is familiar with. If only we could bury it or de-emphasise it, all would be well, so thought the president in Namibia.

But did Dr Jonathan rebut Mr Mugabe’s conclusions? Was the Zimbabwean president’s perception coloured by our boisterous celebration of talk of corruption, rather than the plain, hideous fact of our corruption? Indeed, is there anyone, Nigerian or foreigner, who needs anyone’s report to appreciate the maddening delight Nigerians take in corruption? Can anyone truly get anything done in Nigeria without, as Mr Mugabe put it dishearteningly, paying for it? There is absolutely no doubt what the answers are, even if Dr Jonathan buries his head in the sand, pretending not to know how he has by his lack of diligence magnified the inventiveness of corrupt Nigerians and coloured the sham heroism of the anti-corruption agencies.

In Windhoek, Dr Jonathan also talked about the futility of fighting corruption with a sledgehammer. Alas, he gives the false impression he is fighting corruption with anything at all, sledgehammer or plastic hammer. If anyone requires proof of how Dr Jonathan is fighting corruption, assuming any fighting is going on at all, let him ask the president’s ministers, especially the former Minister of Aviation, Stella Oduah, and the Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke, who is alleged to have frittered away billions on egotistic plane junkets.

Mr Mugabe did not exaggerate. On the contrary, it is Dr Jonathan who is living in denial. Africans know us well for who we are. So, too, do many other world leaders, even if they humour us with sympathetic words and gestures. The reputation of a corrupt Nigeria is not one Dr Jonathan can get rid of with his feather touches and kitchen midden policies, not even if his past years of slack policies and bureaucratic lassitude were rewarded with another four undeserving years.

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President Goodluck Jonathan generates both excitement and puzzlement whenever he makes speeches. While inaugurating the national conference in Abuja last week, he was at his most robust best with this fallacious supposition: “In our history as a political entity, we have experienced highs and lows but have always forged ahead. To my mind, the fact that we have weathered all storms and continued with the mission of evolving a truly national identity signifies that we are going in the right direction.” But there is absolutely nothing in what we are doing or how we doing it that shows we are headed in what the president describes as the right direction. If we were headed in the right direction, why would we need a national conference to remake the country’s template? The speech was indeed full of many other false and homiletic suppositions and propositions, disjointed efforts to stir the people with tired and worn-out phrases, not to talk of many sweeping statements the president himself, by his antecedents, never embraced nor endorsed.

Predictably, too, he all but ended his speech, which massaged the ego of the national conference delegates and listeners around the country, with the equally untrue and vexatious proposition: “We need a new mind and a new spirit of oneness and national unity. The time has come to stop seeing Nigeria as a country of many groups and regions. We have been divinely brought together under one roof. We must begin to see ourselves as one community. We are joined together by similar hopes and dreams as well as similar problems and challenges. What affects one part of the community affects the other.” Both in his past political campaigns and present disposition, including his unguarded and insistent deployment of religion as a tool of political mobilisation, Dr Jonathan evidently repudiates the ‘one community’ spirit he so facilely recommends. As proof that he and his speechwriters hardly read contemporary materials and analyses on grave national issues, he restates the false theology of attributing divine permanence to national borders, a deeply mendacious and ahistorical theology rebutted in this place several times and in many other write-ups elsewhere.

What is clear is that Dr Jonathan and his national conference delegates repose an unrealistic confidence in the conference both as a sacrifice for our national slothfulness and indiscipline and as the ultimate panacea for the woes afflicting the body politic, woes almost entirely man-made. Apart from the fact that a significant number of the conferees had before now dedicated their lives and careers wholly to the subversion of the national interest and to nurturing and benefiting from the status quo, Dr Jonathan has himself deftly appointed many delegates – though he pretends to altruism – whom he is confident will either ingratiatingly rally behind his battle cry when the need arises or are too enfeebled by ideological stasis to challenge his frequent brainstorms. Given the flattering stipend voted for each delegate, and the fact that some of them even celebrated their appointments as delegates with newspaper advertisements, the doubts of sceptics are more likely to grow and be reinforced. For in the final analysis, we are more likely to get a highly compromised constitution, in the spirit dictated by Dr Jonathan, than tackle the real problems undermining the country.

There is also the expectation that Dr Jonathan, conference delegates and many other Nigerians hope the conference will arrest the country’s dangerous march towards the precipice, in addition to providing a road map to peace, unity and prosperity. I am an advocate of sovereign national conference as a tool for formulating a framework for national coexistence and cohesion. But I have never imagined that even if that template was designed, peace and prosperity would inevitably be guaranteed. The 1999 constitution might have presumptuously claimed to be a people’s constitution, like all other constitutions before it, but that presumptuousness did not indicate that the constitution could not be redeemed by intelligent and altruistic leadership and citizenry through patriotic and substantial constitutional amendments. In his speech to the conference, Dr Jonathan makes the trite argument that a constitution is a living document needing periodic review and possible amendment. It is good that that elementary fact has dawned on him. That epiphany, it must be added, did not escape his predecessor, the highly animated but obtrusive Olusegun Obasanjo. Yet neither Dr Jonathan nor Chief Obasanjo made conscientious effort at the beginning of their presidencies to remedy the situation.

For both Chief Obasanjo and Dr Jonathan, the fact is that they think constitutional review, mechanically done through legislative work or national conference, can replace the need to devise a philosophical framework upon which the country’s government must be anchored if it is not to experience persistent disruptions or atrophy. Had that philosophical framework been devised and applied, the passion to build a great nation, one that eschews the kind of injustice rife in the land and eliminate the massive alienation and politics of exclusion undermining the polity, would have seized the hearts and minds of Nigeria’s rulers. Historians recognise this philosophical framework in Rome under the first two Caesars, Britain in Pax Britannica, the United States in Pax American (and its discredited variant, the New American Century), and Stalin’s and to some extent Vladimir Putin’s Russia. It also existed under Tito’s Yugoslavia, France’s Gaullism, Hitler’s Germany (in a perverse way), and contradistinctively in Bismarck’s Germany and Charlemagne’s Holy Roman Empire, among others.

The point is that there is a crushing and suffocating absence of knowledge-based leadership. Most Nigerian leaders have either been ordinary men or, if active and passionate, nothing more than practical men. They are not philosophical because they are unable to be. That philosophic state of being comes from the inside and is based on the depth of knowledge and understanding one has acquired. Constitution reviews do not teach, and cannot imbue, that essential quality of a knowledge-based or philosophical leadership. Recall, for instance, the drafting of post-war Japanese constitution, how Gen Douglas MacArthur all but framed it, though it was fleshed out by the technocratic expertise of men like Shigeru Yoshida. That constitution has philosophical underpinnings that have made it to endure. Recall also that the framing of France’s Fifth Republic constitution and its military doctrine, especially the now discarded Force de Frappe nuclear policy, were essentially the work of Gen Charles de Gaulle. Italy’s constitution did not have the benefit of that Gaullist touch, making its constitution often inadequate in addressing the country’s contemporary needs.

Dr Jonathan has transferred the responsibility for the making of a new constitution, as it were, to his national conference. Understandably, he has no original ideas to contribute, because his knowledge of history and politics, like Chief Obasanjo’s, is severely limited, if not obfuscated and jaundiced. Indeed, whatever the conference comes up with is unlikely to arrest the drift towards chaos, for the problems are so fundamental that this conference, not to talk of the Jonathan government itself, is hopelessly incapable of inspiring the structured and disciplined approach to national political renewal. Consider, for instance, the fact that Dr Jonathan has not ensured a legal basis for the conference. Worse, he has left the outcome of the conference open-ended, unsure whether it should be validated with a referendum or be a part of the National Assembly’s constitutional amendment process. Would this not create extreme dissonance in the system, and given the intellectual conceit and volubility of some of the conferees, would the stage not be set for a major political clash possibly ending in the deliberate or accidental extension of the electoral timetable?

A national conference may be underway and a new constitution in the works, but the country is proceeding blithely towards catastrophe with its troubles over kerosene subsidy rip-off, fuel subsidy financial abracadabra, rape epidemic, political violence, religious conflicts, pension heists, and Boko Haram insurgency, among others. There is no plan or deep thinking to fashion a way out of these symptoms of grave and precipitous societal decline. Indeed, we are in far worse trouble than we think. It is, therefore, urgent that we come to the realisation of the limits of Jonathan’s conference, and appreciate why we need to compel this government to do what is intelligently necessary in the few months it has left. Above all, there is a far more urgent need to vote a thinking government into office, or we perish.

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Reactions to the shocking outburst of the Lamido Adamawa, Muhammadu Barkindo Mustafa, on the floor of the national conference have ranged from the indifferent to the hysterical, and from the liberal to the downright chauvinistic. Asked to give his view on whether the conference should call for memoranda from the public, Dr Mustafa deviated into issues virtually at a tangent to the discussions, issues that had apparently bothered him for some time, and which some believe reflect the perspective of the North on the conference. Miffed by some delegates’ contributions, particularly the so-called elder statesmen – perhaps he meant Edwin Clark – he had bellowed: “…In the long run, if we are not careful, this conference will flop – God forbid. And if it flops, the resultant effect cannot be predicted by anyone of us here. If something happens and the country disintegrates – God forbid – many of those who are shouting their heads off will have nowhere to go. I and the people of Adamawa – and many others – have somewhere to go. I am the Lamido of Adamawa and my kingdom transcends Nigeria and Cameroon. A large part of my kingdom is in the Republic of Cameroon, apart from my kingdom in Adamawa. Part of that kingdom in Cameroon is called Adamawa State, in Cameroon. So, you see, if I run to that place, I can easily assimilate but I want to plead with us to adhere to laid down rules by Mr. President in his address, which include issue of voting.”

Ignoring the hecklers, the Lamido added the clincher that seemed to have infuriated many delegates: “Jingoism is not the exclusive preserve of anyone; everyone here is a potential jingoist. If we are pushed to the wall, we will easily walkout of this conference.” Some delegates believed Dr Mustafa reflected the rehearsed opinion of the North, and a Southwest delegate, Olaniwun Ajayi, characteristically delved into history to remind everyone that the North had always used the secession card to win concessions. Sir Olaniwun deplored both what Dr Mustafa said and Justice Idris Kutigi for giving him room to talk out of order. Other commentators dared the North to secede, even indecently declaring secession would be good riddance to bad rubbish.

I think public reactions to Dr Mustafa’s eruptions were hurried, unreflective and absolutely nonsensical. Not only was the Lamido Adamawa’s speech brilliant, revealing and honest, it indicated a critical call for intelligent interventions on three levels. First, the speech actually undermined Dr Jonathan’s proud insistence that the unity of Nigeria should be taken as a given that is not open to discussions. I have always maintained that our unity is more theoretical than practical, and is thus negotiable. Dr Mustafa elegantly addresses that point and reinforced my perception that it is crucial for us to discuss Nigerian unity and agree whether it is desirable or not.

Second, and much more importantly, the speech draws critical attention to the need to take a fresh look at the distortionary impact of British colonialism, how it arrested and distorted nation-building in these parts, and how in fact proud and independent peoples and kingdoms have had to sacrifice their cultures and identities in order to accommodate Nigeria as an idea, a British idea. Adamawa, a subordinate kingdom to the Sultanate of Sokoto, as the Lamido nostalgically pointed out last week to recriminating delegates, transcended its present borders in Adamawa State of Nigeria. It extended to parts of Chad, Cameroun and Central African Republic, and had a rich and colourful history since its founding by Modibo Adama in 1809.

Third, Dr Mustafa’s eruptions also reflected the frustration felt by many in the North at being stigmatised as parasites who would suffer irreparable damage if Nigeria should break up. This persecution complex, it will be recalled, had provoked deep misunderstanding and resentment between the North and South before and during the First Republic. Apparently, the wounds have not healed. And given the strong views of many southerners about the North’s political tendencies, which tendency Sir Olaniwun unfortunately skewered in his reaction to Dr Mustafa’s outburst, it appears that the politics of the Fourth Republic, and 2015 in particular, will still be influenced by the animosities and prejudices of the past. Though some political leaders in the North and South now have a different and perhaps better appreciation of issues and are prepared to surmount the obstacles that separate and divide the country, there are still others, particularly the old guard in the Southwest, who cling stubbornly to the outdated prejudices of the First and Second Republics.

Dr Mustafa’s eruptions have done us the great service of inviting an urgent re-examination of Nigeria’s retrogressive politics, especially the issues surrounding its chaotic founding and mediocre leadership. Had Dr Jonathan done a deep reflection on the proposed conference instead of absentmindedly promoting it for other yet to be determined purposes, he would have led the country on the better and more rewarding path of rebuilding Nigeria from its tumultuous foundations. But now we must keep gambling in the dark with conferences and processes certain to lead nowhere.

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Last Wednesday, the Sultan of Sokoto, Saad Abubakar III, in company with Muslim leaders visited President Goodluck Jonathan to complain of underrepresentation of Muslims in the composition of the national conference. This omission, they argued could jeopardise the interests of Muslims in both the deliberations of the conference and its outcome. One of those who accompanied the Sultan, Ishaq Oloyede, a professor of Islamic Studies and Secretary General of the Nigeria Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs, told the media that the president assured them no malice was intended by the apparently skewed composition of the conference. Said he: “We are happy we consulted with him, and he has given us reasons to re-assure the Muslims that Muslims in Nigeria are not deliberately marginalised and he has asked us to convey the feelings of the government, the genuineness of the government, the fairness of the government to the entire populace…”

It is unlikely Dr Jonathan deliberately meant to discomfit Muslims, for though the integrity of his Christianity can be questioned, it is precisely these doubts about his Christianity that make him less vulnerable to accusation of unfairness. He may curry Christian votes unreasonably and even recklessly, but he often behaves so irreligiously that he does not appear capable of being a fanatic of anything. Whether the Sultan and Professor Oloyede understood this Jonathan persona or not is hard to say. But at least they feigned some understanding.

On the other hand, the Jama’atu Nasril Islam (JNI) has been less timid in its opposition to the composition of the National Conference and its understanding of Jonathan’s motives. The Secretary General of the JNI, Khalid Abubakar Aliyu, argued at a news conference in Kaduna that not only were Muslims being marginalised, the selection of delegates to the conference was also not free and fair. Citing statistics, the JNI revealed the following: “We find it as disrespectful to the conscience of the Muslims that of the 20 delegates of the Federal Government, only six are Muslims. No Muslim is deemed fit to make the list of delegates from the Nigerian Economic Summit. In fact, in the representation of the security agencies, Muslims have been so unimaginably short-changed, with only one Muslim out of the six retired military and security personnel, one out of six retired security and NIA officers, and two out of delegates of the Association of Retired Police Officers. This means, of the 18 security experts belonging to these three groups, only four (22.2 per cent) are Muslims.”

If more disturbing proof of the complicating role religion is bound to play in Nigerian politics is required, the Southwest Muslim Ummah gave an adequate one in a publication on March 20. For those in the Southwest who had thought and argued that the unifying core of Yoruba culture, not to say its distinctly secular forms, transcended the divisiveness that religion constitutes in modern Nigeria, the said publication controverts that hope. First, it argued that the Southwest Muslim Ummah was not impressed by what is believed to be the Yoruba’s persecution complex, a major plank of the Yoruba agenda in the conference. Then, secondly, it argued that it did not subscribe to nor require the help of any cultural icon, let alone that of Oodua, in order to have a sense of being or for the Yoruba to fight for their place in the sun. Thirdly, it spoke out vehemently against the nuanced separatist request included in the Yoruba agenda to the conference, arguing that democracy needed not be based on ethnic nationalities.

There were many more arguments in the publication, especially ones promoting the superiority of religious identification over ethnic identification. But in sum, the Southwest Muslim Ummah attempted to debunk the essential underpinnings of the Yoruba agenda by forcefully rejecting any assertion that implies either the superiority of the Yoruba to any other ethnic group or the exclusivity of the Yoruba in a world where other forms of identities, especially that of Islam, is said to be more desirable. They, therefore, rejected the Yoruba agenda, and declared their opposition to its objectives. In other words, if in the foreseeable future Nigeria should fracture, as the Lamido Adamawa, Muhammadu Barkindo Mustafa, insinuated, the oneness of the Yoruba could not be taken for granted. It is not clear to what extent the Southwest Muslims’ position can be sustained, in view of the demonstrable antagonisms between and within Muslim states in the Middle East and elsewhere, not to talk of the brutal conflicts between Christian states in Europe and elsewhere. From all indications, indeed, the Southwest Muslims’ position is somewhat idealistic.

But whether the reference is to the Sultan’s protest group, or the JNI complaint, or the Southwest Muslims’ rebuff of the Yoruba agenda, it is obvious that the Jonathan national conference, with its overwhelming number of handpicked delegates, clearly reveals a grave and urgent threat simmering below the surface of Nigeria’s contrived unity. (See Box). That threat was barely subdued in former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s 1977 Constituent Assembly. It, however, began to flare up under the Shehu Shagari presidency, with its many religious uprisings, and became subdued again only when the country was confronted by graver problems of regime tyranny such as was experienced under the Sani Abacha military dictatorship. Under Chief Obasanjo’s second tour of office, elite irresponsibility pushed religion dangerously to the front burner until it produced the Boko Haram monster.

A careful consideration of the past, and a deep appreciation of the surface currents of national affairs, not to talk of its salient but potentially more explosive undertow, should have led the Jonathan presidency into adopting a different approach to constitutional amendment, whether fundamental and far-reaching or not. Dr Jonathan will now have to find practical means of moderating and tailoring a conference that could very well become a Frankenstein monster. He will also have to be engaged, even if in the background, in mediating what is certain to be an avalanche of procedural and policy conflicts in the conference, if it is not to miscarry before it reaches the halfway line. Whether the president can manage this tightrope walking is not certain, but his presidency will doubtless be severely challenged.

By their positions, the Sultan-led elders, JNI and Southwest Muslims present a comprehensive wake-up call to closet irredentists, potential separatists and politicians who have become so theoretical and so impractical that if they do not force themselves into unity of purpose along beneficial values of tolerance and liberalism, they will surely either hang separately, as one of America’s founding fathers once said of the political class of his time, or dissolve into a maelstrom of war and conflicts. Dr Jonathan ought to have recognised the dangers manifested by the denudation of values in the country he presides over, and the worsening of relationships between groups. He has chosen not to. But now he will have to grapple with new disagreements and conflicts in the conference requiring more boldness and sagacity than he has ever had to muster all his life, or that he is even capable of mustering.

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If care is not taken, the 2014 and 2015 polls in the Southwest may signpost the collapse of normal politics as we know it. Given the way former Osun State Governor Isiaka Adeleke was choked out of the PDP primary in Osun, it is feared that President Goodluck Jonathan’s plan for Southwest polls may be strewn with all sorts of perils and premonitions. He has placed the unscrupulous Musiliu Obanikoro as his point man in Lagos and empowered him with the position of Minister of State for Defence. Mr Obanikoro has remorselessly begun to use illicit powers to muscle his home state and perceived enemies, and in general to undermine the peace and prosperity of his geopolitical zone.

The president and his party have also placed the impetuous and coarse Ayo Fayose in Ekiti as a countervailing force to Governor Kayode Fayemi, and are prepared to back their surrogate all the way in furtherance of the president’s determination to take the state from the APC. Dr Jonathan is also preparing to seize Osun by appointing into his cabinet the lachrymose and unconscionable Jelili Adesiyan as the Minister of Police Affairs, a man whose nauseous ties to Iyiola Omisore are well known. Between Mr Adesiyan, who was accused of having a hand in the assassination of former Minister of Justice, Bola Ige, and the overambitious Mr Omisore, a former deputy governor, a web is being spun to suffocate the APC and retake the state.

Perceptive south-westerners must however be worried about the kind of politics the president is playing in the Southwest. His point men in the zone are all disposed to violence, and they are all backed by limitless federal power. Their brief is to ‘capture’ the zone, and they will stop at nothing to carry out that brief. In other words, if the Southwest escapes the grip of Mr Obanikoro in Lagos, Mr Fayose will grab them by the neck. And if they escape Mr Fayose in Ekiti, the duo of Adesiyan and Omisore will asphyxiate them. Taking Ekiti and Osun is to Dr Jonathan non-negotiable if he is to win the next presidential poll. He has a point to prove, and an axe to grind, for Dr Jonathan has never really hidden his loathing for a zone that appears to him proud, censorious and denigrating of others. But that zone is incidentally the only zone that still gives a semblance of peace and good governance in the country, a zone which he is nonetheless willing to turn inside out whatever the consequences.

Southwest leaders however appear engrossed with the road to Abuja. They must rethink their strategy if they are not to relive the First Republic all over again, when Obafemi Awolowo embarked on a fruitless journey to the centre and ended up losing the Western Region. Dr Jonathan, I must warn very seriously, is obsessed with taking Ekiti and Osun this year. Since he cannot take them peacefully and on the merit of PDP candidates, he will attempt to take them by force. He will not spare anyone, and he will not care what happens, notwithstanding his sweet words about peace and democracy. The APC must recognise that given the rapid descent to anomie all over the country, the courts are no longer an option as a tool of reclaiming legitimacy. If they do not win on first ballot by making it impossible for Dr Jonathan’s forces to practice their malfeasance, then they should forget it.

Should Dr Jonathan have his way, the consequences will of course be grim and swift. If, as we know, he shrugs his shoulders at the harvest of deaths in the Northeast and elsewhere, he will be prepared to even numb his arms and legs should the Southwest yield to violence. In addition, he will attribute the disaster, with the connivance of amoral and desperate Southwest factions like Bode George, rump Afenifere and Olusegun Mimiko, to the zone’s APC leaders. Since he is not a democrat, Dr Jonathan will always be poised on the edge of tyranny, eager to romp into authoritarianism at the slightest prompting, if we let him.

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After what must rank as the most extraordinary feat of realpolitik ever, former Ekiti State governor, Ayo Fayose, has been made the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) standard-bearer in the June 2014 governorship election in the state. The choice before the party big wigs in Abuja was to either get Mr Fayose elected or appointed as candidate. In the circumstance, neither election nor appointment was applicable or appropriate. He had to be made a candidate by the most pernicious sleight of hand the party could muster. With his coronation on March 22, a crowning that is unlikely to be overturned notwithstanding the grumblings from within the state PDP and from among those who contested the ticket with him, Mr Fayose will in June take on Governor Kayode Fayemi for the now ennobled governorship seat of Ekiti State.

Mr Fayose, it will be recalled, ran a populist campaign from 2001 to 2003 to win the governorship seat. But he was impeached in 2006, a year before his first term in office came to an end. The feisty 53-year-old is a study in irony. He has been out of power for about seven years now, and he tends so easily to overreach himself, not to say exaggerate his puny gifts. In his rather violent but abridged first term, he enunciated and implemented horrendously amateurish policies. Not only did he do very poorly in his three years in office, he also reacted very badly to challenges to his power in the typically intolerant fashion of African rulers.

Though Mr Fayose is still being tried for alleged corrupt practices, it is striking that the same PDP – not a different PDP – has found him a fit and proper person to fly their flag in the coming poll. The manner of his emergence itself may have been dubious, and his opponents in the party either weak and ineffective or embarrassingly ingratiating and unprincipled, however, party bigwigs at the state and national levels have curiously and even joyfully turned a blind eye to the strong-arm tactics he employed in muscling his co-contestants into submission. This has prompted many commentators to judge the real objectives of the party in the Ekiti election to be both deceptively intrusive and brutally detached. It must take a huge dose of cavalier politics, they argue, to plot such intrusive machination, and unprincipled indifference to ignore the salient implications of being represented by a man apparently so shorn of ideas and honour as Mr Fayose.

The only explanations for this strange choice of candidate seem to be located in the unearthly inability of the PDP federal government to be identified with noble ideas and standards. First, it is suggested that what the PDP hopes to achieve is not really to win the governorship, but to have a fighting chance of winning sizeable votes for the presidential election in 2015. If this was the aim, the party would still need a man with some dignity and noble carriage, not to say common sense or native wisdom to prise a healthy amount of votes from the ruling party in the state. It is also suggested that having dismissed Mr Fayose’s co-contestants as incapable of discomfiting the more cerebral Dr Fayemi, the Jonathan presidency was prepared to embrace a roughneck. Since Dr Fayemi is expected to conventionally assail his opponents with much learning and self-assurance, the PDP probably guessed that only a southpaw, a brute and a scoundrel could unhorse him.

The choice of Mr Fayose is however more importantly a reflection of the nature and character of the PDP and the Jonathan presidency. The two entities reinforce each other’s callous disregard for sane and elevated politics. They are obviously not thinking in terms of the great heights the country should aspire to, or of the fine ideas it should project. The image of Mr Fayose is settled. No one disputes his mediocrity or his predilections for strong-arm tactics, or even, as evidenced by his last days in office, of his lack of coordination and composure and of his inebriated and insensate gibberish under pressure. What is in dispute, in effect, are what strange motives gingered the Jonathan presidency into abandoning all pretence to principles, principles the president says are anchored on his frantic Pentecostal theology.

There is a general consensus that Mr Fayose indecently and brutishly secured the candidacy of the PDP for the Ekiti poll. There is also hardly a whisper against the open and indisputable fact that he is the wrongest candidate to represent the PDP in the election. If the state and national PDP expect him to win, they have not disclosed on what ideas, past achievements or even penitence they base their expectations. Mr Fayose has not propounded any idea, nor can he, for he is incapable of the robustness and sophistication that Ekiti has managed to acquire in the past few years. As for achievements, there is none for him to showcase, and he cannot dredge up any even by the uncanniest abracadabra. As far as remorse goes, he has sworn to some sort of personal conversion without indicating exactly in what areas of his indistinguishable worldview he practices newness of life, and has also sworn to some sort of maturity without demonstrating any practical evidence of the wisdom that sometimes comes with age.

If normality prevails, Ekiti is unlikely to dignify Mr Fayose with even 10 percent of the votes. (See box). They were grossly mistaken about him in 2003; they won’t like to be caught with pants down again or, after having achieved some sanity and enviable heights in decorous politics, succumb to the lure and fantasies of the juvenile politics propagated by Mr Fayose. However, his entrance into the race and the helping hand the federal forces are expected to give him, are likely to make the June poll a two-horse race between the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the PDP. For all his faults, Mr Fayose is a colourful politician, exuberant, gregarious but simple-minded. These attributes are unlikely to be vitiated by his mediocre ideas and lack of philosophical depth. And so, he will draw attention with his egregious remarks, whip whatever crowd he is able to rent into some animated frenzy, and hope, like his PDP counterparts in Osun State, that whenever he foments trouble, Abuja will back him up.

The logic of Nigerian politics favours the ruling party in any state except where its performance is woeful. The APC government in Ekiti has brought a lot of practical and implementable novelties to the state. On account of its programmes and projects, the party is certain to receive a good hearing. And having been governed for about four years by probably the most cerebral governor in the country, and notwithstanding the poor finances of the state, Ekiti is not expected to want to fix a problem that does not exist. So, where does this leave the Labour Party whose ambitious candidate is the former ACN/APC man, Opeyemi Bamidele? My guess is that he will be strangulated in the middle. The APC and PDP will hug all the limelight, and the LP candidate will be left in the shadow of the two, shouting himself hoarse and receiving little hearing and sunlight. It is possible Mr Bamidele indeed has a great programme for Ekiti and a passion to do right by the state, but he has the misfortune of facing in one election both a performing APC governor and a federally-backed and boisterously loud PDP candidate. His timing is appalling, and his haste exposes to his many admirers a great flaw in his character – an unwholesome and devastating lack of a sense of proportion.

Dr Fayemi is of course not impeccable. He incredulously began his re-election campaign even before he became the candidate of his party, thereby indicating unnecessary overconfidence. His opponents may have no democratic credentials whatsoever, but he himself will need to polish his democratic credentials, for his distinguishing qualities, nobility and definitive and futuristic leadership claims rest on those credentials. In a country rife with false democrats and open and closet tyrants, Dr Fayemi’s blots are unlikely to diminish his campaign, let alone threaten his anticipated victory. But he must be acutely aware of the need to project his democratic credentials and beliefs with deep, effortless and philosophical conviction. His admirers must not sense that these values are merely expedient rather than intrinsic.

If peaceful elections can be guaranteed – a tall order given the presence of Mr Fayose – the June poll may even end up an anticlimax. Mr Fayose’s scaremongering and PDP’s chicanery can only be effective in a close race. With the passage of years, Ekiti voters have become more aware of their environment than during the Fayose or former Governor Segun Oni years. They will forcefully try to sustain the heights they have attained nationally, for the alternative will be too grim for them to contemplate.

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After what it described as extensive investigations into the killing of eight members of the National Association of Tricycle and Motorcycle Owners and Riders Association (NATOMORAS) by a combined team of soldiers and secret service agents in Abuja, the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) has concluded that the victims were in fact not members of the Boko Haram sect. The secret service had claimed the victims were terror suspects and had called on the Army for back-up in flushing them out of the uncompleted building in the Apo/Gudu exclusive part of the Federal Capital City (FCT) where they were taking shelter. The NHRC directed that the government should pay hefty compensations to the victims, living or dead. In addition, it suggested an urgent review and harmonisation of the security agencies’ rules of engagement in order to eliminate the kind of error and gross violation of human rights that occurred in Abuja in September last year.

It is not clear what kind of challenge the military and the State Security Service (SSS) would mount against the NHRC report. But a military spokesman has argued that forensic examination was required to establish the guilt of the Army. Whatever challenges are mounted, however, are unlikely to erase the widely held suspicion that the security agencies did in fact use more force than was necessary in either evicting or arresting the NATOMORAS squatters. When the incident happened, and given the account of the spokesperson of the SSS, the public had called for investigations on the premise that many of the accounts of the killings, or what the security agents called exchange of fire, did not quite jell. The investigations have finally yielded fruit.

The efforts of NHRC must be commended. The outcome of the panel’s report is likely to reinforce public confidence that Nigeria can be made to work, and that when there is a fault somewhere, the inbuilt corrective mechanisms can step in. For a long time, the security agencies have not been quite as successful in dealing with infractions within their folds as the public would wish. There have been too many attempts to cover up atrocities in order, in the logic of the security agencies, not to denude the image of the security organisations or call to question the competence of the officer corps in the various services. The security agencies should see the NHRC report as a call for urgent reforms not only of the rules of engagement, but also in the general running of the organisations and their responsiveness to security and public relations issues. If they have good grounds to challenge the NHRC report, the Army can go ahead and do so. Otherwise, they should let bad enough alone and seek for more professional and less emotive ways of doing their jobs.

Sometimes organisations, whether security or regular, have behaved quite awkwardly in reforming themselves, especially when their leadership is shorn of the right ethical values and are too incompetent to envision great heights to which they must aspire. The country’s political leaders have a huge role to play here. They must create the right environment to engender the right leadership for the various security organisations in the country. Had this been done, for instance, it would have been unlikely for the military in the 1990s to tolerate generals like Sani Abacha, let alone foster the conditions that propelled him into power undeservingly.

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In the political cat and mouse defection game being played by Femi Fani-Kayode, it is not known at the moment who reached out to whom – he to the president or the president to him. But when he offered his trenchant views on the All Progressives Congress’s proposed presidential ticket a little over a week ago, and those views were published to the consternation of many, it was clear something was afoot. We may never know whether the presidency sensed his vulnerability after his views became public, and decided to invite him over, or whether Chief Fani-Kayode flew a kite and followed up through a middleman to let the presidency know he would not be averse to a visit. Whatever the case, and whoever made the first move, we now know that both President Goodluck Jonathan and Chief Fani-Kayode found comfort and inspiration in each other’s company, with the latter perhaps more awestricken than the former was more evidently manipulating.

“This is a Presidential Villa,” enthused Chief Fani-Kayode after he met with the president. “The President is President of Nigeria and every single person in this country that is a Nigerian is entitled to come here from time to time, when the doors are open to come and pay their respect to the wonderful people that are here. As a Nigerian, I have done that today and I am delighted to be here.” His fulsome description of the president apart, not to say his exaggerated belief in the openness of the presidency doors, Chief Fani-Kayode in addition said his hosts were a wonderful people. Had he been a neophyte visiting the perfumed corridors of Aso Villa for the first time, we would have thought he was mesmerised by the marbled and ersatz glitter of the buildings and denizens of the presidency. But he had been there before, and apparently he felt nostalgic about an environment whose splendour made him long for the past.

Given the exuberant manner he expressed his joy at visiting the president and talking with him for about an hour, as the media reported, it was not unusual that there were speculations about his motives. The online media were less charitable in drawing their conclusions, but the regular media would not be drawn into brazen speculations, perhaps afraid to be drawn into a press war with a man who does not shirk a fight, and whose prolixity is both damning and acidic. Asked what he intended to do given the fact that a few months ago he rubbed shoulders with top APC leaders and hurled invectives at the PDP and the president in particular, Chief Fani-Kayode stonewalled. “The step that I will take will be made known to Nigerians at the right time,” he said curtly and self-importantly. Then, as if he in fact had already made up his mind, he added censoriously: “The most important thing, and I think you are fully aware of this, is that I cannot and I will not be associated with a situation whereby any group of people is promoting a religion above another. I think all of us have gone past the stage of religious politics in this country.”

It will be recalled that less than two weeks ago, Chief Fani-Kayode had told the media he strongly and unrepentantly took exceptions to the plan by the APC to field a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket for the 2015 election. Speaking to the media after his visit to Aso Villa last week, he restated that position, unmindful of the dissonance of not waiting to see whether the APC would carry through with the plan he suspected. Should he defect, Chief Fani-Kayode would have the unenviable distinction of being one of the few politicians anywhere who anchored a life-changing decision on a mere suspicion. There is, of course, nothing incontrovertible to indicate he will be defecting to his former party where, some suggested, he feathered his nest and rose to some prominence. All we have are his body language and some of his statements. But there is also nothing to suggest he could not defect at the drop of a hat, for he has not managed in his many years in politics to be taken seriously, either for his ideas or for his principles.

I have not perused the online speculations about his motives and his person which drew his ire. In my opinion, the online media has become a feral beast slashing and tearing reputations without scruples and sometimes without respect for accuracy or facts, and I distrust them. But no one needs the online media, nor even Chief Fani-Kayode’s famous background, to assess his person and politics. He has done and said enough in the past few years to elicit a fairly competent, evocative and substantial analysis on him. Except something extraordinary happens to thwart his plans, I think Chief Fani-Kayode has made up his mind to defect. When the president hosted him, it was not a social or casual visit, as he pretended. And his unsolicited offer to every Nigerian to visit Aso Villa is not only misleading, given the way that redoubt has turned into an armoured and impregnable fortress, it is insulting to our intelligence to preach a sense of entitlement to us.

Chief Fani-Kayode is an enigma, a brilliant enigma. He is eloquent, polemical, gregarious and hyperactive. He writes damn well, even if he cannot disguise his irredentism and parochialism. And because he holds very strong and often opportunistic views, he is sometimes viewed as a nuisance to have on one’s side rather than to have with the enemy, for in his discordant and amorphous perspectives lies an obsessive longing to further his private and insular interests. He took on former President Olusegun Obasanjo until he was belatedly invited into the team. In the past few months, he also took on Dr Jonathan, and after last week’s visit, he has given indication he would mellow because disagreements are to him as normal as rapprochement is routine. It is useless engaging Chief Fani-Kayode in arguments; the gifted rhetorician will likely outtalk and outflank you with flawless dexterity. Indeed, given his adventures and dalliances, not the least the Bianca tiff, there is enough evidence to prove his dexterousness comprehensively transcends politics.

I do not know whether he can be trusted again in the APC even if he does not defect. However, given his unconscionableness and irreverence, he is quite capable of boldly retaining his membership of a group even while undermining it. It is an indication his desultory ideas of politics and his general malleability do not arise from a deliberate intent to hurt anyone. Long used to having his way in life, and long accustomed to making modest gains from a general lack of adherence to principles, the former Aviation minister will not feel compelled to change both his ways and his style. His cavil about APC’s proposed presidential ticket is popular; he will use its justifiability as a cover for his other hidden agenda.

Many observers were astounded when they saw Chief Fani-Kayode with APC leaders touring the country and extending hands of fellowship to other politicians. They were equally stunned when they saw the party leaders in company with Senator Ali Modu Sherrif, the former Governor of Borno State blamed fairly or unfairly for the outbreak of the Boko Haram menace. The APC in fact has an apparent knack for drawing into its fold some politicians whose persons or ideas raise eyebrows. But whether they can keep controversial politicians out of their ranks remains to be seen when the other parties, especially the PDP, specialise in producing and unleashing gadflies and termagants on the opposition.

If Chief Fani-Kayode should defect, it is unlikely to have anything to do with the APC’s presidential ticket. He weighs his options expertly, though often short-sightedly, and those options are never based on ideas, principles or morality. But his controversial visit to Aso Villa has concentrated attention on the APC’s coming presidential primary in a way the party probably never imagined. I do not think the lesson of Chief Fani-Kayode’s denunciation and manoeuvres will be lost on the opposition party, assuming they ever thought of taking such humungous risk in a polity riven by ethnic and religious distrust, a distrust now accentuated by the Jonathan presidency’s Machiavellian use of religion.

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The University of Ilorin (UNILORIN) Students’ Union Government (SUG) has held its annual Students’ Week, reports HAMEED MURITALA (400-Level Mass Communication).

They wore different uniform with bags strapped to their backs. They assembled on an open space. Then, the ‘principal’, the Dean of the Faculty of Education, Prof Samuel Olorundare, took the podium to address the ‘pupils’. After the talk, the assembly dispersed and the ‘pupils’ sang back to their classrooms.

But this was not a secondary school. All this happened last week at the University of Ilorin (UNILORIN) when the Students’ Union Government (SUG) held its Week tagged: Have fun while you study.

The campus erupted in excitement at the sight of students dressed in secondary school uniforms. There was a comic touch to the event when some students appeared in funny old school attires.

The event with the theme: I am young; I am the future, was declared open by the Vice-Chancellor (VC), Prof Abdulganiyu Ambali, in the university auditorium. The VC said youths of today would only be leaders of tomorrow if they are knowledgeable, adding that youths must read to understand the future in which they want to be leaders.

Prof Ambali, represented by his deputy for academics, Prof Bayo Lawal, pointed out that youths were the foundation of the country’s future, noting that an illiterate youth population could not lead in the modern world.

“If you are not a reader, you cannot be a leader. If you are not a reader, you are not the future. The first person you must lead is yourself. When you lead yourself successfully, you will be able to lead others properly,” the VC said.

Prof. Ambali encouraged the students to develop the two “Cs” of leadership, which he called competence and character. Explaining that competence would always lead to better capacity and capability, the VC said character gives rise to confidence.

He told students to strive to be the best in their field, urging them not to rest on their oars but to improve on their weaknesses. He said acquiring knowledge was the only way they could rise to become future leaders.

The sub-Dean, Students’ Affairs Unit, Dr Abdulraheem Yusuf, urged the undergraduates to aim for success in all their endeavours. He told them not to think of failure, noting that students of the institution pride themselves as future leaders because of the stable academic calendar and quality teaching they get.

He said: “No matter how bad things may go, your focus must be to attain success, strength, victory and belief. No one will tell you who and what you can be; no one will tell you what you can or cannot be; belief will change your world and the country. History will remember you for this.”

The SUG president, Ahmed Lawal, said the event was organisedto improve social life on campus and to promote peace and unity among students.

Ahmed said: “We want to promote unity in diversity through the exhibition of culture of the our various ethnic groups.”

The Week also featured activities, such as games, cooking and eating competition. The event ended with a musical show where May D, a popular hip-hop artiste, thrilled the students in the university stadium.

The eating contest was won by a 400-Level female Microbiology student, who ate 10 wraps of fufu(cassava flower) within four minutes. She was given a cash prize of N10, 000; the runner up, also a female student got N5, 000.

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Responding to accusation of misusing the military for political ends, the Minister of State for Defence, Musiliu Obanikoro, has offered what is at best a specious explanation for his giddy actions in the past few weeks. He had been accused of deploying, or causing to be deployed, soldiers for the recent Ondo by-election. He was also accused of militarising Ile-Ife, together with Jelili Adesiyan who swooped on the town with truck loads of policemen, during the last Ife day. And, now, he is also accused of using soldiers to subvert the Lagos State government over a land matter clearly not in his purview.

His response does not do credit to his claims of intelligence. He had asked his accusers whether they knew how soldiers were deployed, as if in fact we didn’t. The military themselves, reports say, were embarrassed by what the junior minister was doing with soldiers everywhere. The Resident Electoral Commissioner for Ondo State had complained about Mr Obanikoro’s obtrusion during the by-election. And even though the REC has rephrased his complaint, the essential details of Mr Obanikoro’s malfeasance remain unchanged. What business did he have with the Ondo by-election? Indeed, how does the Lagos land matter concern the Ministry of Defence to warrant his interference?

The fact is that in their obsequious minds, both Mr Obanikoro and Mr Adesiyan interpret their appointments as empowerment to subvert the governments of the Southwest, especially in states where elections will be held soon, and to reclaim the zone for the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). But if they must, should they destroy their zone in order to accomplish the task, or subvert due process and the constitution to please their employers?

But in all, it is a reflection of the low amperage of character left in both the military and the police that ministers could flagrantly and unconstitutionally suborn the security agencies for reprehensible, unethical and partisan duties. In addition, it is a reflection of the contempt the Jonathan presidency has for the country and its constitution that some of its ministers could embark on adventures that ridicule and undermine the country in the estimation of the world.

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All those who ever secretly or openly supported Boko Haram either as a social, political, economic or sectarian revolt should feel deeply mortified by the sect’s atrocious and nihilistic transformations. The sect always had it in them, especially judging from the circumstances surrounding its founding and initial operations, to engage in very appalling and destructive anti-social behaviour. But it fooled many who were hoodwinked by its sectarian appeal, many who thought that in some quaint way it represented an uprising against political and economic corruption, many who were beguiled by its regional proclivities. Given its second major abduction of schoolgirls this year, it has become abundantly clear that the sect is irredeemably evil and that it represents the twisted and selfish interest of its demented and perverted founders and supporters.

As I indicated in this place a few weeks back, I am not sure that Nigeria has learnt the appropriate lessons from the disturbance sufficient to end the uprising. Neither the federal government which was for a long time ambivalent in fighting the sect, nor the religious, social and political elites of the North which initially saw the sect as a puritanical and messianic tool for societal cleansing, nor the dispossessed who saw it as a fitting retribution against government at all levels for years of official tyranny , has had a new and deeper appreciation of the concepts of tolerance, justice, fairness and equity, and that these values actually transcend tribe, religion, class or political grouping.

More practically, however, it beggars belief that the security agencies were not proactive in defending the Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, nor was their defensive dragnet tight enough to forestall the abductions of over a 100 students from that school. The first major abduction of about 20 schoolgirls at Konduga in Borno State in February caught the government and its security agencies flatfooted, notwithstanding the declaration of a state of emergency in that state and two others. Not all the girls have been freed. And now this. Coming a day after the Nyanya, Abuja bombing in which more than 75 people lost their lives, the Chibok, Borno State abductions are bound to fuel a feeling of hopelessness and to underscore mounting lack of confidence in the ability of the government to perform its constitutional duty of protecting its people.

Every Nigerian, especially parents, must be deeply distressed by the abductions and the implication for the safety and chastity of the abducted girls. It is truly heartrending. Indeed, every such abduction brings the country frightfully close to an implosion, as reports of parents determined to go into the bushes to liberate their daughters show. Dr Jonathan has called a security meeting, as he always does every time such horrendous crimes are committed. But does his government have a new plan to fight the sect? Does he himself inspire courage in the society and in those fighting the anarchists? Not only has the president inexplicably failed to visit the affected areas and show heartfelt empathy, even when he visited, all he did was talk down to the traumatised people of the emergency states.

More and more, the Jonathan presidency looks absolutely befuddled, if not paralysed, in fighting the sect. But the president clearly does not have time on his side. Nor do we as a country. If we do not defeat the sect very soon, the sect will be the death of us, for the country is so dangerously close to the precipice and so inflammable that a small fire at any remote part can provoke a conflagration.

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Last Wednesday, Vice President Namadi Sambo spoke of his party’s preparations for the Ekiti and Osun elections slated for June and August respectively. He is of course entitled to speak and act with as much self-aggrandisement as he can muster, and to inflate the hopes and expectations of his party and its candidates. But what he is not entitled to is his undignified and provocative use of language, one that absolutely does not edify his office or person. “We are going to the war front to bring back our stolen mandate,” he said brutally, if a little surprisingly, for someone previously thought to be mild-mannered and more polished than his principal. “Everybody knows that Ekiti belongs to PDP: they used all instruments to take it away from us.”

With that careless innuendo, the vice president spoke many untruths and denigrated his high office. Comparing the Ekiti and Osun political campaigns to war fronts in a society struggling to exorcise the pernicious influences of military rule and the concomitant effects of militarised minds is both reckless and unreflective. He might, like any other nostalgic civilian, wish to romanticise the electoral battles ahead as military engagements, but the demands of his office, not to say the long-running battles his country has waged to democratise the polity and rid it of arbitrariness, ought to have sensitise him to the use of proper language and etiquette.

But likening politics to war was not the only gaffe the vice president made last Wednesday in Abuja. Like the often bucolic President Goodluck Jonathan, he also suggested wildly that the victories of the APC governors in Ekiti and Osun were procured by dangerous artifices, in particular through conniving courts. It sadly did not occur to the vice president that his office imposes great responsibility on him to sustain rather than undermine the independence and sanctity of the judiciary. As a matter of fact both he and the president, not to talk of the many philistines and hawks in top echelons of the PDP, actually believe the court judgements that brought the APC to power in Ekiti and Osun were illegitimately procured. Even if it were so, it is still unbecoming of the vice president to lend credence to such dangerous and damaging insinuations. Once the highest court of jurisdiction gives a judgement, state officials at the level of the presidency must act and speak decorously.

Vice President Namadi may have been put in charge of the PDP campaign to reclaim Ekiti and Osun States, but his reputation as a robust and suave mind should have dictated a better approach to the self-styled war he wishes so indecorously to wage. Had he in fact forborne a little and not excitedly subscribed to the historical fallacy bandied by PDP apparatchiks, he would have rephrased his inaccurate ascription of the two states’ ownership. While it is true that the PDP once governed the two states, it is even truer that the APC, through its progenitors, first governed the two states at the dawn of the Fourth Republic.

The vice president is, however, unlikely to find the motivation to restrain himself in his actions and use of language. It takes much deeper understanding of issues, not to say exposure to the politics and styles of other great climes, for those in high office in Nigeria to embrace measured and polished language. The desperation to win the coming polls in Ekiti and Osun, and everywhere in 2015, will consistently predispose both the president and the vice president, and of course many others in the PDP, to their characteristic fallacies and flippancy.

Two problems emerge from the vice president’s dangerous rhetoric. One is that the Nigerian government’s continuing misuse of power, as their often violent language and actions show, is one more confirmation that African rulers don’t react well to issues of power. Even though they are beneficiaries of modern constitutional arrangements, they have remained substantially and instinctively monarchical in mind and in practice. Any challenge to their persons and policies is nearly always perceived as treason, or in mild cases, as disrespectful of the ‘exalted office of the President.’ They therefore have less motivation in speaking or acting with the courteousness Nigerians demand of them and are constitutionally entitled to.

The second problem is the general unwillingness of African leaders to institute conditions and structures by which their societies could flower and endure. It is not too clear what is behind that slothfulness. Could it be a lack of knowledge, or just plain indiscipline? Looking at Dr Jonathan’s policies and hearing the vice president’s statements on Ekiti and Osun, it is tempting to think it is a question of ignorance. If they knew the positive implications of promoting democratic values and principles, they might be motivated to honour their oaths of office, knowing full well that in the long run, their successors, country and people, not to say their own children, would thrive in a stable polity, one in which justice, fairness and equity would reign.

But perhaps it is a question of lack of discipline. African leaders are notoriously undisciplined, privately and publicly, as past Nigerian rulers showed. Until Nelson Mandela came along, it was thought that the continent was an unrelenting landscape of brutal and undisciplined rulers who find it difficult to even obey the laws they themselves wrote. Vice-president Sambo owes it to himself as the polished mind we are used to not to surrender to the putrefactive mannerisms of his party. He is surely enlightened enough to know how to fight an election and campaign for votes with the decency inherent in his professional training and the civilisation intrinsic to his fundamental make-up. As for his principal, the one who enthrals only when he indulges his bucolic simplicity, this column gave up a long time ago.

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There are not many countries where over 270 teenage girls could be abducted by criminals in one fell swoop and a national emergency had not been declared, or a task force saddled with the urgent responsibility of securing their release. Reports in fact suggest that at the expanded security meeting held on Thursday at the instance of the president, the military claimed to have a secret tactical plan to secure the release of the remaining 234 schoolgirls still being held by Boko Haram militants. If it is true, that fact, notwithstanding its secrecy, must be at least a little reassuring. However, except perhaps in a hostage situation, I do not recollect where so many young girls had been abducted so easily and for purposes that leave little to the imagination. If the abductions do not reflect poorly on the tactical prowess of Nigeria’s security organisations, they at least reflect on the impotence of the nation, and in particular, the impotence of the Jonathan presidency.

The President Goodluck Jonathan government must excuse us if we blame him wholly for these abductions. He was elected to ensure the country’s safety and well-being. If in the process of executing the mandate given him to rule over the affairs of the country he encounters a vicious insurgency, it is entirely his responsibility to devise means of battling it, including knowing how to energise the country’s security network, inspire confidence in his methods and ability, and rally the people to the last man to counter the worst bestiality Nigeria has ever seen. If he is unable to do all these, the failure is entirely his.

Sadly, apart from not giving us confidence in his counterinsurgency measures, his style has also left so much to be desired. He and his aides are too easily irritated by criticism, preferring an unearthly and gentle form of correction that even a dictatorship would find patronising and hypocritical. His judgement is also too strange to be deciphered. While the disaster that the abductions were was yet to sink in, and the shock yet to abate, Dr Jonathan took off to Kano for a superfluous political rally where shockingly he practiced a few dance steps that, in the eyes of the opposition, seemed to mimic the fiddling Roman emperor, Nero. Neither he nor his aides have successfully defended that alarming absence of judgement in the face of grave national emergency.

But at last Dr Jonathan is gradually converting to the full horror of the abductions. His expanded security meeting of Thursday, not to talk of the meeting’s resolve to ensure the abducted girls were rescued, somewhat indicates that conversion. But the Jonathan presidency will have to struggle in the coming days, as the captivity of the schoolgirls continues, to douse national suspicion that it failed to appreciate the urgency of the matter because the daughter of no one of importance was involved. The country recalls that when the president’s 70-year-old uncle, Nengite Nitabai, was abducted in February, it took less than three weeks to arrest the suspected kidnappers and free the septuagenarian. They also recall the alacrity with which the son of the elder statesman E.K. Clark, Ebikeme, was prised loose from the grips of his abductors. Not only were the suspects in the case arrested, together with their families, the abduction lasted only one week.

Such comparisons are bound to surface in the days ahead given both the initial lethargy of the Jonathan presidency to the schoolgirls’ abductions and the business-as-usual attitude it exhibited when the full import of the horrifying news was just being felt. The initiative of the Jonathan presidency may have been dulled by the quality of the personnel in his team, but given the bad press he has attracted over the emergencies of the past few weeks, it is time Dr Jonathan took the job he schemed so passionately to secure more seriously, especially given his fresh scheming to keep it for another four years. He can however only get a second term if he justifies the confidence the electorate reposed in him in his first election. So far there is nothing in his responses to Boko Haram or any of the other social, economic and political ills afflicting the country to justify his craving for another term.

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The leaders of the All Progressives Congress (APC) have been a little edgy over public comments on the party’s proposed presidential ticket. Citing what they believe to be feelers from party leaders, especially concerning a proposed Muslim-Muslim ticket, the commentators have argued vociferously that that proposed ticket was insensitive to Nigeria’s contemporary political culture, and is doomed to fail. That assertion, whose most public proponent was former Aviation minister Femi Fani-Kayode, was doubtless sweeping, judgemental and a little sectarian and polarising. Two weeks ago, this column addressed Mr Fani-Kayode’s frantic but subtle dalliance with both the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and President Goodluck Jonathan himself. But as I indicated then, Mr Fani-Kayode had the right to strongly object to his party’s dispositions, though as I also suggested, he needn’t migrate to another party in order to underscore his opposition to his party’s policies or direction.

Neither the APC nor its leaders have said anything quite significant about Mr Fani-Kayode’s views or his manner of tiptoeing around presidential corridors. Perhaps they are watching to see which way the cats will jump. But judging from many snide remarks here and there by party loyalists, and the impatience demonstrated by a few party leaders over the Muslim-Muslim ticket speculations, I suspect that if not now, then perhaps sometime in the immediate past, APC top shots had flirted with that unusual and controversial proposal. More, I also think that in particular, former head of state, General Muhammadu Buhari, features prominently on that proposed ticket. Given what seems to be their tenacious adherence to a rigid but unstated position on the ticket, it is hard indeed to tell what is driving the APC strategy: their belief in the direction they think the country should be heading, or their appreciation, or lack of it, of the actual direction the country is headed.

My sympathies for the APC are well known, and they are based principally on my frustrations with the abject incompetence of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to redeem Nigeria from policy inertia and ineptitude. My support for the progressives, apart from sharing ideological affinities with them, is influenced not just by what the APC stands for, which I admit can be sometimes amorphous, but by what the ruling conservative PDP does not and cannot stand for. The PDP is loth to embrace principles, chary of adopting democratic tenets, and has produced a slew of successive presidents whose only claim to the presidency is hinged on the circumstances of their background than the value of their academic qualifications and mental attributes. Their first Fourth Republic leader, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, was an unmitigated disaster to whom the wobble of our current democratic experience is wholly attributable. The next two presidents, the late Umaru Yar’Adua and Dr Jonathan, have not been inspiring at all.

It is not certain why the APC has been fairly reticent on its presidential ticket, especially its reluctance to state clearly, in the face of hostile controversy, the values and principles that will inform their choice. By allowing the speculation about its ticket to proceed in the hurtful manner it is going, the APC gives the impression it is unaware of the damage to its credibility as a thinking and progressive political party which such negative speculations can elicit. I am in fact surprised that the party seems oblivious that in the past few weeks, especially after the highly successful and imaginative presentation of its road map, it has lost huge momentum in its drive towards 2015. Not only has the PDP checkmated the APC’s blitzkrieg, it has in my opinion turned the table on the progressives, an unscrupulous advantage that has not even been vitiated by the ruling party’s obnoxious and inept handling of the anti-terror war, rising poverty, tragic and exploitative employment methods, and stultifying energy crisis, among other failures.

In an election period, it is not unusual for the pendulum of public approval to oscillate back and forth in favour of one party or the other. But the APC has a responsibility to ensure the pendulum does not swing against it too wildly. The party may have spent a huge sum of money to build itself, as it were, from nothing into a huge something, but it is not the only one investing in its future and fortune. Many of us who are not members of the party, but who see in the party an opportunity at this point in time to defeat the mediocrity that the PDP constitutes, have also invested tremendously and emotionally in the success of the APC. We know instinctively that if the APC fails, the future of Nigeria will be bleak indeed, if indeed that future is not to be erased almost entirely. We, therefore, have a responsibility to manage and coax the progressive party in the direction that will ensure success. Party leaders may be willing to take huge risks decided upon by their mystical calculations, but those risks, which can also backfire badly, must be tempered by our own detached and sometimes more informed appreciation of social and economic issues and political choices shaping the coming combat.

In short, the APC must consciously begin to reverse the momentum it unwisely surrendered to the PDP in the past few weeks. It must not hope that chance will deliver the needed opportunities to it, as it must have no doubt appreciated from its elaborate and sophisticated road map presentation. The party not only needs to consciously devise programmes and policies to stay in public glare in a qualitative and positive fashion, it must learn how to listen to the electorate, and more importantly recognise that its existence and success are defined by how best it captures or approximates the yearnings, values and ambitions of the people.

Except the APC is living in denial, it must by now have recognised that one of those areas in which it has lost ground to the PDP is the speculation that it was about to embrace a Muslim-Muslim presidential ticket. A few years back, such a ticket might have passed without too much controversy. But the fact is that both the PDP and Dr Jonathan have politicised religion to such an appalling and disgraceful level that an all-Christian or all-Muslim ticket will play into the hands of the other party. Risks are second nature to politics and politicians, but a one-religion ticket, given the horrifying slaughter going on in the Northeast and the church runs embarked upon by Dr Jonathan, will be an invitation to electoral disaster. Should the APC lose the 2015 polls, it is unlikely to have a second chance, given the tentativeness of its structure and the inchoateness of its platform. In tandem with the wish of majority of Nigerians for change, the APC has a responsibility to win the next polls, and it can only do so by taking only educated, sophisticated and not-too-radical risks.

In spite of itself, the APC must begin to ask very hard and unsettling questions about its ambitions and how to achieve them – in particular, how to win the presidency. Such questions must be bounced off those who are not members of the party, those who are not current or aspiring jobholders, and those who really couldn’t care less if the party decided to commit political suicide. One of those questions concerns General Buhari, who in one way or the other is speculated to be on the proposed ticket party leaders might attempt to cajole their members to embrace. In spite of my love and admiration for the laconic and principled general, I am not as optimistic as the party that given the fast changing dynamics of Nigerian politics, and notwithstanding the fanatical following the general elicits especially from the North, he can guarantee success for the progressives.

If the APC is to succeed, it needs a radical change of paradigm driven urgently by a new momentum designed to leave the PDP gasping for breath. I invite the progressive party to remould itself by recognising that its priority is to win the next polls first. To do that, its leading lights will have to sacrifice almost their lives. But nature is not so cruel as to leave those sacrifices unrequited.

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