THE NATION MONDAY, JULY 2, 2012
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EDITORIAL/OPINION
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RESIDENT Goodluck Jonathan’s third media chat last week, must have attracted considerable public interest. This is to be expected given the very dire straits the nation is currently passing through. First, the President zoomed off the country to attend the Earth Summit in Brazil at the heat of the bombs blasts in Kaduna State and subsequent reprisal attacks which left many dead. The travel also came shortly after the country suffered a devastating air disaster with scores of its citizens and foreigners sent to their early grave. There was also the scandal of the bribe saga involving the chairman of the ad hoc committee of the House of Representatives on fuel subsidy, Lawan Farouk and businessman Femi Otedola. These combined to heat up the polity and their effects were yet to settle before the President’s journey. Because the reprisal attacks from the bombings pitched Christians against Muslims, there were genuine fears of the prospects of the crisis deteriorating into a religious war. It was thus expected that a man whose house was on fire had no business pursuing rats as the inferno raged. Apparently responding to the welter of criticisms from this, Jonathan on return, immediately sacked the National Security Adviser, Andrew Owoye Azazi and the minister of defense Haliru Mohammed. The media chat must also have been hurriedly arranged to enable the President respond to some of these nagging issues. Not unexpectedly, they were to form the major thrust of his media engagement. The brief has come and gone but the issues raised by the President will for some time, continue to be matters of considerable public discourse. It needs to be pointed out that Jonathan was very frank and forthcoming in responding to some of the questions put to him by the journalists. But in that frankness and show of a high sense of resolve to attend to some of the issues raised, he betrayed the emotion of someone in trouble. His appearance was tense and dense. His composure, that of a man haunted at all fronts who must be very cautious else the enemies will have ample reasons to come after him. Ironically, it was the same President who argued that he had to put up a bold face to attend the summit in Brazil so as not to give the impression to the international committee that there was crisis at home. Why the same consideration could not reflect in his demeanor
deeply rooted in Islam, maybe Dasuki could pull a surprise. Only time will tell. But we must no longer appear helpless in this fight.
Emeka OMEIHE
ABU’s Lamentations:
08121971199 email: EmekaOmeihe@yahoo.com
Jonathan’s Media chat at the live interview is puzzling. As it turned out, he lost the conviviality and congenial ambience of a President who is at home with his people. That was perhaps why he thought ‘criticizing Jonathan has become a big business’. It is not just about Jonathan but the President of Nigeria. Off course as the President of this country, he is public property. His actions or lack of it have far reaching repercussions for the people of this country. If we do not talk about our President who again should we talk about? So it is not entirely tidy for the President to have viewed the searchlight on him as an aberration. His fate is not substantially different from those of his peers in other parts of the world. More so in view of the daunting challenges he is expected to provide answers to. Challenges such as the threat posed by the Boko Haram bombings on churches are issues citizens are itching for immediate solutions. That cannot be wished away. And he spoke very frankly and decisively about them in his chat though the phone-in dimension was a huge embarrassment. He talked about the changing tactics of the dreaded sect, government’s responses to them and the fact that the attacks are instigated to cause disaffection between Christians and Moslems. He said very unambiguously that government was not going to enter into negotiation with a faceless group that has not articulated its grievance several months after it levied war on the country. That is the way it should be. We were told very clearly that at least a very well known Nigerian and Islamic leader Dr. Datti Ahmed has access to the deadly group. What is left to be seen is the decisiveness
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Y apologies to readers for this rather weird caption, which sounds more like Hon. Patrick Obahiagbon’s lexical incantations in his usual attempts to explain the nation’s woes. I coined the title after late Godwin Agbroko’s incisive piece Nixonistic Obasanjoism, in which he compared Obasanjo’s failure to openly admit complicity in the Third Term project with Richard Nixon’s failure to admit guilt in the Watergate scandal despite tendering his resignation letter to Americans. The late journalist had also chiselled his title out of late wordsmith, Andy Akporugo’s piece, Nassiristic Ogbemudianism in the 70s in which he drew analogy with the military governor of the Mid-west Region, Brigadier Samuel Ogbemudia, to the late Arab nationalist and Egyptian President, Gamal Abdul Naser. I am drawing similar analogy for the fact Nigerian political actors always act in a similar weird manner. One peculiar attribute of Nigerian legislators is that they hardy learn lessons. And they are poor students of history. I guess both chambers of our National Assembly have in their finishing some amnesiac blend. One wonders why they always forget their constituencies, forget their benefactors, their schools and their villages. Our hopes are often raised and dashed whenever the House embarks on probe. Not long a go, the chairman of the House Committee on Capital Market, Hon. Herman Hembe (whose name forms part of this caption) was made to step aside for his involvement in the N44 million scandal while probing the activities of Securities and Exchange Commission. And now it’s Faruok Lawan, a man who warmed his way into the hearts of Nigerians for having the temerity to implicate the high and mighty in his committee report. But Rep. Lawan is not new to controversy. Although he sounds every inch effeminate, Lawan cuts the inner image of a political Hercules. As a Kano-based reporter during the last general election, I closely monitored how he handled the matter of his gubernatorial ambition with levity despite appearing serious to his team. To compress
‘I don’t really hold brief for Lawan but I doubt if he would be dumb enough to “insist” that bribe be given by a person on whose companies there was no prima facie case of the operational misconduct the House committee was probing’
and efficacy of the responses of the government to stem the dangerous tide. Indications are that Boko Haram is intent in precipitating a religious war in this country. The motive is political even as they have taken refuge in Islamic religion. Knowing that religion is the opium of the people, they are goaded by the reasoning that it is the easiest way to fast-track unmitigated calamity in the country. So we must confront that insurrection very squarely. The removal of Azazi and Haliru was to inject new blood and new ideas into the fight against insecurity. For Jonathan, the security challenges needed people with new approaches. By this the assumption is that the President has done his home work and in the days ahead we will start seeing those new ideas and innovations to justify the appointment of Sambo Dasuki as the National Security Adviser. But one thing people will loath to hear is that he succumbed to pressure by removing Azazi. The impression that only people from the northern part of the country can function effectively in that capacity must not be allowed to fester. Not with what we are currently facing in the hands of Boko Haram. Not with the sophistication and high wired connections of the dreaded sect. Boko Haram could not have held the nation prostrate without the backing of the influential and people very well groomed in brute tactics. These should sufficiently instruct that we must significantly dilute the security hierarchy of this country such that no section of the country can muster the capacity to hold us down. Since Boko Haram is essentially a northern affair
Even as Jonathan was talking of his resolve and strategy to tame insecurity, an interesting episode was playing out at the Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria (ABU). Vice Chancellor Prof. Abdullahi Mustapha cried out openly at the weekend that about 80 students of the institution of Rivers and Jigawa states’ origin were ‘whisked away’ in suspicious manner by their state governments. According to him, buses belonging to the Jigawa and Rivers state governments stormed the institution with armed policemen and took away their students without reference either to the Kaduna State governor or the authorities of the university. The university is worried that the evacuation created panic and confusion even as it wants the federal government to investigate the matter and direct the return of the students as normal academic activities were going on. The worries of ABU are to be understood. But that is how bad the situation has become. If state governments could truncate the academic activities of their indigenes that way so as to save their lives, that speaks volumes. It is equally instructive that Jigawa is one of the states in the north. If it is no longer sure of the safety of its students to the extent of whisking them away in a commando style, one can guess the enormity of the problem. Yet, we are supposed to be one country.
‘The motive is political even as they have taken refuge in Islamic religion. Knowing that religion is the opium of the people, they are goaded by the reasoning that it is the easiest way to fast-track unmitigated calamity in the country. So we must confront that insurrection very squarely’
‘Lawanistic Hembeism’ By Jaafar Jaafar the episodic political soap opera into a single package, Lawan surreptitiously secured the House ticket through tact and treachery without publicly withdrawing from the governorship contest or notifying his campaign coordinator, Malam Kawu Gurjiya. But even without seeing the purported Lawan video, the translucent evidence before the nation shows that Lawan’s paw was actually trapped in the cookie jar. And so the verdict in the public court may not favour him. Although in this digital age the maxim that pictures don’t lie is disparaged by the world’s geeky gait, motion pictures are hardly manipulated. Given the impossibility of a fool-proof motion picture manoeuvre, sometimes the real-time session can be manoeuvred to nail a target. Similar instance occurred when oil giant Chevron’s 16year legal tussle came to a close and appeared likely to go in favour of the people affected by it’s toxic spillage in the Amazon region of Ecuador. The toxic disaster, tagged ‘Amazon Chernobyl’ (the Chernobyl disaster is a disastrous nuclear accident that happened in 1986 at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine, then under the Soviet Union) affected over 30,000 inhabitants of the region. When Chevron explored all legal tricks and delay tactics to frustrate the trial without success, in August 2009, just a week shy to the judgment day, the company finally came up with a video that vaguely ensnared the presiding judge, Juan Nuñez, in a web of corruption. Guess how much was the money involved? It was $3 million! The same amount that is slowly casting credibility deficit on the Lawan’s fuel subsidy report. But then another chapter was opened in the Chevron’s legal drama. A cursory look at the Chevron video by industry experts showed that one of the two persons involved in the secret video taping, Diego Borja, “is a longtime Chevron employee in Ecuador with significant personal and financial ties to the company, including direct association with the oil giant’s legal defence in the very trial his dirty tricks operation was designed to disrupt.” By drawing inference with the above scenario, one can hardly conceal, even in a sleigh of hand, the involvement of the powerful subsidy cabal indicted in the Lawan re-
port. As many Nigerians now posit, the entrapment of Lawan might be a plot by the oil cartel to ridicule the allimportant report. But further scrutiny into the secret footage indicated that Borja’s partner, American Wayne Hansen, “who posed as the owner of a remediation company willing to pay bribes for clean-up contracts” was never into remediation. Here, the fact we shouldn’t blink over is that Femi Otedola, the person behind the video taping, has never been into PMS (petrol) import but rather AGO (diesel) import which has since been deregulated years ago. Why on earth will Otedola, whose companies had never been into petrol import, “play to the gallery” if his industry colleagues, who are involved in the subsidy scandal, do not have hand in setting the camera trap? I don’t really hold brief for Lawan but I doubt if he would be dumb enough to “insist” that bribe be given by a person on whose companies there was no prima facie case of the operational misconduct the House committee was probing. Even our corrupt police would “insist” on taking bribe only if there is primary offence! Knowing full well how the lawmaker often speaks tongue in cheek, I suspected, right from the outset, that Lawan’s defence was anything but credible. Obviously, everyone can make sense in what Lawan said just a day after claiming that neither him nor any of the committee members collected bribe from any of the oil marketers: “I wish to inform you that I was on his (Otedola) invitation, at the residence of their chairman, Mr. Femi Otedola, in Maitama (Aso Drive) ...and he offered me the sum of one hundred thousand US dollars in two bundles of $50,000 each”, he shamelessly made a u-turn. His weak defence that he had presented the marked dollars before a House plenary was also punctured when the Speaker and some principal officers allegedly queried why he had not declared the money until after three weeks (or rather after getting wind of the video in possession of top security chiefs). A litany of reference numbers he reeled out was also nailed when the chairman, House Committee on EFCC and Narcotics, Adams Jagaba denied receiving Lawan’s letter. Now that the poor canary is in the police net, Nigerians are musing a witty Hausa proverb: “a clever bird often falls into snare from the neck.” • Jaafar is a public affairs commentator.