The V-Day that never was

If all things had gone the way we initially planned, on this day, we would have been reviewing how the 2015 general elections started off yesterday. Many would have been waiting anxiously to know how their candidates performed. Of course, there would also have been accusations and counter accusations of electoral fraud and possibly violence. Those, after all, are the typical scenarios from elections, as far as our history goes.

Our reality today, however, is that the dates of the elections have been re-loaded by the single authority with the legal backing to fix (and move) dates for our elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). But as we all know today, INEC may have announced the rescheduling of the elections, but the forces behind the shift were certainly not that of the commission. So, whodunit? It’s the security forces as represented by the National Security Adviser. After all these years of trying to stop the rampage of the Boko Haram insurgency in Nigeria, particularly in the north east, the military forces say they have suddenly found the secret to routing the criminals in six weeks. And those weeks have to fall within the period earlier fixed for our elections.

There is no need to stress the obvious that we cannot go on with elections if the security of life and property cannot be guaranteed. And that much the security agencies say they cannot guarantee because they need all the concentration and focus they could muster on the joint operation they have entered into with other neighbouring countries to tackle the insurgents. It is curious however that having received more troops from other countries, we would therefore expect our security forces to now have more of its personnel available to provide security cover for the rest of the country during the election. But the military say these six weeks require serious focus and concentration.

And talking about the foreign troops coming into Nigeria to help, I remember the fears we had expressed to the INEC Chairman, Prof Attahiru Jega following the successes of the gubernatorial elections in Ekiti and Osun states. On both occasions, the country deployed a more than usual number of security and election officials to cover those states. We often teased then what would happen at our general elections and wondered if we would be calling on the United Nations or a regional body like the African Union to help deploy troops to us during the period. Somehow, this reality is beginning to dawn on us.

It is also clear that even though this rescheduling of the elections was masterminded by the military, INEC itself has a lot to gain from it, given that it was also faltering with some of its preparations including the availability of all the voter’s cards. While we may not blame INEC wholly for the failure of many to collect their permanent voter’s cards, the agency must take the flak for the cards they were yet to produce or take delivery of as at the Saturday they announced the shift in dates. One also hopes that all other agencies (state and non-state) whose roles include mobilising citizens to participate in the electoral process will step up their work to sustain the tempo and also encourage many others not interested to get involved in the elections. It is a tall order though, given the fickle nature of our electorate. But try, we must.

The one point I want to stress is the need for the political class to roll back on the hate messages that had built up to a crescendo just before the elections were shifted. And by the political class, this covers not just the political parties but their supporters in every strand of society, including, very unfortunately, the clergy. The hate messages have gone viral and stand today as the greatest risk to our existence as a country. If and only if our security agencies were independent and neutral, I would expect them by now to be picking up the masterminds of the hate messages, including ethnic and religious bigots. Failure to do so would only lead to heating up the polity the more. While we are preparing for elections not war, we must be on our guards not to plunge the country into war after all.

On a happy note however, many non-state agencies especially civil society are working to support the relevant international agencies which are documenting some of these hate messages which would become useful in a future prosecution of the persons for crimes against humanity. The culprits here would include unexpected persons and institutions like religious leaders and journalist who willingly propagate hate messages. It would also include ordinary citizens who spread hate messages on the social media.

And for the security forces, they need to ensure they clean up their acts within these six weeks as a future request for time would not only be rejected but would amount to a desecration of our Constitution.

Preparing for electoral loss

Someone said a politician is a dealer in hope. By that it is meant that a typical politician carries on with so much confidence of victory in the elections such that his/her supporters are almost driven to believe that they have won the battle before the ballot is cast. That explains why it is impolitic to say ‘if I am elected’ but to say ‘when I am elected’. A lot of such is playing out this election season here in Nigeria. But as everyone knows, there will be more losers than winners in the elections which start less than two weeks away. So are people preparing for electoral losses? I can almost hear someone say ‘it is not my portion’.

Whether we accept it or not, there will be losers in the elections. And it could be anyone. The contestants know that fact, despite sometimes trying out some braggadocio acts when the result is out. Too often, they mellow after the initial ‘gra-gra’ and even end up partnering with the eventual winner to ‘move the state forward’, if not to push their personal interests and recover from their financial losses. That’s why the private closets of many a politician has enough mementoes of different political parties to be dusted up for use as the occasion demands.

But that is one secret many of them don’t let their supporters know. And if the supporters know, it hardly reflects in their quality of support or limit how far they go in supporting their principals. I have observed from a vantage position the sourness in the heart of many supporters of politicians when such politicians eventually did not get their party tickets and never bothered to try their luck in alternative parties or did and lost. In one case a gubernatorial hopeful complained of being cheated out of the contest. He threatened everything and made his supporters believe he was on the way to another political party to achieve his aspiration. After a few weeks, he sneaked back to the hierarchy of the old party and pledged allegiance, leaving his supporters in the lurch. Some openly cursed the politician for ‘using’ them. Truth is the politicians are adept at ‘using’ people and in the process setting the ‘ordinary’ people against one other and taking advantage of them.

It is therefore to those supporters that we should advise to look beyond the elections to see where they will be in the picture and what would be left of their personal relationships with their fellow ‘ordinary’ citizens. This season has certainly brought out the beast in many citizens, fighting their otherwise closest relations and friends. This builds up to anger and bitterness which escape through hate messages, malice keeping and hatred just because friends, neighbours, classmates, co-workers, religious brethren and families support different political parties and candidates.

And this is where many of us find this particular electoral season very dehydrating and energy sapping, seeing as compatriots so easily build high walls of distrust and go for each other’s jugular. It is indeed scary. The volume of venom circulating on the cyberspace is enough to annihilate a country and one only hopes this is not eventually manifested in the physical realm. We need to stem or reverse this tide and urgently too. We need to advise citizens to not only plan electoral victory but prepare for electoral loss or defeat, which is a natural possibility in any contest. After all, 13 of the 14 presidential candidates will lose and their supporters, who could be anyone should brace up to that.

One way of preparing for electoral loss is to acknowledge that the eventual winner is going to be a fellow Nigerian, nothing more. Why then must we split hairs over who wins? Why would right-thinking citizens want to wake up the day after the elections to not being able to have an honest and open conversation with their long-time neighbour or even members of the same faith, just because they supported different candidates in the elections? Truth be told, the candidates in the election do not even have personal knowledge of and could not be bothered with the identities of the supporters who are willing to put their lives on the line for them. As many supporters as get bloodied physically or traumatised even on cyberspace altercations are left to sulk and remain mere statistics, at best. Even those who get killed ‘die wrongfully’, in the lyrics of the late Fela Anikulapo-Kuti.

The lessons of 2011 are still fresh in our memories. Only last week, a television station ran a news report showing that many of the victims of the 2011 post-election violence were yet to be compensated as promised by government. But some others were compensated. Has anyone wondered who the lucky ones were? It would most certainly be the elite, who lost some of their luxury goods. And certainly not one of the poor, anonymous fellows who were in the thick of the fight; spewing their anger all over the place. The moral of that report is that when the chips are down, the foot soldiers get sacrificed to serve the selfish interest of the ruling class.

It is safe therefore to advise everyone going into the elections to prepare for a ‘plan B’, which is defeat, just in case things don’t go their ways. After all, no matter the result, we all share one thing in common, the country Nigeria, which we must preserve.

Published on February 1, 2015 in The Niche newspaper http://www.thenicheng.com/preparing-electoral-loss/

Bumpy ride to the polls

Things are really spinning out of order in an annoying manner as we head towards the general elections in Nigeria this February. It is bad enough that many citizens were unable to register for the elections during the very limited window opportunity provided by the electoral body. It is also worrisome that many registered voters are unable to collect their Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs), less than three weeks to the election, even as the electoral body admits that some of the cards are still being expected from the printers. As if that is not enough stress, the politicos have refused to allow us focus on more weighty issues about the elections.

For the past few weeks, so much focus had been on the academic qualification of Muhammadu Buhari, the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress (APC). One initially thought there was nothing to fuss over there, but it consistently made it to the front burner. Let me quickly address this issue dispassionately here.

Section 131 of the Nigerian Constitution says a candidate for president must have been “educated up to at least School Certificate level”. On the face of it, being educated up to school certificate level means you studied and got to the stage of writing the school certificate examination. You need not have passed the examination; otherwise it should have been couched as a person who “has obtained the school certificate”.

More importantly, the interpretation section of the Constitution (Section 318(1)) defined “School Certificate or its equivalent” to mean:

(a) a Secondary School Certificate or its equivalent, or Grade II Teacher’s Certificate, the City and Guilds Certificate; or (b) education up to Secondary School Certificate level; or (c) Primary Six School Leaving Certificate or its equivalent and

(i) service in the public or private sector in the federation in any capacity acceptable to the Independent National Electoral Commission for a minimum of ten years, and

(ii) attendance at courses and training in such institutions as may be acceptable to the Independent National Electoral Commission for periods totalling up to a minimum of one year, and

(iii) the ability to read, write, understand and communicate in the English language to the satisfaction of the Independent National Electoral Commission, and

(d) any other qualification acceptable by the Independent National Electoral Commission.”

Thus, even if a candidate did not obtain any other qualification, he or she would still be qualified under paragraph (c) if the person had just the primary six school leaving certificate had served in the public or private sector for a minimum of 10 years and satisfies INEC that he or she can read, write, understand and communicate in English. The clincher, however, is paragraph (d) which says “any other qualification acceptable to INEC”. The question, therefore, is: has INEC accepted Buhari’s qualification? Clearly it has and it has said so.

Another annoying issue ahead of the elections is violence. Although the major candidates and parties in the election openly embraced each other and promised to run a violence-free campaign, incidents of violence have been reported now and again, just like hate messages are flying all over the place openly and clandestinely. Like many citizens, I have received a few hate messages from known and unknown contacts, all claiming to love me, my faith, my region etc so much that they take the privilege to urge me to support a particular way. I waste no time to tell the senders that their messages are hate message and idiotic. This is where I expect to see the effectiveness of our security operatives to trace the sources of these messages and go after them.

And while all this is going on, highly-placed politicians, including state governors, have engaged in similar hate speeches such as referring to fellow citizens as cockroaches or suggesting illness and nearness to death of opponents. There are also the disturbing reports of physical attacks on the campaign team of President Goodluck Jonathan, the candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

While one condemns every act of violence, the police and other security operatives have no excuse for failing to arrest and prosecute culprits after every act of such violence. The problem stems from describing these acts as ‘electoral or political violence’ the same way we classify some other acts of violence as ‘domestic violence’. Whenever we do so, we then suggest that those acts of violence should be treated as ‘political’ or within the family, as the case may be. I submit that the best way to handle violence is to first see it as the crime that it is and act accordingly. That is the minimum irreducible standard we must insist on and we must do so as we continue on this bumpy road towards the general elections which is 20 days away.

Published on Sunday January 25, 2015 at http://www.thenicheng.com/bumpy-ride-polls/ 

A case for non-violent elections

After more than one week of mainly negative campaigning by the two major political parties, the Peoples’ Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC) towards next month’s general elections, a seeming respite came last Wednesday. On that occasion, the presidential candidates of the two parties, incumbent president, Goodluck Jonathan and challenger, Muhammadu Buhari publicly signed a pact against electoral violence. It was supervised by two eminent world citizens of African extraction, former Secretary General of the United Nations, Kofi Annan and former Secretary General of the Commonwealth, Emeka Anyaoku. It extracted from both candidates a commitment to ensure peaceful elections and good conduct.

This peace deal, if only it would percolate through the ranks of the political parties and their supporters, represents a key step in rolling back the fear that has gripped the country since it became clear that 2015 is a rematch of 2011 presidential contest. As the electioneering commenced, there had been incidents of intemperate use of language by the parties and their supporters with fears that things could easily slip into more grievous situations. Two incidents in one week, the torching of a Jonathan campaign minivan in Jos and the bombing of APC office in Okrika, Rivers State set off the alarm bells. Matters are made worse by the involvement of religious and traditional leaders in the cacophony.

With the open embrace of peace by Jonathan and Buhari, it behoves us to hold them to account by ensuring that their supporters at all times are put in check. The attention of those supporters needs to be drawn to the rare photograph of a warm embrace, handshake and smiles between their principals to let them realise that this contest does not call for any bloodletting for two members of the elite class who have a way of connecting at that level.

It was also good that both men used that occasion to bare their minds on what they considered the cause or fillip for electoral violence. One reason, according to President Jonathan is the practice of winner takes all wherein a victorious party or candidate grabs every space in government without conceding opportunities to the loser. It makes good reason therefore to encourage the formation of broad-based government or what we call ‘government of national unity’ to ensure every party gets a chance. But that of course defeats the idea of ideological political parties and validates the idea of ‘come and chop’ or ‘food is ready’ governance.

I think however that the major causes of electoral violence include manipulation of the system and the citizens, breach of the rules or ignorance thereof. From our experience, the greatest threat to our electoral system is the political class itself whose members would not hesitate to bite their noses to spite their faces. And this explains the notion that election is too serious a matter to be left for politicians alone, more so, when many have chosen politics as a livelihood and would do anything to preserve such ‘livelihood’. 

The manipulation of the system finds expression in the muscling of interests and candidates during the internal selection processes of political parties and often results in pre-election violence which is usually under-reported. There is also the manipulation of the system in the main elections, a deliberate effort by the politicians; armed with deep pockets raised in inordinate fundraisers which themselves breach the law on political party campaigns, with impunity.

With such huge finances, crooked politicians find it easy to buy their ways to victory by compromising officials and daring the aggrieved persons to seek legal redress, which in our climes can often be long, tortuous and sometimes mere academic. This much Muhammadu Buhari alluded to on that occasion. And so, when interested persons see the legal system as unlikely to help them from the electoral rape they suffer, they would rather fight to finish on the field, thus resorting to violence.

By far the greatest threat to post election violence would be the issue of ignorance. For many of the voters, the election would begin and end in their locations. So, whoever wins in their polling unit would be assumed to be the winner of the final election. It behoves on the political parties and other agencies of citizen’s mobilisation to explain this to voters. 

Very importantly, in the presidential election, a candidate must not only win the majority of the valid votes cast, but must in addition score 25 percent of the votes in two-thirds of the states, which is 24. There is a possibility of a candidate not getting both of this in the first balloting, on which account a runoff election would be imperative to decide the winner by simple majority of votes cast. This fact needs to be explained to the voters as a step to avoiding unnecessary expectations, anxiety and possible violence.

I really wish the political parties could agree to stop the campaigning for votes now but focus on campaigning against electoral violence by beginning to talk more with their supporters. After all, with 27 days to the presidential election, most voters have already made up their minds how they would vote.

Published January 18, 2015

Time to exorcise religion from politics

The problem with sentiments is that you cannot limit the ridiculous extent it could be pushed to since they not based on laid down rules. A good example of that is the attempt to bring religion into politics, starting with the question of the faith of the occupants of public office. This issue keeps creeping into public discourse whenever we approach presidential and sometimes gubernatorial elections. It comes like the issue of ethnicity, geopolitical zone or state of origin of contenders to offices. This argument drains the energy from not only the contestants but their political parties and by extension, the citizens. And in so doing, we lose the opportunity to raise real issues of governance and competence of candidates.

This unnecessary discussion is again attempting to upstage more important issues this electioneering season. As stated above, there cannot be a limit to the extension of the argument. Last week, the Church of Nigeria (Anglican Communion) in Enugu added its demand by questioning what it sees as the impending ‘Catholic-Catholic’ leadership of the state government. I know you are as confused as I was when I heard that. By this description, the Anglicans are saying that the next governor and deputy governor of Enugu State are likely to be Roman Catholics, meaning that an Anglican will not be in the Government House. Apparently they consider such a possibility as serious concern to the existence of Anglicans or the practice of their faith that their leadership had to address a press conference. So that is what we have reduced governance to? It is no longer about Christianity and Islam but since Enugu State is predominantly Christian, the division should now be one of denomination.

As ridiculous as this sounds on the surface of it, on deeper thought, I thank the Anglican priests for their selfish and narrow interest which has helped us reason further to show how so vacuous the whole discussion about religion in public office can be. As a matter of fact, the Anglicans, through the Archbishop of Enugu, Emmanuel Chukwuma are demanding at least the position of deputy governor in addition to at least three cabinet positions in Enugu state. And this point they mince no words about as according to Chukwuma: “we totally reject the intention (to field two Roman Catholics) and are warning that if they want peace to reign in this state and if they want our cooperation, it should not be Roman Catholic-Roman Catholic ticket”. They went ahead to say, “all those who want to become governor are Catholics and in the PDP, they are plotting to make their running mate a Catholic. We are saying give us an Anglican Deputy, otherwise you are looking for our trouble”.

By law, only political parties are qualified to sponsor candidates for election, not ethnic or religious groups. So there is no such thing as ‘Southern candidate’, ‘Muslim candidate’, ‘Christian candidate’ or ‘Catholic candidate’. But these are cheap points used by politically desperate citizens. I cannot therefore understand the argument of groups such as those represented by Archbishop Chukwuma, neither can I say this position reflects that of their entire church. What the church ought to do if it is bent on having its members in government is to encourage them to stand election not wait to be considered as running mate.

Besides, this whole talk about religion and politics seems to concentrate on and build upon a faulty premise that Christianity and Islam are the only religions in Nigeria. It is this same faulty foundation that emboldens the Nigerian state to set up Christian and Muslim pilgrims’ welfare commissions and spend public funds in footing the private interests of some privileged citizens.

I was just wondering, what if, for whatever that is worth, we agree with Archbishop Chukwuma that an Anglican should be made deputy governor and few other Anglicans appointed commissioners, what would happen if one of such officials changes his/her faith and denomination? Would the person thereby lose his/her seat, same way the Constitution requires legislators to lose their seat if they defect from one political party to another?

The time has come for religious and ethnic leaders to be told to limit their involvement in everyday partisan political contestations and allow the system to properly evolve.

Published December 28, 2014

It Smells Like Christmas But Not in Chibok

“Wow! It smells like Christmas.”

“Meaning?”

“Meaning that this season reminds me of Christmas.”

“But it is Christmas.”

“Really?”

“Yea man, there’s Christmas in the air, that’s what you are smelling.”

“I see.”

“You are smelling the dry weather and dusty roads. You know what I always say about this season?”

“What’s that?”

“‘O, what fun it is to throw banger on a dusty harmattan night’.”

“Well…”

“Well what? Be merry man, be merry. This is December for crying out loud.”

“Oh, stop that your ‘crying out loud’ nonsense.”

“What’s eating you bro?”

“‘Crying out loud, crying out loud’, some people have been crying out loud for about 260 days now and nobody gives a damn about their cries.”

“Who? For wia be dat?”

“Please, please, please get serious man. Everywhere across the land. And have you never heard of Chibok girls?”

“Oh, that? I never knew you were part of the #BringBackOurGirls…”

“Oh shut up man! That’s usually the problem with some of you in this country.#BringBackOurGirls is not an association or club, it’s a movement. And I don’t have to be from Chibok to identify with the girls.”

“I know, Bro. Just that sometimes, we are too preoccupied with so many different issues in this country that we tend to forget about the Chibok girls.”

“Truly, I don’t know what this country is doing to rescue the girls, assuming they are all still alive and safe at all.”

“I pray they are. God will not let any harm come upon them.”

“So typical…you just mentioned God now, right? God has endowed us with common sense to act.”

“I guess we are trying.”

“‘Trying’? That’s what we ever do and nothing but try.”

“What would you rather we did then?”

“Results…that’s all we want. The world is not interested in excuses but in results.”

“Hmm…”

“Truly, I don’t know how our government officials sleep soundly every night since the girls were abducted. It must be either their conscience is in slumber or outright dead.”

“I think I get your point there.”

“I wonder what Chibok is like this very moment.”

“I can’t imagine it myself.”

“There would be dust in the air no doubt, maybe cold nights too but the setting must be eerie and funereal. For them, the smell in the air would not evoke Christmas or love. It would be the continued reminder of the forced absence of their sources of joy, the very girls who last year sang carols in the town are still unaccounted for. So, how would they know it’s Christmas?”

“Sad, very sad, Bro. It’s a shame!”

“And it’s not only the Chibok community. This Christmas-lessness affects many others who suffered preventable losses during the year. All the people bombed to death across the country through acts of insurgence yet nobody is made to account. And what about the scores of young people killed in the Abba Moro supervised-Nigeria Immigration Service job recruitment scam?”

“I almost forgot that too. And the minister and other officials in that ministry are going to celebrate elaborately this Christmas.”

“I can bet you; hampers, rice, chicken etc have been exchanged several times by all these inept officials to celebrate their year of grand failure. And they do so because they don’t give a damn.”

http://blogs.premiumtimesng.com/?p=166404

http://www.punchng.com/opinion/its-christmas-but-not-in-chibok/

Is the oil party over yet?

Back in the 1970s, in the height of our oil boom, our then Head of State, Gen. Yakubu Gowon, was alleged to have boasted that Nigeria’s problem was not how to make money but how to spend it. That was a perfect description of how giddy we strode with swagger as an oil-rich country. Soon, our appetite for consuming what we needed and what we didn’t need became our hallmark. We abandoned agriculture and settled for the new deal in town: oil. Or maybe we should say here that we were intoxicated by the substance.

Truth be told, oil did us well, especially in the famed days of oil boom before the oil doom. We built several infrastructure across the land – roads, railways, schools, hospitals, airports, seaports, stadia etc. We hosted several international events and competitions and established our voice internationally as an authentic African voice. Oh, and we played the big brother to many other countries, even picking up some of their mundane bills like salaries. Who never knew of Nigeria? Well, those who lived in outer space maybe.

Yet it seemed that the oil was also our undoing. Apart from driving up our tastes to a point of inordinacy, it made us lazy about other sources of income generation such as agriculture, tourism and even tax collection. Why bother about any ‘hard work’ when we had the substance which turned to wealth, almost instantaneously. The interesting part was that we didn’t need to know the process of harvesting the substance from the soil. Those who needed it more than us were willing to come and apply their ingenuity to drill it out, tell us how much they had drilled and pay us what we agreed on. Many said the process allowed us to be cheated by the ‘driller-marketer’ which our technologically-advanced partners are. But we never bother because in this romance called ‘joint venture’ we are in; we the rent-collectors are guaranteed our rents, no matter the quantum.

The very rent gave us smart toys, squeaky clean designer clothes and perfumes that attracted friends and foes alike to recognise our place in the firmament of oil-rich countries. But then, it also created our club of local oil sheikhs and our nouveaux riche who became the new overlords over fellow citizens who were banished to a life of poverty, to eat from the hands of the oily men and women. The latter’s only ‘pedigree’ was usually connection to state power. And the state? That became synonymous with waste and ineptitude.

The state played yoyo with the oil. And because we still rely largely on imports of the refined products (petrol etc) of what we sell in raw form (crude oil), the cost of the refined product stayed high whenever the international oil price was high. And when the oil price dips, we still suffer because, being an oil-producer, it means our income flow is reduced, with attendant negative effect on the ordinary citizens. In a sense, therefore, it is, ‘heads they (government) win, tails we (the citizens) lose’. Such hanky-panky by government always brought out the anger in the people with some praying that they wished the country never had the magic substance after all.

Every run comes to an end after all. And so many of us saw this coming, while many pretended it would never happen. Even now that it has happened upon us, many have still not heard or have refused to hear. But as the saying goes, if it feels like it, it probably is. The party is over, or isn’t it? The party of swimming in the ocean of oil money (read ‘oyel money’, for good effect). In the last few weeks, our petrodollars have refused to come tumbling in as we often assume and expect. We need to wake up and smell the coffee, or is it the stench of burnt oil? Whatever it is, we are in trouble and the earlier the country and its citizens realised that, the better.

We need to not only diversify our economy to bring in more money from the abundance of sources, but perhaps, more importantly, we need to curb our penchant for excessive consumption and wastage at the personal and corporate levels. Many of us have campaigned for smaller government in terms of the number of political offices. The time to implement that is now. It is equally important to cut the official and unofficial perks of such offices, including the costs for running illegal offices such as those of first ladies or wives of government officials at any level. We need to tell ourselves the hard truth that the oil party is over!

- See more at: http://www.thenicheng.com/oil-party-yet/#sthash.qYDqy8L5.dpuf