PEOPLE & POLITICS BY MOHAMMED HARUNABetween Adekunle and Obasanjokudugana@yahoo.comWhen
my friend and fellow journalist, Karl Maier, a former Nigerian
correspondent of The Independent of Karl
took the title from a quotation by Chinua Achebe, himself by no means
very optimistic about Nigeria, gauging from his now famous essay, The
Problem with Nigeria, and gauging also from his Booker Prize
winning novel, Anthill in the Savannah, not to mention his recent
rejection of the award of Commander of the Federal Republic from the
Obasanjo administration, on account of the mess he said the
administration has made of Nigeria in general and his native Anambra
State in particular. “This”
Karl quotes Achebe as saying, “is an example of a country that has
fallen down; it has collapsed. This
house has fallen.” Not
only did Karl choose a rather despondent title for his book, he also
concluded it on an equally despondent note.
Three things, he said, could happen to Karl
had little doubt that the soldiers have been too discredited by their
dismal record in politics to stage a come-back.
Even then he did not think the Obasanjo administration was up to
the task of stemming the rot it had inherited.
“By early 2000,” Karl said, “there appeared to be scant
reason for optimism. There
were simply too many problems, too much anger and too little time; Obasanjo,
as we all know, took over from General Abdulsalami Abubakar in May 1999.
Karl’s book appeared less than a year after that.
Therefore his judgment of Obasanjo’s record at the time must
have seemed rather harsh to many. In
retrospect, however, it now looks as if Karl was anything but harsh;
five years on and with the president dead set in his ways and
convictions about his infallibility, it now seems Nigerians put
too much faith in his capabilities. A
recent self descriptive book, THE NIGERIA-BIAFRA WAR LETTERS:
A Soldier’s story (Volume I), by Abiodun A. Adekunle,
the son of Brigadier Benjamin Adekunle, a.k.a. The Black Scorpion,
provides perhaps one of the best insights into why Obasanjo has made a
harsh of his job of leading However,
even though Abiodun has an axe to grind with Obasanjo over his
father’s behalf, it is hard to dispute his charge that Obasanjo’s
claim to fame and good political fortune has been more due to cunning
and good old simple luck than to competence and integrity in the sense
of fidelity to his self-acclaimed “born-again” values.
“It
is legitimate,” said Adekunle, the son, in his introduction to the
book, “to ask what role may fairly be attributed to my father in
bringing the war to its conclusion.
Nigerians, more particularly the Yorubas, have perhaps been
fortunate that Obasanjo has always been available to fill the roles of
other fallen comrades, such as my father after his loss of command,
Murtala Mohammed after his assassination and again MKO Abiola, after his
premature death. OVER THE
LENGTH OF HIS CAREER, FROM THE VERY START UNTIL THE PRESENT, GENERAL
OBASANJO SEEMS TO HAVE DISPLAYED AN UNCANNY ABILITY OF REAPING WHERE
OTHERS HAVE TOILED (Emphasis mine). I
am not sure Twenty-six
years after the war, Adekunle seemed to have changed his story.
In an interview with the Weekend Concord (July 6, 1996)
which the son quoted in the book, the Black Scorpion regretted that he
fought, not for oil, but to keep Nigeria one.
“While some of us were dying in the battlefield for the
restoration of The
Black Scorpion’s grouse this time was obviously directed, not at
Obasanjo who, in effect, snatched his crown as the most pre-eminent
Nigerian war commander, but at the North whose crime is that it is the
biggest and most populous region of Obasanjo’s
problem he told Tell as quoted extensively in the book, was
simply and squarely the North because the president stopped the
“business as usual” that Northerners were used to.
“Obasanjo is saying no to them and that’s why he’s getting
the problem. And this Sharia
thing is part of it. Sharia,
is the biggest headache they can give Obasanjo, after that nothing
more,” said Adekunle in his new found fondness for the president. Asked
by Tell how, if he were Obasanjo, he would tackle the Sharia
issue, the war commander in him came to the fore. “As far as I am
concerned,” he said, “the state of emergency is there, just declare
it. You have got a diseased
child. But he President is
trying to practice democracy, trying to have a ‘Talk Shop’.
But this is a situation where nobody is going to reason about
Sharia… They give you, give them back”. With
a command mind-set like this, a mindset worse that Obasanjo’s, it was
probably a good thing Adekunle never became the country’s peacetime
leader. We are even the
luckier that our socio-economy never came under his management because
his claim that oil was the live wire of our economy clearly betrayed a
very shallow grasp of its workings.
Adekunle
is of course not the only one in this misreading of the place of oil in
our economy. Many an
otherwise educated politician and pundit have made similar claims for
the commodity. True, oil,
because it seems to provide easy money, has since become “the oil
fulcrum of power”, to use Adekunle’s words. Again, true, oil is an
important component of the economy, but agriculture, despite its abject
neglect, and not oil, remains the live-wire of our economy.
Agriculture, along with livestock, accounts for more than 45% of
our GDP, while oil accounts for less than 30%.
Agriculture also accounts for more than 70% of our employment
rate. Oil,
one the other hand, accounts for at least 90% of government revenue and
a similar percentage of our foreign exchange earnings.
But then government revenue and foreign exchange are not the same
as the entire economy. If
that were so, the country would have since been economically dead and
buried given the marginal impact oil revenue has had on the lives of
ordinary Nigerians whether they live in Warri, Ibadan, Kano, Maiduguri,
Jos, or Bida, or wherever. Now,
while the chances are that Nigeria would have been worse off under
Adekunle than under Obasanjo, it still does not detract from Adekunle,
the son’s, insight into why Obasanjo seems out of his depth in fixing
our political economy. Events
in the last one year alone – the genocide in Plateau, the more recent
mindless destruction of public property in Anambra, and the galloping
cost of petroleum products – suggest that while the president has
cunning and sheer luck in abundance, he lacks the other qualities –
credibility, a firm belief that not even the president is infallible,
and the absence of malice against each and every one – needed to do a
good job of leading a country in big trouble like Nigeria. Is
it any wonder then that the Nigeria House under his watch is falling
down all around him? On the
other hand, is it not a cause for much wonder that some of his courtiers
have tried to stretch his luck by contemplating a third term for him,
possibly with his own consent? Justice
Bello: a man of courage
It
speaks volumes of the level of security in this country that the
residence of a former Chief Justice of the Federation would be raided by
armed robbers with impunity. But
this was precisely what happened to Justice Mohammed Bello who died
recently. On at least three
occasions, his modest home at After
the first robbery incident, you would expect the authorities to have
provided him and his family with adequate police protection to
discourage future robberies. I
do not know if Justice Bello asked
for one, but none was provided. I
do not also remember the old judge making any hue and cry about it,
certainly not on the pages of newspapers as he could easily have done.
I thought this reticence in the face of little or no protection
for his life and property and those of his family, was a mark of his
humility and of his courage, particularly the latter. In
his tribute to the late Chief Justice in the Daily
Trust of November 10, Chief S,B.Awoniyi, the Aro of Mopa and
Chairman, Arewa Consultative Forum, said the late Chief Justice was
truly “a most courageous
man.” I am not very
familiar with his record on the bench, but on at least two occasions
outside the bench he demonstrated such courage. The
first was back in February 1990 when he tried to defend the retention of
Decree 2, albeit in a watered down version of the original one. Readers
familiar with the controversy that surrounded This
may be true, but problem with this notion of courage, however, is that
it assumes only government is the enemy of free speech.
True government is a powerful institution, but other institutions
as well as public opinion, sometimes right, sometimes wrong, but all the
time fickle, can be more powerful in threatening free speach than
government. Powerful
institutions like the Nigerian Bar Association and the mass media
believed and said Decree 2 was unjust and I agreed with them in an
article I wrote in my Perspective column in the rested Today weekly newspaper of The
second time Justice Bello displayed real courage was when he intervened
in the Sharia controversy at a National Seminar organized by a Jamaatu
Nasril Islam, early 2000. That
intervention, along with another by Professor Ben Nwabueze, a
constitutional lawyer and a former education minister, were probably the
most scholarly and level headed interventions in the Sharia controversy.
Certainly Justice Bello’s intervention was the most helpful in
dowsing the fire that the adoption of Sharia by a number of northern
states, led by Zamfara, seemed to have sparked. In
a language that avoided emotion and vulgarity, the judge listed the
constitutional obstacles in the way of wholesale adoption of Sharia.
Then through the force of fact and logic, he showed which
obstacles were surmountable and which ones, not, for the continued
existence of a multi-religious His
humility and rare courage will be sorely missed, especially at a time
when the country is suffering from a severe shortage of humble leaders
who have the courage of their convictions, instead of leaders who like
to peddle the convictions of powerful outsiders. May the soul of Justice Bello rest in peace. And may the relations and the friends he has left behind have the courage to bear his loss. |