Between APC and PDP

We are in big trouble. The overreach of the president and his henchmen is dragging Nigeria democracy to the praecipes. Who will save Nigeria from "jaguda" politicians?

Guest Columnist: Ebenezer Obadare

This month, I yield this space to my buddy, Ebenezer "Ebenco" Obadare, another alumnae of my alma mata, Ilesa Grammar School.
http://m.premiumtimesng.com/opinion/162 ... adare.html

Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, the General Overseer of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) is missing. I mean hiding. No, he has not fled the country. He is, as it should be, in fine fettle, dispensing dollops of Biblical wisdom to his extensive flock. But other than that, he has been hiding, by which I mean that he has morally abdicated. In the middle of a grave national emergency, the kind that most countries experience only once in a generation, the esteemed man of God has stood out by his conspicuous silence. And what a loud silence it is.

The abduction of the Chibok girls has sparked considerable outrage both within and outside Nigeria. Within, a lethargic and episodic civil society appears to have found a timely cause célèbre. In several Nigerian cities, thousands of Nigerians, boasting nothing more than righteous anger, plus a firm conviction that it is the fundamental duty of a government to protect its citizens, have taken to the streets. In Abuja, day after day, protesters, mostly women, have organized peacefully but determinedly, even surviving the Federal Government’s recent cynical attempt to infiltrate and disperse them. In other parts of the country, and among the Nigerian diaspora, the common will appears to have been recharged.

Of course it is regrettable that it had to take the tragedy of the abduction of nearly three hundred girls by a gang of murderous bigots for Nigerians to realize that we never had a state properly called, and that what we call a security apparatus merely flatters to deceive. Still, the significance of the moment cannot be overestimated, and the challenge from this point forward is to make sure that the proper lessons about state building and adequate preparation for social emergencies are taken to heart.

It is this very significance that throws the silence of pastor Adeboye into bold relief. Why, you may ask, does his voice matter? The reason is simple. His intervention matters because he is one of the people who foisted the current occupant of Aso Rock upon us. No, he didn’t select him, and agreed; he did not openly campaign for him. What he did is more subtle and arguably more pernicious: He prepared the ground for the President’s social legitimation. Pastor Adeboye was instrumental to President Jonathan’s astute deployment of religious (read Christian) symbols and the enthronement of the narrative that he- the President- is God’s anointed, the man without political pedigree whom God himself has chosen. The visit to the Redemption Camp, the kneeling down for prayer, the malediction against the enemies of the President, the President’s own ostentatious spirituality- all are building blocks in the mighty edifice of his (President Jonathan’s) public presentation as a simple believer who did not hanker after power, who in fact abhorred all politicking, yet had power fortuitously thrust upon him.

Pastor Adeboye was an active participant in the construction of this narrative. But he was not alone. Other members of an increasingly reactionary religious elite have played their part in its development. In the middle of 2010, I had a debate on the pages of The Guardian with one of them, Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, Bishop of the Sokoto Catholic Diocese. With the champagne from President Jonathan’s official inauguration not even properly digested, Fr. Kukah went to town to invoke the divinity of the President. In an article titled “The Patience of Jonathan,” Fr. Kukah, finding political sociology too constraining, attributed the political ascendancy of the President to “a monumental act of divine epiphany.” Not satisfied with his own personal failure to adduce a concrete explanation, Fr. Kukah threatened those who might as follows: “This man’s rise has defied any logic and anyone who attempts to explain it is tempting the gods.”

In that same piece, and in a subsequent wholly illogical response to my challenge, Fr. Kukah took comfort in astrology, claiming that the fact that the President is called Goodluck, and his wife Patience, can only mean that the gods themselves, for nothing other than an a mere appreciation of nomenclatural symmetry, had decided to reward President Jonathan with Nigeria’s highest office. Said Fr. Kukah: “Dr. Jonathan (yes, our President has a PhD) has done absolutely nothing to warrant what has befallen him. I am sure I can safely say he has neither prayed, lobbied nor worked for what has fallen on his lap. (My parenthesis.)

Fr. Kukah is an intelligent man. So is Pastor Adeboye. Both are doctorate degree holders who, intellectually speaking, can roll with the punches. But both are bad for Nigeria, and decidedly so. They are not bad people. They are wonderful individuals who no doubt mean well for the country. But it is their politics that is bad for the country. In the case of pastor Adeboye, most readers will recall a time, before he became the go-to pastor whom you can count on to whitewash Nigerian politicians’ dirty laundry, when his political sensibility was right. No more. Same thing with Fr. Kukah, whose rightward social turn is as baffling as it is absurd.

The common thing to both, as I have been pursuing, is that they literally connived in preparing the narrative of President Jonathan’s divine installation. And now that everything with the administration of the country has gone pear-shaped, both have retreated into an unbecoming and morally grotesque silence.

Nigerians must pressure them to speak up. For all their bad judgment, they remain widely influential, and we need the weight of their reputation as we sustain pressure on the government to find and bring back the Chibok girls. More important, we need their apology, apology for selling us a bad product. President Jonathan is not, as I insisted then, a divine candidate. He is a good family man doing his best in the current circumstances with everything in his capacity. The problem is, he is out of his depth.

Professor Obadare, a political sociologist, teaches at the University of Kansas in the United States.

Lost and Floundering: the Sad State of Jonathan Administration

Lost and Floundering: the Sad State of Jonathan Administration

If you are a Nigerian in diaspora like me, chances are that you have been inundated by many of your friends and neighbors asking about your home country. The daily news about kidnap of the Chibok girls have internationalized our nightmare: the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan regime! What some of us bloggers and writers have been shouting at the top of our lungs for years has now become the chicken that came home to roost. For instance, while at an event yesterday with the Mayor of my city, here in the US, the city attorney approached me and whisper this question in my ears: "what is wrong with Nigerian president? How could he be that clueless? How can a nation with distinguished Nobel laureate and reputable scholars from all field of science and humanity be ruled by buffoonish characters like that guy? And by the way, what is wrong with asking for help when you are lost and in over your head?"

I could not answer any of these questions as I know any attempt to do so will get me overly emotional. Fact is the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan regime in Nigeria is not only lost it is floundering before our very eyes. It is shamelessly clueless and pathetically inept. We are now in a phase where we should begin to question the credibility of the few honest aide around him who are still supporting this corrupt and inept regime. It is time to remind the likes of Ngozi Okonjo Iweala that they and their reputations are going down with this sinking ship if they do not have enough gumption to bail out now. History will definitely judge them harshly as they stood by and watch the ship of the Nigerian nation flounders perilously. Even those sycophantic assistants and advisers who keep trotting the clueless leaders to dance in Kano while Abuja burns will surely pay for their crimes in future. They may be helping themselves to our treasuries with reckless abandon presently like bandit; the fact of the matter is they will surely pay one day!

What is more, those who foist Goodluck Ebele Jonathan on the Nigerian nation, the so called puppet master from Abeokuta need to remember that history will never forgive their selfish dictate. The record of their infamous imposition of the terminally ill Yaradua and his wife, followed by the educated illiterate called GEJ and his monstrous wife will forever inhere in Nigerian consciousness.

Many said Nigeria is a cursed nation. I beg to differ. Nigeria is a blessed nation saddled with crazed leaders whose god is their belly and their directive principle is avarice. The urge to loot is what brought us to a situation where a military once renowned all over the world for its bravery is now the joke of the whole world. Nigeria military has never been underfunded, the problem is not with budget of the ministry of defense but the misappropriation of those funds by successive regimes since the 1980s. The rot in our government has now affected the military just as it is rearing its ugly head in other institutions like judiciary and even sports ministry!

We may not get back the Chibok girls but can we at least have an honest conversations about the state of leadership in our dear country. A nation where the so called First Lady of Nigeria, a position unknown to our constitution, will order the arrest of protesters is a nation in peril. Lest call a spade a spade and stop labeling it an agricultural implement, the Jonathan regime is lost and unravelling before our very eyes. It is time to move on and start planning on how we as citizens could take our destiny in our hand and save our floundering ship. If the people of Ukraine could do it, we can too! We need to start making a demand on the future leaders of our country and abhor imposition of leaders by political godfathers.

Our President Engages in Toxic Political Campaign While Nigeria Burns

I still can’t fathom the type of leeches and sycophants who surrounds and counsels President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan. For him  to strut out and go on political campaign at Kaduna soon after  over 100 Nigerians lost their lives to a terrorist bomb blast at Nyanya Bus Stop in Abuja is quite inexplicable. However the part that is more baffling to me is the president’s own decision to engage in scurrilous attack on the governor of the state he went to campaign at. The fact that the campaign event also happened on a day Professor Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s only Nobel laureate, called for a bipartisan solution to the ongoing terror war is quite numbing. The questions that kept coming to me are these: what is wrong with Aso Rock? Are there no adults around anymore over there? But the most embarrassingly shocking thing for me are the content of the president’s words at the campaign event. This is indeed a case of Nero fiddling while Rome burns.

Let’s take a look at the president campaign rhetoric at Kaduna, on a day he had just visited blast site and learned that additional 80 Nigerian school age girls were kidnapped by Boko Haram terrorist. According to Punch Newspapers, “President Goodluck Jonathan on Tuesday took on Governor Rabiu Kwakwanso of Kano State, accusing him of embezzling the money his (President’s) campaign office provided to mobilize the state delegates for the 2011 presidential primary of the Peoples Democratic Party and the main election. “Even the little money that my campaign office provided for refreshment of the Kano delegates and for their transport, Kwakwanso refused to give to the delegates. “He did that so that the Kano delegates will be angry and they will not vote for me. “Even for the main election, the little money the campaign office sent to Kano State to facilitate the movement of people, Kwakwanso refused to give the money to anybody. How can Kwankwaso tell people that he voted for me?”

Let’s set aside the propriety of the president making such a jejune issue a campaign talking point, (because if the money is “little money” it matters little to him and probably to politicians like him), and focus on legality of providing money to voters during election time (apparently to sway their votes), be it at the primary (it is expressly prohibited by PDP constitution) and general election (INEC statute actually makes this a ground for criminal investigation and disqualification). A president dumb enough to campaign on the day he lost a centurion of his citizens and over 80 young girls kidnapped is definitely not a serious leader.

It is high time Nigerians of all hue begins to talk about a post Jonathan administration in Nigeria. Nigeria leadership of all hue needs to come together in a bipartisan way to address the terror stalking our land. The charade going on in the name of National conference is not a vehicle that will get us there. You do not go ahead with a national conference where only those who agree with you attend. You work out the kinks and reach out to the opposition to get them involved. So forget the sleepers at the National Conference. Let all Nigerians begins to clamor for the leadership of the two political parties to come together and establish a joint framework on how we can decisively deal with violence in our land whether it be those fomented by MEND, OPC, Kidnappers or Boko Haram. We cannot rely on this presidency to get us out of quagmire politicians drove us into. The time for change is now!

Guest: Is Nigeria Africa’s Biggest Economy Now? Maybe!

JOSHUA KEATING

Joshua Keating is a staff writer at Slate focusing on international affairs and writes the World blog. 

Nigerians, yesterday, discovered the surprising news that the size of their economy had doubled overnight, making it the largest economy in Africa and the 26th largest in the world. It took the biggest in Africa crown away from South Africa, which still has a much larger GDP per capita.

Nigeria hadn’t calculated its GDP since 1990, and the new number takes into account a number of new industries for the country including telecommunications and the booming Nollywood film industry.

This isn’t the first time this has happened in Africa in recent years. After a similar recalculation in 2010, the size of Ghana’s economy “grew” by 60 percent, catapulting it into the World Bank’s middle-income bracket.

Given that these countries seem to have had entire sectors of the economy they were leaving off their books, it certainly raises some questions about other GDP figures we see reported on a regular basis.

The unreliability of African economic statistics was the topic of a book last year by Simon Fraser University economist Morten Jerven. Jerven argues that GDP “is the most widely used measure of economic activity, yet little is known about how this metric is produced and misused in debates about African economic development.”

On the other hand, as my old colleague Uri Friedman asks, “Are we too obsessed with GDP as a measure of countries' economic strength and health?”

As Chris Blattman put it last year, policymakers are hung up on the reliability of statistics because they “want the world nicely ordered with levers to pull and a dashboard to monitor.” Improving the numbers we have would be great, but most countries have more pressing concerns.

(See Dayo Olopade’s new book The Bright Continent for an welcome antidote to state- and statistic-oriented thinking about economic development in Africa.)

The fact that Nigeria’s economy is significantly bigger this week, and that oil is less of a factor in its growth is good PR for the Nigerian government. (Who doesn’t love Nollywood?) But it doesn’t really do much for you if you’re Nigerian. As one social media user quoted by the AP put it, “Nigeria is Africa’s biggest economy - on paper. So technically, I’m rich in theory.”

If Nigeria’s figures were off for so long, I’m guessing most citizens probably aren’t filled with confidence that they’re totally correct now. Today’s news probably tells us less about how we should view Nigeria than how we should view published GDP figures as a measure of anything close to reality.

Did Jonathan Just Nuked Nigeria's Federalism?

In a wildly circulated news report, President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan appears to have "napalm-ed" whatever is left of the vestiges of federalism in Nigeria when he said Nigeria governors should never criticize him if they wanted him to help in the development of their states. Some would say, well he said governors should not abuse him. But the import of his message is clear: stifling dissent. We have seen it time and time again in the course of this administration that every attempt to offer constructive criticism is viewed as personal insult and usually met with derision.

Someone need to let Jonathan that our constitution did not create an imperial presidency and Patience Jonathan is not Imelda Marcos or Marie Antoinette!

Bad Leadership 101: To Compound Problems Just Install a Criminal Suspect as Minister of Police Affairs?

"On some positions a coward has asked the question, is it safe? Expediency asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? But conscience asks the question, is it right? And there comes a time when one must take a position that is neither safe nor politic nor popular but he must take it because conscience tells him it is right. "—Martin Luther King Jr., November 1967

President Goodluck Ebele Jonathan has a doctorate degree but obviously lacks any administrative acumen or leadership qualities. One could readily concede that Nigeria’s problem predates Jonathan and he should not be blamed for the myriads of problems assailing Nigeria. His many blames however lies in his lack of tact and seriousness. His approach to Nigeria’s hydra headed problem has not been sure footed and when he did took decisions he often complicates simple problems with politicking. 

The leadership Nigeria needs now is one that is willing to do what it takes to pull the country together in these trying times. We are fighting many wars, even though the presidency will want us to think Boko Haram is the only problem we faced. The Niger Delta militants despite billions spend placating them are still striking the poor people of Niger Delta with deadly force. Just last week another explosion went off. As usual, the presidency never uttered one word about that incident nor commiserates with the families of the victims. The war against corruption is also dead on arrival because our dear president as usual is often too busy laughing and “jollificating” over dinners with corrupt politicians while they milk the nation dry. A president that will give the nation’s centenary honors to the most corrupt and vile military head of state like Sanni Abacha is definitely not ready to fight corruption. What is more, for many months, the minister of aviation, caught with her hand in the “cookie jar of corruption”, was allowed to continue in office ostensibly so she can obliterate all evidence against her before she was rotated out of that office.

The pivotal test of leadership’s good managerial acumen lies in response to difficult circumstances. Our president’s response to every problem often complicates and compounds the problem. Take for instance the assignment of a murder suspect as the supervising minister for police affairs. Alhaji Abduljelili Adesiyan was not just fingered in the deadly assassination of a former federal minister, Chief Bola Ige, he was arrested for it. In strange circumstances, the evidence was allowed to gather dust in the police force headquarter and President Jonathan has now handed over the key to that evidence room to the same murder suspect; possibly so the latter could get rid of the evidence and potentially fired the officers or otherwise demotes those officers who investigated him. What in the world was the president thinking when he made this appointment?

Nigerian of all hue gave Jonathan every opportunity to prove his leadership mettle but time and time again he throws everything up in our face with his ineptness and perfidious mendacity. The fact that he is sitting in Aso rock is due largely to the sacrifice of many Nigerians who risked their lives to force Yaradua’s wife and her “chicken cabinet” to abdicate power to Jonathan. And now the beneficiary of that largesse rules with disdain over the very people that brought him to power. Someone said the coteries of the sycophants that surround the president often leads him to take bad decision, but how long should we continue to wait for him to get out of the bubble and see the anger on the street?

Nigeria is in dire straits and bad leadership is compounding our problems!