Oh, you do not know the porcupine? It is a species of rodents with a coat of sharp spines, or quills, which protects it against predators. With backward-facing quills like needles, when threatened, the porcupine shoots the spines which pierce the skin of its predator and are painful to remove.
We may think that, because they have demonstrated acute inability to turn Nigeria’s fate around, Nigerian political office holders lack strategic approach to political power. No, we are dead wrong. They may not have the strategy of sustaining power or making their imprints on the sand of time, but the hunger for higher political power makes them momentary thinkers. That the strategies turn awry many times does not invalidate their abilities.
With the above template in mind, if you think Governor Ayodele Fayose of Ekiti, whose acts bear semblance to a porcupine’s, is merely throwing stones at the Federal Government so that his voice can be heard, as the Americans say, you have a think coming. Since he attempted to seize power in Ekiti in 2001 or thereabout from equally youthful Niyi Adebayo, Fayose’s approach to catapulting self to the zenith of power had always been Machiavellian. Italian political theorist, Niccolo Machiavelli, remains a great guide to ambitious politicians like Fayose on how to climb the greasy steps of power. Either they are educated enough to read the ABC of Niccolo or they pick his teachings from the street, Machievalli undergirds their approach to power.
There are three evergreen tips from Machiavelli and none gives a hoot about ultimate good faith, charity or kindness. Indeed, they tell the leader to damn moral qualms. First, says Niccolo, if one who is aspiring to the height of power must choose, it is better to be feared than loved. Second is the famous ‘the end justifies the means’ and third, the Italian teaches, different standards of morality should be applied in the uncharted world of politics. In the first course, fear has its political uses. If a leader gives an outward bellicose tendency, his political enemies need layers of strategies to approach/capture him, as being feared makes get him things done easily. Niccolo also teaches that you must be cruel to be kind and the rightness or wrongness of an act doesn’t matter.
Muhammadu Buhari is the predator, the constant variable Fayose deploys his apparent street knowledge of Niccolo to combat. He is brash, politically weird and his path to power is uncommon. Yet, Fayose plays upon the consciousness of the people. Even though, like brash and unstable people, he over-waltzes to the rhapsody by speaking many times out of sync with reality, Fayose studies the mood of the people and on many occasions, his views are their apt barometer. His may be diametrically opposed to the ruling class’ whose voices are rhythms of their bellies, but they are, most times, deft shots that mirror the frustration of the people with their elected political office holders.
Let’s not dwell on Porcupine Fayose’s deft and miscalculated arrows shot at the Villa in the last two years or so. Deploying United States’ damning revelation that the Nigerian Army’s onslaught on Boko Haram is hampered by intra-animosity, Fayose added that the fight was steeped in massive corruption. Nigeria’s anti-insurgency, he said, has become a cash cow for leading Generals and their lieutenants. In a quick reply, the Army rebuked Fayose for seeking to “politicise the military and military Ops,” urging him to “seek other means for his relevance.”
While Porcupine Fayose’s arrows are capable of deft and off-tangent pierce, this quill against the military was a deft shot. For years, the military was alienated from the people and indeed rode rough-shod over them. Having been in power since 1966, with only occasional civilian rule patches on governmental canvass, the military became anything-goes. Its words were unquestionable and its decrees akin to the biblical Mosaic Ten Commandments. At some point, eminent jurists, confused about the awesome powers of military decrees, said they were what Hans Kelsen referred to as the Nigerian grundnorm.
But the military, through its interminable hold on power, soon unraveled for Nigerians to see it as self-serving, greedy and corrupt, if not more, than the average politician. It seemed that as epaulettes increased, military men’s avarice multiplied. They own oil blocs and build castles on hilltops. From revelations starting from the Sierra Leonean war, it became apparent that military Generals become fat toads whenever there is war. This is done in acquisition of armaments and commandeering the entitlements of dead soldiers at war.
So when the army asked that it should not be politicised, what exactly was it talking about? The height of politics is in the army! How many of its ex-Generals are embroiled in fraudulent cases at the moment? The intra-security discord that America talked about led to the fatal January 17, 2017 mistaken bombing of an Internally-Displaced Persons’ (IDP) camp in Rann, Kala Balge council of Borno State and the allegation that there are moles within its fold is in the recent ambush of lecturers and NNPC staff in Maiduguri.
More fundamentally, because the military should be subsumed under political authority, it cannot tell us that it is beyond the scrutiny that is the hallmark of political society. Gone are the days when, fooling us with the concept of “national security,” military actions were unquestionable. Can the Porcupine step forward and let the columnist buy him a bottle of beer, please?
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Ortom’s illness
In decades of reading Thomas Jefferson’s evergreen quip which says, whenever a man casts a longing eye on (an) office, a rottenness begins in his conduct, not for once have I found an instance that has defeated this profound aftermath of conducts. The governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, is, to my mind, another addition to the truth of Jefferson’s rot graph.
Ortom had told State House correspondents last Thursday that “If Mr. President is sick, it means all of us are sick; the whole country is sick.” His outlandish quip has earned him the back of the tongues of Nigerians who saw his comment as one of the usual Nigerian groveling before power called eye service. Ortom was one of the comic crew shepherded to President Muhammadu Buhari’s feet in his convalescent home in London. Since their return, words from the crew have been so self-serving and ludicrous. For instance, Ebonyi’s Dave Umahi said Buhari’s recovery was a miracle, while another clown, Imo’s Rochas Okorocha, literally said he saw the president joggling balls with Paris St-Germain’s newly signed Brazil forward, Neymar inside his London infirmary. While we understand the Archbishop of Canterbury expressing his pleasure at Buhari’s recovery, having probably got medical thread of it, it is apparent no one would forgive Umahi. So how come Buhari’s “recovery” was miraculous? When a politician gets this curiously patronising, be sure he is either hiding skeletons in his cupboard that he wants the presidency to protect or he has his mind on a personal advantage.
Ortom may be right after all. If we were not sick, how could our president be out of the country for this long, in flagrant flout of constitutional requirement against such? Donald Trump is going on a 17-day vacation at his golf course and America is quaking. How could he travel in the midst of a heap of challenges facing the White House and America? If we were not sick, ask Farida Zakaria of CNN who, in innuendo, derided us as a country. If we were not sick, Buhari would by now be contending with national structures which are on auto pilot, automatically demanding his conformity with national rules or he is delinked from presidential power. But, of a truth, we are all sick. And Ortom’s sickness of sycophancy demands urgent attention of a doctor.
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Migration up North
Acting President Yemi Osinbajo was in Kebbi State last week to inaugurate a N10billion rice mill at the fishing village of Argungu. WACOT rice mill, which the acting president inaugurated, is said to be the largest parboiled rice mill in Africa and of course, in Nigeria, with a captive power-on generation facility.
It just occurred to this writer that while the North is showing its disdain for restructuring which would devolve power to the regions/states, it is fast preparing for the raining day by utilising the concept of public/private partnership with its governors, so that if push comes to shove, apology to Sam Mbakwe, the region would not be caught napping. There are so many agricultural initiatives that are springing like ferns in a plantation in the North.
Down here in the South where shouts for true practice of federalism are most trenchant, the redundancy of governors and effeminacy of the people are baffling. If the so-called restructuring of power is whistled to commencement today, the indolence that has percolated governments of the region and its people’s bone marrows is the only harvest we will get. Governors of the region are busy running after inanities and by their personal hostile and magisterial dispositions to power, are driving private partners away. How can they attract the private sector when their body language of graft and lack of trust to handle public money is high? We will soon discover that when the rest of Nigeria concedes to true federalism, our barns will be empty.
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Saraki on devolution
If you care to look out by your window, you are sure to see at least one person mourning the death of devolution of power at the National Assembly. Rather than be the pall-bearer of the remains of devolution on its way to the morgue, Senate President Bukola Saraki, last week, chose to be its mourner-in-chief. The implosion of that ubiquitous hate speech, he said, was responsible for the defeat of the motion at the ongoing constitutional review. Are the parliamentarians zombies who have no mind of theirs? I think Nigerians are not being fair to the lawmakers. Once devolution of power comes full stream, one of its first casualties would be bicameral legislature, to be replaced with a single legislature. Fat and unaccountable salaries will also go and apparitions like Dino Melaye’s irritancy will die a natural death. How unfair can we be to ask them to append their signature to their own sack?
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On Osinbajo’s statements
Has anyone noticed that the vanity of power is fast dethroning the highly burnished brilliance that Professor Yemi Osinbajo is said to have acquired in decades of teaching Law and eight years as Attorney General of Lagos State? A few months ago, he told Nigerians that restructuring was unnecessary; not long after, he said there was no harm in media harangue of alleged looters who haven’t been so declared by a competent court.
On Wednesday last week, at an Institute for Security Studies Seminar, the Acting President prefaced his cants on the irrelevance of restructuring by saying “the first false narrative is that we often say countries formed the way ours was formed are doomed to fail… This is what some people (emphasis mine) have said, that Nigeria is a mere geographical expression and for that reason, it is not likely to succeed as a united whole. But those who say so do not know that even the expression, ‘mere geographical expression’ used in relation to a country was not first used in relation to Nigeria. As a matter of fact, it was the German statesman, Klemens von Metternich who used this same expression for Italy. He simply summed up Italy as a mere geographical expression exactly a century before Nigeria was born. Italy is still a mere geographical expression but still a nation.”
Osinbajo also said those canvassing restructuring are political office-hungry. The question is, who is Osinbajo’s nameless “some people,” the author of that evergreen phrase “Nigeria is a geographical expression”? Did you get my drift? Second, are Ayo Adebanjo, Ndubuisi Kanu, Olu Falae and others hungry for office? Pray thee – apology to Shakespeare – let President Muhammadu Buhari come home quickly, lest this man talk self out of relevance in office.
