The Omoku Massacres

BY OBI NWAKANMA

Obi Nwakanma

NIGERIA (VANGUARD JANUARY 7, 2018) -- New Year’s Day: the flurry of good wishes and triumphant high-fives the midnight preceding it must have been all part of the hopeful rituals for those who made it to the very first day of the year, 2018. Many welcomed that day with uproarious celebration. Many went to church that day – a great number of our people are fanatically religious – to celebrate, and thank their creator for making them see that new day of the New Year. So, imagine that day in Omoku, Rivers state, and the day which began with such great hope and elation for people who had not an inkling, that within the first half of that new day of the year, their lives would be cut short, and the door of existence shut abruptly to the faces. That was to become the fate of fourteen people, shot instantly to death by “bandits” who drove through Omoku spreading terror, and pumping bullets into unarmed, innocent people; some of them women; some children.

According to the report in the Vanguard, thirty-six people were shot, with fourteen fatalities. Who did the killings? What were their motives? This terrorist act is like all terrorists acts, calculated to drive fear into the population, and exact dominance through fear. But it is ultimately a cowardly act, by cowards who had to cover their faces, shooting unarmed people, including children. Sometimes acts of terror are driven by idealist causes – a higher purpose, wrong-headed no doubt – but it is often to press home fundamental demands in the interest of a high-minded idea. And in such instances, the target is often very powerful institutions. Innocent deaths are avoided as much as is humanly possible. Where such perpetrators cannot avoid it, they try to minimize the “collateral damage” as much as possible, because they often want to seem, even in their brutality and bestiality, human and thoughtful. But was not the case with the killings in Omoku.

It was nothing short of savagery and cowardice. It reminds us all of the killings last year in Ozobulu, Anambra state; a pointless, thoughtless bloodlust, driven by vendetta. But the victims were all innocent; easy targets; just regular folk. There is very little that the law enforcement authorities have told us yet to indicate that significant arrests have been made, or that the very roots of the reasons addressed, nor the identity of the perps who came to kill with such horrendous coldness that it should concern us all about the very nature of the mental health of the young generation of Nigerians. If young men and in some possible instances, young women, can kill so coldly and without remorse, then we have an urgent crisis of catastrophic dimensions in our hands. For it used to be that killings did not come so easily. Killing people you hardly know, including women and children in church or just returning from church is, heavy. 

There are failures at too many points in the event of that day: the failure of law enforcement and public safety and security; the failure of public governance, particularly with the absence of a decent emergency evacuation services and quick response to casualty and casualty management; and there is also the utter failure of civic response, in rallying for emotional and community support for victims and neighbors at such horrendous public killings. These are questions that suggest the complete fragility of our current humanity in Nigeria, where we are now prone to dealing with public disaster of this magnitude, with the kind of indifference that also speaks about the situation of mass psychosis currently pervasive in Nigeria. The trauma of the daily exposure to daily violence has deadened the soul of Nigerians. Anywhere else in the world, the killing of twenty-four innocent people, by mass shootings, would be considered a national security disaster. But the question is, who cares any more in Nigeria? If it is not herdsmen killing people, it is Boko Haram, or some hooded mass killers or gang shooting people in their most vulnerable moments, to death. 

The police has said, according to their spokesman, Nnamdi Omini with regards to the killings in Omoku, that although arrests have not been made, they have established some clues, and that justice will be served for the dead. No justice will serve the dead, they are dead. But their deaths must not go unpunished, and it is about time that the authorities at all the levels of government in Nigeria – the local, state, and federal authorities faced up to the terrible challenge of the growing menace of mindless violence, and begin to work out a new strategic initiative that will address this situation. 

These governments must work from the very fundamental premise that all past initiatives and methods for containing insecurity and violence by non-state actors has failed, and they must therefore create new measures, new partnerships, and new protocols, including re-organizing the mechanism and the structure for national security delivery. First, on the question of emergency services: there were heart-rending reports that many of the gun-shot victims just bled out, and could have been saved by a more proactive Casualty Services, where there were ambulances to evacuate them to properly equipped hospitals, and providing immediate first intervention aid in the process. 

As is increasingly the case among Nigerians, many people simply clustered around and watched these victims die, clutching their hands helplessly on their heads and crying for the “Blood of Jesus!” when they could have helped in administering first aid – voluntary emergency response intervention – a skill that the public schools should have long been teaching as part of civic education. In another incident reported by Vanguard, the husband of one of the victims narrated how a military patrol team saw him holding his dying wife, still very alive at that stage, and yelling for help, and the callous indifference with which these soldiers treated his plea to save his wife’s live by driving away. Authorities should investigate this. But better still, we ought to know that what happened in Omoku is a complete intelligence failure: all the services – the secret and sworn services included, charged with keeping Nigerians safe, failed to anticipate, and pre-empt an armed gang, one of the hydra-heads that have grown in Rivers state with the rise of politics in the last eighteen years, that has now morphed into terrorist groups in Rivers state.

 These groups of armed gangs, many of them created by politicians originally as thugs to fight their political opponents, have now grown into small, organic militias, operating as laws unto themselves on land and in the creeks. It is about time that the national security services took on a more proactive approach to smoke them out, and retake the delta, and restore civil peace. The killings in Omoku represent the danger in creating Mephistopheles –that nemesis that haunts its creator. 

But Omoku is just one example of a growing, and terrifying reality: more Nigerian youths get involved in the international drugs, arms, and human trafficking triangles, and they bring with them fallouts – recruitment of idle, sometimes drug-addled, and very clearly emotionally-empty youth, who are forged into a growing army of killers and gangbangers, and we have right by our view, the example of Mexico in the making. 

The Omoku killings, and the Ozubulu killings before it, are auguries of the disintegrating social and moral fabric that once knit communities together. These are dangerous developments. It is time for the government of Nigeria to confront these violent spasms right now, before it grows beyond the capability of any government in Nigeria. Government must hunt down the killers that rampaged through Omoku – just as it must arrest the so called herdsmen killers in Benue, Kaduna, Rivers, Imo, Enugu, Anambra, Delta, Ondo– and such places where people are now routinely massacred by armed invaders. The alternative is for these Nigerians to organize and arm themselves and fight back where the government fails to protect them.

Demons, Aso Rock Villa And The Nigerian Gothic

BY OBI NWANKANMA, 

THE ORBIT, VANGUARD, SUNDAY, NOV. 20, 2016

OBI NWAKANMA

In the 21st century, when people in various parts of the world are making artificial intelligence, and there is increasing and scary talk about “singularity,” when kids in middle schools are in workshops creating robots and exploring robotic applications,

Nigerians, even those with doctorate degrees in the sciences and humanities awarded by Nigerian Universities are talking about haunted state houses filled with “demonic spirits.” Nigerian newspapers publish such accounts with relish. Nigerian newspapers also now rely on prophets to make economic forecasts and political predictions which they retail with gusto to the reading public.

Prophets and priests, not trained economists in universities, research institutes, policy councils, or the research arms of the civil service now guide our economic policies. Perhaps this is much so because, actually, and someone should correct me if I’m wrong, there are no Economic Research Institutes of any serious weight anymore in Nigeria, especially since places like NISER – the National Institute for Social and Economic Research founded by the indefatigable Kenneth Dike in 1960s in Ibadan following the dissolution of the West African Institute of Social and Economic Research have narrowed their mission to become policy wagons rather than drivers of the wagon of research since its appropriation by government in 1977.

 NISER no longer has the kind of weight it should command as a serious site for economic intelligence and research. Nor does the Center for Development Studies established at the University of Nigeria, Enugu campus, in 1963 to conduct social and economic research. These places have not only become bureaucratized out of their functions, they have stopped being go-to places for serious research into national economic and social behavior. The work done in these places are limited because it is generally incestuous.

 There are no residences for visiting scholars, research fellowships, and action plans. There is no connection between the works done in these places and government’s strategic economic masterplan, and yet these are centers established to provide serious economic and social research for the benefit of government and independent actors in the economy. 

Aside from the decline of these places, I need someone to also correct me on this: there is no contemporary Nigerian economist of the weight of a Pius Okigbo or Aboyade or even H.M. Onitiri: there is Charles Soludo, of course, but sometimes he feels like a flash-in the pan. There was a time when Ndu Ughamadu, now with the NNPC, but then Chief Economist and Business Editor of the now defunct Daily Times, used to be Publicity Secretary of the Nigerian Economic Society, and you would think that with all his experiences in journalism and industry, particularly the oil industry, that some University, perhaps even his alma mater, Nsukka, would think to engage him as a Visiting Research Professor in the Economics Department, or a Senior Research Fellow at their Research Institutes. You would think that Ughamadu might even think to write a serious book based on his experience as a trained Economist, a journalist who covered the Economy of Nigeria and has watched and hopefully measured its transitions, and an industry player, particular in the oil industry that is crucial to Nigeria’s economic life.

 There is no sign yet, that such thinking is abundant in Nigeria. Such thinking is rather more prevalent, which prevented the University of Ibadan, University of Nigeria, Nsukka, Ahmadu Bello University, or even the University of Jos, for instance, from recruiting Odumegwu-Ojukwu or Yakubu Gowon as a visiting Professors of Politics in their political Science programs, or even Olusegun Obasanjo, Ibrahim Babangida, and the very many intellectually minded public servants like Asiodu or Ayida or Udebiuwa, or Anyaoku, Adamu Ciroma, or Jibril Aminu, and so on, who had attained high positions and acquired high degrees of experiences as top diplomats, 

Intelligence and National Security experts, Journalists, top civil servants, and industry leaders who retire or are suddenly disengaged from their services. Universities in other places in the world often search for and benefit from these people who they recruit into their faculty, one, to raise the timbre of work done in the universities form these uncommon experiences, two, to raise the profile of the universities who advertise these people and that is why Nigerian universities currently rate very low on the scale of the index of world universities, and three, to provide a good space for these individuals to be debriefed as a way of sustaining national institutional memory and discourse. 

The energies of these individuals are diverted towards creating national values. In sum, the connection between Nigeria’s national research infrastructure and its national policy infrastructure does not exist because these places have narrow missions; primitive orientations, and quite frankly, the disjunction reflects the state of public governance in Nigeria. 

Nigerian intellectuals are irrelevant in the affairs of the nation because those in the universities do not want to engage and create synergy with those outside the ivory tower. So, the cobwebs gather increasingly over the ivory tower while Nigerians now rely on soothsayers and Babalawos to deal with problems that require empirical solutions. 

As a matter of fact, the soothsayers are themselves establishing universities and the cultures of the academy are now increasingly determined and defined by faith healers and religious fanatics. As a matter of fact, I have heard it on good authority that in Nigerian universities these days, Lecturers begin their classes, but first after a “worship session.” Faith-healers and demon-hunters are now in charge of the Nigerian mind. And that is why PhDs can talk with bold faces about “demons” in Aso Rock and there is scant satire to it. 

Newspapers now go to prophets to predict the 2019 Nigerian elections: not political analysts, not empirical surveys commissioned or conducted by the research and investigative arm of newspapers to actually measure voter behavior. It seems that Nigerian newspapers did not learn anything from the faux pas of the pastor of the Synagogue of all Nations, a Joshua who saw “a woman” winning the US elections; nor have they yet discerned the signal lessons of the life, times and metamorphosis of the “magnificent” brother Jero, Wole Soyinka’s very prescient satire on faith in the Jero Plays. 

Perhaps it is all now entertainment, but when we now talk about demons in Aso Rock, and give it long, serious play in newspapers that take themselves seriously as purveyors of serious information to a reading public, we surely must see that the handshake has now crossed the elbows: the Nigerian mind is sick. It has been made sick by too much koolaid. 

All one needs to do is take a consistent look at the quality and pattern of comments in Nigerian newspapers, and some in response to newspaper columns, and it would be abundantly clear that the Nigerian mind has suffered terrible and tragic regression. But let me return to the question of demons in Aso Rock. I should now say that there may indeed be demons in Aso Rock. 

Yes! But hear me out. Every house is a haunted house. All you need do is listen very closely to the beat of your own heart in the dark, and you will see spirits moving. The swoosh of the curtain by a slight wind will take new significance, as would the rustle of branches behind the house. The glow of something in the dark, and yes, that footstep that sounds like something is stepping out of the closet. 

This is the quality of nightmare. But let me say that Reuben Abati’s ghost story of Aso Rock should now qualify as a genre of the Nigerian gothic alongside Amos Tutuola’s The Palmwine Drinkard and Soyinka’s A Dance of the Forests. As for me, I think that the real demons in Aso Rock is the demon of inefficiency and ignorance; of unearned privilege and greed; of tribalism, nepotism; and religious fundamentalism; of corruption; profiteering; budget-padding; contract-inflation; push-me-I push you, arrogance, over-consumption, and selective amnesia. 

It continues to haunt that place with the current occupants. As for the symptoms that Dr. Abati identified, specifically the loss of erection and sundry appetites that afflicted his friends in the last regime: well, think about it folks: lack of exercise and sleep, alcoholism, over-consumption of the rich food freely available at Aso Rock, and depression are factors liable to cause that kind of energy crisis and the deflagging of the pole. So be warned guys. Seek help from the Aso Rock shrinks, and not your pastor or faith healer. Everyone in Aso Rock needs Prozac.

Rochas Okorocha's End Game In Imo State

BY OBI NWAKANMA

VANGUARD NIGERIA, AUGUST 7, 2016

GOV. ROCHAS OKOROCHA

First, let us start by where Rochas Okorocha began: he was swept into government on the wings of the APGA, following a populist revolt at the polls in Imo state that threw out the PDP government of Mr. Ikedi Ohakim in 2011. Ohakim was a man of ideas. He just had trouble with implementation, and so his program sounded too futuristic to a people who wanted immediate relief, and immediate benefit from government programs.

Take for instance the dredging of the River Nworie and the rebuilding of the ecological floodplains and swamps that might serve to provide both recreational and ecological benefits to the city of Owerri: it was a possible, laudable, actionable project, which was mismanaged, misrepresented, and ultimately bungled because that administration failed to secure citizens buy-in for such a monumental project. 

Ohakim was also perceived as brash and alienated in the views of most people, and could not connect with the electorate at the very popular level. He was also believed to have squandered much of the state’s revenue, and like previous governors before him saw Imo state as no more than a honeypot, and Imo people, as no better than troglodytes requiring weekly “how-to” lectures that were big on pictures but small in details. Everywhere you went to in Imo state in those days, all one saw were idolatrous pictures of Ikedi Ohakim hung on proposed projects. It was the subject of a fierce exchange I had with my late friend and colleague, Pini Jason, who insisted to the very end that Ohakim was on to something. 

The problem was that I couldn’t see it. And Imo people apparently couldn’t see it, and they rebelled at the poll. The upsurge of the faith the Igbo always had in Emeka Ojukwu, not on the upstart Okorocha, propelled the present governor to Douglas House. On the strength of a party supposedly backed by Ojukwu, on one hand, and on a capacity for populist demagoguery on the other, Rochas Okorocha was swept into office as Governor of Imo state. It was one of the greatest mistakes the APGA as a party made in 2011.

 So, in a terrible misjudgment, APGA handed Rochas Okorocha, a bird of flight in that party, the slot for governor. It also so happened that aside from his personal capacity for street drama, Okorocha is an astute politician. His politics of course derives not from solid or fundamental ideas, but on simple notions of power and the drama on which power is sometimes staged. 

And so, he presented an alternative face to the Imo people, and for a very brief moment, the Imo electorate, normally informed and discerning bought into his melodrama. He even put up a great show at the debate organized that year by the Catholic Church for Gubernatorial candidates in Imo state. Some who knew a little about Rochas’ background cried out against a great mistake that was about to be made in electing Mr. Okorocha. He had promised a great load of bullshit. Among these, “free education” for Imo children up to the tertiary level. 

I knew personally, as does anyone who does a bit of strategic policy analysis that this was a promise wrapped in wonder and full of wonder. Imo did not need “free education;” what Ndi Imo needed and still need is “quality education” and there is a material difference in that. Quality education is what prepares people with new sets of skills, expands their horizons, and updates their learning environments in ways that would make them compete with their peers all over the world. 

Besides, Okorocha did not clearly establish how he would pay for the “free education” and the monthly stipend to primary and high school students he had promised. What was Imo state’s tax base? He had no clue. What is the property stock of the schools in the Imo school system? He had no idea? What is the population and distribution of children in early child and Infant programs; the Primary School system, the secondary schools? 

He had no clue. He simply came like Falstaff full of beer and hokum. It was a policy and a program driven by a highly uninformed mindset. A census of schools and of teachers in public schools in Imo state should reveal a number of things: one, the quality and number of teachers in the Imo state’s Public Schools have so radically declined, yet the state government continues to post a high payroll unaccountably.

 But something even more tragic has happened in the five years Rochas Okorocha has been governor in Imo state: it is called the tragic decline of education in Imo state. For all the years WAEC figures, and JAMB results have been published, until three years ago, Imo state had remained consistently on the top with the highest number of student enrollments, often sidelining the next state to it with as much as 100, 000 students. Since Okorocha’s government, Imo has slid to the 8th position on the table! 

This is radical diminution. Not to the second or third positions, but to the 8th position on the list of School certificate enrollment and passes, and on the JAMB scores table, for the first time in its history! Sam Mbakwe used to say that education was Imo’s number one industry. Not anymore. 

Poverty is Imo States number one industry by all accounts these days. Okorocha has achieved the one thing that eluded every of his predecessors however they tried: his government has finally brought a resilient state like Imo to her knees. He has destroyed the school system, and the system of public service on which Imo had established a long tradition. Teachers are not paid. Civil servants are not paid. Retirees are not paid, and yet, no one knows exactly what Imo state’s revenue is used for. Okorocha’s tenure has not registered a single investment in any industry. He has built third-rate roads, and opened up, to be fair, roads that now give people some access in Owerri.

 But the quality of work he has done with these rather basic examples of public work is terrifyingly below standard. In actual fact, some of those are simple municipal roads which a well-organized Public Works Department should do on a routine basis. Now, just last week, reports indicate that the government of Mr. Okorocha has succeeded in evicting retired residents of the Alvan Ikoku College of Education from the Alvan quarters at the famous Shell Camp, and according to Imo Commissioner for Information, the government is putting these government lands and property up for the highest bidders. 

“Anybody who is able to put down N50 million will have any one of these lands” says Vitalis Ajumbe. This is unconscionable, and this must be stopped by all means necessary. The eviction of retires from government quarters, and the sale of public property by this administration to individuals must be counted as one of the highest acts of brazen robbery of the commonweal by official means. Over and over again, Rochas Okorocha has demonstrated that he has no respect for Imo people, he has no regard for the highest public interest, and he has no interest in public opinion. He is playing an endgame with Imo, after which he would retire to Abuja, and let the state and its inhabitants suffocate from the bad effects of his actions today. He may yet force Imo people to rise and do “Otokoto” on its own government, and its government officials! 

Imo people have been pushed to the very end of their wits with this government which last week also announced the reduction of the five-day work week to three days, without annual leaves or sick leaves. This is a terrible policy, and it is really not up to the executive arm to impose this. It requires an act of the Imo state House of Assembly to change the Labor Laws, and the laws governing public service in Imo state, not an executive order. But Imo State has only a “photo Assembly” – legislators who have never sat, or represented the will of the people. As a body it one of the most useless parliaments in the land. It has never held the governors to account. 

Okorocha has committed all kinds of impeachable offences against Imo state, yet the Imo Assembly remains in perpetual vacation. It is now up to Ndi Imo to begin a massive recall process of their legislators who fail to rise in defence of their mandates. The Imo people must rise up and defy this aberration called the government of Imo state, or go to sleep and wait for death itself. Okorocha must account to citizens in Imo: how much of Imo’s revenue went to the campaign to elect Buhari, and what has this governor done with the bail-out money? It is urgent matter.

NIGERIA: The President Has No Constitutional Mandate To Probe Corruption

BY OBI NWAKANMA

VANGUARD, JULY 3, 2016

OBI NWAKANMA

Let us think of the Deputy President of the Nigerian Senate as, like a co-pilot. His hands are on the same lever with the president of the senate, navigating the nation through the storms of nation-build. That is right: nation-building does not happen at the executive office, it happens in the chambers of the nation’s legislative houses. This is a fairly clear axiom of democracy: without the parliament,

there is no republic. It is the parliament that legitimizes a free democratic state. It is the very source of all powers of governance. The parliament of the land is the most powerful institution of state, not the office of president, as most Nigerians, still steeped in military-era mentality tend to think. The President is a servant of the elected, and constituted National Assembly.

 While the National Assembly is both the voice, the ears, and the eyes of the public in the system of democratic rule. They do not answer to any other person – neither to the courts nor to the president – but to the people. That is why, whenever there is a coup, the first institution that is abolished is the parliament of the land. For as long as the parliament is in session, the nation exists. But wherever a parliament is abolished, the nation goes into a hiatus. In that instance, the president answers to no one. That is the meaning of absolutism. 

The only power parliament accounts to is the people. I need to emphasize this again. Which is why I was both startled and personally horrified this past week on reading the silly letter to the US Congress, the EU, the UK, and the UN, by the Deputy president of senate, Mr. Ike Ekweremadu, complaining that Nigeria’s democracy is threatened. I am horrified that the Nigerian press that consented to dignify such a middling letter by publishing it, did not go, as part of its obligation to the public, to ask Mr. Ekweremadu what he expected the UN, the US Congress, the UK, and the EU to do with his letter of complaint. 

I do not especially recall that the Speaker of the UK Parliament wrote to Nigeria, or the AU, or the US Congress, or the UN when the “Yes” vote carried on the Brexit referendum, or whenever the Labour Opposition fought with the ruling Conservative party in the Commons. Nor have I even heard, or seen any self-respecting African nation misusing its sovereign mandate so much as Nigerians in making such silly appeals to the “international community.” 

Yes, Africans now call Nigeria: “the big fool.” It is such a remarkable transition, from the “giant of Africa” to the “big fool of Africa” because Nigerian public officials are colonized, sanitized, hypnotized, and perhaps in fact, lobotomized so much that they misconstrue their place on the world stage. 

Nigeria is currently an inferior nation because she is run by inferior men and women. Many of us feel utterly ashamed by the quality of individuals that we have managed to hand over the sovereign mandate, and it is my view that the full measure of Ike Ekweremadu as a legislator and politician can be taken in the weight and significance of his letter. 

The US Congress or the UK government or the UN does not have voting rights in Nigeria. Ike Ekweremadu did not write to his constituents whom he represents in Enugu, nor to the Nigerian people, whose views and actions, and interests, matter in this question. He did not write a straight and unambiguous letter to the president to back off. He did not write to his legislative colleagues to drive home the necessity of protecting the republic from the intrusion of a rampaging elephant in a China shop. 

He wrote to some alien powers whose opinions are really inconsequential to whatever might become of this rapidly evolving situation. And I’m sorry to say that Ekweremadu’s letter only proves that he has no business wearing the shoes of mighty men. 

He has also proved the average Nigerian politicians utter disrespect of the Nigerian electorate from whom they derive their mandates. He has also demonstrated that he lacks a basic grasp of the nature of his own mandate as a senator of the republic. Perhaps I should outline this basically by saying that the president’s actions, for instance, in these anti-corruption probes, usurps the power of the legislature. President Buhari has no mandate to probe corruption or misuse of public funds. 

The only institution mandated by the constitution to probe any person or any institution of government is the National Assembly and the various Houses of Assembly. Here is what the Nigerian constitution says without ambiguity: “ 85. (1) There shall be an Auditor-General for the Federation who shall be appointed in accordance with the provisions of section 86 of this Constitution.

 (2) The public accounts of the Federation and of all offices and courts of the Federation shall be audited and reported on to the Auditor-General who shall submit his reports to the National Assembly; and for that purpose, the Auditor-General or any person authorised by him in that behalf shall have access to all the books, records, returns and other documents relating to those accounts. 

(3) Nothing in subsection (2) of this section shall be construed as authorising the Auditor-General to audit the accounts of or appoint auditors for government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies, including all persons and bodies established by an Act of the National Assembly, but the Auditor-General shall – (a) provide such bodies with – (i) a list of auditors qualified to be appointed by them as external auditors and from which the bodies shall appoint their external auditors, and (ii) guidelines on the level of fees to be paid to external auditors; and (b) comment on their annual accounts and auditor’s reports thereon.

 (4) The Auditor-General shall have power to conduct checks of all government statutory corporations, commissions, authorities, agencies, including all persons and bodies established by an Act of the National Assembly.

 (5) The Auditor-General shall, within ninety days of receipt of the Accountant-General’s financial statement, submit his reports under this section to each House of the National Assembly and each House shall cause the reports to be considered by a committee of the House of the National Assembly responsible for public accounts. 

(6) In the exercise of his functions under this Constitution, the Auditor-General shall not be subject to the direction or control of any other authority or person.”

 The National Assembly can also summon anybody before it, including the president of the republic, as well as cause the removal of anybody from office by impeachment, including the president or his Attorney General. The National Assembly can mandate the Attorney General to try the president for treason, if it finds the president to be a threat to the republic. The National Assembly can defund the office of the Attorney General, the EFCC or any statutory office of government, or cause it to go into abeyance.

 The National Assembly can stop the functions of the federal government by de-authorizing any presidential expenditure. That is the extent of the power of the legislature. With regards to the current distraction of trial for “forgery” of the president and deputy president of senate, one is thoroughly shocked that these gentlemen consented to appear in court! No court of the land has the authority to summon any legislator to court on questions around procedures, discussions, or actions carried out within the chambers of the National Assembly. This is the practice all over the world. 

The allegation of “forgery” of senate rules is a distraction because the rules of senate are subject to change, and is what it is, when a sitting senate votes to use, amend, or discard it as the case may be, as its guiding frame. It is not subject to the intrusion of any court, much less the presumption of crime by the Attorney General. 

This, Mr. Ekweremadu and Dr.Saraki ought to know, and should be properly advised, as an act honoring their mandate, to desist from appearing any further before any courts on this matter, and take charge of their legislative duties.

An Adversarial President, A Divided And Discontent People

BY OBI NAWKANMA

Y-NAIJA, JUNE 05, 2016

OBI NWAKANMA

Truth be told, President Muhammadu Buhari does not have the easiest job in the world. But then again, no one who runs for the president of Nigeria ever imagines it to be easy.

Even on its best days, Nigeria is a very complex and volatile mix ethnic and religious differences compounded by a heritage of political ideas and leadership that has more generally emphasized and intensified these differences rather than create a harmonious idea of shared nationhood.

As I have always insisted, a nation like Nigeria, with its many “ancient kingdoms” and “caliphates” contending with the idea of a single organic nation, is a candidate for profound ruptures.

Nigerians have increasingly grown apart, and have been, as a result of the Machiavellian politics of power and control, pulled apart so much that the nation does not mean much anymore to most Nigerians.

As a matter of fact, except for maybe about 5% of Nigerians, mostly beneficiaries of an oligarchic control of national resource, nobody else loves Nigeria. Over 90% of young Nigerians from the age 15-35, given the choice or opportunity will leave Nigeria, and escape permanently.

They have no reason to love Nigeria, or believe in it. Nigeria does not offer them much. In their estimation, the patch of grass outside its shores holds a greater promise of life than the intense discontent, the darkness of the mood that now pervades the Nigerian psyche and its landscapes.

You can feel it also in the actions and dispositions of the new arrivals from Nigeria to the United States: they wish to have nothing to do with Nigeria, or the community of Nigerians. They basically have given up the idea of a “Nigerian home.”

They do not join Nigerian associations. They just do not want to have anything to do with Nigeria anymore. Those who send their sons and daughters out from the burning land must understand that they have given them up for good, and they shall not return.

This new phenomenon of disconnection and alienation is the product of discontent. This is dangerous – this loss of faith that now animates the Nigerian consciousness. Nigeria is the only nation I know of, which is officially not at war, but whose most educated and most skilled are fleeing from home.

This past week, I had an interesting conversation with an old dear friend of mine, a Professor of Philosophy in one of Nigeria’s major Universities, and his lament was as thick as the melancholy conveyed through the static of trans-Atlantic conversation: “the Nigeria you knew has gone from bad to worse, and I’m telling you this.”

Here is a rationalist, whose field is the Philosophy of Science, and who should, were Nigeria and its political leadership be more clear-minded, be on the advisory council of a National Science Foundation, and on the frequent call-list of Nigeria’s Minister of Science and Technology, saying his dearest hope is to send his children away from Nigeria because he loves them. “The depth of melancholy I felt on returning with them from the US and arriving at the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos; the sheer contrast drives me to tears.

As I speak with you, I have no light.” And he lives in one of those faculty housing on campus. This crisis is existential, and we have told this story ad nauseam – the fact that as Nigerians would say, “nothing is working in Nigeria.”

The question is, and has always been, why is nothing working in Nigeria? President Muhammadu Buhari and his school of thought tend to think it is because of “kwaruption.”

Just in case you are not yet cued in, “kwaruption” is the corruption of the word “corruption.” Just imagine, if somebody were to accuse the resident of corruption based on his corruption of the basic morphology of the sounds of the English language.

In any case, I tend to have a different view: corruption is not Nigeria’s greatest problem. It is the fundamental loss or even absence of the imagination.

A nation without visionary capacity is bound to falter. Take for instance, Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu, Minister of Science and Technology. First class in Chemical Engineering and Distinction in his doctoral work at the University of California, though not the one in Berkley, but in California, and we can live with that.

He has all the right credentials, yet, the minister’s first announcement on resumption is that Nigeria will start producing pencils.

Dear readers, I thought we were all living in the 21st century, where Materials Science has taken us so far beyond lead pencils.

Just last week, the minister also said laid out one of his priorities: he would soon establish science museums in the six regional zones of Nigeria. Why not first activate the Research and Production (RAP) strategies or models of the now defunct Biafra Directorate of Research which led to significant war productions, in the six regional zones of Nigeria? Why not create Research Parks? Why not activate interdisciplinary collaboration between the production arm of the Ministry of S & T with the Ministry of Trade and Industry, etc. I think Dr. Ogbonnaya Onu has lost it. But we watch.

The problem is that Nigerian public leadership does not listen. Those who occupy public office feel themselves immune from the consequences of not listening to the Nigerian public. The feelings and dreams of Nigerians are at odds with the agenda and interest of its public leadership. The president knows it all, and he is not ready caution troops and the police shooting unarmed protesters whose greatest crime is that they are seeking self-determination by peaceful means. He is what the Igbo call, “Eze Onye agwa nam.” That is why the president of Nigeria is now in the process of leading Nigeria to a double-headed insurgency in the South of Nigeria.

Last week’s murder of unarmed members of MASSOB and the IPOB continues a strategy intimidation that will not work, either in the creeks of the Niger Delta or in the streets of Aba.

Voices of reason have appealed to President Buhari to revise his policy of militarization, and stem the possibility of an armed struggle, which no one will win. As a matter of fact, the IPOB/MASSOB have issued a warning that they might be forced to arm and defend themselves against the Federal government’s use of deadly force.

It will be a dangerous situation, and it is in the offing; and the great nightmare which the president’s security analysts and advisers have yet to make clear to him is the possibility of spreading to Lagos, and shutting down the South completely as the Niger Delta militia and the Biafrans establish increasing collaboration with greater strategic objective.

This is the time for the president to stop playing the adversarial president and become the statesman. At the moment the president acts like a school yard bully. He must begin strategic engagement with these agitators, even if to reassure them. Last week’s meeting between the president and a group of his party folk, who claimed to represent the Igbo is a joke. The president met with folk who cannot win elections in their own compounds, and have no mandate from that region. The leaders of the Igbo are, at this very moment, their elected delegation to the National Assembly. Only they can speak, and be used to reach the Igbo, including members of the IPOB/MASSOB, on national issues.

The president’s choice of hosting a mutual admiration party does indicate a profound disconnection with the reality. That the president has never made a real move to reach out and explore means of stepping down the Biafran agitation through negotiations speaks of his capacities, or lack thereof, in understanding the complexity of the situation. That he has never met members of the National Assembly representing the South East on this matter, choosing rather to meet members of his party who do not speak, or act, or have any mandate to represent the South-East, indicates the president’s profound confusion about the East.

I should also say here, and now that the president cannot be accused of not liking the Igbo. That would be a total lie: as he himself has said, he is great friends with Azikiwe’s children; he was an ally of General Ojukwu, and his first two running mates – Chuba Okadigbo and Edwin Ume-Ezoke were respected Igbo. Mike Ahamba stuck with him as his lawyer through thick and thin and disagreed with him only on matters of principle.

The problem is that, in making his first political moves, President Buhari failed to leverage his political capital in the East, and continues to rely, not on diplomacy, but the adversarial use of force to quell legitimate discontent. The president sowed the discontent.