16082018 - Uproar as EFCC seeks minutes of Benue's security meetings

The immoral majority (1)
The political machine works
because it is a united minority acting
against a divided majority’ –Will
Durant
IN the thick of the June 12
annulment brouhaha, General
Babangida had announced that he
was, after all, ‘stepping aside’. And
many said that ‘stepping aside’ was
his political transition’s tragic
denouement -that after all the
transition procrastination and in
spite of even the annulment, for him
it still had to come to such mournful
anti-climax. And so the annulment
of June 12 many said, was now like
an ‘own goal’ ending a timeless
leather game of deception. From
having repeatedly shifted the
transition’s goal post, the great IBB
had at last dribbled himself out of
power. And you wondered, since he
was still to leave office anyway, why
might he not reconsider the
annulment of June 12, validate the
election and hand over to the winner,
MKO Abiola? So that that way both
‘bloody civilians’ and their
jackbooted military oppressors
would nobly have been reconciled.
But no. In pacification of the ego of
esprit de corps, Babangida chose
rather he would hand over to an
unelected kinsman of Abiola, the
famed UAC mogul Ernest
Shonekan, under a contraption
called ‘Interim National
Government’ created, many said, to
sing the Nunc dimittis or the funeral
dirge if you will of June 12. Ironically,
Shonekan who was to be the ‘Head
Celebrating excellence
IN a week that witnessed many unsavoury
happenings, particularly in the
surroundings of the National Assembly, one
piece of gladdening news was that of the Borno
boy who topped the 2018 Unified Tertiary
Matriculation Examination ,UTME. The boy,
Galadima Israel Zakari, emerged the best
student with a score of 364 among the over
1.6million students who sat for the 2018 exam
nation-wide, that is annually arranged by the
Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board,
JAMB, as a prerequisite for entry into all the
Nigerian universities. Coming from Borno
State, a place blighted in the last many years
by Boko Haram insurgency, it was truly a cause
for celebration.
Readers would be aware that in the northeast
where Borno State lies at the extreme
northern-most end, the Boko Haram terrorists,
whose primary grouse was against western
education, had been running a scorched-earth,
pillaging, campaign against schools in the
statesince 2009. The schools were always their
first targets, to burn and kill the children, and
if there were girls carry them away as trophies.
The sordid activities of the terrorists had
continued to drag the name of Borno in both
the national and international media as a
place of war and suicide bombers. Hardly a
few days passes without a report or two, on the
nefarious activities of the terrorists raiding a
community or a suicide bomber creating
mayhem in a mosque which is now their
favourite target.
I am therefore not surprised that the Borno
State Governor, Kashim Shettima, decided to
celebrate Galadima’s feat in a robust manner.
It was reported that the Governor received
Galadima and his mother, Jummai, in the
council chambers of the Government House
where he proclaimed him, ‘King of Jamb’.He
extolled the achievements of the boy whom he
said had proved to the world that the people of
Borno are ‘not known for Boko Haram conflict
alone but also in academic and scholarly
excellence’.
The Governor praised the boy’s effort and
said,’I am fixating on his achievement because
it has also put me particularly in the spotlight.
An orphan raised by a single mother, a son of
Boko Haram ravaged Borno who triumphed
against all odds. He has proven to the world
Of The Interim National
Government’, was conceded only the
authority of a ‘Head of State’ but not
the powers of the Commander-In-
Chief of the Armed Forces, C-IN-C.
As a matter of fact, a special onepage
Decree had been promulgated
and circulated to that effect. A
shadowy, often bleakly bespectacled
de facto 2IC and alter ego of IBB,
General Sani Abacha was to stay
back as Commander-In-Chief, C-IN-
C of the Armed Forces, and
essentially so as to secure the
contrived diarchical interregnum
which also had the mandate, any
time in the future, to conduct another
election. But Shonekan would not
only lack the power to command the
armed forces, he was also not to have
the complement of a cabinet with
the nomenclature all federal
cabinets in both modern
democracies and even in aberrant
military dictatorships, were always
known by: rather than ‘ministers’
they were to be called ‘Secretaries’.
So that in place of a ‘Ministerial
Cabinet’, Shonekan was to have a
‘Secretarial’ one; nominated and
constituted for him by the departing
IBB, to function ‘in-loco-ministrum’.
In family law, a ‘guardian’ is said to
act in-loco-parentis (or ‘in the
position of a biological parent’). And
so in-loco-ministrum was my own
creation for Shonekan’s ‘Secretaries’
who essentially were to function and
operate as though they were
Ministers. The idea perhaps was to
create a lame ‘government’ and not
allow it have a sense of possessing
that where there is a will there is a way. He has
proven to us that adversity should not lock us
down. Adversity should bring the best out of
people. We have to identify with this young
man. We have to identify with the boy and his
family. This the fundamental reason why we
have invited the Zakaris so that we can all
come together and celebrate this young man
who is a symbol of excellence, resilience
against all odds so that young men from Borno
can be inspired’.
It is a fairy tale come
true for the boy who
had to surmount plenty
of difficulties to get to
this Olympian height
The Governor then showered him with gifts
and extended a scholarship award to him to
be spent in the university of his choice. He
continued,’I am in the last lap of my time in
office as a governor, so I want to pay the full
scholarship for five years even though who ever
that would succeed us will sustain whatever
commitment we have made, but I felt that when
opportunity beckons like this one should utilise
it optimally. So to keep the mind of his mother
at rest, we are going to pay the full package of
his scholarship now.The full scholarship for
five years includes the cost of books, cost of
living in the campus, and all other related
expenses. While we are giving you the offer
letter today, the Commissioner for Higher
Education will hand over to you a cheque of
N5 million which covers all that will be needed
till graduation. And I want you, the mother, to
make the payment upfront so that this would
not be affected by any kind of inflation’.
It is a fairy tale come true for the boy who
had to surmount plenty of difficulties to get to
this Olympian height. Earlier Jummai, the
mother of the prodigy had related to the
the essential attributes of a
government.
And just when this anti-June 12
contrivance was about to be
constituted, one quiet, low-key
weekend at the Villa, General
Babangida ran into some of our
members, -namely of the State
House Press Corps- and as it was
often the case, this time also the
‘democrat’ –rather than the soldier
in him- got the better of his sense of
camaraderie. And he would
‘generously’ extend to us a
conditional offer of one slot of a
‘Secretary’ in that soon-to-beconstituted
Interim National
It was how those who
supported him
treacherously went about
it, (in much the same way
Saraki did to grab the
Senate Presidency) that is
the bird’s eye view by
which I intend to espouse
the concepts of
‘minorities’ and
‘majorities’ in a
democracy
Government. The caveat was that
whoever we were presenting must be
elected through the due democratic
process. Such irony, you would say;
that the man who had just brazenly
subverted the electoral will of an
entire nation, annulling the freest and
fairest election ever, would be
recommending to us, ‘watchdogs of
the society’, the virtue of applying
the due democratic process in the
squaring of every little ‘bone’ and
every ‘brown envelop’. And in
fairness to IBB’s conditional offer, it
did remind us, journalists especially,
that the democracy that we were
crusading for the nation should not
only place a demand on politicians
to abide by the due democratic
process in partisan politics alone; but
that even as minuscule as a 53-
member professional fraternity like
ours may be required to live up to
the demand of the democratic
process. Unfortunately, in spite of its
Governor that she
raised the boy
along with his two
siblings as a single
parent in Lagos.
The father who
was a Major in the
Nigerian Army
Vanguard, THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 2018 —17
inherent democratic moral
instruction, IBB’s offer to us would
soon become the proverbial apple
of discord, rending us apart along
sectional and tribal fault lines. It
soon proved to us that Nigerians were
as swiftly schismatic at the realm of
national politics as they can also
easily be at the minutest levels of
professional groupings that arrogate
the right to interrogate others.
By the way, IBB’s offer would later
turn out to be a ‘Greek gift’ -to the
prospective beneficiary that is. But
first how was it an ‘apple of discord’?
NTA’s then State House Chief
Correspondent, the famous Sola
Atere had indicated his interest to vie
for the offer. But then there was a
snag. He was a non-participating
member. He had never identified
with the Corps. Let alone attend its
meetings. But I was one of few
members who appreciated the fact
that Atere had too much on his
professional plate to afford to be an
active member of the Corps. He was
in fact on the permanent list of the
President’s domestic and
international travels; and so he
travelled en-suite with IBB in the
Presidential Jet. Not a great number
of us representing major
organisations, were on the rotational
list and we travelled third class by
commercial airlines -often with the
President’s advance team of protocol
and security personnel. There were
minor assignments we could afford
to miss once in a while. Atere had to
cover and report every presidential
movement. And so he was locked up
always in NTA’s Mini State House
Studio editing or programming –so
much that many of our colleagues
interpreted his non-participation in
the activities of the Corp to mean a
disdain for it. Yet, even those of us
who appreciated his busy schedule
still believed that it was not sufficient
justification not to occasionally
identify with Corps.
And now that Atere was interested
in the offer made to us through the
very body he was believed to have
scant regard for, the argument arose
whether he was a bona fide member
of the Corps, and if so, whether he
was entitled to contest the offer.
died in 2004 leaving her with the three children.
It was a struggle for the mother eking out a
living in Lagos and seeing the children through
schools. Apparently her herculean efforts have
started paying off.
More celebration of excellence
I
GUESS there would be more
celebrations among the circle of friends
of Dr. Barclays Foubiri Ayakoroma who has
recently been elevated to the rank of Professor
by the Nasarawa University, Keffi. Barclays
has just finished his two very eventful tenures
as Chief Executive of the National Institute of
Cultural Orientation, NICO. Actually, that is
where I ran into him in 2010 when I was briefly
posted to the Ministry of Tourism, Culture and
National Orientation. The Ministry had quite
a handful of agencies but even then one could
see that the NICO chief executive stood out
not only as a brilliant academic but one who
was passionate about what he was doing. The
Institute he headed was probably the busiest
agency of the Ministry, with one event or the
other every passing week.
It was only when I came to be acquainted
with his background that I realised that he
must have come to NICO very well-groomed
for job. Besides his Degrees in theatre arts he
had ample opportunity to practice when he
joined Rivers State Television where he wrote,
acted in, and directed many plays on the stage
and on TV. He went to lecture in the
Department of Theatre Arts in the University
of Port Harcourt where his talents flourished.
He combined teaching and writingas well as
producing plays. He even ventured to pioneer
a community theatre programme in
Bayelsa.In due course his talents were spotted
and at the turn of the millennium he was
appointed the ExecutiveDirector of the Bayelsa
State Council of Arts and Culture (BSAC).His
tenure of nine years at the BSAC was certainly
Again, I was one of few members
who had no difficulty admitting that
technically he was one of us; because
I believed –and still do- that the
qualification for being a ‘State
House Correspondent’ is superior to,
and predates the criterion for
membership of the ‘State House Press
Corps’. You are automatically a
member of the Corps if you are
accredited as a Correspondent to
cover the State House. And so
accreditation to cover the State
House and not fidelity to an in-house
fraternity known only to us, was the
key. And so since IBB’s offer was
made not to us as individuals, but to
a body that pre-existed our
individual membership, I thought
that Atere was justified like any one
of us to vie for IBB’s offer. It was how
those who supported him
treacherously went about it, (in much
the same way Saraki did to grab the
Senate Presidency) that is the bird’s
eye view by which I intend to espouse
the concepts of ‘minorities’ and
‘majorities’ in a democracy.
To be concluded
Re-‘Oshiomhole's
pleasant heresies
+2348053429696:-
“Thanks for the series on
Oshiomhole which was lucid and
cogent! The direct participation by
registered voters in APC primaries
is the intrinsic essence of
progressivism. Bravo to the new
Chairman for its introduction!
Sovereignty resides with the ruled -
John Locke’s second treatise on
‘government’.
Oyegun should keep quiet because
timidity, irresolution and lack of
courage and vision is responsible for
the current poor state of the APC. He
allowed Saraki and Dogara to grow
wings when immediate expulsion
from the party could’ve been the
correct, bold, assertive response to
their duplicity in grabbing power
illegally”
–Nnoli, Aba.
eventful as he was said to have contributed
immensely to its development. He led the State
Troupe to perform in many states of the
federation and also out to China, United
Kingdom, France, and Algeria.
He brought the same passionate energy into
NICO when he was appointed its Chief
Executive by President Umaru Musa Yar’Adua
in 2009. He took the Institute to new dizzying
heights when he went after ideals that
synchronised with the national needs of the
moment. One of such was the campaign for
the promotion of the Nigerian Dress Culture
which he personally spearheaded and used
every occasion to remind us to dress in our
indigenous garbs. He presented NICO’s memo
to the National Council of Culture and Tourism
which I recall held in Calabar in 2010 seeking
the approval of the government to declare
Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays as Dress
Nigeria Days to boost our identity as a people
as well as revive our moribund textile industry.
I was pleasantly surprised that this
government gave a listening ear and approved
the prayer last year. I could imagine Barclays’
joys when he received the letter that read thus:
“The Federal Executive Council(FEC) at its
meeting of Wednesday 1st February 2017 has
approved Mondays and Wednesdays of every
week as Made-in-Nigeria Dress Days as partof
measures to uplift the nation’s culture and
promote Made-in-Nigeria textile products.”It
was a crowning moment of many years of
persistent advocacy. So when you walk into a
public office – government ministries,
agencies, banks, - and find all the staff attired
in Nigerian dresses on Mondays and
Wednesdays, this is part of the narrative.
Barclays remains probably the busiest
playwright around Abuja having many of his
plays staged in the universities as well as the
French and Korean Cultural Centres. I guess
with this elevation we shall see more.
Congratulations Professor.