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The beat goes on
BEN OGUNTUASE
[email protected]
After successfully
staving off the November 16 proposed strike thus enabling the nation to have
some sense of relief, there was the temptation by many to praise the President
while quietly wishing he works hard to curtail henceforth his penchant for
heating up the polity. I was going to predict that given this President, it
would be unnatural for us to live through January 2005 without another rumpus.
His average truce period is about three months and much shorter if the
motivation behind the last truce is not internal to him. The truce with Labour
and Civil Society Coalition that resulted from the suspension of the strike
would appear not to have been internal to him as events following immediately
clearly showed.
The threatened
strike was fueling escalation in crude oil prices. $60 per barrel was a level
the world may not be able to live with before economies, particularly Asian,
began to collapse. The world was dangerously close to this point at $57 per
barrel. The strike would have shot it up to at least $65 per barrel. The
President of Nigeria had to do whatever needed to be done to avert the
possibility. Global pressure was mounted on him. He clearly panicked as this is
the only way to rationally explain his embarrassing admission of ignorance on
price of kerosene being higher than the price of petrol. Similar pressure on
NLC also forced it to return to the Mantu Palliative Committee. Once the strike
was averted, our President had to hurriedly visit the British Prime Minister
two days later and a few weeks after, the U. S. President. These were no mere
coincidences. The same forces that made him negotiate with the militants of the
Niger Delta also moderated him into an accommodation with Labour. I suspect
each time he is pushed into this compromise position, he seeks ways to repair
his bruised ego. Doing so always creates another round of crisis.
And so now it is
with the Chairman of his party. Studying the U. S. system very well, one easily
discovers that whenever Presidents are stared with the consequences of bad
policy decisions or general incompetence in governance, they foment trouble in
some unfortunate countries of the world and achieve diversion and criticism at
home. Jimmy Carter tried it with Iran and failed. President Bush almost failed
with Iraq. These are Presidents that at least have something to show by way of
achievements of their administrations in positively and fundamentally
influencing the lives of their citizens.
Our own problem
here is that of an administration so full of contradictions in its policies and
actions, yet so obdurate and resistant to citizens' input into improving the
process of governance. Here is to me another example of the poor orientation
and misplaced priorities of this administration. No sooner had the strike been
averted than the Federal Executive Council at its meeting on November 17 took a
decision to purchase and install in Lagos and Abuja what they called the
Integrated Digital Camera System for crime control at a cost of $800 million.
It does not matter whether I got the name or the figure right. The idea is to
install digital cameras in various places in Lagos and Abuja and monitored in
some room at the Force Headquarters in Abuja. Very futuristic for a country
that cannot get streetlights to work; a country that can not light all its
homes; a country that produces so much crude oil but can not refine at home; a
country that through policy is allowing rapid decay of its higher institutions
of learning.
More important is
the near absence of a comprehensive national database on its citizens, which is
partly responsible for the near total absence of forensic science in crime
management. It is now well over two years we all went out to register for the
National ID card. Only a few have received theirs. Faces seeing on digital
cameras would be meaningful if there is a database to sort, match and
positively identify the face. It also assumes we all have addresses which can
be traced. This is the way fingerprints are used. You must have a database with
which to match records. More importantly, what is the plan of this
administration to empower our higher institutions? We have so many universities
of technology where little or no research is taking place. We also have so many
engineering faculties without laboratories or tools. Only recently, the
University of Warwick Manufacturing Group was reported to have pioneered a
development that turns used mobile phones into flowers. All developments in technology
in the advanced world are the product of collaboration between the industry and
the universities. I just cannot see any deliberate effort by this
administration to promote the desired collaboration between government agencies
and the higher institutions towards national empowerment and development. We
must ask, is there really any collaboration between our Police Force and the
Sociology Departments in the various universities? I doubt it. What we need is
not just integrated digital camera for crime control; we need integrated
national development with emphasis on local empowerment.
The latest feud
between the President and his party Chairman, Audu Ogbeh, will ensure that the
President's attempt to preemptively abort the national conference does not receive
the desired attention. Many are already unwittingly caught in the misguided
euphoria of a presumed policy somersault by Mr. President. We were once trapped
in that euphoria when the Oputa Panel was established. The Alliance for
Democracy was once trapped in the euphoria of an unwritten agreement with the
President and his party. One thing has always been clear about our President;
he has never hidden his intention. He always says what he means, just that
people often don't take him for his word.
He is clear about
what he has described as a national dialogue and the committee he has set up.
The committee will do all the talking and any other body set up thereafter will
merely be to approve their recommendations. The Markafi committee will review
the constitution and carry out all the other specified mandates all before the
end of January 2005. I presume the committee will soon be calling for memoranda
and all sorts of papers. Governor Markafi is already doing the double-speak of
saying they are merely to produce the background paper when in black and white,
their mandate is actually to produce the results of a dialogue that will never
take place. Meanwhile, as we shift focus to the party dispute, the committee
work goes on.
It is interesting
that the President now talks of a moral burden on Ogbeh. That burden, with
respect, is more on Mr. President. Mr. Ogbeh as party chairman is not the
person sworn in to uphold and defend our constitution. Mr. Ogbeh is certainly
not the person in charge of our security forces. So why did Mr. President not
bring the conversation between Chris Uba and Chris Ngige to the attention of
his Attorney General who would have passed same to the Judiciary acting as what
lawyers call ‘amicus curiae’. What even stops the Attorney General
from investigating the claims made before Mr. President? So we have two people
whose behaviour compares to that of armed robbers, yet our dear President chose
to live with the situation.
What revealed the
President's true attitude to the Anambra situation is contained in his letter
to Ogbeh: “I never had warning that things were going sour in the state
any more until I was in Maputo, Mozambique on July 9, 2003 when I received
report that the governor has resigned. I did what normally I do not do except
in an emergency by using government facility for strictly non-governmental
purpose. I instructed that an airplane from the Presidential fleet be made
available to investigate what was happening.” Why would the President
regard such a situation as a non-governmental affair, a situation involving the
police and other agencies of government directly under his control? This is a
situation we now know and in fact had always known had direct implication on
the security and well being of the nation. Is this not a case of very poor
error of judgment on a major issue of national security importance? It is even
more alarming that the President would say he was unaware that things were
going sour in Anambra. Where is his intelligence service? Yet Mr. President claims
he gets daily security reports. How credible are these reports?
The honest advice
to Mr. President is that having been overwhelmed by the problems of Nigeria,
and given emerging evidence that he is severely compromised and therefore can
no longer perform with clear conscience, he should do the honourable thing;
resign. There is no need for him to sacrifice that which is
“dearest” to him. He and his party chairman are implying the
possibility of a coup. We don't need one at this time or anymore. We need a
mechanism to review our experience so far and redesign our nation. But if a
coup is what can do it, so be it, but we will be better off without it.
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