Of rascals, radicals and rebels

It was interesting listening, recently, to the exhortation by former President Olusegun Obasanjo, that the nation was urgently in need of rebels. Obasanjo spoke at the public presentation of a book, ‘Footprints Of A Rebel’, the autobiography of Tayo Sowunmi, an erstwhile activist and statesman, who is the Babanla Adinni of Egbaland. Sowunmi commemorated his ascension into the revered club of octogenarians, at that event, hosted in Abeokuta, the Ogun state capital. Obasanjo charged that Nigeria requires “more rebels, to stand and speak for the truth”. Pursuing his thesis, Obasanjo said the country desires more of “those who would look at things straight in the face and say: “This is not right, this I will not be part of, this is not good for Nigeria”.

It is truly heartening that Obasanjo who I was privileged to serve as a close personal aide beginning from his formal declaration to run for the nation’s top job on November 3, 1998, to his handover on May 29, 2007, is the one who threw this challenge. Without being patronising or subjective, Obasanjo remains the best president Nigeria has had since the return of democratic governance 23 years ago. He was competent, confident, pan-Nigerian, meritocratic, courageous and never quivered when decisions were to be taken. He had his ears on the ground too and felt the heartbeat of the streets.

He had his visible failings in critical sectors and departments of the entire gamut of statecraft and administration, nonetheless. He had every opportunity, for instance, to bequeath a more acceptable constitution to Nigeria than the version hurriedly cobbled together by the fleeting Abdulsalam Abubakar regime. That flawed document remains a subject of disputation and contestation, even today. It has continued to haunt, hound, and hurt genuine national integration, equity, justice and fairness. It is the same constitution that the incumbent leadership operates and cites as an alibi whenever Nigerians query the peculiarly northern-centric, religion-insensitive bias of the administration. “I’m leading this country according to the constitution,” is a regular refrain in those few and far between moments, when the media got the president to speak. Obasanjo was in a position to pragmatically address the burning question of restructuring, which would have assuaged the very roots of the vexation that the issue continues to generate.

I do not intend to revisit Obasanjo’s very tardy transition process in 2007, which brought Nigeria to the despairing morass the country has found itself, especially in the past seven years. Obasanjo was almost singularly responsible for producing Umaru Musa Yar’Adua as successor to the wholesale exclusion of other candidates. Some of them, perhaps, would probably have served the country better. For all the bile and bickering between him and his deputy, Atiku Abubakar, there were credible and competent alternatives Obasanjo would have considered.

I do not want to probe Obasanjo’s wholesale acceptance of the national population census figures conducted in 2006 which proferred the demographic superiority of Kano state, for instance, over and above Lagos. As a student of geography, I was taught that urbanisation expands and gravitates towards the coast. I was tutored that maritime resources provide limitless and sustainable mainstream and downstream opportunities for those in geophysical proximity. Instructively, states which were privileged with jumbo numerical statistics from that exercise are barely able to justify the figures on polls day. Underaged urchins are usually recruited from the streets to make up the numbers. The Lagos we know today is a pseudo-country on its own right, generating about 40% of its fiscal needs while chasing a spot in the top six positions of national economies in Africa.

I also do not intend to interrogate what a possible Obasanjo reaction would have been, to those courageous enough to rebel against him, those days when he held sway in Aso Rock. Atiku’s subsequent travails, as well as the torments of Diepreye Solomon Peter Alamieyeseighas and the James Onanefe Iboris, former governors during his superintendence, have been serially attributed to him. We shouldn’t be unmindful too, of Obasanjo’s lien on federal allocations due to Lagos state in 2006 because the government of Bola Tinubu dared to create more local government areas “against due process”. The state was compelled to look inwards for survival, which activated its internal revenue generation sensibilities. The state subsequently won the case at the Supreme Court of Nigeria.

A lot has also been said about Obasanjo’s complicity in creating the current sociopolitical situation in Nigeria. He joined the chorus of those rooting for the candidacy of the subsisting president in 2015. A few years down the road, however, Obasanjo himself has repeatedly in the public sphere denounced the questionable capacity, unabated inertia, palpable lack of creativity, glaringly divisive governance regimen and the promotion of ethnoreligious fissions in the polity, of a leader he once promoted. Comprehensively disappointed and roundly outraged about the minimum governance the reign the present leadership has brought Nigeria, Obasanjo’s new prescription is understandable.

I align with Obasanjo though, on the need to galvanise the soro soke mass choir, because so much has gone wrong and is still going awry, under the watch of the incumbent “change” administration. The percentage contortions, the mass disillusionment, the quantum despair witnessed within these gruelling seven years, remain the worst in our political history. Beginning from the back and forth on the prices of premium motor spirit (PMS) to the recent sprint of the cost of diesel oil beyond the N400 price per litre mark and the increment of the per-unit cost of electricity; Nigerians are being concurrently bled, left, right and centre. Inflation figures remain on the ascendancy while the figures of the unemployed even as provided by the government’s own National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) is projected at 33% of the general population for the year 2022. The youth unemployment rate specifically was 53.40% in the year 2020.

For all the pretensions about an ongoing anti-corruption war, the incumbent administration may yet produce the richest public servants ever. A certain Jafaru Mohammed, a brigadier general in the Nigerian Army recently forfeited 24 prime properties littered across the country valued at N10.9 billion. Mohammed, serving director of finance and administration in the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) was appointed by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) under Ibrahim Magu’s watch in 2017 to take charge of the finances of the National Intelligence Agency (NIA) after the sum of N13 billion, belonging to the agency, was discovered in a Lagos apartment. Almost simultaneously, 20 landed properties belonging to late Aminu Maude, also an army general, and valued at N3billion, were forfeited to the Nigerian government. Examples abound.

Never in the nation’s history have the twin evils of favouritism and nepotism been so rife. There is this “in your face” haughtiness and accompanying insensitivity about it all, as though asking you the question, “what can you do about it, anyway?” This is why out of the 44 ministers and members of the federal executive council (FEC), 10 substantive ministers, not one minister of state, anchoring most of the more critical ministries are from the northwest. These are the ministries of petroleum, justice, defence, police affairs, finance, agriculture, water resources, aviation, disaster management and environment. Conversely, a much smaller ministry of labour and employment has two ministers from the south, Chris Ngige and Festus Keyamo (SAN) sandwiched in the constrained department.

Hunger has never been as debilitating, acute lack an incongruous twin, in a milieu where sadistic leaders grin from ear to ear as they preside over the customary laceration of state resources, gifting percentage tokens or outrightly denying workers and retirees who have invested their active years in service to fatherland, their legitimate entitlements. Despair and despondency have triggered strings of suicides and untimely deaths across the land.

Elsewhere, desperation has goaded people into untold bestiality, even cannibalism. The decapitation of fellow humans and the consequent marination of parts of the human physiognomy for barbecue is suddenly easier than dressing chicken for the soup pot. Kidnapping has become a veritable goldmine even when some satanic perpetrators are demented enough to receive jumbo ransoms while still murdering their victims to the eternal bewilderment and agony of their survivors. Insurgency and banditry subsist in parts of the country, spawning camps and makeshift habitation for displaced people, even as government agencies continually cook the books on fluke palliatives and phantom succour provided for the needy.

Long after eminent citizens like Theophilus Yakubu Danjuma, a distinguished former army general, and Aminu Masari, the governor of Katsina state, respectively admonished Nigerians to rise up and defend themselves in the face of the failure of the state to stand up for them, the chickens are coming home to roost. President Muhammadu Buhari himself threw up his hands in despair the other day while on a visit to Sokoto state, the seat of the caliphate, describing the security situation in the northwest, Buhari admitted, as thoroughly overwhelming.

Nigeria has never been in short supply of clearheaded rebels, across sociopolitical epochs, by the way. Even under the most autocratic, most repressive of fistic regimes, Nigeria has always had fearless, fiery, courageous, cerebral, and vocal tendencies. The National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), a broad-based coalition of Nigerian democrats, emplaced in 1994 to press for the validation of the presidential mandate of MKO Abiola, functioned under the jackboots of a junta led by the distinguishedly ruthless Sani Abacha. The ‘Occupy Nigeria’ national protests of January 2012, the ‘Lekki lockdown’ of October 2020, in which innocent young Nigerians were killed, are examples from our not too distant past.

Rebels in times past who pushed through their agendas, operated under regimes that listened to their people. Who will listen to today’s parrot, when the king is stereotypically unawia about goings-on under his jurisdiction? Nigeria needs more than rebels in our present circumstances. We can do with a coalition of rascals, radicals and rebels. For an administration in its twilight, however, expectations are better subsumed. Let’s prayerfully anticipate a new dawn, come May 29, 2023.

Olusunle (PhD), poet, journalist, writer and author, is a member of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE)