Honour among thieves

NEXT reports the House of Representatives has voted to kill a bill that would have provided for the:

restraint and civil forfeiture of property derived from unlawful activity and any instrumentalities used or intended to be used in the commission of unlawful and to make provision for the investigation of benefit derived from corruption, money laundering and instrumentalities

In plain English, had this become law, any assets, wealth or property shown to have been the result/profits/proceeds of corruption and/or other economic and financial crimes would be forfeited by anyone convicted of said crimes, and seized by the EFCC on behalf (presumably) of whatever tier or branch of government the convict defrauded.

The legislators in the Representatives apparently want us to continue with the current system. The one where media sensationalism greets each corruption trial (they are so few, it is an "event" when one occurs), followed by prison sentences (that are mostly commuted to slaps-on-the-wrist the moment the public loses interest because the media circus has moved on) and fines (which are dwarfed by the amounts the criminal "allegedly" stole).

Yes, the current system where crime pays, where even a corruption conviction can not stop you from enjoying your ill-gotten loot once your slap-on-the-wrist is over.

I did not even know that such a bill had been introduced. It is the sort of bill that could and probably would attract mass support across the citizenry ... if only the citizenry knew the bill existed in the first place.

Alas, the Nigerian media and commentariat have spent the last few months inundating us with meaningless Prime People (abi Vintage People) stories about Umaru Yar'Adua, Turai Yar'Adua, Jonathan Goodluck and Patience Jonathan. Honestly, I do not see what difference it makes. President Yar'Adua's health is important in and of itself (we all wish him well), but there is no substantive difference between him and Goodluck Jonathan. If the excitement is tied-in to their respective ethnicities, regions of origin, and religions, then the fact is that does not substantively matter either. I am more interested in the fact that we still don't have credible elections in Nigeria. I want to be able to vote for the president, governor, federal, state and local legislators that I want. If I had that right, the National Assembly would have approved this bill. Conversely, the thing that stops the National Assembly from approving this law is the same thing that makes the Yar'Adua-Jonathan dichotomy tottally irrelevant, unimportant and insignificant to anything that matters to me.

Central Bank Reorganization

I first became aware of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi through essays and speeches posted to the internet. Sanusi variously commented on political, socio-cultural and economic issues, and while I did not always agree with him, I always enjoyed his commentaries. Much discourse and debate in Nigeria in these regards is bereft of substance, of quality, or of value to understanding Nigeria's past, to making the best of Nigeria's present or to planning for Nigeria's future. Sanusi's views always had substance, and even if I disagreed with a point here or there, it was the sort of disagreement that makes for proper politics.

What I mean by proper politics is the ability of citizens to choose between different, equally valid, viewpoints on particular issues. He could say the best way to handle an issue is XYZ, I could disagree and say it is ABC, and the citizens could vote. That is what "proper politics" is, not this mess where we seem to have moved from the ethnic, religious and regional chess of the First Republic to the Godfather/Oligarch/Plutocrat chess of the Fourth Republic, via the hypbrid Second Republic and the truncated militaro-civilan Third Republic. Our politics have always been empty, not just lacking answers to the vital questions but making no attempts to find answers to the vital questions. Heck, our politics from Day One had little understanding (or attempt at understanding) what the questions are to begin with. What we have always is a rugged, zero-sum, oft-violent game of power politicking, where the goal is power for its sake.

In this context, as I read more from Sanusi over the years, even when I disagreed with him I found his views refreshing, in many ways superior to the fulminations of the so-called "progressives", those do-nothings who consider themselves the guardians of Nigeria's substantive discourse. I chuckled last year when Sanusi accused the "progressives" of living in 2009 while speaking the language of 1953. At one point, years ago, I even had a brief correspondence with the future CBN governor, sending him an email to tell him I appreciated his commentaries and hoped he kept writing because their was an audience out there for his essays. He responded, thanking me for my kind words and promising to keep writing.

I was hopeful when Sanusi Lamido Sanusi was appointed Governor of the Central Bank. In Nigeria (and frankly all over Africa ... no, make that all over the world), men and women usually express positive points of view when outside government, but revert and become defenders of the negative status quo once they are in government. I hoped that Sanusi remained true to his beliefs, because if he did, Nigeria would have an intelligent, thoughtful monetary policy chief who didn't just reflexively carry out old-schoold ideas that never worked in the past, don't work in the present and will never work in the future.

I have observed the so-called Sanusi "tsunami" in the banking sector. It is clear the banking sector was full of rot, but it is too early to judge whether the CBN has done the right things in terms of cleaning out the rot. I have written many blog posts on the "toxic assets" issue in Nigerian banking, and (before Sanusi came into office as CBN Governor) discussed the question of how Nigeria could bail out the banks and reform the sector so we don't have to face this issue in the future.

The Sanusi-led Central Bank of Nigeria, the Arumma Oteh-led Securities and Exchange Commission and the Farida Waziri-led Economic and Financial Crimes Commission have certainly been busy. Some of what they have done has been controversial, and some (like the proposed Asset Management Company for toxic assets) are issues I hope to study and then discuss on this blog. Sanusi has pumped a HUGE amount of money into the banking sector, and I am somewhat perturbed by the fact that "analysts" have not really substantively discussed this. If you are looking for a sign of how shallow discourse can be in Nigeria, note that for a lot of people the fact that Sanusi is a Fulani from Kano is more worthy of discussion (viz-a-viz claims of "Northern domination") than the substantive import and impact of his monetary policy decisions. Let me say here and now that Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, Arumma Oteh and Farida Waziri are among President Umaru Yar'Adua's best political appointments since 2007.

Waziri in particular gets a lot of flack for not being Nuhu Ribadu, but both Ribadu and Waziri were and are constrained by a simple fact; the Nigerian political system is built on financial and economic misconduct of one kind or another, so it would be suicide if that same political system permitted anyone (Ribadu or Waziri) to actually fight corruption. Ribadu and Waziri were both appointed to give the outward appearance of fighting corruption, while the system remained broadly corrupt. For all the praise lavished on Ribadu, the fact is the years between 1999 and 2007 were the most corrupt in Nigerian history; and unlike Farida Waziri, Nuhu Ribadu was an active and deliberate participant in the corrupt politics that drives the system, particularly ahead of the 2007 fake-election.

But I am digressing from the central reason for this blog post.

The Central Bank of Nigeria has announced plans to expand the number of CBN departments, divisions and offices. In a time when Nigeria should be consolidating things (not just banks, but states and local government areas, federal and state cabinets and ministries, etc), the Sanusi-led CBN is expanding its bureaucracy. The reason given for the expansion is technocratic gibberish:

“The development of a more functional organisation structure, alignment of the structure in line with the Bank’s mandate and strategy, promotion of efficient and effective operations, building synergy with both internal and external stakeholders of the Bank, facilitation of information flow and integrated data management, and facilitation of the achievement of key deliverables of management in conformity with global best practice.”

It is the sort of language politicians, "world leaders", technocrats, diplomats, non-governmental organizations and multilateral agencies use when they either (a) haven't the foggiest clue about something, or (b) intend to do something they know a majority of people oppose, and so are trying to avoid ever admitting bluntly what it is they are doing.

Whatever "synergies" Sanusi is trying to achieve, I am sure he can do it with the same number of directorates, departments, divisions and offices that existed before. I am not so ideological as to demand he reduce the bureaucracy, but I am certainly not so lax as to support expanding it.

Of course the article does not say much about the practicalities of the plan. It is conceivable this new structure will be operated by the same number of staff and managers. In other words, maybe Sanusi is redeploying existing staff to the new departments, as opposed to expanding the bureaucracy per se. I hope this is what he is doing, because if he is doing the other thing, then he is acting like a normal Nigerian politician whose approach to everything is the expansion of bureaucracies, political units, and political-administrative jobs.

Oh how charitable

Future historians will note a particular generation of military officers who played an outsize role in some of the biggest events in post-colonial Nigerian history. Many of them would be surprised to find anyone considered them to be part of the same group; their internal, intra-group rivalries were violent and murderous. Tragically, their quarrels with each other were often projected beyond the group to draw in wider swathes of the Nigerian population.

The long buildup to fratricidal conflict known as the Nigerian Civil War began in the 1950s when restored self-government became a real possibility. One of these days, academics will seriously and rationally research and explore how and why we as a people took ourselves from peace to civil war in less than 16 years; for now, simplistic explanations predominate. But whichever way you look at it, no matter how much liquid "fuel" of civil war we had sprayed all over the country in that decade-and-half, it was a particular generation of military officers who took a lit match to the fuel, thus starting the fire in earnest.

The coup of January 15, 1966 was many things, but within the overall picture there was the specific case of officers (the "5 majors" and their accomplices) killing fellow officers Zakari Maimalari, James Pam, Arthur Unegbe, Kur Mohammed, Abogo Largema and other officers/soldiers.

Due to the paucity of credible historical research and the preponderance of half-truths, I cannot say that I know what the relationships between the members of the officer corps were before this event. I do know that after this event, the members of this generation of officers spent the next 35 years fighting, betraying and killing each other.

The January 1966 coup introduced the first of many military-civilian diarchies. I know we like to call them "military" regimes, but civilian politicians, technocrats, administrators and plutocrats were as much a part of those regimes (maybe even more so), as the soldiers who ostensibly led the regimes. That first diarchy did not last long; members of the officer class rose up and killed Ironsi, Fajuyi and other fellow officers.

Then followed the Civil War, with members of the generation like Ojukwu, Effiong, Njoku, Nzeogwu, Ifeajuna, Banjo, Onwuatuegwu, Ademoyega etc on one side, and members like Gowon, Buhari, Babangida, Muritala, Obasanjo, Nwachukwu, Garba, Abacha, Vatsa, Dimka, Bissalla, Danjuma, Shehu Yar'Adua etc on the other.

The members of this generation of officers continued betraying, fighting and killing themselves after the end of the Civil War.

Members of the group overthrew the Gowon-led regime; Gowan went into exile and his allies among the powerful state governors (like Ukpabi Asika) were forced out. Muritala Mohammed, who had had a hand in the 1967 coup, was installed as president.

Rival members then overthrew the Muritala regime, killing Muritala in the process. The unsuccessful plotters, men like Bissalla and Dimka, and the men who crushed the coup, notably Ibrahim Babangida, were members of this same group of officers. The plotters were executed in grisly fashion, in public, on the beaches of Lagos.

It should be noted that during the 1970s, Mohammedu Buhari was a federal minister, one of many officers in this group to hold senior government jobs. In the 1980s, Joe Garba would serve not only as UN Ambassador, but would chair the UN Security Council.

But I am jumping ahead.

In the aftermath of the assassination of Muritala Mohammed, the new triumvirate of Obasanjo, Shehu Musa Yar'Adua and Theophilus Danjuma (the man who led the detachment that killed Ironsi and Fajuyi) organized a transition to civilian-led government, the Second Republic. But their generation of officers were not done with Nigeria yet.

During the Second Republic, Emeka Ojukwu, leader of the Biafran side of the Civil War was granted an amnesty and returned to join the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN). It was a simple trade; Ojukwu got to return to Nigeria free of judicial consequence, and the NPN gained a massive weapon (a much stronger weapon than K.O. Mbadiwe) to use against Nnamdi Azikiwe's Nigerian People's Party (NPP) in Imo and Anambra, the states with Igbo-majority populations.

It was all for naught anyway. In 1983, Dogonyaro, Abacha and others overthrew the Second Republic, installing Buhari and Idiagbon in federal executive positions. Just over a year later, they moved again, this time dethroning Buhari and installing Babangida as president.

At this point, most of the senior members of this peculiar generation of officers had moved out of the military, and the incoming federal and state diarchy governments were led by men who had been junior officers during the crucial years 1966 and 1967.

Only two months after Buhari's overthrow and Babangida's enthronement, there were a raft of arrests of officers and soldiers accused of planning a coup. Though there is a possibility (maybe even a probability) that Mamman Vatsa was not actually involved in the alleged coup planning, his name is the one most associated in the public consciousness with the alleged would-be coup. Within this overall group of officers who had wielded an outsize effect on Nigerian events since 1966, Babangida and Vatsa stood out for being almost like competing fraternal twins. Yet Babangida did not hesistate to approve Vatsa's execution (along with the executions of other suspects).

Five years later, in 1990, there was a second attempted coup (perhaps it was really the "first").

It was twenty-four years, nearly a quarter of a century, had passed since the events of January 1966; it seemed the people of Nigeria had learned a lesson from the four bloody years that followed. By and large, Nigerian citizens had adopted a posture of keeping out of intra-military violence after 1970, allowing the officer corps to fight it out among themselves without their quarrels sucking in the wider citizenry or inciting outbreaks of ethno-regional and communal violence as had happened in the years 1966-1970.

When the 1990 coupists appealed to still-simmering ethno-regional hate in the hope of drawing support from the broader population, the Nigerian citizenry responded with curiosity and surprise, but were clearly disinterested in leaving their homes to participate in a rerun of the 1960s. Some of the plotters fled the country, while others were executed.

Babangida hung on, starting a "transition to civil rule" that turned out to be a stage-managed, cartoonish joke. Many Nigerians remember the annulment of Abiola's general election victory in 1993. Few remember that that event was actually the second annulment. The first occurred in 1992; Shehu Yar'Adua, the number two in the triumvirate that led the diarchy between 1976 and 1979, had emerged as the Presidential candidate of the SDP, but President Babangida "disqualified" Yar'Adua and others (including civilians with long-term ties to the diarchy) from running for President. It was only then that the SDP and NRC selected Moshood Abiola and Bashir Tofa respectively as their presidential candidates, two civilians with firm ties to the diarchy, two civilians with stronger ties to Babangida himself, two civilians who had become multi-millionaires by exploiting their ties to the governing system.

Abiola was the prime beneficiary of Babangida's annulment of the primaries that gave the SDP presidential nomination to Shehu Yar'Adua, and (understandably, I suppose) Abiola did not oppose or protest the annulment. It is an important lesson. Very often we allow bad things to happen, because we think we can benefit from those bad things, never mind the fact that those bad things could consume us just as easily as our opposition. Moshood Abiola had been involved in Nigerian politics at the highest level for decades, aligning himself with any government in power, be it diarchy or fully civilian-led. He knew better than anyone else how the tides suddenly turn, how men can be at the very top of the system one year and find themselves facing a firing squad or involuntary expulsion from politics the next. But he profited from the system, and hence was uninterested in challenging it; to challenge the system was to give up wealth and power (which did eventually happen when he belatedly moved to challenge Babangida's powers of unilateral annulment).

I suppose the same comment could apply to Shehu Yar'Adua, who also became a multi-millionaire through his connections to the system, only to have his political ambitions crushed by Babangida, who had been his junior in the diarchies of the 1970s.

The 1993 annulment weakened Babangida, and a ridiculous Interim National Government was created to provide cover for the hand-over of power from Babangida to Abacha. Under Abacha's iron hand, dissenters were treated roughly at best, murderously at worst.

Abacha was able to use Emeka Ojukwu to help pacify the Southeast for the government in the context of continuing agitation in the Yoruba-majority states regarding the annulled 1993 elections.

In 1995, Shehu Yar'Adua was sentenced to life imprisonment, to punish him for pushing for civilian-led rule. Shehu Yar'Adua ultimately died in prison, in 1997.

Moshood Abiola was also jailed, in 1994 in a vain effort to stop his fight for the realization of his presidential mandate won in 1993. He died in prision in 1994.

Sani Abacha died of unknown causes in 1998.

He was replaced by Abdulsalami Abubakar, another member of this peculiar group of officers with outsized representation in major events in Nigerian history.

Abubakar started a programme to return the country to civilian-led government, giving rise to the current Fourth Republic. The presidential candidates in the 1999 elections were Olu Falae (an technocratic adjutant of Ibrahim Babangida) for the AD/ANPP alliance and Olusegun Obasanjo (yes, him again) for the PDP. Their running mates respectively were Umaru Shinkafi (a former head of the National Security Organization in the Second Republic) and Atiku Abubakar (a product of the late Shehu Yar'Adua's PDM machine).

Beyond the presidential stage, assorted "godfathers", men who had acquired wealth and with it power during the diarchies, created massive political machines to seize control of entire states and to bargain at the national level for a share of the cake in exchange for "delivering" their fiefdoms to particular candidates.

Four years on, in 2003, there was a flashback to the 1960s, as the three leading presidential candidates were Olusegun Obasanjo (winner), Mohammedu Buhari (runner-up) and Emeka Ojukwu (third place). I remember thinking that nothing proved the truth of Nigeria's political stagnation more than the fact that these three were still relevant 40 years later. What had Nigeria gained from their long years of involvement in politics? What was it that they had not had the chance to do in 40 years that they would do after 2003?

And four years later, in 2007, in an election that lacked credibility, Umaru Yar'Adua emerged as the new President of Nigeria. President Yar'Adua is the younger brother of the late Shehu Yar'Adua, who had been number two in the 1976-1979 triumvirate and who became a latter-day enemy of Babangida and Abacha. That Obasanjo, who had been number one in the 1976-1979 triumvirate, elevated Umaru Yar'Adua to the presidency, is a reminder that Shehu Yar'Adua's political machine outlived him.

After leaving the army in 1979, Shehu Yar'Adua acquired wealth in the usual way of Big Men (through conections to power), but more significantly he created a national political machine, variously known as the Peoples Democratic Movement (PDM). This machine has been very influential in Nigerian politics. First it catapaulted Shehu Yar'Adua to the SDP presidential ticket in 1992, before Babangida's intervention. Later the PDM formed the bedrock of the alliance of machines (including machines loyal to Ibrahim Babangida) that placed Olusegun Obasanjo in the Presidential mansion in 1999; Atiku Abubakar, who became Vice-President, also became the de facto national leader of the PDM at this time, drawing into its fold the state machines of various PDP governors. Once more, in 2003, the PDM and its alliance partners manipulated Obasanjo into office, after which political warfare broke out between Obasanjo and Atiku.

Obasanjo wanted a third term. Atiku insisted on the deal they had agreed upon (that Atiku would succeed Obasanjo after Obasanjo enjoyed two terms).

Victory in the first battle went to Atiku; the Third Term constitutional amendment was defeated in the National Assembly. But the war was ultimately won by Obasanjo, with the help of fixers like Nuhu Ribadu, Maurice Iwu, Tony Anenih, etc. Obasanjo's political machine and allied machines were able to coopt much of the PDM machinery, and destroy the rest of it. Atiku Abubakar was supposedly the leader of the PDM machinery -- but how can you purport to lead Shehu Yar'Adua's machine against Shehu Yar'Adua's younger brother? I daresay the collective mass of political machines in Nigeria preferred Umaru Yar'Adua; he had a softly-softly consensus approach where Obasanjo, Buhari and Ojukwu approached government as though it was an army and they were generals -- and where Atiku has a reputation for corruption, Umaru Yar'Adua was reputedly the only Fourth Republic governor to leave a fiscal surplus after his term.

Okay, I guess you are wondering why I decided to bore you with this long history of a peculiar generation of Nigerian military officers.

Simple.

One of their number, Theophilus Danjuma .... number three in the 1976-1979 diarchy, and the leader of the detachment that assassinated Aguiyi-Ironsi and Adekunle Fajuyi ... announced =N=15 Billion ($100 million) donation to provide free medical and education services for under-privileged Nigerians. The eponymous TY Danjuma Foundation will distribute the funds as grants through accredited non-governmental organizations.

On behalf of the Nigerians who will benefit from this charity, I am grateful. But Danjuma and others officers from the peculiar generation bear an outsize share of the blame for the poverty those Nigerians are living in in the first place. Frankly, those Nigerians would have been better off if Nigeria had had a strong, large, deep and broad economy capable of generating enough employment and wealth, enough productivity and consumption (of healthcare and education among other things).

I mean, haba! Of all things, Theophilus Danjuma gained his current wealth an oil block that was "allocated" (i.e. given) to his business interests by .... Sani Abacha!

It is ridiculous.

A gift of $100 million ... to salve the conscience of a person partly responsible for our economy being tens of billions smaller than it should have been?

Should we really be grateful for this ... charity?

Acting President Jonathan

Nigeria has a new Acting President. Former Bayelsa Deputy-Governor, former Bayelsa Governor, and substantive current Vice-President, Goodluck Jonathan was appointed acting president of the Federal Republic of Nigeria via a bit of legal subterfuge (a.k.a. an unconstitutional act) by both Houses of the National Assembly.

President Umaru Yar'Adua's condition remains a mystery surrounded by rumour and innuendo, but I think it is safe that on the night he was flown out of the country to Saudi Arabia, President Yar'Adua was most likely in no physical condition to conduct the official handover procedure. In fact, it is quite possible President Yar'Adua was already in a coma or near enough to it, or at the very least in imminent danger of losing his life, and was almost definitely rushed out of the country in emergency circumstances with little thought given to constutional niceties.

I understand. When life is at stake, you do what you must.

Furthermore, I am guessing whatever physical condition President Yar'Adua is in now, he was probably just as bad or (likely) worse when he first arrived in Jeddah. Poring through the rumours, trying to guess at the grains of truth, it appears the President is either unconscious or is conscious but not fully functional. Now whether "not fully functional" is a physical issue or a mental issue, we do not know yet and we are not being told.

I wish President Yar'Adua the best of health. I have always thought he was one of the more decent politicians in Nigeria. There has never been the hint, accusation or suspicion of personal corruption on his part, and he has always been good about saving money, for Katsina as governor and then for Nigeria as president. For example, Yar'Adua's interventions spared the federal treasury billions of Naira when he rejected the inflated =N=37 billion budget proposal of the Local Organizing Committee for the 2009 Under-17 World Championships; the global recession's effects on the federal budget left Yar'Adua unable to fund his 7-point agenda, and he saw little reason to use federal funds for a unabashedly padded budget. Yar'Adua knew this was money that would disappear into a black hole, as even without the budget padding, hosting major tournaments always leaves Nigeria with years of debts to service and little or no short-, medium- or long-term economic benefits to balance out the costs. Yar'Adua's pressure forced the LOC to downsize to a more affordable =N=12.1 billion, and even then, he made sure only a fraction (=N=900 million) of the funds for the newly revised budget were released to the LOC upfront.

Unfortunately, Yar'Adua is also a man of the system, and has the same limitations as the rest of the power elite. Even if they intend "good" in some small measure, they are all fundamentally opposed to ending or at least fundamentally reforming the system. And as long as the system continues in its present form, whatever "good" they profess to desire will alway be ephemeral, insufficient and unconvincing in practical, quantifiable terms.

The personal abuse and invective directed at President Yar'Adua and at his wife Turai was pointless. Those who engage in this sort of personalized blame are as misguided as the many people who blame ex-President Ibrahim Babangida for the pervasive corruption in Nigerian public life. Umaru Yar'Adua's presidency is the product of a dysfunctional system, not the cause of the dysfunction, and the same holds for Babangida and all the other political figures that came before him and after him.

Many countries in Africa have experienced dictators who held onto power for decades, but Nigeria has never been burdened such. Whatever you say about the Nigerian political system (and I am a critic), you have to say that we do not tolerate people who try to stay in office too long. Nigeria is one of the few countries in Africa to defeat an attempt by a president to amend the constitution so he can stay in power indefinitely (i.e. Obasanjo's Third Term bid). Even under military-led diarchies, we are leery of life-presidencies; Gowon was overthrown because his regime tried to extend itself beyond 9 years, and Babangida was forced out because he tried to extend himself beyond 8 years -- and we will probably never know the truth about the death of Sani Abacha (or for that matter about the death of Moshood Abiola).

Indeed, Nigeria changes leaders so frequently that we have had more heads of state/government since 1960 (13 or 14 depending on if you count Acting President Jonathan) than France (6), Germany (9), the United States (10), the United Kingdom (9 or 10 depending on how you count Wilson's two terms) and Canada (10 or 11, depending on how you count the two Trudeau administrations). Some of our governments have been brief (notably the Ironsi, Murtala and Shonekan administrations), but the same is true of some of the administrations in the same time period in the United Kingdom, Germany and Canada. Furthermore, the lack of term-limits in the parliamentary countries (UK, Candada, Germany) and the 7-year term lengths used in France until the 200s mean that all of these countries (minus the USA) have had governments that have last 10 years or longer, a length of tenure Nigerians have (thus far) declined to allow any single individual to seek (Obasanjo) or take (Gowon, Babangida, and perhaps Abacha).

Change at the federal executive level in Nigeria is ALWAYS accompanied by change at the state and local levels too. So we are a country in which there has been a lot of change in personalities, but no substantive change in the practical realities of governance in our country. Spending our time blaming individuals (e.g. Babangida) is a distraction from the true problem, which is that our political/economic/social system is designed to repeatedly produce dysfunctional government. In fact, we have had this problem since the middle of the 1950s, and the penultimate Nigerian Civil War was the outcome of over a decade's worth of dysfunctional decisions, choices and actions; even now, a depressing proportion of the issues we face today are in effect the 21st century expressions of unresolved issues dating back to those same 1950s.

Umaru Yar'Adua is, as near as I can tell, a decent man as an individual. However, he is also a product of the Nigerian political system, and was always limited by this blunt truth. I do NOT think he is responsible for the lies and deceptions that followed his emergency trip to Jeddah for medical care, nor do I think he is responsible for the attempts by his kitchen cabinet (the so-called "cabal") to hold on to the presidency rather than resign. Nevertheless, everything that happened is a "normal" and "natural" outgrowth of the sort of politics that prevails in our country.

And therein lies the problem with those who think we would solve the problem by elevating Goodluck Jonathan to the interim or even substantive presidency. The same limitations that bound the hands and feet of Umaru Yar'Adua apply also to Goodluck Jonathan ... maybe even more so. Indeed, whereas no one ever accused the former Katsina governor Yar'Adua of personal corruption, the former Bayelsa deputy governor and governor Goodluck Jonathan was under suspicion and investigation, along with his wife Patience.

Acting President Goodluck Jonathan is a scion of the same Rivers-Bayelsa regional political system that gave rise to the likes of Ex-Governors Peter Odili (Rivers) and Diepriye Alamieseyegha (Bayelsa), as well as current Governors Rotimi Amaechi (Rivers) and Timipre Sylva (Bayelsa). Two of these four were unabashedly corrupt, one of the four became governor by "winning" an unbelievable (and ridiculous) 98.3% of the vote, while the fourth became governor after winning 0% (yes, zero percent) of the vote not figuratively but literally.

As stated earlier, Mr and Mrs Jonathan were under investigation by the EFCC, but Nuhu Ribadu was using the EFCC as an arm of the Obasanjo political machine. A simple tactic: support Obasanjo or face the wrath of the EFCC. Goodluck Jonathan, played his political cards right, enabling the removal of mega-corrupt (and pro-Atiku) Governor Diepriye Alamiesiyegha, replacing Alamieseyegha and then holding Bayelsa (with its fat oil derivation revenues) for the Obasanjo camp, the way Ngige was supposed to hold Anambra. Nuhu Ribadu conveniently forgot about the investigations of Mr and Mrs Jonathan for corruption. Jonathan was a loyal and willing godson, unlike Rivers Governor Peter Odili who backed Obasanjo reluctantly after some arm-twisting (with Ribadu taking a hand). Jonathan became so trusted among Obasanjo's godsons that he was given the vice-presidential nomination alongside Obasanjo's chosen successor Yar'Adua; Obasanjo chose Yar'Adua because he though he would be pliant enough to be manipulated like a puppet, and chose Goodluck Jonathan because he was substantively no more than a facade that said and did whatever was required to win the favour of whichever godfather was in control at the moment of the political job he wanted top.

Essentially, Goodluck Jonathan is a man of the system. The same system that has failed the federal republic and the people of the federal republic. A system that has yet to produce any platform for the long-awaited social contract. A system that does not and has never provided Nigeria with a cogent narrative (or choice of narratives) to direct our collective development and industrialization, nor does it offer an inspirational set of idea to bind our citizenry to a common cause.

There nothing in Jonathan's past to suggest he will be any more or less keen on reform than any of our other presidents (Yar'Adua inclusive), but plenty to suggest he is not a man who will risk his political position in defence of abstract principles or notions like morality. He is an example of the sort of politician who would never have come to political prominence if we didn't operate the kind of political system we do; it is like putting a pride of lions in charge of promoting a vegetarian diet on the savannah.

Nigeria is doubly disadvantaged because the so-called "progressives", "true federalists" and other alleged reformers are as much a part of the problem as the politicians, militicians, plutocrats and sundry Big Men they profess to oppose. I say "profess to oppose" because they are (and have always been) the ones who provide the brainpower that keeps the system alive and strong in the first place! They offer the people no substantive alternative, and the effects of the individual and collective positions they loquaciously advocate reinforce the very attitudes, beliefs, suspicions, decisions and actions which keep the system supreme and safe from challenge. For example, while ostensibly opposed to tribalism, the so-called "progressives" are a rather tribalist lot, interpreting virtually everything that happens in Nigeria from the prism of tribal conspiracy theories.

It makes for a complete lack of trust. Let me give an example. A pan-federal, pan-regional, pan-ethnic majority of Nigerians chose the late Moshood Abiola over Bashir Tofa, his rival in the 1993 elections, but when Abiolas "mandate" was denied, a majority of Nigerians did not lift a finger to fight for him. There are two reasons for this. The first was the people realized Abiola (much like Babangida, Abacha, Obasanjo, Yar'Adua and Goodluck Jonathan) was a man of the system; what is the point in risking your life so that one of them or the other can continue the very system that makes your life more difficult than it need be? But there was another reason. Ethnic distrust has been high in Nigeria since the 1950s, and a lot of citizens did not trust the pan-federal, pan-regional or pan-ethnic credentials of the "pro-democracy" movement that sprung up in the 1990s.

Now, before you accuse me of doing the very thing I criticize, let me remind you that the "pro-demo" coalition initially entered the Fourth Republic pledging to fight for a new kind of politics, complete with constitutional and political reform. They initially refused to align themself with corrupt, old-school politics/politicians and with "pro-Abacha" politicians who they blamed for all the federal republic's woes. Thus they founded the Alliance for Democracy (AD). And then mysteriously, out of the blue, the AD entered an alliance with the All People's Party, thus aligning themselves with the very "pro-Abacha" politicians they professed to disdain. But this was just the first step towards the disaster of 2003, when the Alliance for Democracy, spurred on by the ethno-regional Afenifere group, through its support behind President Obasanjo purely for ethnic and regional reasons. Four years prior, the AD had pilloried Obasanjo as no more than the tool of the shadowy caucuse of Big Men who really governed Nigeria, yet here they were now urging ethnic and regional solidarity with a kinsman ... classic First Republic ethnic politics.

Mind you, the 2003 Elections in general, aside from the rigging, were a throwback to the 1960s. The first-, second- and third-place presidential candidates, Olusegun Obasanjo, Mohammedu Buhari and Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, are all retired military men who first came to political prominence during the violence of 1966-1970.

That violence was the outcome of our dyfunctional politics in the 1950s and 1960s. Surprisingly or unsurprisingly, the 2003 Elections read like an attempt to bring back the politics of the '50s and '60s. Ojukwu's APGA attempted to reconstruct the voting patterns of the NCNC and NPP; the AD/Afenifere mobilized old AG/UPN networks in favour of an ethnic kinsman Obasanjo; and Buhari's ANPP relied on governors who deliberately used wedge issues to rally bloc support in what had been the NPC's regional heartland.

On the other hand, the 2003 Elections also marked the end of this 1950s/1960s-style ethno-regional bloc politics. The new politics of Nigeria, as revealed in 2003, was much more like politics in the rest of Africa -- one giant, dominant "government" party and a bunch of small, regional "opposition" parties. This development is the culmination of a process begun in the 1970s, in the aftermath of the violence and war that followed the fall of the First Republic.

The First Republic fell after 6 years in part due to the unmoderated rivalries of the major Big Men, and one could say the same or similar of the Second Republic, which fell after 4 years. In contrast, the Fourth Republic has lasted 11 years (and counting) due to the mediation, arbitration, coercion and (where necessary) enforcement by the all-embracing PDP. No matter what happens in Nigerian politics, be it unconstitutional, illegal, criminal or whatever, the PDP moves to settle it in-house. President Obasanjo famously described the crisis in Anambra following the 2003 Elections as a "family affair" to be settled, as between brothers.

The People's Democratic Party (PDP) is the culmination of 40 years of change within the Nigerian political class. The process began in 1970, after the end of the Civil War. Nigerian politics, for all its seeming ups and downs, is more stable now than it has ever been. Indeed, the orderly and peaceful transition from Umaru Yar'Adua to Goodluck Jonathan, for all its hiccups, is a more impressive sign of this stability than the previous transition from Obasanjo to Yar'Adua.

The PDP has perfected what the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) tried and failed to do in the Second Republc, what Ibrahim Babangida professed to be doing when he constructed the NRC and SDP of the short-lived Third Republic. The theory is that by compelling all of the Big Men to enter the same Big Tent, and working out the thorny issues of distributing power (through staged elections or coups) and wealth (through rent-seeking, rent-extraction and patronage) within that tent, Nigerian politics can enjoy "stability".

The Nigerian political system is set up like a jigsaw puzzle. Each piece of the puzzle is home to a number of Big Men, and sometimes one or two of these in-piece Big Men are bigger than the rest of the Big Men within their piece. "Representation" as such, within the confines of this system consists of having Big Men from each piece of the puzzle present at the high table when the spoils of government are being distributed. The man at the table becomes in turn the patron to a web of clients within his piece of the jigsaw, giving him political/economic/social power and relevance in both directions; federally he is the man who can "deliver" his jigsaw piece thus helping to ensure stability of tenure to the federal government, and regionally or locally (i.e. within his puzzle piece) he is the man who can deliver "government money" to the piece.

Politics in Nigeria consists of Big Men fighting each other to be the "representative" of their puzzle piece, and fighting each other (separately) to be in charge of the spigot of government patronage (i.e. to be governor or president). "Victory" in these contests does not mean you necessarily occupy a political office; most likely you (and your allies) nominate a consensus figure to occupy political office on your collective behalves.

We the citizens are not allowed to vote or otherwise decide the outcome of these political contests. Instead we are forced to watch like spectators while a combination of violence, the threat of violence, a labyrinth of networks of alliances, shadowy connections, quid-pro-quo business-type relationships, behind the scenes maneuvring and ethno-religio-regional mobilization produces a political landscape that remains substantively the same even as its facade changes with great fluidity.

From the mid-1950s to the 1970, there were no limitations on how far our byzantine political system could go in its internal wrangling. From 1970 onward, the political class, while remaining disdainful of real democracy, began to seek a somewhat more "stable" framework within which to conduct its internal chess match. While Nigeria's civilian politicians and plutocrats profess opposition to "military rule" and do prefer to be in charge of power and patronage themselves, these civilian Big Men have always been somewhat ambivalent towards military-led diarchies. In the same way that the Pax Romana allowed for a growth in trade around the Meditteranean, civilian Big Men in decades past kind of liked the "order" that army generals brought to the disorderly, chaotic, unstable system. Mind you, they did not want to change the system (they profited from it immensely), but felt the system needed a bit more order.

The NPN in the Second Republic was the first effort to build a Big Tent, comprising a super-majority of Big Men, to control the competition for and distribution of power and patronage without the need for the strong hand of an army general. In theory (if not in practice) this was also the motivation for Ibrahim Babangida's NRC and SDP in the Third Republic, although it was expressed in the language of ethnicity/region/religion (i.e. that without artificial mass parties, our politics would degenerate into ethnic, regional and religious factions).

Interestingly, part of what made the PDP successful was the de facto merger that has taken place between the military and civilian wings of the diarchies that have ruled Nigeria for much of the period since 1960. The People's Democratic Party can count on retired generals as well as the super-majority of civilian politicians and plutocrats, to work together as a sort of iron fist to first control the country, and then to moderate the in-house competition between members for shares of the national patrimony of power, privilege and patronage.

The 40-year process that produced the PDP has seen a lot of colourful characters, a lot of events of historic import, and a lot of violence. No one should be surprised to find that Anthony Anenih, known today as the PDP's "Fixer", cut his teeth as an NPN state chairman during the Second Republic. Anenih's footprint is microscopic when compared to the influence of the late Moshood Abiola on the birth of Nigeria's first "mega-party".

Abiola was deeply involved in the efforts to coalesce the Big Men into a single tent from the start. He aligned himself with the diarchies of the 1970s, and acquired wealth, power, influence and (most importantly) connections. Abiola then joined the NPN during the Second Republic, helping it weaken the strangehold of the Obafemi Awolowo's Unity Party of Nigeria on the southwestern states, particularly in 1983. After the fall of the Second Republic, he moved on to align himself with Ibrahim Babangida and Sani Abacha, ultimately joining one of Babangida's two "proto-PDP" parties during the Third Republic. The events that followed 1993, while ultimately tragic, were nevertheless "normal" in the context of Nigerian politics. This is the country where the late Ladoke Akintola fell out with the late Obafemi Awolowo, where Ibrahim Babangida had Mamman Vatsa executed, where the Offor/Mbadinuju and Uba/Ngige wars nearly wrecked a state.

Another notable name in the consolidation process was (oddly enough) Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, who joined the NPN on his return from exile. Ojukwu's role in the NPN was to serve as an arrowhead to break the grip of Nnamdi Azikiwe's Nigerian Peoples Party (NPP) hold in the southeastern states, again with specific focus on 1983. Ojukwu would go on to work with Sani Abacha, before consenting to be the figurehead of the ethno-regional party APGA ahead of the 2003 Elections. His work for APGA was not enough to counteract the trend he had helped foster, the coalescence of Big Men nationwide into a single Big Tent party. As a supporter of the Big Tent concept in the Second Republic, he helped break the mystique of one of the Big Three leaders of the 1950s/1960s ethno-regional politics; as an opponent of the concept in 2003, he indirectly strengthened it by making the PDP seem "least bad" compared to two candidates (Ojukwu and Buhari) perceived as having agendas that excluded Nigerians outside of their regional areas of core support (this despite the regional bias of Obasanjo's AD/Afenifere support base).

Zamfara ex-Governor Sani Ahmed Yerima was the first to realize he would profit from wedge politics in the Fourth Republic. There is plenty of focus on the legal code he introduced, and the effects of that on his political popularity. But what really profited Yerima was the backlash his policy provoked from the other half of the population of the country. Divide-and-rule politics in Nigeria is not about presenting yourself as someone who intends to attack the other sociocultural groups. Rather, you define a constituency and then position yourself as the only person who can defend or protect them against other sociocultural groups that allegedly would harm them if you were not there to protect them. It is the backlash that established and secured Yerima's political position. He even aspired to run for the presidency in 2007....

... but, as it turns out, and contrary to the the legal code he instituted, Sani Ahmed Yerima was corrupt. He was one of the governors whose arms were twisted by EFFC boss Nuhu Ribadu. The deal was simple: Support Obasanjo's chosen successor and enjoy your stolen money in peace or fail to support Obasanjo's chosen heir and face EFCC prosecution the moment you lose your gubernatorial immunity.

Yerima's consequent loss of influence was a symbol for the ANPP as a whole. Wedge politics just didn't work as well as it had in the 1950s and 1960s; as of 2010, the states previously run by ANPP governors states have either been taken over by PDP governors, or are led by ANPP governors who will soon decamp to the PDP, or are led by ANPP governors who behave like PDP governors (perhaps because they used to be in the PDP before they lost the primaries).

As our politics have become more like the rest of Africa, we are starting to show signs of the sort "stability" you see in African countries that have had civilian government for decades. Such countries are not necessarily democratic (some are not democratic at all). In some cases there is a "life president" in control of the government party and the country, but in others the government party is in enough control of the situation to manage orderly transitions from one party man to the next. Nigeria's entry into this class of nations is epitomized, as I said earlier by the Yar'Adua to Jonathan transfer.

Having said that, "stability" is good only when it means the preservation of good things. Stability can be a terrible thing, if it means the continuation and persistence of bad things. In Nigeria's case, "stability" is a synonym for "stagnation". Yes, politicians and plutocrats are better able to moderate their differences (with each other, not with the citizenry) over control of the distribution of power, privilege, patronage and economic advantages, but nothing fundamentally important to the future of "Nigeria" or "Nigerians" has been resolved or is even being addressed. Indeed, the broader citizenry remain riven by distrust, factional violence and competition for scarce survival resources; unsurprisingly, the coalescence of the political class into a single party has not led to any sort of coalescence of citizens. "Unsurprisingly" because in the absence of democracy, what the politicians do among themselves remains adrift and disconnected from the jigsaw people the politicians pretend to serve.

The so-called "progressives" are as much a part of the problem as the men of the system like Goodluck Jonathan. Indeed, while the Big Men spent the 40 years since 1970 evolving and coalescing into the PDP, the so-called progressives have spent the same time period cementing their irrelevance to the Nigerian citizenry -- distinguishing themselves only by their willingness to betray everything they pretend to believe at the drop of a hat.

Nigerian citizens know most pro-reformers forget about reform if offered a cushy government job or given access and influence in the corridors of power; as the late General Abdulkareem Adisa told talk-show host Funmi Iyanda, "All you book people - you are part of the problem. You help us cook the books." Professor Maurice Iwu, head of the Independent National Electoral Commission, and mastermind of the 2003 and 2007 elections, is a PhD-holder, as is Professor Charles Soludo, under whose watch the Nigerian banking industry became a giant bubble that popped, leaving Nigerian citizens to foot the $10 billion clean-up bill for toxic assets.

We see the "progressive" critics who turn around to become defenders of that which they previously criticized the moment their preferred candidate is in political office. We see the job-seekers, like the lawyer Femi Fani-Kayode who was a vociferous critic of Obasanjo up until Obasanjo gave Fani-Kayode a high-paying Abuja job.

We saw those who were vocal supporters of Obasanjo and Nuhu Ribadu when their "War on Corruption" made a distinction between "bad" corrupt people (like Atiku Abubakar) who should not be allowed to hold office, and "good" corrupt people (like Andy Uba) who they helped to rig into office. Heck, many of Umaru Yar'Adua's most vociferous critics are the very men and women proximately responsible for Yar'Adua being president in the first place!

The inconsistencies, hypocrisies and dishonesties in the so-called pro-reform camp mean that at a fundamental level, citizens do not really trust them. In a credible, free and fair election, the people would probably choose the devil they know, an old-school Big Man who will simply keep the system we have adapted to running as usual, rather than a supposed "intellectual" reformer who promises to make it snow in the Sahara via "solutions" that sound worse than the problem he/she proposes to fix.

The scandal and saga revolving around President Yar'Adua's failing health should have been the ideal moment for the 120+ million people of Nigeria to stand up and fight for radical reform, restructuring and transformation, preferably under a Transitional Federal Government. Of course where are you going to find this Transitional Federal Government when there exists no stream of political consciousness, no movement, no platform, nothing at all fighting for substantive reform and change? We have no conduit through which to express our wishes, no format for choosing interim leaders to oversee transformative change.

We just have people clamouring for Goodluck Jonathan or for Umaru Yar'Adua ... as if it makes a difference.

There is no structure for promoting change or reform. Even if we somehow got the chance to press for reforms, there has been no real discussion or discourse on what those reforms should be. The people are not stupid, and our collective apathy and lack of activism is caused in large part by the fact that we have never seen nor heard anything that sounds like something we could rally around to fight for. Not only have we not been allowed to exercise our right to choose (i.e. credible, free and fair elections), but even if that right was conceeded, there is nothing of value out there to choose from, hence we don't care. We don't care if there is a coup. We don't care if elections are rigged. We don't care because it doesn't matter who wins.

Oh well.

With that said, I (like most every other citizen) am willing to shut my eyes and pretend not to notice the unconstitutional legislation that ushered in the Goodluck Jonathan Acting Presidency. There needs to be some sort of closure to the issue, and the only sensible thing to do is to fudge a reason to make Goodluck Jonathan the Acting President.

At this point, regardless of his condition, I do not think President Yar'Adua should resign. It is is only a year or so to the 2011 (to-be-rigged) Presidential elections. The safest course of action would be to see out the remaining year with Umaru Yar'Adua as the de jure president (recuperating in Saudi Arabia or at home in Katsina) while Goodluck Jonathan continues as the de facto president for one year.

It is only one year. No need for people to keep acting as if this was the end of the world or something. At the end of the day, when historians look back on this period, they will decide these changes signified NOTHING. We will have the usual "initiall gra-gra" that every new government does when it gets into office, before the inevitable "relaxation" and continuation of the status quo.

If the initial gra-gra involves the sacking of some of Yar'Adua's kitchen cabinet and other political hangers-on, then fine by me. I blame them (not Yar'Adua or his wife Turai) for the subterfuge, secrecy and confusion. If they had any concern at all for the President's health, they would simply have released the necesssary information to allow Nigeria move to a situation of an Acting President sooner. I guess they were scared they would lose influence if it became known the President was not longer capable of carrying out the duties of his office.

But why were they scared? This is Nigeria where every major political action is the result of behind-the-scenes agreements and understandings between factions of varying hue. If Yar'Adua could not handle the job requirements for an indefinite period, they should have moved to "manage" the transition rather than block it. It is not like Goodluck Jonathan has an independent power base or something, nor (in the context of our stupid rotational system) is it possible for him to remain in the office beyond 2011; like Kgalema Motlanthe in South Africa, Jonathan could at best expect to see out the end of his erstwhile boss' tenure. The only thing the "kitchen cabinet" succeeded in doing with their subterfuge was isolate themselves and draw unto themselves the ire and wrath of several political constituencies.

It is only one year to the next (likely to be rigged) general elections. We can ride it out until then.

The right to choose your leaders

In my prior post, I pondered the elections in Rivers State and Bayelsa, with crtical attention paid to the interventions of the Supreme Court and the Election Tribunal.

It might seem odd to a neutral observe that the Supreme Court would impose a governor on the people of Rivers State, and of all the people they could thus impose, would choose a man who was not even on the ballot, and thus received no votes. But this was consistent with the Fourth Republic Supreme Court's interpretation of the function of the judicial branch of government.

The Supreme Court in the Fourth Republic has acted as though its constitutional role was that of a referee officiating a bout between various boxers. We the citizens, like the audience at a boxing match, play no part in the actual contest; we just watch to see who "wins", with victory determined by the brute strength of the pugilists in the ring. The Court has not acted to give we the people the right to use our votes to pick the contestant we want to win; if anything the fact that we do not vote means brute strength is the only recourse for political contestants (you cannot survive in Nigerian politics if you are not tainted by violence, corruption, fraud, and several other vices). It isn't even much of a spectacle for the viewing public, because most of the fights are "fixed" anyway.

But seriously, the Nigerian Supreme Court has not upheld the constitutional rights of the citizens of the federal republic. Perhaps it does not think we have any rights. Perhaps it does not think it could enforce our rights even if it wanted to, and so serves the governing system to avoid falling afoul of it. Or perhaps the judiciary is part of the governing system, a system that has always been based on government chosen by "the few" and imposed on
"the many".

As the referee and arbitrator in this system, the Supreme Court has tried to moderate the disputes within "the few", while doing nothing to expand the franchise to "the many". The Rotimi Amaechi decision does not make sense democratically, constitutionally or legally, but it was never intended to. There was a set of parties in dispute (Celestine Omehia, Rotimi Amaechi, Seargent Awuse, etc), in dispute over the Rivers State governorship, none of whom was legitimately elected to the office of governor by the people of Rivers State. Since the option of having the people of Rivers State choose a governor was ruled out, the Supreme Court as arbitrator was left to decide which of these unelected disputing parties should be given the prize. The language of the Court's verdict was flowery, but in simple layman's language, the Court acknowledged the fact that the People's Democratic Party in the Fourth Republic has the same right of conquest over Rivers State that the British imperialists had over colonial Nigeria, and with it has the right to impose a governor, regardless of the people's wishes. If Rotimi Amaechi had been the PDP candidate, the PDP would have "engineered" a general election win for him, regardless of what the people wanted. Ipso facto, the Supreme Court decided that if it was going to resolve the separate Amaechi vs. Omehia dispute in favour of Amaechi, it might as well make him governor too.

Ta-da.

To truly understand the Supreme Court's interpretation of its role in the Fourth Republic, you have to study the fascinating case of Anambra State. The key ruling in this respect was the Supreme Court's 2007 verdict in the lawsuit filed by Dr Peter Obi, the Governor of Anambra, seeking to extend his term in office by three years. The significance of that 2007 verdict can only be fully comprehended by going back another 8 years to 1999 and the start of the Offor/Mbadinuju war.

Generally in Nigerian history, the men who hold visible political offices are in actuality the representatives of real power-brokers who prefer to operate behind the scenes. This is true of both military-led diarchies, and civilian-led administrations. For all the pomp and pageantry, the office-holders do not necessarily wield much actual power; indeed, one of many reasons Nigerian governments perform poorly is the fact that most of the "leaders" at all three tiers of government are not really "leaders" as such. None of them has a mandate to actually do anything. It is not just that we the people never gave them our permission to do anything, but that the power-brokers who impose them on the people invariably chose them for the part because they were perceived as unlikely to rock anyone's boat. Both military and civilian leaders come to office because a strong enough coalition of "interests" are comfortable with them as front-office representative; these office-holders spend their time in office trying to keep their initial coalition happy while expanding the coalition to make their hold on office more secure. Since the "coalitions" are comprised of Big Men whose prime interest lies in not rocking the systemic boat, Nigeria has become a country where there is a lot of motion, but very little movement.

The dominant theme of the Fourth Republic has been the wars waged between office-holders (in common parlance, they are "godsons") and the coalitions of interests who put the holders into office (colloquially, the "godfathers"). The biggest of these battles may have been the one waged at the federal executive level in the 2003-2007 term between President Olusegun Obasanjo and a phallanx of his former godfathers led by Vice-President Atiku Abubakar. On the other hand, perhaps the three overlapping "wars" waged in Anambra State between 1999 and 2010 takes the prize for most insidious godfather/godson war.

In 1999, Emeka Offor was the capo-da-tutti-capi of Anambra State's godfathers. He had been part of the political/economic/social coalition backing the presidency of the late General Sani Abacha, and as is the case with many Nigerian plutocrats (including the late Moshood Abiola), Offor's membership in the alliance was rewarded with economic benefits. In the concentric system of patron-client relationships that runs Nigeria, each player is simultaneously a client to someone else and the patron to clients of their own. As a client of Abacha's, Emeka Offor duly became one of the wealthiest men in Nigeria, which in turn made him the patron of the biggest network of godfathers (each with their own clients, who had clients of their, and so on) in Anambra State.

As of 1999, the close of the Abacha era (notwithstanding the brief Abdulsalami regime) Offor was the "decider" in Anambra State politics. He made Chinwoke Mbadinju governor in 1999, and filled the Anambra State Assembly with his clients.

Then Mbadinju turned against Offor, seeking to use the office of governor as a launch-pad (i.e. resource base) from which to build a new network of godfather/clients thus making him (Mbadinuju) the new capo of Anambra. And thus began a war.

There was violence, murder and intimidation, which is an extreme issue in an of itself. But beyond that, there was political paralysis, as Emeka Offor flexed his muscles and basically made it impossible for Mbadinuju to govern the state. The flaws in Nigeria's institutional and systemic structure have been seen and felt over the decades, but the power show in Anambra from 1999 to 2003 was something else. Any pretence that this was "government by the people" was well and truly exposed as farce.

Filth piled up in city streets, public sector salaries went unpaid, infrastructure decayed and violent crime soared. Desperate citizens welcomed vigilantes, with no one bothering to find out what proportion of the more than 1,000 victimes of lynchings were actually guilty of the crimes they were ostensibly lynched for; all you had to do to prove you were an effective vigilante is lynch random people. (EDITED 18-03-10: Read this story to understand the injustice of lynchings of alleged/accused/suspected criminals all over Nigeria. I understand the public's frustration with the police and judicial system, but that could be you or me who is falsely accused and then murdered without a chance to defend ourselves against the accusation.).

Mbadinuju took control of the most famous of the vigilante groups, the Bakassi Boys. Officially, the then-governor was using them in place of the police, who were, like all other public institions, rendered non-functional due to Emeka Offor's shutdown of governance. Unofficially, the Bakassi Boys became Mbadinju's enforcers, and were the prime suspects in the assassination of Barnabas Igwe, a leader of the Nigerian Bar Association in Anambra State, and his wife Amaka Igwe. The Igwes were unaffiliated to Emeka Offor, but were civil society critics of the Mbadinuju government; they were dragged from their car in broad daylight at a busy intersection and killed in full view of shocked bystanders and motorists by murderers who simply departed with no fear of judicial retribution.

The worst thing about the Offor/Mbadinuju war was its futility. After all the lives lost, property destroyed, an entire state left in limbo for four years ... neither man won the war. In fact, they both lost.

In 1999, retired General Olusegun Obasanjo was inaugurated first president of the Fourth Republic. As of 1999, many of Abacha's staunchest supporters had joined the All People's Party, but Obasanjo still maintained a low, non-threatening profile to the generality of godfathers in Nigeria in order to maintain their support for what was essentially a coronation in 1999.
Obasanjo had been jailed and nearly executed by Abacha, and fired by the desire for vengeance had launched into something of a vendetta against the late Abacha's family in his first term as a civilian president.
as such was in no mood to humour an Abacha loyalist like Emeka Offor.

Offor was at the height of his powers in 1999, but his power has always been based on his connection to the late Sani Abacha. By 2003, not only was Abacha long dead, his government history, but Nigeria's federal government had been presided over for four years by Olusegun Obasanjo, an implacable enemy of Abacha. was sworn in as Nigeria's president. Maybe in 1999 Obasanjo needed the support of as many leading godfathers as possible (including those from the Abacha-era) to become president, but by 2003 the comparative power relationships between the different Big Man cliques had changed. Many who had been Abacha-era titans were no longer quite as influential as they had once been. Many Abacha-era titans had aligned themselves together in the All Nigeria Peoples Party; when these Abacha-era giants started leaving the ANPP and joining the PDP, it was clear things had changed amidst the Big Men.

Politics in Nigeria is about profits, not principles, so there was no point for them in remaining on the losing team; alas, the financial desperation of it sometimes leads to zero-sum calculations and resultant violence. Arthur Nzeribe's move from the ANPP to the PDP sparked Ogbonnay Uche's move in the opposite direction; Uche couldn't stay in the PDP because Governor Achike Udenwa of Imo State gave Nzeribe a PDP Senatorial candidature he had promised to Uche to seal the deal. Uche had been Udenwa's chief confidante, enforcer and adjustant; as a new member of the ANPP, he made statements to the effect that Udenwa/PDP would not dare rig the election against him because he knew the governor's secrets. To make a long story short, Ogbonnaya Uche was assassinated. Naturally suspicion floated towards Udenwa and/or Nzeribe, but both men denied the charge. The Nigerian Police Force, the Nigerian Federal Intelligence and Investigations Bureau, the Nigerian CID, the Nigerian SSS, the Nigerian DMI, and all the rest of the security agencies did the usual thing they usually do, and to make the long story short (againg) the assassination remains unsolved crime today.

While Arthur Nzeribe maneuvred (as always) and remained relevant in the new dispensation, Emeka Offor had become politically irrelevant by 2003. After four years of making Anambra ungovernable, he walked away from politics-in-the-public-eye, and is somewhere enjoying his immense wealth as I type this. As for Chinwoke Mbadinuju, well, he was NOBODY without Offor's backing to begin with, and as of 2003, he too subsided to irrelevance.

As I noted earlier, Obasanjo as of 2003 had seen the need to create his own political machine, and to ease his dependence on the godfathers who had put him in office in 1999. Given the fact that the PDP hierarchy was as sick of Offor/Mbadinuju as the rest of the country, there was an opening for the President to handle the situation. With the approval of the PDP he stepped in; by his own admission, Obasanjo and PDP National Chairman Audu Ogbeh personally informed Mbadinuju (at a meeting in Aso Rock) he would not be allowed to contest the 2003 elections.

Obasanjo then put the full power of the federal government behind his chosen instruments for converting Anambra State (or more correctly the Anambra State Treasury, and the near-imperial powers of the state governor's office) into a useful resource for the soon-to-be Obasanjo political machine. He leaned on his trusted lieutenant Nnamdi "Andy" Uba, an Anambra native. This Day ran an excellent story on Andy Uba's mysterious movement of raw cash from Nigeria to the United States and the suspicions of money laundering on his own and Obasanjo's behalf (note This Day's archives require registration, but original story is here; a copy that does not require registration can be found here, but be warned it comes with excessive pop-ups). Nuhu Ribadu, then the boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, saw no need to investigate either Andy Uba or President Obasanjo (indeed, he saw no need to follow up on two auditors-general's reports on widespread graft, fraud, corruption and waste in the federal executive and the federal cabinet); till today there has been no investigation or clarification of the Uba money bad scandal (it isn't even a "scandal"; our collective apathy is dismaying).

In any case, Andy Uba was one of President Obasanjo's closest lieutenants; he stayed in Abuja while his brother Chris Uba used the covert and overt support of President Obasanjo and the national PDP machinery to replace Emeka Offor as capo-da-tutti-capi of Anambra State godfathers. Ahead of the 2003 "elections" (if you can call them that), Chris Uba moved to stuff the Anambra State Assembly with his clients and godsons; and for the state governor's office, he chose a namesake, Chris Ngige.

Nigeria may lack reliable statistical information and polling, but we can all agree that near 100% of Nigerians expect elections to be rigged. Even by this low standard of expection, the 2003 Anambra State elections attracted national attention for the unabashed openness of the fraud. It was almost like they relished doing what they did in full public view, making no attempt to hid or sugarcoat their actions.

Chris Ngige "won", but the new governor was on a very short leash. Chris Uba knew the story of godfathers and godsons in the Fourth Republic, and as such didn't really trust Ngige. Uba definitely had Ngige swear an oath of fealty at a juju shrine, and also had Ngige sign an undated resignation letter to be held by Uba (this latter precaution would prove crucial in the coming points). Uba wanted to bind Ngige to a set of promises, one of which was the promise to transfer a fixed proportion of the Anambra State treasury to his patron, Uba. That promise, the promise of the cash transfer, turned out to be the fork in the road for the Uba/Ngige partnership.

I have often said that "corruption" and fiscal "crime" in general are not Nigeria's principal problem in fiscal governance. We waste the larger portion of our fiscus in contractual and other relationships that are technically "legal". For example, the act of transferring state treasury funds to your godfather need not be a "crime". In Lagos State, Governor Babatunde Fashola outsourced the collection of state taxes to a tax-collection company; the tax-collection company is owned by ex-Governor (and state capo-da-tutti-capi) Bola Tinubu; the company (i.e. Tinubu) is paid on commission (i.e. it gets to keep a percentage of the state's tax receipts as payment for collecting the taxes). The deal is entirely legal, but Tinubu's personal wealth (and the warchest of his political machine) is boosted by the de facto diversion of a percentage of Lagos State's tax receipts (the state boasts the federal republic's highest "internally generated revenue (IGR)" total).

Alas, Chris Uba is not quite that sophisticated; he demanded Ngige approve the transfer to Uba of =N=3 billion in Anambra state treasury funds -- and Uba bluntly said the transfer was meant to defray his expenses in funding Ngige's gubernatorial campaign. Ngige, being the more intelligent of the two, opted instead to approve the transfer of =N=960 million to Uba, disguised (for the purpose of ensuring legality) as payment for a contract Uba supposedly completed years before. Had Uba been willing to accept the advance, which was slightly less than one billion, and/or given Ngige more time to sort out another two billion over the course of four years, recent Nigerian history would have been very different. As it stood, Uba perceived Ngige's move as the first sign of a disobedient godson and moved to crush him immediately.

The war commenced in earnest on the 10th of July, 2003, about two months after the 2003 General (S)Elections. Segun Toyin Dawodu has put together a good compilation of newspaper excerpts that give an clear idea of the events of the day (and a little bit of the prequel too).

Early in the morning on the 10th of July, 2003, the Anambra House of Assembly (which was packed with the Uba brothers' loyalists) convened. A detachment of the paramilitary "Mobile Police" sealed the Assembly ground. A "resignation letter", purportedly written by Ngige, was read to the House. Two federal legislators, Senator Ikechukwu Abana and Rep. Chuma Nzeribe were in attendance. Ngige's spokesman would later accuse the two of having drafted the letter; following this accusation, Ngige's spokesman was arrested and briefly detained.

The legislators accepted the letter of resignation and directed the State Chief Judge to swear Deputy Governor Okechukwu Ude (also an Uba loyalist) in as the new Governor of Anambra State. The Chief Judge obliged.

Following this, an Assistant Inspector-General of Police, Raphael Ige and a detachment of 200 Mobile and regular policemen abducted Governor Ngige from the governor's mansion. AIG Ige and his men held Ngige prisoner in a hotel. If you pardon my sarcasm, the governor at the time of his confinement was unaware that he had just resigned in absentia.

But someone was playing both sides. It was most likely one of the policemen holding Ngige, as I doubt any of them had any particular personal devotion to the Uba brothers. Whoever it was, the smuggled a phone in to the detained Governor Ngige, who promptly called Vice-President Atiku Abubakar, PDP National Chairman Audu Ogbeh, and PDP National Secretary Vincent Ogbulafor. Two things are immediately significant; the first is that Ngige called Atiku, and the second is that Ngige did not call President Obasanjo.

Ngige was released. I am not sure who gave the order to release him. Perhaps more importantly, no one is sure (even now) who gave Assistant Inspector-General Ige the order to abduct and detain him in the first place.

Chris Uba has no constitutional authority to give orders to the police. We have seen uber-godfathers like the late Lamidi Adedibu appear to be giving orders to the police. Godfathers in this category are acting as the regional "sheriffs" of whoever is in power at the federal executive. Did Uba order AIG Ige to kidnap a sitting governor? That seems a little extreme, even for godfathers; the aforementioned Adedibu was able to use police officers to blockade the assembly, denying freedom of movement to legislators loyal to then-Governor Rasheed Ladoja, and even in Anambra previously Emeka Offor's power left Chinwoke Mbadinuju to hire the mercenary Bakassi Boys to serve (ostensibly) as his stand-in police force (and de facto political enforcers) ... but kidnapping and confining a state governor is unheard of. Surely Ige would have sought clarification from his superiors?

Assisant Inspector-General is the third-highest rank in the Nigerian Police Force. The only people with a constitutional-legal right to have given or confirmed an order to abduct a sitting governor, are the President, the Minister of Police, the Inspector-General of Police, and the Deputy Inspectors-General of Police. The Police Minister and the above-mentioned police commanders would not dare give or confirm such an order (kidnapping a governor?) without obtaining Presidential assent.

Raphael Ige was retired unceremoniously from the Nigerian Police Force after the events of July 2003, and died shortly after his forced retirement. In reference to the events with which he will be associate forever, he only said "It was orders from above."

It had to be Obasanjo.

Ngige's release from captivity, on the other hand, had to have been Atiku Abubakar, who was, in 2003, still the most powerful man in Nigeria. Atiku was the dean of the godfathers that had just secured Obasanjo a second term, and per their arrangement was also Obasanjo's heir-apparent.

The newly-freed Governo Ngige insisted his purported resignation was fraudulent. That same evening, the pretender, "Governor" Okey Ude, flanked by the Speaker of the State Assembly, Mrs Eucharia Azodo, and the State Chairman of the PDP, Chief Obi Okoya, held a press conference to insist he was still the governor. Beyond Anambra, all of Nigeria watched agape; it takes a lot to surprise us politically, but the attempted civilian coup in the state was a bona fide shocker.

Because that is what it was ... an attempted coup de tat. It was treason.

But no one was ever investigated, prosecuted, convicted or punished for it.

In fact, what followed was farce. Nigerians got an insight into the farce from the open letter written to President Obasanjo by PDP National Chairman Ogbeh, and by the open letter Obasanjo wrote to Ogbeh in response. Amusingly, both men tried, through their letters, to exculpate themselves from the public derision attendant upon the disgraceful (and criminal) events in Anambra. But the thing that caught the public eye was Obasanjo's admission that the 2003 Anambra gubernatorial elections had been rigged.

Obasanjo did not admit to involvement in the rigging, and unconvincingly professed not to have known the election had been rigged until he was told after the fact. Nevertheless, he told all of Nigeria (through his letter) that he and Ogbeh had invited Chris Uba and Chris Ngige to a peace conference of sorts at Aso Rock, and that during the course of the meeting

Chris Uba looked Ngige straight in the face and said, "You know you did not win the election" and Ngige answered "Yes, I know I did not win."
Chris Uba went further to say to Ngige, "You don't know in detail how it was done."

Obasanjo said (well, wrote) all this as part of a process of denying involvement in the election or in its aftermath, but even if he was truly innocent of those crimes (and he was not), his open letter implicated him in a crime that was just as bad. Here was the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, revealing that two men had admitted to a serious, serious, very serious crime, a crime that had spawned other crimes (fraud, kidnapping), a crime that was intended to open the way to more crimes (economic and fiscal crimes, as the plan was for Ngige to sign over chunks of Anambra state treasury funds to Uba).

Indeed, in his letter Obasanjo says of himself:

I told Chris Uba and Ngige that their case was like the case of two armed robbers that conspired to loot a house and after bringing out the loot, one decided to do the other in and the issue of fair play even among robbers became a factor.

Again, this is Obasanjo distancing himself from responsibility for the crime itself. But having been told of the crime, what did the President of the Federal Republic do?

I decided in consultation with Governor Ngige, to set up a fact-finding and reconciliation committee under the Governor of Ebonyi State to put an end to the violence,
create a conducive atmosphere for the Governor to return to his station and to ensure permanent peace, security through reconciliation of the known warring party members - Chris Ngige and Chris Uba - and their supporters.

No prosecution, no conviction, no punishment. Just "reconciliation". What really caught the attention of the Nigerian media and the public, was Obasanjo's self-alleged response when he initially heard of the attempted coup in Anambra

You will recall that the team reported to you and I that what was happening in Ananm-bra required urgent party action to resolve it as a family affair.

The attempted overthrow of a state governor (who had been rigged into office anyway), was an internal PDP "family affair". No need for such distractions as law enforcement, constitutionalism, or even democracy ... you know, "democracy", that system where it is the people who choose their leaders? Citizens had been denied that most vital of constitutional rights, the right to choose their government, and the President's reaction was to try to reconcile the criminals.

The right to choose your own government is the most important right of all. If citizens do not have the right to choose and thus control their own government, then all other rights, including the right to life, are effectively moot because you the citizen are in no position to do anything to enforce institutional respect for your rights. Your government or your fellow citizen can spit on you, and ... well, and what? Is it any wonder there is so much violence, from lynchings of suspected robbers, to conflicts over land "ownership", to extra-judicial killings by police and soldiers. Underneath the bloodlust and murder, you often find a lot of very, very insecure people who lash out, not only in the belief that they are securing what little rights they have (particularly to land) but that in so lashing out, they can intimidate everyone else into "not trying them". Vigilantes, lynch mobs, as well as ethnic/regional/religious militia enjoy a legitimacy out of synch with their real-world effect which is the preservation of uncertainty, promotion of violence, and destabilization of the very institutions whose absence creates the pervasive fear that seemingly legitimizes the vigilantes, lynch mobs and militia (in other words, the chicken and the egg).

But I am digressing again.

Back to Anambra.

Now, inasmuch as President Obasanjo (who, as stated earlier, was Chris' brother Andy Uba's patron) said he was working with Governor Ngige to restore peace, order and stability to Anambra, he in fact moved penultimately to support of Chris Uba's attempted coup.

In March of 2004, Obasanjo's federal executive went to the Supreme Court to have Ngige's resignation declared valid which would make Ngige's government invalid (and hand the governor's office to Okechukwu Ude, the Uba loyalist).

True, Ngige had not "resigned" per se, and had no idea of it at the time of his abduction and detention, however, before the election, as a sort of insurance policy Chris Uba had had Ngige sign an undated resignation letter, and had (apparently, per Obasanjo's open letter) videotaped him doing this. So there were two resignation letters and one videotape; Ngige's spokesman (the one who was briefly arrested) had accused two federal legislators of writing the second letter and reading it to the State Assembly, but the first, undated, letter was most likely signed properly by Ngige (the process presumably caught on video).

The federal government went one step further and withdrew then-Governor Ngige's security detail. This act was particularly telling, because only three months before, in December 2003 Ngige had survived an apparent assassination attempt; there had been a gunfight between Governor Ngige's security detail (the same security detail the federal government withdrew) and Chris Uba's men. Neither Chris Uba nor anyone in his entourage was arrested or charged regarding the gunfight, and oddly, Uba (who had no constitutional right thereto) rode around town surrounded by a security detail of police officers, while Ngige, the putative governor, had to stay alive without a security detail.

With institutions of public security in Anambra State essentially subordinated to Chris Uba in 2004, he had nothing to fear. And in November of 2004, as the year drew to an end:

the nation woke up to the shocking news of a devastating attack on Anambra State resulting in the burning down of radio and television stations, hotels, vehicles, assembly quarters, the residence of the state Chief Judge and finally, Government House, Awka. Dynamite was even applied in the exercise and all or nearly most of these in the full glare of our own police force as shown on NTA for the world to see. The operation lasted three days.

The above description came from (and prompted) PDP National Chairman Audu Ogbeh's open letter to Obasanjo. The letter was his attempt to distance himself from what had happened. Violence was and is normal in Nigerian politics, but the Big Men always retain the semblance of plausible deniability. Chris Uba's operations were just too public, just too primitive, just too unabashed; it takes a lot for the denizens of the PDP to feel embarassed enough to seek public absolution, and Audu Ogbeh certainly felt compelled to defend the party in the court of public opinion.

Obasanjo's response to Ogbeh was discussed briefly earlier. He too attempted to distance himself from the mayhem in Anambra. Thugs employed by Chris Uba had just burned down the governor's mansion, attacked the State Assembly quarters and the Chief Judge's residence, and committed other acts of sundry violence.

I remind you that everything I described above, from the rigged 199 election that kicked off the Offor vs Mbadinju war, through the killings, kidnappings and fraud, to the November 2004 attack on the physical manifestations of government in Anambra, were done in the full view of the Nigerian public. Everybody knows who did what, because none of the principals were concerned about hiding what they did (comically, Obasanjo's letter, intended to exculpate himself, actually incriminated himself as an accessory after the fact at the very least).

It was almost as if Chris Uba reveled in the notoriety. He seemed to want everyone to see him, to know it was him, to marvel at the impunity with which he broke any and every law.

Perhaps that was why the Supreme Court, in May of 2005, slapped him down and ruled Ngige's purported resignation letter to be fraudulent. On the other hand, May of 2005 is also the month that the Nigerian political class, the Big Men, collectively rejected President Obasanjo's attempt to amend the constitution to allow himself to run/rig for a Third Term.

Perhaps the 2005 judicial defeat of the federal government's case against Ngige was the Supreme Court justices adding their voice to the generalized rebuke of Obasanjo-style politics.

In the aftermath of the defeat of the Third Term agenda, however, Nigerian politics changed. And part of the strength of the "do-or-die" politics (as Obasanjo called it) was its ability to use truth in the service of dishonesty. I have spoken frequently on this blog of the abasement of the EFCC, of how Ribadu and Obasnajo used its prosecutorial powers selectively to weaken opponents of their political project, and to strengthen their supporters (willing and cajoled alike). The point to note here is their victims were definitely guilty of economic and financial crimes (Governor Ahmed Sani Yerima, extorted into backing Obasanjo, was the most noteworthy for me, more so than the Diepriye Alamieseyegha, who was impeached, dethroned and prosecuted, because Alamieseyegha, unlike Yerima, never pretended to be religiously pure), but far from fighting corruption, they were sustaining and promoting it, albeit controlling and distributing the right to be corrupt the way the Shagari administration controlled and distributed licenses to import rice.

This tactic of using truth in the service of dishonesty extended to the Anambra front, in what was becoming a major war between President Obasanjo and Vice-President Atiku Abubakar in 2006.

Chris Uba's allies went to back to the Federal Appeals Court arguing this time that the 2003 Anambra State gubernatorial elections had been rigged, so even if the resignation letter was fake, Ngige had no right to be governor. As Chris Uba's political machine was responsible for having rigged the, Uba's machine had a wealth of evidence to prove the elections had been rigged ... and they used that evidence in their new case against Ngige.

In plain English: Chris Uba admitted to rigging the 2003 Anambra gubernatorial race, and presented proof of his guilt, in order to prove that Ngige should not be governor of Anambra!

And so, in March of 2006, nearly 3 years after the 2003 Anambra elections, the Federal Appeals Court nullified Chris Ngige's "victory" and handed the Anambra governor's mansion to the real winner (according to the court), Dr Peter Obi of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), the regional party backed by Chukwumeka Ojukwu. There was just one year left in the 2003-2007 electoral term when Governor Obi took office.

This was not really a triumph of democracy. For one thing, Ngige was not the only beneficiary of rigging in Anambra State's 2003 polls, though he was the only one forced out of office. The rest of the beneficiariesls (federal legislators, State Assemblymen, local government chairmen and local government councillors) kept their jobs. In fact, inasmuch as the verdict removing Ngige was essentially predicated on the judicial conclusion that that major crimes had been committed in 2003, no one was charged, prosecuted, convicted or punished for any of the crimes revolving around the 2003 Elections or any of the mayhem that followed it. Fraud, violence, corruption, suborning treason, economic, fiscal and financial crimes, kidnapping, sorcery (yes, sorcery for goodness sakes), vandalism, attempted murder, etc, etc, etc, and all in full public view.

Besides, unlike 2005, when the Supreme Court was free to join the slap down Obasanjo's Third Term ambition parade, by 2006 the courts were coming under increasing pressure to toe the line. Indeed, the Supreme Court would find itself handling the very, very, very politically charged question of whether Atiku Abubakar had the legal standing to be a candidate in the 2007 Elections.

Ngige had received assistance from Atiku during his abduction/detention experience; it was most likely Abubakar who secured his release. Given the wide-ranging, near-imperial powers wielded by state governors, he would have had the resources (i.e. state treasury funds and the power of "legal" patronage) to hold onto Anambra State (and potentially make it a power base for Atiku, if for no other reason than to weaken his enemies the Uba brothers) in the 2007 Elections. The effect of Ngige's dismissal from the governor's mansion was to deny him the chance to "fix" the 2007 elections for himself.

And Ngige's replacement was Dr. Peter Obi, a neutral, non-threatening figure (i.e. not affiliated to Atiku Abubakar). Between its credentials as an regional party, and the endorsement of Chukwuemeka Ojukwu, APGA was well-liked in Anambra State, and allowing Peter Obi to serve out the single year left on the term would calm things down (as opposed to the turmoil that would ensue if an Uba loyalist was levered into the job). Significantly, and most importantly, Peter Obi did not have a political machine to compete with the Uba brothers in Anambra State, and one year would not be enough time to use the power of the state government to create one; in other words, Obi would not be able to "fix" the elections for himself in 2007, and (more importantly) would not be able to stop the Uba brothers from "fixing" it for themselves.

Nnamdi "Andy" Uba, had announced his candidacy for Anambra State governor in the 2007 Elections. That he would get the PDP nomination was a foregone conclusion; he and his brother controlled the state party. That he would win the general election was a certainty; it was "do-or-die" time in the Obasanjo camp and nothing would be left to chance. In fact, just to be sure, the Independent National Electoral Commission, led by Dr. Maurice Iwu, disqualified both Peter Obi and Chris Ngige from running in the 2007 elections.

The funny thing is, the only "opposition" to Andy Uba in Anambra came from his brother Chris Uba, who was upset at being shunted to secondary status in a state he had bestrode like a collossus for four years. And it got funnier. Just to make sure his brother Chris didn't pull any coup-type mischief, Andy had Chris arrested and locked up in jail. Yep, just like that. But don't worry, Chris was released from prison after the election, and continues to feud with his brother in Anambra politics as I type this.

In any case, Andy Uba duly emerged "victorious" in the 2007 electoral race for the Anambra State governor's mansion, and was sworn in as governor in 2007.

I am going to stop here and stress something.

In the paragraphs above, I have detailed eight years worth of crisis, chaos, mayhem and anarchy in Anambra State politics. You will notice that in all of that time, not once did the people of Anambra State get to use their votes to decide who should occupy government office.

It did not matter what the people wanted or who the people wanted. Powerful men, Big Men, fought each other openly and behind-the-scenes, like prizefighters with the state treasury as the purse. Like the proverbial grass while elephants fight, the people of Anambra bore the brunt of the primitive contests, and the resulting "winners" were then imposed upon the citizens of Anambra, whether they liked it or not.

But then came what I believe to be the worst part of the whole saga.

After Andy Uba's "victory" in the 2007 Elections, Governor Peter Obi went to court, arguing that 3 years of his 4-year tenure had been stolen by the illegal Ngige regime. He asked the courts to give him the missing three years ... by extending his tenure to 2010. To do that, the Court would have to essentially do away with the fixed 4-year terms meant to run 1999-2003, 2003-2007, 2007-2011, in favour of a brand-new, special, unique, just-for-Peter-Obi term of 2006-2010.

Here is the thing. The 4-year terms and the 2-term limit as set out in the constitution were not created for the benefit of politicians. They were created for the benefit of we the people. We the people have the constitutional right to choose our political leaders EVERY FOUR YEARS. That is the way it is supposed to work. You cannot invent a 7-year gap between elections (2003-2010) because a politician says he deserves 4 years.

If there was a problem in the system (i.e. rigging in 2003, and a 3-year delay in officially acknowledging the rigging even though everyone knew it as far back as 2003), then you should fix that problem because the problem is denying the people their right to choose their leaders every four years. And until that problem is solved, the people will continue to lack the right to choose their leaders even if you extended Peter Obi's tenure to the moon and back.

Finally, I agree with Governor Obi that it is unfair for him (assuming he was the real winner of the 2003 elections) to lose 3 years of his term to fraud, theft and criminality. The solution to the dilemma would have been for the Supreme Court to rule that the 2003-2007 term did not count as Obi's first term vis-a-vis the 2-term limits imposed by the constitution, because it was not a full term. I am no expert in international law, but from historical research I am given to believe that if a deputy-governor (or vice-president) takes over from the governor (or president) due to incapacity or death just one year before the end of that governor or president's term, that one year of service does not count as a full term for the purpose of constitutional term limits.

The Supreme Court should have ruled that constitutionally, Governor Peter Obi could run for re-election in 2007 and 2011, as opposed to being term-limited in 2011. That would have preserved the citizens' right to vote every four years, as enshrined in the constitution (that no one seems to obey), while restoring to Peter Obi the potential to get another four years (as opposed to three) should he manage to win two terms.

You might ask: "Well, what if he lost in 2007, what good would his extra term do him"?

To which I would answer: "If he is not popular enough to win in 2007, that would by definition mean the people of the state don't really want him to be their governor in 2007-2010, the three years the Supreme Court gifted him."

Then you will ask: "But you have spent this entire, long blog post pointing out that the elections in Anambra are not really about popularity or democracy, but about crude power plays."

To which I would answer: "No, I have pointed out in this blog post that this type of chaos, anarchy, violence and maladministration occurs PRECISELY BECAUSE NOBODY IS STANDING UP TO FIGHT FOR THE ENSHRINEMENT OF TRUE DEMOCRACY IN ANAMBRA AND NIGERIA."

Recall I said earlier that the Independent National Electoral Commission, led by Dr Maurice Iwu, had disqualified Peter Obi and Chris Ngige from running in the 2007 Elections. As much as Ngige was (and is) as guilty as Chris Uba, and should probably be barred from running for any office, ever, the fact is this intervention was pure politics, intended to assure victory for Andy Uba (himself exposed as a money launderer for the Obasanjo government, though Ribadu's EFCC and Iwu's INEC both pretended not to notice).

But none of this "dirt" had besmirched Dr Peter Obi as of 2007. The Court should not have extended his tenure by 3 years, because that did not, could not, would never fix the core, fundamental problem with Anambra and Nigeria. It would have been so much more apt had the court instead had nullified the 2007 Anambra Elections, and ordered new elections to be held late in 2007, leaving Peter Obi in place as Interim Governor until then.

Ideally the Court could have taken it upon itself to make sure these new elections were clean. The then-new President Yar'Adua was amidst ridding himself of some vestiges of the Obasanjo era, including Ribadu, and (significantly) would go on to champion Professor Charles Soludo for the 2010 Anambra elections, thus sidelining both Uba brothers from the PDP. Iwu was then, and is now, under serious pressure to quit, surviving due more to inertia than anything else. Surely the Courts had nothing to fear from organizing a semi-credible repeat election?

As it stands, the Supreme Court (as usual) did not act to defend the rights of the people of Anambra, and the so-called "progressives" who hailed the Obi Extension reminded me of why we can never count on so-called "progressives" to lead the charge in a fight for real, substantive change. As always in Nigeria, a way was found to "manage" a situation that should have been rejected and discarded long time ago.

It isn't just about Anambra. The recurrent violence in Jos and elsewhere in the country is symptomatic of our continued refusal to face up to problems and actually SOLVE them, rather than just looking for quick fixes that enable us continue to "manage".

But I suppose dreams of reform, restructuring and transformation remain just that -- fantasy. In the real world, Andy Uba was stripped of the governor office in 2007 (as Ngige had been in 2006, karma?) and Peter Obi was returned to the governor's mansion to fulfill an extended term.

It is now three years later, and the 2010 Anambra gubernatorial elections just concluded.

President Umaru Yar'Adua's faction of the PDP had given the PDP nomination to Professor Charles Soludo, the former head of the Central Bank of Nigeria. This being the PDP, there was nothing democratic about the nomination. I suppose the Yar'Adua faction perceived Soludo to be a more intelligent, more urbane figurehead, a man who best symbolized what they wanted in the new Anambra politics of the Yar'Adua era (never mind Soludo's increasingly discredited supervision of the Nigerian banking sector).

Andy Uba angrily decamped from the PDP to join the "Labour Party". Now get this, the Nigerian Labour Party was founded, principally by the Nigerian Labour Congress trade union, to be a part-socialist, part-social-democratic, left of centre political party. Supposedly the NLP is "progressive" and "pro-workers". And, with no trace of irony, the Anambra State NLP nominated Andy Uba to be their candidate in the 2010 Anambra gubernatorial race. I don't know what to say. I mean, Andy Uba is not exactly "socialist", a "reformer" or a "progressive", so what was the connection, other than a crass desire to get their hands on power and patronage?

Chris Ngige also ran, this time as a candidate of the Action Congress, a party which could best be described ex-Lagos Governor Bola Tinubu's sole proprietorship.

In any case, Anambra's 2010 electoral race to the governor's mansion was won by incumbent Governor Peter Obi of APGA. Mind you, APGA has sort of split into two factions, one of which did not recognize Obi as a member. But that doesn't matter; after three years as governor, he has certainly been able to use the power of the governor's office to secure his hold on the governor's office. Too many Big Men have adjusted to the new system of sharing the spoils, and I don't think anyone was willing to rock the boat.

Amusingly, "losing" candidate Andy Uba complained about the legitimacy and credibility of the polls (as did the other candidates, including Charles Soludo, who had himself unabashedly benefited from "administrative rigging" during the PDP primaries).

To be fair to him and the other candidates, a curious thing happened on election day in Anambra. Sure, there were the usual irregularities attendant upon every Nigerian election, but what was more curious was the turnout. Out of 1.8 million registered voters, only about 300,000 votes were collected on election day; this is a turnout of 17% (seventeen percent) of registered voters. And of those 300,000 votes, some 16,000 were declared invalid.

Wow. Only 17% of registered voters bothered to vote?

Can a person really be said to have been credibly elected governor of a state, if only 17% of the state's voters (far short of 50%) voted for him? But then, Obi didn't exactly get 17% of the vote; he got 98,000 votes or 5% (five percent) of the registered electorate.

Wow. The elected Governor of Anambra State was put in office with a massive plurality of 5% of the vote?

But it gets better.

No one actually knows how many of those 1.8 million registered names are "real". In other words, there might not be up to 1.8 million voting age citizens of Anambra. What I am saying is the voter's register may have been padded with fake, nonexistent voters which someone could use to pad their vote tally, thus rigging without the use of crude techniques.

Tunde Rahman and Chuks Okocha wrote an interesting piece (part one, part two) analyzing the validity (and legality) of the 1.8 million number on the electoral register. They point out that there were 800,000 total votes cast for all gubernatorial candidates in the (rigged) 2003 Anambra elections, and over 1.1 million cast (supposedly) for all candidates in the 2007 elections (of which some 1.093 million were allegedly cast for Andy Uba), before this year's 300,000 figure.

Perhaps some of the "voters" in 2003 were ghost voters ... ghosts that intermarried and gave birth to more ghosts for the 2007 polls. By 2010, the ghosts may have had grandchildren, who pushed the voters' register up to 1.8 million.

Who knows.

As Rahman and Okocha point out, it could just have been voter apathy. And who would blame them? There hasn't been a proper election in Anambra since .... ever.