News of the day

ABUJA

Mobile Police in Abuja shot a bus conductor in the knee. The conductor's crime? He had the temerity to ask the officers to pay their bus fare. Apparently the Mobile Policemen felt they had the right to ride commercial buses for free, and the right to enforce this freedom-from paying their due bills by using gunfire on innocent blue-collar workers who are only doing their jobs.

KANO

Nuhu Ribadu has barely returned from self-imposed exile, yet the EFCC is already reverting to its Ribadu-era form.

Being that Big Men dislike subjecting their ambitions to democratic votes, the many ANPP aspirants seeking to succeed Ibrahim Shekarau as Governor of Kano State after the 2011 "elections" decided against having a democratic intra-party primary decide the All Nigeria People's Party candidate for next year's "elections". No, the ANPP powerbrokers decided to give Governor Shekarau the right to singlehandedly designate one of them as his automatic successor; since governors control their respective State "Independent" Electoral Commissions, control their respective state treasuries (with fully bought-and-paid-for rubber-stamp State Assemblies), and control their respective local government areas (appointing chairmen and councillors as though they were handmaids), being your governor's handpicked successor is as good as "winning" the election before it is held.

Each of the aspirants had spent the last 8 years kissing Shekarau's ... never mind. The point is, they each thought they were the governor's favourite, and they each thought that this undemocratic arrangement would result in the governor picking one of them and using his power to shut their rivals up.

As it turns out, the governor picked none of them. The would-be aspirants have reacted very negatively to Shekarau's selection of Alhaji Salihu Sagir Takai as his imposed replacement (sample stories here, here and in most detail here.

Some of Alhaji Takai's expanding list of opponents seem to have remembered that manipulating the outcome of "elections" was the most important role of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission during the Obasanjo II administration.

Since almost everyone involved in politics in Nigeria is tainted with the pervasive corruption of the system, you can ALWAYS find proof of wrongdoing by any politician ... provided you are actually interested in finding it. Indeed, as much as I am no fan of Nuhu Ribadu (working to make one corrupt faction stronger at the expense of another corrupt faction does not constitue fighting corruption), or of Farida Waziri (who only has the job as a scratch-my-back-I-scratch-yours recognition of her husband's political influence in Gombe State), no one, not even a saint, could fight corruption from within the system. The system itself is so corrupt in its entirety, that "fighting corruption" would entail prosecuting almost everyone in the political system, which the political system (by definition) would never allow.

In any case, Alhaji Takai's opponents have set the EFCC on him. The ANPP does not control the EFCC, so one can see the hidden hand of the Peoples Democratic Party, and the federal government, trying to exploit divisions in the ANPP ahead of the 2011 "elections".

In Fourth Republic politics, aspirants who fail to get the nomination ticket for their current political party simply decamp to one of the other 35 registered parties from where they battle their rivals in a contest to see whose machinery will be more successful in manipulating/dictating the outcome. Specifically, one or more of Shekarau/Takai's rivals is clearly in discussions with the Peoples Democratic Party (and with President Jonathan) about decamping to the PDP ... and Alhaji Takai's arrest may be the first step in the eventual replacement of the ANPP with the PDP as the controlling faction in Kano State.

Oh, don't worry. I doubt Takai will be held for long, or charged with anything. They will hold him for a while, "question him", and then release him. Farida Waziri (like Ribadu before her) will make vague sounds about planning to prosecute him at some unspecified future date.

The PDP has made its point.