Farmers' and Pastoralists' land tensions

I have written before about the land use and land access tensions that flare up in Nigeria (and other parts of Africa) between farmers and pastoralists. Usually the domestic and international media portray these events through the well-worn prism of "ethnic" and "religious" conflict ....

.... when what is happening is in fact a desperate (emphasis on desperate) economic struggle between two groups of poor people, both of whose very subsistence is dependent on the limited resource that is land on a continent that is mostly arid or semi-arid.

I don't care too much about what the rest of the world thinks about our problems. The fact is, the solutions to our problems will only come from within, and sitting at the core of all of our problems is the broken and dysfunctional internal process, in Nigeria and African, of identifying the sources of problems and (by extension) the solution to those problems. When you listen to Africa's politicians and so-called "intellectuals", and (more importantly) watch what they do in practice, you notice that they feed, with their words, the worn-out stereotypes of Africa as a land of "tribes" constantly fighting each other because that is what "tribes" do, and end up sustaining through their inaction and (just as badly) their actions.

Inaction is usually excused by saying there is nothing you can do about people who just hate each other, albeit saying it in fancy, intelligent-sounding gibberish. In reality, such inaction if partly due to official disinterest and apathy, but mainly due to the fact that most politicians gain their political relevance by annointing themselves as the "defenders" of a particular ethnic or religious community, a position from which they squeeze patronage and economic concessions (for themselves and their political allies) in exchange for "delivering" the support of that community to whomever is in government. Mind you, the community does not really support the government at all, but provided the self-annointed leaders say they do, everyone (media and intellectuals included) acts like they do.

The actions of decision-makers are just as bad, because (aside from the usual clientelism, patronage, rent-seeking, waste, theft, corruption, unaccountability, lack of analysis, lack of .... etc, etc), these actions are usually based on the assumption that the problem is ethnic hate. So the so-called solutions are based on the idea that they have to get cultural communities to stop hating each other.

Ask them where this "hate" comes from, and they will start to tell you about religions that don't get along, or ethnic groups that have (supposedly) always hated each other. Neither statement is true, and neither statement is useful as a solution to any of our dillemmas.

In any case, I was reading an article in The Economist about Brazil's success in expanding their agricultural production. One particular sequence of paragraphs caught my attention.

Second, Embrapa went to Africa and brought back a grass called brachiaria. Patient crossbreeding created a variety, called braquiarinha in Brazil, which produced 20-25 tonnes of grass feed per hectare, many times what the native cerrado grass produces and three times the yield in Africa. That meant parts of the cerrado could be turned into pasture, making possible the enormous expansion of Brazil’s beef herd. Thirty years ago it took Brazil four years to raise a bull for slaughter. Now the average time is 18-20 months.

That is not the end of the story. Embrapa has recently begun experiments with genetically modifying brachiaria to produce a larger-leafed variety called braquiarão which promises even bigger increases in forage.

The Brazilians have improved and expanded their livestock output by adapting a variety of grass native to the continent of Africa. The import of this advancement is that you can use a smaller amount of land to increase the amount of feed for the same number (or more) cattle.

Why didn't we think of doing this?

Why didn't we do it first?

Why haven't we done it even now?

You know why?

Because we are too busy telling ourselves (and listening to foreigners tell us) that our farmers and pastoralists are fighting for religious and ethnic reasons, so we are wasting all of our mental energy on questions of religion and ethnicity!

Notice how the 2011 to-be-rigged elections in Nigeria are dominated by the question of zoning. None of the putative candidates has said anything of any use or any substance on any issue of any degree of importance.

To be frank, before Goodluck Jonathan makes the usual fake promises on electricity, he needs to explain the $13.5 million that was seized from him when he was Bayelsa Governor .... and someone needs to subject Bayelsa and Rivers State to an agonizingly detailed forensic audit, because the amount of money that was stolen from the people of those two states in the last 11 years is a national disgrace.

But I digress.

It is long past time for us to see our problems as they really are ... and not as we have been told they are.

News Comment

Should we citizens be angry that a suspected conman allegedly "duped" a federal legislator of =N=130,000.00 ... or should we take this report from NEXT as partial evidence of Nigerians' long-held belief that politicians pay (dare I say "bribe") journalists, newspapers, radio and TV stations for positive coverage.

So-called brown envelope journalism has been around (or rumoured to be around) for about as long as journalism has been around. It works directly, with media outlets either receiving money in exchange for good publicity for the client (or negative publicity for the client's opponent). It also allegedly works inversely as well, like an extortion racket, with media outlets (allegedly) innundating us with negative stories about a politician who is not yet paying them, in order to put pressure on the politician to pay up, kind of like what is known in other countries as a protection racket.

Allegedly.

Speaking of public perception of the federal republic's institutions, a poll was released that showed 70% of respondents believe our judiciary is corrupt.

Political and governmental interference in traditional monarchies ...

In Europe and Asia ....

.... if you permit a brief digression, are "Europe" and "Asia" really separate continents? There is but one "Eurasian" landmass, and if you are going to carve out the European peninsula because it has a separate history and culture from the rest of the landmass, why would you then combine West Asia, South Asia, Southeast Asia, Central Asia and East Asia, all of which are as cultural distinct from each other as they are from "Europe"?

Okay, back to the point.

In Europe and Asia there came a time when the "republican" idea of government clashed with the extant fact of "monarchist" government. Some places became constitutional monarchies, preserving the monarchs as symbolic heads of state while investing all real power in prime ministers. Other places became republics, and their respective royal families disappeared, some into poverty and oblivion, others in relative wealth; a few still use the royal titles they would have inherited as part of their formal names.

In the Americas and Australia, the brutal (lets be honest) invasion of Europeans essentially wrecked existing systems of government entirely. There are countries in the Americas where the majority of the population are indigenous or "mestizo", but any relationship to the systems of government that preceded the colonial invasion are tenuous as near as I can tell.

In Africa it was different.

I am tempted to launch into a speech about colonialism, but this is not the place for that. Suffice to say the apparatus of European colonialism in Africa was a thin crust placed on top of much older, unchanged structures of culture, tradition and identity.

Outside a handful of colonies, there were never that many Europeans (and Asians) in colonial Africa, and the colonial armies, comprised mostly of Africans with very, very few European officers (statistically speaking) were not particularly large either. The British used the term "Indirect Rule" in Nigeria a few other colonies, to describe the process of coopting tradtional governance institutions to supplement the microscopic bureaucracy of the colonial state, but even those European imperial powers who professed to be exercising "direct rule" oveer subjugated peoples had at best tenuous control of vast regions of their colonies beyond certain administrative and trading centres.

To make a long story short, most of Africa never really had the "republicanism" versus "monarchism" debate. In North Africa (Egypt for example) and East Africa (Ethiopia) monarchist dynasties were brought down in favour of republics; in Morocco, the royal dynasty continues to wield de facto and de jure executive power. Elsewhere in Africa, however, the nature of the colonial state, grouping as it did several previously separate and independent entities, left the post-colonial state with a political inheritance that was the hierarchical reverse of the "constitutional monarchy" compromise of Europe.

Where the European monarch became a ceremonial figure who ostensibly sat atop the entirety state as its overall figurehead, the African monarch became a ceremonial figue restrictive to a specific region within the state.

The "President" of the post-colonial African state inherited all of the powers previously held by the European colonial governor, without reform; the European governor was never subject to the people of the colonial state in any democratic, legislative or representative sense, was not accountable to them, did not answer to them, did not tolerate opposition, and did not hesitate to deploy the colonial army and police to destroy any hints of disobedience, protest or "sedition".

The colonial state also coopted our tradtional systems of government, deposing chiefs who did not toe their line, and imposing willing puppets who sometimes were even more zealous about imposing colonial diktat than the colonialists themselves. This too continued into the post-colonial era.

Don't misunderstand me. I am not blaming European colonialism for all of our problems. To be honest, if we didn't have serious problems to begin with, we wouldn't have been so easily conquered by what were relatively small colonial armies (nor would we have been held down in subjugation for quite so long). But this is an entirely different, more controversial conversation. No, I talk about colonialism because much of what constitutes the formal structures of our post-colonial African states are continuations of what existed in colonial times.

To use an admittedly simplistic metaphor, any conversation about the Nigerian judicial system (complete with the funny white wigs) begins with the judicial system imported by the colonial authorities, and not with precolonial Nigeria. It is true that we still practice traditional systems of justice (in my hometown, for example, "land cases" are still decided in a modernized version of the old ways), but much like our traditional monarchies, these traditional judicial systems have been subordinated to the system imposed by the British. In fact, much as our economies have "formal" and "informal" sectors, traditional rulers and traditional justice have become "informal".

As I stated earlier, our pre-colonial, traditional systems of government were not perfect, and some of the pre-colonial governance problems have recurred in post-colonial Africa. We were behind on technology in the pre-colonial days, and paid the penalty for it, when simple military technologies deployed by the European exposed just how obsolete our military tactics were. It is 2010, and we are still technologically behind, and probably wouldn't be able to defend ourselves if NATO or something launched another colonial war. For some reason our political, economic and socio-cultural leaders feel threatened by the prospect of an educated, informed citizenry. It doesn't help that they simply continued the "Bantu Education" systems of the colonial era (to borrow a South African phrase), systems designed to produce complacent bureaucrats happy to occupy the lower rung of colonial administration and not to produce entrepreneurial innovators (who were as threatening to European colonialism as they were to pre-colonial and post-colonial African leaders).

I digress.

The point is we have to come to some sort of decision on what we are going to do with our traditional rulers.

I am very uncomfortable with the nature of traditional government in post-colonial Nigeria. The way their predecessors worked for British colonialism in the days of Indirect Rule is reflected in the way many of them continue to be sycophants for whoever or whatever happens to be the government of the day. On the other hand, they really have no choice; any sign of disobedience, and the post-colonial government will simply depose and replace them with a more pliable character, same as the British used to do.

The best among them are skilled at walking the fine line between being the one thing and being the other, managing to stay in place and do some good without getting on the nerves of whoever happens to be in government at the time. But that raises the question, should they be subject to the power of whoever is in government in the first place? And if they are not, what should we construct as the constitutional rights/roles/privileges/checks/limitations/balance/etc for the institutions of traditional governance?

This brief rant was prompted by this newspaper article. Zamfara State Governor Aliyu Shinkafi was the political "godson" and protege of his immediate predecessor, ex-Governor (now Senator) Ahmed Sani Yerima; after two terms in office, Yerima "engineered" the transfer of his office to Shinkafi. This being the Fourth Republic, an era characterized by serial betrayals by godsons of their godfathers, and consequent, incessant (and violent) fighting between erstwhile godsons and godfathers, Shinkafi turned against Yerima, and even went so far as abandoning the ANPP for the PDP (taking with him his faction of the ANPP).

The Daily Trust article says Governor Shinkafi suspended the Emir of Bakura, alleging "misappropriation of the emirate's funds". The Emir in question is Bello Mohammed Sani, the older borther of Shinkafi's rival and nemesis, Ahmed Sani Yerima.

It is not a coincidence. It is probably not a coincidence that Bello Sani is Emir of Bakura; without doing any research on the matter, I am willing to bet he was appointed Emir by his younger brother. A similar situation has been unfolding in Borno State, where Governor Ali Modu Sheriff has been accused of creating new emirates in order to make his father an emir while simultaneously weakening the power of an emir (of Dikwa) who was not a political acolyte of the governor.

And before anyone comes up with the usual bigotry regarding the north of Nigeria, you should visit my hometown in the southern half of the country, where a chieftaincy dispute has left two halves of the town as politically polarized as North and South Korea, almost literally. During the Second Republic, the entire region around the town was "controlled" by an opposition party, relative to the party that "controlled" the state. The state governor saw an excellent opportunity to sow confusion in the opposition stronghold, declared his support for one of the rival chiefs, and (I kid you not) split the town in two, creating a new "autonomous" town loyal to the governor. It is now 2010, and the 30-year-long argument is still going on; the "real" town and the "autonomous" town have taken each other to court three times over the decades. It is ridiculous.

But back to Zamfara.

Look, this is Nigeria. And this is Zamfara. The fact is, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo was able, through Nuhu Ribadu's EFCC, to blackmail then-Governor Ahmed Sani Yerima into supporting the Obasanjo administration's plans for the 2007 Elections, specifically the plan to impose the now late then-Katsina Governor Umaru Yar'Adua on Nigeria as Obasanjo's successor. The thing about the Obasanjo administration's arm-twisting is Ribadu was able to threaten targets for extortion with legitimate prosecution, because they were in fact corrupt. Forget for a second that the Obasanjo administration was itself corrupt, and that the political machines that backed Obasanjo were even more corrupt, and focus for a second on the fact that Yerima quickly caved to the pressure, for fear that he would be exposed as a hypocrite ... a man who preached Sharia in the daylight, but who robbed the people of Zamfara at night.

I do not know whether the Emir of Bakura misappropriated emirate funds, and I do not trust the objectivity of any investigative panel created by Governor Shinkafi, but it is more than possible the allegations are true. But even if they are true, remember Ribadu's selective, political-extortion-masked-as-corruption-fighting did nothing to change the culture of corruption in Nigeria, and didn't even make a dent in the record levels of corruption witnessed during the mini-Oil-Boom of the early 2000s. In like fashion, if a state governor is only interested in corruption, if it helps him get rid of his rival's brother, it is not likely to change the state's economic losses due to corruption, since you only need be an acolyte of the governor for the governor to tolerate, protecte and even share in your graft (as did Obasanjo and the Big Men that backed him, while Ribadu pretended not to see).

But here is the thing.

Forget for a second the (possible) corruption. And forget for a second the politics.

As a constitutional principle, do we really want our Emirates and other traditional governance structures to be subject to this kind of ridiculous decision-making? Governors making their brothers and fathers Emirs? Governors dethroning the "royal" brothers of politicians they are in dispute with? Governors creating "autonomous" towns with "autonomous" warrant chiefs for purely political purposes?

Whose owns the tenure?

Governor Murtala Nyako insists his first term as Governor of Adamawa will end in 2012, not 2011 as INEC intends.

The Fourth Republic has been very strange.

Sometimes the strangeness is blunt and in the open. The honest actions of a Chris Uba or of the late Lamidi Adedibu are cases in point. Both men were honest in the sense that they never pretended to be something they were not, unlike the rest of the political class. It is funny, in a sad way. It is like the political class thinks we are stupid or maybe blind. They do things; everyone sees them do what they do; everyone knows what they are doing; they know everyone knows what they are doing; but they look us in the face and without blinking claim to be doing the opposite. Men like the late Adedibu, the late Wada Nas and the living Chris Uba were at least honest with us.

But sometimes the strangeness of the Fourth Republic appears, paradoxically, in its efforts to follow constitutionalism and rule of law.

Confused?

Well, take Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State. The Supreme Court said he was duly elected even though he was not on the ballot and consequently received ZERO votes; if you get the opportunity, read through the twisting, turning, ridiculous rhetoric the apex court used to justify this inexplicable decision.

There are those who claim Amaechi is "doing a good job" as governor. Of course every Nigerian governor can boast of people who insist they are "doing good jobs". But the thing is this: Even if he was the greatest, best governor in the history of the world, he shouldn't allowed to take such a powerful office (Nigerian governors are like local emperors) when nobody voted him into the job.

Understand that our inability as citizens to choose who should occupy political office, our sheer powerlessness to control the agenda of our government, lies at the very core of everything we view as "problems" in Nigeria. The people of Rivers State have not had the opportunity to properly elect a governor ... ever! Even if the current one was "good" (and I am not saying he is), the people will be unable to prevent the return of another "bad" governor if they continue to lack the basic ability to decide who should occupy the office.

Another weird decision of the courts, one which has relevance to Governor Nyako's complaint, was the decision to allow Governor Peter Obi of Anambra State continue to serve as governor for another three years after he should have left office in 2007.

Let me explain something, as briefly as I can. A simple internet search will provide you with tonnes of articles on the events I am about to describe.

The 2003 Anambra State gubernatorial elections were rigged. By all accounts, Peter Obi was the real winner, but the political machine led by Chris Uba, with the active cooperation of the federal government led by then-President Obasanjo, contrived to compel the electoral commission to declare a false outcome giving the office to Chris Ngige, Uba's political "godson".

Chris Uba and Chris Ngige would go on to fallout with each other, at which point Chris Uba tried to use the state command of the Nigerian Police Force to carry out a coup de tat to replace Ngige with a more loyal "godson", the Deputy-governor Okechukwu Ude. When this failed, the Uba machine plunged Anambra into more anarchy and violence than usual (the state had suffered in 1999-2003 when "godfather" Emeka Offor fell out with his "godson" Governor Chimaroke Mbadinuju). When this too failed, Uba hit upon the plan of the century -- admit the 2003 elections were rigged, so Ngige could be legally removed from office. The plan worked, the courts stripped Ngige of office, and in 2006, some three years after the 2003 Elections, Peter Obi was sworn in as Governor of Anambra State.

The Nigerian (un)democratic system is modeled loosely on the United States' system, with four year terms. When Obi was sworn into office, Ngige had already served 3 out of the 4 years of the 2003-2007 election term. But for good measure, the Chris Uba-aligned Anambra State House of Assembly impeached Governor Obi late in the 2003-2007 term, handing the governor's mansion temporarily to his deputy, Dame Virginia Etiaba.

The Fourth Republic has not been a triumph for democracy, but the situation in Anambra from 1999 to 2007 was egregious even by Fourth Republic standards. It was an embarrassment, even for a political class that seems incapable of shame. Yet, since Nigerian politicians prefer the undemocratic environment of the Fourth Republic, nothing was done to reform the situation in Anambra. If anything, the various camps simply maneuvred to be the ones to take advantage of the political anarchy.

Chris Uba was ultimately upstaged in 2007 by his older brother. Nnamdi "Andy" Uba was a devoted lieutenant of President Olusegun Obasanjo; the Americans had caught him laundering money on behalf of his boss, but the incident was hushed up (by both the Nigerian and American authorities). Obasanjo, his bid for a Third Term blocked, had declared the 2007 Elections were "do or die"; with the help of Nuhu Ribadu, he strong-armed various political machines into helping him fill as many political positions with his loyalists as possible. None were more loyal to him than Andy Uba, and in due course the 2007 Anambra State Elections were rigged to place Andy Uba in the Anambra Governor's mansion.

As a sidenote, Andy had his kid brother Chris jailed. The younger Uba had been looking forward to being the local kingpin of Anambra State while his older brother remained as the family's representative in Abuja. When big brother Andy showed up to push him to a subordinate position in the local hierarchy, Chris rebelled ... so his brother jailed him. It is interesting that Chris broke almost every criminal statute in the Nigerian law book, but remained free; pissing off his older brother, on the other hand, well, that got him some brief jail time, didn't it? Emphasis on "brief"; Chris was out in time to intervene in the 2010 Anambra State gubernatorial elections and to destabilize the state branch of the PDP ahead of the 2011 polls.

Which brings me to the point.

The 2007 Elections marked the end of the Obasanjo II administration, and with Mr. "Do or Die" gone, the Tribunals, Appeals Courts and the Supreme Court felt free to throw sand into his garri, as a Nigerian idiom goes. Obasanjo, with the assistance of several political machines (and the EFCC and INEC bosses Nuhu Ribadu and Maurice Iwu) had manipulated several of the contests to place loyalists in office; I suppose the plan was for Obasanjo to continue to wield power over Nigeria behind the scenes, like Deng Xiaopping. It didn't quite work out that way. For one thing, the late former President Umaru Yar'Adua moved to establish his independence from his erstwhile godfather (the wars between godfathers and godsons has been a recurring them of the Fourth Republic; Obasanjo himself had declared war on the most powerful of his own godfathers, then-Vice-President Atiku Abubakar)

In any case, the Courts began to annul and overturn quite a few rigged contests. On the one hand, it is great to see the judiciary act against electoral rigging. On the other hand, I don't think rule of law triumphed per se, because the Courts seemed to be fishing around for ridiculous of reasons for annulling specific results, and then following this up by imposing some ridiculous remedies.

The reasoning for making Rotimi Amaechi governor makes a mockery of any concept of democracy. But it pales in comparison to the frightening reasoning used to annul the election of Andy Uba, and restore Peter Obi.

The Courts said Peter Obi was entitled to 4 years as governor. Since Ngige had taken up 3 of the 4 years of the 2003-2007 term, the Courts restored Peter Obi to the governor's mansion to serve another 3 years, so he could complete the 4 he deserved.

Here is the thing ....

The fixed 4-year term was not created for the benefit of politicians, nor was it created as a reward to politicians for winning electoral contests. The fixed term was created for we the people, the citizenry. It represents our right to use our votes to choose leaders every four years. By giving Obi an extra 3 years beyond 2007, the Courts created a 7-year gap between one chance for the citizens' to decide who occupies public office, and their next opportunity to do so.

The 2003 Elections in Anambra (and the rest of Nigeria) were rigged, and Peter Obi was denied his proper mandate. The unelected Ngige went on to enjoy 3 of the 4 years that should have been Peter Obi's first term.

I do not dispute these facts.

But the Courts could (and should) simply have ruled that the one year Obi spent as governor between 2006 and 2007 did not count as his first term for the purposes of the application of the constitutional provisions for term limits. In plain words, the Supreme Court should have said Peter Obi could (in theory) run and win the 2007 election, and still remain eligible to run again in 2010.

Peter Obi's rights would have been upheld; the remedy would even be to his benefit if he had gone on to two full terms, de facto 9 years in office.

But the citizens' right to choose their leaders every four years would also have been upheld.

Peter Obi's supporters could argue events on the ground are different from textbook conversations about law and constitutionality. The Uba family (and their Obasanjo Administration backers) had the Anambra State Assembly (a legislative chamber filled with Chris Uba's "godsons") impeach newly sworn in Governor Obi only months after he took office. When the High Court and Appeals Court both overturned the impeachment, the Maurice Iwu-led INEC simply barred Peter Obi from standing in the 2007 elections, most likely acting on instructions from the federal executive. Pay attention to the fact that Iwu's pretext for leaving Obi off the ballot was the same as Ibrahim Babangida's pretext for nullifying the 1993 elections -- a last-minute lawsuit filed by a co-opted politician.

The Court's decision restoring Obi to the governor's mansion for an extra three years beyond 2007 was made after the 2007 election. Peter Obi's supporters could argue that my argument in favour of the Court's freeing him to run for two terms after the 2003-2007 term was effectively moot, because he would not have been able to run in the 2007 race based on the timeline of the court's decision, and wouldn't have been able to seek a potential two terms after 2011 because once Andy Uba was sitting on the governor's chair, he was guaranteed to use its imperial powers to gift himself a second term and then hand the office over to a chosen godson who (like all godsons) would betray him, kicking off another round of crisis.

But this argument is false.

The Courts could simply have annulled the 2007 Elections in Anambra .... and ordered a rerun election, this time with Peter Obi on the ballot. If he was truly as popular as he in fact was (or rather, if APGA, which is trying to replace NCNC and NPP as the "Igbo Party was as popular as it believed itself to be), then Peter Obi could have won in 2007, with a Court ruling allowing him to run for the 2011-2015 term after the 2007-2011 term ended.

You see? The people retain their right to vote for their leaders every four years, and no harm comes to Peter Obi and his political ambitions.

But no, the Courts preferred to come up with a ridiculous rationale for giving a man who wasn't on the 2007 ballot a free ride to another 3 years in office, leaving the citizens with a 7-year gap between one chance to influence government policy and choose their own leaders, and their next chance.

Now, you might point out to me that Nigerian Elections are not even remotely democratic in any substantive sense, and accuse me of being a naive fool in suggesting the votes of the people of Anambra would have had any influence over the results declared at the end of any of these 4-yearly elections.

But if you do that, you will be missing the point.

Yes, the Elections are fraudulent. That is the issue. That is the problem. That is what we have to correct.

And the Courts are not helping.

What they have done and been doing has only emphasized and strengthened the absence of citizen participation in government. Our elections, apparently, are either decided by politicians and plutocrats without our participation .... or are decided by the Courts, equally without our participation.

Either way, we the people are spectators in our own country, divorced from policy-making, and ultimately treating our own country as if it belongs to someone else and not to us. The attitude that "government property" does not belong to us allows us to feel good about apathetically watching things decay without lifting a finger to stop it; sometimes we participate in the destruction, profiting by cannibalizing the very things that could have been, should have been a foundation for our well-being, because we think we are taking from somebody else something that they would have kept from us, rather than realize we are only hurting ourselves in the long-run.

The Courts have not made Nigeria any more democratic by giving Peter Obi and Rotimi Amaechi offices they did not earn in any election, not even in a rigged one.

Nothing has changed.

The Courts did order rerun elections in a few states, but Timpre Sylva's victory in Bayelsa State tells you all you need to know about Nigerian "democracy" -- the official result of the 2007 rerun election in Bayelsa had Sylva winning with a hilariously unbelievable 93% of the vote.

Now, if you think that the solution to that is to have the Supreme Court choose the candidate it wants, and hand the candidate the office on a platter, don't forget that the Court is creating problematic legal precedents.

Unbeknownst to most Nigerians, Andy Uba filed a lawsuit ahead of the 2010 Anambra Elections asking the Supreme Court to name him Governor of Anambra State when Peter Obi's term ended in 2010. Andy Uba's lawyers argued that their client was as much a victim of Ngige's illegal 3-year regime as Peter Obi; if Obi lost 3 years because Ngige was in office, then their clien Andy had lost 4 years because he had had to step aside, losing the 4 years he was supposed to get for winning in 2007, so the Supreme Court could compensate Obi for Obi's victory in 2003. Andy Uba's laywers felt their man should get his own 4 years beginning in 2010, after which (presumably) Anambra could start on a clean slate without having to compensate any past victors.

The Courts rejected Uba's argument.

But that is not the end of it.

Remember the story that began this blog post? Governor Murtala Nyako insisting his term of office will end in 2012 and not 2011? You realize he bases his demand on that same Court decision in re: Peter Obi?

As far as Nyako is concerned, if the Courts gave Obi an extra 3 years to complete his allotted 4, then he (Nyako) deserves an extra one year to complete his four too. And waiting in the wings behind Nyako are Governors Ibrahim Idris (Kogi), Aliyu Wamakko (Sokoto), Segun Oni (Ekiti), Liyel Imoke (Cross River) and Timipre Sylva (Bayelsa) .... all of whom had to leave the governor's mansion for a few months while undemocratic, rigged rerun elections were prepared to return them to office. They too will one their one year compensation.

Also in line for compensation are Edo State Governor Adams Oshiomhole, whose case is almost exactly like Peter Obi's. The initial (rigged) results of the 2007 Edo State election declared the PDP's Oserheimen Osunbor the winner of the governor's race. A year-and-half later, the Courts overturned the announced verdict and proclaimed Oshiomhole the true victor. I guess that means he has a case for an extra 18 months compensation.

And then you have Anambra State, where Peter Obi was reelected to a second term in early 2010 .... in an election where 300,000 people voted, out of a registered electorate of over 1.8 million. All of the candidates (Obi inclusive) agreed there had been irregularities, and civil society groups were critical, but a weary Anambra populace merely shrugged its shoulders and hoped for peace. In his second and final term, Governor Obi, apparently not noticing there are too many armed groups in the country, with too many hidden and open agendas, leading to increased lawlessness in the country, declared his desire to see more armed militia in the country.

But that is besides the point.

Are we the people going to fight for the right to choose our leaders and influence our government's policy? Or are we going to leave it up to the judges of the Court to decide when and whether to adjust the outcome of our undemocratic processes?

Maybe we should amend the Constitution and do away with the expensive process of having elections, and just have the candidates submit their names to the Supreme Court. The Justices can then decide in a vote among themselves who should or shouldn't occupy political offices. Of course that means the politicians will stack the Courts with their godsons, but as long as we are not being democratic, what is the difference?

We are supposed to choose our leaders every four years. We can't keep letting our rights drift away.

The solution to the conundrum of rigged elections is to stop electoral rigging ... and if the Courts want to change the outcome of a rigged election, they need to do it within 6 months of the election, with NO term extensions for anybone.

EDIT 25/10/10: Ten days ago, on the 15th of October, 2010, the Appeal Court annulled the 2007 "victory" of the PDP's Segun Oni, naming Kayode Fayemi the true victor of the 2007 Ekiti State gubernatorial race. Governor Fayemi takes office three-and-a-half years after the 2007 elections. Will he be compensated with a 3.5 year extension of term?

nd then you have


, thus (in Andy Uba's lawyer's argument) den

givUba Supreme Court had compensated Peter Obi by giving him 3 years because Ngige's illegal 3-year regime had denied him the 4 years he was supposed to get by winning the 2003 elections, and

had denied

I choose the word "stupid" deliberately because of this article from the the newspaper Leadership http://leadershipnigeria.com/index.php/columns/views/politics/7667-the-ubas-end-of-a-dynasty

since their man had not been allowed to win the 2007 election


was still eligible to run for the office of governor in 2007 and 2010 if he ran and won the 2007 Elections, that would count as his first full term, allowing him to run for reelection in 2011 rather than be required by term-limitation to step aside.


It is eminently undemocratic.

It is also the reason Nyako and

And quite a few Obasanjo loyalists had thei

is apparently in the

was supposed You can imagine Chris' chagrin atlittle Ch ... presumably for being t

Obasanjo's kitchen cabinet

control

The 2007 Elections were only a year



The rest of the political class takes great care to pretend to be lawful, constitutional democrats, when in fact

(RIP) or from a rule-of-law or constitutional perspective.

time. The Supreme Court said Rotimi Amaechi "won" the Rivers State election, even though he wasn't on the ballot and consequently didn't win any votes.

News Comments

Another politician decamps to the PDP.

This time its Governor Theodore Orji of Abia State, who is decamping from All Peoples Grand Alliance (APGA) to the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Governor Orji had previously decamped from the Progressive Peoples Alliance (PPA) to join APGA. And before that, he had jumped from the PDP to join the PPA. Perhaps bookmakers in Las Vegas and Macau should give odds and take bets on where Theodore Orji will be next year.

Elsewhere, the publication NEXT reports the newly renamed "Action Congress of Nigeria" (it used to be called "Action Congress") will annoint former EFCC boss Nuhu Ribadu as its presidential candidate for the 2011 (s)elections. It will be interesting to see Ribadu insisting he will fight corruption, while standing side-by-side with the ACN's sole shareholder, Bola Ahmed Tinubu. A bit like calling yourself a vegetarian while you are consuming copious amounts of meat, but that sort of hypocrisy is the defining characteristic of Mr Ribadu.

And Vanguard reports the PDP has decided to keep the Regional Zoning phenomenon peculiar to the Fourth Republic, but will allow current President Goodluck Jonathan to seek the party nomination even though he is not an indigene of the region whose turn it is right now.

I have frequently said on this blog that Nigerian politics is empty, hollow and lacking in substance. The fact that the argument over "zoning" is the dominant issue of this (s)election campaign is basically par for the course. Even if we took the rubbish of "zoning" on its own merits, there sure is a lot of hypocrisy going around. In 1999, all we heard was "power shift" to a specific region, and I guarantee in 2015 an "apex socio-cultural group" from another specific region will insist it is now their turn because the last time a man from their region held the president's chair was 44 years ago. Today, the people who benefitted from the rubbish of zoning, and the people who hope to benefit in the future from the rubbish of zoning ... are criticizing zoning, so as to block yet another specific region from keeping the presidency for another four years. Today they criticize it, tomorrow they will demand its reintroduction -- why criticize Theodore Orji for jumping around like a grasshopper, when all of our politicians are all clones of Theodore Orji?

Personally, I have never bought into the belief that there is a qualitative difference between "Northern" politicians and "Southern" politicians, between Christian politicians and Moslem politicians, between civilian politicians/plutocrats and militicians/plutocrats from the army. The rubbish of "zoning" and "power shift" extends even to the states, where senatorial zones are supposed to take turns in filling political positions with corrupt men that have no ideals and no plans for societal progress or economic development.

If we don't change is the fundamental, substantive nature of our society, then it doesn't really matter which region produces the president, because that president will just do the same ridiculous things that were done before him, that will be done after him, and that would have been done if one of his rivals had "won" instead. It has been over 50 years since the march to Independence in the 1950s, and we have consistently produced the same type of politics and the same type of leaders pursuing self-defeating policies and lacking in any type of vision of what our federal republic should be, and bereft of any comprehension of what our real long-term strategic interests are. Yet, it is a question of demand and supply, and the politicians definitely supply our insatiable demand for rubbish conversations about rubbish topics like zoning.

Look, it just doesn't make a difference to me if my country is mismanaged and maladministered by a man from Badagry, Maiduguri, Oloibiri, Sabon Birni or Awka-Nri.

What the heck is the difference?

When are we going to talk about issues, and measure candidates based on their ability to deliver on the issues?

When will our politics be relevant to real life, and not to this cartoon existence we seem unable to escape?

Bloody politics

News today of a political assassination in Edo State, and of 3 killed in Zamfara State in a violent clash between party thugs employed by the Peoples Democratic Party and the All Nigeria Peoples Party Politics.

THE INCIDENT IN ZAMFARA ...

... left several injured and "scores of cars burnt".

When there is no substantive democracy, the participants will compete undemocratically. More to the point, when there are no rules of conduct, and when what we pretend to be rules are enforced sparingly and arbitrarily (usually "victor's justice", where the person who won by breaking the rules using the rules to destroy his competition), then the competitors will push the limits of what they can do because victory goes to the man who is able to go that one step further than where his competition is willing or able to go. Each party in the contest knows that if it doesn't or cannot match its opponents' excesses, it will lose. Effectively it is in the rational interest of all participants to act without moral limitations.

Not only do we not have rules, but there is no rule against killing and lesser forms of violence, is there? Murder and mass-killing have been at the core of our post-1960 politics, as have intimidation, brutalization and the deliberate fostering of a climate of fear and distrust.

You can't say that the political class are opposed to it, because most of them have been the direct and/or indirect beneficiaries of it. And I don't just mean people who shot their way to power, or people who stay in power undemocratically because Nigerians are too scared to do anything about it. No, it is worse than that. Think about it. Almost 100% of Nigeria's post-1960 politicians (including the giants of the First Republic) would have been completely irrelevant if the political process in Nigeria were not what it was. Outbreaks of ethnic and religious violence have been useful to these politicians because they (a) keep us citizens divided against each other; and (b) serve as "proof" for these politicians' claims that we need them to protect us against the rest of Nigeria that lies outside our ethnicity and religion.

Persistent, low intensity violence, if eminently beneficial to our politicians. Too much violence would be bad for them, as there is neither power nor money to be milked from outright anarchy .... but the absence of violence would mean the extinction of their political careers, so they work very hard to keep us in a limbo that is neither too far here, nor too far there.

And can you imagine if they had to compete for power by offering the citizenry a choice between different credible and intelligent policies to address political, economic and sociocultural problems? They don't know how to do that. It isn't in their nature. Better to maintain the system as a sort of primary schoolyard fight, where triumph goes to the biggest bully, the gang-leader with the biggest gang, the clever cheat with the best ability to fight unfairly, or even to the kid who is able to co-opt the irresistible power of the teachers and/or headmaster/headmistress to his cause (if you didn't get that last one about teachers and headmasters, it was an allegoric reference to co-opting the unchecked might of the Nigerian Armed Forces).

Democracy? They don't understand it.

Rofo-rofo schoolyard fights? Na dat one dem sabi boku.

Depressingly, it has always been this way. Violence has always been the route to power and control.

The British colonial yoke was imposed by violence and maintained through the credible threat of violence; said credibility earned through the liberal use of violent reprisals and "collective punishment".

And in a land where ancient history is mostly oral history of varying provenance, few if any of our ethnic nationalities can match the Kanuri in terms of how much and how far back their written and unwritten-but-empirically-credible history goes. The list of Kings (Mais and Shehus) goes back to the semi-mythical Sef, founder of the Duguwa Dynasty, whose reign began circa 700 CE, some 127 years before Egbert of Wessex forcibly united competing kingdoms to become the first King of All England. At least one writer has suggested the Kanem-Bornu Empires were successors states to an entity that served as an entrepot for Phoenician-era Trans-Saharan trade between North Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa.

Alas, the tale of the Kanuri imperial monarchy from the more empirically reliable period of the Saifawa Dynasty (began 1075 CE) to date is suffused with violent rivalries for the succession. These internal rivalries and civil conflicts were so bitter and destructive they all-too-frequently left the Empire exposed and defenseless to its external enemies. The last conquest of the Empire, that of the British, was itself possible in part because of internal political wrangling (pitting the remnants of the Saifawa against the ascendant El Kanemi dynasty), as well as the continuing struggle between the Bornu Empire on the one hand, and the constituent states of the Sokoto Caliphate during and after Uthman Dan Fodio's consolidating war.

Come to think of it conflicts between and within the states and statelets of proto-Nigeria opened the door for a relatively small British colonial army to conquer the entirety of the future "Nigeria" piecemeal.

But I digress.

THE ASSASSINATION VICTIM IN EDO ...

... Oghogho Omoregbe,

"was still alive until they got to the University of Benin Teaching Hospital, where he was rushed to after they could not receive medical attention at the Central Hospital owing to the one-month-old strike of health workers in the state."

Whoever killed Mr Omoregbe is guilty of first-degree murder.

Whoever hired the assassin that killed Mr Omoregbe, be it an individual or a group, is also guilty of first-degree murder.

But I would like us to discuss the possibility of manslaughter and/or negligent homicide cases against everyone that made it impossible for this man to receive emergency medical treatment at Central Hospital, Benin, the nearest medical facility to where he got shot.

This includes:

(a) The labour union bosses who think it is a good idea to endanger the lives of the public by taking doctors, nurses and other health workers out on strike. They have done this intermittently over the decades, and it has never resolved any of the issues they continuously bring up each time they strike, so what is the point of continuing to endanger the lives of innocent citizens? Do they not care? As someone who wants to fight (along with my fellow citizens) for substantive reform, restructuring and transformation of our federal republic, I despair at the fact that no platform exists from which to launch such a fight. The unions have no capacity to fundamentally alter any aspect of the political/economic/sociocultural environment of Nigeria, and frankly I fear they are like every other interest-group in Nigeria, fighting for a more advantageous position in a foundering ship, rather than taking action to patch the leaks and set the ship aright.

(b) The Edo State Commissioner of Health, the top technocrats at the State Ministry of Health. None of them depend on public hospitals for their own health, and hence none of them care. Their own families do not need Central Hospital, so they do not care whether their failure to resolve long-standing issues leads to a pointless and unnecessary strike and consequently to avoidable deaths. It is not like we are a democratic country where citizens can vote our their leaders to punish them for heartlessness. Their plan (as always) is to wait until the doctors and nurses run out of savings, begin to starve, and come back to accept whatever deal the government offers.

EDIT 20/09/10: Health workers strike in Delta State.

Edit 21/09/10: Health workers strike in Lagos State.

Still on the NSE

The SEC has named an interim president for the Council of the Nigerian Stock Exchange. He is Ballama Manu, a former banking executive.

More on Emmanuel Ikhazobor (named interim Director General of the NSE) and Ballama Manu, the new interim NSE council president.

Ikazaboh holds a degree in Accountancy and Finance from the Yaba College of Technology, MBA in financial management from the Manchester University Business School, UK, as well as a client service management degree from North Western University, Chicago USA. He is also a fellow of the Chartered Association of Certified Accountants (FCCA) and Institute of Chartered Accountants on Nigeria (FCA).

The new administrator has over 25 years of experience in public accounting and financial management. He was until yesterday the chief executive of Hedonmark Management Services, a management consulting firm, business process outsourcing and contract employee management.

For his part, Manu holds a first class honors Bsc Accounting degree from the Ahmadu Bello University Zaria and an Msc. in Accounting and Finance from the London School of Economics, UK.

He was until yesterday the chief executive of Sicom Capital Services Limited, consulting in project finance, banking and taxation. He an executive director of Union Bank, was chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service and also worked at the Nigerian Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC).

There is also speculation from NEXT that a new, substantive NSE Director-General has already been selected, and will step into office after the interim Ikhazobor period runs its course. Ndi Okereke-Onyiuke, the sacked former D-G, had been due to step down anyway, in a month's time, after a 10-year reign. So it is quite possible here replacement had already been lined up.

NEXT believes (based on "sources") Mrs. Yvonne Fasinro will soon be named substantive Director-General of the Exchange. They say of her:

Mrs Fasinro is a Senior Vice President at JP Morgan Chase, one of the world's biggest financial services institutions with assets worth $1.1 trillion and operations in more than 50 countries. She is an Ernst and Young trained Chartered Accountant who holds a BSc in Economics. She joined JP Morgan in 1994 and in that time has worked in the private bank, investment bank, and in a variety of roles in the fixed income, credit, equity,and equity derivatives businesses.

Though, if in fact she is named to the post, her appointment would more likely be linked to these facts:

Her husband is Habeeb Fasinro, the House of Representatives member representing Eti Osa federal constituency, Lagos State whose father is the first town clerk of Lagos City Council. Her father, Christopher Kolade, was Nigeria's former high commissioner to Britain, and a management expert.

The ever-excellent Business Day reports KPMG have been contracted to conduct a forensic audit of the Nigerian Stock Exchange, and further suggests the possibilty of "criminal prosecutions of some past and present Nigerian Stock Exchange (NSE) officials over allegations of financial infractions and insider abuses over the last few years."

That phrase "insider abuses" should throw up danger signs for Mrs Okereke-Onyiuke, as I doubt her involvement in the creation of Transcorp would survive the "conflict of interest" test. Ironically, her chief accuser, Alhaji Dangote, and his bitter rival, Femi Otedola, may also have to answer questions about Transcorp.

Oh, what am I saying? There is no way to properly investigate the creation of Transcrop without implicating a whole bunch of powerful politicians ... so if KPMG finds anything, I am sure it will be swept under a thick carpet.

Speaking of KPMG's potential audit findings, I must include these reader comments on the NEXT site. There was an interesting tid-bit at the end of the NEXT article, mentioning, without elaboration, that the firm of Akintola Williams Deloitte act as external auditors for the Nigerian Stock Exchange .... adding, again without further comment, that the man the SEC just appointed as interim Director-General of the NSE, Emmanuel Ikhazobor, is the "immediate past chairman and CEO of Akintola Williams Delloite, for West and central Africa".

If the SEC trusts the financial reports that have been made by Akintola Williams Delloite, then by definition Dangote's accusations should not have prompted such an over-the-top reaction from the SEC. On the other hand, if the SEC thinks there may be an iota of fact to what Dangote has said (so much so that they are getting KPMG not Akintola Williams Delloite to do a forensic audit of the books), then why place a company man from Akintola Williams Delloite in charge of the NSE?

A couple of reader comments on the NEXT site indicate I am not the only one worried about the conflict of interest issues

Posted by adetilewa@keromail.com on Aug 06 2010

Mr. Ikhazobor is the immediate past chairman and CEO of Akintola Williams Delloite, for West and central Africa which also acts as external auditors for the NSE. has he ever report any foul play in the NSE account he had been auditing? he is there to put final cement on the burial tomb of the stolen money, while Balama Manu, former chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS), as interim president of the council of the NSE. another most corrupt venture after nepa, the account of FIRS is more shady than NNPC. oh God of creation come to our rescue.

Posted by chibuzorsam@yahoo.co.uk on Aug 06 2010

I am just too worried that the appointment of Ikhazobor, the immediate past chairman and CEO of Akintola Williams Delloite, for West and central Africa which also acts as external auditors for the NSE is another breach of conflict of interest in corporate governance. It is very clear that this man, haven worked with an auditing firm serving as the external auditor to the agency will compromise in the discharge of the duties expected of him. His appointment as the interim administrator of the agency should be seen by many as a mere invitation for this man to cover up the compromising attitude of the external auditor, who ought to have since expressed an independent opinion about the weak and corrupt nature of the agency before now. We need an independent person who has no any known relationship, past and present, directly or indirectly, to guide the affairs of the agency

Update - Stranger Days at the NSE

Yesterday I wrote this post.

Today, I awake to find the Securities and Exchange Commission (acting on a petition from stock brokers) asked the Council of the Nigerian Stock Exchange to sack Mrs. Ndi Okereke Onyiuke, Director-General of the Nigerian Stock Exchange. The SEC further asked all members of the Council, including the Council's President, Alhaji Aliko Dangote, to resign henceforth.

The SEC released a statement, a portion of which was quoted in this excellent article from Business Day:

“The affairs of the Exchange are (to be) managed by an Interim Administrator appointed by the Commission pending the selection of a new Director General”, the statement signed by Arunma Oteh, director general of SEC, stated [sic] “Given the gravity of the allegations around financial mismanagement of the Exchange, the Commission has also directed the conduct of an independent investigation into the allegations.”

Arunma Oteh, Director-General of the Securities and Exchange Commission at the 2006 World Economic Forum.

As alluded to in the statement, Mrs Onyiuke has been replaced on an interim basis by Emmanuel Ikhazobo, a former managing partner of Akintola Williams Deloitte, an auditing firm.

No word yet on Dangote's interim replacment; there will have to be an "election" (so to speak) of a new substantive NSE Council as well as Council President in the near term.

In other market-related news:

M.S.C. Aviomoh, the Executive Director of Femi Otedola's African Petroleum has contributed documents to a website created specifically to accuse Otedola of financially wrecking AP. Incidentally, he includes copies of documents he sent to Akintola Williams Deloitte, African Petroleum's auditor (and the former firm of the new interim NSE Director-General), complaining about the official Deloitte sent to audit AP's books.

Give it a couple of days, and Otedola (or a representative of his) will accuse Aviomoh of being on Dangote's payroll. Maybe he is. Maybe he isn't. Either way, his website is quite detailed, and raises quite a number of questions about AP and Otedola

And one more tid-bit:

Erastus Akingbola is back in Nigeria. He is the

former chief executive of Intercontinental Bank from 1989 until August last year when he was ousted by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) over the huge non-performing loans of the bank and other alleged infractions

Akingbola went into exile when he was declared wanted by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission, subsequent to being sacked from his CEO position by Sanusi Lamido Sanusi of the CBN. He returned from exile a couple of days ago (making our security agencies look ineffectual in the process), before surrendering himself to the EFCC today.

Strange Days at the Nigerian Stock Exchange

The word "oligarch" has a particular meaning in Nigeria. It is a pejorative term, used by certain commentators in the South of the federal republic to refer (by way of barely concealed insut) to a section of the Nigerian political class that happens to hail from the Northern states, and which they accuse of various conspiracies against the federal republic.

None of these commentators ever explains what differentiates these northern "oligarchs" from their southern counterparts. They seem ... well ... the same to me.

It kind of ruins the word "oligarch". In its textbook, dictionary sense, "Oligarchy" is a good word to describe all of Nigeria. When we talk about godfathers, Big Men, army generals, plutocrats, ethnic/religious champions and warlords, etc, etc, we are talking about "oligarchs". For example, Andy and Chris Uba of Anambra State are textbook/dictionary "oligarchs", as was the late Lamidi Adedibu of Oyo State.

Using the word "oligarch" the way European and North American conspiracy theorists use the words "Illuminati", "Bilderberg Group", "New World Order" or "Freemason", is a disservice to honest dialogue.

It is unfortunate that the government (back during the late President Yar'Adua's administration) had to publicly deny allegations that Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, CBN Governor, was pursuing a "Northern Agenda" in his approach toward sanitizing the Nigerian banking industry. For some people, the fact that a Hausa President replaced an Igbo man (Prof. Charles Soludo) with a Hausa man as boss of the Central Bank of Nigeria, was evidence enough of a "cabal" of "oligarchs" pursing an "agenda".

The internet tends to highlight the views of extremists. From football to politics to business news, the "reader comments" sections on the websites of Nigerian newspapers and magazines have tended to have the obligatory accusations directed at "Mallams" or some other euphemism for northerners.

Of course, ethnic bigotry runs in every direction; just today, I read a response/comment to an article on the Nigerian Stock Exchange (of which Ndi Okereke Onyiuke, an Igbo, is Director-General) to which one reader responded by accusing "Igbos" of being behind the drug trade, kidnapping and (in the writer's view) the Nigerian Stock Exchange.

Censorship can be self-defeating in that it could be deceptive, giving us a sense of complacency about inter-ethnic relations when bigotry still stalks the land, however I must say I am disappointed by those Nigerian newspaper websites that don't seem to have gatekeepers or moderators to block or delete reader-generated content that crosses the line of decency.

In any case, that article about the Nigerian Stock Exchange prompted this blog post.

Alhaji Aliko Dangote is an "oligarch" in the Russian and Eastern European sense of the word, or more correctly in the sense in which Western Europeans and North Americans mean the word when they apply it to Russia and Eastern Europe.

Dangote is fabulously wealthy, probably the singely richest human being in the history of the lands now enclosed by the borders of the federal republic. He is a dollar billionaire, named on the Forbes list (the financial downturn has been rough on him; Forbes estimated he was worth $2.1 billion in 2010, down from their 2008 estimate of $3.3 billion).


Alhaji Aliko Dangote

Like the Russian oligarchs, Dangote profited from a close relationship with the central government and with the powerful politicians who controlled the central government. And he too benefited from the privatization of previously government-owned corporations and assets.

As with the Eastern European oligarchs, Dangote is now the head of a huge, sprawling corporate conglomerate.

I only have access to English-language news outlets from Western Europe and North America, so I do not have a reliable idea of what the people in post-Communist Europe think about their oligarch. The impression I get from the sources I have access to is of a persistent cloud of suspicion hanging over them, a silent, unstated accusation of malfeasance.

The same sort of cloud follows Dangote. He is not the first Nigerian Big Man to profit from the unaccountable, unregulated, secretive, dubious nexus between Nigerian politics and Nigerian business. Over the last 50 years, constitutionality, rule of law, accountability, justice and (most importantly) even-handed law enforcement have been ... shall we say discretionary at best (the narrow self-interest of those who have "captured" the state trumping principle as a decisive factor) and nonexistent at worst? Aliko Dangote has not decided (as of yet) to try for a political career of his own (unlike, for example, Chief Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu or the late Moshood Abiola), but he makes sure he is in the good books of Any Government In Power (A.G.I.P.) and otherwise focuses on working the system for profit. The power of government has always distorted markets, and he who controls or has access to this distortionary power, can reap great benefits in our distorted, dysfunctional, rentier, clientelist economy.

Dangote, who has been battling attempts to void his election as President of the Nigerian Stock Exchange Council, recently accused the Nigerian Stock Exchange of being technically insolvent, a claim that has attracted the attention of the Senate.

This issue, in and of itself, is something that must be investigated, the truth ascertained, and action taken ... either against the management of the NSE (who would be guilty of falsifying financial reports, if this is true) or against Dangote (who would be guilty of libel, slander, defamation or whatever lawyers would call it, if it is not true).

It should be noted that Dangote and his friend-turned rival Femi Otedola (worth $1.2 billion in 2009 according to Forbes) only last year traded accusations of share-price manipulation. Otedola accused Dangote of driving down the share price of Otedola's African Petroleum, while Dangote accused Otedola of driving down the price of Chevron. Muddying matters somewhat, Otedola was also accused of inflating the share price of AP in the first place, and just to add to the Investments and Securities Tribunal essentially overturned the earlier decision by the Securities and Exchange Commission that Dangote's Nova Finance and Securities Limited had indeed manipulated AP share prices downward (see SEC findings here).


Femi Otedola

The long and short of all of these accusations and counter-accusations was the drop in the value of Otedola's net worth, from $1.2 billion to $500 million, meaning he dropped off the Forbes billionaire list.

The former friends' private war grew out of a gentleman's agreement. Essentially, Dangote supposedly agreed to keep out of the oil importation and marketing business, and Otedola allegedly agreed to stay out of commodities importation and manufacturing. When Dangote moved to acquire the Nigerian assets of Chevron, it meant "war". Otedola announced his intention to invest in manufacturing and to import commodities at prices which undercut Dangote's. Anyone who has taken 101-level economics can understand why Dangote, who had a near-monopoly at the time, was able to charge such high prices, and concomitantly why Otedola could so easily threaten to undercut him.

Both men were godsons of President Obasanjo; had their quarrel started during the Obasanjo II administration, I am sure he would have stepped in as referee, made a firm decision, and milked both men for a share of their profits. Alas, this confrontation went big-time after Obasanjo stepped down, after Obasanjo's hand-picked successor, the late President Yar'Adua, began to distance himself himself from his erstwhile godfather. Ex-President Obasanjo's political machine had manipulated the 2007 election in the expectation that Obasanjo would run the government from behind the scenes, like a puppet-master; it would be a Third Term de facto, if not de jure, and (with all due respect) Yar'Adua and current-President (then-Vice President) Goodluck Jonathan were picked because of their perceived weakness in the rough-and-tumble world of Nigerian politics -- they were expected to be reliant on Obasanjo's machine for their political survival, but in the usual manner of the Fourth Republic (which will be remembered for its pervasive godfather-versus-godson wahala), Yar'Adua moved to weaken Obasanjo almost from the start of his presidency.

But I am digressing.

The point is .... when Dangote says something, you have to stop and ponder it. Whatever he says or does is said and done from the canny perspective of a man who knows how to play the Nigerian system for profit.

He is probably telling the truth. In fact, one of the funny things about Nigeria (funny in a sad way) is the system is so dysfunctional and distorted, that any time two Big Men have a quarrel, each one of them can legitimately and truthfully accuse the other of any number of crimes that were never investigated, much less prosecuted because though such acts are criminal they are also the normal working of the system (everyone, even the police know that that is the way it is supposed to be).

The Director-General of the NSE, Mrs Ndi Okereke Onyiuke has never inspired confidence in me. She is a Peoples Democratic Party stalwart, planted in the NSE to oversee the normal (i.e. dysfunctional), workings of our markets.

Onyiuke has questions to answer regarding the crises in the Nigerian Stock Market in the last three years, as does Musa Al-Faki (Ms Oteh's predecessor as SEC Director-General) and Professor Charles Soludo (the immediate past Governor of the Central Bank). These administrators and regulators watched a giant bubble inflate to astronomic proportions (particularly in the banking sector), did nothing to slow or stop it, and indulged the politicians and plutocrats rather than press them to prepare a so-called soft landing for the financial, securities and equities markets. And Ms Onyiuke's role in the creation of Transcorp, indeed her ownership of shares in the firm, only highlighted concerns about unethical (and possibly illegal) linkages between government and business.


Mrs. Ndi Okereke Onyiuke

Onyiuke's spokesman has denied Dangote's accusations.

In its reaction the NSE General Manager, Mr. Sola Oni, said: “The Nigerian Stock Exchange is not insolvent. The organisation is meeting all its obligations as at when due.

“The staff are not owed salaries and allowances. The retirees receive their cheques promptly. The Exchange does not owe any bank or individual. If there is any form of owing it could be that such a company is handling project that has not been completed. Even at that, the Exchange must have made some pre-payment.

“No organisation in Nigeria is fully insulated from the effects of global market down turn. The Exchange is certainly affected

On the other hand, Dangote accuses Mrs Onyiuke of robbing Peter to pay Paul in order to hide the NSE's financial difficulties.

He accused NSE’s management of dipping its hands into the finances of its subsidiary, the Central Securities Clearing System’s (CSCS) accounts to borrow N 900 million to support its cash deficit position.

Dangote further revealed that the NSE is indebted to the tune of N 119.5 million to Accenture auditing firm and that it has decided to stop additional work on executive selection, trading platform selection completion and implementation of the operating model for which the Exchange engaged its services, until all outstanding invoices are duly paid.

The fact that I don't trust Onyiuke does not necessarily mean Dangote is telling the truth. And the fact that Dangote has been accused of unethical practices in his business dealings does not mean he is not telling the truth.

So who is telling the truth?

If we can't trust the word of the NSE, SEC or the Investments/Securities Tribunal, then your guess about what is true and what isn't is as good as mine.

Fiscal Issues

So, we have depleted our foreign reserves to defend the Naira (began under Soludo, continued under Sanusi), and to bail out Nigerian banks suffering a home-grown "toxic asset" problem (bank and Stock Exchange troubles started in the Soludo era, expenses to combat the problem occurred under Sanusi).

The Excess Crude Account is mostly depleted. We have budget trouble, arguments between tiers of government over insufficient funds for monthly distribution to the three tiers, questions of sustainability, and doubts about the fiscal health of the states.

In this context, please note three things:

(a) The federal government spends $4 billion a year on the fuel subsidy programme. Rather than earn revenue from taxing the production of refined fuel as well as the domestic and industrial consumption thereof, we suffer diminished federal revenues (by $4 billion) as well as capital flight of what could have been investment funds (this is not just empty rhetoric, as the Nigerian National Petroleum Company is struggling to keep up with its investment obligations, losing money as it does on the front end because of the illogical structure of our oil industry, as well as on the back end when the federal government fails to reimburse it for subsidy-related expenses -- as of the middle of July, the federal government owed the NNPC nearly $8 billion in reimbursements, while the NNPC allegedly owed fuel importers $4.9 billion).

(b) Every day, an estimated 100,000 barrels of Nigerian crude oil are stolen by oil bunkering. If each barrel were sold at $60.00, then oil bunkering is depleting the federal treasury of the taxes, royalties and other revenues associated with sales of $2.19 billion of crude oil. Logically, it is not possible for these gangs to operate so freely and with such impunity, without connections to elite members of the business community, the world of politics and senior officer corps of the military. Our direct losses from theft are in addition to losses from production that has been shut down because of instability and uncertainty; I have no figures for our losses this year, but in the first nine months of 2008 (i.e. at 2008 prices) it exceeded $20 billion. And how do you determine the environmental cost to the Niger-Delta of attacks on pipelines that result in 14,000 tonnes of oil spilled into the delicate ecosystem in 2009, double the amount spilled in 2008, and quadruple the amount spilled in 2007.

The Federal Republic of Nigeria has the second-largest GDP in Sub-Saharan Africa, but we are by no means a "wealthy" country, and our governments are not so rich that they can afford to throw money away.

With an election coming up in 2011 (it will probably be rigged, but thats beside the point), these are the sort of issues that should be central to political discourse (and would be, if we were substantively democratic).

Eight dollars per person

From time to time I've talked about the debt cancellation deal, and about the Millennium Development Goals we are supposed to fund with the $1 billion a year the cancellation deal supposedly saved us. The future value of the $12 billion we paid out is equivalent to the $20 billion over 20 years we supposedly saved, so the net result was $0. And the "savings" of $1 billion a year comes out to $8.00 (eight dollars) per capita, assuming a population of 125 million, which is hardly sufficient to fundamentally change anything about Nigeria.

You might say that even if it isn't much, at least it is something. And you would be right. Indeed, a few citizens are actually enjoying some degree of benefit from Hajia Amina Az Zubair's MDG spending.

Do a search on youtube, and check out the sequence of videos titled "Eye on MDG" from the broadcast outfit ABNDigital. To a certain extent, the videos are hagiographic, a bit like a political campaign advertisement, designed to make you support a particular thing.

Let me give an example.

Oprah Winfrey spent $40 million of her own money to build and staff a single all-girls boarding school in South Africa. In 2007, when the school opened, it had only 152 students. A person could go and film that school, and film the students in that school, and put together a hagiographic portrait of the school. I am sure everything about the school is excellent, and I am sure it is giving the young ladies world-class preparation to be leaders of the future, so (the abuse scandal aside) the film would be heartwarming and uplifting, giving viewers a lot of hope for these girl's futures and for the future of the school.

Context is everything. There are millions of school-age children in South Africa (13 million according to this possibly out-of-date wikipedia page). The country as a whole continues to suffer the after-effects of 400 years of Apartheid, when the education system was deliberately designed to give "white" and "black" children two different standards of education. In 2010, there are still disparities on every input indicator related to education, and consequently disparities in education outputs as well.

The truth is, $40 million is not enough money to fix all of South Africa's education problems. The truth is, it is not Oprah Winfrey's job to fix all of South Africa's education problems. But, objectively and empirically speaking, if you did have $40 million to spend, and you wanted to make the greatest possible impact on education in South Africa, the biggest bang for your buck, so to speak, spending the whole thing on a single school to cater to 152 students out of 13 million .... is not very effective.

Nevertheless, I liked this particular video (below), because it begins with a vignette on an adult education programme targetting women. I will be blunt about it, and say the literacy rate for women in the northern states has long been a concern of mine, and anything that helps these women get the education they deserve (and should long have had) is something I wholeheartedly support.

Watch the video:



Perhaps unsurprisingly, the school depicted on the video is in the Federal Capital Territory.

With only $8.00 per person to spend each year, Nigeria is dotted with an MDG project here, and an MDG project there. For the beneficiaries, it is fantastic (and I am glad for them), but as an approach to fundamentally alter the nature of poverty and social welfare in the country, I can't say that the project is making that much of a difference. As recently as November, 2009, a federal minister estimated the number of child beggars in the northern states at 10 million.

If the MDG programme, which has been going on for six years, had made a dent in that depressing number, it would have been trumpeted to the high heavens -- everyone would have heard it. Even if we were just on course to lower the number, if there was at least a statistical trend toward reduction, the federal government (and the respective state governments) would have invested millions of dollars in self-praising advertisements across all forms of media.

It is too much to expect from a programme with an $8.00 per head budget. It is not even like it is new money really, just all tiers of government designating a portion of funds they were already going to spend anyway as "MDG" spending.

Now, I am not complaining without proffering a better alternative. Money follows money, and investors like to invest in projects that already have strong fiscal foundations. For example, a $12 billion investment in electricity generation, if used to leverage additional private sector investment would have a greater impact on economic growth across the board ... and this economic growth would do more to cut down on poverty and to improve all the social welfare indicators that the MDG programme is ostensibly directed toward. Better a rising tide that lifts all boats, that a top-down programme with a limited budget that benefits only a selected, statistically insignificant handful.

I picked electricity for a reason. I spent some time in Kafanchan in 2003, and got to talk to many young men and women who had big ideas for small and medium businesses that could transform their individual lives, and their town as a whole. These were young people about to enter a workforce that does not have sufficient white-collar and blue-collar jobs to employ them, young people who clearly realized that self-employment (with the possibility of becoming employers themselves) was the way to go. But these ideas were uneconomical without the necessary supporting infrastructure and policy environment. Kafanchan in 2003 was a town that went completely dark at night, because there was no electricity; I could always find my way back to my hotel, even in the dark, because it was the only place in town that had any electricity after sunset (thanks to a hardy generator).

With enabling infrastructure and a supportive environment, ambitious Nigerians of all ages can do it for themselves, without having to repeatedly witness the spectacle of thousands of people fighting for a handful of opportunities available in the organized private sector, the already-bloated Civil Service, and fiscally limited top-down social welfare programmes. Trust is a scarce commodity, and capital/funding/revenue is just as scarce for many of the would-be self-employed; Nigeria is a country of citizens adapting their lives and decisions to ensure the least amount of reliance on lawywers, accountants and other branches of what should be a much bigger service sector. Nevertheless, so many of our graduates who seek to work for established firms could (in theory) be absorbed by offering back-office support to new business like the ones my friends in Kafanchan could have launched -- businesses of that size would definitely outsource their back-office operations.

There is so much you can do with a $12 billion in dormant capital, particularly if you consider how much more you can leverage with it. You don't even have to put it all in one place, provided there is enough of it to work as leverage, to inspire public-private partnerships. A more ambitious country would have found something to do with $12 billion. A political class with a better understanding of the bottlenecks holding back our growth would have been keen to use it in a different way.

Paying out $20 billion in future value over 20 years in exchange for $20 billion in "savings" over the next 20 years doesn't make sense, which is what we did when we handed $12 billion to our creditors in exchange for debt cancellation.

Saying that the deal gave us $1 billion per year to spend on social welfare doesn't make it better. The $12 billion lump sum was capital; the $1 billion in yearly spending isn't even "new" money, and will either do a lot for a statistical few (if you target a few, as we seem to be doing), or do next to nothing for everyone (if you target everyone).

Incidentally, the Fourth Republic is emulating the First Republic in terms of amassing debt at the federal and state levels. For the federal government alone, total debt is set to rise another $7.1 billion over the next year, from $31.4 billion now to $38.5 billion. I don't know if the NEXT reporter didn't express it properly, or if Abraham Nwankwo of the federal Debt Management Office didn't express it properly, but the best I could get from that article is that in the best case scenario our growing debt will be sustainable and in the worst case scenario it will not be (really?).

More important to the topic of this post is the fact that the much-trumpeted "savings" of $1 billion a year only exist if we stopped borrowing forever on the day that the debt cancellation deal was signed. Provided we continued borrowing, which was inevitable because in the real world ALL governments borrow, then our yearly debt service payments would progressively rise from the $0.00 it was after the debt cancllation. This rise would be proportional to the rise in our debt, until such a point as we were paying $1 billion or more in debt servicing, at which point the idea of "saving" anything by paying out a $12 billion lump sum would become academic and trite, but of no practical import.

Indeed, between 2005/2006 when we "cancelled" our debt, we have borrowed MORE than the $12 billion we paid out, and now owe MORE than $12 billion in new principal, as well as the interest on the MORE than $12 billion we have borrowed in the last four years. This is particularly interesting since a UN official has said two-thirds of the $36 billion we "cancelled" represented penalties on what had initially been $12 billion borrowed in the 1970s and early 1980s.

All this, and with the depletion of our foreign reserves to defend the Naira, and the depletion of the Excess Crude Account for federal, state and local recurrent spending, we are in no position to deploy a lump sum of $12 billion to leverage investment in any industry.

With the possible exception of Lagos State (and even there, the state government's borrowing has not been independently examined), I am not sure anyone can explain to me the point of the borrowed funds. Those infrastrucuture issues that could have been helped by $12 billion leveraging even more investment.

It is all recurrent expenditure. The government has spoken of transforming the Excess Crude Account into a Sovereign Wealth Fund, but that is only possible if the basic ideology of governance across our three tiers was geared to targeted long-term investments and not cash-in, cash-out expenditure of the kind that sees $12 billion shipped out in exchange for "savings" that don't really exist.

I blame the paucity of proper political debate. We argue about a lot of irrelevant nonsense, but nothing of substance is ever debated ... nor is anything ever decided by elections. We don't even have the right to use our votes to decide the irrelevant stuff we argue about.

Our funny and sad politics

The federal republic is rife with negative stereotypes about motorpark touts, known as agberos in Lagos State and throughout the southwestern states.

Both NEXT and Daily Trust report the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Dimeji Bankole, recently decided to act out some of those stereotypes in Abeokuta.

Come to think of it, agberos have a better reputation than legislators and governors.

And speaking of legislators and governors, elsewhere in the federal republic, the Abia State House of Assembly impeached the state's deputy governor on Monday, even though he had resigned on Saturday. Abia State Governor Theodore Orji is involved in a dogfight with his former godfather, ex-Governor Orji Uzor Kalu, and ex-Deputy Governor Chris Akomas is just collateral damage. Still, the Assembly men (whose access to money is controlled by Governor Orji) were determined to shame Akomas in public with an impeachment. Akomas' resignation did not play into the script, but never mind, the State Assembly can always publicly impeach him anyway.

What baffles me about our politicians is ... they don't seem to be even remotely embarassed by the things they do.