Nigeria Content Online

To be or not to be?

That is the question that leaders the world over who have stayed more
than two decades in power must be asking themselves now, after the
avalanche of protests in the Arab world has crumbled otherwise
untouchable demi-gods. Of course, Muammar Gadaffi by now should know
that his days are numbered, not only in Libya but globally. He must be
beginning to realise that he is not invincible and so like the
unrepentant terrorist, is determined to take as many people as possible
with him.

During one of those
sessions where big issues are thrashed endlessly – sometimes leading to
disputes that will not benefit any of us, as the ‘big-big ogas’ being
argued about really do not care and do not know if we ‘small-small
people’ exist – somebody said, “If third term had succeeded, Nigerians
would have seized these worldwide protests as an opportunity to sweep
OBJ out”. Obasanjo did not succeed with that heinous plan and so we
really cannot say if my friend predicted correctly how Nigerians would
have reacted.

Everybody talked
about different protests taking place in their own domain and a good
friend of mine referred to a lady that could not recite the national
anthem but was still given the green light to go on being our
Ambassador without anybody protesting. I quickly cut in and talked
about the protest that is gathering momentum in the hushed voices of
entertainers.

Some comedians and
musicians asked me if entertainers could not file out and begin to
advocate for a Bank of Entertainment, where individuals involved could
go and access loans like is done in the Bank of Industry or Bank of
Agriculture.

One of the veterans
in the business complained about the bank he has been with for donkey
years refusing to give him a loan of just ₦300, 000 to prosecute a
small entertainment project that could employ about 10 youth monthly,
if actualised. They told him that the flow of cash in his account was
not consistent, so they could not give him the loan. He really was just
grumbling because if he takes up a placard who would listen to him?
Well, I have heard his cry that is why you are reading his protest.

The protest train
was passing by and everybody had to say something, so one woman talked
about how her children decided to protest by keeping quiet inside the
car for the rest of the journey home after school, when she went to
pick them up. After careful and very diplomatic insistence, she got the
youngest who was a five-year-old to talk and he said if their mummy
does not buy them ice cream from the sellers hanging around their
school gate, especially in this hot Abuja afternoon sun, like the
parents of their friends in class are wont to do, they would no longer
be chatting with her in the car on their way home from school.
According to my friend, “Dis kind of protest don wear face cap.”

The young lady said
she quickly had to put on her thinking cap in order to douse the
protest and kill that spirit once and for all. She said she told her
children that she has prepared their favourite meal at home as well as
restocked her fridge with their best fruit juice and she ended with
“all this ice-cream that is being sold on bicycles by these men by
their school gate are meant for the less privileged” adding that proper
food and juice meant for good children like them was waiting for at
home. All the placards on the faces of her children were dropped.

The protest ignited
under my nose was set upon me by the teachers in my children’s school
and whereas I was able to cleverly instruct my three children above
eight years, my little boy who just turned five came home asking
different questions at different intervals as the spirit gave him
remembrance.

“Daddy, how old are
you? What is your occupation? How much do you earn in a year? Do you
steal government money? Do you think I will still love you if you are
caught stealing government’s money? If I call you a thief, will you be
mad at me?” I wanted to make him know that indeed, I am already mad at
that teacher who put all these ideas in the mind of a little boy.

While I was trying
to protest to my wife about the little lad, the boy went to his school
bag and brought the written questions and they were his assignment for
the weekend. So are you going to answer the protesting boy or even the
teacher? Or are you not aware that the freedom of information bill has
scaled all huddles?

Are you
election-weary? Welcome to the club; you are in excellent company!
Surely, by now, you will have voted for your new (perhaps improved?)
members of the National Assembly? How did it go in your neighbourhood?
Did all the relevant agencies involved in the process keep faith with
all those clichéd promises we got? Of course, as the days roll by, we
will learn about the good, the bad, the absurd and the totally daft!
One can’t wait for the gist to start rolling in.

After all that has
been said and done by every candidate in these elections, one really
wonders if they ALL truly believed that they would win. And one is only
trying to be realistic here. The whole process is not as
straightforward as the election for prefect you participated in at
school; you each wrote the name of the person you wanted as prefect on
a piece of paper and placed it in a box or school beret (as the case
may be).

The names were then
compiled from the ‘ballot’ papers and the person whose name cropped up
the most was elected. Sounds so simple; you then wonder why, with a
process so straightforward, we insist on complicating matters.

If any school today
wants a particular person elected as prefect, who may not be the most
popular kid in school, they have enough styles to choose from. The
students may want a non-conformist prefect who will not succumb to the
whims of the school’s management. So the first thing is for the school
to make sure that the popular kid can never, will never and does not,
under any circumstances whatsoever, emerge as a prefect, so that there
will be no one voting for him. How? Simple!

What are the things
the popular kid is good at? Outlaw them; and make ONLY those things he
is bad at, the criteria for participating in the election. And make
these rules with a straight face, never minding how the perceived
unfairness and alleged injustice is viewed by anyone in the school.

There are many
reasons to proffer: “we are the owners of our school and we reserve the
right to decide who will fly the flag of the school. If anyone does not
like our criteria for deciding who is eligible to be a prefect, they
can go to another school and try their luck there. After all, where
were they when we were struggling to build the school to this level,
for them to just come from nowhere and want to be prefect, just like
that?”

Push it further:
“we are the owners of our school and we know the dream of our founding
fathers. We have decided that zoning exists in our school; as a result,
Master/Miss Popularity is hereby declared ineligible because he/she
comes from the wrong zone. It is important that ALL our students feel a
sense of belonging in this school to enhance the unity of our nation
from these formative years; they must feel that it is possible for
their own ethnic group to eventually become prefect one day. If anyone
does not like our zoning policy, they can move to another school that
does not zone students’ leadership positions, please!”

The idea is to work
from answer to question, and do it legally. Follow due process, then
you have no problem. You can add to and/or subtract from the criteria
at will; you own your school, so who is to stop you?

If Miss Popularity
has long hair, outlaw long hair as discriminating against female
students who are ‘blessed’ with short, thin, scanty or just bad hair;
if Master Popularity is athletic, outlaw ‘hunks’ as discriminating
against nerds. In fact, insist on ‘seriousness’, not sports, as the
MAIN consideration of the school’s electoral panel.

Is Miss Popularity
pretty? Outlaw beauty because it discriminates against those not
considered beautiful! Is the popular guy handsome? Outlaw good looks,
and justify it on the ground that not all world leaders are handsome
anyway; after all, handsomeness or beauty is no guarantee of a person’s
performance.

Remember you are
not saying anything new; you and everybody else have heard it all
before! Be prepared, however, for troublesome parents who know too
much. Call their bluff and tell them to meet you in court; or quickly
appoint their popular kid to a position with a great title: “Swagger
Prefect” in charge of all males getting the school swagger right or
“Beauty Prefect” in charge of all females aspiring to some level of
beauty. LOL!

So, about a month
or two ago, a coalition of musicians led by D’banj, who had sung for
the Goodluck Jonathan campaign; and Psquare, who had sung for the
Ibrahim Babangida campaign; gathered the press to a briefing in Ikeja,
Lagos and announced that they were committed to a series of free
rallies across the geopolitical zones of Nigeria to encourage young
people to register and vote.

Something wasn’t
quite right about it – and not just because, as someone who has been
part of civil society working on elections and youth participation over
the past year, the leading lights for this sudden campaign had been the
most reluctant to engage in any non-partisan process to get young
Nigerians involved.

The response across
social networks shared my surprise when the news hit. “We know those
who will do free shows,” one popular name tweeted. “And they have not
yet been born.”

I agreed – a
little. We know those who can do free shows – and they have been born,
they just weren’t the guys who were now involved in this free show. And
conspiracy theorists soon emerged – who swore that the presidential
candidate with the deepest pocket was using this supposedly
non-partisan platform to drive a deeply partisan agenda.

Nothing was heard about the concerts for weeks after.

In that period, a
group of young people (including me, for purposes of full disclosure)
began to work on the country’s first youth-centred political debate –
fixed for March 25. A debate that President Jonathan (you know, the big
pocket candidate) and Muhammadu Buhari had telegraphed a refusal to
attend.

Then, suddenly, on
the eve of the now famous NN24 national presidential debate, whispers
turned to frenzy: D’banj was going to be interviewing President
Jonathan on Silverbird Television. There’s no need to recount the
‘Dbanjing’ (a new word for nodding mumu-ly) that followed, or the
opprobrium that attended D’banj immediately after the interview – as
well as his cohort and boss, Don Jazzy, who made the mistake of trying
to defend the action on Twitter, against a band of angry young people.

As it is, and
obviously as a post-interview fallout, D’banj has not been seen
anywhere near the president. He is said to now have security due to
threats to his life, and his credibility as a youth advocate is
terribly impaired.

What was the
annoyance? Yes, there were some who would get angry anyway just because
D’banj exercised his constitutional right to endorse Mr. Jonathan – a
point which is really, er, pointless, as there is absolutely nothing so
terrible about the Jonathan candidacy that makes it impossible for him
to have true believers.

The anger was,
first, that D’banj positioned himself – wrongly and inappropriately –
as representing the youth. That was weird. Of course, he was buoyed by
his UN Youth ambassadorship, his The Future Awards for Young Person of
the Year and other such laurels, which he mentioned disingenuously
during the interview. But worse for him, was the advertorial that
followed – announcing one of those suspicious “It’s our time” free
concerts, to hold on the same day as the youth debate! Ah, the danger
of free shows.

The battle line was
drawn. Did D’banj and his sponsors really think young people are so
vacuous that they would choose music over a conversation about their
future?

There and then the concert’s buzz died.

Young celebrities
should be paying attention. Last year, when a host of singers and
actors began to gyrate for the candidates, while they denied that money
change hands, antennae were raised. But, of course, it is alright to
endorse a candidate or even do your job as a singer by entertaining at
his event.

The problem is when you get high on your own supply.

D’banj will yet
recover from this – but the elasticity of that recovery will lie in
whether this kind of, well, mistake becomes a pattern with him or
whether it is a one-off; a mistake to which he is entitled.

The choice he makes
will determine if his image goes the way of Onyeka Onwenu – who has now
sung for and ‘endorsed’ three consecutive PDP presidents, in addition
to that pesky concert for Sani Abacha in 1996 – or whether he will
build a powerful, activist brand, like his colleagues Banky W (who
shunned the concert) and MI, (who promptly returned the performance
fee, according to reports).

You see, folks might like it when you sing about the koko, but when push comes to shove, they know what the real koko is.

In September 2010, John Campbell, the former
United States Ambassador to Nigeria, published a sensational article in
Foreign Affairs about the dire consequences of the elections failing.
He argued that “Logistical preparations for the 2011 elections have not
started. There is no voters roll, and despite the president’s signing
of an electoral reform bill, some of these reforms remain unimplemented
four months before the election. The election therefore will almost
certainly lack legitimacy, especially in the eyes of the losers. This
will further drive the country to the brink, especially if winners and
losers are defined by their religious and ethnic backgrounds.” The
response of most Nigerian commentators to Campbell was that the
elections would not be as bad as predicted and that Attahiru Jega and
his team have the capacity to organise an election that is
significantly better than what we have had previously. The day after,
what is our assessment of the elections that took place yesterday? The
three key words that have been repeated over and over again in relation
to the elections are free, fair and credible.

Writing a day before the elections, my feeling is
that in most parts of the country, the elections would be relatively
free. That is to say, most people would be able to go to their polling
unit and cast their vote without impediment. The situation of 2007 in
which, in so many states, voting did not take place and yet results
were declared, is most unlikely to happen. Nigeria, I believe, is on
the path to reclaiming the franchise for its citizens.

The fairness of the elections is maybe the most
problematic element. Fair elections are characterised by a level
playing field for all contestants. It has been clear that candidate
Goodluck Jonathan has had enormous resources to engage in a major media
blitz and run the most elaborate road show Nigeria has ever seen.
Obasanjo’s campaign, which was supported massively by resources raised
for the campaign by “Corporate Nigeria” pales into insignificance
compared to Jonathan’s. The President needs to explain to Nigerians,
the financial sources that are supporting his ongoing campaign.

The credibility of the elections is what we shall
be assessing as from today. In so doing, we are interested in knowing
whether the outcome of the various elections would correspond to the
choices made by a majority of Nigerians. In other words, has the
special procedure developed for the elections produced the desired
result?

To discourage electoral fraud, INEC has developed
a procedure in which accreditation takes place in the morning and
voting in the afternoon. Voters are allowed to stay at the polling
centres to observe the counting and posting of results. Civil society
has encouraged voters to stay, observe the counting, photograph the
results with their cell phones and share the results with their
neighbours to create widespread awareness of polling centre results. It
is unfortunate that the National Security Adviser to the President came
out openly to challenge the procedure. The constitution is clear that
the procedure for voting is determined by INEC. He should have played
the role of a responsible citizen, supporting the decision of the organ
that is constitutionally empowered to act.

Observers and political party agents have been
encouraged to follow the results to the ward, local government and all
other levels of collation of results, so that people know that the
results announced reflect actual results counted at the polling
stations. The day after is the time for reflections and assessment on
the use of the special procedure.

It has been clear since 2003 that the integrity of
Nigeria’s elections would only improve if more and more citizens
protect their mandate. The outcome of this election would depend on
Nigerians taking the opportunity offered by the special procedure to
defend their mandate. This is the path to preventing the fall over the
precipice that Campbell has spoken about.

As we wait for the
final results of the first round of voting in our general election
cycle, there’s one trend I’m looking out for.

No, not whether –
if the Peoples Democratic Party returns the majority of legislators
again – that automatically means that their presidential candidate,
Goodluck Jonathan, is going to win. No serious contestant for executive
office (and after he has invested so much of our time, money and other
resources towards being elected, I think we can agree that Jonathan is
a serious candidate) ought to have their own electoral fortunes tied to
a group held in such thorough disregard as the nation’s legislators.

Even their own
party is anxious to get rid of them, having given its flag to only a
third of legislators to return to the National Assembly in June 2011.
That’s an improvement on the 80 per cent that it sacked in 2007, but if
this time the electorate happens to apply a ‘three strikes’ rule and,
deciding that after three attempts (in 1999, 2003 and 2007) that they
really can’t trust the PDP to pick good lawmakers, turn to other
parties to populate the Senate and House of Representatives, it won’t
necessarily mean that they won’t vote for the PDP’s presidential
candidate.

It’s also entirely
possible – even though doing the same thing time after time and
expecting a different result is the classic definition of madness –
that the electorate will again choose PDP candidates, perhaps consoling
themselves that the problem isn’t with the party, but with the people
it presented in past elections.

No, the trend I’ll
be watching for is whether one group that has been loud about its
entitlement (but short on everything else) will have any discernible
impact on the vote. ‘De yoot’ (not to be confused with their English
counterparts, ‘va yoof’) were on the lips of every candidate this
election. Perhaps, having seen what young people claim as their
achievement in the ‘Arab Spring’, our politicians thought that they had
better appear deeply concerned about the condition of our own ‘yoot’.

Even if they
hadn’t, ‘de yoot’ themselves have been insisting that since they are
over 60 per cent of the population, they are entitled. The National
Population Commission classifies only those between 18 and 24 as youth,
but assuming that they are including the under 18s: the 2006 Census
puts the 0-24 years population at 64 per cent of the total.

That’s a bigger
percentage than, for example, Nigerian women, who scraped in with an
anomalous 49.2 per cent of the total population, but who, thanks to the
Beijing Declaration and Platform of action, are supposed to have 35 per
cent of all appointments.

What is more, Mr.
President himself (at the end of a ‘debate’ in which the only woman
participating was the timekeeper whom he resolutely ignored) has
undertaken to keep the promise made at Beijing in 1995. True, he didn’t
explain what stopped him from achieving 35 per cent in the year that
he’s been in power so far, but the all-male panel didn’t ask him.

And his Congress
for Progressive Change challenger, whose military dictatorship started
the ball rolling by insisting that each state must appoint at least one
woman as a commissioner, wasn’t there to trumpet his own credentials …

In an election
when even middle-aged ‘uncles’ of 50 are touting themselves as ‘de yoot
candidate’, it isn’t surprising that young people tried to make
themselves a big story in the ongoing elections. Though it wasn’t quite
clear what they felt their numbers entitled them to.

If as long ago as
1991, the Population Commission recorded that 59 per cent of household
members searching for work were the children of the heads of those
households, the woeful failings in education and employment that have
characterised the intervening 20 years must be at least as worrying to
their parents as they are to ‘de yoot’.

Had numbers alone
justified special recognition, the status of the ‘giant of Africa’ with
its claim to house one fifth of the world’s black population ought to
reflect that. But it doesn’t. Worse still for ‘de yoot’, if the group
classified by the NPC as ‘children’ – the under-18s – are stripped
away, they shrink back to a much less impressive 13 per cent, with the
remaining 51 per cent left to whistle Eddie Cochran’s old Summertime
Blues song: ‘I’d like to help you son, but you’re too young to vote’.

Still, de yoot’s
insistence on their own importance seems to have won at least one
convert: at the end of last month an old-timer who started his own
(unsuccessful) campaign with the flat assertion that young people are
not qualified to run Nigeria, apparently discovered that they are
exactly what the country needs. But will the vote reflect that?

The youth of Nigeria are too often the tools of
those who seek power and this becomes increasingly obvious as we
approach the elections. These youth are led with false promises and
hopes for a future that will improve their lives and their families’.
Greasing the wheels of violence with a little money to enslave these
youth to the power lust of their godfathers is akin to throwing grain
on the ground to feed chickens.

If the candidates whom these youth support are
elected, then we can expect these same youth to be cut loose after the
elections for their masters have no further use of them. Many of these
youth will be armed, disillusioned and then continue down the road that
leads to a life of crime and violence.

In this context we are seeing more groups than
ever before urging the public to shun violence in the run-up to the
elections. The National Association of Nigeria Students, the Christian
Association of Nigeria and Jama’atu Nasir Islam have each joined the
chorus of public bodies calling on youth not to join in any violent
actions or be unwitting tools of corrupt politicians.

The Sultan of Sokoto has called on all Muslims toa
be on guard against politicians seeking to mislead them. “We should
respect each other in Nigeria. No one should infringe on the religious
rights of the other, in the spirit of unity and respect for one
another.”

Amidst these calls against violence comes what I
can only describe as a thoughtless, foolish and attention-seeking
statement by a person claiming to be a pastor. A “pastor” of a church
in Enugu has declared to reporters that God has told him the elections
will be “bloody”. I do not dismiss the position that God may choose to
interact with us in a variety of ways and provide direction for our
daily lives, nor that we may seek His intervention. But this sort of
comment from the Enugu pastor must be dismissed for the reckless and
misleading statement that it is. It is an encouragement to violence
that it would have been prudent not to have reported.

The leaders of the major Christian denominations
are disappointingly invisible when it comes to dealing with this sort
of situation. In fact, with so many bodies publicly calling for a
peaceful election process and urging youth to shun violence, these same
church leaders are almost undetectable. They must take a lead in such
debate. The Sultan of Sokoto provides an example that the leaders of
the Christian church might care to note.

My comments are not intended to ignore the
potential for violence. Rather they are a plea not to overestimate or
inflate the potential for unrest and election related conflict.

This point was made this week by the National
Security Adviser (NSA) Owoye Azazi, a retired General, when, in a clear
and welcome break with past security practices, he invited local and
international media to a very full and frank security briefing in which
he underscored the need for collaboration between the media and
security agencies to ensure free, fair and credible elections. “The
media have frequently reported pre-election activities in bad light
leading to unnecessary violence and reprisals by the electorates who
feel that their political sympathy has been threatened,” he said.

The NSA acknowledged that, although the conduct of
the elections next week will be an improvement over previous elections,
the nation should strive to ensure that future elections “will even be
better”. “We have a responsibility to show all Nigerians and the
international community that we are capable of conducting free, fair
and credible elections in a secure environment,” he said.

But what weight do we give to the seeming resurgence of MEND and the ongoing even if sporadic attacks of Boko Haram?

The MEND public profile which operates through
media releases lacks the credibility it enjoyed particularly in 2008
and 2009, not least because there are multiple email addresses used by
persons claiming to be the MEND spokesperson. This lack of public
credibility causes the group to try to mount operations to prove that
they continue to exist as a viable militant group capable of causing
destruction and therefore should be taken seriously. But the community
support that MEND enjoyed in past years is now noticeably lacking. The
past MEND agenda of agitating for an improved quality of life for Niger
Deltans seems to have faded. Maybe it will be unnecessary if the next
government aggressively addresses deficiencies in the Niger Delta.

Boko Haram may have its gripes about a secular
government but it is substantially a different dimension of violence
that is not election related and must be addressed in a manner
different to that which seeks to curb political godfathers and their
aspirants recruiting youth to violence for the purpose of influencing
the elections.

The seed of MEND was sown by politicians seeking to retain power by
recruiting Nigeria’s youth to violent behaviour. Every effort must be
made to stand against such action that perverts the youths, the
electoral process and ultimately the nation.

As Nigerians await the legislative election which
was postponed on Saturday and is due to take place tomorrow, it is
important to remind ourselves of the role of the legislature in the
democratic process.

The 1999 Constitution says that “the National
Assembly shall have power to make laws for the peace, order and good
government of the Federation or any part thereof with respect to any
matter included in the Exclusive Legislative List…” Without laws, a
democratic society, or any other society for that matter, is doomed.
The 17th century English philosopher, Hobbes, reminds us that without
laws, there can be no justice, and the only life available to citizens
will be a “nasty, brutish, and short” one.

We have in recent weeks been treated to a
semblance of activity from our National Assembly– the passing of the
Freedom of Information Bill, an Anti-Terrorism Bill, and the National
Tobacco Control Bill. We have no idea what spurred this seeming
awakening from a legislature that for most of its tenure has made the
headlines, not for its accomplishments, but instead for how much it has
cost the nation, and how obsessed it has been with self-gratification.

Perhaps the lawmakers realised that time was no
longer on their side, and that if they wanted to be judged kindly by
posterity then they had to start passing laws, which is what they were
elected to do in the first place. If that is the case, then they need
to be told that the realisation (of history’s looming judgement) has
come a little too late.

If only they had shown a dedication to duty from
the beginning. A look at some of the headlines and comments that have
accompanied our stories on the National Assembly in the last two years
will give a better idea of the kind of legislators Nigeria has been
burdened with since 2007 (not that their predecessors were any better):

‘An Assembly for looting’; ‘The luxury cars of our
lawmakers’; ‘National Assembly, the most expensive on earth’; ‘Our
National Assembly is not producing any laws’. In ‘An Assembly for
Looting’ (2009), our correspondents wrote: “If the citizens were to
dismiss the entire membership of the National Assembly and find other
uses for their money, our treasury will have nearly enough money to
fund the N88.5billion that President Umaru Yar’Adua plans to spend this
year on building power plants, so that children can do home work under
electrical lamps and not paraffin.”

With the benefit of hindsight, it is clear that
the choice Nigeria made was to keep the profligate legislators and
instead dismiss our vision of a transformed power situation. Late 2010,
the Central Bank Governor disclosed that the National Assembly – made
up of less than 500 elected officials– was taking up 25 per cent of
“total government overhead.” Even for hardworking legislators, that
figure would be unjustifiable.

In June 2009, two years into their tenure, we
reported that the Senate had succeeded in passing only 15 of the 284
bills that came before it. At the state level, the situation is not
much better. Many State Assemblies are either firmly in the pockets of
the state governors, and thus employed for nothing more than
rubber-stamping of the governors’ decisions; or embroiled in a
cat-and-mouse relationship with the executive. There is the tragicomic
case of Ogun State, where the House has been split into two since 2010.
We watched as a minority group of nine senators (sympathetic to the
governor) met and announced the suspension of 15 members. They then
went ahead to elect, from amongst themselves, a new Speaker, who was
immediately recognised by the governor.

We hope that the incoming batch of legislators, at
federal and state levels, will make a clean break with the past. If the
federal legislators want to convince us that they are serious about the
wellbeing of our country, they will have to start by doing something
about the N63 million (senators) and N45 million (representatives) that
they will be ‘entitled to’ per quarter as “constituency allowances”,
and for which they do not have to give account.

Legislators have no business awarding contracts
and managing project funds. Nigerians also have a duty to hold their
legislators accountable. We cannot continue to just complain about
dismal performance. Hopefully there will be an election tomorrow and
the votes cast will prove to be a just verdict on the performance of
the lawmakers. Until politicians get punished – with outright rejection
– by the electorate, there will be no incentive for them to shun
mediocrity and greed.