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In the Nigeria of our day, writing is synonymous with loss of gravitas.

To be identified as
someone who ‘makes noise on the pages ofnewspapers’, is the surest road
to Siberia. Power and media currency are, are, to all intents and
purposes, diametrical opposites. Why then do I write?

I first encountered
my demons as a fourteen year-old at the British Council Library in
Kaduna. During the long summer holidays, with nothing better to do, I
spent all my days reading everything I could lay my hands on – history,
literature, science, philosophy. I stumbled upon Bertrand Russell in a
feat of absentmindedness. Russell wrote such beautiful and witty prose.
Although his childhood was as lonely as mine, I was not born an Earl
and did not grow up in a palace in Richmond. And my grandfather was not
prime minister. I was born in a humble evangelical village parsonage in
the ancient central savannah of Nigeria; a place more beautiful than
the Swiss Alps.

For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted to write with the wit and lucidity of Lord Russell.

I also look back
with nostalgia to an earlier chivalrous tradition that was founded on
robust intellectual culture. The Founding Fathers of the Nigerian
Republic — Azikiwe, Awolowo and Balewa — were excellent writers. It
is only in an ignominious age like ours that people would deign to look
askance at anybody who takes up the pen.

It was the mystic
Carlos Fuentes ho noted that writing is a ‘struggle against silence’.
In our own case, it is the silence borne of decades of military
tyranny. As a consequence, we have lost the civic culture, which has
inspired our greatest patriots.

Many people write
to promote sectional agendas. Others write because someone has paid
them handsomely. I write because I believe in Nigeria and her manifest
destiny; because of my faith in the unconquerable power of the human
spirit — in the ultimate triumph of Good over Evil. Some have accused
me of writing to curry favour with the powers that be. One or two have
already declared me to be the prospective envoy at the Court of St.
James where I would presumably idle my days in small talk and
champagne. Never have a man’s ambitions been more under-estimated.

It was Elbert
Hubbard who observed that, in order to avoid being criticised, you
would have to “do nothing, say nothing, be nothing”. When I wrote about
gays and the Church, I was accused of being homophobic. One or two
critics have advised me to avoid writing about politics, which I know
nothing about. One regretted that my writing no longer made him cry, as
it did when I wrote on child abuse. I must therefore, I suppose,
restrict myself to subjects likely to exert the most lachrymose impact.
I once made the mistake of mentioning our five German shepherds. It set
off a bedlam of howls. Nobody will ever know that those dogs protected
me from the real and present danger of assassins; and of course, God
Almighty, and the late President Yar’Adua, who called the people
concerned to order.

Criticism is a form
of recognition. But even criticism has limits. Some have compared me to
Reuben Abati of The Guardian; others say I am ‘the new Dele Momodu’. I
would rather I was compared with Obadiah Mailafia.

Echoing the
Scottish philosopher David Hume, I would say that the invention of the
Internet marks the real end of chivalry, as we have always known it.
The Nigerian Internet crowd is a rather illiberal horde. Most of them
live abroad and have lost touch with realities back home. Most are in
all sorts of primordial cocoons — Biafra, Arewa or Oduduwa. Hiding
under bizarre pseudonyms, they have succumbed to the Western-inspired
nonsense about our being a ‘failed state’. When I got tired of the
haranguing, I decided to throw in one lone Latin expletive – just to
test the waters. Pandemonium! “We told you this fellow is not what he
claims, beneath the gentility”; “We must never vote him!” On and on
they went.

What some of these
people lack is a bit of irony. When I wrote about Cecilia Ibru, I never
for once absolved her of any crime. What she did was horrendous, and
all the more tragic, considering how hard she had worked to build up
Oceanic and how so many looked up to her as a model. Even if she we
were my mother I would never excuse her crimes. Someone even asked if I
had collected money from her.

Reminds me of the
story of the woman who was caught in adultery. As the Jews set off to
stone her to death according to the Laws of Moses, Jesus asked that
those who had never committed adultery be the first to do so. He was
not denying her sin. All have sinned and have come short of the glory.
We are human and fallible. What matters is to learn from our mistakes
and to move on.

“Woman, where are your accusers?”

This week Britain’s
coalition government announced its spending plans for the next four
years. We are taking urgent steps to reduce the national debt and deal
with the fiscal legacy we inherited. We have shown that we have the
resolve and determination to live within our means. And we have set out
to reinvigorate Britain’s diplomatic engagement with the world,
elevating our links with the fastest growing economies and championing
Britain as a home for business and investment. We understand that
economic recovery starts at home, but that we have to look beyond our
shores for new opportunities and new partners.

The scale of the
economic challenge is formidable. We inherited one of the largest
budget deficits in Europe and the G20. But we have a clear vision for
the future of our country. We have chosen to spend on the country’s
most important priorities – the health care of our people, the
education of our young, our nation’s security and the infrastructure
that supports our economic growth.

We are building a
fairer and more responsible society, with more opportunity for people
to lift themselves out of poverty, and with state support focused on
those who need it most. We are reforming public services – improving
transparency and accountability, giving more power and responsibility
to citizens and enabling sustainable long term improvements in
services. And we are building a stronger economy, with more jobs,
investment and growth for a private sector-led recovery.

We have protected
as far as possible those areas of public spending which matter for
economic growth and pursued reforms to make these more cost-effective.

We know that we
cannot have sustainable growth in the economy without healthy public
finances. We have created a new independent Office for Budgetary
Responsibility, so that the power to determine the growth and fiscal
forecasts now resides with an independent body immune to the
temptations of the political cycle. And we have pledged to eliminate
the UK’s structural deficit by the end of this Parliament, which has
been welcomed by the International Monetary Fund as a necessary path to
ensuring fiscal sustainability and a balanced recovery.

Our Spending Review
is part of an ambitious plan to create a business environment that is
one of the most competitive anywhere in the world. We understand that
the British economy of the future must be one that is built on
investment, saving and exports, and are determined to use our tough
plans for fiscal consolidation as a springboard for growth and recovery
through the private sector.

From 2011 we will
gradually reduce corporation tax to 24 per cent, giving Britain the
lowest in the G7 and one of the lowest in the G20. We will reduce the
small profits rate of corporation tax to 20 per cent. We will lower
capital gains tax for entrepreneurs.

And we will cut
National Insurance contributions for employers, extend help to small
businesses needing to access credit, and make Britain the easiest place
in the world to start a business.

But let us not
forget that throughout the recession the UK has remained the sixth
largest economy in the world. We have one of the most flexible labour
markets in Europe and, according to the Organisation for Economic
Co-operation and Development, the least number of barriers to
entrepreneurship in the world. Our unrivalled financial services
industry, our strong skills base, our global outlook and orientation,
our creative talents, our world class universities and our central
position etween Asian and American time zones all demonstrate that we
have an open economy and we are open for business.

So we have a strong
base on which to build. With that in mind, we want to inject a new
commercial focus into our relationship here in Nigeria.

We are aware our
two countries already enjoy an important trade relationship. Trade
between the UK and Nigeria increased by 67% from the year 2007 to the
year 2009, and in the last year alone, UK goods and services exports
reached the value of £2.3 billion indicating that Nigeria is a key
destination for British firms keen to invest in Africa.

The UK is one of
the largest investors in Nigeria, in sectors from oil and gas to
financial services, to agriculture. As His Royal Highness The Duke of
Gloucester stated during his recent visit to mark the 50th anniversary
of Nigeria as an independent nation, Nigeria is and will continue to be
a key international partner for the UK. So we are confident that we are
taking the right steps at home and abroad to help economic recovery in
our own countries, and to contribute to a stable and prosperous global
economy.

William Hague MP, is United Kingdom First Secretary of State, Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs

In the build up to
the 2003 elections, there was a consensus in civil society that we were
wrong to have taken the decision not to participate in partisan
politics in the 1998-1999 transition. The interminable transitions
without end orchestrated by the Babangida and Abacha administrations
between 1986 and 1997 had pushed us into the conclusion that we must
defeat the military before we can talk about democratic transition.
Then Abdulsalam Abubakar came into power and the transition did occur,
but without us.

In our subsequent
analysis, we felt that the very low quality of both executive and
legislative branches was partly due to the absence of those who had
fought so hard for democracy. We prepared the grounds for the
transition to democracy through our combative struggle against military
rule and for human rights and when the transition moment arrived we sat
on the sidelines while “professional” politicians, most of who did not
fight for democracy took over power In the run up to the 2003
elections, there were extensive discussions within civil society that
as many as are willing should join political parties and compete for
power. Over twenty major civil society activists sought nomination from
different political parties. Some went to the big parties and never got
nominations which were sold to the richest aspirants. Others joined
progressive small parties such as the Gani Fawenhinmi’s NCP and the PRP
and were rigged out in the elections.

Four of our
colleagues however made it to the National Assembly. Dr Usman Bugaje of
the Network for Justice and Abdul Oroh of the Civil Liberties
Organisation became PDP members of the House of Representatives while
Dr. Haruna Yerima and Uche Anyeaghacha also joined the House on the
platform of the ANPP and APGA respectively. They fought Obasanjo’s
“Third Term” agenda and succeeded in stopping him from ruling us
forever. Obasanjo for his own part took revenge and succeeded in
stopping them from returning to power.

In November 2005,
Kayode Fayemi came to meet me to discuss his intention to join the
political fray by seeking the gubernatorial contest in Ekiti State. I
drew his attention to the risks as Obasanjo was unlikely to tolerate
his progressive views in the PDP and the other parties might be rigged
out. His response was that if we do not engage in the battle to regain
the franchise, our struggle for democracy would remain superficial. I
agreed and wished him well in the struggle. In response, he requested
that I resign from Global Rights where I was country director and take
up the leadership of the Centre for Democracy and Development where he
then was. I accepted and took up the challenge of keeping up the task
of deepening democracy on the civil society front.

Today, Centre for
Democracy and Development applauds the unanimous judgment by the Court
of Appeal that our founding director, Dr Kayode Fayemi, indeed scored
105,631 votes as against Segun Oni’s 95,176 in the April 2007
governorship election and won that election three and half years ago.
The Court of Appeal also ruled that he was the winner of the April 2009
supplementary election involving some wards in the state.

The judges have
become heroes in Nigeria’s democracy building marathon by finally
allowing the truth and the mandate of the people of Ekiti State to
triumph. The judges have also made it clear that certain officials of
the Independent National Electoral Commission of that time were the
perpetrators of the electoral crimes that kept Fayemi away from his
mandate for three and half years.

We recall that
after the April 2009 re-run elections, Mrs. Ayoka Adebayo, the then
Ekiti Resident Electoral Commissioner had initially rejected that fake
results Ido-Osi stating that her conscience as a Christian would not
allow her falsify the truth. She was immediately declared a wanted
person by the Inspector General of Police, dragged out and marched to
the office of the then Chairman of the Electoral Commission, Maurice
Iwu. Thereafter, she recanted and announced the false results knowing
full well that she was depriving the people of Ekiti the governor they
had elected twice.

Now that INEC has a
new credible leadership, we call on their Chairman, Professor Attahiru
Jega to immediately set in process the prosecution of Ayoka Adebayo,
Maurice Iwu, former imposter Governor Segun Oni and the then Inspector
General of Police for the electoral offenses they committed. As long as
there are no sanctions for electoral crimes, people will continue to
commit them.

We congratulate our
founding Director, Kayode Fayemi for his dogged determination over the
past 42 months to recover the stolen mandate of the people through the
judicial process and wish him the best in implementing his 8-Point
Agenda aimed at deepening democracy and promoting people-centered
development in Ekiti State.

In a recent op-ed
piece in the Financial Times (‘Casino gibes do our banks no justice’),
John Varley, outgoing group chief executive of British Barclays,
describes the ‘core of banking as money transmission, safe storage of
deposits, maturity transformation, provision of investment advice,
trading and market making.’

If these vital
economic services are what banks provide, they, in turn, depend on the
public trust as the foundation of their existence. In fact, ‘credit’,
the elementary function of financial intermediaries, takes its root
from the Latin word ‘credere’, which means ‘to trust.’ Each time banks
and bankers have gone against this social contract, the consequences
have been dire.

While regulators
from Basel to Washington debate new rules on capital adequacy and
liquidity, it is easy to forget that the mere adoption of stricter risk
management rules cannot by itself rebuild confidence. Today, the
greatest challenge faced by the financial sector lies in addressing the
dissonance in values between what the public expects banks and bankers
to stand for and what some of them have, regrettably, come to
represent. One year after the Central Bank of Nigeria launched its
ethical crusade to bring bankers back in line with the traditional
values of the profession, it is timely to examine if institutions that
abide by those ethos perform better than those that do not. If indeed
they do, then there is a self-standing business case for doing the
right thing by shareholders and customers.

The October 8
ruling by Justice Dan Abutu of the Federal High Court condemning
Cecilia Ibru, the former chief executive officer of Oceanic Bank, to
six months in prison and compelling her to return assets valued at over
$1.2 billion indicates a sea change in the way flagrant abuses of trust
are treated.

Understandably,
many commentators have focused attention on the scale of recovery from
a single individual and the moral dimension of unethical wealth
accumulation. Far less coverage has been given to its import for
Oceanic Bank and the burden of trust, which banks must carry.

When the CBN
announced its intervention in Oceanic Bank in August 2009, few could
have imagined the herculean task that lay before the John Aboh-led
management team. Saddled with the responsibility of leading a delicate
transition, whose outcome would determine the future of one of
Nigeria’s foremost financial services groups, the management recognized
that beyond the headline issues of shareholder equity erosion and
misuse of depositors’ funds, the bigger challenge that confronted
Oceanic Bank was to rebuild public trust in its identity and mission.

In effect,
Oceanic Bank’s management has had to juggle three balls all at once:
pressed on one side by the demands of supervising an inside-driven
forensic review of the bank’s actual health status, on another with
stabilising the institution, and on a third by providing a fair
assessment of strategic options for recapitalisation, it had to show
employees, business partners, customers and shareholders why the CBN’s
decision was the right one at the right time.

Gradually, in
several meetings with stakeholders, the management team won over its
audience with the message that Oceanic Bank had begun a new chapter.
Its consistent theme that the future is bright at Oceanic Bank
supported by a solid recovery in deposits growth by the end of 2009 and
its return to profitability has helped to put the harrowing near-death
experience behind it. But it could never have achieved such a rapid
turnaround without an emphasis on regaining the trust of its key
publics.

Attendees echoed
this sentiment at an interactive session organized by the bank in July
to sensitize shareholders on its turnaround progress and
recapitalization plans. Commending Oceanic Bank for hosting the event,
Bisi Bakare, national coordinator of the Pragmatic Shareholders’
Association of Nigeria, expressed her satisfaction with the board for
reaching out to shareholders to correct lingering misperceptions and
making sincere efforts to carry them along. On his part, Emmanuel
Ikwue, a retired Brigadier, chairman of the Coordinating Committee of
the Zonal Shareholders’ Association, shifted the dialogue from a
fixation on the sale of Oceanic Bank to how to secure the best future
for all stakeholders in the institution. He implored the bank’s
shareholders to be open-minded in the consideration of capital raising
alternatives presented by the board.

There is no doubt
that the restitution of ill-gotten assets will go a long way in Oceanic
Bank’s bid to recapitalize successfully. But adequate capital alone
does not guarantee the competitive strength and attraction of a
financial institution. Trust must be at the root. If there is one thing
that the bank has relentlessly laboured to do since that balmy
afternoon in August 2009 when Nigerian banking was changed forever, it
has been to regain it. Just as the theme of 2010 global brand campaign
by UBS, the Swiss bank, says ‘we will not rest’ until we meet our
customers’ expectations, the reformed Oceanic Bank may well have
solemnly sworn not lay down its oars until it has regained the full
trust of its stakeholders. Justice Abutu’s judgment has only given
added fillip to that purpose.

Sunday Badmus is a corporate finance consultant based in Lagos.

In the middle of
the re-run of the Ekiti gubernatorial elections on the 28th of April
2009, Olusola Ayoka Adebayo wrote to then President Umaru Yar’Adua to
resign her appointment as Resident Electoral Commissioner for Ekiti
State in the following terms:

“… the on-going
election in Ekiti State was suppose [sic] to be the election that will
enhance the image of INEC, electoral process in our dear country
Nigeria and the whole black race. Unfortunately, the circumstances
changed in the middle of the process; therefore, my conscience as a
Christian cannot allow me to further participate in this process.”

We didn’t hear much
from Mrs Adebayo during the original April 2007 gubernatorial elections
in Ekiti State, but in that election, although Kayode Fayemi had the
plurality of the valid votes cast, she felt comfortable declaring that
the winner of the election was Segun Oni.

By the time the
re-run election ordered by the Court of Appeal came round however, the
big story was Mrs. Adebayo’s ‘Christian conscience’ as per the above
letter, and what it would or would not allow her to do.

Champions sprang up
for her everywhere. The Anglican church was trenchant in its defence of
the REC, while we women were also presumed to have something in common
with her that would make it impossible for us to stand idly by while a
‘fellow woman’ was hounded into unconscionable acts. If the Association
of Pensioners hadn’t been so busy fighting to show that their members
weren’t dead, they too might have come out to defend the septuagenarian
Adebayo.

But INEC Chairman
Maurice Iwu and the nation’s PDP masters were having none of conscience
or resignation. The Inspector-General of Police was asked to fish the
fugitive out, and after she had been gathered into the bosom of the
INEC ‘family’, she emerged to do what her Christian conscience now
apparently found acceptable – that is, to declare as winner of the
election the man, Mr Oni, who had not won it.

Now that the
fraudulent result of the re-run election has been set aside by the
Court of Appeal, many insist that there must be some retribution for
the forty months during which Mr Oni usurped Mr Fayemi’s rightful
position. Governor (at last!) Fayemi has suggested that there ought to
be an Electoral Offences Tribunal to deal with people who defraud the
voters by rigging elections and/or awarding them to those who did not
win.

Mr Fayemi certainly
has many other matters to deal with as he settles down to the business
of governing Ekiti, so he won’t be unduly or at all bothered if I
differ from him on a matter that is – for now – behind him. At any
rate, it seems to me that the problem of elections is not the absence
of an Electoral Offences Tribunal, but the absence of an Electoral
Offences Commission to get election riggers investigated and
prosecuted.

The venue of such
prosecution is secondary to the business of actually dragging the
wretches to court. The Electoral Reform Committee chaired by former
Chief Justice Muhammadu Uwais had recommended that just such a
Commission be established: “to work independently in the arraignment
and prosecution of electoral offenders. This will include offences
arising from failings of INEC before, during and after voting day.”

Explaining why an
ECC was necessary, in their joint publication on Electoral Reform: Ten
Critical Points of Order, the Nigerian Bar Association, Nigeria Labour
Congress and Transition Monitoring Group asked whether the electoral
body could truly police itself. They noted that the excuse given by
INEC’s then chair, Mr Iwu: that the Commission was waiting for election
tribunals to complete their work, was fraught with danger and bound to
affect impartial adjudication. An ECC would have removed the burden of
investigating and prosecuting electoral offenders from an INEC which
must clearly have its hands full with the conduct of the elections and
mundane matters such as getting election officers and materials to
polling stations on time, and accurately counting and declaring the
tally of valid votes cast.

Although the result
of an election petition may very well reveal some electoral offences,
it makes no sense to suggest that no offences can be discerned until
the winner of an election is known, and rather tends to support the
fear that the (election-victory) end justifies the (election-rigging)
means.

Do I need to note
that the National Assembly, in its wisdom, rejected this as it rejected
all the Uwais panel’s proposals for the unbundling of INEC?

As for Mrs Adebayo, she may or may not escape prosecution for
falsification of election results. Unfortunately it is not within
Attahiru Jega’s power to ‘sack’ Mrs Adebayo. For all his instructions
to RECs about what they should or should not do, she isn’t his
employee. RECs are appointed solely by the president, and need not even
go through any Senate confirmation to secure their jobs. So Mrs Adebayo
has the job for five years unless the two-thirds of the Senate accept a
presidential recommendation for her removal. Unless of course, her
Christian conscience again prompts her to do what she tried to do in
April last year. That is, to resign.