What are some of yesterday’s people doing now?
Now that they have time on their hands and considering their diminished circumstances, a good many of them must be reflecting on the awful instability of human greatness.
Previously, if they had time to reflect at all, it was about how to pull in the next N100 million from the public purse and stay in place to pull in another N100 million or multiples thereof at the earliest opportunity.
And as we have been learning to our grief with each passing day, there was never a shortage of opportunity or pretext.
They probably still have lots of resources – enough, at any rate, to engineer a curious reversal in the epochal case that started out as The Federal Republic of Nigeria v Obtainers Unlimited & Others but is now shaping up as Obtainers Unlimited & Others v The Federal Republic of Nigeria.
Identified perpetrators, who have in diverse ways fessed up to “obtaining “ have nevertheless put on the garb of victimhood and are with help from their confederates and sympathisers, challenging those seeking to bring them to justice to defend and justify the quest.
It is a familiar conjuncture, and the reason why corruption has blossomed. Remember Nuhu Ribadu, and how they ran him out of office and out of town? Can any lessons be learned where no lessons were taught?
The quest for restitution should be pursued with vigour, but also with diligence. It cannot be abandoned. It cannot be deferred. There may not be another day.
To return to the beginning, what follows is the first instalment of an occasional series that will speak to the prefatory question, namely: What are some of yesterday’s people doing now?
The two most powerful women of the era happily behind us now are confronting realities they never could have imagined. So ubiquitous was Mrs Patience Jonathan, so forcefully did she intrude into so many areas of state action, so irresistible a force had she become that it was being suggested quite seriously in some quarters that the safest thing was to entrench her in the Constitution her husband was set to give Nigeria.
That way, so went the reasoning, she could at least be managed.
And the signals, I gather, were that Dr Jonathan, having tried without success to rein her in with the intervention of elders flown from the creeks of the Delta to Abuja for the purpose, would not be averse to a constitutional fix. Unfortunately, it never came to be.
That may be just as well. Not much has been heard lately from that quarter. Perhaps she has finally dedicated herself to peaceful pursuits, now that she can no longer engage in nor advocate lawless action without having to face the consequences.
Diezani Alison-Madueke presided daintily over the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the heart of the petroleum industry that was losing 25 per cent of its daily output to what a British report called “political officials,” while also bleeding the country dry through payment of bogus import subsidies to the administration’s retinue of freeloaders.
Yet she remained untouchable. If Dr Jonathan were still in the saddle, there is little doubt that, despite her illness, she would have continued to preside over what is without question the most corrupt public sector organisation in Nigeria, and one of the most corrupt anywhere.
She must be regretting that she did not quit when she was diagnosed with cancer. That would have earned her a great deal of empathy. Now, she has to cope with its ravages while attending to the genteel but insistent demands of the police and courts in the UK for information about her time in office.
The man at the centre of all this, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, has been having a time of his life, especially abroad, garnering prizes and commendations, overseeing national elections, being toasted and feted as the statesman he aspires to be and the great democrat he never was.
His stock seemed set to rise and rise and rise until The Economist, that master of the pernicious putdown, dismissed him in its current issue as “an ineffectual buffoon.”
Ouch.
That magazine is no longer on my reading list. I have not held a copy in my hand nor paid more than cursory attention to its online manifestations since August 2002 when, as the Bush Administration was exploring with almost maniacal frenzy just about anything that could furnish a pretext for the invasion of Iraq, it had this banner on its cover: WE VOTE FOR WAR.
It would be hard to come up with a more disreputable headline or a more pernicious piece of advocacy than the one laid out under it. Here you have some privileged white boys sipping tea in their cosy offices in London and with smug complacency, if not sang froid, “voting” for a war to be fought by other people’s children and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers – a war that will claim tens of thousands of lives, and upended the lives of the millions who survived it
All for a lie – a transparent lie.
Given the mindset of the war-mongering US Republican Party and the hawks George W.Bush surrounded himself with, the only question left was when the invasion would start, not if. The Economist had made their case for war.
When it dismissed Dr Jonathan as an ineffectual buffoon, it was doing what it does best – the savage putdown. Jonathan may be ineffectual, but buffoon he ain’t.
Just wait until he locates that dodgy dissertation, dusts it up and cranks out seminal paper after seminal paper, the type that is sure to guarantee him a Lifetime Achievement Award of the World Congress of Ichthyologists. And if he can make the time to settle down to apply that supple mind and well-honed sense of discrimination to work out the definitive distinction between corruption and stealing, even The Economist will have to admit that it was wrong about him.
The last time we heard from Labaran Maku, Dr Jonathan’s Minister of Information, he had just been clobbered at the Nassarawa gubernatorial election, which he contested on the platform of the Labour Party, the PDP having disowned him. He had made his mark in the cabinet by staging jamborees he called Good Governance Tours, during which he ostensibly gauged how each state government was delivering. Only the PDP states measured up; in Lagos, take away the federal projects and Governor Babatunde Fashola was just an empty barrel, Maku said.
I cannot yet confirm it, but I hear Maku is planning to get into tourism big-time, drawing on the skills that had served him so well in the Jonathan cabinet.
When Femi Fani-Kayode, who now wishes to be known and addressed as Olukayode (former documents presumably remaining valid) was warning so stridently the other day that hell would break lose if anything happened to the beleaguered former National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki, someone quipped to my hearing: E dey talk like person wey don obtain well well.
Easy, I upbraided the fellow. The jury is no out yet.
Meanwhile, I hear he has de-mothballed his wig and gown and re-organised his well-stocked law library. Next time Dasuki and some of the more notable suspects appear in court, do not be surprised if you find Fani-Kayode in their corner, decked up in lawyer’s garb and lugging an arsenal of private facts on which he will draw copiously
Did Donald Trump really say that?
My column for last week (Donald Trump’s delusional world) was based entirely on disparaging remarks the frontrunner for the Republican ticket in November’s U.S. Presidential election was widely reported to have made about Nigeria and Nigerians.
It sounded very much like what Trump has been saying and could have said. In journalism, there is a rule of thumb that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck. I had followed that rule and pronounced Trump guilty as charged, without verification.
I report with regret that I can find no authoritative source for the statement at issue. It was a brilliant spoof, and I can almost hear its author laughing heartily.
NATION
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