Bola Ige owner of the game

"...Politics in Yorubaland is dangerous; it is meant for witches, wizards and sorcerers" Or, that is what Reuben Abati, following a rash of anti-Bola Ige columns in Thisday, Punch, Vanguard, and Tempo, concludes in his piece "Ige's darkest moments" (The Guardian, March 16, 2001). Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, in (The Comet On Sunday March 18, 2001) does not talk about witches and sorcerers. He pursues what he calls the "intricate labyrinth" and "the cloak and dagger nature of Yoruba politics". And, I think that both of them, sufficiently different, but alike in their conclusions, can be safely taken as representative of the many columnists and feature writers who have, wittingly or unwittingly, signed into a media lynch-squad trained upon Ige.

Because both columnists are Yoruba, the rest of us are supposed to accept their self-characterization of the politics of their people. They require us to grant them and their ethnic group certain idiosyncrasy credits as sorcerers and witches. It is either that Reuben Abati is himself a wizard or sorcerer or he is under the spell of some witch, wizard or sorcerer. Or, we may speculate as to which witch, wizard or sorcerer has overcome him and other members of the media lynch-squad; and whether they see themselves in the way they appear, as trumpeters in a sponsored bandwagon for 2003. Evidently, the rest of us are supposed to be sorcerers and witches before we can understand them and "their" Yoruba politics. The good thing is that they are, and can be shown, to be dead wrong.

Truth is, there is no sorcery, witchery, wizardry or labyrinth in Yoruba politics that other discerning Nigerians cannot see through. It is easy to show, for instance, that Abati's reading of Yoruba politics in his Ige's darkest moments is distracted, devoid of secular understanding, hostage to fashions and bandwagon effects, and generally aimed at humouring transient players on the political stage. Abati, misusing his monumental talents, simply stitches together the facile opinions of others without analysis or awareness of the need to distinguish between genuine opinion-makers and those who are speaking, writing or buying space in the newspapers, out of weighted ignorance, spite and a flair for illogicalities. Of interest is that Gbolabo Ogunsanwo, ever so secular on such matters, also allowed himself to be overtaken by the witches and sorcerers and so entered the voodoo lane in his Comet On Sunday column.

Out of a doomsday urge or pure sorcery, they tell us that Bola Ige is going towards "a sad political extinction". Or, that he is becoming either another Ladoke Akintola, as some Afenifere stalwarts always wished it; or another LK Jakande, as Reuben Abati divines it. We are not told what is so right about the position of Ige's opponents to create such alchemy. Nor are we told why those who are more wrong, planless and unpragramatic than Bola Iga are going to carry the day outside the orchestrated sorcery of newspaper columns. Columnists who are supposed to be concerned with democracy are demanding that Ige should play dictator over Governors whom he helped to elect. At the same time, they remind us that Ige's 'sharp tongue' is to be blamed for UPN's loss of the Governorship of Oyo State in 1983. They thereby cover up the fact that the people of Oyo State did not vote against the UPN Governorship candidate in 1983 but that Modakeke, with a population of 50,000 people, was helped by Federal machinery to cast more than 200,000 votes for the NPN victory of that year.

Rather than help create a culture of electoral probity in the 4th Republic by hammering the 1983 NPN victory in Oyo State as fraudulent, we have commentators who would rather prepare the ground for another such fraud by seeing "political extinction' where none is remotely in the offing. It is the same kind of logic that has made them give 'judgmental notice" to some lawyer whose pursuit of a resource control brief in one of the South South states, leads him to purchase full page advertisements in some newspapers to say that Uncle Bola is no longer his uncle. To raise such a comic distraction to the level of a serious happening instead of analysing the substance of the charges being made, amounts to turning Nigerian journalism into a mere rubber stamp for charlatans. What is more, for salacious effect, the columnists throw in insinuations about whom Bola Ige is sleeping with outside wedlock as if the case of Bill Clinton has not already shown the irrelevance of mixing public morality with questions of political efficacy. At any rate, if media lynching were all that were needed to finish off a good politician, Obafemi Awolowo himself would not be surviving so well today, 14 years after his mortal exit.

Let me note, quickly, that I am intrigued by "their" pictures of Yoruba Politics, and of Bola Ige's strategic place within it, because I believe that, although the solution to Nigeria's multifarious problems will come from the South South, what is happening or not happening in Yoruba politics at the moment offers a key to the solution. In spite of President Olusegun Obasanjo's presumption during his recent visit to Yenagoa that the people of the Niger Delta have only a choice between Igbo-Biafran colonialism and Hausa-Fulani imperialism, and despite the not-so-veiled threat that war will be visited upon the Delta if they go on demanding resource control, it is clear that Yoruba politics is mapping a way to the solution which he (the President) may or may not be aware of. The solution actually lies in the unresolved issues provoked by Bola Ige's gladiatoring style. It is a style that has ensured that all the three political parties in Nigeria have each a manifesto with his imprint while his party, the Alliance for Democracy, has a distinct identity as the party of "restructuring". Indeed from the day the AD took over Yorubaland, even in its present distracted form, it laid the basis for a solution that I need not go into for now.

What is clear is this: Whether Ige remains in government (as things are) or out of it (as many critics wish) is irrelevant to what his structured solution will lead to. Unlike the exit from political centrality by LK Jakande, Bola Ige's choice of silence or his return to Esa Oke, will not remove the key that he has designed; a key that can only be removed by smashing or disorganizing the whole Nigerian system. The political genius that he has deployed to do it is often abused and reviled by some of his Afenifere siblings who happen to be the prime beneficiaries. Instead of worshipping him for it, they keep reminding the world that it came out of Ige's pursuit of selfish ambitions. Yet they are the first to salivate over the goodness of having a virtual 'laager' that protects the Southwest from the mess of the other political parties. In fact, what it tells us is that if Bola Ige were to decide to quit the political stage, he would be punishing those who have suffered too much already from his mere withdrawal of enthusiasm from their activities. At any rate, only political neophytes and false prophets will spell extinction for a politician whose sense of structural co-ordination has already programmed the possibilities for the future. And I suspect that the current media lynch-squad is being wheeled into place to take care of him because he remains the godfather who never sleeps at poker.

What must be said is that Bola Ige, being human, can make and has made mistakes. But not the ones being stressed by his critics. The mistakes, whichever they are, have not touched his quintessential centrality to the existing political equation. In terms of the issues at stake, especially in terms of "restructuring", he happens to have a handle and a grasp that no other Yoruba person, and only few other Nigerians, at the centre of current events have managed. It is not just because he understands, and has a more resilient hold of Obafemi Awolowo's politics on the matter. It is also that he is not afraid to be misunderstood and called bad names, like Awolowo in his time, in order to open up new political directions. Again, unlike many of his siblings in Afenifere, who would like to turn matters of tactics into issues of principle, Bola Ige has shown that he has a better understanding of the word consistency. It is to be looked at from the standpoint of long-range goal-orientation rather than mere submission to the reigning quarrel or fashionable slogan. Any serious-minded attention to the core issues being haggled on the pages of the newspapers at the moment will prove the point.

Since the NADECO days, I have tried to conscientize as many proponents of the idea as I came across, so that they may see the danger in making too much meal of the necessary but highly inefficient agitation for an SNC. While avoiding the need to puncture the necessary agitation that NADECO was pursuing, my argument was and remains that the struggle for true federalism requires a proper drawing up of terms, including the constitutional provisions, under which the idea of restructuring can be met. Until such provisions were drawn up and properly canvassed, any talk about true federalism remained so much hot air, something good for agitation politics but not for solving problems.

Towards a solution, I have argued that it is best for every nationality or local government area to draw up the kind of Constitution for Nigeria with which it can feel comfortable. Arrival at a commonly accepted Constitution could then begin through a matching and merging and streamlining of the different Constitutions until a critical mass of Nigerians who support one Constitution are ready to pose the question of Sovereignty. Actually, by the time a critical mass is arrived at, a true sovereign national conference will have started that no President however powerful can stop. The point is that those who want a government to organize a Sovereign National Conference for them are not serious about their goals.

Unfortunately, too many of the people in search of restructuring, including many of the columnists who 'oversight' them, are too impatient, too aware of the applause of the gallery, and too distracted by the current shenanigans of government, to dare to be wrong by proposing something different. Rather than put themselves on the line by suggesting what needs to be done, they resort to slogans. They seem to be saying: "just wait till we get to the Sovereign National Conference and we shall surprise you". But, seriously, they can only surprise themselves. They are like the great stalwarts who went to the 1950 All-Nigerian Conference at Ibadan only to capitulate to the brazen injustice of a revenue-sharing formula based on population figures cooked by British colonizers.

Those figures have remained everybody's albatross and nightmare. And, the experience warns all those in search of a Sovereign National Conference that they are in danger of repeating the grand error of 1950. The surprise is that they all want an SNC even if it will be over-dominated and over-determined by forces opposed to restructuring. The old argument used to be that an SNC was the only way to ensure that the decisions reached at the sessions would be final and above the kind of tinkering usually perpetrated by military dictators. It was imagined that "we, the people" would exclude military fiat as well as the crush of an Arewa Veto. It was assumed that the views of the agitators would hold water.

Except that the agitators knew that those against restructuring had a clear superiority of numbers in terms of population, number of local governments, number of states, number of identifiable nationalities and strategic placements in the civil service and armed forces. They knew that the lie of the ground was artificially skewed in favour of a moribund unitarism. On the face of it, one would have expected that, as serious strategic thinkers, they would first consider modes of representation and patterns of decision-making, and how to meet them, before jumping into the SNC bandwagon. At least, one expected them to know where they were going before bundling their followers - clans, tribes, nationalities and ideological fellow travelers - into the bandwagon.

But, no. They would rather seduce the masses with great expectations that are abstractly defined. So we hear talks about equality of nationalities, representation of social groups and NGOs as of right, and voting by consensus. They discountenance the reality that consensus is usually a vote for dominant power structures. And so, you want to ask how they intend to coerce, or bribe or woo or wheedle the other side to alternative visions? Or how they will guarantee that the gainers at the end of the battle for restructuring will not over-reach themselves by hacking down the pillars of other people's citizenship. We never hear of such things. Not so much an aside, I recall the case of one sympathizer of the cause of restructuring. He demanded to know from his comrades where the allocation for his local government would come from after the restructuring.

It was like some question out of Animal Farm: will there be sugar after the rebellion? But the question was and is relevant. Who wants to be de-citizened by change? This is a question that readers of Awolowo ought to be able to answer but which the proponents of the SNC do not bother to answer. They are stuck in that un-programmatic bracket that made all of us look like kindargarten hordes after the death of Abacha and MKO Abiola. Because of the absence of back-up options to their idea of an SNC and the even more makeshift idea of a government of national unity, they were outsmarted, out-manouvered and out-gunned by military politicians who were already agreed on one of their own as the heir apparent. The militariat, so to say, could not continue with evil but they did not want to do real good on behalf of democracy.

In effect, the compromise which was reached with Abdusalami Abubakar may be touted as a good way to take the military bull out of the china shop. Yet may it be seen as a poor preparation for the constitutional government. Arguably, what it does not and cannot mean is that there is no constitutional government in place. We may not like it but there is such a government. Anyone who wishes to think constitutionally rather than in arbitrary terms simply must concede that there is already in place a procedure for changing the constitution. The procedure is lop-sided, wonky, and impracticable. But it exists. An Attorney General who says he cannot defend that procedure even while trying to change it has no reason being in office. Which is why I would say that Bola Ige is quite right to say that only those who did not participate in the 1999 transition ought to feel morally comfortable with the continued demand for a Sovereign National conference.

Bola Ige's option of a National Conference that is not Sovereign is however tenable for a different reason. It is not because, as government megaphones claim, that we cannot have two Sovereigns at the same time. No. It is because, at this point in our history, it is simply impossible to have a Sovereign that is not a moral cripple like the government we have in place at the moment. The truth is that, in spite of President Obasanjo's gung-ho attitude on the matter, he too believes that the existing custodian of Sovereignty in government, is a moral cripple. That is why there has been a Presidential Constituional Review Commission which is an extra-governmental committee of political parties. And then, there is another committee in the National Assembly.

Truth is, only the review by the National Assembly is recognizable as a formal constitutional performance. Speaking strategically, the parallel approaches which all political parties including the AD has accepted, cannot lead to an SNC. They can lead to a National Conference that is not sovereign. I think too that such a conference is a safer bet for those who demand re-structuring. No doubt, it is only a little better than a talk shop. At the end of the day, if it manages to reconcile the divergent demands from different parts of the country, it would require only a referendum to legitimize the document. Sovereign or not sovereign, any National conference, I insist, will be quite a repeat of the lopsided architecture of the existing system. It is a system that allows mythical majorities to steal from those whose numbers are presumably fewer.

Hence I argue that those who are being shortchanged in current affairs need to design a constitution with which they believe they can be comfortable. They should dare to take a common stand before sitting at table with the mythical majority. At any rate, the true sovereign, the people, ought to be heard properly, before official pretenders to sovereignty overtake common sense.

The Supreme Court's determination can grant to littoral states revenue sources that President Olusegun Obasanjo's government has been doing everything to deny them of since he came to power. Those who have been arguing that the Minister of Justice has no business going to court are either closing their eyes to the damage that Obasanjo's government has been seeking to do to the Federal system in Nigeria or they are collaborators with it. They think that the attack on Bola Ige and comical tantrums such as buying full page newspaper adverts to say that Bola Ige is no longer an uncle is some way to appear to be fighting. It is actually a sign that most of those who say they are interested in democracy can be easily swindled by a media lynch squad organized to abuse rather than to think.

As the truth is, the matter of onshsore/offshore dichotomy in revenue sharing has become a most destabilizing question in our much-damaged Federal system because President Obasanjo and the cabal that mis-advises him believes that the oil producing littoral states ought not to be so blessed. Although the matter had been raised and settled at previous constitutional conferences, it has continued to crop up at every opportunity that President Obasanjo and his mischief-makers have had of destabilizing the Federal ethic in the country. We have it on the authority of Governor Obong Victor Attah of Akwa Ibom State in THISDAY February 11, 2001, that "Three times, Mr. President tried to introduce ofshore/onshore. He tried it in the NDDC bill. It was removed. He tried it in the 2000 budget. It was removed. He tried it in the 2001 budget. It was removed" Governor Attah also told THISDAY "we know that the government has been advised by everybody that should advise it that what it is doing is wrong". But the President persists. Governor Attah was more specific in his interview with NATIONAL INTEREST of the same date. He said: "we have been talking, we've been negotiating. I am summarizing a dialogue that has spanned nearly two years over this issue and we insisted that what he's doing is wrong. His own Solicitor General, a copy of which (sic) letter we have, has written to him to say what you are doing is wrong and there is no basis for that".

Still, you find so many desultory columns and articles in the newspapers purporting to know that there is no reason for a Court case. What is an Attorney General to do, who knows what the correct principles are, but is functioning in a government in which the wrong principles are consistently being pursued. Resign and like Pontius Pilate wash his hands off the matter so that the wrong thing continues to happen? Or accede to a civilized mode of making it an issue for more central decision-making? At any rate, if the President continues to disagree with the Legislature, where better to resolve it than at the Supreme Court where all the arguments for and against can be proffered in an orderly fashion? Since in any case President Olusegun Obasanjo has been opposed to the idea of a Sovereign National Conference, what higher court is there to appeal to? Incidentally, Governor Attah has actually provided the best reason for the Attorney General and Minister of Justice to have gone to Court.

The Governor was asked by NATIONAL INTEREST why the South South Governors have not gone to court to challenge the onshore/offshore dichotomy that President Obasanjo is determined to bring back. He said: "if we went to court and establish that the President has been going against the constitution, you know he could be impeached ". Why should that matter? He explained: "You know we are PDP governors, we wanted to respect our PDP President and we expected reciprocity". You bet that all the champions of restructuring in Nigeria have been covering up for the President in the same manner as Attah has described. And, they are waiting for reciprocity that is not forthcoming. In the circumstance, I think that a good Minister of Justice is simply supposed to have enough faith in the highest court in the land and to follow-through. Of course, he is expected to be politically astute enough to know that if the Supreme Court yielded a quixotic ruling in the manner of Awolowo's twelve two third case, other forms of political engineering would take over.

What is even more interesting is that the mere mentioning of the issue as a case for the Supreme Court has already set in motion the very process of political engineering that the Federal Government, or more correctly, the Presidency, has been refusing to engage. The report that Vice President Atiku is suddenly prepared to withdraw the case from the Supreme Court to pursue a political solution, is the very stuff of epic drama. During a recent visit to Uyo, capital of Akwa Ibom State, the Vice President gave a very interesting, actually very entertaining rationale, for wishing to move the case from the Supreme Court. He said: "by the grace of God, we have a President who is an international statesman, who is internationally acknowledged and respected in the art of conflict resolution. There is no political conflict or problem that will be too hard for this statesman to resolve". The Vice President went further.

In the NATIONAL INTEREST of Thursday march 22, 2001, he said: "One thing you should know is that politicians are people who are capable of magnifying political issues, of making such issues look intractable, so that the ordinary man on the street would think the issues can never be resolved. I want to tell you that the problem will be resolved and we will resolve it". What Vice President Atiku did not tell the people of Uyo is that in the past two years, he has been meeting with and reaching no agreement with the oil-producing states on the very issue of onshore/offshore. It should be asked: where has the political solution been hiding in all the negotiations that Vice President Atiku has been having with the State Governors in the past two years? And where is the solution to be found in President Olusegun Obasanjo's abusive attitude towards the oil-producing states and in his virtual brag that every other thing must wait till after the Supreme Court judgement? Surely, if the Federal Government withdraws the case from the Court, it will have admitted that its refusal, in the past two years, to concede the demands of the states, has been a case of lousy power show. It amounts to trying to have a Sovereign National Decision without a Sovereign National conference.

By implication, Vice President Atiku is trying to eat his cake and still have a part of it. Otherwise, I have no doubt in my mind that the states have a greater chance of Justice at the Supreme Court than in Atiku's political solution. In court, the states have a fairer chance to press their case without the intervention of miserable party solidarities which have already wrong-footed even a Governor like Victor Attah who is quite clear-eyed about the resource control issue. Let's face it, one ought to expect that even the Supreme Court would, seeing the importance of the case, allow all 16 judges to sit together on the matter. To withdraw the case from the Court and to make big noises about a political solution, as Vice President Atiku is doing, amounts to pure hoodwinking.

Yet, again, it is not a solution that is guaranteed to earn popular respect among the aggrieved. It may well be argued that the court case has put the fear of God into the Federal Government by confronting everybody with the likely enormous implications of sticking to the wrong. But how does that tell us what Vice President Atiku means by a resolution of the problem? Who will grant a sovereign status to the resolution that Vice Presdient Atiku envisages, especially knowing that President Obasanjo has been working so hard to deviate from the decisions of the National Assembly in the past two years? Properly speaking, unlike what the Vice President believes, the issue is not just about reaching a solution or resolving a conflict.

The President and his Vice should simply learn to obey the Constitution and abide by the decisions of the National Assembly. Otherwise, it would be clear that they are looking for a civil war to fight in order to fulfil the old fantasy of those who wish to empty the Niger Delta of the natives so that they can have unhindered access to oil wealth. Of course, we are going to be hearing more of the fallacy that, by seeking to withdraw the court case, Atiku is merely evening up the resource control case with that of Sharia in the Northern States. Frankly, as I see it, nothing has been more insulting to the South South states than this attempt to put the Sharia problem on the same pedestal as the resource control problem.

Why should the manner in which the Federal Government faces the religious crisis in the North become the model for a solution to the resource control problem? What needs to be faced is that the Federal Government is going to Court in the resource control matter not because it wants to restrain erring state governments but because, according to Governor Attah, the President has been quite determined to disobey the requisite constitutional provisions, as well as the position taken consistently by the National Assembly; not to mention the advise of the "Solicitor General". Those who want to get the head of the Minister of Justice because he went to court are behaving like ostriches. If fair is fair, a Minister of Justice who sees the Chief Executive contesting the opinion of his Ministry on any question simply has no choice but to think of how what is right may be protected from power. But it also may not be a question of power.

The Attorney General and his Ministry could be wrong. The pursuit of justice in the last resort, if it does not lie in the National Assembly whose views are already known in the matter, ought to lie in the Supreme Court. That was where Bola Ige had to go. That is where he has gone. The attack on him for taking the case to the Supreme Court, or the presumption that an Attorney General who seeks the court's interpretation on resource control must be a disbeliever in it, merely presents the opinion makers as rabble-rousers.

Odia Ofeimum was the last personal secretary to Chief Awolowo he sent this in from Lagos, Nigeria