AS WAS WITH BALARABE MUSA, SO IT SHOULD BE WITH TANKO AL-MAKURA

The recent threat by the Nassarawa State House of Assembly to impeach the state governor, Tanko Al-Makura of the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) reminds one of the maxim that “the more things change, the more they remain the same”.  Reading the story took me back to the second republic politics of old Kaduna State when a National Party of Nigeria (NPN) dominated House of Assembly fought a war of attrition with the Peoples Redemption (PRP) governor of the state.  The then NPN swept the country like a gale picking states at will particularly the northern states but could not win the mother lode – the old Kaduna state.  It was a shocker for the NPN and its candidate, Lawal Kaita, who to all intents and purposes was just waiting to be crowned.  While the NPN swept almost all the seats in the legislature, it performed woefully losing the gubernatorial seat to a little known accountant – Balarabe Musa.  This was unacceptable to the NPN and so began the ‘war’, which led to Balarabe’s impeachment.  The people of the state were the worst for it because in the two years that Mallam Balarabe Musa lasted, he was not allowed to perform optimally with distractions coming from the House of Assembly.  Be as it may, the PRP government was able to establish some industries like the Kachia Ginger factory and the Ikara Food Processing Company.

We can only guess what the state lost by the antics of the NPN, but from the little that was delivered by Mallam Bala, we can hazard a guess as to the unquantifiable loss the state experienced with his impeachment.  Balarabe Musa operated without commissioners for the duration of his stay in office but many people still revere him for his performance and he still remains a reference point for good governance.  The shenanigans taking place in Nassarawa state since the ascension of Al-Makura to the governor’s office reminds one of how the NPN scuttled people’s dreams because of the selfishness of the party and its members in 1981.  In the run-up to the 2011 general elections, Tanko Al-Makura a founding member of the PDP decamped to the newly registered CPC to actualise his ambition of leading Nassarawa Sate as governor, which he couldn’t realise in the PDP.  In a scene reminiscent of Kaduna in 1979, the PDP won almost all the elections held in 2011 and then lost the governorship to the CPC and Al-Makura.  The PDP holds Al-Makura responsible for its loss in Nassarawa State.

From the day Al-Makura was sworn to the present moment, the governor has not known peace from his legislators who are supposed to be his partners in carrying the state forward.  He has been jumping from one booby trap to the other.  The legislators once boycotted their legislative functions for the ridiculous reason that the governor refused to furnish their chamber – a contract awarded by the erstwhile governor when most of them were in the legislature.  But the recent threat to impeach the governor within seven days beat all else.  How does a fight between two ethnic groups constitute an impeachable offence beats my imagination.  Much as I try to see reason and logic in the threat, I couldn’t find any.  Nigeria has been practically on fire since Goodluck Jonathan became president but I cannot remember anyone threatening him with impeachment.

Ethnic and religious violence has been the hallmark of elite rivalry and has been destroying the country and tearing the nation apart and any right thinking Nigerian is trying to find solutions to these senseless killings and destructions going on.  To try to trivialise such a grave issue is tantamount to irresponsibility.  The PDP like politicising issues that they believe will advance its cause even if lives may be lost.  This attitude is exactly why you have pockets of clashes all over the country.  Authorities concerned are not interested in addressing critical questions but rather try to gain political points from such.  The recent misadventure by the group called Ombatse in Nassarawa state that led to the lost of lives of innocent Nigerians, some ordinary travellers, should under normal, rational circumstances elicit condemnation by the State House of Assembly and a call on the authorities (state and federal) to arrest and prosecute the leaders of the group.  But no.  The PDP see the disturbance of a way of issuing threats and may be finally get rid of Al-Makura, whose only offence seems the bruising of PDP’s dirty nose in the dirt.

The legislators accused the governor of lacking “competence to response to emergencies, and has shown complete disdain for the courtesy of extending relief to thousands, including women and their children, as well as the elderly, often displaced by the fast spreading violence”.  I hope federal legislators from Borno and Yobe states are listening and will take a cue from the Nassarawa State legislators.  The people of the two states (Borno and Yobe) should ask their representatives on why they are yet to issue impeachment threats against the president.  Goodluck Jonathan has not for once visited these hapless people to even show empathy, much less extend “relief”.  While he is not busy to attend the 40^th pastoral anniversary of Ayo Oritsejafor, he is always busy to visit Borno and Yobe despite the unparalleled lost of lives and destruction of economic activities in the two states under his watch.

Al-Makura was also accused by the majority leader in the House, Godiya Akwasiki, of “failing to comply with previous House resolutions to act on the raging violence and has folded his hands to watch while the people were daily being killed”.  May be I don’t get the meaning of this allegation, but are they talking about the president or Nassarawa State governor?

The NPN held the people Kaduna State to ransom and denied them the chance to be led by a bonafide welfarist.  Now it appears it is the turn of Nassarawa State and its people to be treated to the fascist’s treatment by the offshoot of the NPN.  I see the fascism that drove Balarabe Musa out of office in 1981 at play in Nassarawa State in 2012.  But if the state legislators should be foolhardy to go ahead with their threat, National Assembly members should be on notice to kick out Goodluck for the fact that while Nigeria is on fire he is playing modern day Nero – drinking expensive wine in place of Nero’s fiddle.

If the PDP as an institution wants to play this type of brinkmanship, why don’t they start with the presidency?  At least they are in control of the National Assembly.  To selectively single out Al-Makura for such a threat smacks of arrogance and bad bele.  This should be unacceptable to Nigerians wherever they may be.  We should not allow dictatorship creep in on us wearing the garb of law and order.  Granted that Al-Makura must, as the chief security officer of the state, ensure the prevalence of peace, harmony and peaceful co-existence amongst and between the disparate people of the state.  But this must be applicable to the federal government that controls all security agencies.

THE NORTH’S WRETCHED OF THE EARTH

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Whenever you think northern Nigeria has reached its nadir in the area of insecurity, we touch a new low.  With the killing of Major General Mamman Shuwa, war time General Officer Commanding (GOC) of the first Division, the situation was pushed a notch lower.  The late Shuwa was the most invisible among his peers throughout his retirement years and many people believed he died a long time ago.  His low profile life after retirement belies his larger than life stature of the folklores surrounding him while we were growing up.   Shuwa was an enigma to many people but that was the way he chose to live his life.  May his soul rest in peace.

The north has been under siege, so to say, since the middle of 2010.  The first salvo was fired in the Eagle Square during the Independence Day celebration of that year and since then the region has not known peace.  Almost every part of the region has experienced one crisis or the other; lives have been needlessly wasted and economies, both public and private, destroyed.  The level of infrastructural damage in a region with already atrophied infrastructure is mind-boggling.  This is happening to a region noted for its high level of poverty and illiteracy, high poverty level, low economic and commercial activities and dangerous rise in immorality and indolence.  The area is therefore home to the largest concentration of beggars found anywhere in the world.  These factors and bad governance by a leadership that is increasingly isolating itself from the people may largely be responsible for the insecurity situation.

Much as one may try to make excuses for our leadership (particularly the northern governors and other political leaders of the region) one is forced to admit leadership failure at all the strata of governance in the north.  The northern region has never had it so rough and I dare say no region has ever had it this tough without any fear of contradiction.  Gone were the days when parents were either forced or enticed to send their wards to school; gone also were the days when there was competition among parents as to who has the highest number of wards in the school, or the number of university graduates per household; gone also were the days when service to the community and nation supersedes personal aggrandisement.  Today the competition may be on who has the least number of students in school or which mallam has the largest body of almajirai.  Our streets are littered with street urchins, some barely out of their diapers – non-among them has a chance in hell of seeing the four walls of classroom.

My generation and the generation before enjoyed the best governments have to offer is now denying these poor souls the chance to even hope for a decent life.  We, the inheritors, are guilty of the perilous state of our communities.  We foolishly think being well off personally is tantamount to living in peace and to hell with the other guy.  Living behind high fences topped by electric or razor fence gives us a false sense of security.  We forget that those boys – those that we turned into hewers and drawers of water – venture into our houses, some to our innermost sanctums, to spy on us and see first hand how our over-pampered, children live while they scavenge our thrash cans for remnants of junk foods bought for our kids to or from school.  We invite them into our lives to come and wash for kids, sweep our houses and remove the garbage from our houses.  They see us living a life that they can only envy; yet we wonder how they become beasts without compassion.  We turned them in these beasts, wittingly or unwittingly.

We steal the money meant to educate them and send our kids abroad only for them to come back (or brought back) as graduates of drug addiction.  We pilfer the monies meant for the purchase of drugs and equipment for public hospitals to afford us the opportunity of travelling abroad for the merest ailment only for us to be brought back in caskets or strange ailments that our doctors lack the expertise or equipment to take care of.  We siphon the monies meant for the provision of potable drinking water to build boreholes in our houses.  We pinch monies for the provision of electricity and buy generators so our kids won’t miss Scooby Doo, The Simpsons, Ben10 and such other cartoons that only encourage immorality.  We are comfortable stealing funds meant to construct roads for the use of the poor and buy planes to pollute the atmosphere and air they breathe.  How did we come to this heartless century?  We that are noted for compassion are today guilty of lack of empathy.

We were given free education by our past leaders and now that we have taken up the leadership mantle have failed our younger ones and generations yet unborn.  We pretend not to know the causes of the mayhem unleashed on us by those whom we neglected and treat like dirt.  The hopelessness, their poverty and the way we throw our ill-gotten wealth at their faces are some of the things that make them behave irrationally.  We have taken away their future and that of their children, yet we think they are unreasonable.  Have we ever paused to think our roles in the creation of the monster that is now threatening to consume us?  Have we been fair to those who made it possible for us to be the successes that we belief we are today?  How did we come to this sorry pass? 

We have created a nation where injustice appears to have taken permanent residence.  Different folks are treated differently and this therefore, engender lost of faith in the country.  While pickpockets and small-time criminals are punished, armed robbers are rewarded with the country’s highest honours, appointments and contracts.  I can easily empathise with a boy who grew up on the streets, through no fault of his, when he becomes a killer for hire.  I am not justifying such behaviour but where you have a country that doesn’t care about your well-being and a president who “doesn’t give a damn” about you and your feelings, what do you expect to get?  The streets are harsh and unforgiving.

The spate of killings and property destruction sweeping across the north is a serious indictment on the leadership of the region.  They appear to be going round in circles with no clear vision as to how to bring an end to this madness.  Unfortunately they are part of the problem.  The poverty level of the region can be directly attributable to their selfish style of leadership.  For their visionless leadership style, today the economy of the north is prostate, the result is what see – unemployment spawning poverty, which breeds discontent that translate into anarchy.  While our cities and villages are burning, we pretend to find solutions in posh hotels, drinking coffee and exchanging banters while reading our mails on our Ipads, Iphones, BlackBerry and Samsung Smartphones.  Each of these gadgets is enough to send a kid to school.

The north is fast turning into a concentration of illiterates; drug addicts, morons and this invariably make people angry and suicidal.  Suicidal because they don’t have anything in life and nothing to protect.  Their lives become hopeless so therefore not worth living.  If such be their lot, why do you think they should spare you.  Shuwa is gone through the bullets fired by either an amateur or a trained killer.  His visibility, service to his community and the fact he lived all his live in the midst of the down trodden, couldn’t save him from them at the end.  Are we living the life Shuwa led?  Are we truly one with the people just like the late General?  Have we really tried to interrogate ourselves on why the region, known for its peaceful coexistence has suddenly turned to violence, where human life isn’t valued more than a dog’s?

The genesis of the violence surrounding us can be located in our governments abandoning education, making it unaffordable to the poor.  This led to the burgeoning in the number of street kids – their training ground being the streets and their teachers the criminals roaming the streets looking for gullible, innocent youths.   Thus we unwittingly created an army of killers, rapists and sundry criminals.  We created mindless, hopeless youth that will look you in the eye and shoot you dead without blinking their eyes.  We assumed in our usual fashion that we could use them as cannon fodders and scallywags during elections and discard at the end of their assignments.  To have total control over them, we introduce to hallucinogenic drugs but forgot to learn how to wean them from it.  They now take all manner of assignments to enable them satiate their thirst for the drugs.

These then are those that could kill without any emotion.  These are our legacy to the north that our parents inherited from the likes of Sardauna, Tafawa Balewa and Mahmud Ribadu.  While our first generation leaders bred first class scholars, civil servants and military officers, we have proudly procreated the demons that are consuming us.  To insult them the more, we conceived the Almajiri schools, more to give out contracts to the ‘boys’ than to cater for their education.  Why don’t we use the money so voted for these segregated schools to incorporate them into those schools where the kids of our domestic helps go to – the public schools.

We either rethink our ungodly, thieving ways or be prepared to be consumed by the hatred we are brewing in the bellies of these poor souls.

TARABA: THE HEAT IN SUNTAI’S ABSENCE- JOURNALISTS AT IT AGAIN

Our journalists and political jobbers are at it again.  In 2010 when the late President Umaru ‘Yar Adua was on his dying bed in Saudi Arabia, the vultures began circling and so much unwanted acrimony was generated which we are yet to overcome as a nation.  Danbaba Danfulani Suntai, Taraba State governor had an accident in a plane he was flying himself and his condition is still unknown.  We all pray for his recovery soonest.  But the signals emanating from the state portends danger for all the citizens of the state and all those who love the state.  I see some people trying to recreate what happened during the dying days of the ‘Yar Adua presidency.  The alleged sacking of the Deputy Governor by thugs said to be sponsored by a sitting Senator while security men attached to the Deputy Governor averted their gaze, says much about what to expect in the near future.  While the Deputy Governor was issuing press statements with a view to dousing the tension generated by the accident and its aftermath, I read a feature in the Daily Trust of November 1^st, 2012 by its Taraba State Correspondents Messrs. Andrew Agbese & Terkula Igidi with the above caption.  I felt scandalised.  Despite what transpired in the run-up to Jonathan taking over from ‘Yar Adua and the attendant friction it created in our society, some people are still ready to take us down that road again.

The feature was nothing but a subtle way of turning one segment of the society against the other.  Otherwise, what is the use of amending the said section 190 of the Constitution, which they copiously quoted?  I thought the section was amended to take care of such eventualities and prevent the recurrence of the unnecessary situation that arose in the ‘Yar Adua case.  If I understand the quoted section of the Constitution very well, the question of which Senatorial Zone or which religion one professes doesn’t arise.  A Deputy Governor / Vice President is picked precisely for what the duo of Agbese and Igidi are now trying to use to ‘disqualify’ Alhaji Umar Garba, the Taraba State Deputy Governor.  When those calling for Goodluck Jonathan to take over were in their elements, nobody brought up the issue of his faith or Zone and when ‘Yar Adua’s handlers resisted the move, the Senate passed what it called the “doctrine of necessity”, something alien to our laws.  We all accepted the Senate’s wisdom.  For the duo to imply that Patrick Yakowa was opposed because of his faith in Kaduna is a blatant lie with a mischievous intent.  He was the Deputy Governor and there wasn’t any ambiguity in our Constitution as who shall take over once there is a vacancy in the Government House so long as the tenure the Governor and his Deputy for which they were elected has not expired. 

No one opposed the take-over by both Goodluck Jonathan and Patrick Yakowa at the time the conditions of vacancies emerged in their respective political spheres.  As far as I am concerned, Jonathan and his group created a panicky scenario where northern politicians, depicted as desperately attempting to cling to power by all means, fair or foul, were trying to deny him his right to “ascend” the throne.  My take then was that it was indecent for us to be fighting over ephemeral things like the presidency while the holder of that office was lying prostrate before His maker, waiting for Him to do as He decreed.  It was disrespectful to his family and friends that we could be so heartless as to start “sharing” his inheritance while he was still alive and kicking.  But I know that every living soul must taste death.  Do we have guarantees that Danbaba will not outlive Alhaji Garba Umar or any of his plethora of loyalists who wanted to be identified as those who protected the realm in the emperor’s absence? 

If it were alright for both Jonathan and Yakowa to succeed their bosses when vacancies existed, then equity demands that Alhaji Umar shall also take-over – it is just a matter of time.  Endangering hatred between and among the disparate ethnic groups in the state will not help anyone bar the merchants of hate.  The writers’ resort to this underhand way of giving credence to those who want section 190 of the Constitution be interpreted to reflect their narrow prisms and horizons, makes them more guilty than the purported thugs who invaded the government house while the security operatives deployed to protect the Deputy Governor looked the other way.  Sub-section (2) of section 190 clearly spells what ought to happen in the case of Taraba State.  The section states unequivocally that “In the event that the governor is unable to transmit the written declaration mentioned in sub-section (1)  of this section within 21 days, the House of Assembly shall, by a resolution made by a simple majority of the vote of the House, mandate the Deputy Governor to perform the functions of the Governor as Acting Governor, until the Governor transmits a letter to the Speaker that he is now available to resume his functions as a Governor.  So said the Nigerian Constitution and concurred by our duo.

As things stand today, Alhaji Umar Garba is the Deputy Governor of Taraba, and until such a time as he is impeached, he remains the Deputy Governor.   We will wait and see if Danbaba may stay beyond the stipulated 21 days or not outside the state.  We will also not relent in our prayers for his recovery.  Morbid as it may sound, I had been looking forward to such a scenario where a principal is indisposed for one reason or the other and a deputy may be compelled to act.  It may appear we have not learnt any lesson from the ‘Yar Adu’a case.  For (un)biased journalists to take such a route portends so much danger for the populace – but more dangerous is for such a paper as the Daily Trust to publish such without minding its ramifications. 

For the information of Agbese and Igidi, Muslim political leaders promoted Yakowa’s candidature in the main and he wasn’t “opposed” to step up to the governor’s office – it was just a matter of taking over and appointing another deputy governor.  Same applied to the presidency when ‘Yar Adu’a died.  If the “odds do not favour a Muslim becoming a governor in Taraba State”, in this case, we have to resort to the Constitution and wait till election time and reject a ‘Muslim’ candidate.  But as it was with Jonathan, so it should be with Alhaji Garba Umar.  This does not mean I have written off Danbaba, God forbid.