The President’s Service Chiefs

When crossing a stream, use the leader to know its depth. Nigerian proverb.

It must be difficult being one of our current military  Service Chiefs. Imagine being in the eye of storms well past your service’s expiry date, with all and sundry asking that you be sacked. Imagine being in a situation where you may want to leave but cannot, and staying on is entirely at the pleasure of a President who says publicly he is displeased with your performance. But many will not shed tears for them.  After all, were not plucked from the air. They were part of the military that Nigerians punished President Jonathan for, and trusted a former military General and Commander-In-Chief(C-in-C) to do better with.

These Service Chiefs held senior positions when the war against Boko Haram was a tiny speck that was bungled into a huge monster by the ‘YarAdua/Jonathan administration, and they witnessed it grow into a new and difficult enemy. They were part of a military under whose nose the Chibok girls were abducted. They could not have been entirely isolated from, or oblivious of the reported scams and sleaze around defence contracts. They were part of the military that was chased out of vast tracts of Nigerian territory under the Jonathan administration. They rose through the ranks of a Nigerian military that was (except for those moments when they overthrew democratic regimes and each other)strong, with a proud tradition. 

So our current Service Chiefs were part  of a mixed past that President Buhari charged with responsibility for creating a new future. It was assumed that he had searched deep and wide, and his selection of NSA, Chief of Defence Staff, Chiefs  of Army, Navy and Air Force,  even given our national creed for geographical spread, had to be the best from what was available. What reasons would the nation have for doubting that a former General now President  will not lead a military with new leadership to raise its levels of professionalism, effectiveness, morale and integrity?

If, therefore,  six years after the nation’s hopes were raised, the chorus now is that we are less secure, and the nation is baying for the heads of Service Chiefs, serious questions need to be asked. First, what is it about our military that has made major improvements in capacities and effectiveness virtually impossible to achieve under the new leadership? My thinking here is that our military has been fighting two major wars for longer than a decade, and losing both. The more damaging war the military has been losing is against itself. It is very likely that exposure to power and corruption in the past have made major inroads into the military, and hallowed values like professionalism, integrity, honour and good leadership have eroded discipline,  morale and institutional integrity. No military can win a war of any type if its foundational values have been emptied by corruption and loss of morale created by nepotism, politicization and discredited leadership.

The second war the military has been losing is one  that pitches it against every threat or security challenge in a nation  that grows more insecure almost by the day. The virtual collapse of policing institutions and the dramatic erosion of social structures that  had worked to  reduce the incursion of  violent criminal activities  in the past have created huge vacuums around the security of citizens and growth of large  number and varieties of internal security challenges. Poor political leaderships at all levels, unread in the complexities of governing a  rapidly-changing country, have consistently  adopted a single-track approach to solving all security challenges and conflicts: use force, and more force. Unfortunately, that force is only the military, and there is not enough of it, or even reasons for its involvement in the first place.

Even if its strength, funding, standards of professionalism and quality of leadership have been consistently addressed and improved in the last two decades, it might just have been able to defeat Boko Haram and consign restiveness in the Niger Delta as a permanent feature of our national life. Now it engages these  security challenges with mixed results, and is then spread thin all over the country with orders  to separate many  fights between communities, fight bandits and rustlers and kidnappers and perform a dozen other duties that are responsibilities of policing institutions and communities themselves. The military loses all its battles against old and new  enemies, not just because it does not know how to fight them, but because its rank and file understands that politicians create problems which they want the military to solve with lives, limbs and poor motivation.

A second question that has to be answered is related to the role of the President and C-in-C. How, and at what stage does a former general and military head of state realize the weaknesses of the military he is commander of? What yardstick does he apply in judging effectiveness? What manner of C-in-C leaves a military engaged in fights in many fronts virtually unchanged and its leaders sitting tight over subordinates who should assume more responsibility? The sad fact is that as C-in-C, President Buhari has failed the military, and the military is failing the nation under its current leadership.

When the Senate recently joined ranks with the House of representatives to demand the removal of Service Chiefs, a presidential spokesman made a comment that has more truth in it than any he has not made. He said the fate of the Service Chiefs was entirely at the discretion of President Buhari. In a sense, he reminded the nation that the military may be failing the nation because President Buhari cannot, or will not fix it. He recently gave its leadership a slap on the wrist with a public rebuke and a demand for improvement. This has not worked, because reports suggest that more soldiers are dying at the hands of insurgents and bandits, and communities are as exposed to armed criminals as they have been in the last year. The answer to the second question therefore is that the military is poorly led not just by Service Chiefs, but by President Buhari, and it is difficult to see how it can win any of its multiple wars with this type of leadership

A third question that needs an answer has to do with the type of leadership the nation needs in the face of its many political and security challenges. The first answer that comes to mind is that at the very worst, it must do a lot better than President Buhari’s leadership. It must have a vision of a secure and peaceful nation with growing opportunities. It must be willing to take tough and informed decisions, develop an effective sense of timing and hold all persons with responsibility to account. It must operate with high intelligence and a sense of purpose. It must build and sustain strong institutions, including defence, security and law and order institutions and public service that are run by competence, integrity and accountability. It must be a leadership willing to take an informed view about the state of the Nigerian political and administrative structures, with the goals of addressing key issues that represent developing and existential threats.

In the meantime, it will be important for President Buhari to realize that Service Chiefs are not aides he can retain or fire at his personal pleasure. They are public servants who are accountable to him, as he is accountable to the nation. The bottom line is, he has not improved national security under their leadership. Keeping them in place suggests either of two things. One, he alone is satisfied with their performance, and the nation does need to know why. Even making allowance for the need for secrecy, this is unacceptable. Two, he does not care enough for all opinions to replace current Service Chiefs with others who may do better. That is intolerable contempt from an elected President.

President Buhari needs to do a lot more than replace Service Chiefs. He needs to look deeply at our defence, security and law and order assets and liabilities and address them before the end of his term. The nation will not survive its current challenges unless he accepts to affect major improvements  in the management of national security. The replacement of current leadership of the military and security and policing agencies should only be a part of this.

The young Nigerian

“The young bird does not crow until he hears the old ones do” – African proverb

Read more: https://www.dailytrust.com.ng/the-young-nigerian.html

he young bird does not crow until he hears the old ones do” – African proverb

The arguments around whether Nigeria will submit its over one and a half  million young people to sit for the West African Examinations Council Examinations (WASCE) or, in more general terms, the debates on possibilities and timings of re-opening schools must be additional sources of depressing young Nigerians. There are hundreds of thousands in federal and some State universities who are being reminded that studies will not resume even when governments give the approval to open schools and tertiary institutions because their teachers will be on strike. There are millions of schoolchildren who are bored and stressing parents at home. A few receive on-line lessons at home, teaching methods that are still of questionable value, but are important because they allow parents and schools to create a semblance of movement beyond a static, depressing stage. There is another category of the young Nigerian, the almajiri who was swept away here and there in the initial panic triggered by the pandemic, but is now back, very much in business on the margins of existence.

No one had a say in the arrival of COVID-19, a phenomenon which so rudely interrupted our life as a nation fast depleting its store of faith that there is the possibility of a good future for our young Nigerians. There were already attempts to patch a few sore points such as the huge numbers of unemployed graduates through blurry programmes like N-Power and even more blurry dole-outs to vulnerable groups. Now the plan to borrow N56b and throw it at 774,000 young people to sweep streets and have pocket money for three months after which they resume normal hopeless existence is entangled in quarrels over how much goes to lucky, un-connected  young people, and how much goes to others as largess and patronage by politicians. There will be much bitterness after selections into temporary relief are over, as majority will be left out because they lacked powerful people who will push them through irrespective of their rights or merit.

The young Nigerian is an expert in the science of getting ahead without rights or  merit. He is well taught by adults who have perverted every standard they set for others. For every position available in the public service, one hundred graduates will apply. The one who gets the job would have been decided long before the process even begun. When multitudes began to appear and cause scandalous stampede, government found a way to ask for approvals to be exempted from advertising vacancies. Positions are quietly shared between statutory regulatory agencies, leadership of employing agencies, legislature and other powerful people. Still, the young Nigerian keeps hoping that one day he will find his own big man, or someone who will teach him how to circumvent tough barriers against the powerless.

The young Nigerian knows all about circumventing barriers. Very few children go from kindergarten to the end of tertiary education without indulging in a widely known and tolerated practice of bending examination rules. Parents know this, and in most instances, the level of efficiency involved in the arrangements involving school authorities, parents, teachers, invigilators, children and young people to assist students cheat is breathtaking. It is no exaggeration to say that if we had collectively deployed our energies and resources that we use to subvert basic education standards towards improving the overall quality of education, Nigeria would be counted among countries with the best education standards. At the end of his education, wherever that point is decided by a system where progress is made by abilities to fund and cheat, the young Nigerian resumes a life of extreme frustration. Groomed by a broken system to work for a salary, the vast majority of young people finishing schools and tertiary institutions will not know what else to do with all their years in school if their lives depended on it.

There are millions more of our young scraping a living in a highly volatile informal sector of the economy. Many work hard to make a little here and there, and then hope that the opportunity does not dry up. There are others who have no education, skills or hope of securing a productive existence. In terms of numbers, this category is frightening. This group is open to scrapping an existence through crime. Drugs cushion marginal and brutal lives. Organized violence sweeping across the country provides an outlet. Many young people join, deploying rare brutality at victims and law enforcement agencies and expecting same in a life that is very likely to be short. Finally, there is a growing group that services a political process that is fueled by illegal money, perversion of all rules and violence. This process teaches its young apprentices and foot soldiers one lesson: win at all cost, or lose at great cost.

The young Nigerian will be familiar with the underlying values that surround the Magu saga, the revelations from the  Niger Delta Development Commission(NDDC), the controversy over how many slots out of the 774,000 sweeping jobs the legislature will take, the corruptions in the management of COVIC-19 all over the country, and just about every facet of public and even private lives. He has not been groomed to expect honesty, integrity or justice from leaders, or even religious people. The most important lesson he learnt from home, school, streets and forests is this: survive at all cost, and do not expect any favours. He lives with multiple standards, which leaves him free to choose his own.

Yet the young Nigerian has to sit and wait while quarreling and thieving leaders decide whether he  goes back to school or not. If he lives on the margins of a shrinking economy, he has to worry over his fate at the hands of government officials and law-enforcement agencies. He has no idea when or if he can resume studies at the university, since his teachers and governments are involved in the usual cat-and-mouse that is entirely about more money for them and less for quality education. He lives with the demands and restrictions of COVID-19, bottling-up huge energies or finding outlets in unusual places, while adults plan and scheme their ways around rules and scandals right under his nose.

The young Nigerian is the biggest casualty of a failed political system. It feeds him on a solid staple of fiction that there are groups out there that are his enemies, thus diverting attention from massive failures. He is taught to hate, not leaders who have let him down, but other Nigerians who are held up as reasons behind his desperate or hopeless existence. He has no faith in his nation; no trust in leaders or authority, and no hope that he can affect a change in his life. For many, it easier to fight against his community and his country that to work for it. Millions have left the country, taking their raw labour or skills to other nations that value them. Thousands have died trying to get there. Those working for others feed the narrative of a failed nation that has no right to exist unless they re-design it.

If this nation will survive the next decade as one, it will have to address a number of major issues. The first is to begin to see and do something about the foundational threat of official, stupendous corruption that is feeding insecurity and creating millions of alienated young people who feel they owe nothing to it. The second is to fix a broken political and electoral system that breeds bitterness, incompetence and frustration that the nation is stuck, or rapidly regressing. At the very least, there must be better quality of leaders who will emerge to provide renewed hope and a vision to rebuild the nation from the bottom up. Thirdly, it must revisit its priorities. Its biggest asset is its young. It is also its biggest threat. We must commit to providing  good education and skills and opening up employment opportunities for children of the poor. Our young must be better than us.

A final word. I apologise to any young Nigerian who feels this material has been unfair to them.

Inevitability of the inevitable

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you are still a rat”. Lily Tomlin

In governance and leadership positions, bad things happen when you do not fix what is wrong. There are reasons why problems do not get fixed until they become disasters. Those who should fix them may not know that some things need fixing. Plain ignorance or inadequate exposure to the way problems are identified and fixed are responsible for this. Another reason is unwillingness to fix problems. This is a function of an understanding that problems represent advantages and opportunities when they are not fixed. Another reason is inability to fix problems. This is to do with lack of capacity to fix an obvious problem until it grows into a disaster. Finally, there is simple, old-fashioned indifference. This is a combination of contempt for consequences of inaction and failure to recognize the imperatives of fixing problems.

The seeming mess involving Ibrahim Magu’s current circumstances provide an interesting study into how and why things will go wrong under the administration of President Buhari. Out of deference to the process that should establish guilt or otherwise of Magu, it is important to limit temptations to hang him higher that his traducers are taking him. At this stage, it is safe to say that Magu merely represents a symbol of a very deep malaise which has been a key part of the DNA of the Buhari administration. The basic character and structure of this is made up of a President whose basic conception of leadership is to let a few trusted people do most of his work the way they think he wants it done, and he retreats to being President while they wield his power, most times against each other.

These elements form powerful groups or factions which carve areas of influence, growing on the vacuum allowed by a remote President. In most instances they fight each other over spoils of a closed system with virtually no mediation. No part of this structure is neutral, and power flows and ebbs largely on the basis of who can demonstrate access to, and support of the President. There are fixed power points in this structure, but they operate at a position substantially outside the basic structure. They are, nonetheless, extremely powerful in determining friends and enemies and keeping boundaries fixed. The entire structure creates near perfect-settings for abuse, inefficiencies that are tolerated and grow bigger, opacity and loss of control  over systems, structures and processes.

These are  the contexts that inform the basic failures that have produced the Magu embarassment. Lets look at this from the prisms of decision-making. President Buhari wins an election substantially because he had an image for not being corrupt and promising to fight corruption. Magu comes to him recommended as the man to help him head the premier anti corruption agency. It is possible that even Magu’s nomination to the President had some dust from skirmishes over candidates of different factions who were already in place. In any case, he was recommended to the 8th Senate for clearance by the President, who may have needed to consult powerful insiders like the former DG of the DSS before doing this, but a president who knows his powers will consider this a disposable luxury. When asked by the Senate to screen Magu, the DSS advised against clearing him, reportedly giving strong, damning  reasons. This is where other leaders will be strong and decisive. If your own security outfit says do not appoint, you need to show due deference to its mandate and professionalism, unless other interests have one of your ears whispering that you should ignore advise from a powerful outfit under you like the DSS.

President Buhari had a number of other choices here. He could have replaced Magu with another nominee. He could have stood his ground against the DSS if Magu was really worth it, and persuaded the agency not to oppose his clearance again. He could even have undertaken a major investigation into why his nominee for a very sensitive post was shot down by his own agency. If what DSS said was correct, his continuation in the police under a corruption-fighting administration would even have been untenable. If the DSS had motives other than a desire to prevent the wrong person become Chairman of EFCC, another leader would insist on establishing this and taking appropriate action. He could even have prevailed on Saraki and his colleagues to treat the DSS report as fictional mischief, but he was in the trenches attempting to strangle Saraki. It is possible that the president did not know he had many options; or that camps had already taken control of his presidency; or that it was not a problem when  his troops were shooting at each other; or, indeed, that it was not worth his bother. So he kept Magu, as an unconfirmed chairman of a very important agency in a country with at least 50,000 people who could do the job well. But Magu had been wounded and would always know he had enemies lurking, so he had to fortify himself with allies and spoils.

When the president sent Magu’s name to the Senate for the second time, no one would have had cause to believe that he had not done his homework. Even if the nation did not hear of it, it was expected that the president had sorted out whatever it was that was behind the indicting recommendation of the DSS: an error or mischief which had  been rectified or  punished. Apparently, as it turned out, the president had done nothing. The DSS insisted that Mr Magu was unfit to hold public office, again. For the second time, the president’s nominee for a very sensitive post at the heart of his credibility collapsed under unfriendly fire from his own side. At this stage most  Presidents  will replace Magu with another nominee. Our President Buhari went the other way. He ignored grey areas in law, principles governing public office and even morality in allowing Magu to continue to superintend a very sensitive agency.

If Magu thought he could get away with just about anything, who should blame him? If the faction that produced him, protected him and kept him safe and sound against the other side, why should he fear? If Magu read his mandate in its widest form, and literally designed his modus operandi as an untouchable, who should blame him? Who was he accountable to? The President. How was he to he account? Through offices that had themselves been  part of the bitter factional warfare since appointed  people (and others  who were too powerful to be appointed) close to Buhari knew about the gaps around him. Magu was not entirely alone. Powerful people had his back, and they kept him in place for five years.

If this nation has stomach for shocks and disappointments regarding the stewardship of President Buhari, it should not waste it on the outpouring of outrageous revelations that will spill  out of the investigations of Magu. There will be enough in asking why a public officer will exercise massive powers in a very sensitive position for five years in an acting capacity, even when he was adjudged a major liability by a government agency and rejected by the Senate? There will be more in asking why all the allegations and investigations of Magu took over a year, his reported transgressions went on for years, reports of abuse, impropriety, highhandedness, favouritism, manipulation of the public media to get dubious outcomes, insubordination, corruption and possibly more that will be revealed have taken this long to get the president to react?

If the nation’s capacity to be astounded by failures and limitations of this administration still has some room  it should be prepared to know that the disposition, the forces and the weaknesses that created and sustained Magu will be in place long after he takes a few big names with him. Indeed, given the manner all sorts of terms are being given to the circumstances surrounding his current status and the long knives being sharpened for a bruising battle on both sides, it will be unwise to write off Magu entirely. Worse, Magu could go, but there will be many more skeletons in the cupboard. Service Chiefs. Ministers and heads of agencies of government running around with stinking allegations. Someone once said if something is designed to go wrong, it will. There are ways to identify inevitability. President Buhari’s administration does not make it a difficult job to do.

Friends and foes

                  The axe forgets what the tree remembers. African proverb.

Alhaji (Dr) Yusuf Maitama Sule, Danmasanin Kano died three years ago.  There has been some of mentions of this in social media, mostly from young northerners who believe they lost an irreplaceable icon. His compatriots in the Northern Elders Forum (NEF), the last final block he placed  on an incredible legacy of service to the nation and the North would have remembered and prayed for him. It will be comforting to know that there is a book on his colourful and eventful life because it would be a great injustice to history if the story is not told of a man with a towering intellect, a walking encyclopedia on Nigerian  politics and an inimitable combination of greatness and profound humility.

It will not be entirely correct to say that Danmasanin Kano died a happy and fulfilled man. Certainly, Allah knows best, he died in service to God, and nothing would come between him and that devotion. But he died weighed by concerns that the North he loved and laboured for, and the Nigeria he projected and embodied with such distinction were both severely distressed and floundering. Even in his last days, he continued to make the case for service to the North, and the demands that all leadership must be made to respect the values of justice, accountability and sacrifice. It was a message he repeated equally to the most powerful leaders and the humblest citizen, and to young Nigerians who only heard of these values as abstract concepts.

 In his last few years, his beloved Kano was showing evidence of deep, simmering conflicts between systems and values that will neither die nor be born. Like most prominent Kanawa, he had agonized over a historic incongruence: an unusual Emir and a Governor with pronounced paranoia over loss of power. Danmasani felt that it was not going to end well, and Allah saved him the agony of witnessing a most unseemly outing involving the family of late Ado Bayero in a political context that tore a long, proud history to pieces.

His Northern Elders Forum (NEF) was a tear-away from the larger Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), a revolt of sorts by elderly men and women who were exasperated by the failure of the ACF to be more assertive in the protection of Northern interests. The manner Northerners, particularly from the North East, appeared to have been abandoned to an insurgency by the federal administration, and the absence of a strong voice from the North, were the major catalysts behind the creation of the NEF. The new group had solid support from very powerful personalities and looked set to change the way the North did business with power and the rest of Nigeria.

No one was more qualified to lead the NEF than the apostle of moral politics, the man who had evolved from NPC’s band of the best and the brightest into the statesman with a captivating voice. He led it with dignity and a level of sagacity that created a healthy balance between a critical organization of distinguished Northerners and a responsible group that was willing to help with advise and support where necessary. President Jonathan experienced the persistence of a small group of Northerners who would not walk away from locked doors. He met the group a number of times to discuss matters related to the security and economy of the North, including the imperatives of exploring additional options of ending the Boko Haram insurgency. 

As the elections of 2015 drew near, it became obvious that the fate of the North had never been more at stake. The NEF went through an intensive and difficult search for where to invest its considerable weight. It was a choice between an administration that was at best indifferent over the state of the North and at worst a bungling leadership that was a threat to the entire nation, against the opportunity of replacing it with the presidency of General Muhammadu Buhari who had promised to re-secure the nation, fight corruption and fix the economy. It was a very difficult job steering the entire Forum to stand solidly behind a Buhari Presidency. Many members had reservations regarding his track record  in positions of leadership in the past. A few were founding fathers of the PDP, and it took more than a little effort to get them to throw over the remnants of partisan loyalties. Some of the members of the Forum now shoulder responsibilities under the Buhari administration.

Once the decision was taken to support Buhari, no member looked back or dropped out. When the campaign became dirtier and Candidate Buhari was being demonized in Western capitals as likely to be soft on religious extremism and a threat to democratic traditions in the event of a loss, the NEF did the rounds of key diplomatic missions in Abuja and the Danmasani and his loyal deputy, Paul Unongo led  a strong team to Europe and the US at its own expense. The outcome was almost dramatic in its effect: it created a groundswell of positive disposition in the West towards Buhari and a commitment to remain neutral. NEF made no song and dance about this. Here at home, NEF organized a game-changing meeting between candidate Buhari and over 200 senior Christian clergy, an event that was vital in raising the confidence of Northern Christians under his Presidency.

Danmasani’s NEF threw itself into the campaign, hoping that its contribution would help   facilitate  a regime change, create an administration that would stop alarming decline  in integrity levels, defeat an insurgency that had the run of the North,  and provide a new lease of life for Northern political unity. Danmasani broke down in tears while praying for Buhari’s success when NEF paid a congratulatory visit to the President-elect, the first group to do so. Encouraged by the President-elect to support him with advise, the NEF submitted recommendations it thought would consolidate the administration with inclusiveness, and political wisdom that would build bridges where the elections showed some weaknesses. Significantly, it advised him to work with the party and the legislature and get a Northern Christian elected Senate President,  and appoint a competent Igbo person as Secretary of Government of the Federation. It turned out that there were many keys to the new presidency. Senator Bukola Saraki who had been lurking with strong intent saw a unprotected goalpost and scored a winner. A Northern Christian was then appointed SGF, but he was the candidate of holders of other keys to the presidency located in Lagos.

Danmasani witnessed the high and low points in NEF-Buhari relations. Under his leadership, the doors to the President slowly closed. The Forum watched as Boko Haram survived a major onslaught by the new administration, but clung to a territory to continue to torment the population. It watched a President who had promised much settle down to an unimpressive performance in the fight against corruption, insecurity and rehabilitating the economy of the North. Barriers against advise went up. The circle of influence became progressively narrower around a President  who said he belonged to everybody, but in fact belonged to a handful. Danmasani was spared the agony of witnessing much of the North swamped by criminals. He did not live to see his group go back to the trenches from where it fought the Jonathan administration. He was not alive to see the Forum publicly denounce the record of President Buhari from the perspectives of Northerners who had voted for him to defeat an incumbent President. He had sat at the head of meetings with Ohaneze Ndigbo to improve North-East political relations, but the formation of a platform to take a stand against the re-election of President Buhari involving  major regional groups occurred after his death. Death spared him the pain of hearing these same leaders of ethnic groups from the South sweep Nigeria’s entire problems to the doorsteps of ‘Hausa-Fulani Northern Muslims’. 

Danmasani’s North is a lot more insecure than it has ever been. Its insecurity is compounding its poverty at a frightening  rate. He will be proud of his compatriots who have stood solidly in defence of fellow Northerners. His NEF is now the northern frontline in the fight to secure the region, manage ethno-religious conflicts better and arrest increasing  poverty. It is the reference point on discussions on the future of the nation. It is in familiar territory: it took up the Jonathan administration for the North, and it is taking up the Buhari administration for the same North. Danmasani’s NEF is neither friend nor foe. It will only fight or work for a North that lives with dignity and justice in Nigeria.