Mr. Muhammadu Buhari as the Hero of Aisha’s BBC Interview By Abimbola Lagunju

Aisha Buhari’s BBC Hausa Service interview is generating a lot of excitement in the polity. For some, her responses represent political opportunities to either self-glorify as prophets or to condemn the president for his political choices. For others the interview looks like a betrayal of a husband by his wife. And for the misogynists of all shades, the interview represents an abomination. However, irrespective of the judgment made of the interview, the freedom and frankness with which Mrs. Buhari fielded the questions surprised everyone as they do not match our mental representation of the President.

Our president cuts the image of a no-nonsense head of a household. His carriage and demeanor portend an aristocratic Fulani rooted in the firm tradition of patriarchy. His stern mien conveys the impression that his words carry more weight than his tall lanky frame. His background as a General in the army gives the impression that his is to give orders and for the others to execute without questions within and outside his family compound. Put together, all these characteristics show a person to whom dialogue within the household is an anathema. This is probably the impression that our president gives to many people inside and outside Nigeria.

But Aisha Buhari, his wife of almost three decades has, through her bare-all interview with the BBC, shown that we all have a wrong impression of our president as a family man and probably as a politician. Her responses demonstrated that Mr. Buhari is a liberal man who sees himself as an equal partner in a family relationship. Who would know him better?

The open-mindedness and the frankness of Aisha’s responses to BBC’s questions could not have been on the spur of the moment. Clearly, if Mr. Buhari had been a fierce household dictator, Aisha would have learnt over the years to rein in her independent thoughts. Women that live with dictatorial husbands will not dare bare their minds about the politics or the behaviour of their husbands in public. At least not in Nigeria. This interview gives an insight into Buhari’s household where, it appears, independent opinions and the freedom to express them are allowed. Mrs. Buhari has shown the world the humane and women’s rights-oriented face of her husband.

And the President’s responses confirm this suspicion. If he was surprised that his wife gave the interview, he did not show it and did not excoriate her. There are many ill-omened responses that the President could have given. A typical Nigerian man could have ominously said, “This is a family matter. I will deal with the situation when I get back home..”  But the President simply said, “my wife belongs to the kitchen, living room and the other room..”  A smart answer by all standards to massage the misogynistic ego of obsessed testosterone-driven Nigerians who would have taken him to the washers. He did not promise to clobber his wife as many would have done. How many Nigerian men hit their wives everyday for insignificant things? And he is being criticized for his response to Aisha’s interview by women’s rights groups!

Mallam Garba Shehu, his spokesperson, when first confronted by those that apparently took offence at the President’s response to his wife’s interview said, on twitter, “Mr. President respects the place of women in our society. He believes in the abilities of women.” This is logically true, given the freedom and honesty with which Aisha answered the interview questions posed. Under further pressure, Mallam Garba Shehu sought to further explain the President’s response by saying, “He was obviously throwing a banter….. My friends, can't a leader get a sense humour anymore? Mr. President laughed before that statement was made…” This shows that the President did not get worked up because his wife expressed her independent opinion on the situation of things in Nigeria.

It is my opinion that the President on his return back to Nigeria from his trip will not make a big deal out of his wife’s interview. He is not cut out for that. He will, probably over tea with his wife discuss the merits and the demerits of the interview and move on. Hopefully he will act on some of her concerns, and if he does not, it will not break up his family.

The true hero of this interview is not Aisha Buhari. She did not tell us many things that we did not know. And harping on what she said during the interview is immaterial and puerile politics. The true hero is the President who, in aberration of his social and religious environment as well as his military career proclivities has shown that the issue of the Rights of women is not just a political discourse but a way of life to be practiced both in private and the public. This is an opportunity for campaigners for Women’s Rights to leap in the other direction. It is the moment to celebrate the anti-thesis of their thoughts and representation of the President.

The import of this event should be seen vis-à-vis the gender equality bill in the parliament. There have been reports of some religious leaders warning against the passage of the bill for religious reasons. Mr. Buhari has, by the freedom of expression of independent opinion demonstrated by his wife shown on which side of the debate he stands.

I give Mr. Buhari all my respects as a head of a household ….I have been wondering what would be my reaction if my wife were to grant an interview to a news outlet in a way that expresses her independent thoughts and which directly or indirectly puts me on the spot…..Ask yourself this question.

Nigeria: When Facts Don’t Prove the Hypothesis, Change the Hypothesis, not the Facts By Abimbola Lagunju

There are many things profoundly wrong with our country. The hypothetical political, economic and existential frameworks on which the country is built do not fit the facts of our life as a nation. We have borrowed theories that are inherently faulty from source and have imposed them on ourselves as our desired metrics of governance and self-management. Borrowed theories cannot be twisted to produce a national vision. A vision of a nation can only be rooted in grassroots aspirations of the people and cannot be built on poorly-understood imported theories and frameworks. It’s not a surprise that successive leaderships of Nigeria have not been able to define the Nigeria-project and if there is a national vision, then I have not heard of it. What we have had and we have from different regimes and administrations that have ruled this country are ill-defined and unsustainable short-term objectives that get truncated either by coups or by elections. Nigeria is not only home to countless abandoned projects, but it is also the haven of abandoned dreams.

The theoretical framework of Nigerian politics is based on democracy and the rule of law. Democracy, a system inherently divisive, is the political choice in a country where the national substructure sits on an unstable tectonic plate. In an environment where abject poverty is not sufficient to seal the many faultlines that define our existence and instigate a common and popular demand from Katsina to Calabar, any talk of ideological alignments required by democracy is futile and the political parties in Nigeria have abandoned any pretensions at any ideology. On what leg then can democracy stand on the several faultlines of this nation if poverty, a common social enemy is not a decider of electoral outcomes?

The Nigerian democracy is premised on the fact that franchise can be bartered and purchased, and when the holder is unwilling, he must be discounted and ultimately discountenanced. The financial power to purchase people’s franchise is the new ideology.  It is a commercial transaction where the buyer completely dispossesses the seller of not only his electoral right, but also, of all his rights as a citizen and as a human being. It is a political ideology founded on a permanent disconnect between rights-holders and the political duty bearers as soon as the transaction is consummated. Thus, politicians need to amass wealth irrespective of the legality of the process and from any source in order to be taken as a serious contender for any political post.  The bottom-line is that the legitimate aspirations of the people do not count and indeed must be discounted in order for the Nigerian version of democracy to function. In the Nigerian system, the two arms of governments inhabited by politicians – the presidency and the legislature are products of any other system but democracy.

National institutions which are supposed to promote and protect democracy vis-à-vis the aberrant political system have been reduced to a case of ownership issue. Who owns the institutions? In the mindset of the Nigerian politician, all the institutions of the state belong to the political class. The people neither know nor understand who the legitimate owner is. The managers of these institutions, unsure of themselves, have yielded the control and ownership of the state institutions to the political class. Under this setting, the police heed the biddings of politicians, the central bank opens its vaults to prying fingers, the judiciary sells judgments, the civil service warps its mission, etc. Nothing works…. Nothing, because the superstructure of democracy does not fit and cannot stand on the defective substructure of this nation.

Can the rule of law bring some sanity into the warped political system? The rule of law has become a weapon in the hands of the political class to fight each other. When the existent rules are insufficient for their purposes, they rewrite or invent new ones to fit their immediate desires. In many cases the rules are completely forgotten.  The wigs and gowns, all guided and inspired by the large amounts of money to be legitimately or otherwise made, go into a frenzy of interpretations and misinterpretations. The recent arrests of senior judges in Nigeria and the disclosure of their illicit cash accumulations are an indication that the guardians and the final arbiters of the rule of law are unreliable.

The multiple criticisms visited upon the different aspects of our political and economic life presume the workability of the hypothetical frameworks on which the Nigerian political system is built. However, this is not the case. Attacking symptoms does not cure a disease. The criticisms may highlight the rot, but do not put the disease under spotlight. The blatant indifference of the Nigeria political class to scandals that would have sent even the most hardened criminal politician under cover in western countries is a sign that questions have to be asked about the adoption of this political framework.

How low will Nigeria descend before our intellectuals stop mutilating facts to fit the imported political and economic hypothetical frameworks? We must understand that when facts don’t fit a hypothesis, it is time to change the hypothesis. When will we honestly sit down to work out autochthonous systems that will serve our aspirations and build superstructures on this defective substructure? It will be a failure of imagination and intellectual laziness to resign ourselves to this system that has created monsters of politicians. It is not everything that glitters in other climes that can be gold on our shores.

When eventually the process of working out the appropriate political system with inbuilt accountability measures is engaged, it will be a great mistake to involve this present political class, the progenitors and beneficiaries of chaos in the process.

Of Lies – Ryan Lochte, Rio Olympics and Black Africans By Abimbola Lagunju

Recently during the Rio Olympics, Mr Ryan Lochte, a much decorated US swimmer attempted to smear the credibility of a whole nation. He invented a story that never happened and sought the interface of the misrepresenting violent stereotype of the host nation to pass his fiction for truth. In his warped narrative, he, the aggressor transformed himself into a victim of a crime in which he was the villain and not the victim.  His dummy story was read all over the world. Some, who read the story shrugged their shoulders and with the misguided stereotype in mind, thought, “It’s Brazil anyway, that is a non-story. It is normal. Very high crime rate.” Some others were horrified that an Olympian, particularly a high profile one had been subjected to such a horrendous crime. The Brazilian people and the authorities were disappointed and unhappy.  They did not want the Rio Olympics to be remembered by any crime that happened during the games. They wanted the event to be remembered as a joyful gathering of world’s best athletes and into which painstaking planning and resources had been invested.

They sought to know more about what really happened to Ryan Lochte. Their investigations took the veil away from Mr. Lochte’s story. Ryan had told a barefaced white lie. Rather than being a victim, he was the aggressor. The technology of closed circuit television unraveled his lies. The Brazilians did not waste time to expose the pitiful liar that wanted to sacrifice their national integrity for his own ego.

According to news reports of what really transpired, Ryan had gone out in the company of three other swimmer-colleagues allegedly to the French camp and had partied all night. In his own words he was drunk. On their way back from the party in the early hours of the next day, they stopped at a petrol station so the camaradas could use the loo. The door of the toilet was locked. In a drunken rage or perhaps because of his grandiose delusion, he broke down the toilet door. The petrol station guards challenged his behavior and told him he had to pay for the damages. He raged and it took a gun drawn by one of the guards to calm him down. He was told to sit on the floor like any common criminal. After a while, he paid for the damages and left with his colleagues back to their camp. But Mr. Lochte could not live with his ego battered. He had to change the story. He would rather have the image and honour of the host country damaged than his ego. He invented a story of armed robbery in which he was the victim.  But the hosts would not have that. They undid Ryan Lochte. The Brazilians deserve an extra gold medal for protecting their integrity and self-esteem.

Had this happened in any country in Africa, Mr Lochte would have escaped with his lie. The host country would have been browbeaten into shameful submission and admission of guilt. The world press would have gone into frenzy to further damage the African State. It would have been thought inconceivable that someone of Mr. Lochte’s status could tell a blatant lie. Warped statistics would have been rolled out by western pundits to back Mr. Lochte’s lie. And no one, no one would have believed the African authorities if they attempted to counter Ryan’s lies with contrary evidence.

The Rio story brings to fore the different historical lies that have been told against the African and which have formed the basis of stereotyping of Black people by other races. Here are some of the lies:

Georges Curvier, a French biologist, once wrote in his book, The Animal Kingdom, (1827-35), that “The African manifestly approaches the monkey tribe. The hordes of which this variety is composed have always remained in a complete state of barbarism…”. America’s Thomas Jefferson also shared this position and said, “...I advance it therefore as a suspicion only that the blacks whether originally a distinct race or made distinct by time and circumstances, are inferior to the whites in the endowments of the mind and body…" Georg Wilhem Hegel in his Philosophy of History, said this of Black Africans: "….their condition is capable of no development of culture, and as we see them at this day, such they have always been..." The Vatican, through Pope Julius II after having declared at the beginning of 16^th century (1512) that Indians in South America could be considered the sons and daughters of Adam and thus could not be enslaved, but that Black Africans could be enslaved as they were not of Adam and Eve, recanted in 18^th century by advancing the doctrine that indeed, Africans could also be considered as children of Adam and Eve, but that they were the accursed sons of Ham (Genesis 9: 18-27). Britain’s Lord Milner also had this to say of early South African politics: “A political equality of white and black is impossible, the white man must rule because he is elevated by many, many steps above the black man.” (Martin Meredith: Nelson Mandela, A Biography. Penguin Books 1997) Frantz Fanon in his book, The Wretched of the Earth made reference to one Dr. Carothers of the WHO, who in the 1950’s opined that, a “black man is equivalent to a lobotomized white man.” As recently as July 2007, Nicholas Sarkozy the former president of France in a speech in Dakar, Senegal practically diagnosed schizophrenia in Black Africans when he accused Africans of remembering what never happened in their history. He said, “The tragedy of Africa is that the African has not fully entered into history. … Africa’s challenge is to enter to a greater extent into history. Africa…is to realise that the golden age that Africa is forever recalling will not return because it has never existed.”  These lies have stereotyped the African and the Black race as an accidental beneficiary and object of history rather than an active contributor to and participant in human history. And these lies continue in different forms – in statistics of dubious origin, in generalization of oddities by the western press and in deliberate omission of historical and contemporary achievements of Black Africans.

The US Olympic Committee quickly apologized for the behaviour of Ryan and his three colleagues and declared that "The behaviour of these athletes is not acceptable, nor does it represent the values of Team USA or the conduct of the vast majority of its members." Some of Lochte’s sponsors, ashamed of their business partner, have withdrawn their sponsorship. Mr. Ryan Lochte is in disgrace.

Had the Brazilians not put their brain and resources to prove that the story of Ryan was a mere fabrication, the whole world would have, in their minds equated the beautiful and well planned Rio Olympics to armed robbery.

Black Africans have the obligation, like the Brazilians did, to provide evidence that the historical lies told against the black race are simply white lies. Like in the case of Ryan Lochte, these lies are fabrications of the vilest minds. These lies do not in any way represent us. Our indifference will not make these lies to go away. We need to shame the liars in a concerted way.

Aso Rock is Jinxed! By Abimbola Lagunju

Nigerians are perplexed by their political and economic misfortunes. This is an understatement of our condition.  It is the reality of our existence that despite the bright minds and enviable natural resources that this country is endowed with, nothing seems to be working for the people. All tested political and economic theories that have worked elsewhere and have produced results do not work in our country. Somehow, they just do not work and no one seems to understand why. Some blame the leadership while others have put the responsibility on the followership.

Our leaders travel to all parts of the world to learn how other countries operate their legislative, judiciary, economic, scientific and existential systems, but they either forget what they have seen and learnt immediately they return back home or they put all their efforts to figure out the unworkability of their new knowledge in Nigeria. We do not see any signs of their acquired knowledge either in their conduct or in their political or economic decisions. They simply travel for travelling sake.

Sometimes, these same leaders bereft of any ideas despite their extensive travels and seeking to silence the challenging vocal diaspora employ some bright and high-flying experts from among the diaspora to bring new ideas and try them out in Nigeria. They make them team leads and rely on them for guidance. But as soon as these experts arrive, they metamorphose into worse versions of their employers. They bring nothing; they take everything and leave the people worse than they found them. When challenged by the people, they flaunt their CV’s in their faces, and when the heat becomes too much, the experts from the diaspora pack their bags, now loaded with our money and travel back to what they call their “bases” in foreign lands.

The battered followership is fed up with the disconnect between the highs of electoral campaigns and the subsequent lows of post-election governance and leadership. They have realized that their investments in goodwill and hope every four years do not bring any yields. The leaders waste the capital and impoverish the mind and intellect of their followers.  Largely inarticulate and when not, incoherent due to the enormity of their predicament in their demands for a better life, the followership resorts to religion for solace or to arms for redress. Neither works for them. God will not do what he has given intellect to man to do. Neither will a small cache of arms in the hands of some overpower the arsenal of a state.

It appears that the Nigerian state has reached a dead end. We know the problems, we know the “why” (leadership and disoriented followership), but we do not know from where the problems arise. What changes a good and God-fearing man during the campaign into a monster after winning the election? What transformed Abacha? What changed Obasanjo of a socialist orientation in his first coming into a disciple of Graham Sumner of the infamous “it is not the function of the State to make men happy” in his second coming?  What blinded and deafened a honourable man like Yar’Adua? What changed a shy, decent and God-fearing Jonathan into a political fiend and corrupt wastrel? What do these men of diverse backgrounds share in common that could be at the origin of their misrule? It is Aso Rock !

A person can be jinxed. A process can be jinxed. A house can be jinxed. A town can be jinxed. A people, either in small groups or as a whole can be jinxed. Jinxing transcends science. It is a reality of life. It cuts across all cultures.  The chances may be one in a million, but it happens. And it just happens and no one knows why it happens. It is an unexplainable phenomenon where two and two can make five or make zero; a mathematical conundrum where all equations end in the negative sense. Nothing simply works even in the best combinations known to the human mind. Logic becomes illogic. Forward is backward; backward is backward at double pace.  Ratio transforms into confoundment.

The jinxed may not know that he is jinxed. An observant person that moves into a jinxed house or into a process may notice a reversal in his fortunes and realize that something has gone wrong. If the house is status-linked or the process is a potentially profitable one, then the person looks for help either from his pastor or his imam in order to keep himself in his position even when the odds are stacked against him.

In the case of a jinxed state institution, no good decisions that affect millions of people can be made in such a building as the occupant with his family and his team are confounded. Their intended good becomes evil and causes pains. Good intentions that enter the building become bad or become twisted. Their utterances become weird and incoherent. Promises made are not kept. The occupants can neither see nor hear the cries of the people that they have sworn to protect.

In Aso Rock, Olusegun Obasanjo who was the first beneficiary of the current democratic dispensation sought to undermine the constitution with an alleged third term agenda; Umaru Yar’adua allegedly handed over power to Turai and her cabal;  and Goodluck Jonathan, a decent man turned the Central Bank of Nigeria into a private property. That something happened to these people while they were resident in Aso Rock is attested to by the fact that soon after vacating the building, the scales appear to fall from their eyes. Olusegun Obasanjo sees and writes on deficits in governance; he challenges corruption and advocates for a sensible and sensitive government. Jonathan, who sought to buy votes while resident in Aso Rock, now sees virtue in transparent electoral process. Yar’Adua and Jonathan probably suspected something was amiss during their tenancy in Aso Rock.  Yar’adua had a retinue of marabouts; Jonathan surrounded himself with pastors of all shades and colours, but these prayer warriors were all saying the wrong prayers. The smart ones among the marabouts and the pastors allowed themselves to be jinxed too. They saw wealth and influence in the jinx.

Dear Mr. Mohammadu Buhari, it appears that “Change” of election campaign period has undergone “transformation” since you took up tenancy in Aso Rock. It is not your fault, Aso Rock is simply jinxed. Many Nigerians want you to succeed. They want to see, feel and live the change that you promised them.

Mr. President, you are a decent man living at a wrong address. You can’t overcome Aso Rock jinx. Find yourself a new address and lead the people with your decency and integrity.