By Lasisi Olagunju

Patient walks unaided into the doctor’s consulting room. Patient soon suffers mismanagement. She goes pale and jerky, unconscious. Doctor gives his best shot – or so he claims. Patient is not responsive. Doctor strolls off, leaving the patient to sip his tea. Doctor comes back and sees worsening symptoms: Cold hands. Weak pulse. Fatigue. Incontinence. Dyspnea – respiratory distress. Restlessness. The clock ticks, and the patient’s condition deteriorates. Doctor sets up a symptom control team. Symptoms persist. Patient’s relatives accuse the doctor of incompetence and negligence. Doctor denies all charges and promises to do something. He ponders and sacks members of the symptom control team. A few other nurses also kiss the canvas. Doctor looks into anxious eyes and tells everyone that with that step he has taken, the sick should be well soon. The leader is the physician; the country they tend to is the patient.

Where vigilance tanks, a bad government is easily replaced with something worse. It is the same with team management. Where the leader is easily distracted or he distracts himself, a mortician calmly slips into the delivery team. In Ibn Butlan’s ‘Doctors’ Dinner Party’, we read of a certain gentleman who proclaims himself doctor after recovering from an illness. The storyteller says: “God said to him: ‘Become a physician and destroy people! Take sick man’s money — that’s excusable — and send him to the grave.’” Doctor becomes rich, ostentatious and gilded. Author notes other things and prays: “God protect us and you from the misfortunes wrought by his hands…” A government with demonstrable lack of competence and empathy is a killer hospital. Its problem goes deeper than the names on its management list.

I refuse to join those whose drums are out because a cost-cutting president last week sacked five ministers and replaced them with seven. How is that oxymoronic step going to cure the nation of its chronic illness? I would rather seek therapeutic answers by asking why the sick fell into a coma. Was it the doctor’s fault? Or nurses’ wickedness? Or the consequence of the patient’s own life choices? Or the ailment is congenital? Or a combination of all of the above? If the fault lies with the caregivers, who then should sack whom? Who should be sacked? And, how is the sack of that someone going to correct the near-fatal error that has sent the country into this terrible distress?

As a consequence of that cabinet reshuffle, the government scrapped the Ministry of Niger Delta Affairs, and from its ashes has risen a humongous ministry in charge of regional development commissions. I call that new creation the ‘Ministry of Nigeria Affairs’ because virtually all regions will find rooms in its mansion. What sense does that make?

Certain big men in the Niger Delta are loudly condemning the scrapping of the Niger Delta ministry. One of them, Asari Dokubo, blames the whole of Bola Tinubu’s ethnicity for his government’s action. The agitator says in a purpose-made video that he would join forces with the North because “the Yoruba are betrayers.” Around the same time, I see the Muhammadu Buhari people loudly complaining about power outages in the North. They also throw innuendoes of the Yoruba as the cause and beneficiary of the darkness in the North. I saw all these and wondered why the angry wailers mistook the victim for the culprit. They are raining knocks on the head whereas it was the bottom that farted – Ìdí só, orí ni wón nkàn ní’kó.

Prolonged power outage is ongoing in the North. It is officially blamed on vandalism wreaked by bandits. The North can complain – and should complain if the state is failing them. But I find the Buhari people’s complaint particularly interesting – and galling. While in power, their principal was like Unoka, Okonkwo’s flute-loving father in Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’. Achebe describes Unoka as a man famous “for the weakness of his machete and…hoe. When Unoka’s neighbours go out with their axe to cut down virgin forests, “the man sows his yams “on exhausted farms that take no labour to clear.” Such men, in Yorubaland, are identified with farming under the shade of palm trees. Where weeds do not grow, crops can’t do well there.

The Buhari corridor and all who egged on his regime or pressed the mute button while he was here should not insult us with complaints of lack of electricity, and should not make any demand on even the Tinubu government. I recommend to them the wisdom of Achebe’s Obiako. This character is told by an oracle: “Your dead father wants you to sacrifice a goat to him.” And, Obiako replies the oracle with indignation: “Ask my dead father if he ever had a fowl when he was alive.” Those asking for light today, was it not darkness they sowed yesterday?

That is for the fox, our angry Unoka. And, back to the cock of this regime. Where is the light it promised? It pledged to sanitize and fumigate the nation, north to south. When is that going to be?

With this government, austerity means ostentation. It’s been churning out one regional commission after the other while wearing the lapel of a lean government. On 26 February, 2024, President Tinubu presided over a meeting of the Federal Executive Council. We were informed after that meeting that the president had ordered a full implementation of the Stephen Oronsaye report which demanded a reduction in the number of federal government agencies. In furtherance of that directive, we were told that the president had constituted a committee to effect certain agencies’ mergers, scrapping, and relocations within 12 weeks. Today is 28 October, 2024 – eight months, two days after that directive, nothing serious has been heard of that directive. Or did I miss something? Instead of doing what it announced and celebrated with pomp, what we had last week tells how the government rates our intelligence.

On June 5, 2000, despoiled Niger Delta was given a development commission as its balm of Gilead by the Olusegun Obasanjo government. Because that troubled region had that commission, insurgent-wracked North-East demanded its own from Buhari and got it in 2017. Because the North-East got it, the South-West demanded its own from Tinubu and got it last month. The South-East received its own; the North-West also has; the North-Central too – all from Tinubu. This is one government that actively sells laxative but sees nothing contradictory in its eating mountains of pounded yam. Why do we need regional development commissions? I recently asked an ègbón, an Emilokan, if he sincerely thought a South-West Development Commission would be of any usefulness to the people of the region. His response: “Create another opportunity for sleaze among Yoruba politicians and their business associates. I was fundamentally against it but aligned eventually on the basis of ‘what is good for the goose…’ If the other regions are being awarded cash cows for the boys, why not us? When Nigeria becomes serious about development, we’ll jointly scrap all such distractive wastage…” I am sure if you asked around the other regions and your subject is as truthful as mine above, you would get the same answer. Now, what kind of country is this? And what kind of government cuts costs by increasing them?

Hunger dusts up strange, dangerous ideas. People’s suffering is unremitting. If a government functions as people’s undertakers, why should the people desire it? Why do we even need a government? Because it was failing tragically, a radio station in Poland recently stopped using human beings for its operations. It sacked all its journalists and did something novel. Last week, it brought in Artificial Intelligence (AI)-generated presenters. The result has been magical. A Nobel Laureate who died in 2012 was made to present a popular programme on that radio station last Tuesday. The audience heard him and applauded the undead.

Now, should we really have ministers as many as the sands of the desert? Can’t we live without the hordes of overpaid, overfed officials of the state? Or sell them to buy what eludes us? Those extreme questions you may find in every mouth that hasn’t tasted food since yesterday. And, truly, a government that fails in fulfilling its social contract with the people is not a government; it is a gang of pirates like the one led by one-eyed, one-legged Long John Silver in ‘Treasure Island’. John Silver sails under The Jolly Roger – pirates’ flag with white skull and crossbones; the ones here are at sea with our Green White Green. That is the sole difference.

The president may change his team every hour like a child’s diapers. It won’t make his government work well unless he himself sits up. He should teach himself how to enlarge his vision beyond the narrow tunnel that opens at his backyard and closes inside his dockyard. We won’t stop telling him and the other owners of today that leadership is about service. It is not about how much they have locked up in their strong rooms and how many billions they spray in arrant oppression of the poor. We will keep reminding them of life after office. And that as they rule the town, they should endeavor to rule their homes also. Collapsing state affairs into the affairs of their home endangers the wellness of all.

Basorun is the second in command to the Alaafin of Oyo. He may not be king but he rules his corner like a king. And, because power is wine, sweet and strong, it intoxicates the entire royalty. There was a Basorun Gaa in Oyo history whose sons reigned more forcefully than even the Alaafin. Samuel Johnson, author of ‘The History of the Yorubas’, records an instance: “One of them once engaged a carrier to whom he gave a load too heavy for him to carry, but he dared not refuse to do so. He walked behind the man, amusing himself with the sight of the man’s suffering from the weight of the load. He remarked in jest that the man’s neck had become so thick that he doubted whether a sword could cut through it. He suited his action to his words, drew his sword, and actually tried it! The man was decapitated. His body was left wallowing in his blood, and another man was compelled to take up the load.”

Powerful people see nothing wrong loading helpless people with super excess luggage. They call it sacrifice. They also won’t mind trying their swords on the calcified neck of the burdened- just to prove the point of their almightiness. They swim in mindless insouciance yet they deceive themselves with silly assurances of permanence. To them, every warning is a dangling, swirling sword, an act of treason. There was a king in a Yoruba kingdom who came with a name that defies death. He was Oba Maku (Maku means Don’t-die). The king launched his despotism the very day he ascended the throne. Because he was a king whose ways were not his people’s ways, the people soon skirted death around his name and turned it into a song. From street to street, loud was the echo of ‘When will Don’t-die Not die?’ I say that in Yoruba: Ìgbàwo ni Maku kò níí kú sí? The man reigned for only two months.

The impermanence of nothing is the consolation. Every era, no matter how painfully long, will eventually end. General Francisco Franco ruled over Spain from 1939 until his death on November 20, 1975. He was a dictator with a vast network of spies home and abroad. He muzzled the press and muffled the gong. Because his reign was long and very eventful, he never believed it could end. And when death was drawing his curtain he denied it was his door death was knocking. Oriol Pi-Sunyer captures that moment well in his ‘Political Humour in a Dictatorial State’ (1977). He writes: “In the final hours of his life, Franco becomes aware that a crowd is forming in the street outside his chamber. The semiconscious dictator asks an attendant what the subdued sounds are – ‘It is nothing, Excellency, just some people passing.’

As the crowd grows and the noise increases, this fiction cannot be maintained.

Franco: ‘I insist you tell me what is going on outside.’

Attendant: ‘The people, Excellency.’

Franco: ‘The people?’

Attendant: ‘Yes, the Spanish people.’

Franco: ‘What are they doing?’

Attendant: ‘The Spanish people have come to say goodbye.’

Franco: ‘Oh, where are they going?’

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

“A Judge shall avoid developing excessively close relationship with frequent litigants – such as government ministers or their officials, municipal officials, police prosecutors in any Court where the Judge often sits, if such relationship could reasonably create an appearance of partiality.”

Rule 2.8, Revised Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers in Nigeria (2016)

Sylvanus Nsofor was a little-known Justice of the Court of Appeal when he breathed oxygen into Muhammadu Buhari’s political aspirations with his dissent in the presidential election petition in 2007. Eight years earlier, he had launched a unique career in the history of political litigation in Nigeria.

The case arose from the election into the office of Chairman of the Obio/Akpor Local Government Area (LGA) in Rivers State in Nigeria’s Niger Delta on 12 December 1998. Cyprian Tasie Wike was the candidate of the All Peoples’ Party (APP). Cyprian Chukwu flew the flag of the Alliance for Democracy (AD). After screening aspirants on 24 November 1998, the Peoples’ Democratic Party, (PDP) settled on Ezenwo Nyesom Wike as its candidate.

At the time, local elections were conducted by the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and the PDP initially submitted Nyesom Wike’s name as their candidate. However, sometime before election day, the party substituted his name with Samuel Rogers Icheonwo. When it announced the results, INEC declared the candidate of the PDP as the winner with 40,370 votes, beating the candidate of the AD into second place with 11,441 votes.

Nyesom Wike sued, claiming that INEC had announced Icheonwo as winner when he was not lawfully sponsored by any party in the contest. The election petition tribunal struck out the petition, holding that it lacked jurisdiction “to resolve the issue as to who was sponsored by PDP.”

Nyesom Wike appealed. In his judgment on behalf of a three-person panel of the Court of Appeal on 6 March 1999, Sylvanus Nsofor nullified the result announced by the INEC and ordered a re-run of the election with Nyesom Wike as the candidate of the PDP. Wike duly won the re-run to emerge as the Chairman of the Obio/Akpor LGA.

Since then, Nyesom Wike’s political trajectory has been attended by what appears to be an unusual coincidence of mutually beneficial intercourse with the judiciary. In 2008, he became Chief of Staff to a Governor of Rivers State whose emergence rested on a somewhat improbable piece of judicial machination.

After a stint as Minister of State for  Education, Wike emerged in 2015 as the candidate of the PDP for the governorship of Rivers State. Following the election on 11-12 April 2015, the INEC declared him as winner, ahead of  Dakuku Peterside of the All Progressives Congress (APC). Peterside petitioned challenging the result declared by INEC. The tribunal granted his petition and initially set aside the result. The Court of Appeal agreed with the trial tribunal.

On 12 February 2016, the Supreme Court set aside the judgment of the Court of Appeal on a specious technicality and restored Nyesom Wike as duly elected. The author of the Supreme Court judgment was Kudirat Kekere-Ekun.

In the past week, she and Nyesom Wike resumed mutual acquaintance. In the intervening nine years, Kekere-Ekun had risen to become Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), while Wike emerged in August 2023 as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory. The venue was the flag-off of the construction by the Minister of 40 units of judicial housing in Abuja.

This was the latest chapter in Wike’s durable track record as Nigeria’s most prolific judicial benefactor.

As Governor of Rivers State, he gave 41 Range Rover Sports Utility Vehicles (SUVs) to judges in the state. Customary Court judges were not left out. He gave them 29 Renault SUVs while complaining about the “unfortunate the unwillingness of the judiciary in Nigeria to seek true independence to discharge their functions.”

The irony was clearly lost on him.

In 2020, Wike donated 24 luxury duplexes to judges in Rivers State and reportedly “handed out $300,000 in cash to judges who preferred to build their own houses.” It was presumably tax-free. Then CJN, Tanko Muhammad, slavishly “applauded his generosity saying the gifts spoke of the ‘love the Rivers State governor has for the judiciary.’”

The love was fully requited.

The previous year, in January 2019, the judiciary had made Wike’s re-election an electoral non-event when it disqualified the opposition APC from fielding any candidate against him. Neutral observers did not need to wonder whether all the investment in the judiciary was without mutual benefit.

Before leaving office as Governor in 2023, Wike launched yet another construction of quarters for judges also in Rivers State, this time on a site “where his administration recently demolished flats initially belonging to Bayelsa State.”

This gubernatorial generosity to the judiciary went beyond the state level. Former presidential candidate, Omoyele Sowore, reported that as Governor, Nyesom Wike awarded a contract to former President of the Court of Appeal (PCA), Zainab Bulkachuwa, “to build the Court of Appeal in Port Harcourt”, the capital of Rivers State. In return, he said “anything Wike wanted was granted before he asked.” Neither Wike nor Bulkachuwa has thought it fit to issue a denial.

Now, as Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Wike’s political generosity has become fully federalized under the judicial benediction of yet another CJN. At the launch of the 40 new units of judicial housing in Abuja this past week, the Minister had in attendance both the CJN and the PCA. Presumably keen to impress such high judicial presence, Wike serenaded them with testimony as to how he summarily revoked the land previously allocated to construction conglomerate, Julius Berger, in order to make it available for building suitable judicial digs.

The high judicial figures present looked nothing if not suitably impressed, but the Minister was only getting started. According to him, it was important “to build houses for judges so they would not be susceptible to temptations from unscrupulous politicians.”

No one around had the presence of mind to ask him to look in the mirror.

This has been described charitably as convenient overreach. A better description for it will be judicial subornation. In full public glare, the two senior-most judges in the country looked rather giddy as they advertised an undisguised breach of the Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers, whose effectiveness depends on their combined leadership and example.

There is no political litigant in the country more prolific than the current Minister of the FCT. He has an almost extra-terrestrial ability to normalise outcomes that defy all cannons of lawful judicial enterprise. If anyone fits the description of the prohibition in Rule 2.8 of the Judicial Conduct, it is Minister Wike. Yet, for him, the Chief Justice of Nigeria is happy to retrench that same Code of Conduct.

It was not supposed to be like this.

Jerome Udoji, one of Nigeria’s best-known lawyers and public servants, was born in Ozubulu in present-day Anambra State around 1912. Udoji was also the first indigenous District Officer in the colonial civil service. He ended his civil service career as Chief Secretary to the government of the Eastern Region under the military coincidentally in 1967, the same year in which Wike officially was born.

When he got the opportunity to undertake a retrospective on his public tour of duty  in 1995, fifteen years before he died in 2010, Udoji chose to issue his memoirs with the title “Under Three Masters.” The three masters whom he served, of course, were colonial administrators, post-colonial civilian politicians, and their military usurpers.

Each set of masters was not without exertions in seeking judicial subservience. Until now, they had usually encountered judicial resistance. Under the current dispensation, however, it is almost as if the government has a minister responsible for judicial subordination. To many, the leading judges have simply become Wiked and the country has a CJN who appears happy to have the judicial branch fully Nyesomized.

A lawyer and a teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at [email protected]