By Lasisi Olagunju 

The University of Ibadan is 75 years old. Chief Bisi Akande celebrated his 85th birthday on January 16 this year. He was made Secretary to Oyo State Government 45 years ago at the age of 40. He was Deputy Governor of Oyo State 42 years ago. He was elected Osun State Governor in 1999 – 25 years ago.

He left the office of governor 21 years ago. Last Friday, the 85-year-old man was appointed by President Bola Tinubu to serve the University of Ibadan as its pro-chancellor and chairman of council. When you heard Chief Akande’s name as the appointee, you were almost as sure as I was that the old warrior would reject it in a jiffy.

I told myself that he would tell his friend, the president, that his choice for UI’s top job must be an error; that only today’s hound can successfully chase today’s hare. But today is Monday – four days after, Chief Bisi Akande has not rejected the ‘juicy’ job. We have no business rejecting it for him.

An elephant chooses how he wants the forest to address him. If you schooled at the same time as I did, you must have read the poem ‘Salute to the Elephant’. It is there that you meet Elephant – “possessor of a savings-basket full of money” who is “huge as a hill, even in a crouching posture.” The Elephant is that mighty one “who carries mortar and yet walks with a swaggering gait…, animal treading ponderously.”

The Elephant, more importantly, is that “mountainous animal, the huge beast who tears a man like a garment and hangs him up on a tree.” The sight of the Elephant, the chanter-hunter says, “causes people to stampede towards a hill of safety.” Now, imagine that elephant coming down from the height of his high reputation to mingle with deers in a scavenge-rush for forbs.

An elephant would do that if it does not see itself as an elephant. It is his choice. I am not qualified to tell Chief Bisi Akande’s Elephant not to eat what common goats eat. But if I were his son, I would beg him to say “No, thank you.”

Chief Akande is not alone on that geriatric podium of self-diminution. With him is General Ike Omar Sanda Nwachukwu (Rtd) who was made chairman of the University of Nigeria governing council. The University of Nigeria is 69 years old. It was founded in 1955 but formally opened on October 7, 1960. General Nwachukwu will be 84 years old on September 1, this year. He has been everything anyone would ever want to be in Nigeria.

As a soldier, he rose to be Major-General and General Officer Commanding. He was governor of Imo State 40 years ago. He was Minister of Labour 39 years ago. He was Foreign Affairs Minister 34 years ago. He was elected senator 25 years ago. He is back from the bench in this season of renewed past.

Must it be them? Don’t they have around them, in their political party, sleek-headed young people with knowledge and ideas who can handle these assignments? They have them, but those ones are useful only as aides and bag carriers.

Writing in May last year for US’ satire newspaper, The Onion, grand old Dianne Feinstein satirized America as “an out-of-touch gerontocracy” where “the average age of a senator is 65” – and the president eighty-something years old. She said she was “glad” not to live and get stuck in that country of “dementia-addled” leaders “who keep a stranglehold on power” and “who prioritise their own careers and bank accounts over the common good.”

Then she wondered, angrily “How selfish you’d have to be to cling to power when you’ve long since ceased to understand the needs of ordinary people.” I will be shocked if I am the only one who thinks strongly that Feinstein wrote about Nigeria of today.

I read a sonnet of William Shakespeare where he deplores “age” staying “too long.” In his ‘The Passionate Pilgrim’, Shakespeare explains why “crabbed age and youth cannot live together.” Shakespeare sings of “Youth like summer brave, age like winter bare.” He says “Youth is full of sport, age’s breath is short; Youth is nimble, age is lame; Youth is hot and bold, age is weak and cold; Youth is wild, and age is tame…” Yet, our country’s vote is for the old and cold; the lame, the tame.

We have more of them. Our universities are now a rest home for the ancient. There is also 72-year-old Alhaji Yayale Ahmed who was announced as the chairman of 62-year-old Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria. He was appointed Head of Service of the Federation in the year 2000 – 24 years ago. He occupied that post for seven years, retiring in 2007 to be appointed as the Minister of Defence.

He left the office of minister in September 2008 to be appointed as the Secretary to the Government of the Federation. He held sway there till May 2011. He left 13 years ago. He is back from retirement to preside over ABU’s highest governing body.

These king-size men and others on that long list will be interfacing with a 70-year-old minister. Professor Tahir Mamman is our minister of education. If he had remained in the university system, he would be due for retirement in three weeks’ time. The minister reports to a president who is officially 72 years old. Essentially, these 20th century men are the drivers of the 21st century vision of Nigeria’s knowledge industry. That is the way we roll. The National Universities Commission (NUC) regulates Nigeria’s university system. Who is NUC’s substantive executive secretary? Check if it has. And, who presides over its board?

As I write this today, Sunday, 16 June, 2024, the commission in charge of our universities has on its website, Emeritus Professor Ayo Banjo as the chairman of its board. Baba Professor Banjo died last month – he was 90 years old. NUC has not remembered to update its website – or it is reluctant to let go of the late Professor Banjo.

Beyond the dead, shall we ask the new octogenarian appointees where they hope to start from in this digital age? With their appointments, Nigeria is asking its Gen Z students to use fatigued eyes of tired men to prepare their journey into the future. May God help them.

A leader must know when to say enough to seeking power. Someone (I can’t get their name) said knowing when to walk away is wisdom. He also said being able to walk away is courage. Yet, there is a third line: walking away with your head held high is dignity. Why would an eighty-something-year-old man want to be a baggage carrier – porter – to the youth of his land? Someone said it is the love of service. I replied that it is simply a case of an Egungun, because of perks, dancing itself into irrelevance.

Apart from them being his friends, are there patriotic reasons why the president posted these men to those schools? We may not know the real reason why our president made those geriatric choices – unless he tells us. Raul Magni Berton and Sophie Panel in 2017 did a paper on why non-democratic systems produce older leaders. They postulate that leaders’ “ruling styles” are “partly shaped by the rules that brought them to power.” They ask why anyone, even the old, would want to be ruled by aged people. They dissect types and motives of gerontocratic rule. They speak on what they call ‘taste’ gerontocracy “which is based on genuine preference for old leaders.”

This government’s choice of yesterday’s men for today’s work has natural consequences. You know menopause, its complications and implications. That is what the University of Ibadan, UNN and ABU and some others in their geriatric shoes are now married to. Escaping the schools’ climacteric suitors and their creaky beds looks futile.

When Humphrey Hawksley wrote his 2009 book, ‘Democracy Kills’, he probably had our case in mind. There is hardly anything which today’s democracy inherited that it has not fed to the dogs. While we fantasised on what the textbook says democracy is, the leaders have unitised the benefits in it; they’ve warehoused the gains in their family silos – for the comfort of their generations and for their friends’.

I am wasting my time writing this. The same applies to you raising complaints about how our planes are being run aground. The government does not care about the public and its opinion. You can’t blame it. There is a problem with winning all bouts all the time. It intoxicates the winner, making them look down on the street and disdainful of even their fans. “At being humble, I’m the greatest”.

A Minnesota, United States mother in about 1970, was horrified to hear her young wrestler-son say this as he recorded wins after wins. The woman described that statement of her son as “silly” – but that was hubris at work. We read such ‘humility’ in the insults the Nigerian leadership rolls out almost daily. Everything points at the end of sanity in the conduct of our affairs. Yet, long before this present darkness, there had been eras of rationality and hope.

There had been an age when leaders insulted not the people’s sensitivities and the people bowed in respect of fair leadership. We had a past of values which even those who colonised us acknowledged in their own moments of sobriety.

Between the last days of 1927 and the early weeks of 1928, a group of United Kingdom’s Members of Parliament visited Nigeria. They moved from the coasts in Lagos through the hinterland forests to the grasslands of the North. They thoroughly toured the East of Nigeria and the creeks of the Niger Delta – then went back to London through Lagos.

At a dinner of the African Society in London on 13 March, 1928, leader of the delegation, Major Walter Eliot, presented his team’s report. In that report, Major Eliot said while in Nigeria, his team saw an “honest attempt” by the black man to build “a house” for his soul; a house “where the black man could find a shelter” against the impact of a strange alien culture; a house “from which in years to come, he may take his own share as a partner in the progress of the world – not as an inferior and certainly not as a serf…” Eliot’s optimism – expressed in that report 96 years ago – was hasty and misplaced. If the Briton visits Nigeria of today, he will meet 200 million people shuffling and struggling not to be serfs of power.

That is not all from Eliot. Everywhere they went, his team said they saw a people who had very high regard for their leaders and who had their leaders’ respect. He disclosed that his team members were surprised (and impressed) and were of the conviction that “the black man should look to the black ruler as the keystone in the arch of rule; that the white man should not be the keystone…that the rule should be of the black man by the black man and – as far as we can devise it – for the black man.”

They are long dead, those proud, upright people who were met in Nigeria by the British in 1927. About a hundred years after the Eliot team experience and the positive testimony from London, and 64 years after foreign rule, a virulent strain of disdain for the ruled – and disgust for the ruler – reigns. Our democracy is a despicable bazaar; the classic “every man for himself and God for us all.” What the 1927/28 visitors envisioned as the rule “of the black man by the black man” has turned out not “for the black man.” The rule serves the strongman and his clan whose ways are decidedly not necessarily the ways of their people.

They take the benefits; their children take. Their concubines and mistresses also pick theirs while your own portion is tucked away in their pouch. It is the reason they can’t reason with us when we say Nigeria cannot survive as a unitary presidentialism. They take our call for federalist sanity as a threat to the advantages they enjoy. They think a truly federal Nigeria would be too tight to structurise into personal fiefdoms.

They work that federalism won’t happen. Not now, not tomorrow. And they are winning. They spring on us federal surprises everywhere. They set up institutions and make appointments that are designed to unitarise our lives under the Big Brother. Because they are smart, they easily know that they can’t compete and feed their greed in a Nigeria that is properly structured. The result of their knowing is that we can’t breathe without their permission.

A restructured Nigeria has the prospect of not surrendering to Comrade Napoleon’s unitary dictatorship in the Animal farm. Less than one week into this democracy, Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, in the Friday, 4 June, 1999 edition of the Nigerian Tribune, warned that Nigeria was on the way to a most destructive form of unitarism. “The road to the hell of unitarism is paved with good intentions. They should be careful…”, he warned the inheritors of the gains of the struggle for this democracy. They ignored him. We were too hopeful to hear him. But, words of elders, if they don’t come true in the morning, they will in the evening. The evening of Nigeria is here.

By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

Less than a decade ago, the detention centre of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in Scheveningen on the outskirts of The Hague could easily have been mistaken for a committee meeting of leaders of the African Union. One of its long-term guests was Laurent Gbagbo, a former president of Côte d’Ivoire. From neighbouring Liberia, Gbagbo’s contemporary, Charles Taylor, kept up a punishing schedule on the tennis courts of the facility. With them there also was former Vice-President of the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), Jean-Pierre Bemba.

At about the same time, Kenya’s President, Uhuru Kenyatta; and his Deputy and future successor, William Ruto, were suspects on trial before the ICC. For over five years before that, since 2009, the Court had an arrest warrant still outstanding for Sudan’s President Omar Hassan Al-Bashir.

Even as the ICC advanced towards an arrest warrant for Sudan’s then dictator, the African Union (AU) complained somewhat vainly that “abuse and misuse of indictments against African leaders have a destabilizing effect that will negatively impact on the political, social and economic development of States and their ability to conduct international relations.”

The month before the ICC authorized the arrest warrant against Omar Al-Bashir, in February 2009, the summit of the African Union’s Heads of State and Government requested the Commission of the African Union “in consultation with the African Commission on Human and Peoples’ Rights, and the African Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights, to examine the implications of the Court being empowered to try international crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes, and report thereon to the Assembly in 2010.” In the wake of the onset of the crisis in Libya, the African Union decided that the ICC’s focus on the African continent was “discriminatory.” In Malabo, the capital of Equatorial Guinea, in June 2014, the AU adopted a treaty to confer on the court jurisdiction over international crimes. This treaty is known as “the Malabo Protocol”, after the city where it was adopted.

It was the assessment of the AU then that the Bashir arrest warrant would “seriously undermine the ongoing efforts aimed at facilitating the early resolution of the conflict in Darfur.” More than five years after Omar Al-Bashir’s ouster and one and a half decades after the ICC’s arrest warrant for him, the current metastasis of atrocities in Darfur provides reason to reassess the African Union’s fears.

At the time when the AU first voiced its fears and suspicions about the ICC in the first decade of this millennium, they were largely greeted with derision. This attitude was foundational to the existence of the ICC. At the adoption of the statute establishing the court in 1998, then UK Foreign Secretary, Robin Cook, infamously sniffed that “this is not a court set up to bring to book Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom or Presidents of the United States.”

This colonial superciliousness did not preclude African countries from recognizing the opportunities in the ICC. The continent was the single largest source of resilient support to the project and process that culminated in the creation of the Court. With 33 of the 124 member states of the ICC, Africa provides over 26.6% of the signatories to the Statute establishing the Court, the largest single bloc of any continent. In January 2004, when few trusted the Court to exercise its functions with skill or responsibility, Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni voluntarily referred the situation in the country to the court, yielding up the first case received by it. By the end of the first decade of its operations, the prosecutorial docket of the ICC read like a political geography of Africa: Central African Republic, Côte d’Ivoire, DRC, Kenya, Libya, Mali, Sudan, Uganda.

A senior lawyer practicing at the ICC accused it of being “a vehicle for its primarily European funders, of which the UK is one of the largest, to exert their influence and, particularly, in Africa.” For a long time, fundamentalists of the ICC dismissed this view as lacking in credibility.

As the current prosecutor of the Court, Karim Khan, prepared to turn his attentions to the atrocities in the ongoing crisis in Gaza earlier this year, however, all the suspicions about the targeting of Africa by the court were confirmed. In a high profile interview with the Cable News Network (CNN) last month, Mr. Khan disclosed that an un-named senior Western official seeking to dissuade him from seeking an arrest warrant against Israel’s Prime Minister, had told him that the ICC was “built for Africa and for thugs like Putin.”

At about the same time, it emerged that the head of Israel’s much feared foreign intelligence agency, the Mossad, had “allegedly threatened a chief prosecutor of the international criminal court in a series of secret meetings in which he tried to pressure her into abandoning a war crimes investigation.” According to The Guardian in London, this was part of “an almost decade-long campaign by the country (Israel) to undermine the court (ICC).” In the wake of these disclosures, those who issue gratuitous lectures to Africa about the impunity and accountability have seen nothing and said even less.

The Prosecutor whom they threatened was Fatou Bensouda, Gambia’s current High Commissioner to the United Kingdom whose courage in defending the independence of her office as the second Prosecutor of the ICC made her the subject of punitive sanctions by the United States.

In the Malabo Protocol, the African Union, tired of protesting the pigmented project of the ICC, decided to endow an African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights with jurisdiction over 14 crimes of an international or transboundary nature on the continent. These include aggression; war crimes; crimes against humanity; genocide; trafficking in persons, in hazardous wastes or in drugs; terrorism, corruption; money laundering; mercenarism; piracy; illicit exploitation of natural resources; and unconstitutional changes in government.

Despite the truly capacious scope contemplated by this treaty, a sustained international campaign frightened most African states into losing their sovereign nerves about the establishment of the court. The current scandal around the skullduggery and double standards in relation to the ICC’s efforts to address Afghanistan and Palestine have finally persuaded African countries to return attention to the project of an African competence on international crimes.

On 31 May, Angola became the first country to ratify the Malabo Protocol. That leaves 14 more to do so before the African Court of Justice and Human and Peoples’ Rights can be established. That cannot happen too soon. When it does, the new court will have 15 judges who will sit in three sections. The General Affairs section will handle cases on mostly trade, regional integration and continental institutions. The section on Human and Peoples’ Rights will focus on human rights cases. There will also be a section on International Criminal Law which will have a pre-trial, trial and appellate chamber. The new Court will house one prosecutor and also one registrar.

Fundamentalists of the ICC mock the idea of an international crimes instance for Africa. In truth, in the period of just over two decades of its operations, the record of the ICC has been largely underwhelming. It can do with all the help that it can get. The continental criminal instance proposed by the AU should be seen as a paydown by Africa on precisely that kind of assistance. Ten years after the its adoption, there is no longer time to wait; Angola’s leadership in the push to bring the Malabo Protocol into force deserves to be quickly complemented by other African countries.

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