Moghalu, Sowore, and the Diasporan presidential challenge
Kingsley Moghalu, former CBN deputy governor and professor of the practice at Tufts University in the US, and Omoyele Sowore, publisher of the New York-based SaharaReporters, have signaled their intention to run for the office of president of Nigeria.This is not an endorsement of any of them, but a reflection on the possibilities and hopes that they excite.
Given the tremendous excitement that their announcements are generating in Nigeria, especially among the youth, it’s worth giving a thought to who they are and what they might bring to the table should they get the chance to lead Nigeria.
Since at least the mid-2000s, Nigeria’s exilic elites,particularly in the United States, have forged lasting, internetenabled transformative linkages with their homeland, the popularity and centrality of SaharaReporters in Nigeria’s media landscape being a prominent example of that.The entrance of two important voices in Nigeria’s US diaspora in next year’s presidential contest is a significant milestone that elevates this home-diaspora connection.
In his influential book titled Kinship and Diasporas in International Affairs, Professor Yossi Shain pointed out that people who deterritorialize from their home countries and reterritorialize in other countries actually only leave their home countries physically but not emotionally. He said diasporans think of themselves as being “outside the state
The open outburst at a public function in Jalingo last week Saturday March 24, 2018 by Lieutenant General TheophilusYakubu (TY) Danjuma (retired) was very un-statesmanlike of a former General Officer Commanding (GOC) 3 Division of the Nigerian Army, a former Chief of Army Staff and a former Minister of Defence. Most Nigerians find General Danjuma’s reckless allegation against the military worrisome because it borders on national security. The seditious lyrics in his call for self-defence are equally too serious to be ignored.
Speaking at the maiden convocation ceremony of the Taraba State University, Jalingo, General Danjuma urged Nigerians to defend themselves against killers in the country because the armed forces collude with the bandits. Danjuma chose to mention bandits in place of herdsmen, possibly to demonstrate his knowledge of paronomasia. Talking with tongue in cheek, General Danjuma said “They kill people, kill Nigerians. They facilitate their movements, they cover them. If you depend on the armed forces to stop the killings, you will all die one by one. The ethnic cleansing must stop in Taraba State, must stop in all the states of Nigeria. I ask every one of you to be alert and defend your territory, your state”. The tragedy in General but inside the people.” It is this notion of being “inside the people” even when physically separated from them that drives the participation of diasporan Nigerians in the affairs of their home country.This is the context of the foray of these two diasporans into Nigeria’s presidential contest.
I have a fair amount of familiarity with both Moghalu, 55, and Sowore, 47. Although I have no informed opinion on Moghalu’s tenure as CBN’s deputy governor, I have interacted with him since his relocation to the US in the past couple of years. He is, without a doubt, one of the best brains Nigeria has produced. He has an impressive mastery of the political economy of development and has written well-received books and articles on the subject.
He also strikes me as a cosmopolitan, well-bred person who isn’t beholden to narrow, primordial loyalties, and who understands the complexities of Nigeria and the defining role leadership can and should play in managing national differences. He is energetic, passionate, and brims over with fresh, innovative ideas about governance and inclusive growth.
I’ve enjoyed reading his think pieces and penetrating insights on Nigerian politics and economy. Of course, based both on my personal biography and intellectual temperaments, I differ a bit with him on his prescriptions to get Nigeria out of the woods.
During one of our conversations, for instance, he said “some of the reforms Danjuma’s regrettable remarks is further worsened by the fact that those highly inflammatory words were spoken in the presence of young university students.
Reacting on behalf of the military, Nigeria’s Defence Minister, Mansur Dan Ali, said the call by TY Danjuma on the people of Taraba State to take up arms and defend themselves is an invitation to anarchy. TY had accused the Nigerian military of colluding with militia herdsmen to kill people. Mansur said “The Nigerian Armed Forces is well organized and highly professional in discharging its constitutional mandate”. He thus urged anyone who has any evidence of wrongdoings or dereliction of duty against the troops to tender such for necessary action.
A Middle Belt based civil society group, Middle Belt Conscience Guard, has called on the federal government as well as the international community to hold TY Danjuma responsible for any breach of peace in the region. National President of the group, Prince Raymond Enero, warned that the group will not hesitate to drag TY to court over any degeneration of the security situation in the area.
The prime message in General Danjuma’s implied idioms is the insinuation that the killings in Taraba and other riverine states in the middle belt region of the country failed to required to sort out the challenge are likely, even if well executed, to still be unpopular-at least temporarily.” I misinterpreted him, given his background as a central banker, as endorsing the familiar neoliberal policy prescriptions for developing countries that almost always consist in stripping the poor of government subsidies while leaving intact the often unearned perks and privileges of the ruling elites.
But he said I was mistaken.“I am neither a fan of the Washington Consensus nor the Beijing Consensus,” he told me.“My take is more pragmatic. We need our own consensus, but our leaders are so intellectually lazy that they do not even bother to engage the subject or bring in people who can lead that effort.”
You may quibble with his economic prescriptions, but you can’t deny that he is a deeply informed thinker who invests considerable intellectual energies in formulating his positions. His experience working with the United Nations-from where SanusiLamidoSanusi brought him to the Central Bank of Nigeria- which afforded him the opportunity to compare and contrast the economic systems of different countries of the world certainly redounds to his credentials.
Sowore may not have the intellectual sophistication of Moghalu, but what he lacks in erudition he makes up for in drive, enthusiasm, and consuming patriotic fervor. I first met Sowore at the University of Lagos in, I think, 1994 cease because the military has taken side with suspected killer herdsmen. Further interpretation of T Y Danjuma’s hypothesis would simply infer that suicide attacks and abduction of school girls by insurgents have not stopped in some north eastern states of Nigeria because, according to TY Danjuma, “the military provides cover for the insurgents”.
The same theory propounded by Danjuma putatively suggests that “banditry and kidnapping in Zamfara State failed to stop because all the security agencies involved in combating the menace have been conniving with the bandits and kidnappers”. General Danjuma cannot claim to be unaware of the fact that the military he is accusing alsolost many troops to violent attacks launched by insurgents and bandits in northeast Nigeria and Zamfara State respectively. General Danjuma’s wrong application of syllogism led him to erroneous conclusions because his propositions were predicated on wrong premises.
The Wukari-born army General turned theorist was in some way speaking inferred idioms. An idiom is one of the many literary devices referred to as figurative expressions. Figurative expressions could come in various forms including simile (called tashbih in Arabic), metaphor (majaz in Arabic) and when he was president of the University of Lagos student union government. I saw him leading the public shaming of members of violent student gangs popularly known as “secret cults” in Nigerian universities, which didn’t exist at the Bayero University in Kano where I was an undergraduate at the time. His fearlessness in taking on these monsters of depravity head-on in broad daylight frankly unnerved me.
I met him again here in the US and have related with him robustly over the last decade. From his days as an uncompromising, principled, and intrepid student activist to his transition to prodemocracy activism against military totalitarianism to histransformational diasporan citizen media activism, he has remained uncommonly consistent. His passion to salvage Nigeria from the blightinflicted on it by successive leaders has never wavered.
While several former activists of our generation have retreated to their ethnic and religious cocoons, Sowore has never faltered in his panNigerian nationalism. You may accuse him of activistexuberance, but you can’t question the genuineness of his patriotism.
The narrative that there are no credible alternatives to Buhari who aren’ttethered to the dark past is no longer tenable. My own hope is that people like Moghalu, Sowore, Dangiwa Umar (if he decides that he wants to participate in partisan politics), and others like them should form a united front and choose a person to serve as an alternative to APC and PDP candidates. They can’t afford to divide their votes. Doing so would give victory handily to the corrupt, visionless, and bankrupt gerontocrats who have stalled Nigeria’s growth since independence.
I had naively thought that Buhari would initiate the process toward Nigeria’s reclamation, but he is turning circumlocution (itnab in Arabic). These and other stylistic techniques such as homonyms (jinas in Arabic), oxymoron (tibaq in Arabic), metonymy (kinayah in Arabic) and paronomasia (tauriyyah in Arabic) all combine to form the subject matter of Arabic rhetoric. An idiom, in specific terms, is an expression that has figurative meaning which is unrelated to the meaning of the phrase or sentence articulated.
Indeed, T Y Danjuma’s igniting statements were his own circuitous way of expressing his hatred in idioms for President Muhammadu Buhari and his administration. Others including two former Heads of State, General Olusegun Obasanjo and General Ibrahim Babangida have their peculiar ways of disclosing their ill feelings against President Buhari. While Obasanjo as a professional letter-writer would write open letters, Babangida would choose to issue a statement designed to be refuted afterwards. The question to ask is: why are all these retired military colleagues of Buhari against him?
It would be recalled that in his inaugural speech at the Eagle Square in Abuja after taking Oath of Office, President-elect Muhammadu Buhari said “I belong o everybody and I belong to nobody”. Many did not grasp the rhetorical implication of this statement by Buhari. Others who read between the lines of his speech, most likely, misjudged him for a joker. Few people also thought the declaration was a mere rhetoric meant to adorn the speech. More than half-way into his four-year tenure as Nigeria’s President, the three categories of people who listened to out to be worse than Jonathan in every index of governance.The government he heads is so unfathomably incompetent it’s not even vaguely clued in on what path to tread to solve the country’s unbearably enduring economic problems. It shouldn’t be rewarded with a second term unless Nigerians have a perverse taste for violent selfimmolation.
The Fraudulent Martin Luther King Award Buhari Fell For
After Bill Gates’ in-your-face dissing of the Buhari government, AbikeDabiri got some Black American hustlers from Atlanta to pose as close relatives of the late Dr. Martin Luther King Jr and present a fraudulent “Black History Award” to Buhari.
The photos of the “award” circulated on social media a few days ago with the following cutline or some variations of it: “Buhari wins Black History Award. The Award was presented to him in Abuja by the Family of Martin Luther King led by Luther’s Wife. Martin Luther King’s Wife said PMB won this award because of America’s recognition of his ANTICORRUPTION war, urging him not to be deterred.”
First, Coretta Scott King, Martin Luther King’s wife, died on January 30, 2006. I know Buhari gives appointments to dead people, but in America, dead people don’t give awards. Second, Black History is celebrated in February, not March, in America and Canada. Finally, the King family has dissociated itself from the award. In a March 28, 2018 tweet, the King Center tweeted:“The award given to President Buhari of Nigeria was not given by The King Center, at the request of The King Center or by the children of #MLK and #CorettaScottKing.”
The extent the Buhari government is prepared to go to court embarrassment and ridicule to Nigeria in its bid to lie in order to conceal its crying incompetence is simply astounding. Buhari’s speech realized that he is actually what he claimed to be when he said he belonged to nobody.
The discontent currently being voiced by these army Generals could be out of their failure to intimidate President Buhari to play their respective but self-serving scripts. Their individual comments, given their respective approaches, must have sprout from motives other than constructive criticisms. They each, I guess, have access to President Buhari by which they could draw his attention to certain things they find detrimental to the collective interest of Nigerians. General Danjuma is currently the Executive Chairman, Presidential Committee on North-East Initiative (PCNI). Well, as Nigeria’s President, Buhari isn’t the first to come under damning condemnations from former leaders or statesmen. When General Babangida was serving as Military President, Obasanjo maintained that IBB was so distrustful that if he said‘Good Morning’, you had to look out (of the window) to know whether it was actually morning or evening.
In spite of General Danjuma’s past military records and public perception (which he is attempting to ruin), it is important for relevant security agencies to interrogate him over those un-elderly remarks. While some writers have referred to him as “master of the gaffe’, others are calling for the examination of his medulla oblongata, considering his advancement in age. T Y Danjuma’s recent idioms define him better as dacnomaniacor polemomaniac. May Allah (SWT) make our end on this earth a good one, amin.