Reporting News and opinions
Some political leaders leave office and quietly retreat into the background. Others spend their retirement writing memoirs that nobody reads and giving speeches that nobody remembers.
The optical message broadcast to the public is one of relentless vigilance, a leader ensuring the masses are not shortchanged. The institutional reality, however, is that governance has vacated the cabinet room and wandered into the realm of amateur site supervision.
Nigeria is once again standing at a constitutional crossroads. The growing insecurity across the federation, from banditry in the North-West, secessionist violence in the South-East, kidnapping in the South-South, farmer-herder clashes in the Middle Belt, and urban criminality in Lagos and Abuja, has pushed the debate over state police from intellectual seminars into the centre of national survival.
Somewhere in a glass-and-steel conference centre in Geneva, a distinguished panel is convening to discuss Africa's poverty crisis. The room costs £18,000 a day to hire. The keynote speaker flew business class from Washington. The catered lunch is exceptional. The conference proceedings will produce, in due course, a forty-seven page report recommending as the 1994 report did, as the 2003 report did, as the 2011 report did, more aid. Africa, meanwhile, remains poor.
In 1999, Olusegun Obasanjo and Atiku Abubakar rode into Aso Rock together, a presidential double act that Nigerians assumed would age like most political marriages: quietly, then not at all. They survived one term. They won a second in 2003. Then, somewhere in that second term, Obasanjo discovered a constitutional itch that the 1999 Constitution's two term, eight year ceiling on the presidency simply would not scratch. He wanted a third term. Atiku, nursing a presidential ambition of his own and possessed of the inconvenient habit of reading the Constitution literally, said so publicly. The friendship ended there.
