nation0428

TUESDAY, APRIL 28, 2015 TRUTH IN DEFENCE OF FREEDOM VOL.10 NO. 3198
ACK in 1986, I served with Uche
Chukwumerije and about a dozen other senior
media figures on the Publicity Advi- Bsory Committee for the National Population Census,
at the instance of Tola Adeniyi, the commissioner
for public affairs and communications at
the National Population Commission.
After general introductions at the Committee’s
inauguration, Chukwumerije had walked up to
me and told me how much he admired my weekly
column for The Guardian, and how he looked forward
to each installment. I told him how I had
treasured his pan-African newsmagazine Afriscope,
and how I had served as its University of Lagos
stringer and had been generously compensated
for my effort.
That encounter was the beginning of what went
beyond mere acquaintanceship, though it would
be claiming too much to call it a friendship.
Shortly after he was named Secretary for Information
in the Transitional Council, he came to my
office at Rutam House one late afternoon, unannounced.
Preliminaries over, he told me he had
come to seek my help and that of “my boys” in
carrying out his duties as Secretary for Information.
“Not so fast, Uche,” I said. “You didn’t consult
me before taking the job, and now you are asking
me to help you make a success of it. Tell me: Why
did you accept the job?”
Chukwumerije said he had agonised over the
offer and had consulted with his comrades in the
progressive community – he named the activist
Baba Omojola specifically – and they had all advised
him to accept the offer because if he did not,
it might go to someone who could not bring to the
office the ideas and ideals for which Chukwumerije
stood. Besides, they had told him that the best
way to change the system was from within.
“What if, on taking office, you find that the government
is pursuing an agenda different from the
one you had been appointed to execute?” I asked.
“No way,” Chukwumerije said. He had raised
that very question with Babangida, and had made
it abundantly clear that he would resign if he found
that the government was pursuing a hidden
agenda, he said. Babangida had in turn assured
him that he harboured no hidden agenda, and was
resolutely committed to handing over to a democratically
elected government on August 27, 1993.
As proof of his earnestness, Chukwumerije said,
Babangida had pulled out a drawer from his desk
and reached for a copy of the Quran to swear by,
but could find none.
“How very convenient,” I said. “You believe
him?”
“C’mon, Tunji, you are too far gone in your
cynicism. If you don’t believe him, you should at
least believe me.”
He assured me, as he said he had assured
Babangida, that he would resign if he found that
he was being used to pursue a scheme he had not
bargained for.
“That’s good enough for me, Uche. What do
you want of me?”
RIPPLES
NIGERIAN BEATEN TO STATE OF
COMA BY POLICE IN ASIAN
COUNTRY–News
Luck chap, here NIGERIANS are beaten to
‘STATE OF FULL STOP!
OMMENT & D
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OLATUNJI DARE
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Remembering Uche
Chukwumerije
•The late Chukwumerije
“Call me to order, rebuke me publicly whenever
you feel that I am straying from the ideals we
share,” he said.
“I will do better than that,” I told him. “I will
remonstrate with you privately. I will not go public
unless you make private discussion impossible.”
We sealed the deal with a handshake. We rarely
met thereafter, but kept in touch through his special
assistant, Dr Dokun Bojuwade, since deceased.
The Transitional Council, comprising many eminent
Nigerians from a class and an era that military
president Ibrahim Babangida had spent the previous
eight years excoriating, was charged with supervising
the last nine months of his political transition
programme that had lost momentum and
credibility. He had manipulated the programme
so often and in so many ways that it seemed to
have become an end in itself, a journey to nowhere.
Even as the programme muddled its way towards
the June 1993 presidential election that was
billed as its culmination, proxy groups established
and financed by the military regime were staging
rallies and employing every platform to urge
Babangida to continue in office. And Babangida
R
ADICAL Lagos pastor Tunde Bakare
has come up with a prayer perhaps
only his inimitable self can pray: “My
sincere prayer is that,” he prayed his prayer,
“not all those who helped Gen. Buhari to win
the elections will help him run the government”!
That is Pastor Bakare’s latest prayer release
from his Akilo, Ogba big house of prayer —
and his congregants must have lapped it up,
the diktat of the man of God!
Now, how’s that? In the secular world, that
prayer would qualify for basic inequity —
for is that not praying that whoever sowed
should not reap?
Should it not also translate into prayerful
iniquity on the ecclesiastical plane, if God is
not man and man is not God, even if there
are trumpeted (wo)men of God, who nevertheless
delude themselves by playing God?
And pray, where is the place of that part of
the scripture, which stresses divine grace and
never human accomplishment, by saying,
without the grace of God, all is as clean as a
filthy rag? Perhaps that never has any appeal
in Bakarean theology, as the radical evangelical
petrel unleashes Bakarean prayers and
even prophecies, from his blessed pulpit!
Recall, 1999. The equally controversial
Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo had just won the
Nigerian presidency. Bakare was perhaps
piqued by Obasanjo’s monumental betrayal
of the June 12 cause, as MKO Abiola lost both
himself was lending them every encouragement.
It was in the context of this pervasive uncertainty
in the weeks leading to the presidential election that
I asked Bojuwade to tell Chukwumerije that I needed
to see him, persuaded that he would be in a position
to help resolve my doubts.
I met him at his official residence in Ikoyi, Lagos,
in the afternoon of Friday, June 4, 1993, seven days
to the presidential election. Dispensing with the
usual preliminaries, I asked Chukwumerije pointedly
whether the election would hold.
He said he could not answer categorically, but
that the indications were that there would be no
election. He said he was flying to Abuja the next
day, Saturday, to return to Lagos the following
Tuesday. If I looked him up the day after, he would
be in a position to tell me categorically whether the
election would hold or not.
Chukwumerije did not return to Lagos that Tuesday,
and I never saw him again. That very day, the
Abuja High Court, Justice Bassey Ikpeme presiding,
ordered NEC Chairman Humphrey Nwosu and
the Federal Government to appear the following
day, June 8, to show why the presidential election
scheduled for June 12 should hold.
Two days later, on June 10, in the dead of night,
Justice Ikpeme issued an injunction blocking the
election. But this was not a blanket ban, for she
added that NEC was free to ignore her order since,
as the law stood, the court lacked jurisdiction in the
matter.
Against all odds, the election took place. When it
seemed clear that Bashorun MKO Abiola of the
Social Democratic Party was headed for a landslide
victory, Babangida hid behind a battery of
suborned judges and revanchist shysters to annul
it.
Chukwumerije was not a party to the annulment.
He first learned of it, I gather, from a reporter who
sought his reaction to it. He had dismissed the
question as an unseemly joke, until the reporter as-
HARDBALL
Ecclesiastical
spite?
his presidential mandate and, eventually, his
life. Besides, the trio in the Bakarean drama
— MKO, Obasanjo and Bakare — are ethnic
Egba. Well, all politics is local!
So, perhaps brimming with ecclesiastical
rage, the stormy Bakare went ahead to predict
— no, that is secular! — prophesy: Obasanjo
would somehow not consummate his mandate!
That requiem of the futurologist (though
of a chartered spiritual hue!), apologies to Prof.
Wole Soyinka, held a troubled nation spellbound,
and kept Obasanjo friends and fiends
on sheer tenterhooks.
Well, perhaps that prophesy would come
true tomorrow? O, sure! It could well be that
more powerful bleat of prayers eventually
overthrew that dire prophesy? Or that it had
really come to pass since, not a few would
reason, after eight years of presidential power,
Obasanjo himself had badly unravelled? Or
just that God’s grace, which is sufficient for
all, just punctured the virtual fatwa.
Whatever it was, the notorious fact is that
the Ebora Owu did not only consummate his
first term, he gifted himself another four
years, and, by the third-term gambit, even
ogled an illicit third and, after failing, had
TODAY IN THE NATION
“Let security chiefs be appointed solely on
merit; not on their perceived duplicity to
subvert the law against the political
opposition”
OLAKUNLE ABIMBOLA
sured that he was in earnest.
But whether he was party to it or not, I had
expected Chukwumerije to resign from the Transitional
Council, based on the discussions we had
held some six months earlier.
Not only did he not resign, he championed the
annulment with messianic zeal, the kind of fervor
with which he had promoted the Biafran cause to
stunning success and acclaim. With each passing
day, he came across more and more like a Stalinist,
bearing little resemblance to the engaging and amiable
Marxist Comrade gifted with a rich, sometimes
deprecating sense of humour, penetrating
insights, a dialectical imagination, and a capacity
for friendship across Nigeria’s treacherous cleavages.
He dredged up footage on the civil disturbances
of the First Republic and on the Nigerian civil war
to inflict on the public a psychosis of fear.
Listening to broadcasts on Radio Nigeria or
watching news and current affairs programmes
of the Nigeria Television Authority then, you
thought you had been transported back in time to
Albania and Radio Tirana in the days of Enver
Hoxa.
Here, to cite just one example, is the doctrine
Chukwumerije enunciated in a meeting with proprietors,
no doubt as a warning to the so-called
Lagos-Ibadan axis, the critical posture of which he
resented passionately: “Publication that subverts
the national interest (as defined by the regime) “removes
the publisher from the realm of proprietary
rights and places him in the terrain of treason”.
In another context, he charged that some sections
of the press were being suborned “to incite
communal mistrust” and hinted that tough new
measures were afoot to replace the extant laws
that did not provide “adequate regulatory safeguards.”
The measures would surface later as
Decree 43, a throwback to Tudor’s England.
But that dark era does not and cannot define
Uche Chukwumerije, who died last week, aged 75.
Nor can it define his place in Nigeria’s history. It
was but an episode in an otherwise productive
and inspiring life of public service. Babangida’s
silence at his passing is telling indeed, but it reflects
more on the self-styled “evil genius” than on
his former cabinet minister who had served him so
dutifully.
Chukwumerije gave Nigeria its first intellectually
oriented pan-African newsmagazine. He was
a committed socialist activist, eloquent advocate
for the downtrodden, and as a member of the Senate
and chair of its Education Committee, a firstrate
legislator.
Hail and farewell.
I drew liberally on my book, Diary of a Debacle, for
this column.
•For comments, send SMS to 08111813080
•Hardball is not the opinion of
the columnist featured above
moved on to other power mischiefs that
drew his fancy. And the Ebora Owu still dey
kampe! But so is the prophet with unfulfilled
prophesy; he also is still in business. Indeed,
the grace of God is sufficient for all!
On the cusp of another historic change of
order, the first time the opposition defeated
the central sitting government, Pastor
Bakare has rolled out another controversial
diktat, couched in “prayer”!
But strictly, Hardball is not worried about
Pastor Bakare. No, not in the least! The scriptures,
to which he is totally devoted, has a
short-and-sharp riposte to spiritual waywardness
from any quarters: it is not what
you eat that defiles you, it is rather what
comes out of your mouth! Pastor Bakare
will be saved or nailed by his own pronouncements.
It is rather an appeal to the new Buhari
government. Nigerian Christendom,
through President Goodluck Jonathan’s evangelical
allies in the Ayo Oritsejafor-led Christian
Association of Nigeria (CAN), actively
contributed to the president’s democratic
ouster.
Gen. Buhari cannot afford such destructive
luxury, for it is hard to see how the Buhari
government would benefit from Bakare’s
prayer of inequity.
As for Bakare, Hardball’s friendly advice:
keep to church matters; and leave politics to
politicians.
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