ENTHRONING VERBAL CIVILITY IN STATECRAFT
By Tunde Olusunle
The minutes preceding the arrival of former President Olusegun Obasanjo and his deputy, Atiku Abubakar in the council chambers and convening rooms of the State House, Abuja for meetings, were very useful in our time. Those windows of opportunity were pointedly and positively deployed by presidential aides who were not authorised to attend some scheduled meetings. Those who had issues were able to thrash them out with ministers and senior government officials who participated in the meetings. Obasanjo abhorred being hemmed in, in the name of officialdom, unlike some of his successors. He had tremendous stamina, he was open and accessible in the line of duty. He refused to be garrisoned by the structures and trappings of office. He picked his phone calls, minuted on documents from his aides old and young, and even fixed appointments himself. He told a very senior official in his government at a meeting in the early months of his stewardship, that he, Obasanjo, had information to the effect that the top shot’s office was “over militarised.” It was Obasanjo’s way of describing the elaborate security cordon around the office of that senior man, which he as President considered an overkill in a democracy. By the way, the official in question was but a long-serving bureaucrat.
I caught up with Nasir El Rufai, Minister of the Federal Capital Territory Administration, (FCTA), at the time, during one of those pre-meeting windows. I complained to him that a property I had somewhere in Wuse Zone 4, Abuja, had been marked for demolition. He studied the document I presented to him and told me that my property was not the only one so scheduled. He reminded me that the Inspector-General of Police, (IGP), at the time, Tafa Balogun, (of blessed memory), was also affected. Yet we had valid approvals from the FCT Department of Development Control, one of the departments under El Rufai’s watch. He admonished me softly, very calmly to arrange to take down the property myself. He said that would save me from being “surcharged by his ministry for the cost of removing an obstruction on a water course!” You should have seen the way I looked at him as though to gobble his head for such cheeky, unfeeling retort to my predicament.
Nasir El Rufai established a reputation as a no-nonsense restorer of the FCT, reinstating it as close as possible to the original masterplan. He was the prototype bulldozer, whose cold-blooded earthmoving equipment humbled the aesthetics and arrogance of castles and mansions in split seconds without a care. I attended a meeting in the State House chaired by Obasanjo where El Rufai told participants that the Aso Villa complex was at an illegal location. The area was originally a “green area” he said, speaking from documents before him. Trust Obasanjo. The old man cut in and made a joke out of El Rufai’s narrative. Said Obasanjo: “Before I appointed you, I said I was looking for a madman to clean up the FCT. I’m glad l found a good one in you. I will relocate to my farm in Otta while you demolish this place, while you provide another facility where I can do my work!” El Rufai’s style was characterised by “soundproof” practicality, eschewing insults and invectives, beyond threats, abuse and noise making.
It is necessary to lay this background as a parallel to the hoopla which tinges the official rhetoric routinely deployed by some officials in the present administration. True they are in a hurry to translate the “renewed hope” mantra of the incumbent government into tangibles. True they crave back slaps and thumbs-up from their employer. The content, colour and context of their communicative register, however, is oftentimes, more suited for wartime or civil unrest, than for clement times. We sure can do with more verbal finesse, more vocalised temperance, more expressive humanness, than presently emit from the throats of some of our public officers.
Nyesom Ezenwo Wike’s appointment as Minister of the FCTA, was hailed by many. President Bola Tinubu intentionally unhinged the longstanding stereotype of helmsmen of the ministry always being sourced from the same part of the country. This was in addition to being adherents of the same faith in every instance. I confess in this wise, that Tinubu demonstrated more resolve than his respected kinsman and predecessor, Obasanjo. For context, the three gentlemen who served as FCT ministers under Obasanjo, namely Ibrahim Bunu, (an architect), Mohammed Abba Gana, (an electrical engineer) and Nasir El Rufai, (a quantity surveyor), were all from the north and are all from the same religious inclination.
But here was the same Tinubu who previously ignored public outcry when he settled for a deputy of the same faith, Kashim Shettima, against popular condemnation, opting for a Christian as FCT points-man. I should hasten to express my grief at the probable present dysfunction under this administration, of the beautiful Aso Villa Chapel, built by Obasanjo in the present power equation. Indeed, the last and only same-faith presidential pairing in Nigeria’s contemporary history was the military duo of Muhammadu Buhari and Tunde Idiagbon which was in office between January 1, 1984 and August 27, 1985. The administration was summarily torpedoed by Ibrahim Babangida and company. Nigeria’s secularism has been consistently adhered to ever since, including under the regime of Sani Abacha, the famous enfant terrible.
Wike came into office with a track record of commitment to the massive infrastructural makeover of Rivers State, his immediate past official address. Abuja had gone sleepy since after the activist superintendence of El Rufai. His four successors before Wike barely impacted on the capital territory, their names and regimes mostly consigned to the “spam” compartment of our collective memories. With their salaries yet unpaid right in the middle of yuletide, employees of the FCTA are nostalgic. They remember the established promptness of the payment of their emoluments by Wike’s immediate predecessor who was in office for eight years, Mohammed Musa Bello. He ensured prompt payments of salaries if that was all he did. Abuja under Wike has re-assumed its erstwhile toga as a sprawling construction site. Projects which were uncompleted by his predecessors are being revisited. Some have been completed and indeed put to use, while work is progressing in other locations. Select rural communities abutting the city centre are also receiving attention.
My interest in this piece is not about Wike’s demolitions in the FCT which has culminated in loud uproars from home owners and residents alike. Wike looks to have come to Abuja with the same jarring verbal preferences which typified his years in Brick House, Port Harcourt, the pseudonym of the Government House in that oil city. Wike grabs a microphone during a church service in the “Garden City” and rails at his opponents with expressions like thunder fire you. Such recklessness. The elegant, cultured Senator representing the FCT, Ireti Kingibe, notes at a media event that Wike had refused her requests to have a meeting with him to discuss the challenges, feelings and expectations of her constituents. This is very much in order. She got into office at the polls at their behest.
Wike retorts with she’s jealous that she has been seeing me with Philip Aduda her predecessor in office. Is it by force for me to be her friend? I won’t see her and I cannot see her. This is plain uncharitable and unnecessary. Ireti Kingibe should be able, seamlessly, to request for a meeting with the minister overseeing the senatorial territory she was elected to represent, by just a telephone call. While addressing communities and residential estates impacted by the ongoing demolition exercise, Wike on national television tells those who try to engage him to shut up their mouths. Reaffirming his obstinacy about proceeding with the “clean up” of Abuja, Wike rails, let the heavens fall. Haba!
I’ve heard Dave Umahi, Wike’s colleague in the Works ministry on television, address contractors, telling them that successive governments had taken a lot of shit from them. He boasted that he was aware he was on camera and was cognisant of his choices of lexicon. At another engagement, he ordered contractors at a particular project site, to disembark from the location forthwith. If they delayed or attempted to restart the road project, he assured that he would invite the landowners to beat them up, inflict them with bruises and chase them away. These are hallmarks of a loose canon. Instructively, very much like Wike and within the same time frame, 2015 to 2023, Umahi was governor in Ebonyi State. That should represent sufficient grooming period, preparatory to mainstream national service.
I have, in a previous essay titled Fela, Basket mouth and Godswill Akpabio published back in March 2024, drawn attention to some avoidable slips and slurs by the President of the Senate, Godswill Akpabio. Let’s hope he has rejigged the indiscretions characteristic of his public engagements, the most recent being his admonition that the poor should eat wherever they find food! He was practically recommending dumpsters and dunghills for our kinsmen and country folk. We are referring to our comrades who are the butt of state-orchestrated weaponisation of poverty. We are alluding to our fellow citizens pauperised and condemned to the vagaries of life in the face of diminished socio-economic opportunities. We are talking about hordes of despairing literate and skilled, some of them possessors of well-earned first class degrees, vegetating across the land.
As we round up the tumultuous year 2024 and look forward with subdued optimism to better days ahead, our leaders and representatives must adopt new, more temperate registers of public expression. The “renewed hope agenda” which is serially sloganeered and referenced at every opportunity must be concretised as real evidence of irrepressible commitment to this credo. It must move beyond being just a vacuous rant, and must tangibly reassure and pacify our people. Evidence of this must begin from the lips of those who lead us. This is the basic minimum, this is the littlest expectation as we step into year 2025.
*Tunde Olusunle, PhD, Fellow of the Association of Nigerian Authors, (FANA), is an Adjunct Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Abuja*
