Andrew Prokop: Are progressive groups sinking Democrats' electoral chances?Former Governor of Benue State, Senator Dr. Gabriel Suswan, and the Chairman of Benue State Football Association (BSFA), Chief Dr. Paul Edeh Esq FCPA, have undertaken to power the administrative block of Benue State University (BSU), Makurdi with 24-hour solar electricity. Both Senator Suswan and Chief Edeh made the joint pledge after they were bestowed with Honourary Doctorate Degrees by BSU at the weekend. Others who were honoured with same degree include a renowned Professor of History, Politics, Human Rights, Humanities and African Studies, Prof. Toyin Falola, Engr. Chief Sylvanus Gbasarah, as well as Wantaregh Paul Iyorpuu Unongo and Lt. Colonel Joseph Akahan who got posthumous honours. Responding on behalf of the Honorees at the Convocation ground, Chief Edeh expressed gratitude to the Governing Council, Senate and entire management team of the prestigious University for the recognition. He said, “Honours like this are not given lightly. They are earned through acts of service, through contributions that uplift our people and nation at large. The four of us being honoured and celebrated today, along with the distinguished personalities conferred with honorary degrees, are recognized because of the good we’ve worked to do. These awards remind us that small acts of goodness, layered one upon the other, can build something extraordinary, something far greater than what can be achieved by what we get from the National cake. “I am told that I am the first alumnus of this University to receive this honour in its 33-year history. That is a privilege I do not take lightly. It makes me proud, but more importantly, it makes me responsible.” He then charged the alumni of the institution to toe the path of notable globally-reckoned higher institution like Havard University in entrenching needed development at BSU, adding, “No institution grows beyond the contributions of its alumnus... BSU has the potential to achieve greatness, but it starts with us, its alumnus”. Then came the official announcement that he and Senator Suswan have decided “to undertake the installation of 60 kilowatts of solar power in the Administrative Block of the University. He will undertake 30 kilowatts while I will undertake 30 kilowatts at a combined cost ..... A consultant will be sent to immediately conduct a needs assessment so as to commence work as soon as possible.” Chief Dr. Edeh Esq who later dedicated his new attainment to the the Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in Benue State, visited their camp located along University of Agriculture road in North Bank to make donations, with a call on all stakeholders to “lend their voices towards resolving this crisis and help these families return home.” Earlier, the BSU Vice Chancellor, Prof. Tor Joe Iorapuu, who went down memory lane on how the school was conceptualised and has been on, informed that “The students of Benue State University have been spectacular among others in Nigeria and globally. Their academic and leadership performances have been top notch. Their records are available for all to see. “I must say that Benue State University is blessed and will continue to excel academically with a resolve to set the pace always.” Benue State Governor, Rev. Fr. Dr Hyacinth Alia, in his speech announced his administration’s readiness to rename BSU after Rev Fr. Moses Adasu, a former Governor who established the citadel of learning that produced 44 first class graduates at the 22nd, 23rd and 24th Combined Convocation Ceremony. He immediately announced scholarships for all the first class graduates and donated 500 Computers to BSU. He also revealed that his government will embark on the expansion of BSU with a campus at Adikpo town, Kwande Local Government Area, an area sharing boundary with Nigeria’s neighbouring country Cameroon. While commending the BSU Vice Chancellor-led management team for its visionary and focused leadership which is already yielding positive fruits, the governor announced that the present state government will establish a new higher institution to be known as Benue State University of Technology and Agriculture. Both the new Chancellor of BSU, His Royal Highness Alhaji Dr. Najib Hussaini Adamu (Emir of Kazaure) and Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the school’s Governing Council Sir Paul Chukwuma spoke of the various recent far-reaching programmes and projects geared towards entrenching scientific research which the institution embarked on. The Pro Chancellor particularly enjoined BSU alumni to shelve their individual interests and unite to lift the school in unity. Friends, former school mates and allies later gathered to celebrate Chief Dr Edeh at a special reception, where each of them took time out in dishing out glowing tributes on the popular philanthropist who is the only Proprietor of two Women Football Clubs in Nigeria – Naija Ratels and Honey Badgers. Among them were Prof. Toyin Falola who has bagged 25 Honourary Doctorate Degrees from different higher institutions in parts of the world and the most decorated scholar in Africa, the member representing Apa and Agatu federal constitutuency Hon. Ojotu Ojema, Majority leader of the Benue State House of Assembly Hon. Saater Tiseer, a serving lawmaker and Deputy Minority Chief Whip Hon. Blessed Onah, a Chief Supritendent of Police CSP (rtd) and interim President Benue State University Alumni Association (BSUAA) Dr. Vandefan James, a globally-recognised scholar and a guest lecturer of BSU Convocation event. Others are BSFA Vice Chairman Sir Alex Awuna, , a Professor of Economics, Prof. Sam Ominyi, Special Adviser to Benue State Governor on Youth and Sports Hon. Dr. Elizabeth Idoko-Okogun, former BSUAA President Mr. Lawrence Vihimga among othersFormer Department of Human Services secretary Kathryn Campbell (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch) It is something of a miracle that we are even here now... because none of the sclerotic checks and balances built into the system of governance in Australia worked to stop this rapacious scheme. Not the public servants who received the original legal advice before it even became a policy proposal, advice that flatly declared the approach unlawful; not the Commonwealth Ombudsman, whose credulity was exploited by wilfully deceptive bureaucrats. Freedom of information laws, once a serviceable transparency mechanism but now devolved into a clerical blockade, were rendered tautological. Critical information was imprisoned with the stroke of a pen, forever, and not even an eventual class action lawsuit in the Federal Court could obtain the damning documents needed to expose what had actually happened. Two Senate inquiries could not pry robodebt from the grip of secrecy, the information commissioner failed and even the appeals tribunal decisions — with only a few notable exceptions — were either limp or flat-out wrong. The lawyers got around to fighting robodebt, but only once they’d found their perfect victims. It’s hardly their fault that test case law requires the unblemished “good” victim to prove how monstrous a regime is, but the suffering continued while the search was on. The national audit office overturned rocks and found nothing of substance. What tiny criticisms of process were made were swatted away with a grim and well-practised administrative athleticism. NACC shouldn’t exist if it’s going to dog its remit by ignoring robodebt Read More Nothing stuck. Not even the initial media storm that blew in around Christmas 2016 and lasted a few months was enough to end robodebt. It is an appalling fact of this story that the largest number of people fed into the robodebt machine and the biggest dollar value of debt raised by this illegal program happened in the 2018-19 financial year, long after the fatigue of fighting it set in. But who am I to judge. I missed it, too. A tiny and dedicated band of reporters led by Christopher Knaus at the Guardian Australia and Ben Eltham at New Matilda , and building on a grassroots online campaign sparked by the seemingly omnipresent digital rights activist Asher Wolf, caught this sick thing for what it was. I was too naive, too credulous, to understand that Centrelink could really be that horrific. Wasn’t it just more of the same bastardry I’d seen them try on for decades? As a boy raised by a single mum, I’d been forced to watch her on the phone to Centrelink, begging and bartering for our financial security. What struck me, even as an eight-year-old, was that the support system was itself abusive. It left people like my mum exhausted and afraid. That kind of brutality leaves a mark. But it also rendered me immune to just how much worse things could get. This is what institutional power looks like. No agency or authority managed to lay so much as a glove on robodebt for years. We can deploy all of the usual excuses: resourcing, cowardice, incompetence. These defects are far from unique, but in robodebt they met, quite uniquely, the “dogmatic and authoritarian” secretary Kathryn Campbell who, on this particular policy, had more than most to lose. When she briefed Scott Morrison on December 30, 2014, some people in her department knew there was already legal advice in the sister policy department of Social Services categorically rejecting the lawful basis for any such proposal. Whether or not she knew about this advice at the briefing with Morrison in Sydney remains unsettled. But there is no doubt she later learned of the seismic policy and legislative consequences such a policy proposal, if it were ever taken to cabinet, would represent. How could she go back and tell this powerful new minister that he couldn’t have the idea about which he was “most excited”, and that she’d been premature in even mentioning it? Did she tell him? This is the woman who, according to her peers, “gets satisfaction from proving people wrong”. It would have been an unbearable realisation. “Not only was it so much money it would balance the [department’s] books but it punished welfare seekers, it was just a perfect, golden idea,” a source with knowledge of briefing arrangements between departments and ministers says. “And then when she found out that it would require amendment to the legislation, otherwise it’d be unlawful, she so did not want to have to tell him that. If she had never mentioned it to him, and if he hadn’t already said ‘Yes, I want that,’ it wouldn’t have been a problem. But she had. And that golden light that was falling on her for being the person who came up with it would all have been ruined.” These dynamics are not the result of vivid imaginations. Secretaries lived and died by the patronage of their minister. That they could be fired by these ministers (since changes to the public service in the 1990s) was well known, but the Coalition governments from late 2013 onwards had mutated the expectations of public servitude so greatly as to usher in a new era of weakness. Top servants were not praised for being frank and fearless so much as they were encouraged to be dishonest, one-dimensional vessels of an unchecked political desire. Whether this worked for the politicians depended very much on the senior executive at the top of their agency. Some told the ministers what they wanted to hear and then worked against them. Others were frozen out for being insufficiently “responsive”. We’ve ensured another robodebt will happen Read More In fact, it could get even worse. During the Coalition term, there was one secretary who fell so out of favour with their minister that they were literally ignored. The head of an entire department was no longer welcome to brief the minister. They had to find out what the minister wanted from their deputy secretaries. It was a situation that was untenable. Their career, at least under that government and quite possibly forever, was doomed. While Campbell was in the Middle East on her Joint Task Force 633 deputy command deployment, she gave an interview to The Australian newspaper about the competing dualism of her twin roles. “I’ve found it very useful in my public service career to have that leadership and command training that the military provides, to always see people as a key determinant of achieving objectives,” she said. “My military experience gave me at a very young age a focus on leadership and working with people and decision-making that I may not have got from my public service career.” The insignia of the Joint Task Force is a scorpion crawling through the stars of the Southern Cross, its tail aloft. This army-first mode of operating infected every element of her life in the public service. An executive officer in Kathryn Campbell’s secretarial office at DHS, Ben Keily, responded to simple requests from his boss with the quasi-military term “wilco”, short for “will comply”. In March 2017, after the public furore over robodebt finally revealed the nature of the degrading program to a mainstream consciousness, Campbell appeared before Senate estimates to defend the public release of private Centrelink data belonging to people who had complained about debts in the media. One of these people had already been named and minister Alan Tudge had shopped their personal details to journalists to discredit their complaints. It was an eye-popping exercise in government loathing and, as the royal commission would eventually find, it was an “abuse” of the enormous power that rested with the minister. When Ben Eltham wrote up Campbell’s calm defence of the whole episode before the Parliament, he drew her military career into the copy. Campbell, who monitored the daily media alerts and often chided teams when they were late, saw the article almost immediately and rushed to alert her colleagues at the Department of Defence. “Sir,” she emailed a senior figure in the military establishment. “Please find attached an article which unfortunately drags the Army into the Centrelink Privacy Data issue. I saw CA [chief of army] at a breakfast this morning and he is aware of the Centrelink Privacy Data issue.” She sent this just 16 minutes after getting the media alert. This was the issue that had her full attention. Campbell sent an update the next morning — a Saturday — at 7.42am, having scanned the newspapers and morning bulletins for anything that might drag the military into further disrepute. Never mind the thousands harmed by the robodebt disaster; never mind that presumably one of the chief attributes of the Australian Defence Force is an ability to defend itself (here against the most milquetoast of public criticism that was not really about them but about Kathryn Campbell’s conduct); and never mind that precisely nobody cared, not even at the ADF. Campbell was concerned with her own status with respect to the institution she most admired: the Army. Didn’t they realise there was a war going on? “Sir ... mainstream media does not appeared [sic] to have picked this up so no risk to Army,” she wrote. This is an extract from Rick Morton’s Mean Streak (HarperCollins). Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au . Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say . We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
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