The Nation Newspaper

Author: The Nation

  • We are set for victory, says APC

    We are set for victory, says APC

    Text of a press conference by Mr. Dele Alake Special Adviser, Media and Communication, All Progressives Congress Presidential Campaign Council on February 27th, 2023 in Abuja

    The APC Presidential Campaign Council and our Presidential Candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, are thankful to Nigerians for coming out in large numbers to exercise their civic duty on Saturday, February 25, 2023. It was, yet again, a momentous day in our democratic journey as Nigerians lined up to choose the next set of leaders, especially the President and National Assembly members that will direct the affairs of our country for the next four years.

    We are glad to note the very convivial atmosphere under which the election was conducted. Domestic and international observers have adjudged the election and the process as credible and transparent. They also thumbed up the electoral commission and security agencies for the general peaceful conduct of the election. This is in spite of isolated cases of technical hitches and attempts by some of our desperate opponents to subvert the process through violence and other malpractices.

    The results trickling in since the close of voting on Saturday have clearly shown the direction Nigerians have chosen to go. Right from the polling unit results received from across the country, the signs were clear that the deceit and propaganda of the opposition did not fetch them the expected votes. This has expectedly generated anxiety in their camps with many of their leaders making irresponsible incendiary comments.

    We note with utmost concern those inciting comments and call to violence by some spokespersons of the opposition, especially those from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). We are particularly concerned and call on the State Security Services and the Nigeria Police Force to immediately restrain persons such as Dino Melaye, Dele Momodu and a certain Pastor Paul Enenche of Dunamis Church from their clear call to violence.

    Melaye’s tweet threatening violence, Momodu going on the TV to announce a purported winner and Enenche’s hate speech from the pulpit violate every law of the land. They should not go scot-free.

    When failure stared them in the face, rather than accept the outcome with dignity like good democrats would, some sore losers began shopping for ways to cut corners or scuttle the process. We have seen many doctored results giving false victory to the Labour Party in places where it performed abysmally poor. The idea was to give its followers hope and prepare them for a planned street insurrection. The PDP has employed almost similar tactics despite secretly admitting defeat. They went about with mouthwatering offers looking for willing partners that would help them subvert the will of the people.

    Perhaps having failed to procure officials to help it doctor results, the PDP earlier today rented willing airwaves to make very dangerous statements on the election.

    We also wonder why agents of the party at the Abuja collation centre are pushing insistently for the uploading of the results on INEC portal, when section 60 of the Electoral Act is clear about who has the power to do so at the polling unit. The state collation officer has no such power. The INEC chairman, who collates what has been collated from the states also has no such power.

    Is the PDP calling for the upload to enable it hack the system to give it a false victory?

    Unlike what the PDP spokesmen have done, we will not announce ourselves as winners despite having the figures which affirm our anticipated victory.

    We will abide by the laws by allowing the electoral umpire to do its job.

    A cursory look at the figures from across the states show that our candidate is well placed for victory. The results have shown that the Labour Party, as we kept saying, is no threat to our victory.

    The PDP, on the other hand, has also failed in its own permutation making its dream of victory go up in smoke. The PDP’s projection of a landslide win in the North has collapsed.

    For example, the PDP’s celebrated victory in Katsina State was only with a difference of less than 7,000 votes. On the other hand, the APC maintains a lead of over 30,000 and 150,000 in nearby Jigawa and Zamfara states, respectively.

    The bad news for PDP, however, is its dismal performance in Kano where the APC is emerging with over 600,000 difference ahead of the PDP. This is a monumental figure which offsets the PDP in the entire North.

    The trend is the same in the South where PDP’s very poor show in Lagos, Oyo, Rivers and other key states spell doom for the party. The little gains made by the PDP in South-South and South-East are too little to compensate for the party’s huge deficit suffered in the South-West.

    In the North Central, the APC has decimated all parties to a comfortable majority votes in Kwara, Kogi and Niger. Our impressive show in Benue, FCT and Plateau is also pushing PDP into third position in these places.

    Taken together, we are very upbeat as the numbers do not lie. We call on the opposition to stop the macabre dance of a dying horse and embrace defeat honourably. There can still be honour in defeat.

    We once again call for maturity and restraint. Nigerians have spoken through the ballots and the umpire must be allowed to do its work without harassment or blackmail.

    Security agents should stay on alert and deal with individuals and groups who are planning to foment trouble. Election is not a war. This is democracy at play.

    We once again thank Nigerians for subscribing to our message of Renewed Hope and ask our supporters to remain calm and hopeful as we will ensure that their votes are not manipulated by any ethnic power-mongering person, subversive elements, or serial losers!

  • The morning after

    The morning after

    After the campaign for the General Election closed, I woke up every morning with one question on my mind:  Have they procured a rogue judge to issue a midnight injunction restraining the Independent National Electoral Commission and its agents from proceeding with the polls scheduled to start on February 25?

    But the question did not just sit on my mind.  I put it to colleagues and associates and persons in the attentive audience who share my concern about the parallels between the runup to the June 12, 1993, presidential election, and the one about to be staged.

    No, or not yet, were their responses, right up to Election Day.

    The morning after, my question was a slight variation on the theme:  Have they procured a judge to issue an injunction restraining INEC and its agents from announcing the results or anything purporting to be the results of the election?

    Again, the responses were, no, or not yet.

    I will ask that question every day until the election results are declared.  For, between this writing and then, anything can still happen.

    In the closing stages of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s transition, even the most unyielding skeptics, among whom I counted myself, thought that, at his most desperate, he could only put off the election.  We rested easy thereafter.

    None of us ever thought that the election, the finest Nigerians had ever witnessed, would be annulled.  Babangida had reserved unto himself the authority to disqualify any aspirant before, during, and after the election, but we never thought that he would avail himself of the last option.  But annul it he did.  And a great many who had voted in the poll cheered on. 

    This being a  country where nothing is impossible, one must remain resolute in the belief that nothing is over it is really over.

    People:  The election is not over until the winner takes office.

    That much is now clear from all the skirmishing over the delayed declaration of the outcome. The official position is that nothing about the outcome is over until INEC says it is over.

    So, why all the pitter-patter about “collating” returns  Why the delay in releasing them?

    They say the resident election commissioners are in transit from the state capitals to Abuja for the conclave at which they will be asked in full public view to proclaim the outcome in their domain. If that is indeed the case, why did INEC frontload the results from Ekiti State?

    -In this mechatronic age, why should the physical presence of resident commissioners be  required in Abuja just to announce election results?  What if they are kidnapped en route?   

    Stragglers of the anti-June 12 brigade and their retinue of shysters, are latching to what seems to be a lacuna in the poorly-drafted 1999 Constitution to insist that, in addition to winning a majority of the votes cast and securing at least 25 percent of the votes in two-thirds of the 36  states and Abuja Federal Capital Territory,  a presidential candidate cannot succeed without winning a plurality in the FCT.

    This cannot be the intendment of the appropriate clause in the Constitution.  For it would mean that the votes of Abuja residents carry greater weight than the votes of other Nigerians, in effect giving them a veto.  It would set at nought the Constitution’s equal-protection clause.

    But this shibboleth might be only the opening gambit of the stragglers.  They are a pertinacious breed.

    It is a constant cause of lamentation among many Nigerians living abroad that they cannot vote in elections back home.  But that circumstance is not as disabling or handicapping as it might seem at first blush.  For they participate in the elections in every way just short of

    Like the folks back home, they follow the twists and turns of the transition keenly.  They comb the internet for scraps of information relating to the elections, but not always with the nice sense of discrimination that one must bring to material from that provenance.

    I have before me one such material that was doing the rounds on the eve of the presidential election.   The source identified himself only as a pastor,  and here is his message to fellow Christians:

    Nigeria had been a member of the Organization of Islamic Community – he couldn’t even get the name of the body right – for eight unbroken years, with a Muslim president in the saddle. To qualify for all the rights and privileges, Nigeria had to have had ten years of continuous rule by a Muslim head of state.

    It needed two more years of rule by a Muslim to enjoy full membership.

    The design, the pastor claimed, was to ensure that the leading presidential candidates were all Muslims, so that, whoever won the race would serve out the two years needed for Nigeria to qualify as a full member of the OIC. 

    For that privilege, however, Nigeria would have to pay an annual subscription.  A certain percentage of the national cabinet (and presumably high-ranking offices) would have to be assigned to Muslims.

    So that, when Buhari displayed time and again a craven partiality for Muslims in making federal appointments, he was merely executing the OIC’s plan for Nigeria.

    They never reckoned with the coming of Peter Gregory Obi and the massive following he generated across the country.

    God has given Christians the privilege to see through the scheme.  It is therefore “mandatory” and “a service to God” to ensure that President Buhari is not succeeded by a Muslim.

    If that were to happen, your children would be barred from certain schools.  And you would be barred from holding certain positions.  Christians must not allow that to happen

    God told the children that had given the land of Canaan to them, but that they had to fight for it.  All (Christians) must come out to vote for Obi.  They should mount a door-to-door campaign to convince every single friend to vote for Obi.

    This was no Sermon on the Mount, but a summons to hatred and bigotry – in the name of God.  It would be hard to find a more revolting example of the weaponization of religion.

    Obi qualified on all counts to run for President.  He never presented himself as a Christian candidate, only as a reconditioned trader who would “move the country consumption to production.”   Why did the pastor insinuate God into his pet desires and press his audience to embrace them as a sacred duty?

    He was preying on the innocence of his audience with his fact-free harangue.  The clauses cited with such contrived earnestness are nowhere to be found in the OIC’s charter.  He could not even state the organization’s name correctly.  Nigeria acceded to OIC membership  more than 30 years ago, in the Babangida era

    But how many in the attentive audience would take the trouble to check out his claims or challenge him if they found out or knew that he was faking it?

    As I end this piece to meet my deadline, INEC has not yet announced the final outcome.  But certain trends are clear.  Religion was in big play.  So was ethnic identity, which cuts across all groups with its contents and discontents but is much stronger in some than in others.  Instead of savouring their gains, some are demanding that the elections be cancelled.

    Judging by the provocative reactions to the results declared so far in an election advertised as the most consequential in the nation’s history, and the revanchist tenor pervading them, the question is already being asked:  Is this the new dawn the election was supposed to preface?

  • Lawmaker runs-in with the law

    Lawmaker runs-in with the law

    Hauling around a huge pile of cash around in foreign currency at wee hours is by any stretch suspicious enough to attract agents of the law. This is more so on election eve, and when the ‘cash mule’ is a political actor and not by any reckoning a conventional money agent or businessman in the strict sense.

    But that was what House of Representatives member representing Port Harcourt Federal Constituency II, Chinyere Igwe, was up to when he was nabbed at about 2:45a.m. on Friday, 24th February, hauling around $498,100 inside a bag in his car. It was de facto a heist, because at the conservative official exchange rate of N460 to a dollar, that cargo amounted to some N230million. And Igwe wasn’t hauling the value in local currency apparently for portability and, of course, local currency scarcity occasioned by the naira redesign policy of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). He transported hard currency that only God knows how it was sourced.

    Rivers State police command easily discerned the objective of the cash haulage, courtesy of a distribution list the lawmaker had in his car when he was arrested. Command spokesperson, Grace Iringe-Koko, said in a statement: “Police officers from Rivers State Command deployed to INEC Headquarters, Aba Road, today 24/2/2023 at about 0245hrs, while on stop-and-search, arrested one Hon. Chinyere Igwe, member, House of Representatives representing Port Harcourt II Federal Constituency with a cash sum of 498,100 US dollars inside a bag in his car. Also recovered was a list for distribution of the money.”

    Igwe is a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and supporter of its presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. In effect, he has been at odds with Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike, who stood against Atiku’s bid. How the lawmaker had hoped to transact in so much cash amidst pervasive cash drought in the land without drawing attention to himself is curious. It is even more curious he didn’t show much enlightenment about the law of the land despite being a lawmaker. At his best chance, he has a tough task ahead wriggling out of a money laundry charge. Worse is that he seems unaware of the need for mitigation by coming clean upfront on his accomplices. In a visual clip that made the rounds following his arrest, he was interrogated on who handed him the cash and all he could repeatedly was that it was ‘the party.’ He refused to disclose who it was in the party. It remains to be seen how long he can hide behind a finger.

  • Lagos’ empowerment initiatives

    Lagos’ empowerment initiatives

    By Bolaji Odumade

    The commitment of the Lagos State Government under the leadership of Babajide Olusola Sanwo-Olu toward empowering more Lagosians has been further strengthened with programmes such as the Jobs Initiatives Lagos (JIL), Eko Digital Skills, Adult Literacy Education, Vocational Training, Quarterly Mega Empowerment Programme and LSETF Funding Initiatives among others.

    The Sanwo-Olu administration is embarking on several intervention programmes to empower the youths, women and indigent citizens in tandem with its vision of attaining a ‘Greater Lagos’.

    In order to sustain the momentum in its skill acquisition centres, the government has completed the upgrading of most of its vocational training centres to world-class standards.

     It has also equipped those centres with additional working tools to allow for expansion and more enrolment.

    Over 25,000 trainees have graduated from the state’s 20 vocation centres in the last three and a half years. 

    During a quarterly mega empowerment programme by the Ministry of Women Affairs and Poverty Alleviation (WAPA), 890 residents were empowered.

    The empowerment programme is a demonstration of the government’s commitment to eradicating poverty. The scheme has positively influenced many Lagosians who are now employers of labour in their own right. 

    Similarly, over 1,000 widows were provided with livelihood support during last year’s International Widows’ Day celebration. The state’s First Lady, Dr. Ibijoke Sanwo-Olu, who made the cash presentations to the widows at Alausa, restated the commitment of the Sanwo-Olu administration to rendering necessary assistance to widows and women in general.

    Meanwhile, another 1,050 Lagosians were empowered with various items by the government. This includes hair dryers, pepper-grinding machines, generating sets, sewing machines, popcorn production machines, clippers and sterilizing sets among others.

    Speaking at the event, Governor Sanwo-Olu, represented by his deputy, Dr. Kadri Obafemi Hamzat restated the commitment of his administration to providing succour to citizens, especially in the face of daunting social-economic challenges.

    Similarly, 200 household heads for orphans and vulnerable children were empowered with 76 grinding machines, 69 sewing machines, 10 tools, 10 deep freezers, 15 hair-drying machines, 10 braving equipment and 7 ovens among others.

    Also, no less than 255,000 direct and indirect jobs have been created in the last two years via the various activities of the Ministry of Wealth Creation and Employment.

    Also, 8,000 residents were supported last year through a Special Grant for Rural Women in partnership with the federal government. The beneficiaries are spread across all the 57 Local Government Areas and Local Council Development Areas. Also, no fewer than 22,647 beneficiaries under the variants (N-teach, N-Health, N-Agro) participated in a sensitisation workshop organised to review experiences, gather strategies needed for post-N-Power programme and provide a platform for future career prospects.

    Similarly, the development of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) is also being used to empower Lagosians. Very soon, the 44 Factory Units-Imota Light Industry Park, which is about 86% completed, will be commissioned to further provide opportunities for residents to generate wealth.

    Also, the various projects being executed with the private sector at the Lekki Free Trade Zone are already yielding great dividends.

    Despite the pandemic, over 230 jobs were created through the Alaro City project, a joint venture project designed and owned by Rendeavour Nigeria Development Company Limited and the government, through Lekki Worldwide Investments Limited.

    The government has also been exploring opportunities in the agriculture sector to empower more. Recently, 1,750 Agricultural Value Chains Actors were empowered with various agricultural productive assets and inputs via the Agricultural Value Chains Empowerment programme. 

    Governor Sanwo-Olu reiterated the need for active participation of all stakeholders in agricultural space towards exploring the diverse empowerment opportunities available in the sector.

    He listed some of the projects being deployed to empower Lagosians in the agricultural sector to include the Imota Rice, Agricultural based Youth Empowerment Scheme (YES), World Bank assisted Agro-processing and the Productivity Enhancement and Livelihood Improvement Support Project (APPEALS) among others.

    The government has also commenced another youth empowerment programme, under its Jobs Initiative Lagos (JIL), targeted at final year students and those in penultimate classes in higher institutions.

    The programme targets 8000 entrepreneurs. At present, 8000 penultimate and final year students, drawn from all higher institutions in the state, are undergoing entrepreneurship and employability skills training programmes.

    The JIL is aimed at preparing participants for immediate entry into the workforce as employees and employers of labour, by equipping them with the new market-aligned knowledge, soft skills, business tools, and a mind-set re-orientation that will make them suitable and qualify for their chosen career in the technology-driven world of work.

    Soon, the selected 8000 students were trained in core areas such as soft skills, resume writing, work etiquettes, entrepreneurship skills development presentation and pitching, corporate email drafting and negotiations skills among others.

    The government came up with the initiative to up-skill the youths by equipping them with all necessary skills that would not only make them employable and highly competitive in the global market, but make their services highly essential for national economic growth.

    The Sanwo-Olu administration is also set to empower over 2.5 million youths via arts and crafts. This is aimed at making them self-reliant and economically independent.

    This was disclosed during the annual creative industry’s skills acquisition workshop organised by the Lagos State Council of Arts and Culture.

    The event, tagged “Unlocking the Potential of the Innate Creativity for Sustainable Development”, was organised to equip participants for employ-ability opportunities.

    The government has also presented cheques of various amounts of money to beneficiaries of the ‘Sanwo-Olu Listens’ initiative. The scheme, which was designed to provide long-term financial assistance to vulnerable citizens, is one of several social intervention programmes being implemented by the Sanwo-Olu administration to bring relief to residents with adverse socio-economic conditions.

    Speaking during the programme at Alausa, Sanwo-Olu affirmed he would not shy away from making lives of the citizens of the state better. He added that governance goes beyond providing security of lives and property for the citizens, but ensuring the daily upkeep and welfare of the citizens.

    “I am really delighted to be at this event and listened to some of the beneficiaries as they tabled their priorities. This is what government entails. We know you will face diverse challenges. We intend to do our best to support and give succour to the vulnerable”, Sanwo-Olu noted.

    The governor reassured Lagosians that his government will always listen to the voice of the people, especially the less privileged. He stressed that the programme was planned to bring hope and help to the downtrodden.

    Though the task of tackling poverty and unemployment might seem herculean, the Sanwo-Olu administration has demonstrated, through its numerous creative initiatives that with the required will both monsters could be overcome.

    With a comatose global economy and frightening unemployment statistics, we cannot afford to take the issue of wealth creation lightly. Therefore, all stakeholders must join hands with the government to come up with more ingenious means of wealth creation.   

    •Odumade is of the Features Unit, Ministry of Information & Strategy, Alausa, Ikeja.

  • Sacrificing Ukraine on the altar of geopolitical rivalry

    Sacrificing Ukraine on the altar of geopolitical rivalry

    By Alade Fawole

    The Russia-Ukraine war has raged with intense savagery without a clear winner or end in sight. What is clear is that Ukraine has suffered tremendous physical destruction, its critical infrastructure so badly degraded and hobbled that life for millions of Ukrainians has become horrifyingly hellish even as tens of billions of dollars of heavy weapons keep pouring into Ukraine from NATO member countries. Despite this, Ukraine is not anywhere near driving Russians forces off its territory, especially Crimea which Russia had annexed since 2014, and the Donbas, which it occupies in support of ethnic Russians in that eastern part of Ukraine. Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelensky meanwhile mounts vigorous campaigns to get more support for his country across the globe, including here in Africa, although most countries rebuffed his entreaties for them to take sides, condemn and isolate Russia.

    It is not impossible that President Zelensky knows deep down that Ukraine is simply being sacrificed on the altar of geopolitical competition between two elephantine nuclear rivals, the US and Russia, two arch-enemies that are unwilling to confront each other on the battlefield because their fearsome nuclear arsenals might have to be unleashed on each other. Since neither adversary wants to fight to the death, it is convenient to sacrifice a hapless Ukraine whose leaders are too naïve to see through the veneer of Western propaganda urging them that NATO membership is its right. Seduced by America’s promise that Ukraine would be gifted NATO membership, Ukrainians had allowed America to overthrow their government and install puppets, including Zelensky, as leaders for them. Even after Russia had annexed Crimea in 2014, Ukraine still allowed itself to be led to the slaughter in ‘a forever war’ by American war-mongers who choose to frame the struggle between Ukraine and Russia as one between democracy and authoritarianism, between freedom and oppression, and which in their view Ukraine is bound to win.

    Ukraine is fighting a lost cause, Zelensky’s pretensions to defending democracy and freedom fools no one. It is a war it cannot reasonably hope to win because Russia is too much of a formidable enemy and because neither the Americans nor the Europeans want to get involved beyond arming Ukraine with sophisticated heavy weapons, some being tested for the first time in real live combat. So Ukraine has been turned into America’s ordnance-proving ground. Reality check: only a negotiated settlement can end that hapless country’s nightmare. Its Western backers are unfortunately preventing its leaders from ever contemplating such. Instead, Ukrainians are being told that they can win the war, defeat Russia militarily on the battlefield and force its total withdrawal from Crimea and Donbas, frankly impossible to accomplish under present conditions.

    Certain plain realities must be embraced here. First is the impossibility of defeating Russia and forcing its total withdrawal from the Ukrainian territories it has seized. Ukraine is not in any shape or form to secure total defeat of Russia, except other countries deploy troops on its side, which none is willing to do at the moment. This is in any case a dangerous proposition not currently in the immediate contemplation of the European countries which are themselves militarily unable to sustain any drawn out war in Europe. Second, total defeat for Russia will mean giving up the entire Donbas region and the Crimea, the latter with implications for Russia’s Black Sea fleet and overall naval capability and influence, and Ukraine regaining full sovereignty over its entire pre-2014 territory. This is far-retched, remote and almost unattainable military objective. Total withdrawal means also Russian troops leaving Ukraine and abandoning ethnic Russian-Ukrainians to a fate worse than death, and relinquishing its strategic naval foothold in the Black Sea.

    Great powers rarely ever contemplate defeat and surrender in humiliation unless they are totally vanquished on the battlefield, as Germany was in both First and Second World Wars. Even after Germany had suffered the most devastating military defeats across Europe, Nazi forces continued to fight on until the Soviet forces reached the centre of Berlin, its capital.

    Let’s face it, the fate that awaits Russia if defeated will be far worse than what Germany suffered after WWII – the likelihood of forced balkanization into unviable ethnic enclaves, territorial adjustments, payment of reparations, possible demilitarization, the humiliation of a nation with a long and proud history, etc. Russia knows what the US is up to in this conflict, i.e., total destruction and cannibalization of the vast country into unviable states. America’s ultimate objective is to use the war in Ukraine to permanently weaken Russia! So, if we peel off the tissues of Western propaganda that have egged Zelensky on, it will be plain that the war in Ukraine isn’t about democracy or freedom, for Ukraine is not even a democracy but a corruption-riddled fascist state. It was carefully and methodically designed by the US, and Ukraine is only a whip that Uncle Sam needs to inflict punishment on and humiliate Russia, and to bleed its economy white.

    A nuclear-armed country is terrible adversary to contemplate. Nuclear war is not winnable, no matter the calculations. And great nations also have elephantine memories – the Russians would not have so soon forgotten that very prominent among Adolf Hitler’s expressed objectives for launching Operation Barbarossa, the massive ground and air assaults on the Soviet Union in 1941 were: to defeat Russia and degrade it to a third rate power in Europe, and to inflict national humiliation on Russians as a people. Vladimir Putin knows all too well that America’s objectives in the current war are not too dissimilar. This is why it doesn’t make sense to expect Russia, with a vast nuclear arsenal, to easily cave in to defeat and national humiliation and all its ugly consequences.

    Prolonging the war is not in Ukraine’s interest. Weapons being supplied by the Americans and its NATO allies though formidable, but cannot alone win the war. Ukrainian forces are being badly depleted by humongous battle casualties because the war is thus far restricted to their territory; the Ukrainian population is being demoralized by Russia’s relentless destruction of their critical infrastructure and power grids, mass suffering in the winter cold, etc. A fight to finish is not in anyone’s interest. The war’s consequences on global economy, security and stability have been far-reaching, hardly any region of the globe is left unaffected.

    It is high time all well-meaning neutral states, groups, blocs and organizations, and respected individuals with sufficient international clout, like the Pope, took necessary steps to encourage and facilitate negotiations that will bring peace and end the suffering of the people. The great powers, i.e., NATO member countries with vested interests in the crisis, are already complicit in the war and are morally compromised to be fair and honest arbiters in any peaceful negotiations. Actually, this is a good time for the Non-Aligned Movement and others in the Global South to step in and broker peace and prevent possible escalation into a nuclear showdown between the Russia and NATO that will likely consume entire human civilization. But the first step is for Ukrainian leaders to accept the inevitability of a negotiated settlement and allow this to commence.

    •Prof Fawole is of the Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife.

  • The morning after

    The morning after

    Days after the presidential and the National Assembly elections, there is, as one might expect, just as many gloating out there as there is gnashing of teeth going on. And this is even at a time when the results still abode in the province of speculation. Talk of a long night; the rumour mill has been busy as much as their kith in crime – the hyper-active, fake-news-prone social media industry have practically taken to the overdrive – churning out, as one might imagine, results generated from wherever.

    It’s been a hell of a waiting time.

    If one expected the day after the election, which is a sacred day of worship to help calm the nerves, things actually turned the opposite direction. After weeks of not-exactly-silent bickering by those who conflate their partisan preferences for the Divine Will, it was not surprisingly; time to launch into the next phase: featuring the most heinous rationalisation from the same palace theologians who not only claim monopoly of the heavenly wisdom but say they are able to tap on the celestial hotlines on the go! Whether they will allow the rest of the orderly society to have peace in the event of their prophecy (?) missing the mark remains to be seen! In any event, there will still be time to make amends for those fatal misses, if only to assuage their gullible, hyper-forgiving flocks who took their gibberish seriously!

    What about the throng who believes that their beloved candidate is incapable of losing in a free and fair election? The only declaration that would please them is to hear their man pronounced winner – irrespective of what the rules say and even when their candidate’s pathway to the presidency only exists in realm of fantasy! I believe the rest of the orderly society have a duty tom pay attention to the silent rumbling of the atavistic club already notorious for their aversion for civil political discourse. Remember EndSARS and its disgraceful aftermath? The country deserves some calm from their quarters after the dreadful storm of the past weeks.

    And where are we? Monday night, some of the results as indeed the lessons from them have continued to trail in. Surprises? Not exactly at this point; at least as far as what is already declared is concerned. Perhaps in a few instances – may be; over all, the election could be said to be as competitive as could be in the circumstance. We know who is leading and those whose mission is – to use the Gen-Z lingo – to catch cruise is all but completed.

    To be sure, the lessons are instructive for those willing to learn, something leading parties in particular – notably the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic Party can afford to ignore at their peril. One refers to the old paradigm of party outreach, mobilisation and organisation; the imperative of new tools and mechanisms for party engagements. There will certainly be a lot to say on this and much more in the coming days/weeks.

    The politicians and their notoriety for crass delinquency are of course a different matter. Will they ever learn? Surely, the signs are ominous.  Trust the tribe to find any avenue, no matter how ludicrous to seek to throw the spanners into the wheel of progress particularly when things appear not to be going their way. They are back to their old ways.

    Imagine, what began as an ordinarily simple observation by the PDP representative, the erratic Dino Melaye, about the so-called failure of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) to upload the results as captured by the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BIVAS) in the 174,000-odd polling booths would suddenly become the ratio for seeking to abort an entire result collation process. To do this, the party had to literally browbeat some fringe parties to follow its ignoble steps, and failing to force the hand of INEC to do its bidding, resort to an Orubebe-like theatrical which climaxed in the walkout on the collation process.

    Does it really matter that some 66,000 (38 percent) of the results had, at that point time, been uploaded on the INEC website? Or that the process was still on-going? Or the copious assurances by the INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu that the results being presented to INEC were those whose hard copies had not only been authenticated by the parties at the polling unit levels but were also in the custody of the parties themselves? And what about the remedies availed to the parties to challenge the outcomes?

    Delinquency must come with great rewards else the likes of Dino Melaye would not be found in decent company. In any case, it’s been said that ours is a democracy without democrats. In 2015, it was a man called Peter Godsday Orubebe; in 2023, it is one Dino Melaye. Same party; same plot, same outcome – a doomed venture. Yes, Nigerians are wiser!

    And now, the latest information is that the Labour Party also wants the process halted or better still, the entire process aborted wholesale! And who else is this coming from other than Akin Osuntokun, the director general of the party’s Presidential Campaign Council (PCC)? Interesting times ahead, you say?

    Talk of the delinquency of the political class being barely tolerable; how about a section of the media and their civil society allies, almost simultaneously, going to town with choreographed talking points ostensibly to de-legitimise the process that the world saw online and in real time?

    And this at a time most Nigerians already had, with perhaps the exception of that irrepressible club of losers, a fair idea of the outcomes.

    To be sure, no system is perfect. Not even the United States where we borrowed this presidential system. In any case, neither the constitution nor the Electoral Act demand perfection; what it prescribes is substantial compliance with all applicable laws governing the process. Considering that the process is not yet completed, it seems early in the day to judge INEC any fairly. In the meantime, PDP, Labour Party and their media enablers should calm down.

  • Between critical and adversarial journalism

    Between critical and adversarial journalism

    Every election has its unique dynamics, never the same with the previous one.  

    But the media that should track and dutifully guide voters on these changes have remained more or less static, many times chasing inanities, while the real issues beg for attention.

    By its lax tracking, the Nigerian media systemically under-develops Nigerian democracy, though it huffs and puffs as its loud guardian: the all-mighty fourth estate, that could do and undo!

    This scandalous abandonment of sacred duty has made elections that should ordinarily be clear cut, in stark choices, to become needlessly blurred.  

    That condemns the voter to poor choice, often fired by gushing emotions.  But the same fourth estate that sets up this debacle is the first to bawl and whine that things aren’t going well — and this dire judgment, most times, suffused with raw passion instead of clinical reason.

    The Nigerian media appears resigned to the easy way out: empty thundering in pursuit of showy advocacy, instead of quiet, lonely and rigorous thinking to proffer hard solutions.

    By the way the February 25 presidential election is panning out with quite some stunning upsets.  

    In Lagos, Peter Obi and his Labour Party (LP) triumphed, thanks to many precincts with heavy Igbo population; laced with some “youths”, emotive at the best of times, fated to racing to hasty conclusions without thinking hard and through.

    That led to some maniacal triumphalism along stark ethnic lines.  

    Still, if you must bury PDP — and that was what LP votes did in Lagos for Abubakar Atiku and his party — must you replace it with Obi who, running on LP platform, was fakery through and through?

    That brings the discourse back to the media and lax tracking.

    Candidate Muhammadu Buhari won in 2015 exuding integrity, when the PDP years had been nothing but rot and maggots; and Olusegun Obasanjo’s party had pawned our collective heirloom to a wild and greedy few, even if PMB was his gruff old self.

    But his transparent honesty and bewitching simplicity stepped in to save his endangered co-elite, giving them a rare chance to reboot and find a new path.  

    By his government’s far better programme conception and far more verifiable project implementation, spread to every part of the country, he tried his best to yet save his stiff-necked power elite.

    But how did his political adversaries take this offer of “new life”?  

    The South East dominant power elite, who lost out in the 2015 sweepstakes, weaponized their plum loss to rile their masses into blind “Fulani” hate — with swashbuckling ethnic arrogance and condescension to boot!  

    That ironically came to plague Obi in his bold run, with his generally poor showing in the North, at least from available results so far.  He did well though in the some Christian-dominated areas of southern Kaduna.

    Baba Ayo Adebanjo and his tendencies, leading a plank of the fractious Yoruba progressives phalanx, exploited Awolowo-era Yoruba-North antipathy to bake Bola Tinubu in dry hate, among his own folks.  His crime?  Paving the way for PMB, the alleged latest face of blind Fulani hegemony!

    But as Fulani hate gave IPOB the vim to bury the Igbo in self-assured destruction in wanton Igbo-on-Igbo violence, Yorubaland barely dodged the bullet in the Yoruba Nation campaign, which threw up some virtual dregs, pontificating to the cream, all fired by ethnic rage.

    Baba Adebanjo, for continued relevance, continues to thrust his relationship with the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo as willy-nilly, must-earn tribute.  

    But running from pillar to post in three presidential elections — 2015: Jonathan, 2019: Atiku, 2023: Obi — Baba hangs in there.  Unlike the old Titans, he simply lacks the grace to concede to the Olympians, as the graceful change of guards went in Greek mythology.

    Instead of the media to faithfully report all these excitements but put them in clear perspectives to guide the reader, many segments just jumped into the fray, amplifying the din.

    In that dreadful screech, strides the taciturn PMB made, in renascent agriculture and transformative infrastructure, were blissful ignorance to an electorate gorged silly on the bogey of PMB as the latest Fulani gargoyle in town!

    Which is why an Obi would emerge from the blue and remake himself “youth champion” (even if he didn’t articulate any logical way to put his beloved “youths” out of their misery); or a flat Atiku peddling old fumbling of the PDP era (that catapulted Nigeria into these current challenges) as fresh magic cures.

    Still, imagine if the media had put the PMB 2015 win in correct perspectives?  Imagine if they had followed that up with the lesson of the 2019 win, which a foreign newspaper even explained to an endorsement of and reward for trust-worthiness?

    Imagine tracking and dutifully linking renewed infrastructure as boon for personal economies, and going ahead to do factual stories to elicit these new realities — not as propaganda for anyone but as sacred duty to correctly inform the population?

    After doing all of these, also imagine the media clinically x-raying PMB government’s power policies (the critical area of infrastructure which PMB has not really done well, beyond improvements in some elite segment of the power market) and suggesting reasonable and realistic ways forward?

    By doing all that, well before the election season, without prejudice to partisan preferences, the voter would have known the progress (or retrogress) between 2015 and now — again as sacred, fact-led, surveillance duty, not captive to any partisan pandering.

    Wouldn’t the voter then have been well informed to make rational choices, and not fall victim to election-season shamans, who after scamming the electorate with sweet nothings, leave them in the lurch and set them on another bout of wailing and near-hopelessness in the next four years?

    From the earliest days of Lagos Weekly Record and Lagos Standard (that pair bossed the Lagos newspaper scene from 1900 and 1920), to Herbert Macaulay’s Lagos Daily News (founded 1925) that took no prisoners in its continuous agitation and Zik’s thundering West African Pilot (launched in 1937), adversarial journalism has become, for many Nigerian newspapers, the unfazed gold standard.

    While that stood Nigeria well during the colonial times and the best-forgotten military era, it’s hardly a winning model for a democracy trying to find its feet, without prejudice to the media’s sacred duty to call to account the ruling order.

    It’s time to evolve into developmental journalism.  It is never mutually exclusive to critical journalism.  Rather, both can reinforce each other, if the media master their craft.

  • SON at 50: Journey to working quality control

    SON at 50: Journey to working quality control

    SIR: Nigeria’s journey to standardisation effectively began in 1971 with the establishment of the Nigerian Standards Organisation (NSO) as a department under the Federal Ministry of Industry. Birthed under Decree No 56 of 1971, tagged, the Standards Organisation of Nigeria, cap 412 of the Laws of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, SON had commenced operations on January 1, 1970 as Nigeria’s foremost standard regulatory body.

    Before the early 1990s, enforcement activities were primarily focused on local manufacturing companies. It was in the early 1990s that the organisation commenced inspection of imported products. It did this by joining the Customs Agency to carry out customs examination. Regardless of its weak functional structure at inception, the organisation managed to pull through, leaving traces of positive milestones.

    More than 50 years later, the organisation has endured a series of changes, including name change to Standards Organisation of Nigeria (SON) and amendments that have positioned the organisation to withstand and function effectively, despite the fast-evolving regulatory challenges and needs of the industries they were created to regulate. These changes, which were necessitated by a series of teething challenges faced by the organisation, have earned SON a place of pride in the class of global regulators of note. 

    A look at SON today would seem such problems never existed in the organisation, as it has been structured to handle current and emerging standardization challenges, especially to lead every process that relates to the preparation of standards for products, measurements, materials, and processes among others, and their promotion at the national, regional, and international levels.

    SON turned 50 in 2022, a milestone the organisation has celebrated even into the year 2023 with a sequence of activities including the launching of a Historical Compendium, exhibitions and landmark awards to deserving industry players to highlight the journey of SON from being a directorate to an agency of international repute.

    The Director General, SON, Salim Farouk used the occasion of the 50th anniversary celebration to chronicle SON’s evolutionary journey in time. He said, in over the last 50 years, SON has collaborated with industries to provide consumers with products fit for their purposes.  Going down memory lane, Salim said, “The quest for quality within the industry left staff faced with stiff challenges, including unavailability of utility cars, rundown cars, and traffic jams to undertake factory inspections which have been totally upturned with the provisions of conducive work environment, mobility, and equipment most especially for the state-of-the-art laboratories.”

    With the benefit of hindsight, the SON DG, Salim has said his vision for the organisation in the coming years is for it to be the foremost standardisation body in Africa and among the top-ranking globally.

    In readiness for the future that is ICT-dependent, Salim said SON, in late 2019 upgraded its online application portal for the operation of the offshore Conformity Assessment Program (SONCAP) for processing of imports into Nigeria. The transition of the SONCAP Portal has enhanced a seamless operation and more efficient service delivery to customers and stakeholders, within shorter turnaround time. To boost its operation, SON has established a Training Institute to provide an increased range of training beyond the Management Systems Standards for private and public sector organisations and institutions with regional branches for easier access by stakeholders and reduced costs. However, industry watchers and stakeholders are still of the view that more could still be achieved if the right steps are kept steady and new initiatives are taken.

    •Carl Umegboro,

    <umegborocarl@gmail.com>

  • On the man, Nasir El- Rufai

    On the man, Nasir El- Rufai

    SIR: Time and change as scholars have argued, have provided the best barometer to measure the value of persons playing in the public space. To drive home this aphorism, civil rights crusader, Martin Luther King Jnr in the 1960s in the United States puts it simply that the true test of a man is where he stands in times of crisis and controversies.

    Herein lies the sampling of the man Governor Nasir El – Rufai. Although, misunderstood by many, yet rides in his enigma.

    I have been following the track record of Governor El Rufai.  Well-educated and endowed with uncommon native intelligence, the governor has proven himself in every assignment he has handled the ability to turn difficult situations around.

     For example, Abuja, then an unplanned capital city, was turned around when El Rufai became the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister.

     Kaduna, which has been down for decades, has suddenly woken up to take her rightful place in the North politically and in development. 

    The voice of the occupant of Kaduna Government House resonates not only in the North, but across Nigeria. 

    After overcoming the initial hurdles of the first lap of four years of his administration by those who placed higher premium on politics as a thriller game rather than  a means to meeting the critical needs of those they are elected to serve, he settled in the second lap to offer the purposeful leadership he promised the electorate.

    Kaduna has rapidly overtaken Kano and Bauchi with a well-laid road network, Bus Rapid Transportation system and light rail, spiced with two malls in good locations to race to a finishing line topping in infrastructural upgrade and human capacity development.

    To achieve these, ethnic origin and religion played no part; only the capacity to deliver does.

    True, El Rufai has been helped mainly by the assemblage in his executive council, who were selected from virtually every nook and cranny of Nigeria with a common identity of competence and performance. 

    The governor’s role in changing the narrative in the North is determined by his national outlook that Nigeria belongs to all, not a section of it.

      Besides, El Rufai’s report on the Constitutional Review on Devolution of Power has positively calmed frayed nerves and shaped the political architecture across the nation with a reassured sense of equity for all. His distinguishing trait is his courage to take tough decisions in the interest of the common good for the common people.

    Some time ago, when he found the quality of teachers in the state appalling, the governor never ran away from taking a tough decision, by asking the teachers to take basic aptitude test of competence to retrain them where appropriate and injecting capable hands   

    Amid security challenges, though not peculiar to Kaduna, El Rufai has attracted a lot of foreign investments to some communities in the state with Olam, Nigeria and Sub-Sahara Africa’s largest hatchery/animal feed mill, leading the pack of other investors. Also, the World Bank is a prominent ally in development in the state.

    El Rufai is undoubtedly, one to watch as he shares the unique character of a meteor that appears only for a purpose in a wide space of time, leaving a trail of impact on the landscape.

     My wish for this governor is many years of sacrificial service to our fatherland. 

    •Titus Ajimobi,

     Lagos.

  • Elections: Thumb up for INEC

    Elections: Thumb up for INEC

    SIR: As Nigerians await the outcome of last Saturday’s presidential and National Assembly elections, the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC), deserves commendation for conducting free and fair election. Though, the election witnessed delays in voting and pockets of violence in some states, it can be adjudged as peaceful. Eligible youths of voting age and other voters came out en masse to cast their vote.

    President Muhammadu Buhari should take a credit for signing the electoral bill into law which paved the way for the deployment of technology in the conduct of elections in the country. With the Bimodal Voter Accreditation System (BIVAS), voters were accredited with relatively ease, leading to the conduct of free, fair and transparent polls. Equally mentioning is the naira redesign policy which curtailed votes buying. There was departure from excessive use of cash by money bags politicians. In fact, the elections did not witness the use of money as obtained in the previous polls. The political culture has changed leading to the change of voting patterns. With this development, one can confidently say that our over two decades of democracy has improved significantly.

    INEC has started announcing the results of presidential and National Assembly elections. Winners have continued to emerge from different constituencies in the country. As usual, it is expected that the winners should be magnanimous in victory while losers should accept the outcome of the results in good faith. In any election, there must be a winner and loser.

    Desperate politicians should refrain from making unguarded utterances capable of igniting crises. If they have genuine cases of proven irregularities arising from the just concluded elections, they should take them up to elections tribunal to be inaugurated to entertain elections matters. This is best option to seek for redress instead of recruiting thugs to foment trouble or mayhem.

    It has also been reported that INEC’s server was slow in uploading the election results. The hitches should be hurriedly addressed in order to provide Nigerians with accurate and reliable elections results. INEC should fix this problem before the March 11 gubernatorial elections.

    There is no gainsaying that the incidences of rigging which marred previous elections in the past have been minimised if not completely eliminated. INEC has become an independent and unbiased institution. Through various reforms and innovations, INEC operates like its contemporaries in developed countries. Nigerians pray that INEC will maintain the momentum in the subsequent elections.

    • Ibrahim Mustapha,

    Pambegua, Kaduna State.