The Nation Newspaper

Category: Emeka Omeihe

  • Election litigations

    Election litigations

    Emerging statistics on the 2023 election-related litigations raise serious concerns on the future of representative democracy in this country. Figures of pre and post-election litigations released by government officials question the capacity and continued relevance of elections in adequately reflecting the collective will of the electorate as expressed at the ballot box. Interestingly, these issues hinge on the philosophical and conceptual role of the electorate as the ultimate sovereign.

    It is not that the trend is entirely new. But the escalating number of contestants relying on the judiciary to determine the rightful winners is a serious threat to the growth and sustenance of the democratic culture in its pristine form. Nothing illustrates the inability of the electoral process to approximate the collective will of the people than the indiscriminate resort to litigations to redress perceived infractions.

    Though the constitution envisages that aggrieved contestants could seek legal remedy by making provisions for it, it is not anticipated that any and every electoral contest will end up at the courts. Something must be off beam in an electoral process that overwhelmingly relinquishes to the courts, the direct rights of the people to choose their leaders.

    That is the sad impression conveyed by the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC when they said they had more than 1,000 pre-election litigations in the build-up to the 2023 general elections.

    Its director, Legal Drafting and Clearance, Mrs. Oluwatoyin Babalola said the figure emanated from primaries conducted by political parties and substitution of candidate’s names. Additionally, the failure by political parties to adhere to their constitutions and timelines for the conduct of primaries contributed to the bloated figure.

    The data for post elections litigations released by the President of the Court of Appeal PCA, Justice Monica Dongban- Mensem at the commencement of the 2023/2024 legal year is even more revealing. Of a total of 1,280 political offices contested for in the 2023 elections, 1,209 petitions ended up in the courts for adjudication.

    This represents 94.453 per cent of the elective positions contested for during those elections. Only in 71 offices representing 5.547 per cent of the contested positions did the elections go unchallenged at the courts. This would at once suggest either the primaries/elections were fraught with glaring irregularities or the existence of a culture of refusal by politicians to accept defeat or both.

    By contrast, available independent data indicated that only 663 petitions or 44.32 per cent of the positions contested in the 2015 elections ended up in the courts. But one significant thing in that year’s election was that the presidency went unchallenged.

    The 2019 elections produced 766 petitions representing 51.2 per cent while that of 2011 featured 769 or 51.4 per cent of all the offices contested for.  These statistics speak for themselves. But one thing that stands out distinctly is the unprecedented upsurge in election litigations arising from the 2023 elections.

    This should be something to worry as it conveys the inevitable impression of a groundswell of dissatisfaction with the outcome of both the primaries of the political parties and the elections proper. But as worrisome as these outcomes are, they did not come as a big surprise.

    Not with the rancour and acrimony that characterize the primaries of the political parties. Not with all manner of infractions that combine to diminish the credibility and sanctity of our elections. The figures are reflective of the level of progress or lack of it on the democratic chart despite all pretensions.

    It remains a sad commentary that routine internal affairs of the parties as primaries are characteristically marred by scant regard to rules and intractable disputes culminating in large scale litigations.

    Scant regard to internal democracy is the big issue here. An electoral process is already compromised in a situation political parties show strong aversion to the rights of party members to choose their candidates for elective offices.

    Imposition of candidates, substitution of the names of successful candidates with cronies, friends and favoured ones and lack of adherence to rules and the constitutions of the parties combine to diminish the sanctity of party primaries. In the last election, instances exist of individuals who did not contest the primaries, yet their parties gave them a clean bill of health to fly their flags.

    Ironically also, in some of the recorded instance such decisions were challenged in the courts, the candidates that did not go through primaries were still able to win in court rulings that have continued to confound the public. Court rulings like these are at the centre of reservations on the increasing resort to the courts to determine the true representative of the people.

    There is genuine fear that excessive reliance on the judiciary to determine winners of elections abridges popular sovereignty as it takes away the rights of the electorate to choose their candidates. Go to court has become a popular advice for any complaint on electoral matters. There may be nothing wrong with going to court to redress perceived electoral wrong.

    But it is being applied in a very pejorative manner; a franchise for all manner of infractions in electoral matters. The unfortunate undertone is that all in fair in electoral contest including ignoble subversion of the rules. You can go to court but allow us subvert the process first, they seem to be saying.

    Those quick to urge the aggrieved to go to court will not be inclined to do so if they are sure the judiciary will live up to its bidding as impartial arbiter; the last hope of the common man. But they know the Nigerian judiciary is not isolated from the glaring ills that plague the larger society, ills that accentuate the culture of winning elections by fair and foul means.

    Conscious of the obstacles in conclusively proving electoral cases; the huge toll they take in the finances of the litigants and the Nigerian factor, its purveyors aim at procuring from the judiciary the victory that eluded them at the balloting process.

    One agency that should be held squarely for the inability of the ballot process to conclusively throw up undisputable candidates is the electoral umpire, INEC. Even as the inordinate penchant by politicians to win elections through devious means impact adversely on elections outcome, the buck largely stops at the table of INEC

    It should take responsibility for the inability of the ballot process to throw up generally acceptable results. Such prospects were high as the last elections approached, especially with the introduction of sophisticated technology to enhance credibility and general acceptance. That optimism has been dealt a death blow by the facts of these litigations.

    Read Also: INEC to parties: Stop malicious rumour mongering

    A situation more than 94 per cent of all the contested offices in the country ended up in the courts say much on the credibility and acceptance of those elections. It is possible to raise all manner of excuses. We can blame political parties and politicians for circumventing and sabotaging the rules. But INEC should be held squarely for much of the crisis of confidence that assail the ballot process.

    The confidence of the electorate in elections as a true reflection of the collective wishes of the people is increasingly waning. It is not enough for our leaders to parrot and grandstand on the values of democracy when at the slightest chance they invent all forms of strategy to sabotage the rules of the game.

    As a governance framework, democracy is guided by rules; it assumes the character of any other contraption when these guiding principles are observed in their breach. This calls for further electoral reforms such that will tie the hands of INEC by ensuring the ballot process is truly reflective of the collective will of voters. That right cannot be abdicated to the courts without stultifying the sovereignty of the electorate.

    This should instruct moral re-engineering of the psyche of average Nigerian to political cultures of decent electoral conduct. That was perhaps, what Prof. Toyin Falola referred to as moral restructuring at the 2023 Faculty of Arts Lecture of the Lagos State University.  We need a dose of attitudinal change and reforms to correct the noxious impression that politics is the quickest route to illicit wealth. Until then, there may be no end to this madness.

  • Missing genitals, witchcraft!

    Missing genitals, witchcraft!

    What could be responsible for the rising wave of allegations on the disappearance of male genital organs and witchcraft across the country? That is the burning question our policy makers will have to find answers to and very urgently too.

    Perhaps, the way this puzzle is untied will chart the path to effective solutions to festering weird belief systems that have continued to put the lives of innocent citizens at mortal risk. The issue assumed aggravated dimension recently that the Federal Capital Territory FCT Police Command had to warn against the sharing of false information on alleged disappearance of male genial organs in Abuja.

    The warning was sequel to mounting mob attacks on innocent citizens over alleged culpability in causing the disappearance of male genital organs. In one of such incidents, one Rokeeb Saheed had accused one Lucky Josiah of causing his male organ to disappear. An irate mob descended on Josiah and was about to kill him before he was rescued by the police.

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    After medical examination, the police said Saheed’s organ was found to be in order even as Josiah was treated of the injuries he sustained. But for the intervention of the police, he would have been a dead person over spurious and wicked allegation.

    It was a different story for another male adult in the Gwagwalada area of the FCT who was similarly accused. He was not that lucky. He lost his life as a result of the injuries inflicted on him by the surging mob.

    Though the police made attempts to save his life, hospital authorities confirmed him dead when he was taken there for treatment. There has been a litany of such false alarms and accusations in and around the FCT in recent times.

    Yet, Abuja is not alone in this. The Delta police command just arrested an 18-year old boy for raising false alarm accusing an elderly woman of causing the disappearance of his genital organ. According to the boy, his genital organ disappeared when the woman inside a tricycle touched him.

    The accusation prompted a mob to descend on the poor woman beating her to pulp and stripping her naked before rescue came from the law enforcement agencies. On examination, it was discovered that nothing was wrong with the boy’s genital organ.

    The police captured the sad scenario thus: “He just lied against the poor woman, a mother, a daughter and a wife. Now the video of her being beaten and stripped naked is all over the place”.

    The police are hunting for all those seen in the circulating video for them to face the books. But the harm has already been done. Any respite for the poor woman? What of the rising fad in circulating videos of calamities and sufferings of fellow citizens even when what was direly required at such occasions was help for the victims?

    Elsewhere, we are inundated with allegations of witchcraft and associated superstitious beliefs and practices. A mentally challenged woman accused of witchcraft in Ibadan was rescued by the Oyo State government, rehabilitated and sent back to her home.

    But in Adamawa State, three women were stripped naked and beaten on allegation of witchcraft. Two of the women were killed in the encounter that saw to the arrest of three policemen for their ignoble role that led to the extrajudicial killing of the women. That is how degenerate the situation has become.

    These are just isolated instances of the cascading weird accusations and the jungle justice that trail them across the country. Even as the law enforcement agencies continue to warn against such odious beliefs and practices, they fester because the gullible public believes in their existence. 

    Ignorance, fear, poverty and disease combine to hold our people hostage to the mundane and the abhorrent. But that is not all. Even among the educated and well positioned in the society, you still find people clinging tenaciously to these fetish and stone-age leanings. Preachers of diverse religious faiths do not help matters either. Their messages, often laden with contents that instil fear on their members, reinforce belief in these noxious practices. It is little surprising such tendencies have refused to wither away.

    Sadly, the innocent ones are at the receiving end of this madness. Apart from the intervention of law enforcement agencies when innocent citizens are wrongly accused and attacked, little has come from the government circles by way of engaging the public and interrogating such weird beliefs and practices.

    Since these tendencies have refused to fade in the face of increasing contact with modernity, the government has to come up with sensitization programs through seminars and conferences to interrogate the subject matter. It has become imperative to engage these issues to disabuse the minds of the gullible public that they only exist in the imaginations of those who believe in them.

    The most recent attempt at such intellectual engagement came through an international conference on witchcraft organized by the Prof. B.I.C. Ijomah Centre for Policy Studies and Research, University of Nigeria Nsukka UNN. It had its original theme as, “Witchcraft: Meanings, factors and practices”.

    But as soon as this theme was unveiled, the Nigerian factor crept in. Protests arose from some Christian groups and students regarding the purpose the conference was meant to serve. Allegations were freely bandied that it was going to be a gathering of witches and wizards; an attempt to promote evil.

    The promoters were compelled by the UNN management to change the topic or have the conference cancelled. They had to settle for “Dimensions of human behaviour”, as the new theme. But it took a toll on the keynote speaker who refused to be part of the new topic.

    The Director-General of the Centre, Prof. Egodi Uchendu was so piqued by these misplaced attacks that she lamented how an ordinary academic engagement was twisted out of context to create confusion.

    She captured the contradictions: “Surprisingly some persons erroneously concluded that only witches can discuss witchcraft. We are not witches. We are professors and scholars intrigued by the phenomenon of witchcraft. Our conference is mere academic discussion where we shall review journals and information gathered over the years on the subject matter”.

    The frustration of Uchendu illustrates very poignantly the daunting challenge in getting the citizenry part ways with extant prejudices that sustain such superstitious beliefs as the disappearance of male genitals, witchcraft and ritual killings for money. If a purely academic engagement could be so mischievously misinterpreted within a university setting, it remains to be imagined the herculean task in convincing the citizenry that these weird beliefs and practices do not approximate reality.

     Nonetheless, the conference held even as the views of experts on the subject matter were quite revealing and instructive. In his paper titled, “The wealthy are no witches: towards an epistemology and ideology of witchcraft among the Igbo of Nigeria”, Prof. Damian Opata argued that the way witchcraft was propagated and believed here had continued to kill the development of knowledge on the subject matter.

    Lamenting the deployment by pastors and seers of foreign religions of perceived attacks by witches and wizards to put fear on their congregation, he said witches exist in the minds of those who believe in it and does not exist for those who do not believe in it.

     Peter Jazzy Eze, head of department of Sociology and Anthropology, UNN in his paper, “Which Witch? What anthropology knows of the adult Bugbear”, argued that witchcraft did not exist but only existed in the minds of those who believe in it.

    For him, science and technology have overtaken superstitious beliefs in witchcraft while urging Africans to drop such beliefs and embrace science and technology that have practical and verifiable applications. These were some of the insights thrown up by the conference that would have been lost had that intellectual gathering been aborted.

    But the controversy is a measure of the difficulty in changing stereotypes on superstitious beliefs and practices despite their defects in scientific verification. It is a measure of the country’s level of progress in modernity that people still take quick resort to self-help and mob action to avenge accusations they do not have slight proof for.

    The government has a daunting task changing the narrative through sustainable economic development and technological progress.

  • Bandits’ abduction of female students

    Bandits’ abduction of female students

    What could be the motive behind the increasing attacks by bandits on female university students in parts of the country?  That is the searing question elevated to the fore by the resurging selective attacks and abduction of female university students in the last two weeks.

    Bandits invaded the private residence of female students of the Federal University, Dutsinma, Katsina State around 2am last Wednesday while shooting indiscriminately to ward off possible resistance. By the time their fire power subsided, five final year female students were abducted and ferried to unknown destination.

    The Katsina State Police Command while confirming the incident said a man suspected to be an informant to the kidnappers was arrested. It is yet unclear the motive of the kidnappers or what they intend to do with the female students. But such selective attacks targeting female students have continued to generate concerns across the country.

    Before then, about 21 female students of the Federal University of Technology, Gusau, Zamfara State were similarly abducted by bandits. The terrorists that invaded three female hostels of the university at 2.50am rode on about 50 motorcycles to the scene of the attack.

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    Armed with sophisticated ammunitions, they shot their way indiscriminately into the three hostels and kidnapped the female students they saw there. A source privy to the attack incident said Nigerian troops engaged the bandits during the encounter but the bandits held on and were still able to escape with the kidnapped victims.

    Some students of the same university had last June, protested the high rate of kidnapping of their schoolmates in the Sabon-Gidan and Damba areas of the university town. Elsewhere, attacks on institutions of higher learning and the subsequent abduction of students have been a familiar narrative. 

    A private university located in Kaduna State was in April 20, 2021 similarly attacked with the bandits abducting about 20 students. Some of the students were released after ransom payment while in a twist of fate, three of the unfortunate ones were shot dead by the demented bandits and their bodies dumped in a village close to the university. Two other students died as a result of the attack bringing the casualty rate to five.

    The university was forced by the attack to relocate from its permanent site along Kaduna-Abuja highway to its city campus inside Kaduna metropolis. These are just few instances of the attacks on educational institutions since kidnapping and associated criminalities gained traction on these shores.

    Before this new focus on female university students, there was the selective abduction of 276 female secondary school girls from Chibok, Borno State in April, 2014 which generated considerable global attention. Even with all the efforts made to release some of the abducted girls, estimates still have it that about 90 of them are still missing till date.

    This reign of terror on school girls was also unleashed on Dapchi in Yobe State when terrorists abducted 110 secondary school girls from their dormitory in April 2018 and ferried them away. After 33 days in captivity, 104 of the students were released through what the government described as back-channel efforts and help from friends of the country without paying ransom.

    Sadly, five of the students died of exhaustion while one of them Leah Sharibu was held back for failing to denounce her religion. News made the round a fortnight ago that she had married another Boko Haram commander after dumping a previous one with whom she had two children.

    Those were the harrowing but celebrated encounters of our secondary school children in the hands of kidnappers before the sudden rise in attacks on female university students in the last two weeks. Are we about to witness another round of abuse and dehumanization of our female students? Is it a re-enactment of the previous experience where the girls were married off to bandits’ commanders and made to suffer serious mortal harm even as their whereabouts remain largely illusory several years after? Or is ransom the motive?

    Whatever the case, the experience of female students of Chibok and Dapchi do not leave one in comfort that serious harm will not come the way of the poor students. Some of the school children that passed through that traumatic encounter in the past died in the process of their abduction.

    Others were forcibly married off to leaders of the terrorists even as the whereabouts of many others are yet to be accounted for.  These fears are bound to resonate with the current fate of university students abducted from their hostels in Katsina and Zamfara states.

     As I write, the fate of some of the abducted students remains uncertain. President Tinubu gave the security agencies a marching order to ensure the release of the students. Ironically, the federal government and the Zamfara State governor, Dauda Lawal got embroiled in serious altercation on the rightful approach to the matter.

    Lawal accused officials of the federal government of entering into secret negotiations with the bandits. Though the federal government denied authorizing any secret negotiations with the bandits, Lawal remained adamant. He insisted that a federal delegation met with bandit groups in Birin Magaji, Maradun, Mun Haye and Ajah among others.

    We are confronted with the words of the state governor against the federal government with no means of authenticating them. But the evidence of where the said federal delegation met with the bandits as adduced by Lawal seems to suggest he may have his facts.

    That is however, beside the issue. Perhaps, the value of the altercation can be gleaned from the larger issues of lack of consensus on the proper approaches to the cycle of insecurity it brought to the fore. Zamfara is counting on past experiences. The immediate past regime in that state entered into serial negotiations with bandits including amnesty but all failed woefully.

    Lawal has no confidence in such negotiations and would prefer that the bandits are smoked out from their hiding places. He prefers the kinetic approach given the intransigence and unreliability of agreements entered into by the bandits.

    Katsina State under the administration of Aminu Masari had similar experience. Masari shared the difficulty in entering into agreement with the bandits when he reportedly said that negotiations with the bandits failed because those who entered the agreement with him were murdered in the bush. This he said scarred away others. This should be instructive.

    Masari was compelled by the situation to swear never to enter into any other agreement with the bandits. At some point, he had out of frustration, asked residents to bear arms to defend themselves.

    That was the background Governor Lawal viewed the said attempts by a delegation of the federal government to negotiate with the Zamfara bandits. And his feelings ought to be appreciated.

    But we have gone through this path before. The body language of the last administration to killings in parts of the country did inject some complications into the prosecution of the war. This was manifest in the handling of killings and despoliation of communities by rampaging herdsmen.

    The near air of invincibility of the killer herdsmen and inability of the government to apprehend and bring them to book may have contributed to the situation we have today. There were also attempts in the past to play down the enormity of the worsening security challenge when facts on the ground pointed to the contrary.

     This is not the time for such ambivalence. The rising infractions indicate we are yet to get effective handle to the festering insecurity fast tilting the country to the edge. It finds manifestations in diverse forms across the country. It calls for re-strategizing and re-examination of our approaches. It is time to dig deeper into the remote and immediate factors that compel all manner of non-state actors to take up arms against constituted authorities.

    Even as Governor Lawal has no faith in negotiations with the bandits, the kinetic approach will continue to prove ineffective as long as we fail to understand the factors that compel disobedience to civil authority. The non-kinetic option holds much of the prospects to the resolution of some of these security challenges.

    That is the path the new administration should tread if it hopes to make a quick difference. Security of lives and property is the raison d’être for the existence of governments. This country can ill-afford the cascading cycle of insecurity that has reduced life to the atavism of the state of nature. 

  • LUTH: Beyond Michael’s controversy

    LUTH: Beyond Michael’s controversy

    Even without the clarification from the management of Lagos University Teaching Hospital LUTH, claims that a resident doctor with the facility, Umoh Michael died after working 72 hours non-stop, would appear demonstrably inconceivable.

    Not only is it humanly impossible for anybody to work for that number of hours without stop, such a practice in a teaching hospital strikes as a very remote possibility. Yet, that such a narrative made the rounds last week courtesy of a letter addressed to the Chief Medical Director of LUTH by its branch of resident doctors suggests all is not well with the working conditions of those doctors.

    In the letter triggered off by the death of Michael after slumping at a church service, the resident doctors stated: “We the house officers are in deep grief over the loss of our colleague, a co-house officer (Dr. Umoh Michael), who died on September 17, 2023 after having a 72-hour call in the Neurosurgery unit”

    The letter further claimed that his roommate attested to the fact that Umoh barely slept in their apartment over the past one week as he was always on call or the day he came home, he returned around 3am. The resident doctors then chronicled other challenges they face such as bullying from senior colleagues, stressful call hours without break in-between, no call food and poor accommodation. 

    Read Also: LUTH denies late doctor worked 72-hour call duty

    The unfortunate incident has expectedly drawn the ire of the public. The thought of a promising young medical officer dying in the circumstance painted has evoked emotions. This is especially so, given a recent related incident a young female medical doctor lost her life due to elevator failure in a general hospital in the state.

    But the management of LUTH did not allow this narrative to gain undeserved ground. Even as it would not want to be drawn into unnecessary controversy in deference to the deceased family, it said the story of a 72-hour non-stop shift is false.

    According to the management, “the record from the neurosurgical unit shows that the last time he was on call was 13th and Septemeber14, 2023. He was not on call on the 15th, 16th and 17th (the day he died), contrary to the insinuation on social media. He was at home with his parents on September 16 and 17”.

    Before this time; the management went on, he was also on call on September 7 and 8. This shows that Michael was on call for four days in September 2023, LUTH said emphatically. With the explanation, it would appear pretty difficult to sustain the picture painted by the resident doctors on the circumstances of his death.

    It is also possible the account of the number of times he slept at the resident doctors’ quarters as allegedly furnished by his roommate did not factor in the fact that he has a family house in Lagos.  With this disclosure, it is possible the account of the days he did not sleep at the quarters did not capture the number of days he opted to stay with his family.

    But that is beside the issue. As unfortunate as the death of the young and promising doctor is, the issues it threw up should not be completely waved aside. Those that crafted the story of a 72-hour non-stop shift may have exaggerated the situation. But they may be indirectly drawing attention to the difficult conditions house officers do their work.

    And this should not be surprising to anyone. Not with the recurring decimal of strike actions by resident doctors. One of such strikes was just suspended last month. Central to their grievances were the release of the circular for ‘one-for-one replacement of clinical staff’ and the payment of the 2023 Medical Residency Training Fund.

    National President of the Nigerian Association of Resident Doctors NARD, Dr. Emeka Orji had justified the demands during the strike on the ground of acute shortage of doctors in the hospitals leading to the overworking of the few remaining ones. This should be instructive. Definitely LUTH is not exempted from the picture painted by the NARD president. It is probable the death of Michael just provoked the sad feelings nursed by the doctors on their difficult working conditions.

    This angle is quite potent. It is evident from the other grievances in the letter the resident doctors sent to the management of LUTH. It is clear from the general exodus of doctors and allied medical staff to foreign lands leading to acute shortages. The fact is that some of these grievances are not peculiar to LUTH even as it has a fair share of it. They are an integral part of the agitations for which the NARD has been engaging the federal government, sometimes resulting to strike actions.

    Ironically however, the past regime in this country lived in denial of the shortage of doctors in our hospitals. Two former ministers-health and labour, Prof. Osagie Enahire and Dr. Chris Ngige had on two different occasions respectively denied there was shortage of doctors in our hospitals.

    Enahire had while admitting they have heard of doctors leaving the system claimed there are actually enough doctors in the country. According to him, Nigeria produces between 2000 to 3000 doctors yearly while the number leaving is less than 1000. Then also, the National President of the Nigerian Medical Association NMA, Dr. Uche Ojinmah had faulted the claim of enough doctors for running contrary to available statistics.

    At other times the shortage had been rationalized by government officials on tardiness in the recruitment process. Ironically, as they bandy these excuses, our hospitals suffer acute shortage of medical doctors and allied personnel. The World Health Organization WHO puts the doctors’-patient ratio at one doctor to 600 patients.

    The same WHO had also pronounced that Nigeria and 54 other countries face the most pressing health workforce challenges related to universal health coverage. How the arguments canvassed by Enahire and Ngige conform to this ratio, is anybody’s guess. But one thing that is not in doubt is that Nigeria is confronted by dire manpower shortages in the health sector.

    Our doctors especially the experienced ones are leaving in droves to foreign lands where they are offered better salaries and congenial working conditions. Not only are we losing our experienced doctors and allied personnel to the advanced countries of the world, African countries have miserably joined in the poaching spree.

    That was the sad story told by the chairman of the committee of Chief Medical Directors of Federal Tertiary Hospitals, Prof Emem Bassey when he appeared before the House of Representatives ad hoc committee investigating employment racketeering in federal agencies. He lamented that countries like Sierra Leone and Gambia are offering them up to $3,000 and $4,000 which is about four times the amount paid locally.

    Additionally, recent data obtained from the Medical and Dental Council of Nigeria. MDCN showed that 53 Nigerian doctors are practicing in Sudan, 41 in South Africa, 17 in Egypt and Ghana respectively. Uganda employs 13 Nigerian doctors while there are seven others working in the Gambia among other African countries.

    The register of the General Medical Council of the United Kingdom puts the number of Nigeria-trained doctors practicing in that country at 11,872. Ordinarily, there would have been nothing untoward about this if the leadership of this country had admitted the reality and taken steps to ensure there are enough medical personnel to attend to the needs of the citizenry.

     But they rather chose to live in its denial resulting to shortages that stretch the capacities of the few remaining ones. That was the sad irony presented by the LUTH situation which found immediate ventilation after the unfortunate death of Michael.  

     The excruciating economic conditions worsened by the depreciation of the local currency have even made matters worse. The controversy LUTH was embroiled in, though unfortunate, may not be unconnected with the general difficult conditions of work in our hospitals. It may not be the fault of the management of that institution. The federal government that has been slow on replacing departing staff shares much of the blame.

    Michael may not have died as a result of work overload. But the lesson served by his death should not be lost. The working conditions of doctors and allied staff should be improved upon else we will have self-fulfilling prophesy to contend with. Addressing the issues that prompted the controversy should serve as a befitting tribute to Michael. May his soul rest in peace!

  • University fees’ hike

    University fees’ hike

    It would appear some of the issues to the last suspended strike by the Academic Staff Union of Universities ASUU are creeping back, albeit, from a different angle. Emerging events are beginning to raise concerns as to the genuineness of some of the promises made by the government for which ASUU called off its strike action towards the end of last year.

    Central to this was the issue of adequate funding for the universities. Then, the government had said it made a provision of N300 billion revitalization funds in the 2023 appropriation bill to improve infrastructural facilities and operations in the federal universities.

    Given this, the general expectation was that these funds would be made available to the universities to address some of the debilitating infrastructural challenges that had over time, been the source of conflict between ASUU and the government leading to prolonged strikes. But emerging signals point to a different direction.

    Within the last few weeks, federal universities have been announcing general but very substantial increases in the fees paid by their students as they are set to commence a new academic session. The managements of the University of Lagos, Obafemi Awolowo University, OAU, Ile Ife, the University of Jos, Michael Okpara University of Agriculture Umudike and University of Uyo among others have had their fees increased.

    Fresh students of OAU in the faculties of arts, law and humanities will pay N151, 200 while their returning counterparts in the same faculties will pay N89, 200. Returning students of the same faculties paid N20, 000 during the last academic year.

    The same pattern of phenomenal increases featured at the University of Benin with science students who previously paid N73, 000 now required to pay N190, 000. Non-science students that paid N69, 000 previously are now required to cough out N170, 000. These are in addition to other fees such as exams, library, laboratory, sports, ICT etc. Ironically also, the universities have attributed the increases to rising cost of learning materials and the need to adequately fund their activities.

    These phenomenal increases have not gone down well with the student population and they are mounting serious opposition to them. They contend that given the dire economic situation in the country that has thrown many into unmitigated hardship, the high fees will inevitably squeeze children of the poor out of the university system. They would therefore want the increases reversed back to affordable levels.

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    But they did not just stop there. Students of the University of Lagos, UNILAG, took to the street to protest the increase vowing to continue until the fees are reversed downwards. The management of UNILAG was compelled by the protests to prune down the fees.  Students of the University of Jos blocked the road leading to the institution to press home their demand for a reversal while those at OAU are threatening serious action if nothing is done to checkmate the situation.

    Unfolding events have again raised fears of uncertainty within the university system. There is palpable apprehension that the protests could disrupt normal academic activities with dire consequences if something urgent is not done to diffuse the hot air.

    But more fundamentally, the situation has again brought to the fore the nagging issue of university funding and the propriety of government’s position that tuition fee in federal universities is free. Permanent Secretary of the federal Ministry of Education, David Adejo had at a public hearing by the House of Representatives ad hoc committee on students’ loan said last August that no federal university is allowed to charge tuition fees.

    He had then also claimed that what the universities collect are charges to cover the cost of accommodation, power, ICT among others and that the powers to approve such charges resides with the governing boards of the various universities. 

    But the governing boards of the universities are yet to be reconstituted by the government following their dissolution by President Tinubu. Yet, the universities are in the bazaar of increasing all manner of fees to levels that create serious doubt as to whether they are to make up for tuition fees. We are faced with the contradiction of justifying these high school fees in the face of claims by the government that tuition is free in federal universities.

     It is not for nothing that the new fees are viewed with utter scepticism by the academic community. They see it as either a reintroduction of tuition fees or a prelude to it. They contend that based on the laws establishing federal universities, the universities require clearance from the National Universities Commission, NUC, and the federal ministry of education to review such fees. They find highly incongruous any attempt by the government to wash off its hand from the fee increase spree.

    Accusing fingers are also pointing at the government for being behind the scene of the fee increases in the universities. It is believed that the buck passing on who approved the fee hike may be a strategy by the government to set the students against the universities as seen in the current pattern of protests.

    The development has also not gone down well with the national president of ASUU, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke. He contends that the constitution of the country mandates the federal government to provide free education and that it will be difficult to run the universities without sufficient funding. For him, the universities do not receive adequate funds for their activities even as he would want the government to fund the universities adequately.

    Those opposed to the development find a correlation between the increase in fees and the introduction of students’ loans. President Tinubu had after assuming office last May, signed the Students’ Loans Act to enable Nigerian students access loans at interest-free rates. To access the loan, a student must show evidence of being indigent even as default attracts two years imprisonment or a fine of N500, 000 or both.

    What seemed to have emerged from the above is the recurring decimal university funding has been.  It featured centrally in all the disputes between ASUU and the government often snowballing into precipitate and long-drawn strikes that diminish the worth of certificates issues by our higher institutions. It is also at issue in the current increase in school fees despite claims by the government that tuition fees are free.

    It is getting increasingly difficult to sustain the argument of free tuition in our universities in the face of the multiplicity of fees paid by students. Fee is fee, no matter the names by which it goes. Perhaps, the only difference is that these fees are bound to go even much higher should the tuition variant be added.

    More fundamentally, the situation points inexorably to the dilemma faced by the government in running the universities. It is confronted with the challenge of making education affordable to the citizenry in the face of dwindling resources. So it has to allow the individual universities to charge fees even as it claims that tuition remains free.

    The quandary the government faces was succinctly captured by the immediate past chairman, committee of vice chancellors of universities, Prof. Samuel Edoumiekumo. For him, “the government does not provide overheads for universities. In a month, they provide N10 million for a university that cannot even pay for electricity bills. Most of these costs will now be covered by the students and this was what ASUU was fighting against but Nigerians will not like to listen to ASUU because of the strike”.

    That is the troubling issue-university funding. How long it will take the government to come clear on this reality is a matter of conjecture. But even as students’ loans will aid beneficiaries in offsetting some of the charges, it does not in any manner address infrastructural deficits in federal universities.

    Those were the twin purposes behind the defunct Education Bank. Sadly, Education Bank failed due to actions and inactions from the same government that set it up. It is time to come clear on the funding of federal universities.

  • Between Jonathan and Fayemi’s positions

    Between Jonathan and Fayemi’s positions

    Some of the obstacles against Nigeria’s greatness re-echoed last week at a national dialogue and book presentation in Abuja. Though two of the guests, former president, Goodluck Jonathan and former Ekiti State governor, Kayode Fayemi spoke from different angles, the major thesis of their presentation revolved around the challenges standing against effective functioning of the Nigerian state.

    Jonathan’s major concern was the abysmal progress of the country in national integration. He would rather hold Nigeria’s founding fathers liable for doing a poor job at national integration subsequently.

    He lamented that the country was so polarized at the early stages of political parties’ formation resulting in the evolution of the parties along regional lines. “There was no sense of commitment to integrate Nigeria into an entity that you can say this is a nation with core values, common philosophy and people will be patriotic to that nation”, the former president contended.

    Drawing parallels with Tanzania which shares similar history of ethnic and religious diversities as Nigeria, he said that country’ foremost founding father, Julius Nyerere was able to build a nation out of these disparate cleavages through the instrumentality of a one-party state. Whether a one party state was a way out of Nigeria’s national integration challenge is another kettle of fish. 

    For Jonathan, his own modest attempt at nation building was the driving force for convening the 2014 National Conference. Had the recommendations of that conference been adopted, he believed we would have had a nation called Nigeria. We shall return to this.

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    On his part, Fayemi picked holes with the ‘winner takes all’ style of Nigerian democracy. For him, the challenges facing Nigeria today cannot be solved unless the country embraced proportional representation where the spoils of elections are shared between the contestants.

    “What we need is alternative politics and my own notion of alternative politics is that you cannot have 35 per cent of the votes and take 100 per cent, it won’t work. We must look at proportional representation so that the party that is said to have won 21 per cent of the votes will have 21 per cent of the government”, he argued.

    The former Ekiti State governor touched on a recurring issue that left many bewildered when he said the protests that trailed the removal of fuel subsidy during the regime of Jonathan in 2012 were propelled by political interest. He admitted that the opposition which he was part of ‘knew the truth’ about the imperative of fuel subsidy removal but was merely playing politics with the Occupy Nigeria protests. This disclosure is interesting but at the heart of all that is wrong with the politics of this country.

    There is a common thread running through the presentations of Jonathan and Fayemi. This can be gleaned from the convergence of views that the Nigerian state is not just working and that certain institutional adjustments and reforms must be carried out for it to discharge on its mandate to the citizenry.

    Jonathan identified lack of progress at national integration and blamed our founding fathers for their inability to construct a Nigerian personality out of the various groups that make up this country. To the extent that the emergence of political parties before and after independence followed regional lines, he has a point in wanting the founding fathers to share in the blame for lack progress at national integration.

    But some individual regional leaders share more in this blame than others. Even then, the mistakes made at the founding stages of the country pale into insignificance in the face of the brazen mismanagement of our diversities by subsequent leaders especially in the last couple of years.

    The politics of exclusion, alienation and marginalization which hallmarked the last eight years wrought incalculable harm on the psyche of the average Nigerian. That may in part, be what Fayemi referred to as the winner-takes-all politics. This country really had a dose of that adversary politics where the commanding heights of the national security architecture and key federal positions were almost exclusively dominated by people from certain ethnic and religious persuasions. The brazen impunity with which these policies of exclusion were carried out led to the generally accepted notion today that Nigerians are more divided than they have been since independence. The facts are there!

    They can be seen from the raging battle against weird religious insurgency. They are evident from lure for self-determination. They can be gleaned from the multifarious dimensions of the festering insecurity across the country. It is also no less manifest in the increasing competition between the federal authority and non-state actors for the loyalty of the citizens.

    Progress at national integration presupposes genuine and conscious efforts to redress those fundamentals that stand against collective progress. That is the point Jonathan raised when he lamented the non-implementation of the recommendations of the 2014 National Conference.

    Its corollary is that this country must as a matter of necessity address those vexatious issues of our federal order for meaningful psychological reconstruction of the individual psyche to take root. That goes without saying.

    A cursory glance at the key recommendations of the 2014 National Conference will drive home the point being made by Jonathan. But the 2014 National Conference is by no means the first attempt since the end of the civil war to address the national question through some form of national conversation.

    While a constitutional conference was instituted during the Abacha regime, Obasanjo convoked the National Political Reforms Conference NPRC. While there was convergence of views on some of the issues identified by these conversations, the 2014 conference stood out as the most far-reaching in providing enduring solutions to the national question.

    Here are some of them: the creation of 18 additional states-three from each geo-political zone and one additional state for the southeast to bring it at par with others except the northwest. Though the rationale for 18 states may be debatable today, the justification for one additional state for the southeast is still as potent as it has ever been given it is the only zone with just five states.

    On resource control, derivation and fiscal federalism, a technical committee was to be set up to determine the appropriate increase in their percentages. NPRC had recommended increasing derivation from 13 per cent to 17 per cent. Similarly the 2014 conference recommended a revenue allocation formula of 42.5 per cent, 35 per cent and 22.5 per cent between the federal, states and local governments respectively.  

     Presidency is also to rotate between the north and south and among the six geo-political zones while governorship rotates among the three senatorial zones. This will take place in a home-grown system of government combining the presidential and parliamentary variants.

    There were also recommendations scrapping the immunity clause for offences that attract criminal charges and the setting up of special courts to handle corruption cases. The two are to encourage accountability and reduce the long delays in the prosecution of corruption cases in the regular courts.

    These are some of the challenges Jonathan identified as standing against national integration, unity, progress and stability of the country. They are still much with us. The country’s inability to record significant progress in all indices of development is a measure of how far we have fared in addressing these irritating challenges.

    Fayemi captured part of this contradiction in his notion of zero-sum game politics. But more fundamentally, he touched on the ruinous dispositions of the political class that vitiate national progress in the partisan political reasons he gave for the opposition mounted against the 2012 fuel subsidy removal. But the country has been the loser.

  • NBS 4.1% jobless data: Myth or reality?

    NBS 4.1% jobless data: Myth or reality?

    t is not for nothing that recent data from the National Bureau of Statistics NBS, which put unemployment rate in the first quarter of this year at 4.1 per cent stirred up the hornets’ nest. Not only is the figure at variance with known trends in the country’s unemployment market, the abrupt drop raised more challenges than it was meant to resolve.

    In its Nigerian Labour Force Survey (NLFS) released last week, NBS said the figure is the outcome of recalibration in methodology using the standards set by the  International Labour Organization ILO and not that the government had performed better.

    The new survey methodology classified employed individuals as those who are working for pay or who profit and who worked for at least one hour in the last seven days. NBS said the figure aligns with the rates in other developing countries where work, even if only for a few hours and in low-productivity jobs, is essential to make ends meet, particularly in the absence of any social protection for the unemployed. It also bears close semblance with the figures in neighbouring countries- Ghana (3.9 per cent), Niger (0.5 per cent) Chad (1.4 per cent) and Cameroun (4.0 per cent).

    Going by this configuration, Nigerians are classified as gainfully employed if they worked for at least one hour in the last seven days even if the pay they received is not a living wage. This would at once sound absurd going by the peculiarities of the Nigerian labour market.

     Not unexpectedly, the new figure has attracted a deluge of criticisms with the immediate past Statistician General of the Federation/ Chief Executive Officers of the NBS, Dr. Yemi Kale leading the campaign. He picked holes with the one hour benchmark instead of the 20 hours previously adopted in calculating the unemployment rate in the country.

    Kale said he resisted the pressure during his tenure to reduce downwards the minimum number of hours to count as being employed on two counts. The first was based on the fact that the income generated within one hour was not necessarily a living wage while the other relates to the glaring inadequacies in deploying data so generated for general planning purposes.

    The 20 hours was decided because “if you work for that duration, you might be able to generate enough income that might sort of equate to what working one hour in the US is. Then you have a bit of more comparison”, the former NBS chief said. This makes better sense.

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    But the spokesman of the NBS, Wakili Ibrahim surprisingly launched a diatribe on the person of Kale seeking to discredit his tenure for daring to question the new calibration system. Though the NBS dissociated itself from Ibrahim’s invective as personal to him and not the official position of the organization, it came as a huge disappointment that Ibrahim left the substantive issues only to hurl personal insults.

    It is not just enough for the organization to dissociate itself from that poor outing of its erring staff, he needs to be reprimanded for the vituperation he heaped on the informed observations of the former NBS boss. At the least, he owes him apology for speaking in the very careless manner he did.

    But his harangue did not resolve in any significant way, the salient objections raised by Kale against the new parameter for calculating the unemployment rate. Not with the facts of the unemployment statistics on the ground.  Not with extant data released by the organization in the fourth quarter of 2020 which put the unemployment rate at 33.3 per cent.

    That figure placed Nigeria second in a global list of 82 countries monitored by Bloomberg along their unemployment standing. Namibia led in the unemployment list with 33.4 per cent while South Africa placed third after Nigeria. Key indicators including a report from KPMG estimates Nigeria’s unemployment rate at about 40 per cent with a projection that it could climb higher by the end of this year.

    Additionally, in its multidimensional report towards the end of last year, the same NBS had said 63 per cent of Nigerians were poor due to lack of access to health, education, living standards, employment and security. Before then, the World Poverty Clock had in 2018 rated Nigeria as the poverty capital of the world with 86.9 million of its people living in extreme poverty.

    Given the nexus between poverty and unemployment, it is startling that a country housing the poorest of the poor could all of a sudden, post unemployment data that compares favourably with those of the industrial and developed countries of the world. It completely lost sight of glaring disparities in working conditions, remunerations, purchasing power of different currencies and the standard of living in countries being so compared.

     Kale was on point when he observed the absurdity in comparing one hour pay in Nigeria with the US for instance. Is there really anything like one hour income in at least, the last seven days in our own clime? And what difference will such a meagre amount make in the life of the earner in a country where the average worker takes care of many non-working dependants?

     The new unemployment rate looks more of a myth. Sadly, this myth has been dressed as reality courtesy of a new parameter adopted by the NBS which classified employed individuals as those who worked for at least one hour in the last seven days.

    Apparently conscious of the limitations of the new parameter, NBS was quick to caution the government not go to sleep with the data as it does not indicate it has performed better in that sector. And we ask, if the data is not a good measure of the performance of the government in the unemployment sector, of what use is it then? That is the contradiction in adopting a methodology that is at utter variance with the peculiarities of our local situation.

    There are also issues with the sample adopted by the organization to arrive at the contentious figure. A sample that only relied on 35,520 households in a country of more than 200 million people cannot be said to be truly representative of the population.

     It is not just enough to plead that the new calibration aligns with the standards adopted by the ILO; neither does its allure lie in the argument that it conforms to the expectations of the World Bank or similar international institutions. What we should be craving for are country-specific guidelines that capture the unique situation in our country. Ironically, that is not the situation we are presented with.

    By what the NBS did, the new figure puts Nigeria in the bracket of countries of the world with the lowest unemployment rates in 2023 such as China 4.1 per cent, UK 4.15 per cent and USA 3.83 per cent. This paring is as ridiculous as it is deceptive given its glaring inability to isolate our peculiar job challenges to make for effective planning.

    We are exposed to the duplicity and inadequacies of the new method. Such pairing neither factors in wage disparities nor the yawning yaps in the development levels of the countries being so compared. Before now, the danger in sticking to economic and development models recommended by multilateral institutions irrespective of their suitability to our local situations had been eminently identified.

    That had been the driving force for agitations against the deregulation of the oil sector and the floating of Naira at the foreign exchange market despite promptings from multilateral organizations. Nigerians have since been living with the harsh realities of the two policies.

    Their capacities to further drive more of our people down the lowest rung of the poverty ladder have been manifest in spiralling inflation and untold hardship unleashed on the people. The situation will further swell the army of the unemployed and render worthless the new job projection by the NBS.

    If the NBS is serious to produce reliable data to aid policy makers defuse the unemployment time bomb, it must discard the new calibration system which classifies one hour work at least, in the last seven days as employment. One hour work is patently alien to our system. Its adoption can only produce counterproductive outcomes.

  • Regulating deregulation!

    Is the federal government about to regulate the deregulated oil sector and the foreign exchange market as well?

    That is the paradoxical question thrown up by events in those sectors, the flurry of activities and responses around governmental circles to challenges stemming from their liberalization.

     Incidentally, the above puzzle touches the heart of reservations on the propriety and timing of those two key policies introduced by President Tinubu immediately after he assumed office last May.

    The federal government had then sought to reassure the public of their ennobling objectives; the better prospects and solid future they hold for the toiling majority of our citizenry. But their implementation has continued to raise challenges, increasingly reinforcing reservations on the correctness of both policies given the fragility of the Nigerian economy.

    Nothing bears this out more strikingly than last week’s reactions from the presidency, the Central Bank of Nigeria CBN and the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited NNPCL. Their responses to fallouts in these two key policy areas indicate that the necessary and sufficient supportive factors for their effective functioning were not just there before they were introduced.

    That is why the policies have continued to present challenges that reinforce reservations on the spontaneity of their implementation and consequences on the lives of the ordinary people.

    The first indication of the policy jolt came from the acting Managing Director of the Central Bank of Nigeria CBN, Folashodun Shonubi when he said after an audience with the president that the apex bank would intervene to stabilize the continued depreciation of the local currency. He did not disclose what the measures are even as he said their impact would be felt within a few days. Shonubi was reacting to the free fall of the Naira in the foreign exchange market.

    But he was quick to blame the continued depreciation of the local currency especially at the parallel market on speculation warning that the new measures may lead to quantum losses to such speculators. As he spoke, the Naira at the parallel market exchanged for about N950 per dollar while the official rate hovered around N744 per dollar.

    The exchange rate regime precipitated a chain of reactions with independent oil marketers threatening to increase the pump price of petrol to about N720 per litre in order not to run at a loss. As if that was not frightening enough, the Nigerian Labour Congress NLC threatened to shut down the country should the price of petrol rise further.

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    Both the presidency and the NNPCL were apparently compelled by the foreboding development to deny contemplating further increases in the pump price of petrol. Special Adviser to the President, Media and Publicity, Ajuri Ngelale was more emphatic on the issue: “There will be no increase in the pump price of petroleum motor spirit anywhere in the country. We repeat, the president affirms that there will be no increase in the pump price of petroleum motor spirit”.

    He insisted the market has been deregulated and liberalized while admitting inefficiencies within the midstream and downstream petroleum sub-sectors, which once swiftly addressed, will ensure the maintenance of prices where they are without reversing the deregulation policy in the petroleum industry.

    On face value, the reassurances from the presidency would seem to address mounting concerns on the fallouts of the liberalization of the petroleum industry and the foreign exchange market. But that would amount to a circumscribed perspective of a rather very complex issue. As alluring as the reassurances of no further price increases are, there is a risk in swallowing them hook, line and sinker because of the contradictions they present.

    There is a mortal policy contradiction in the presidency and the NNPCL promising there will be no further fuel price increases. The first notion it convey is that the government will directly intervene to ensure that the price of petrol remains at the current rate. By some logical inference also, the dynamics of market forces will no longer be allowed to determine the price of the commodity. That contradicts the whole essence of liberalization.

    The marketers threatening further petrol price increases do so because of the current rate they access foreign exchange. At that rate, they will be left with no option than to increase prices since they are in business to make profit.

    The last time pump price of petrol was increased from N500 to N617, the chief executive officer of NNPCL, Mele Kyari had fingered market forces for the rising prices. “What I know is that market forces will regulate the market; prices will go down sometimes, sometimes it will go up. …That is the best way to go forward so that we can adjust prices” he had argued.

    If the same Kyari turns round to emphatically state there will be no further increase in the price of petrol despite copious economic indicators to that effect, one begins to wonder whether market forces have taken flight. The impression one gets is that the government will directly act in such a manner to obstruct the interplay of market dynamics.

    There is no way the price of fuel will remain at their current levels with the continuous depreciation of the local currency since fuel importation is intricately tied to the vagaries of the Naira in the foreign exchange market. It is inconceivable that independent marketers will access foreign exchange at the current rate and sale below their cost price.

    That is the quandary in the insistence by the government that there would be no further increase in the price of petrol. How that was going to happen remained a matter of conjecture until the NNPCL suddenly announced it signed a commitment Letter and Term Sheet with Afrexim Bank for an emergency $3 billion crude oil repayment loan.

    The loan according to the NNPCL will enable it support the federal government in its “ongoing fiscal and monetary policy reforms aimed at stabilizing the exchange rate market” In effect, the NNPCL secured the loan to enable the federal government force down the rising cost of foreign exchange.

    By extrapolation, once such foreign exchange stability is achieved via the loan facility, petrol will continue to sell at their current rate. So the promise by the government that there will be no further increase in the price of petrol is hinged on forcing down the rising foreign exchange rate through the injection of the loan.

    The insistence that there will be no further petrol price increase even as liberalization stays can now be understood. It targets price stability in the petroleum sector through stabilization of the foreign exchange rate regime. Ironically, that stability will not be determined by market forces but government’s intervention. Good economic strategy, it would appear.

    But the loan is still unable to free itself from the contradiction of obstructing market dynamics. Liberalization of the foreign exchange market would in its very strict sense imply the primacy of demand and supply dynamics in exchange rate determination. That principle will be obstructed by what the government intends to do irrespective of whatever benefits the outcome portends.

     It is not for nothing that the loan initiative has been likened to a return of fuel subsidy in some quarters. And those who subscribe to this view have a point. There are also issues pertaining to the terms of the loan agreement, the interest on it and anticipated effects on the economy when the repayment is due.

    If the loan succeeds in stabilizing the value of the Naira such that there will be no further increase in the price of petrol, the government would have scored a point. But that prospect remains a moot issue. More fundamentally, the liberalization quagmire illustrates very poignantly the dearth of the fundamentals for its eventual success.

    For a country hugely dependent on imports including petrol which it has in abundant capacity, producing without refining, it is anybody’s guess liberalization will produce very debilitating results as witnessed in the escalating cost of living. It is fervently hoped governors will judiciously apply the N5 billion disbursed to each state to ameliorate the pains of the liberalization policy on the vulnerable segment of the society.

  • Insecurity: The Southeast angle

    Insecurity: The Southeast angle

    Three different but closely related events last week again, highlighted increasing concerns on the lingering insecurity in the Southeast.

    The first came through assurances from the Chief of Army Staff, Major General Taoreed Lagbaja at a meeting with the House of Representatives’ Ad Hoc committee investigating killings, kidnapping and sundry criminalities in the Umunnochi and Isuikwuato Local Government Areas of Abia State.

    Lagbaja who spoke through Deputy Director Operations, Army Headquarters, Brig. Gen. Gabriel Osho had assured that the army and other security agencies were working round the clock to address the insecurity in the region. He noted that kidnapping remains a potential security threat even as he observed that in July this year, the region recorded cases of kidnapping and attacks by criminal elements suspected to be elements of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra IPOB.

    The army was responding to a request from the House ad hoc committee for a memorandum and interface with relevant security agencies and stakeholders in respect of the incessant attacks of kidnapping, assassination, banditry and other criminalities in the two local government areas.

    The other was the meeting of southeast governors in Enugu to deliberate on how to evolve lasting solutions to the insecurity that has left the region a ghost of its former self. It was the first time the five governors met without sending representatives. In a communiqué at the end of the meeting, the governors resolved to fight insecurity decisively both individually and collectively and in partnership with the federal government.

    But they appeared to have added a new dimension to the narrative when they stated “categorically that the perpetrators of insecurity in our region and their sponsors are criminals and should not be seen as legitimate agitators… upon arrest, they should be dealt with in accordance with the laws of the land”.

    This should be instructive given the penchant to blame any and every criminality in that part of the country on the IPOB. Ironically, such blanket profiling did not only inject complications to the war against insecurity but exposed youths in the zone to all manner of suspicion and maltreatment.

    Had the governors come to this realty before now, some of their actions that led to the mismanagement and escalation of the security situation in the zone could have been perfectly avoided. Perhaps also, we may have come to terms early enough with the reality of the so-called unknown gunmen.    

    The third dimension stems from a trending television interview granted by former militants’ henchman Asari Dokubo.  The ex-militant leader had bandied claims which seem to have injected complications into the unceasing insecurity in parts of the country especially, the southeast.

    Hear him, “I have a private military company that is engaged by the government and we are fighting side by side with the Nigerian military in many places. Like Niger, Plateau, Abia, Imo and parts of Rivers. We were in Anambra too. We are doing a good job and being commended by the host communities”.

    He drew parallels with such private military companies as the notorious Wagner private army in Russia and Blackwater in the USA to justify the existence of his brand of a private military company. But he was quick to add that he does not have an army.

    Director, Army Public Relations, Brig. Gen. Onyema Nwachukwu denied his claims. He said the army neither conducted operation in any part of the country in collaboration with Dokubo’s men nor is it in any form of partnership with the ex-militant or whatever private security outfit he claims to own.

    In Nwachukwu’s view, the veracity of his claims to ownership of a private military company can only be ascertained by the relevant agency statutorily mandated to licence such outfits. We shall return to this later.

    It is heart-refreshing that the army, southeast governors and the House of Representatives are seriously concerned with the incalculable harm wrought on the economy of that zone by the festering insecurity and are commitment to stem the tide.

    Of particular note is the keen interest by the ad hoc committee of the House in seeking a memorandum from the army; on how to interface with other security agencies to stamp out the hydra-headed incidents of kidnapping, killings and sundry criminalities that have left that axis, a verity of the atavism of the state of nature.

    But it is important to have a proper reading of the situation in that axis else the renewed efforts may not hit the real culprits. This point is underscored by the statement from the army which seems to ascribe the degenerated insecurity in that area solely to the activities of the proscribed IPOB. This, to say the least, is a very limited perspective of the matter.

    No doubt, the activities of criminals of the IPOB and other elements in crime cannot be ruled out in the orgy of violence that characterizes that axis. But of particular interest should be the kind of activities that go on in the cattle market located in that axis which serves as boundaries to the three states of Enugu, Abia and Imo. 

    Before now, criminal herdsmen have been fingered for much of the kidnapping that occur in that area. The narratives of those who had the misfortune to encounter them had left no one in doubt about the main characters in the illicit trade. The Prelate of the Methodist Church of Nigeria, Dr Kalu Samuel Uche who was kidnapped in the axis with some of his bishops some time ago, was unambiguous that those who took him hostage were clearly herdsmen from Mali and Sudan.

    He had also alleged the herdsmen they saw were born and grew up in the southeast and were children of cow dealers who had lived in the region for decades. Prelate Uche who was released after paying a N100 million ransom had then accused the military of complicity by acting as enabler of kidnappers.

    There had also been demonstrations and agitations from host communities for the relocation of the cattle market seen as the incubator of insecurity in the axis. So the role of the cattle market in that winding and desolate axis is an issue that must be tackled head on.

     Even as calls for its relocation may appear a tall order now, there is nothing preventing the army and other security agencies from conducting thorough and regular searches in and around the markets given allegations that it serves as hiding abode for sophisticated weapons used for sundry criminalities.

    The interest shown by the House of Representatives will yield startling and positive outcomes if the army leads such discrete search operations. As long as we treat concerns on the security risk the cattle market poses with disregard, so long will the insecurity in that area remain a recurring decimal.

    Dokubo’s private military company in the fashion of Wagner and Blackwater: it is irreconcilable he has a private military company but does not have a standing army. Yet, he claims to be involved in operations with the military in some states including three in the southeast zone. The story does not just add up. 

    It is also not just enough for the army to deny any form of collaboration with his so-called private military company. Neither is it sufficient to pass the buck on the veracity of the existence of such company to the agency charged with such registrations. In saner climes, Dokubo should have been arrested to furnish details of his claims and collaborative engagement with the government in its military operations. It is still not late.

    Getting Dokubo to account for the activities of his private military company is even more compelling given copious allegations before now that his security outfit is involved in some of the killings in parts of the southeast. He must come clear on what security operations he is involved in Imo, Abia and Anambra states and the arrangements under which he operated.

    If the notoriety and disregard for rules of engagement by private military companies as the Wager group and Blackwater are anything to go by, we may be getting clues to the riddle posed by ‘unknown gunmen’. The governors of the southeast should speak up on whether they engaged the services of Dokubo’s private military company and in what capacity.

    It is time to come clear on the so-called Ebubeagu security outfit whose activities, membership and modus operandi are shrouded in utmost secrecy if current concerns are to lead to productive outcomes.   

  • ECOWAS ‘boots’ on Nigerien ground

    ECOWAS ‘boots’ on Nigerien ground

    Will the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) adopt the military option to restore constitutional democracy in Niger? This poser is of major concern to keen observers of events since the military sacked the democratically elected government of President Muhammed Bazoum.

    The fear of possible military engagement followed resolutions of Heads of States and Governments of the sub-regional body after an extraordinary meeting in Abuja. ECOWAS leaders had while condemning the forceful takeover of power in that country, issued ultimatum to the putschists to reinstate Bazoum to power within seven days or face possible military force.

    They also reeled out sanctions including the suspension of all financial and commercial transactions, freezing of all service transactions, land border closures and suspension of all commercial flights between Niger and ECOWAS countries.

    They directed the Chiefs of Defence Staff of ECOWAS to proceed on an emergency meeting to strategize on effective ways to implement a possible military action to restore Bazoum to office.

    But the coup leader in Niger, Gen. Abdourahamane Tchiani described their action as the military response to the “degradation of the security situation”, linked to jihadist bloodshed. The military warned about the “consequence that will flow from any foreign military intervention…that certain dignitaries are thinking of military confrontation which will end in nothing but the massacre of the Nigerien people and chaos”.

    Both Mali and Burkina Faso have warned against foreign military intervention in Niger. The military governments in both countries said any military intervention in Niger to restore deposed President Bazoum would be considered a “declaration of war against their two countries”.

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    The sub-regional body did not however, foreclose the diplomatic option. President Bola Tinubu has in his capacity as the ECOWAS chairman dispatched a delegation to Niger and another to Libya and Algeria last weekend. While the first delegation led by former head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar is to convey ECOWAS resolutions to the coup leaders in Niger; the other led by Babagana Kingibe is to engage the leaders of neighbouring Libya and Algeria to solicit their cooperation on ECOWAS position.

    Feelers from the outcome of discussions of the delegation with the coup leaders spoke of dissonance between ECOWAS position and that of the military leaders. Reports had it that negotiations had collapsed seemingly irretrievably as the junta is set to recall their ambassador from Nigeria and some other western countries.

    They were also mulling other measures that gave out their commitment to pushing through their vision on the forceful regime change. With the seeming deadlock, it is unclear whether ECOWAS will seek further avenues of getting the coup leaders see reason or opt for forceful intervention to enforce their will.

    It does appear ECOWAS is weighing both possibilities very closely. Defence chiefs of the body had since met to map out responses in the event of a military action. Rhetoric from their meeting fuelled speculations on the prospects of force. This could be gleaned from the statement of Nigeria’s defence chief, Gen Christopher Musa when he said, “we must face the challenge of restoring democratic governance in Niger head on”.

    ECOWAS commissioner for political affairs, peace and security, Abdel-Fatau Musah toed the same hard line thus, “we need to demonstrate that we can go beyond barking to bite”. He harped on the imperative of decisive action to stop the coup from spreading to other countries given that in the last three years or so there have been about nine successful/unsuccessful coups in West Africa.

    Such have been the sentiments. In addition, a leaked viral memo from Nigerian Defence Headquarters revealed an order had been given to the Army, Navy and Air force to ‘prepare to commence movement of platforms to Sokoto and enforce a no-fly zone’.

    These have raised speculations on the eventual deployment of force by ECOWAS to restore democracy in Niger. Already, Nigeria has cut off electricity supplies to that country as part of the efforts to give teeth to the sanctions. But the regime in Niamey is adamant as it has gone ahead to arrest and detain top ministers of the sacked government even as it is still holding Bazoum in detention.

    The challenge facing the ECOWAS given the alleged breakdown in negotiations with the Nigerien coup leaders is how to proceed henceforth. Will they consider further peace meetings or regard the failed engagement sufficient evidence of a complete breakdown of truce? Should the sub-regional body deploy immediate force to restore Bazoum or explore other diplomatic channels to engage the military leaders?

    That is the game situation presented by the Nigerien impasse. It involves options and payoffs with wider repercussions. If the temperament of the leadership of ECOWAS, especially the lure for Nigeria to upscale its diplomatic role within the sub-region is anything to go by, the temptation of a military option appears high on the table. President Tinubu is faced with the temptation to use the Nigerien situation to demonstrate his famed credentials and commitment to democracy.

    This should not be a surprise. In his swearing-in speech, last May, he had indicated his primary foreign policy objective as “the peace and stability of the West African sub-region and the African continent…work with ECOWAS, the AU and willing partners in the international community to end extant conflicts and resolve new ones”. He also promised to contain threats to peace, retool our foreign policy to more actively lead the regional and continental quest for collective prosperity. So there is everything to expect that the Nigerien situation provides the first opportunity for him to demonstrate this resolve.

    But whether he would prefer the military option so soon after or the exploration of more diplomatic avenues to resolve the impasse, will depend on a complex set of intervening variables. Already ECOWAS is divided on military intervention. Three of its member states, Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso are ruled by the military.

    Both Mali and Burkina Faso have taken sides with the Nigerien coup leaders and warned ECOWAS that foreign military intervention in Niger will amount to a declaration of war against their own countries. The implication of this is that in the event of foreign military intervention, both countries will join hands with Niger, pool their military arsenal together to ward off any intruder. That is the message. And this will lead to complications whose outcome nobody can predict.

    These countries have also embarked on some form of nationalism which has seen them sacking their former colonial masters with a demonstrable inclination and preference for Russia which is said to have stationed the notorious mercenary Wagner private army in their territories. Their attachment to Russia is not propelled by any ideological consideration.

    With the collapse of the communist party, Russia opted for a variant of democracy which Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way dubbed ‘competitive authoritarianism’. Its framework appears democratic in principle but refused to accept the effects of liberal pluralistic politics including the possibility of losing power.

    Increasing ties of these West African countries with Russia are for military protection. The possibility of proxy war is high should ECOWAS choose the military option. It goes with dire consequences both for the sub-region and the oppressed and malnourished citizens of those countries.

    Foreign military intervention could also put the life of deposed Bazoum to mortal risk. He will become the first victim of any military onslaught as those holding him are likely to sacrifice his life when faced with existential threat.

    If that happens, ECOWAS will have no Bazoum to restore to power even if they succeed in crushing the junta. This should instruct ECOWAS to de-emphasize force; re-engage the junta to work out a quick timeframe for the restoration of democracy in that country.

    But of greater concern should be the objective factors that propel forceful regime change. These are located in unbridled corruption, mismanagement of common patrimony, electoral heist and subversion of the constitution by leaders desperately seeking to push through their third term ambitions. We need to tackle these root causes if we are serious to consign coup d’états to the dustbin of history.