The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

  • Okpebholo and Sanwo-Olu

    Okpebholo and Sanwo-Olu

    It was an important visit. The Governor-elect of Edo State met with the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, in Lagos. But what the new governor can learn from Lagos are many. The BOS said he would ply Monday Okpebholo with the state’s developmental template and the ideas to help him save Edo from the ruins of Obaseki.

    We can recall that Adams Oshiomhole did same once he became governor. He brought his team to understudy Lagos and borrowed ideas that could fit into the rise of the Niger Delta state. When he was done as governor, Adams became a model of development Obaseki pooh-poohed. The man derailed and went his own way, the way of pain and regret from the people.

    Read Also: Nigeria to save N5.4tr from subsidy removal in 2024, says Abiodun

    When the new governor-elect heard the sounds of victory last week, one of his promises was to go back to the Adams project.

    That is all fine. He has something else to learn from the BOS, though. It is his ability to strike a balance between politics and governance, and he did it by working together with all the interests in the state’s politics. That was what plagued his predecessor. The BOS promised not to hark back to a time of division. He has managed the disparate forces who worked for his victory the first time. They liked him so much that they did not undermine his search for an encore. He is a sunny first citizen who governs without coattails of rancour.

    The incoming helmsman of Edo State must learn that. It took a potpourri of interests to make him governor, including Adams, Ize-Iyamu, Dan Orbih, et al. All of them would want influence. Although Oscar Wilde says “all influence is immoral,” for him not to kill the morale of his stewardship, he must learn to navigate big egos. It should not turn into pounds of flesh for him. it takes emotional intelligence to pursue that with success. The BOS of Lagos can teach him one or two about the Omoluabi spirit that helped him to do that.

  • Unbundling Unity Colleges

    Unbundling Unity Colleges

    If everything goes on well, the federal government will soon unbundle the 115 Unity Colleges across the country into basic and secondary schools. Consultations to that effect are already on-going between the relevant ministries and agencies of the government.

    Minister of State for Education, Yusuf Sununu, while disclosing these at a meeting of principals of Unity Colleges with the theme, “Entrepreneurial Education: A Panacea for Self-reliance and National development” said the new measure is an integral part of the National Policy on Education. He further justified the unbundling exercise on the ground that it will allow more funds to go into the basic education level which is the basic foundation for learning.

    “As at today, money accruing to the Universal Basic Education Commission UBEC is not being enjoyed by the Federal Unity Colleges. But the unbundling will allow them (Unity Colleges) to have the basic education component which will be funded through UBEC”, the minister argued. By the new arrangement, more money will go into the basic and secondary education against what obtained in the past.

    Apart from additional funds that will be attracted by the schools, it was further canvassed that the unbundling will draw further benefit from the huge opportunities it offers for self-employment and self-reliance on the part of its products. Its effects in ameliorating the escalating unemployment level in the country is also put forward as further reason why the unbundling is a thing whose time has come.

    Given the reasons adduced by the minister, the proposed unbundling of Unity Colleges would seem to draw considerable allure. This is especially so given the high unemployment level among products of our secondary schools. The socio-economic and developmental challenges that currently assail the country, further lend any policy capable of equipping graduates of such schools with the necessary skills to make use of their heads and hands to create employment a desideratum.

    But there are grey areas in the minister’s presentation that require further clarification. There was no explanation on whether the basic and secondary schools would operate from the colleges as presently constituted or entail earmarking some of the Unity colleges as distinct basic schools running subjects up to the senior secondary school level while others are designated secondary schools with subjects running up to the same level.

     This clarification is germane for clear distinction between the current proposal and the 6-3-3-4 policy on education around which the nation’s secondary school education revolves. This is more so as the proposed new initiative shares the same objectives with the 6-3-3-4 policy on education which came into place since 1983. When the 6-3-3-4 system was introduced, all the nation’s secondary schools including the Unity Colleges had to cue into it.

    Ironically, the same reasons that had all along been adduced to justify the 6-3-3-4 policy on education are the very ones the minister is putting forward to justify the unbundling of the Unity Colleges. It was then argued that on completion of the six-year secondary school system split into junior and senior secondary schools, their products would have had vocational training inculcated into them such that will make them self-employed and self-reliant if they are not able to proceed to the university.

    By this, the government would indirectly reduce the scourge of unemployment that has been growing in geometric progression with its associated social vices. The minister spoke along these lines when urged principals of Unity Colleges to cultivate the entrepreneurial mind-set on their students by integrating it into the school curriculum to empower them to become job creators than job seekers.

     “Entrepreneurship education offers a solution to this challenge as it prepares students to think creatively, innovatively and develop the confidence to take calculated risks”, Sununu further eulogised the proposed initiative. This argument is nothing new.  It was the lynchpin around which the 6-3-3-4 education system revolved.  

    After more than two decades of its implementation, facts on the ground indicate very appallingly that the policy has been unhelpful in producing school leavers capable of self-reliance or creating employment for themselves. The touted self-reliance and self-employment from its products have largely remained a grand illusion. This should not come as a surprise.

    A combination of factors added up to rob the policy of its advertised potentials. Lack of adequate skilled manpower to see the students through vocational training, the absence of home grown technology, institutional corruption and dearth of supportive infrastructural facilities have remained the key obstacles to the high-minded goals of the 6-3-3-4 education system.

    So when Sununu presented the unbundling of the Unity Colleges in the same fashion the 6-3-3-4 system was dressed but failed to deliver on promise, public cynicism was bound to greet it. There are reservations as to whether the unbundling will not suffer the fate of other policies before it. There has been no substantial change or improvement in the conduct of public affairs to give confidence that the unbundling will not suffer from the same systemic challenges that worked against the realisation of the goals of the 6-3-3-4 system.

     It is not just enough to justify the unbundling of the unity colleges on the premise that it will allow more funds from UBEC to be injected into them. Neither is it enough to expect that once the schools are split and additional funds injected into them, all the necessary and sufficient conditions they require to deliver on promise would have been guaranteed. Far from that. How these funds are utilised in a system notorious for official corruption is at issue.

    Moreover, it is yet uncertain how the government intends to address such systemic deficits as requisite skilled local manpower, the attendant technological base and such infrastructural facilities as the epileptic power supply that are sine qua non for the kind of revolutionary change in skills acquisition.

    But then, the term unbundling throws up feelings that leave sour taste in the mouths of the citizenry. Nigerians encountered that term when the oil sector was broken down. They also saw it in action in the case of the National Electric Power Authority NEPA. Unbundling was dressed as the elixir to the challenges in those sectors.

    But the efficiencies and economy of scale that were to be derived from those unbundling exercise have been hard to realise. Rather, they have brought with them the same inefficiencies that marred their predecessors and high costs which the citizenry have had to pay for their services.

    So when the minister spoke of unbundling the Unity Colleges, the images the citizens got was that it would entail increases in school fees. But the explanation that the envisaged additional funds would come from the UBEC with the introduction of the basic education component seemed to have put that possibility at bay.

    Before then, there had arisen speculations that school fees in the unity schools had been increased to N386,000. The Federal Ministry of Education was quick to deny it. It had in a statement; described a document to that effect, which it said was circulating among parents as fraudulent. It said the highest fee paid by students in the unity schools was N100, 000 only for new students.

    It is good the speculated increase arose before the unbundling exercise was announced by the minister. We now know that additional funding for the new initiative will come from UBEC. That should be heart-refreshing. But the federal government must do proper homework this time around. It is not just enough to tout the advantages the unbundling of the Unity Colleges will bring forth.

    This country has not been lacking in churning out policies designed to set the nation on proper developmental direction. But there exists a whole world of difference between policy formulation and its implementation to achieve the desired goals. Secondary education that equips their products to make use of their heads and hands to create jobs is the way to go.

    But the fundamentals must be gotten right. The consultations presaging the unbundling must ensure all the supportive infrastructure and technological manpower to inculcate the envisaged entrepreneurial skills on the students are adequately in place. That will make the difference between the deficits encountered by the 6-3-3-4 system and the current one.

  • Ofone!

    Ofone!

    At the best of times, he always looked like a man who did not sleep last night. But at 4.40 am on Sunday, Godwin Obaseki had murdered sleep, his own sleep. He could not prepare for church. His eyes were alert enough for sermons but not his spirit.

    Sitting at the INEC office like a regular citizen, he crouched over his phone, his face quizzical. He did not lose a wink, did not doze or snore, was not tired. He lacked the ennui of a loser. He still nurtured hope.

    He sat alone, and confused. He was suffering from a territorial crisis. Where was he to be? He was not supposed to be at an INEC office. It belonged to umpires. He was probably mistaking the word umpire for empire. His – an empire – was crumbling. INEC office was not his gubernatorial territory. But there he was; he, an interloper. He was supposed to be in bed. He banished his pillows. He was not antsy for a snooze. He could not nap because he had been caught napping at the polls. He should be at his party’s situation room, or at home as a receptacle of updates.

    But he was at the situation room. However, his situation cut a pathetic pose. He stood, paunch forward, face morose, alone among people. He was looking at the last clock of a pride ticking away into oblivion. He witnessed it after he overstayed his welcome at the INEC office. The governor, amidst his police guards, was ushered out of the office like a regular tout, booed until he turned his scowl into a toothy smile, the most embarrassed smile in Edo. From the video camera, his cameo of a smile revealed some of the whitest teeth you could see anywhere. He might have wished the polls rewarded his dentition. Which is a contrast to one of his term-expired governor neighbours who tormented the television set with his set of broken incisors, neither white nor set but unsettling.

    This was Obaseki, the peacock of Edo State. He was getting his comeuppance with his people on whose back he had betrayed, he had puffed, he had a subpar performance, capsized democracy with a rubberstamp house, tossed about his deputy, undermined the monarch in a revanchist plot, desecrated Bini symbolisms.

    Read Also: 2024 FASU games kick off in grand style at UNILAG

    The people just gelded this same Obaseki. He had exhibited nervousness in the runup to the polls. He borrowed a book from his party’s notorious patriarch when he belched out the lingo of desperado. He promised do-or-die if his Asue Ighodalo did not win at the polls. But he had a bluster unlike the patriarch at Ota, who had an ex-soldier’s braggadocio and an appeal to the muscular use of force. Bravado is not enough for a third-world election.

    You could use Bravado in the west, like his counter in the United States has done. All he did was say the word, and the army beat its chest and they stormed the Congress. And ever since, Trump’s army has been agile, angry and at war with the rest of America. And the others are afraid. The Owu chief had raw muscle, men, thugs, police and soldiers. After Obaseki’s little huff, the IGP pulled Edo State police commissioner and that was the beginning of his castration. He tried to recalibrate the phrase after a backlash, and that showed that he did not have his mentor’s mettle. The Owu chief never ate his words. He spat fire instead.

    At the night of the election, APC top brass had begun to stir with pride. I called one of them, and he quipped, “Are you calling to congratulate me?” I wasn’t. Just wanted to confirm a video. Then I asked about the word Ofone, and I had not finished my sentence when he broke into pidgin, “Ofone naim be the song for Edo now.” He was too ecstatic for dialogue.

    Ofone means it is finished. They mean it is finished for the arrogance of a man who did not know that democracy has an expiry date for every office holder. That he knew he commanded awe but he would be awe-struck by the time he was up. That real majesty is democracy but more so is time. Time does not respect anyone. As the bible says,”I have seen the wicked in great power and spreading himself like a green bay tree. Yet he passed away, and lo, he was not.”

    Fate is telling him that the Edo servant for eight years now departs, if not in peace, according to the laws of democracy and the people. His eyes have beheld the humiliation of the polls.

    Today, he would be thinking many things, and perhaps for the rest of his life. He may not forget agony but he probably will outlive it. He will not forget Adams Oshiomhole. Why did he not show more humility or even understanding to the man who picked him from obscurity in Lagos, but he decided to pooh-pooh him. An act of betrayal.

    He will not forget his deputy, Phillip Shaibu, who worked for him like a little boy, as a point man and even a bull dog. He did not afford him the courtesy of humane discussion even if he decided to pick someone else as his successor.

    He might also contemplate the phrase “Edo no be Lagos.” He rallied his people against an outsider. Does he know that he was a Lagos pick? Now, for irony, he might also say to himself that Asue Ighodalo, like himself, is a Lagos boy, too. He beat Lagos but Lagos beat him back in the last laugh when he picked a Lagos boy like him. This time, Okpebholo the homeboy wears the crown. It is the pirouette of destiny, a revenge of history.

    It is the way things end, a certain sense of destiny seems to work things to oust persons who always believe they know it all. He thought he could control time. But only God can. As Shakespeare said in Hamlet, “There is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we will.”

    He will also think about the election day. The failure of rational expectation. He could muse about how men plot festivals and end up with funerals. Like a sour dawn, like another line from Hamlet, “The funeral baked meats did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables.” It is this air of ironies that will plague Obaseki. Epic collapses are ironies. Federico Lorca’s play Blood Wedding was a nuptial mirth of dance and feasting until the tragedy. But Obaseki’s story is often comic.

    When you saw him in public, he had an air of glory without purpose, a man who thought he had love everywhere but not enough. Now he leaves power after thinking himself a godfather. He realizes he is neither god nor a father of the throne. Okpebholo, who did not show any assumption of arrogance, has now bested his best man.

    He will contemplate another line from Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure: “But man, proud man/Dressed in a little brief authority/Most ignorant of what he’s most assured—His glassy essence../Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven/As makes the angels weep; who, with our spleens/Would all themselves laugh mortal.”

    Vincent Akanmode, deputy weekend editor of The Nation, characterized the moment like a poet. Hear him. “Okpebholo won at the polling booth, Akpata in the social media and Obaseki in none.” I should add that Obaseki won in his fantasy.

  • Elupee candidate

    Elupee candidate

    It still baffles me, the video clip. Is it a work of artificial intelligence or a temporary loss of intelligence. I saw the clip of Labour Party candidate Olumide Akpata while lamenting his prospect. He was referring to a poll as his buoy of hope. It was not a poll by a university or funded by even a political party, not commissioned by his own party or any other one. But by who? A TV anchor. And he referred to it as a reason he thought he was headed not just for victory, but a landslide.

    Read Also: Niger Delta: Troops kill two armed vandals, arrest 18 others in war against economic sabotage

    I like to think he was not the one. After all, he is supposed to be a man of evidence  as a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association. For him to stoop to fiction, gives one a window on how the rabble of that party thinks. It is the sort of delirium that works that crowd.

    They performed so poorly in Edo guber poll that I wonder why TV stations present the numbers as though it were a three horse race. The third horse has not hoofbeat and cannot neigh.

  • Fintiri, it’s finito

    Fintiri, it’s finito

    If anyone challenges an election before INEC announces, it should not be Fintiri, Adamawa State Governor. He it was who survived the impunity of Hudu Ari, who did the same thing against him.

    Read Also: Okpebholo’s victory, an endorsement of Tinubu’s administration – Ganduje

    The man is facing the consequences of his action. Fintiri is doing same to challenge Edo governorship elections. He is acting like a gangster who is becoming one because he was made by one. He should know that once the process says it, the only other option is the court. Not freelance impunity. For now, it is finito.

  • Ban on Togo, Benin universities

    Ban on Togo, Benin universities

    All is definitely not well with federal government’s blanket ban on degree certificates issued by universities in Togo and Benin Republic. Events since the Minister of Education, Tahir Mamman announced the retroactive de-recognition of degree certificates awarded by universities in the two countries indicate vividly that the government may not have taken into account, all the facts to the matter in arriving at the sweeping and painful decision.

    The government had following revelation by a national daily on how a reporter secured degree certificate from a Benin university within six weeks and got enrolled for the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) programme, set up an inter-ministerial committee to investigate degree certificate racketeering and find solutions to the malfeasance.

    It also suspended the evaluation and accreditation of degree certificates from Togo and Benin. But few weeks ago, the minister suddenly directed all higher institutions in the country to regularly submit their admission lists immediately after matriculation ceremonies through JAMB dedicated channels. The directive was said to be one of the recommendations of the inter-ministerial committee on fake degree racketeering in the two countries and locally.

    Nothing was said of other recommendations of the committee or government’s position on them. But the minister was to throw further insights into the decisions of the government days after, when he was reported to have said, “In the case of Togo we have three universities that are officially approved and licensed to offer degrees, and in Benin there are about five of them. Anyone who didn’t attend these universities is parading fake certificate”.

    This must have jolted many especially thousands of graduates of private universities duly approved by the governments of those countries. The weight of the pronouncement was further reinforced by available data from the NYSC which revealed that 21,684 students from Benin Republic and 1,105 from Togo had obtained fake certificates between 2019 and 2023. The government then promised to weed out fake degree holders from the system including those who had secured jobs with them.

    It is not certain the measures the NYSC adopted to generate this humongous and scandalous data. Neither is it of public knowledge whether this whopping number of fake degree holders scaled through the NYSC evaluation process in error or were flushed out from the scheme. It would have been interesting for our policy makers to know how the NYSC came about its findings. Such information would be useful in tackling the menace of fake degrees from those two countries.

    Read Also: Tinubu pledges to empower 30 million Nigerians with digital literacy by 2027

    Whatever the case, it is a sad commentary that this high figure of fake degree certificate holders sought illegal enrolment into the NYSC scheme within the timeframe. Who knows the number that succeeded undetected just like the reporter that got his degree certificate from Benin within six weeks? But it is puzzling that the NYSC kept this recurring scandal under wraps until the investigations by the inter-ministerial committee.

    Had this trend been exposed, perhaps, our education managers would have taken the necessary steps to avoid the present situation they are compelled by the enormity of the challenge to resort to precipitate measures. It is still good a thing we are coming to terms with the danger of fake degree certificates’ influx not only from those countries but from within our own local universities.

    But the blanket and retroactive ban is not only too drastic and harsh but guilty of hasty generalisation. The measure conveys the unmistakable impression of the government punishing all graduates of those two countries for offences committed by the unscrupulous ones. There is everything untidy about such a measure.

    It is inconceivable that every graduate from those universities parades a fake certificate as Mamman would want us to believe. Rather, what seems to have emerged is a palpable inability by the education ministry to do a thorough job on the very sensitive matter.  There is no evidence from the way the government went about the ban that they were meticulous and painstaking to sift the wheat from the chaff considering the very nature, weight and sensitivity of the issue.

    Or how else do we rationalise the de-accreditation of all the universities in those two countries except the three and five mentioned in Togo and Benin respectively?  How is that fraudulent activity substantially different from the revelations emerging from some of our local universities? The inability of the government to apply the same hash and sweeping measure to local universities in similar mess speak of the contradiction and unfairness of the blanket ban.

    The committee should have been more painstaking in investigating the particular universities complicit in the issuance of such fake certificates, the number of those that benefited from that fraudulent activity with recommendations on how to stem the tide. There is no evidence of that. Neither was clean bill of health issued to any of the private universities duly accredited by their home governments.

    It is bad enough that fake degrees are being churned out to Nigerians from those countries. But it is also a big statement that patrons of those universities are Nigerian youths. That is a big statement that should have instructed extreme care in separating the genuine certificate holders from the fakes. If the government has other issues with the quality of education and duration of certain courses, these can be taken up with their home governments for remedial measures to address observed shortcomings.

    Facts available from the two countries further interrogate the criteria adopted by the federal government in issuing the ban. Stakeholders in education in the Republic of Benin have faulted the claims by the minister.

    Contrary to the Mamman’s claims, the stakeholders said there are eight public universities in Benin Republic and 95 private ones. These universities are duly accredited and licensed by the country’s Ministry of Higher Education and Scientific Research. How the minister arrived at his figure even when the list of accredited and licensed public and private universities were said to have been handed over to the inter-ministerial committee when they visited, is at the centre of the controversy that trailed the ban.

    Graduates of the blacklisted universities in Togo and Benin have also protested the sweeping ban. In a press conference under the aegis of West African Francophone Universities Alumni held in conjunction with the National Association of Nigerian Students in Diaspora, they called for a reversal of the order. The groups lamented that the order is not only retroactive and unjust but has exposed their members to ridicule before employers and the larger public.

    They further contended that it was wrong for a government that had over the years accredited and approved courses run by some of these universities to turn around only to declare their degree certificates fake. Many of them have secured jobs both in public and private establishments and have not been found wanting. They are at a loss on what to make of the ban now.

    This is the contradiction the Nigerian government must resolve. The government said all those that obtained degrees from these countries between 2017 and 2023 should consider them fake. How? It should have offered reasons for the decision. By extrapolation, degrees obtained from those universities before this deadline are considered genuine. So at what point did we get it wrong?

     If some of these universities were awarding recognised degrees from 2016 downwards, at what point did our education authorities come derelict of their supervisory functions? Why did it take this long before that realisation? These dialectical questions expose the flaws in the blanket ban. We expect better and considerate measures in issues that are at the very heart of the lives of our younger generation.

    The federal government has definitely not finished with this matter. It has to re-engage the governments of the two countries, scrutinise the programmes run by their accredited  universities against universal academic standards to arrive at better informed decision.

    Through this method, it will fish out the fakes, allowing those that are deficient in some aspects of their programmes, enough time to make up. It flies in the face of reason that all the private universities in the two countries churn out substandard and fake degree.

  • Smart city, smart country

    Smart city, smart country

    It is for the contempt of the past that President Tinubu made China the centre of gravity a week ago. While some media outlets and commentators washed up ink and airtime fulminating over Agbaero and his arrest without asking why, the president and his entourage focused on the future.

    Ajaokuta Steel, neglected by a generation, is whirring back to life. Solid mineral tie-ups, infrastructure development, power generation, and deals amounting to billions of dollars. These were sweet pies that some commentators wanted to ignore as poison. Some had criticized two governors for accompanying the president. While all the critics saw was jamboree, what they accomplished was progress. They were smart, as smart as the smart cities they are working on.

    They are Governor Uba Sani of Kaduna State, and the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu. From what seemed a gloomy beginning for the Kaduna chief executive, the new helmsman of the north’s pivotal state sees a rosy horizon. Debt or no debt, he is not going to grieve over what’s lost, or bemoan a prelate class’s silence over a contract with his predecessor. Not for him the sentiment of the Shakesperean play, Love’s labour is Lost.  He went to China for the state, and he penned a suite of sweet deals. Just like Sanwo-Olu, their desire is to turn the main cities into what town planners call conurbations.

    Before the China visit, Governor Sani has been working on safer schools by consolidating schools to make them lean and mean, and easy to access and secure. He has revived the Panteka Market, as the number one tools hub for the north. He has unveiled the lithium making factory, a surefire source of jobs and tonic for the nation’s economy.

    He penned an MOU with Huawei Technologies, Chinese premier tech company. It covers the following: state-level unified command centre, enhanced security, intelligent traffic system, e-government and office automation, smart education, smart healthcare, ICT talent, renewable energy and public transportation. This is quite a huge pot and its ambition is shown by the breadth of the areas covered. This is the power of a smart city. A smart city has a smart transport system that must segue into a smart healthcare system that must work in tandem with smart schools, and all must source their nimbleness from a smart government office. The result is a smart people. As Lincoln said, the greatness of a country consists in the quality of its citizens.

    These deals are going to build on the Kaduna Technology City now being upgraded to a Smart City. It also has a first in a state: a digital Innovation and Entrepreneurial Centre that uses existing ICT Hub empowerment and ICT business clinics.

    Says Governor Sani: “I signed into law a bill to make provisions for the development of tech-enabled start-ups in Kaduna State…The key objective…is to position Kaduna State’s start-ups ecosystem as the leading digital technology centre…” it is in this light he has ramped up the “Bridging the Last Mile Initiative 2024-2027.”

    Read Also: Tinubu pledges to empower 30 million Nigerians with digital literacy by 2027

    For the BOS of Lagos, he announced his deal with éclat. “Lagos, yet another Metro line? Absolutely. The Green Line Metro is here.” It was an eclat for a clap. He signed an MOU with China for yet another colour-coded city on the move. We have had the blue and red. It’s now green light for the Lekki corridor. For a governor noted for big-ticket projects, the Green train is not a surprise. This is part of what Lagos has been becoming, a smart city as model. The Green line is a 68-kilometre wonder that will connect the Lekki Free Zone to Marina. In a sense, it is ancient and modern. The Lekki Free Zone is, perhaps, the fastest growing zone in all of Africa. It is a catchment of new estates, new businesses, educational institutions, high-tech innovations, entrepreneurial gusto and the siting of new landmarks. It is from its belly that the new express from Lagos to Calabar will sprout. Traffic logjams have been a perennial headache of Lekki, and it is because people outpaced development. The train will be a disruptive solution. It will, as the governor has noted, link areas like Victoria Island, Ajah, Ikoyi.

    “This rail line is projected to carry over 500,000 passengers daily at launch, rising to over a million as demand grows,” he said.

    With blue, red and green on course, the government will be dusting its masterplan for the other colour-coded trains, including yellow, purple and orange. A smart city is an interconnected city. It is its capacity for every part to talk to one another in a nimble automation that distinguishes 21st century city and the ones in the past.

    For the modern world, cities are the bellwether of civilization. In the past, cities equated our sprawling villages today. Athens, Rome, Babylon, et all. But their inhabitants reveled in their geniuses. Horse-drawn carriages were high-tech. Roads without tars or cars, or wood-fueled fireplaces amounted to the acme in innovation. Candles were dainty but not because they shed light. Electricity was still in prophetic infancy. Faraday was not imagined; his foetus was not even fantasised. Their shrines were too dark for their gods to conjure light. Lions dueled humans in the Roman coliseum as counterpart to the UEFA League or World Cup. To travel then makes today’s planes and cars the machinations of witchcraft. Yesterday’s conceit is today’s contempt. In his sprawling novel Lonesome Dove, a tome about the wild, wild west in the United States, Larry McMurtry writes an epic about rural America before big, beautiful cities rose out of the underbelly of cowboys and Indians as the vast region from Texas to Montana was a trap for rapes, kidnapping, murders and whoring. There is hope yet for us.

    The smart city we envision is not the big, bright Babylon lamented in scriptures in the line, “fallen, fallen Babylon the great!” It is not the one of duplicity in Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, or the one of the lecher in Ekwensi’s Jagua Nana, or political vanity and cultural extravagance in Soyinka’s Opera Wonyosi, or of greed in Ben Jonson’s Volpone, or of religious chicanery in Olga Tokarczuk’s The Book of Jacob, or Dicken’s London of filth and cunning.

    We seek a smart city of beauty and rule of law and imaginative citizens and profits cohabiting with human generosity. That is what Governor Sani has started. It is what Sanwo-Olu is delivering. It is what President Tinubu wanted for his country by taking the two gentlemen with him. It was no jamboree. It was real.                            

  • Of Aisha Yesufu, Pastor Itua Ighodalo and Obidient hypocrisy

    Of Aisha Yesufu, Pastor Itua Ighodalo and Obidient hypocrisy

    Just suddenly, all is quiet in the social media on the Obidient front. It was after Julius Abure, the turbulent Labour Party Leader, took off the gloves and delivered an uppercut. It was in the form of revelation. One, that Pastor Itua Ighodalo was – or is he still? – a signatory to the account of LP or Elupee. And guess the other signatory. Some in the social media are calling her hushmummy. But that may not be fair. They need more imagination. Diezani will be jealous. They need something original for Aisha. Abure said both Aisha Yesufu and Itua Ighodalo signed the comings and goings of the Eluppee purse. We are not talking no-shishi here. A lot of chin chin. We are talking billions of Naira. Not one or two billion, but a purse in the neighbourhood of N12 billion. And not Naira alone. We know Elupee is international, not just because Pitobi had offshore accounts when he was governor and kept money aside for himself and family. After all, a governor is worthy of his election.

    Funny, that Aisha now recognizes the courts. Was she not the one that gave a vote of no confidence in the judiciary when the Nigerian people outvoted Elupee? Now the courts are important. She said those who are aggrieved should go to court. That is, those not happy with her position on how the money was spent in those giddy days of LP ferment. We want transparency as clear as a person without a hood. We cannot hide accounting inside Hijab. Let’s take apart the hijab from the signature.

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    Again, Pastor Ighodalo has an interesting story. He was angry with President Tinubu, then candidate, for running for the election. Ighodalo was for Osinbajo then before the primary. When his pastor friend lost, he pirouetted to Pitobi, the closest he could to a pastor. So smooth was he that he rose to the sumptuous reaches of accounting. Was this not the same Pastor Ighodalo, who, before the last political dispensation, could not take his feet out of the gates of Bourdillon? It’s like the character in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night who said “make me a willow cabin at your gate,” signifying permanence. I still wonder what is going on in this man’s mind about why he made a U-turn on his supposed friend without decency. He could not blend empathy into evidence and experience into testimony. I thought a man who saw Bourdillon in its interior would have acted as a good witness. He did not have to support him but he should have made a case. He just looked the other way and openly dismissed his ambition. He should have articulated what he knew and the whys and wherefores of his new course. Most people, given their past association, would not turn it into an open antagonism. You would think he would be one of those to have cleared the air when the Christian elite launched a calvary against the Muslim-Muslim ticket. But he carried Judas’ halo. If it was not fair, he was not alone in this sordid fare.

    But more perplexing is that the Obidients were angry over the money the lawmakers spent on cars and few acts of laxity by some persons in the government, and all of them do not amount to the money at stake in the Elupee scandal. That is, N12 billion and over half a billion dollars. If this is not hypocrisy, I wonder what it is. Obidients have not called for a proper audit of the account, and this was a barn they filled with their own sweat, I suppose. They don’t even want to know who is feeding on the harvest. Charity should begin at home.

  • Bello Turgi’s MRAP ‘capture’

    Bello Turgi’s MRAP ‘capture’

    The viral video by a band of insurgents celebrating the purported capture of Mine Resistant Ambush Protected (MRAP) vehicles of the Nigerian Army in Zamfara State forests has again elevated to the fore, the complex nature of insecurity in the northwest.

    In that video, the terrorists sang songs of victory depicting themselves to have captured the war vehicles in combat with the Nigerian Armed Forces. The well-organised and well-armed insurgents made remarks and proclamations depicting them as a group spurred by some weird doctrinaire.

    They did not stop at their bogus celebrations but went ahead to burn down the two MRAP’s. That outing no doubt, created serious consternation, raising fears of possible upsurge in terrorism in Zamfara State notorious, for what is ordinarily called banditry in official circles. Banditry?  We shall return to this!

    Defence Headquarters (DHQ) was so touched by the video display that they issued a statement debunking some of the impressions created by the insurgents. Their account was that troops had embarked on a fighting patrol to dislodge a terror gathering at Kwashabawa village, Zurmi LGA of Zamfara State. In the process, two of their MRAP’s got bogged down due to the swampy terrain caused by the rains during the fight.

    While trying to extricate the MRAP’s, the DHQ said terrorists massed up. “Subsequently troops dismounted and demobilised the MRAP’s when efforts to backload them proved futile”. The measure they said was to prevent the terrorists from using the war vehicles even as they admitted that “these situations are not uncommon in war”.

    That appears a veiled admission that Nigeria is currently at war with terrorists in that part of the country. The disclosure is significant given attempts by officials of the government to obfuscate the real nature and dynamics of the insurgency in the northwest. Before now, the impression was that the festering insecurity in that part of the country is all about banditry.

    This mix-up was evident in the statement issued by the office of the Minister of State for Defence, Bello Matawalle in reaction to the video claims by the insurgents. Matawalle had while directing the military to relocate its command structure to the northwest, urged them to address the worsening security situation.

    He expressed deep concerns over the activities of terrorists and bandits terrorising Sokoto, Zamfara, Katsina and Kebbi states. While in the region, the minister would be leading the military to ensure that Bello Turji and his gang of bandits are eliminated.

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    As can be gleaned from Matawalle’s statement, terrorism and banditry were used interchangeably to characterise the insecurity in the northwest. But they denote different criminal engagements. And the inability of our leaders to come clear on the nature and wider dynamics of insecurity in that region is largely responsible for the difficulty encountered by our security agencies in taming the monster.

    Though the minister’s account of the circumstances leading to the ‘capture’ of the MRAP’s by the terrorists tallied essentially with that of the DHQ, there are still untidy issues in the encounter. It remains cloudy whether there was some form of intelligence to ascertain the terrain before the military embarked on the fighting patrol to dislodge the terror gathering at Kwashabawa.

    But then, in the account of the DHQ on why they had to demobilize the MRAPs, nothing was said of air support in such dire circumstances except perhaps, that the weather was inclement. This sounds like excuses. It may equally be genuine excuses but it definitely makes a statement on the combat capacities and readiness of our armed forces.

    In circumstances of this nature where the ground forces faced serious risk of mortal attacks, air support would have been the game changer. Even if a helicopter was made to fly over that terrain during those perilous hours, that would have been sufficient to deter the terrorists and save the MRAPs.

    Nothing of such happened. So where were the celebrated Tucano fighter jets acquired from the USA not long ago to fight terrorism? Or was the inability to deploy the fighter jets bogged down by the terms of agreement for the use of the jets restricting them only to the fight against terrorism? If that was the case, then the federal government was caught by the contradiction of its inability to proclaim the festering insecurity in the northwest as terrorism.

    It was not good enough we lost these two key war vehicles to the terrorists in the circumstances we have been told. Equally of note, were references by the DHQ to war. “These situations are not uncommon in war. The ever changing environment of war creates some of these experiences”, the DHQ stated in justification to their decision to demobilise and abandon the MRAPs.

    That may well be. Perhaps, this is the first time the nation is made to know that we are really at war in the northwest. Before now, the story we are fed with has been that of the so-called bandits raiding villages and markets in search of food, kidnapping at will for ransom and committing sundry atrocities.

    It is not clear how and at what point the term banditry crept into our insecurity lexicon or what differentiated it from the well known Boko Haram insurgents whose ideological promptings were identifiable. Somehow, we came to accept the brand of insecurity in the northwest as banditry even as its characterisation remained opaque.

    Fiery Islamic scholar, Sheikh Ahmad Gumi seemingly came to our aid in profiling the bandits after he interfaced with them in the forests. In an interview after the meeting, the bandits’ leaders gave their grievances as cattle rustling, attacks on them by the Nigerian military and the beating of the Fulani on the roads by some indigenous people. These grievances blurred the lines dividing the so-called bandits from herders. It was on this score Gumi called for amnesty for them.

    But that is not the profile of the insurgent group we saw around the MRAPs. It was a well-armed, sophisticated fighting force propelled by some form of ideology against the Nigerian state. My Hausa interpreter said they made references to religious war ‘Jihad’ and protection from the Nigerian state even as they beckoned their colleagues to raze down the MRAPs.

    These are by no means the type of bandits Gumi interfaced with. These are no herders and cannot possibly complain of cattle rustling. They are brave and committed fighters. They are bold enough to show their faces and damn the consequences. So, the DHQ was right to categorise their outing in that part of the country as a situation of war. The sooner we come to terms with this reality, the better for the country.

    Even when some of them surrounded the MRAPs with sophisticated weaponry adorning military camouflage, others kept a good distance in anticipation of possible attack. Who knows the strength and number of others hiding in possible ambush?

    Their conduct had the imprimatur of war. If you found banditry in their activities, it is in furtherance of the war agenda. And if they kidnap for ransom, it is all for the prosecution of the war. Our leaders should stop confusing issues by describing the insurgency in the northwest as banditry. It is terrorism propelled by the same weird ideological prompting that spurred the Boko Haram insurgents into action.

    It is inappropriate to continue profiling Bello Turji as leader of a bandits’ gang. How Turji transmuted into his current powerful status is an interesting one. But it is worthy of note that while Matawalle was the governor of Zamfara State, Turji was a significant face in the so-called banditry enterprise.

    He had before now, been very critical of the previous policy of the Zamfara State government under Matawalle. He had alleged in a video that the policy of the former governor was the reason insecurity escalated in Zamfara and north-western states.

    As governor, Matawalle initiated an amnesty scheme that provided financial rewards and protection for bandits who surrendered their arms and abandoned criminality. But in the widely circulated video, Turji alleged the scheme succeeded in empowering some of his colleagues residing in the cities from where they commanded bandits operating in the forests.

    A Zamfara group – Concerned Citizens for Peace, Security and Development toed similar lines in faulting the amnesty scheme of the previous government. They claimed to have uncovered a strong collaboration between state officials including traditional rulers and security agencies with the bandits. They categorised the peace accord as nothing but a high wired deception to divert attention from the real issues behind the root causes of banditry, its sponsors and enablers.

    These issues have resonated with the linking of Turji and his band of so-called bandits to the ‘capture’ and burning down of the MRAPs. Where do these lead us to?

  • The first kiss

    The first kiss

    Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)’s dilemma about embracing Pitobi is not PDP’s alone. It is also an Obidient quandary. The LP dilemma over PDP merger is not LP’s alone, it is also a PDP’s.  It is the jigsaw puzzle of Nigerian politics. It was created by PDP itself.

    But it is too simplistic to put it that way. We saw it last week when PDP said it was on the cusp of healing itself, and one of its formulas is to bring everyone home, including Kwankwaso and Pitobi. Like Medea in Euripides’s rendition of the Greek tragedy, they are looking at what might have been. Before she slaughtered her two sons, Medea avenged her traitor and power-crazed husband Jason by murdering his new wife and her conniving father, King Creon, who snatched Jason from Medea. Medea looked back at the time of her love with Jason with an unblended alchemy of fury and tenderness. Memory drove her to a witchcraft of envy and murder and regicide.

    PDP spokesperson spoke with sumptuous nostalgia on how they might have trounced Tinubu and his APC if they had come together. Kola Ologbodiyan probably read in his mind the scripture when David eulogized how “good and pleasant for brethren to dwell together in unity.” Only that the precious oil of the election poured on their head did not reach down to Aaron’s beard before it gave them a splitting headache. They were already three persons. This trinity had no unity.

    They are like divorcees with the fantasy of their first kiss. The fantasy is sweet, but the reality is like quinine without the cure. Between the first kiss and divorce, they had blisters and sores, fought bedbugs of cash in the other room, flew dinner plates across the sitting room after equity failed in sharing it, lied to their children about what they shared, kissed lovers across the aisle in furtive hours. They want to cancel all that memory to reenact the hour of the first kiss?

    That is the problem with PDP. The first kiss never comes back, like Chekov’s short story of a woman who had a kiss in the dark in a party and spent all her life wondering about it and who had kissed her. Neither Pitobi nor Kwankwaso’s NNPP are sure they can reenact the bliss of that romantic kiss.

    They hope to return to the first kiss believing that they are like water into water and no one can know their differences anymore. Old things have passed away. Behold all things have become new.

    First, they must stop lying to themselves. One, Pitobi has outgrown who he was when he was a candidate who rebelled against PDP and picked up LP ticket. Since then, he has amassed a big and rambunctious following, and that makes him a force in the political sweepstakes. How formidable that force is today is doubtful. It may have retreated into a rump. But it is still far bigger than Pitobi ever could have been under the umbrella. During the election, PDP lamented the collapse of its unity as stormy Nyesom Wike turned the party upside down. Now, the story is not different. Pitobi did not relent, after building a coalition of faith and tribe in southern and central Nigeria. He hoped he had enough to pull off a win.

    It was an illusion that political Mathematician Babatunde Raji  Fashola(SAN) laid bare as a prophecy. But Kola Ologbodiyan and Professor Pat Utomi goaded their candidates on. Fashola’s Math as prophecy came into reality because, like Oedipus in Sophocles’ play, they did not listen. They saw victory in a cloud. They were afflicted by what literary critic G.D. Killam called “insistent fatality,” in characterizing Okonkwo in Things fall Apart. They saw death and careened into it like a drug.

    Since things fell apart, PDP has been trying to bring everyone home. But it is important for them to know who they are now. Pitobi does not know. He has diluted the religious part of his Obedient movement. The Tinubu administration has allayed fears and quieted ballyhoos about an apocalypse about the Muslim-Muslim ticket, with a cabinet and appointment profile that undermines any allegation of pious bigotry.

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    So, if Pitobi goes to PDP, will he become a deputy to the party’s point man? That will not suit the feminine-voiced Anambrarian. That will, to all intents and purposes, be the Nunc dimittis of the Obedient movement. PDP forgets that the reason the Obedient movement was born was because, one, they wanted a party to fix their dilemma of southern and central Nigerian Christians not voting for a Fulani man and a Yoruba man. They did not want Tinubu, a Yoruba, and did not want the moral cross of voting a Fulani man in a prostitute like Atiku for another possible eight years. For this big chunk of the Obidient cause, Pitobi was not a candidate, or even a person, he was an excuse as a cause. But the excuse has grown into a myth for its core followers, many of whom dumped Kanu as a cultic hero (almost as sacred as Ojukwu) for a more practical one in Pitobi.

    PDP will have a lot of problem blending that crowd into its own party. Again, there were the Endsars component and ill-digested radicals and lawyers who clasped to their bosom the same Pitobi who they had associated with a perverse elite before his born-again LP sojourn. How will they blend? I can hear them echo Apostle Paul, “Come ye from among them and be ye separate.”

    But that makes the Obidient crowd too small to fight alone. Wike is the immediate nemesis of Ologbodiyan’s party. Last week, the FCT minister warned the Bauchi governor and other interloper PDP governors that he has the capacity to undermine peace in their states. For sure, they cannot expel Wike form the party. Unlike Ganduje,who had ward miscues, Wike is still a stalwart of Rivers State PDP. He put the party echelon on notice last week for a reason. He is capable of determining the presidential candidate of the party next election cycle. Remember, but for Tambuwal, he was on the path to victory in the last PDP primary.

    It shows how powerful he can still be. Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed, the hypocrite who called for removal of fuel subsidies in the open during Buhari’s time, suddenly became a critic of its removal because he wants to run for president. The megalomaniac, who responded to this column the last time I ribbed him, has been quiet over Wike’s jibe.

    What it means is that we are back to Fashola’s mathematical prophecy. Their followers are only going to line behind them. And as troubled as the APC may be today, it is more united than its foes, and a house divided against itself must beware of its wobbly legs.

    Before any of them can unite, they must decide who is guilty. For without guilt, there is no reconciliation. The issue with Nigerian political class is that we allow guilt to fester without atonement. If these groups reconcile, there must be penance. Who will do penance if Wike reconciles with Bauchi Governor? Or if Pitobi goes back to PDP? Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote the Oresteia trilogy, the first was about guilt known as Agamemnon, the second about atonement known as The Libation Bearers and the third is about absolution and known as Eumenides. When have we had a major reconciliation in our politics that evokes absolution? I don’t know when. Our politicians don’t reconcile. They embrace like pigs. We keep a narrative of patchworks that turn back to haunt us. Hence, we have parties without philosophies. The people inherit their lies and illusions. Sir Ivor Jennings had Nigerians in mind when he asserted that, “the people cannot decide until somebody decides who are the people.” Pitobi must be wary to make a decision like a merger for the Obidients. He risks losing them. If he joins PDP, he would have decided who his new people are, and they may not be called Obidients.

    So, it is time for them to heed Shakespeare advice, “to thyself be true.” In a satire of class and manners, the great Oscar Wilde penned the play, The Importance of Being Earnest, in which lovestruck men try to change their identities in order to marry two women who only want to marry men named Earnest. In the end, saying truth to themselves matters.

    Nor is identity so easy in politics anywhere. In the age of absolutism in Europe, Catholic France was defending Protestant Netherlands against its Catholic enemies and Catholic Spain and Germany pitched tents with Protestants called the Huguenots in France against the Catholic French king. And Oliver Cromwell, a Protestant who slaughtered many Catholics at home, made alliance with the great Jules Mazarin, French Catholic leader. If you compromise faith, you can compromise anything. We saw Pitobi the other day in the shadows of a mosque.

    The story of PDP and Pitobi’s LP will make a great study in crisis of love and marriage in politics.

    If their first was luscious, the next will be Judas kiss.