The Nation Newspaper

Category: Monday

The salesmen

Wanderers shall never earn. They shift for profit in vain. No matter how shifty their logic, they shall not reap except the foul fruits of their labour. That is the conclusion one can draw from the new coalition between Aso Rock shadow men, LP Candidate Peter Obi and PDP’s Atiku Abubakar. They have shown where their moral mettle lies as Muhammadu Buhari instrumentalises currency policy to oppress the common folk. They have become adjectival warriors of doubtful pedigree as they say what Nigerians are suffering is “little” and “some” inconvenience. They do not the people, or they would side with the people in the face of tyranny. As Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel wrote, “the opposite of love is not hate. It is indifference.” Their indifference, while cynical, is criminal.

If these candidates are dead from the neck up as people riot on the streets, die and pine for food and medicine, their intellectual salesmen are now out and about. Their toga of lawyerly erudition cannot pass muster as logic but as superficial and stinking like a corpse half buried in a shallow grave.

The first salesman is one Chidi Odinkalu who says Buhari did not breach the Supreme Court order by foreclosing the circulation of N500 and N1000 bank notes. According to his ethereal wisdom, currency “cannot be legislated or brought into existence by a court.”

Deploying circuitous syntax and clutching at straws to wriggle out of his self-imposed maze of thought, he wrestles with the idea of status quo antebellum. Hear the young sage: “The question then becomes, what was the status quo antebellum that you are trying to preserve? And this is where the laziness of the judicial system as well as the limitations of law actually come into view, because status quo antebellum actually, was the Central Bank circular on exactly when this thing should stop. I suspect this is the advise (sic) the President got, he has not breached anything.”

Why is Odinkalu quibbling over what status quo ante was when the court specifically said the three bills of N200, 500 and 1000 should circulate ahead of its substantive ruling. He uses the phrase “I suspect” more than once on his view to show he lacks conviction.

Suddenly, he is now wiser than the judicial system, or shall I say intellectually stronger as he cavils at “the laziness of the judicial system.” He is like his new-fangled friend Buhari who is now bigger than the law of the land. Much ego for this season. Maybe they see themselves as elephants. Buhari sees himself an elephant above the law. Odinkalu sees himself as an elephant of the law. They are now making love. The cliché says when two elephants fight, the grass suffers. As Lee kuan Yew asserted, “When two elephants make love, the grass also suffers.” These are rogue elephants swooning together in a distorted halo of sweat, saliva and blood, while the people groan.

When did the Supreme Court legislate about the currency? The matter was brought before them, and it acted according to the constitution by interpreting and giving an order. Is he saying we did not have the currency? Maybe he is in bed with the myth of money in circulation like Emefiele who says we have money in circulation but no one sees it. He circulates ghosts of currency but we are corporeal beings. We are no spirits. We deal in what we can see and touch. We are tactile but not facile. Nobody can say there is money and we cannot see it. Unless Odinkalu wants us to believe that only Buhari and Emefiele can see. We are now blind. According to Odinkalu’s wisdom and his uncles, we the people are living in the republic of novelist Jose Saramago in which the citizens are all blind as narrated in his masterwork, Blindness.

He also takes exception to state governors taking the federal government to court on behalf of the people. Hear the wise fellow again: “I don’t think it is proper for state governors to go around, issue orders countermanding a president on exactly the thing that a central government cannot negotiate – money and currency.” Then he adds, for emphasis: “what the governors are doing in this matter, verges on treason.” Forget his arbitrary use of comas, his argument is like thinker in a coma. Of course, he is entitled to his own coma.

He calls himself a human rights lawyer and had the great misfortune to head a human rights agency, yet an issue that affects the majority of the people’s welfare and right to exist comes up and he bands together with a despot.

This same fellow who has taken exception to Buhari on his issues about human rights is now a strange bedfellow because his presidential candidate is opportunistically paralysed on the lips. He and his candidate have acquired an ominous serenity as people die and rage on the streets. He would even deny governors their rights in a federal system. It is more than state’s rights. It is about the right to life. The right to earn a living. The right to survive. It trumps any other right. Rights are not created equal. The president has no right to deny anyone of their right to life.

Lawyers like him need to go back to school and read their jurisprudence books like Law’s Empire by Ronald Dworkin and also study the roots of the African empathy that enriches our laws.

Laws are made for men and not men for the law. This is not a matter of law alone. It is a matter of human existence. We have to have human beings before we can have laws. We have to have human beings before we have a currency.

So, even as a matter of law, he errs. The right to life is the first principle of law. We cannot have security if all are dead. That is the first principle that this so-called human rights lawyer has turned a blind eye to for partisan gratification.

Again, the governors have a right to defend those who voted for them. That is why they are governors. They did not take laws into their hands. Rather, they went to court, and have challenged.

Odinkalu has suddenly become a feudalist. He says “You cannot be telling a president to yield up his authority over currency systems, that is not negotiable.”

If anyone has committed treason here, it is not the governors. It is his logic that bustles with rebellion against the law. Odinkalu should remove his blinkers before he writes because he and his candidate come from the same heath and bedchamber.

The other fellow is J.B. Dauda, a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association, who justifies the action of the president to defy the law. He argues that each arm of the law can act according to its own light. In order words, he is savaging the Supreme Court for vanity or waste of judicial calories. He asserts: “One arm of government cannot therefore prevent another arm from performing it’s sacred constitutional functions.”

He, a puny mind, is trying to wage war against the tested principle of separation of powers. He is trying to say it is more separate that it is. He wants to make it less sacred by making it more separate. The French thinker Montesquieu gifted us the idea, and it has worked to restrain not only lawmakers but also men with despotic tendency. De Gaulle wanted to bring his military temperament to supersede the society but the law always had its way. He became an instrument in birthing its Fifth Republic.

Dauda is a dubious salesman who cannot sell a sentence from the brain of the French philosopher or else he will get an intellectual life sentence. The concept of separation of power was designed to stop exactly what Buhari has done: To ensure that no president or chief executive acts above the law. By defying the Supreme Court, he thinks he can elevate himself above the law. He cannot be the Superman of this democracy in the lights of the German philosopher, Fredrick Nietzsche. Or the Napoleon that Dostoyevsky muses on in Crime and Punishment. As John Adams wrote: “Power must never be trusted without a check.” Individuals can exercise overreach. Maybe he needs to go back to Nigerian history and look at how Oyo Empire fell and plunged Yorubaland into a long fratricidal bloodbath. It was because the king wanted to defy the lawmakers, the Oyo Mesi, and the system crawled into a self-reckoning of blood and tears and the dislocation of a whole race. Just one man’s hubris or ambition. Hence in the Federalist Papers, James Madison wrote: “Ambition must be made to counteract ambition.”
Dauda was looking for a law to justify a president. Rather, he found tyranny.

It is because of men like Odinkalu and Dauda that, in seeking a society based on the rule of law, we must be wary of falling captive to a rule of lawyers.

February 19, 2023
Public enemies

In the course of this republic, we have fallen under spells of catch phrases, some of them benign, some meretricious and others ominous. But always ferociously funny. They have all entertained, enthralled and terrified. Whether it was a doctrine of necessity, or stomach infrastructure, dibo ko sebe (vote and make a pot of soup), naka sai naka (Your own is your own) or Olule, or even emilokan, the political facility of the Nigerian political society to conjure a term seems infinite.

No one, however, has had such a long shelf life as the word cabal. It is not only enduring here, but around the world, except that they do not wield that phrase from phase to phase. Maybe because those societies, especially in the west, do not calculate with the same level of feline cunning and ferocity as our own cabals do or are imputed to perform.

In western political experience, they sometimes use a less sultry word. During the presidency of Abraham Lincoln, they called the men around the 16th American president the Trust, especially when they wrote an agreement ahead of the elections to cooperate if they lost the next elections so that the civil war plan would not be compromised. That was a good cabal. These days, Republicans have coined a term, the deep state.

We do not use the term without temerity or with uproars of joy. It reels in a furtive, serpentine tunnels. You never utter hello and cabal in the same sentence, except for mordant irony. The word had its origin in arcane Jewish text and it was called Qaballah. Referring to it in her mammoth Nobel Prize-winning novel titled: the Books of Jabob, Olga Tokarczuk paints how its invocation fuels a religious riot and pogrom in the 18th century. But cabal came into limelight, or shall I say lamelight, when five men in the age of the English King Richard II worked out the Treaty of Dover between England and France, and the first letters of the five men’s names spelled CABAL. Their act and combined initials initiated a sacred stain. They profaned the word.

If anything, it shows that cabals tend not to have respect for what is sacred even if that sacred goal is to help humanity. This essay does not always embrace mystics. For instance, Achebe, in his Arrow of God, undermined the gods by privileging material evidence over received opinion. In his review, Soyinka, a man who loved the mystical, lamented Arrow of God’s “dogged secularization of the profoundly mystical.” I thought Soyinka was warm there, if we took away his lament. In his latest novel, Soyinka makes mincemeat of the mystical shysters.

In democracy, though, nothing is more sacred than the popular will, celebrated sometimes to subversion by philosophers like Rousseau and Disraeli. Rousseau’s sanctified bloodshed and tyranny in the French Revolution, and Disraeli’s a cavernous class divide in Britain. Nonetheless, they all applauded the people while the people had no say in the matter.

That is what we are seeing with the shadowy cabal in Nigeria. In what this essayist termed Emilokan and Emilokan 2, I hinted at this cabal before the Kaduna State Governor Nasir El Rufai elucidated. While many are crediting Asiwaju for lifting the veil, the credit goes to Aisha Buhari, who had yelled years ago over some baboons who were “chopping” after the monkeys had perspired. Not her words.

The posse pussyfooting in the dark alleys of Aso Rock is gradually being unveiled. A certain young man said he is not one of them. But we know one of them now. He is the justice minister and attorney general Abubakar Malami. He will not admit it. But we know them by their deed. While many poor cannot feed because they cannot spend the money they earned, the same man went to court to ask for the same money to be kept out of the hands of the common people. That is a violation of the common touch. Gods are not sacred in a democracy, unless through the people’s voices. As they say, the voice of the people is the voice of God. Even when the people make mistakes, God lets it happen to teach the people a lesson, if they want to learn. After the founding fathers finished their meeting to make the United States constitution, the media asked Benjamin Franklin what they produced. “A constitution,” he said, “if you can keep it.” No democracy is given.

But it is not in any man’s place to appropriate the power of God and foist policies on the people. That makes Malami what we might call a public enemy. He is the only one who has exercised the effrontery to negate a popular will.

Jesus said when he was hungry, they gave him food. When he was naked, they clothed him. When without a shelter, they built one. Jesus’ end-time prophecy of deprivation and succour does not apply to men like Malami. He is the one who did not provide. Jesus said if you did that good to any of the poor, you did it to him. Not a Malami. Men like him remind us why we have never had a good attorney general since the dawn of this republic.

The Supreme Court smoked Malami out of the hole like a rabbit in a village square. He did not want to reveal himself. But he did it with the bravado of guilt. He exercised the courage of his own infamy. He freed himself from hypocrisy, in the mould of Satan in John Milton’s Paradise Lost who proclaimed, “All good to me is lost.” Yet, when the APC had its rally in Kebbi, he was the last person anyone would expect to materialise. Indeed, he peacocked in the VIP roll call before a sea of human faces hailing the man he is trying to scuttle.

Maybe he does not count himself a public enemy. The concept was complicated in a famous play by Ibsen, Public Enemy. It is titled in irony. The man regarded in that play as enemy of the people is actually the one who pits himself against a conspiring, thieving elite who want to profit from the people’s misery.

But if Malami is a public enemy, he is not alone. The LP presidential candidate and his PDP co-traveler engaged in adjectival conspiracy by saying that what Nigerians were suffering is ‘some’ and ‘little’ inconvenience, respectively. Inconvenience is not when I am hungry or have no shelter or death stalks me in the hospital. That is agony. Inconvenience is when I have to park my car and walk over three houses instead of one to my destination. This suffering is not about destination, but destiny. Both men either do not understand simple English or they are playing partisan mischief from interiors of tendentious tyranny at the expense of the people whose votes they seek.

The other enemies are a group of faceless political parties who threatened to boycott the election if Buhari reversed the naira policy. They are jobbers who become parties because they want to be part of the party. It was their time to deal. No one will miss them if they boycott. No one even knows them. Ebenezer Obey sang, “Oja Oyingbo ko mo p’enikan owa o – Oyingbo market does not notice anyone’s absence. They should exercise a fundamental right: the right to lose.

Of course, the big enemy is Mefi himself, the CBN chief. He is a man of numbers without a soul. But for most part, he is a marionette. He is obeying the strings from the shadows. The nebulous posse like Malami and Co are pulling the strings and he is obliging like a puny puppet. I pity him. He is reincarnation of June 12 Arthur Nzeribe, except that Arthur had more cunning, and was able to play his masters as much as they played him. Mefi’s is naïve servitude.

Another enemy is closer home. I refer to media gatekeepers who cast headlines and shape stories to play down the suffering of the people because of their contrarian spirit against one man. As I said on TVC Breakfast show last week, it will be interesting how history will tell the story of the role of the media in this political season.

When the late Yar’adua’s health plunged the country in a constitutional turmoil, someone we know asked what did Yar’adua do to his wife that she would not forgive him but allowed him to go through all that ignominy. By the same token, I wonder whatever did Buhari do to this posse of Aso Rock shadow men that they cannot forgive him and are ready to risk some of his solid legacies because of the hatred of one man. This was the man they loved when they wanted power. They now suffer from what Tacitus calls the fear of gratitude. Because they fear one man, the world must suffer. They are no different from Putin who wakes up with a hyena’s happy sneer at the depredation of Ukraine because of his fantasies of ego.

They have tried a number of times. First, they dissolved the APC hierarchy and started what Akpan Udo-Edehe called the search for a consensus candidate. The Akwa Ibom man did not even survive it or the APC. Then they changed the primary rule from open to delegate vote. That also fell into the ditch. They moved on to choreograph the primary for an anointed man. That also failed.

What kind of massage are they applying to the President’s soul that they want to hurt him? I recall V.S. Naipaul’s comic caper, The Mystic Masseur, about a fellow who managed to impress the people he healed all kinds of diseases as a masseur. Or the Leader who is massaged by a woman sent by a group known as Little People in Japanese author Hakuri Murakami’s tome titled 1Q84. It does not end well with the mystical recluse.

Buhari does not deserve his cabal. Neither do Nigerians.

February 13, 2023
Victims of Naira redesign

One election; many challenges

By Emeka Omeihe

The coming general elections seem primed for difficult outcome. It is a very peculiar election not only in terms of the plethora of challenges confronting it but the diverse angles they are emanating from. Even as efforts are made to tackle extant obstacles to its successful conduct, new ones with greater ferocity rear up their ugly heads.

Not unexpectedly, the nature and regularity of these crises situations are beginning to raise questions as to whether there are unseen forces working to scuttle the polls. This is especially so given that the way these forces play out, is bound to have far-reaching repercussions on free, fair and credible elections.

Before now, concerns had largely hinged on the preparedness of the electoral umpire and the sincerity of the government in power to bequeath the country an election that truly conforms to the wishes and aspirations of the electorate as expressed at the ballot box. With the new laws permitting electronic transmission of election results and copious assurances from President Buhari of his commitment to the integrity of the elections, public confidence in the process was largely shored up.

However, concerns shifted to the emerging phenomenon of vote buying especially given experiences from some of the off cycle polls where electronic transmission of votes was experimented. It is in recognition of the prospects of vote buying to impugn the integrity of the polls that the authorities including the law enforcement agencies have been reassuring of their determination to arrest and prosecute those found to engage in these unwholesome activities.

How these promises will actually play out in the face of alleged plans for electronic wiring of money for vote buying during the coming elections is left to be imagined. The banks and the security agencies will be assessed against how able they are to burst the ring that intends to buy votes through wire transfer.

Perhaps, one issue that is yet to be sufficiently addressed is insecurity in many local governments and constituencies across the country. The situation has given rise to genuine fears that elections may not hold in such areas. There have been suggestions even from the electoral body that inability to hold elections in many constituencies on account of heightened insecurity might hamper the declaration of results and precipitate constitutional crisis.

A recent report from CLEEN Foundation; a non-governmental organization involved in the promotion of public safety, security and accessible justice through empirical research and legislative advocacy gave added credence to these fears.

In its ‘2023 Election Security Threat Assessment’, the organization said only two states: Jigawa, Kano and the Federal Capital Territory FCT are presently safe for the conduct of the coming elections. The executive director of the foundation, Gad Peter said 13 states of the country are violence prone while the rest 21 states have pockets of violence in various quarters.

He named the 13 violence prone states as: Sokoto, Kebbi, Niger, Benue, Gombe, Bauchi and Plateau. The rest are Nasarawa, Taraba, Edo, Delta, Akwa Ibom and Abia states. This may look like an exaggerated presentation. But it mirrors very clearly the dire security situation in which the coming elections are going to be held.

Apparently worried by the security situation, the chairman of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), Mahmood Yakubu took up the issue with the National Security Adviser who gave copious assurances that everything is being done to secure those areas for the election to go on unhindered. But that is at the level of promises.

The fact remains that political campaigns are not taking places in many of such violence prone areas and others marred by pockets of violence in various quarters. One would have thought a better test for the assurances by security agencies that elections will hold in those violent prone states should have started with political parties mounting their campaigns there.

If political parties are afraid to campaign in those places during this period, it is a measure of how unsafe they feel going to such areas. Given this situation, it remains inconceivable how INEC officials and agents of the parties will carry on in those places on the day of elections. The security agencies should first, secure those places for political campaign to proceed unhindered as a demonstration that all will go on well on the day of elections.

In the absence of that, we are faced with high prospects of the elections not holding in sufficient constituencies as to impugn the integrity of the entire process. That is the reality on the ground and a serious factor that may act as a disincentive to voters’ turnout in spite of the high number of people registered for the exercise.

The election is also facing a new threat from events following the redesigning of the national currency and the resultant pegging of weekly cash withdrawals by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN). Though the reasons for the currency redesign policy cannot be faulted, its implementation in terms of the timeline for the old currency to go extinct has come with problems of gargantuan dimension.

To complicate matters, the new currency notes are nowhere to be seen even as the extended deadline has expired. This has brought in its wake untold hardship to the already famished and suffering people of the country. It is also a serious threat to the successful conduct of the polls. It is unclear why the new currency notes are not readily available to the public even as the CBN laid the blame on the table of the commercial banks accused of sabotaging the process through hoarding.

Even with glaring lapses in the implementation of the redesign policy, the greatest challenge lies in its undue politicization. It is clear politicians are taking advantage of the hardship created by the shortness of the timeline for the phasing out of the old notes to get even with opponents in a bid to score cheap political points. Ironically, both politicians belonging to the government in power and the opposition have suddenly found the redesign policy a fertile ground for blackmail in order to gain political advantage. This politicization may lead to complications with far-reaching adverse consequences for a national economy assailed by all manner of existential challenges. Accusations have been so freely traded that one begins to wonder whether those in their vanguard really understand all the ramifications to them.

Some air of complication further crept in when the Supreme Court granted an interim injunction barring the federal government and the CBN from sticking to the February 10, deadline for the phasing out of the old currency. As at the time this article was being concluded last Friday afternoon, the CBN was yet to issue any guideline on its position on the court order. That left the commercial banks somewhat confused as to the next line of action. This air of uncertainty is definitely not good for the health of the national economy.

Matters were not made any easier by divergent opinions as to whether the CBN should obey the court order having not been joined as a party to the suit. The confusion this state of affairs created may not peter out so soon. It has the frightening prospects of defeating whatever gains that informed the currency redesign policy in the first instance.

It is unclear whether the temporary extension through injunction will now compel the CBN to begin to re-circulate the old notes withdrawn from the system; some of which may have even destroyed. And what will be its consequence on the imperative to control the currency in circulation and check hoarding of the Naira banknotes outside the banking system and other ennobling goals of the currency redesign policy?

The injunction did not address the limits on weekly cash withdrawals – a key component of the currency redesign and cashless policy of the CBN. It is doubtful if the apex court can dabble into such issues without throwing the entire economy into unmitigated crisis.

The situation calls for utmost caution. Isolated riots have been reported in some states against the hardship imposed by the currency redesign policy, the scarcity and escalating price of petrol. Things could get worse for the elections that are a few days away, if partisan politics is not exorcized from the Naira swap policy, the scarcity and high price of petrol.

February 13, 2023
Victims of Naira redesign

Jane Unachukwu (not real names) was in need of some cash to buy food items for the family. She approached a usual Point of Sales POS centre around her vicinity before the January 31 deadline for the phasing out of the old currency.

She told the sales lady she wanted to withdraw N20,000 and the following conversations ensued.

Sales lady: I will exchange the N20,000 new notes for N18,000.

Mrs. Unachukwu: what do you mean?

Sales lady: if you want me to pay you with the new Naira notes, you will get N18,000. N2,000 is my commission.

Mrs. Unachukwu: So you mean I will lose N2,000 when I withdraw N20,000.

Yes madam, the sales lady answered.

At that point, Mrs. Unachukwu lost her temper. “You are very wicked. You want me to lose N2, 000 for withdrawing N20,000. How do you think I get my money? Just tell me the justification for this inhumanity. You are the people who easily blame the government for every ill in the society; is it the government that is asking you to demand such an outrageous commission from me? Why do you people exploit situations to fleece the ordinary people, she queried.

The sales lady tried to explain that it was not their fault but Mrs. Unachukwu would not listen to her explanation as she walked away in anger. That evening, she went back home without making any purchases for the family as she could not reconcile how she would lose that chunk of her hard earned income in one fell swoop.

A Lagos-based journalist also shared his experience in one of the social media platforms. He said he paid a hundred Naira for each N1,000 he was paid by the POS agent. For the N5, 000 he received, he parted with N500 even as he was given three pieces of the new Naira notes and two pieces of the old ones. He described the bargain as the best he could get as he had no choice than to accept it.

To compound his problems, the Automatic Teller Machines (ATMs) in the banks were not dispensing cash while the mobile transfer Apps for the two banks he uses were not working. All these forced him to sacrifice N500 just to get N5,000.

The accounts of the Lagos-based journalist and Mrs. Unachukwu mirror very vividly the excruciating experiences of most citizens of this country especially in the last week leading to the January 31 deadline for the phasing out of the old currency and since its extension to February 10.

As the initial deadline drew closer, those with the old notes rushed to deposit them in the banks so as not to lose money. But as they deposited the old notes that had sustained life in the absence of the new Naira notes, the CBN announced an extension of the deadline. With the old notes virtually out of circulation in the face of acute scarcity of the new notes, things became chaotic.

Neither the new notes nor the old ones were any longer available to the public. With the scarcity of the currency, all sorts of untoward practices had a field day resulting in mindless exploitation of citizens as epitomized by the two cases under reference.

Businesses and other commercial activities were virtually paralyzed by the worsening scarcity of the old and new Naira notes. But by far small businesses were the most affected by the scarcity of the currency as many of them did not have the luxury of the facilities for the cashless economy that forms an integral part of the Naira redesign policy.

The hopelessness of the situation was dramatized by a man and a woman who were said to have gone half naked inside the banking halls of some commercial banks in Lagos in protect against the hardship. Why was it not possible for the government to go about this exercise seamlessly? Must the citizens be made to undergo such excruciating hardship just because we are redesigning our national currency? What signals are we sending out when we have to pay more to access our local currency? These are some of the puzzles thrown up by the disorganized implementation of the Naira redesign and cashless policy.

While launching the new naira banknotes, President Buhari had said the aim is to help the CBN design and implement better monetary policy objectives as well as enrich the collective memory of Nigeria’s heritage. “There was an urgent need to take control of currency in circulation and address the hoarding of the Naira banknotes outside the banking system, the shortage of clean and fit banknotes in circulation and the increase in counterfeiting of high denominations of Naira banknotes”, Buhari explained.

Emefiele offered the same reasons but gave further insight that 80 per cent of the country’s currency was outside the vaults of the commercial banks. So the objective is largely to check the hoarding of the currency by reducing the amount outside the vaults of the commercial banks.

To what extent can we sustain the contention that the current currency redesign has effectively checked hoarding given the facts on the ground? And how can that be with the latest explanation by Emefiele that depositing of the old notes will continue to be accepted by banks after the extension has lapsed? If the CBN furnishes details of the amount of new currencies it pushed into the commercial banks since the exercise began, the picture of the effect of redesign exercise on currency hoarding would become clearer.

Even without the benefit of such data, it is evident that the new currency made available to the commercial banks to dispense to the public found themselves in wrong hands. That should be obvious from the inability of the banks to pay the new notes even after the extension of the deadline. It is also obvious from statements from the apex bank.

The CBN, working with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offences Commission (ICPC), has arrested some bank managers in connection with hoarding the new Naira notes instead of utilizing them through the proper channel. That says it all. The apex bank also disclosed that they are looking for other third parties selling new Naira notes instead of putting them into the ATMs for people to access them.

In effect, the implementation of the Naira redesign policy failed in part in its objective of checking hoarding. That is evident from the attestations of the CBN and the failure of the new currency to get to the public weeks after its launch. So what happened? Why is the CBN waking up from its slumber after the harm has been done? Why did it not supervise and monitor the commercial banks even with copious public complaints on the unavailability of the new currencies?

Apart from the scarcity of the new currencies, the woes of the ordinary people were compounded by the withdrawal limits set by the CBN consequent upon its cashless policy. It would appear the CBN overestimated the available technological infrastructure for the effective operation of its cashless policy. This miscalculation turned out the undoing of the naira redesign exercise.

The reality is that many citizens do not have any access to facilities that will enable them take advantage of the cashless policy. Ours is still largely a cash economy with many of our people living in subsistence. There are many articles of trade especially in the food industry that have to be paid for in cash because their sellers do not even have bank accounts. Additionally, many local government areas across the country do not have a single bank branch.

That is the subsisting situation and any cashless policy that fails to factor in this segment of the population is bound to hit the rocks. It makes better sense for our monetary policy makers to factor in these variables and set realistic timelines for the implementation of the cashless policy. The Naira redesign has ample justification. But its implementation which bought more hardship to the already suffering people of the country left much to be desired.

February 6, 2023
An era of ghosts

Violence has acquired a new meaning in this election season. The old menu is passing away: Ballot snatching, bullies, glitters of knives and machetes dripping blood, barehanded goons, gunmen on rampage, bone-mangled streets, subdued alleys, cars and homes in ruin, innocents on the run. From sanguinary to the sanguine.

Technology is upstaging all that theatre, if we do not reckon with IPOB’s daredevil daring. We now are enshrining the sort of violence that Festus Iyayi lamented in his novel. A violence without the blood. No thanks to Godwin Emefiele and the men who crest Nigeria’s hierarchy of oil.

It is our perversion of genius. We have always known how to reinvent our stories. Gunmen out. Conmen in. The con is happening in our body politic. This essayist wept over the new invisibilities of cash and fuel. They told us they have enough fuel for all. We cannot see it. But only those atop the hierarchy of oil can see it. We have become blind men walking. Emefiele says he has enough cash in circulation. We cannot see them. ATM machines cannot see them. The bank clerks and CEOs cannot see them. Only Emefiele and his men can see them. We are also blind. We are doubly blind.

That, it turns out, is only one level of a ghostly era, a ghastly error. Fuel is called motor spirit. We have fulfilled the name. It has become a spirit. As Jesus told his apostles, “A spirit has no blood, bone or flesh as you see me have.” In his play Julius Caesar, Shakespeare said, “In the spirit of men, there is no blood.” Fuel is the blood of the car engine. When it loses its blood, the car’s spirit vanishes. It is dead. The same is happening in the world of money. Without money, what can we do in a modern economy? The scriptures say money answers all things. Now money hampers all things.

That is not the only spirit of the age, our version of the word zeitgeist. Asiwaju Bola Tinubu drew our attention to another dimension of ghosts. There are two types of ghosts: corporeal or embodied ghosts and disembodied ghosts in this political reason. Ghosts are wholly spirits. When Tinubu said it, it ignited a pushback from some who thought he was clutching at straws. He said there were some people who did not want him to win the election, and last week this column was the first to make the point that some people did not win the APC primaries and their sponsored candidates were still wallowing in their shellacking. The wanted to be spanner in the works. I concluded with a Shakespeare quote that it is easier to play with a lion’s whelp than with an old lion. Not long after, Governor Nasir El-Rufai confirmed it. He made some revelations first with Okinbaloye at Channels and elaborated on it in his interview with TVC’s Journalists hangout. Journalists like us do not say everything we know. When Dele Giwa wrote this, I wondered, as a student, at his restraint. Not so now. El-Rufai, for his revelations, is still restrained. He did not mention names. He did not cite episodes. But he revealed that in the combustion of the primary run, some villa tenants encouraged northern governors to muddy the waters by buying forms.

These are the corporeal ghosts in Aso Rock. The ones that, as Shakespeare alluded to in Hamlet, “are doomed for a certain term to walk the night.” They are the night marauders of APC, the nightmares of democracy, the wizards and spoilers of presidential ambition. Tinubu added a new spectre to the plot. He alleged that they so hate his prospect to be president that they are contemplating the Samson option. They want to pull down this democracy and pave the way for an interim national government. They have wet dreams of a new Shonekan. In words of Poet Leopold Senghor, all their “dreams made dust.”

They are also making ghosts of Tinubu. Anywhere he goes, anything he says gives them the creeps. They failed to kill his ambition. They even wanted him to die of illness. But he is the most travelled presidential candidate, lapping up miles on road and in the air. They have made Tinubu into Banquo’s ghost haunting them like Banquo did Macbeth. They are screaming, “avaunt and quit my sight. Let the earth hide thee. Thy bone is marrowless and thy blood is cold.” They are appalled that Tinubu’s blood is still warm and he will not quit their sight. He whispers them awake in their sleep and pinches their buttocks at their seats. Hence, they want, in the language of the Bible, money to fail in the land.

Another man chasing ghosts is Atiku Abubakar. He said he was in talks to ally with NNPP and Labour Party. Obi said, no dice. Kwankwanso said, “na lie.” He was speaking with ghosts of both parties.

But he is in cahoots with the presidency and the CBN governor by his own Freudian confession last week. He said the CBN and presidency should remain steadfast and not postpone the deadline for the currency change. He describes what we are going through as “little inconvenience.” Why did he say “presidency” and not president. This confirms what El-Rufai has said. Some folks in the villa want Atiku as revenge for their disaster at the APC primary. The Kaduna State governor said these fellows have never even won a local government election.

Atiku has been wishy-washy on the currency crisis. He wanted it before he did not want it. After I poked fun at him last week for following Tinubu’s path, he exercised a pirouette. He now says we can ignore the people’s suffering. Did he see the naked woman at a bank, the fellow who slumped and died on a queue in Asaba, the fellows who cannot get money to buy fuel, who cannot feed. That is little inconvenience from his lofty tower in Dubai. He is seeing the wrong ghosts of the people. It was the same wishy-washy way he condemned the killing of a Sokoto girl before he regretted it. The same way he wanted to be a PDP member before he spat it out before he came back to his vomit. It is politics as whoredom.

The cash problem continues, and Emefiele – his friends call him Mefi – has shown he does not understand the full meaning of finance. He understands the mechanics of it. He needs to read economic anthropologists like Karl Polanyi and Abraham Rotstein to get the grip of the intercourse between economics and society. Finance is not for finance’s sake. This cash policy just exposed him. The Kaduna State governor said one local government in Kaduna State is as vast as Anambra State, and it has only one bank. Only two local governments have banks in Borno. Did he factor this in? I recall making this point when he introduced this policy in November, and warned that it could lead us to this treacherous pass. Here we are. Here is what this essayist wrote on November 7 in In Touch:

“Also, as markers of the conflict of economics and society, dislocations are coming from climate change and flood as well as the insecurity and fear of movement. With flood affecting 22 states of the federation, many people are out of the loop of the so-called modern economy with its financial institutions. How will those cooking Kosei in Jigawa or Ogbono soup in Bayelsa access banks wiped out of contention by the unthinking might of a flood? Or an ancient town like Lokoja. With the fear of bandits in the shadows of northern bushes, how are the men and women who own fifty thousand naira as life savings, or even less, going to trust the streets between their homes and their banks? How sure is the trader with N20 million in the Southeast that the local militias will not mark him out on his way to his bank?” It shows Mefi does not understand the geography of finance, let alone its cultural nuance. He needs a crash course for we are on a crash course.

I wrote further: “Mefi is trying to conjure a miracle without being a god. He is a prophet without the gift of prophecy.” We are witnessing his fate as a prophet. No one has faith in him. Riots have broken out.

The so-called money swap is aiming at politicians. What a pity. They forget that the upper crust can circumvent it. But the ordinary citizen lacks any facility for manoeuver. The upper class has oppressed the common folk as a routine. Now, Mefi and his cohorts have installed a new layer of class tyranny. They are the ones suffering it more. Hence, Atiku calls it little inconvenience. It’s like the Bible’s picture of an economic apocalypse:

“As with the people, so with the priest:

As with the servant, so with his master;

As with the maid, so with her mistress;

As with the buyer, so with the seller;

As with the lender, so with the borrower;

As with the creditor, so with the debtor.”

As cerebral Kayode Komolafe of ThisDay – alias KK- noted, it is not the constitutional job of the CBN to monitor election spending. Leave that to INEC and EFCC. He is playing electoral busybody. His own job he cannot do. He is doing another’s.

And Atiku says it is little inconvenience. Mefi’s ghost of cash and the oil hierarchy’s ghost of fuel are not holy. They are unwholesome ghosts. All we want is to make our nation whole again.

February 6, 2023
Adeleke’s exit dance

When the dancing fellow was announced governor of Osun State, some fellows went viral online asking Sam Omatseye to apologise for lampooning Adeleke. Well, there was no point for that. I cannot apologise for berating a man who boasted that he was going to buy the voters with pounds, dollars, Euros et al. I was not going to say sorry to a man whose ungainly waist was going to turn state affairs into an alawada gig. Well, technology has had its final dance. It is a tribunal decision, of course. But it was less a human verdict than a magisterial sway of technology over human cunning and artifice. There were many ghosts in the elections. Machines do not see ghosts. So, they were winnowed away. To parody scriptures, the machines removed those things that are shaken so that those that cannot be shaken can remain. Ghosts of fake voters and thumb prints were removed. Ademola Adeleke was relying on ghosts. In the words of Job, he leaned on a house, but it did not stand. So, I might have said they should apologise to me. But no matter. I don’t trade in remorse. Gboyega Oyetola, the authentic owner of the oruka, is waiting in the wings for what the people have bestowed on him. Meanwhile, Adeleke should start rehearsing his exit dance.

February 6, 2023
Emilokan 2

Before I put finger to keyboard, Godwin Emefiele – known to his friends as Mefi – ate his words. How it must have hurt his ego. Ouch! Or did he shout Yee!!!

Some of us knew he would buckle before he would buckle up. He kept all on tenterhooks. But we knew it was coming. No one is congratulating him because he did no one any favours by that. The poet Robert Burns said, “suspense is worse than disappointment.” We are not going to thank him for the miseries.

To reflect the discordant notes – no pun intended – of his CBN, my cell phone flashed with a text message from Mefi’s financial temple. The message read: “Don’t wait till January 31, 2023, to deposit your old N200, N500, and N1,000 banknotes with your bank and agents.” This was out of touch with the news that he had given Nigerians up to Feb 10 to deposit old bills. CBN news divided against itself? Was it latency in his system. His CBN is too late for its late news.

It was a miserly one-week concession. But the man did not address the fundamental question. How is he going to avail us of the new notes? The news occludes the fact that the problem is the man at the apex bank and not the people. Or shall we say, he knows he is the problem or one of the coterie of men oppressing the people. He knows he is just playing a foolhardy spoiler.

When APC presidential flagbearer Bola Tinubu sounded the alarm in Lisabi’s lair, his foes resorted to their adversarial impulse to attack him, including Atiku Abubakar. Then he, too, learned from his master and lined behind him. The CBN, he said, ought to rethink. I would have said he was changing his mind in tandem with the words of George Bernard Shaw that “Those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.” Atiku changed his mind to endorse Tinubu’s Abeokuta speech because he had no choice. His opponent was thinking for him. A tear for him.

I used the phrase Lisabi’s Lair to refer to the Abeokuta warrior who liberated Egbaland from an imperial tyranny. So, when Tinubu stood twice in Egbaland in Emilokan One and Emilokan Two, he was standing on the eponymous shoulders of an Egba war chief who would not yield to a suffocating despot. Every March, the Egba celebrate the 19th century farmer who tuned his ploughshares into a sword. Tinubu was bellowing from his martial shadows.

So, Mefi’s action to put off CBN’s deadline was at once a vindication of Tinubu’s outcry and silencing of those who thought he was paranoid. If he was paranoid, Mefi has put paid to it. We all are in the dread-lock of Mefi’s policy. He has to make the new notes available. He should liberate them from the owambe parties where the new notes have become new commodities fueling inflation. Rather than introduce new currency, he has turned the currency into new products. The new products have brought a new cartel of corrupt bankers. They have induced scarcity, and therefore enacted courtiers of new naira. We can call it the cult of Mefi’s new naira notes. Only the initiated can get them.

Is that not what Tinubu implied? Mefi says the new notes are plenty in circulation. The people are not seeing them. The banks are not confessing to their possession. The same story with fuel scarcity in the country. The hierarchy of Nigerian oil says there is no fuel scarcity. But the people are suffering in long lines all day and night waiting for fuel. We are fulfilling two classics of literature. Samuel Beckett’s Waiting For Godot, where everyone is expecting Mister Godot, and no one is seeing him. Or Samuel Coleridge’s Poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner with the line, “water, water everywhere but not a drop to drink.” In the case of the ancient mariner, they saw the water, the sea. They just could not drink it. Here, the cash is invisible and the fuel is invisible. But they are everywhere.

The people must be blind. NNPC alone has the eyes to see the fuel. Mefi and his bank alone have the eyes to see the new notes. We all need to beg both Kyari and Mefi to give us what Apostle Paul calls the eyes of understanding, so we can see both fuel and new notes. We are like the citizens in Jose Saramago’s novel titled: Blindness where all the citizens in the city are turned into blind people. Some are more blind than others. A new set of powerful people rise out of it to tyrannise the majority.

If we have fuel and car tanks pine, do we blame the fuel or the people who should supply? If we have notes and the people cannot spend them, do we blame the people or the officials who should supply? If correction lies in the hand that committed wrong, to who shall we complain?

That is Tinubu’s point. And professor Itse Sagay echoed the same ideas. It reflects a deliberate immiseration of the people. Tinubu says a set of people with the government he called saboteurs are working with opposing politicians to cast the ruling party in bad light for electoral sabotage. Suddenly, they started saying he blamed the president. He has come to clarify, without diluting his charge, that he was not referring to the president who only a few days earlier had called him Mister President, and he responded Yes sir.

A shadowy group can frustrate a leader within a government. They call them fifth columnists. The word derives from the lips of General Emilio Malo, a leader of the republicans who wanted to overthrow Francisco Franco’s ultra-conservatives in Spain in 1936. General Malo was leading a four-column army during the Spanish Civil War into Madrid and quipped that sympathisers within Madrid would furnish a fifth column to rout the city. His prediction foundered and Franco led the country until the 1970s. Hence, Tinubu vowed that the fifth columnists would fail. He came short of re-invoking the ‘Olule’ term this time.

We have seen in the life of the Buhari administrations that some groups have undermined their leader. Recently, the DSS was trailing Mefi while the president was praising him. They didn’t brief their commander in chief, apparently. We can recall the same thing with EFCC’s Magu.

Those who Tinubu beat at the primaries are still nursing an old wound. But let us remember Shakespeare’s words: “It is better to play with a lion’s cub than an old one.”

January 30, 2023
Sanwo-Olu’s week

I read a piece by a certain Lade Bonuola. Not many know him, but in the journalism world, he is a familiar figure. Known more for his technical gifts than imagination, Bonuola once edited The Guardian. His claim to fame is less his guardianship of a newspaper. He also had The Comet whose travel lasted like its name. He is best remembered for his job as ombudsman for the Daily Times in a column known as Caught Out By LadBone. The legendary Dele Giwa had to draw his readers attention to the creative failings of his column. Bonuola came out of hiding recently to try to retell the story of Lagos. He implied what Jakande made modern Lagos. Men like LadBone need to study what scholars call historiography. He will learn how to handle historical material and put events in context. He implied Tinubu did nothing new. For instance, he referred to the trains. He referred to the opening of Lekki. He referred to sanitation day. He went on and on. So, when Buhari and the BOS of Lagos, Babajide Sanwo-Olu were launching the Blue Line last week, was it Jakande’s train? Would we not have had to modernize the rails with digital bells and whistles as we see the governor of Lagos do? Did Jakande have the plan for a refinery in the Lekki Corridor, the Free Trade Zone, the panoply of Estates, the Deep Sea Port? Jakande launched a road. Rinubu opened an express to Lekki. Jakande was opening a road to Lekki but Tinubu was launching a new city. If Jakande revolutionised Housing, can you recommend those flats for a 21st century citizen? The problem with men like LadBone is that malice sometimes overtakes their sense of perspective. Jakande was great for his time. For all that, what was Lagos like in 1999? If he cleaned the city, do we blame him for the pile of dirt in the city at the turn of the century? If we should not blame him, then we must acknowledge the man who reimagined and rescued the place. But Tinubu has not tried to undermine Lateef Jakande, but to modernise. That is why Tinubu is refered to as the visioner of modern Lagos. We don’t undermine the present in order to glorify the past as Bonuola has done.

If in journalism he did not show much imagination, are we surprised Bonuola lacks it in appreciation of history. We often say the young need to understand our past. Obviously, LadBone, who was an editor when I was in school, is not a young man. He failed to sully Sanwo-Olu’s shine.

January 30, 2023
New naira chaos

It is thought-provoking that the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, is in denial about the problematic deadline for old naira notes. Redesigned N200, N500 and N1000 notes introduced last December are replacing old notes that, according to the CBN’s schedule, would cease to be regarded as legal tender after January 31.

But on the eve of the day, there is strong evidence that the implementation has been untidy. After the apex bank announced its plan to change naira notes, it should have taken steps to ensure a smooth implementation. The evidence does not show that it was sufficiently prepared for the change. It can be said that the naira change was hastily introduced, and the apex bank should have known that it is better to make haste slowly.

The scale of the problem attracted the attention of the National Assembly. Emefiele’s failure to cooperate with federal legislators on the issue has not helped matters. He apparently shunned two invitations from an ad-hoc committee of the House of Representatives set up to look into the reported scarcity of the new naira notes.

Speaker of the House of Representatives Femi Gbajabiamila said “the summons of CBN was simply based on a motion to clarify a gap and to know where the problem is. Whereas on one hand, bankers are saying that they don’t have sufficient new notes to dispense, on the other hand, the regulator, the CBN is saying that they do have enough notes to dispense. How can we get these monies to the public?”

The question demands an answer. Gbajabiamila said the legislators “will invoke the provision of Section 89 to compel the presence of the CBN governor.”

It is unclear why Emefiele is apparently uncooperative. The posture is bad for his image. There is no doubt that the new naira notes are in short supply, and many Nigerians are affected by the shortage. This cannot be the CBN’s intention. Or is it?

The president of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Ayuba Wabba, observed that “Right now, our commercial banks are culpable of inflicting hardship on Nigerians, go to the ATM points and you will see what is happening. Most of them are not even dispensing. You see many queues.”

The situation has generated calls for an extension of the deadline from several quarters, including the NLC, the National Assembly, the Governors Forum, the Bank Customers Association of Nigeria and the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA).

Curiously, just about three days after the introduction of redesigned naira notes on December 15, a report published in Sunday Tribune said “at a party in Ibadan, Oyo State… a woman was seen freely hawking the newly redesigned wads of N200 bank notes.” The newspaper also said it could “authoritatively report that large wads of the new notes have saturated party venues with hawkers charging N200 on N1,000.”

This happened amid complaints “that several bank branches had run out of the small quantities of the newly redesigned naira notes allocated to them from their head offices…” the newspaper said. It was puzzling that currency hawkers had the new notes in abundance when several bank branches had allegedly run out of the notes soon after they were introduced.

There are indications that the banking authorities failed to address this anomaly. The News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), last week, reported that “some persons have been seen hawking the new notes at Dadi Motor Park, Sabon Gari-Zaria, Kaduna State, at exorbitant prices.”

One Thomas Damina, for instance, was reported saying he bought a wad of the new banknotes, N20,000 for N25, 000. He needed to pay farm workers, he explained, and had “no option than to buy from cash hawkers” because people in his community were “rejecting the old notes” and the new money was “not available at the banks.”

According to the report, trading in naira notes is in contravention of Section 21 of the CBN Act, 2007, which is punishable under Section 21 Subsection 4 of the Act. But the report said buying and selling of the new naira notes went on freely close to the police station at Kwangila, Sabon Gari-Zaria.

Where do the currency sellers get the new notes from, amid the reported scarcity? Who are those supplying the sellers with the notes? Why is it easy for them to get the notes? Why is it difficult for the authorities to deal with the situation?

The CBN had said the naira was redesigned in order to control the currency in circulation, manage inflation and tackle counterfeiting. Emefiele had also said “the CBN is convinced that the incidents of terrorism and kidnapping would be minimised as access to the large volume of money outside the banking system used as source of funds for ransom payments will begin to dry up.” It remains to be seen whether redesigning the naira will achieve these aims.

Why has the CBN refused to review the deadline despite widespread reports of scarcity of the new notes and the consequent social difficulties? This refusal to adjust to the reality of the situation is unrealistic and unreasonable. Indeed, it can be said that the apex bank’s rigid position on the deadline amounts to defiance of the Nigerian public.

Currency change should not cause chaos. But the introduction of the new naira evidently brought avoidable confusion. There is no doubt that the CBN needs to get its act together. Why the rush to do it within one and a half months? What is to be gained by sticking to that schedule? What is to be lost by reviewing the schedule?

It is a cause for concern that the Governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje, wrote President Muhammadu Buhari, asking him to postpone his visit to the state, “for security reasons,” following complaints by Kano residents who are feeling the pain of the scarcity of the new naira notes.

This is perhaps the ultimate sign that there is a need for presidential intervention. If Emefiele is inflexible, Buhari has the power to make him follow the path of reason and extend the deadline reasonably. He should use his power wisely.

This piece was written before the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), on January 29, announced a 10-day extension of the deadline from January 31 to February 10.

January 30, 2023
Perilous signals

With less than one month to the general elections, events are beginning to create doubts as to whether its overall outcome will satisfy the irreducible decimal of free, fair and credible process.

Events are taking place in very quick succession in several fronts to suggest that unless very prompt and decisive measures are taken to check the obstructive tendencies of these challenges, the coming elections may after all, be in for very difficult times.

The challenges are evident in almost all facets of our national life. They are perceptible from recurring events in the polity, the economy and other spheres of our national endeavour. Sadly, their combined effects are exerting so much pressure on the citizenry to nurse genuine fears as to the direction the ship of this country is currently sailing irrespective of the promises the elections hold for their future.

Not unexpectedly, doubts are now being raised as to whether the elections will really hold in the face of this pervading air of fear and uncertainty. Even optimists on the future the elections hold for the country, are not left out of the doubt as to the kind of progress a new leadership can possibly make in the face of lingering systemic hiccups.

Are we laying landmines to encumber the new regime from taking off effectively or will these challenges just disappear as soon as the elections are lost and won? Is there anything to give the comfort of mind that the new leadership has the magic wand to resolve these challenges overnight? What will be their overall effect for a new regime battling to settle down for governance? These are some of the nagging questions and the way they are resolved will point the direction as to what to expect after the elections.

Perhaps, answers to these will emerge after identifying the plethora of challenges currently pushing the nation on edge a few weeks to the general elections. Insecurity! This has been with us for some time now. The country is assailed by all manner of security challenges that have stretched the capacities of the security agencies to elastic limits.

There is the Boko Haram and Islamic State West Africa ISWAP insurgency in the northeast and elsewhere which the current regime claims to have substantially diminished in terms of their capacity for evil. There is banditry together with its devious manifestations in sundry criminalities. We are also home to self-determination agitations in the southeast and southwest with the former taking violent coloration.

That is not all. There are security challenges arising from the activities of herdsmen across the country as well as other threats to the authority of the state. As the elections draw nearer, the expectation is that our security agencies should have substantially diminished their obstructive proclivities to enable voting go on unhindered. But that does not seem to have happened despite official claims to the contrary.

The security situation has rather become very problematic as the elections draw nearer. There are many localities and constituencies with such volatile security situations that campaigns for elections are not taking place in those areas. If political parties are afraid to campaign in such districts for fear of the unknown, it is difficult to fathom how election officials will convey materials to such areas on the day of election.

That was the fear rightly raised by the INEC recently when its chairman, Board of Electoral Institute, Abdullahi Zuru said if insecurity is not monitored and dealt with decisively, it could ultimately culminate in the cancellation and or postponement of elections in sufficient constituencies to hinder the declaration of election results and possibly precipitate constitutional crisis. This fear is very real and has been heightened by emerging events.

It is evident from mounting attacks on the campaign trains of political parties across the country. It is also manifest in some of the killings and attacks that bear the tinge of politics and religion. These have further raised fears as to what to come during the elections proper.

Even as the INEC is basking on the euphoria of the high number of people registered for the coming polls, this number may count for little if the pervading fear of insecurity persists. The electorate may be scared from coming out to vote unless they get adequate guarantee that they will not get into harms’ way if they venture to vote. Matters are not remedied by reports from some parts of the country of subtle attempts to intimidate voters, warning them no to venture out on the day of elections.

The identity of those scarring potential voters from taking part in the coming elections is not clear. Neither is their objective. But whatever they are, they are injurious to free, fair and credible elections. How the government responds to these threats in the days ahead remains a matter of guesswork.

But the way such threats are handled will largely influence voting outcome. It is usual for the government to deploy security agencies during elections to maintain the peace. In the past when the country did not face debilitating security challenges as we have today, such deployments were scarcely enough for the tasks at hand. The situation will be more daunting in an environment dogged by an assortment of security infractions.

The government has to buckle up to this reality. All the efforts to guarantee the success of the elections may come to naught if nothing substantial is done to douse the mounting tension arising from the pervading air of insecurity across the country. The tension is palpable and requires urgent measures by the government to reassure the voters of their safety now and during the polls.

There are also challenges to the elections emanating from the interplay of forces in the economic front. The country is currently facing biting scarcity of fuel that has hiked transport fares in the face of escalating prices of goods and services. This has rendered life a miserable lot for a majority of the citizens. The product now sells for about N400 per litre in many parts of the country while the government has just adjusted the official selling price from N165 to N185 thus raising more fears that the selling price of the commodity will further escalate.

Varying reasons have been given for the scandalous selling price of petrol in the last couple of months among them hoarding. Matters got to a head last week when the presidential candidate of the All Progressives Congress APC, Bola Tinubu attributed the high price of petrol consequent upon its scarcity to an attempt to sabotage the coming elections.

That is damn serious especially given the high level of movement required during elections. What remains unclear however is which political parties stand to take advantage of such shortages during elections. Whatever the case, the persisting scarcity of petrol and the subsequent escalation of its price will have very adverse effects on movements before, during and after the polls.

It is vital that the government takes urgent steps to ensure the availability of the product not only to eliminate potential impediments to the elections but above all, to save Nigerians the untold hardship they now face on account of the high price of the product. With the unenviable record of the country as the poverty capital of the world, the escalating price of petrol will further push many more citizens down the poverty ladder. We shudder at such prospects.

The living conditions of the people are not helped by events following the redesign of the currency by the Central Bank of Nigeria. The handling and implementation of the redesign policy has left much to be desired. The new Naira notes are nowhere to be seen barely three days to the expiration of the deadline for the use of old notes.

The government must take urgent steps to stabilize the economy, check the rising challenges to the authority of the state by non-state actors and sundry criminals. otherwise, Zuru’s warning may turn out a self-fulfilling prophecy.

January 30, 2023