The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Coalitions, mergers and defections: It’s all politics

    Coalitions, mergers and defections: It’s all politics

    The next Nigerian general election is less than two years away. Barring any shifts or cancellations, Nigerians are expected to go to the polls by February 2027 to elect a president, governors in majority of the states (post-election litigations had altered some state governors’ elections to off-season) and state and federal legislators. The political environment is hitting up giving vent to the cliché saying that, “politicians always  think of the next elections”.

    The Nigerian democracy is fashioned after the American model (but I dare say to the extent that the politicians in Nigeria find very expedient). The Nigerian political party system allows for dozens of political parties. The American political party system is clearly a two party system even if there are the less popular smaller parties that have not made great inroads electorally.

    The two popular parties, the Republican and Democratic parties are deeply ideologically based. Despite their marked differences, they often agree on some national policies when it is in the interest of the American people. Even though policy routes might differ sometimes, they often hold dear American national interests especially in global politics. The Republican and Democratic parties are run under strict constitutional guidelines. Party leaderships are  not based of financial capacity and their roles are often purely administrative.

    The Nigerian political system is such that the structure seems so flawed that it would appear there are neither strict adherence to both party and the national constitutions nor a strong adherence to laws. This seems to be the core reason for the level of indiscipline often displayed by some influential members of most political parties at ward, state and national levels. There is clearly no strict ideological identities of political parties in Nigeria. This is reason why politicians easily oscillate (often euphemistically referred to as defections) from one political party to the other. In fact, the late former Senate President, Chuba Okadigbo, a renowned political scientist had once referred to the Nigerian so called political parties as mere gatherings of people.

    READ ALSO: The Tinubu administration and its malcontents (2)

    The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) had to deregister some political parties because some of them did not meet the electoral benchmarks to continue in the process. Recently too, it does appear that more than a hundred political parties are seeking registration with INEC. This fact says a lot about Nigerian political party system. Between the  mere gathering of people who are often strange bedfellows politically and socially and functionality of the democratic system in Nigeria is often some blurred lines.

    One fairly good outcome of the former military ruler, Ibrahim Babangida’s lengthy transition period was obviously his insistence on just two political parties, the National Republican Convention (NRC) and the Social Democratic Party (SDP). That system seemingly brought a bit of order and cohesion within the political party structure. It helped the Nigerian political system as it helped in uniting the country politically. That system produced what is now celebrated as the best, freest and fairest election in Nigeria’s history. It blurred the tribal, ethnic and religious lines often drawn by politicians for their personal expediencies.

    So as the 2027 general election draws near, the Roundtable Conversation is calmly observing the usual macabre dance in the Nigerian political field. There have been a continual defection of politicians mainly from the seemingly opposition Peoples democratic Party (PDP) and the 2023 revitalized Labour Party (LP) aand other inconsequential political parties to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Despite the Supreme Court’s verdict about the consequences of defections from one party to the other after winning elections, Nigerian politicians through their actions sometimes say in very loud terms, “the Supreme Court can give verdicts but we can do what we like”.

    Even though this disobedience of the Supreme Court ruling happens most of the time with no consequences, it is a loud verdict on the discipline of the Nigerian political class. It stands as a bold example of why Nigerian democracy seems to appear very unweanable and  earns the delusional tag of ‘a nascent democracy’.  No nation that has chosen democracy as a system of government can continue to toy with wobbly political culture and make progress.

    A close scrutiny of the average politician’s attitude in politics shows a lot of hypocrisy. The lack of ideological leaning and the indiscipline of oscillating from one political party to the other is often euphemistically explained as a power granted by the constitution for freedom of choice, free speech and gathering. The kind of cherry-picking that doesn’t apply when they refuse to be held accountable, when they disobey  their own party and national constitutions and the Supreme Court of the land.

    While analysis go on and on about formation of new political parties, defections to or from the ruling APC, PDP, Labour or SDP, one thing remains clear, there is an ominous sign to Nigeria’s democracy. Professional politician as they exist in Nigeria is not good for democracy. It is sad that most politicians in Nigeria describe themselves as ‘professional politicians’. On the face of it, it sounds comical but with a deeper look, it portends grave danger for development. There seems to be a preponderance of individuals whose only means of livelihood comes from the ‘spoils’ of office and politicking.

    The late Ojukwu once defined most politicians as individuals with no second addresses. By this he meant those who introduce themselves as ‘professional politicians’. They often lack the discipline of occupational achievers. They eran their every dime and influence from playing politics and in most cases, they are in it not to improve the welfare of the people but for what they can get election after election. There is hardly any developmental initiative, vision for the future of the country or worries about the state of the ordinary people who are the main reason for governance in the first place.

    Nigerian elite has a role to play in redirecting the course of our democracy. It is not enough to sit back and sneer at the things happening in our political space. The essence of education, knowledge and exposure is the value it brings to the lives of others. Iconic individuals and legends in the world earned their legendry accolades for their civil and political activism that impacted others beyond thei generations. Late Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Alhaji Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, Mandela, Ghandi, Martin Luther King, Patrice Mulumba, Queen Amina, Moremi, Queen Idia and countless others earned their immortality through acts that edify humanity.

    As we watch the drama in the political field, the scramble for registrations and the harvest of inter party defections at a time most politicians ought to be held accountable is as tragic as it as laughable. In the 26 years return to democracy, there are more people in the poverty bracket that even India with its more than a billion population has left Nigeria in the poverty bracket. There are more than 133million people living in multidimensional poverty, Nigeria has more out of school children than some five countries’ population, there are more chronically malnourished kids than some country’s entire population.

    Nigeria might be raising a generation of mentally and physically retarded children whose future miht be altered by their developmental deficiencies which ultimately impacts productivity. Do our politicians take stock at all? Do they care for the future? Do they care for legacies beyond bank balance and property and notoriety? It is a sad commentary that most politicians only see themselves in the mirror of life. Nothing matters except their advantageous political positioning.

    Beyond the political party intrigues, who cares about the structure of these political parties as enduring legacies that can enhance the Nigerian democracy for the children yet unborn. The irony and hypocrisy of politicians at campaign podiums is that the same puerile rhetoric keeps being regurgitated with no serious thought about walking the talk post elections. Why do most state governors hide under the federal government instead of taking their constitutional roles beyond white elephant projects  that often have no direct impact on the people? The basic needs of food, shelter and health have not really been prioritized. Political expedient but low impact projects are often over celebrated and not very impactful.

    As one watches the political activities unfold across the country, there is a tendency to be despondent. This is reason the best brains in the country are being lured to other countries through the now socially coined word, ‘jakpa’. It is a euphemism for the lure that emigration from the country offers. Globally, immigration is not a crime as humans have been moving from creation for different reasons. However, the modern trend is a fall out of socio-economic conditions forced on the people by bad practice of winner takes all democracy.

    The constant political lexicon, ‘mergers and coalitions’ seem to only be for the positioning of the political actors most of who have played politics all their lives with little or no legacies of good service delivery. As the 2027 political season hots up, we are forced to ask the political actors, what new song shall the people sing? Are we just going to see, ‘my sin is smaller than yours’ kind of self-aggrandizement that has kept our political parties looking like tree brances to the monkey – a mere means of getting to either the next fruit or running from a predatory animal?

    As we watch the public race to grab the headlines and with it power, we watch keenly to see the stars that would shine on their merit like a Zik of Africa with his patriotism, an Awolowo with his free education legacy, an Aminu Kano with his pro-talakawa popularity and effective leadership, a Lateef Jakande with his investment in public housing and education. Each day, we watch and record…

    • The dialogue continues…

  • The Tinubu administration and its malcontents (2)

    The Tinubu administration and its malcontents (2)

    It is difficult to credibly dispute the assertion that hardly any politician in post-colonial Nigeria has faced as much opposition, hostility and undisguised hatred against the realization of his political ambitions as President Bola Tinubu. Both as governor of Lagos State from 1999 to 2007 and now the occupant of Nigeria’s apex position of power since May, 2023, Tinubu continually confronted and overcame persistent efforts to distract him and ensure his failure to achieve set political goals. His unanticipated triumph in the 2023 presidential elections despite vehement and bitter attempts to prevent his emergence as the candidate of his party, the All Progressives Congress, (APC), the concerted and surreptitious subversion of his candidacy by a powerful and influential cabal in the immediate past President Muhammadu Buhari administration and the unprecedentedly vicious campaign of calumny he faced particularly from the opposition Peoples Democratic Party, (PDP)

    and Labour Party, (LP), fueled the unabating antagonism against his administration right from its inception by malcontents both within the ruling party and in the opposition.

    Thus, although his administration has just passed the two- year mark in its first term in office, aggrieved political elements who are aggravated at their perceived marginalization within the APC as well as implacable adversaries in the perennially crisis-ridden major opposition parties are openly talking and planning towards the formation of a coalition to dislodge the President and his party from power in 2027. During his visit to Benue State in response to large scale killings in parts of the state by marauding gunmen, Tinubu acknowledged that his opponents hate him “like hell” though he remains their President. And in Nasarawa State where he went to commission some legacy projects of the Engineer Abdullahi Sule administration, the President taunted those plotting the coalition to unseat him in 2027 describing them as internally displaced politicians.

    Yet, the security agencies curiously appear to suspect no linkage between the bitterness of many of those who have drawn a battle-line against the President and the persistence of unrelenting bloodletting in parts of the country which appear to be deliberately instigated to lend credence to unceasing efforts to discredit and delegitimize the administration. Surely the security agencies should send an unmistakable signal to those malcontents who have been making incendiary and reckless pronouncements against the President and his administration and who are alleged to have a track record of having sponsored violent subversions of the Nigerian State in the past, including publicly threatening foreign elections observers that they would leave the country in body bags, that it is closely watching them. The inexplicable lethargy of security agents when some aggrieved political groups and individuals have openly called for military intervention to overthrow this democratic dispensation has undoubtedly emboldened such elements to persist in their strenuous efforts to destabilize the polity.

    The strategy of the malcontents is obviously to portray the hardships attendant on the administration’s reforms such as removal of the fuel subsidy and merger of the parallel foreign exchange markets leading to the devaluation of the Naira as a deliberate decision to inflict pain on the people as if the reforms were avoidable. But the economy, which as the eminent economist, former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), and now Anambra State governor, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, has noted was practically comatose at the inception of the Tinubu administration, needed urgent corrective surgery, which Tinubu and his economic team promptly administered. It was a situation akin to the dentist in Woke Soyinka’s novel, ‘Season of Anomy’ who had to inflict the discomfort of tooth extraction on his patient to save the latter in the long run from excruciating tooth decay and pain.

    But a large number of the ever increasingly sophisticated Nigerian electorate are not unaware that all the major presidential candidates in the 2023 general elections had promised to implement far reaching and long overdue economic reforms such as removal of the fuel subsidy. During the campaigns, the voluble LP candidate, Mr Peter Obi, had said severally on national television that he would remove the subsidy,  which he described as an elaborate scam, “on day one” but now insists that had he been elected President, he would have done so gradually after putting in place measures to alleviate the pain without elaborating on how he would do this. In their plan to predicate their campaign against Tinubu and the APC in 2027 on the hardships associated with the reforms, the desperate opposition politicians angling for an electorally viable coalition appear to discount the fact that the APC had won off-season elections in Ondo, Imo, Kogi and Edo States even after the reforms of the Tinubu administration had set in.

    Even as they continue to seek the actualization of their coalition plans, it is obvious that the anti- Tinubu malcontents will be relentless in their demonization and concerted efforts to demystify and delegitimize the incumbent APC administration by vehemently denying and denouncing even its most glaring accomplishments. As the ongoing reforms continue to show signs of bearing fruit and achieving set objectives with downward trend in inflationary spirals, systematically increasing productivity, growing employment and prosperity, the more strident will be the efforts to vilify and portray the administration as non-performing in the hope that assertions repeated often enough, possibly with the aid of Peter Obi-type of manufactured statistical mumbo jumbo, will be readily believed by a gullible public despite the reality. And they will be enthusiastically sided by a section of the media still hurting at Tinubu’s emergence as President despite their no-holds-barred exertions to ensure his defeat.

    In the past week, for instance, former Vice President Abubakar Atiku has tried to resuscitate public discourse around the stale issue of President Tinubu’s academic records despite the futility of his litigation of the matter both in the United States and at the highest judicial level in Nigeria in the last election. He even tried to taint the President as associating with an allegedly corrupt Belarus businessman without any evidential basis for the allegation. Atiku probably thinks that most Nigerians had forgotten that it is on record that a Congressional investigation in the US indicted him for allegedly criminally transferring over $40 million into various accounts of his fourth wife, Jennifer Douglas, in the US during his tenure as Vice President.  Similarly, the former governor of Kaduna State, Nasir El’Rufai, has continued his round of television talk shows this time claiming that members of the coalition had commissioned an opinion poll which showed that Tinubu could in no way win the 2027 election. He is probably unaware that what he needs more urgently is an opinion poll that indicates with acceptable accuracy and credibility his current standing in Kaduna State which he governed with unprecedented arrogance and impunity between 2015 and 2023.

    The former governor of Jigawa State, Alhaji Sule Lamido, was also on television trying to rewrite history by distorting Tinubu’s well documented and applauded role in the struggle against the annulment of the June 12, 1993, presidential election won by Chief M.K.O Abiola and claiming that the President supported a military atrocity that he actually expended humongous resources and risked his life to fight against. Luckily, Lamido has been unable to respond to the exposure by Dr Dele Alake and Mr Bayo Onanuga on how, as National Secretary of the defunct Social Democratic Party (SDP), he worked in concert with the National Chairman, Chief Tony Anenih,  to trade away Abiola ‘s mandate. But President Tinubu and his party should expect these outright falsehoods and historical distortions to continue especially as it becomes increasingly difficult to credibly fault the administration on the basis of incompetence or non-performance.

    Read Also: Makinde greets Muslims on Hijrah 1447, urges prayers for Oyo, Nigeria

    Initially, the APC gave the impression that its main strategy in response to the ceaseless, often baseless, onslaughts against the Tinubu administration was to utilize its power of incumbency at the centre and the control of the advantage of patronage to lure key opposition figures to defect from their parties and join its ranks. The party had scored a major victory in this regard with the defections of the incumbent governors of Delta and Akwa Ibom States with the entire government machinery and PDP party structures in their states into the ruling party. At the same time, significant numbers of National Assembly members from the PDP and the LP have continued to stream into the APC almost on a weekly basis. This has prompted allegations from some opposition politicians of attempts by the APC to turn Nigeria into a one-party state based on the unproven supposition that it is the ruling party instigating the crises that have continuously plagued and immobilized the major opposition parties in the aftermath of the 2023 elections.

    Of course, as President Tinubu stated in his maiden State of the Nation  address to the National Assembly on June 12, he does not desire a one-party state for the country but cannot be expected to assist the opposition parties in resolving their intra-party crises and running well organized, efficient and harmonious party entities. However, in my view, the APC, by beginning to more effectively showcase the achievements of the governments elected on its platform at the federal and sub-national levels is laying a better and more convincing foundation for its campaign towards the 2027 elections than merely attracting opposition politicians to join its ranks. This is because the phenomenon of political vagrancy, which has been a common feature of Nigerian politics right from the First Republic, smacks of opportunism and a deficiency of principles on the part of political actors. There is really no way to ascertain that a defecting politician from one party to another is not  doing so for self -serving reasons rather than the new platform offering a better opportunity for public service.

    However, in the last few days, President Tinubu has been in Nasarawa and Kaduna States to commission well publicized legacy projects in diverse sectors including education, healthcare, agriculture and road infrastructure. For the past one week, the Borno State government has been advertising over 1,339 projects implemented across diverse sectors by the administration of Professor Babagana Zulum in the print and electronic media. In the last ten days or more, the Federal Capital Territory, (FCT), Minister, Barrister Nyesom Wike, has been inaugurating a plethora of projects including ultra modern roads, water projects, a modern bus terminal, interchange bridges and the radically modernized President Bola Tinubu International Conference Centre, with the President personally launching most of these facilities. True, Wike is of the PDP but the credit for the ongoing transformation of the FCT goes to the APC administration in which he is serving.

    Before now, President Tinubu was in Lagos to launch the first 30 km of the ongoing path-breaking Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway as well as the new access road to the Lekki Deep Sea Port. Among the major highways on which work is going on across the country under the superintendence of the Minister of Works, Engineer David Umahi, are the Bodo-Bonny Road, Second Niger Bridge Access Road, Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway, Benin-Asaba Super Highway, Abuja-Lokoja- Benin Road, Enugu-Onitsha Expressway, 9th Mile-Oturkpo-Makurdi-Road and Abuja-Kaduna-Zaria-Kano dual Carriage Way. This week, the President launched the distribution of 2,000 advanced tractors and thousands of farming implements including 50 industrial-grade land preparation booths, 12 fully equipped mobile workshops, and over 8,000 specialized farming implements under the Renewed Hope Agricultural Mechanization Programme, designed to boost food security and national prosperity.

    Even when the President has been in states controlled by opposition parties such as his being invited to commission projects delivered by Professor Soludo of the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) in Anambra State earlier in the year, the governors have openly declared that the federal government’s economic reform policies under Tinubu had made substantially more resources available to the sub-national governments thus enabling them to meet recurrent expenditure obligations without jeopardizing the implementation of critical capital projects. The most critical advantage of the APC’s incumbency at the centre is not the power to attract opposition politicians into its ranks but that of conceptualizing and actualizing key projects to build the country’s economic capacity and generate prosperity in such a way that the most inveterate malcontents will be unable to impugn the administration’s efficacy, efficiency and effectiveness with any degree of credibility or integrity. It would be unwise for the APC to allow its governments at the centre and in the states to be distracted from productive governance with a premature preoccupation with the 2027 polls at this time.

  • Siasia, Mikel enough

    Siasia, Mikel enough

    When the country’s Olympic Games Football  Dream Team coach, Samson Siasia, was accused of leading the squad members on a trip not approved by those who ought to have planned the squad’s trajectory to the Olympics’ soccer event, one knew that the tales of the unexpected would haunt us in the years ahead of us. A proper investigation of the accusations ought to have been carried out in 2016, with one objective – fish out those who were complicit in the show of shame as it was when it happened in the United States of America in 2016.

    The shameful conduct was swept under the carpet because the team won Nigeria’s only medal – a bronze medal, making the Dream Team to earn the honour of winning all three medals in the event. Gold in Atlanta 1996, silver in Beijing 2008 and bronze in 2016.

    The sports minister at that time visited the team in Atlanta where he was reported to have frowned at the coach, Samson Siasia’s resort to the media to complain about the difficulties the team was facing.

    According to Vanguard’s report: ”Apart from warning that Siasia’s action would be looked into and appropriate sanctions meted out to him if necessary”, the minister was said to have not only instructed the team’s captain, John Mikel Obi to take control of the team but equally asked him to restore sanity to the team, which he alleged was plagued with indiscipline.”

    The battle line between Mikel and Siasia had tacitly been drawn.  Wahala no dey finish for Nigeria. What a country.

    Was it right for the minister to have chastised the coach by belittling him, especially as Siasia is one of the icons of the game here having played for the country’s teams? Did Siasia tell a lie that the team was cash strapped? No. Who should Siasia have complained to if not pressmen who saw the players’ and coaches’ poor living conditions in America, in spite of the fact that they were our sports ambassadors to the 2016 Olympic Games? What a pity.

    This isn’t the first time Mikel would drop what now looks like falsehood on this matter. In fact, the then sports minister, Solomon Dalung, in the aftermath of the Rio 2016 Olympic Games said: “To the best of my knowledge as the Minister at the time, no player — Mikel Obi or otherwise, was authorised to arrange transport for Team Nigeria to Rio,”  in an interview with AIT.

    The operative words from Dalung are, ”neither Mikel nor anyone else was authorised to arrange transport for Team Nigeria to Rio”. The imminent question to ask Dalung was, who was authorised to arrange transport for the team? Again why didn’t the person do it? Or was it that the trip to America was unauthorised, dear Dalung?

    “I used my own money to help fund the Nigerian Super Eagles’ trip to the 2016 Rio Olympics, and till this day, the federation has not given me anything back,” Mikel recently said. “Honestly, I regret doing that.”

    But Dalung, who oversaw Nigeria’s sports ministry during the Games, dismissed the claim, stating emphatically that no player, including Mikel Obi, paid for any flight.

    “I want to apologise for all the circumstances that led to your late arrival here. I apologise because I am the head and as such I must take responsibility for anything that happens under my watch,” Dalung said after they beat Sweden, with a game to spare to qualify for the quarter-finals.

    One would have thought that the contending issues in the team would have been settled, especially with the celebrations in the camp and the minister’s apology.

    The pertinent question to ask is if Mikel is using this allegation to get traction to his podcast or stating the truth of the matter. I shudder to use Siasia’s statement suggesting that perhaps, things are rough for the former Chelsea star defensive midfielder. Not possible, my dear coach.

    It was Siasia’s call to explain what transpired since he was the coach of the team, which he did. But Siasia ought to have avoided the petty talk of poverty, since it was out of place in the discussion. Siasia exhibited grave immaturity. How, the so called players union ought to call both men to sheath their swords for the good of the game. This idea of washing our dirty linens in public is unnecessary, since those who should have dealt with matter in 2016 failed to do so. Now that events have overtaken the incidents, the wise thing that Mikel can do is thrash out the issue with the new Nigeria Sports Commission (NSC) boss, if indeed Mikel’s claims have been substantiated with documents from the Delta Airline’s management on request.

    Otherwise, it won’t cost the NSC anything to do a letter to Delta Airlines seeking to know what transpired, if there are doubts by all those in the past who debunked Mikel’s statement, including a former sports minister. Can all of them be lying and Mikel speaking the truth? Yes, we need to know which of the two parties to believe.

    Read Also: NFF endorses Sam Okwaraji’s Championship

    Whilst the matter is being investigated discreetly, it is important to remind Siasia and Mikel that as icons of the game in Nigeria and all over the world, they need know that the image and integrity of the country shouldn’t be tarnished on the altar of seeking a refund of $250,000 or otherwise? If Mikel feels he is speaking the truth, he can head for the EFCC or ICPC to do their jobs on the matter and keep quiet until the truth is told by the courts.

    However, one only hopes that the two bodies responsible for preparing the country’s contingents to the Olympic Games are noting this disturbing noise from our soccer icons, which rests squarely on a failure of leadership at the NSC and the Nigeria Olympic Committee (NOC), I dare say.

    There must be a workable synergy between the NSC and the NOC going forward to avert these kinds of show of shame among our contingents to international sporting competitions such as the Olympic Games, the Commonwealth Games, the World Cup, Africa Cup of Nations, Africa Games, WAFU etc. Perhaps, this is the time to find out the details of the arrangement which dragged our sports ambassadors on a clueless trip to America?

    The NSC and indeed the NOC should ensure that all preparatory trips for our sportsmen and women outside the country for future competitions must be interrogated such that the ones which aren’t discerning should be dropped immediately. Of course, nobody is talking about the NFF’s involvement in the trip to America. Yet, it is the federation’s prerogative to provide answers to questions arising from the Mikel cum Siasia imbroglio. The team’s bronze medal celebrations ensured that the matter was swept under the carpet with everyone describing it as a ”golden” bronze. Indeed.

    Please Siasia and Mikel, you are sports treasures who should be celebrated always. We have heard enough of this mess. Case closed!

  • Governors crucial to tackling electricity deficit

    Governors crucial to tackling electricity deficit

    Electricity is a sine qua non for development

    The most critical of Nigeria’s infrastructure deficits is the electricity deficit. Therefore, in my view, the decentralization of power generation, transmission, distribution, and regulation is one of the key panaceas for the electricity deficit jinx which Nigeria has been facing for over 40 years.

    Understandably, the challenges of the availability and sustainability of electricity have been sources of concern and national embarrassment, to the extent that 65 years after independence, Nigeria is yet to get to the power capacity that is more than 40% of its initial capacity over 40 years ago. Nigeria is one of the most underpowered countries in the world, with actual consumption of 80% below expectations, based on current population and income levels.

    According to CEIC, a global economic data insights provider; electricity production in Nigeria reached about 8,879 GWh in 2024, while electricity production in Egypt reached 16,900 GWh in 2024, and electricity Production in South Africa reached 18,961 GWh in 2024. Whereas the combined population of Egypt and South Africa is about 178million population as against about 227million population of Nigeria. This speaks to the precarious and unfortunate situation of infrastructural deficit that we have found ourselves in this country, and unless we deal with this issue of electricity (power) deficit, all economic recovery, development, and growth strategies and initiatives will be never be achieved.

     Certainly, major milestones have been achieved in the past three years from the twilight of the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari (when the Bill to empower States to generate, transmit, distribute and regulate electricity was passed by the 9th National Assembly), and the assent of the Electricity Act 2023 into law by President Bola Ahmad Tinubu, on his resumption in office, as one of the key policies that he immediately signed into law, recognizing the importance of power to our national development. Indeed, Mr. President understands the need to, urgently decentralize the ability to generate, transmit, distribute, and regulate electricity in Nigeria. Accordingly, this law gives the opportunity to States across Nigeria to generate their own power, based on their priorities and the availability of different sources of power in their states. This also means that while the federal government will continue holding the core responsibility of generating, transmitting, distributing, and regulating power in Nigeria, states have the prime opportunity to complement power availability, and catalyze economic recovery and development. Already, about 11 states have taken the lead and have started the process of self-regulation. The States are Lagos, Enugu, Ondo, Ekiti, Oyo, Imo, Ogun, Edo, Kogi, Niger, Plateau, and are expected to complete their transitions between June and September this year. Anambra State recently passed its electricity law and is also preparing to join the list. Abia State has taken the lead long before the Act was passed. Interestingly, of all the states of Nigeria, Kano State is not in the list of early adopters of this opportunity. Therefore, I urge the Governor of Kano State to seize the moment. This is because Kano State, as the industrial and commercial hub of Nigeria and the entire Sahel region of Africa, needs to take this golden opportunity to bring back the glorious days when Kano was a hub of commerce, manufacturing, and industry.

    Read Also: Hijrah: MUSWEN, ADSN, MCLS urge Nigerians to unite

     The Electricity Act of 2023 is a Golden opportunity for states

    The states that have seized the opportunity are already putting strategies and structures in place. However, we need to know that there are lead timelines required, for design, engineering, procurement, installation, construction, etc., for such a project, and an incubation period to achieve success. Therefore, the timelines of action are very important for States. And I commend the Executive Governors of those States across Nigeria that have so far been working towards achieving the independence of power generation, transmission, distribution and regulation.

     The age and dilapidated state of our hydroelectric power generation and transmission equipment in Kainji, Shiroro, and Jebba Dams, amongst others, speak to the fact that there is no way the current national grid capacity can be sustainable. While natural gas has have come into play some years ago, and has been adding critical values to the national grid, the only way we can achieve purposeful growth in Nigeria is when and if states plug into this opportunity to achieve what I call the “quick wins” of power solution in Nigeria; while the federal government is dealing with the mega projects to ensure the availability and sustainability of power in Nigeria. Therefore, I urge all of us to continue pushing for these laudable projects while the federal government, through its various institutions, including the Rural Electrification Authority, etc. undertakes proper reforms in the Power sector.

     It is also instructive, to note that the dilapidated state of power that was inherited by successive administrations, increasing cost and management of infrastructure, wanton corruption, poor infrastructure management, poor project management, lack of transparency and accountability and declining availability of expertise in this very important industry are the crucial inhibitors of getting out of the power deficit doldrum we are facing in this country. Hence, unless we deal with these issues, we will not make tangible progress. The incessant power outages are the glaring reality of how we sat on our hands, as a nation, for decades without providing the requisite enablement in terms of investment, infrastructure, capacity building, and the political will to ensure that we have power availability to drive the productive sector.

     Instances of corruption in the power sector include: the attempt by President Olusegun Obasanjo to change the game in the power sector, as he did in the telecommunications sector, has been bedeviled by corruption, as it happened during the time of President Buhari. Two former Federal Ministers of Power are facing prosecution in Nigeria and even an arbitration abroad, to the extent that two former Presidents of Nigeria, i.e. President Obasanjo and President Buhari are witnesses and have testified before the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC), Paris, France, in connection with the $2.3 billion power project arbitration proceedings filed against Nigeria by Sunrise Power over an alleged breach of contract by the federal government. This situation speaks to the crucial importance of political will. Unless there is the political will at the federal and state levels, we will continue to dance around the vicious circle of power deficit in this country.

    It is clear that there is a nexus between socio-economic prosperity and the availability of power in any country that needs to industrialize to activate its productive sector and grow and sustain socio-economic development in the short, mid, to long terms.

     The Electricity Act 2023 will upscale governance capacity at the state level and also enable states to move at their own pace in terms of development. For the forward-thinking governors, they will be able to harness the opportunity to catalyze development, as we can see in Lagos and some other states. It will also reduce the timeline from conceptualization to actualization at the state level because the electricity infrastructural development could be done in a modular and scalable manner, such that the states can set up and deploy power in segments, for example, per local government, senatorial district, etc. Of course, successes will depend on the priority of the State Governor with respect to his vision and mission-critical objectives, and the strategy blue print and strategy and policies implementation. Any governor who really and truly wants to develop his state knows that power is very critical. Because any other development cannot take place, especially with regard to the productive sector, without the provision of electricity and the entire energy value chain.

     Therefore, rather than the traditional fixation on the federal government, it is time for citizens, indigents, and residents to wake up to their responsibilities of keeping the feet of their state governors to the fire, to ensure that they do the needful. By fixation, I am not saying that we should not continue constructively engaging the federal government. But this is a golden opportunity for all of us to continue speaking truth power, constructive engagements to ensure that governors prioritize policies properly and act accordingly for the betterment of the people.

     Conclusion

    If State Governors plan very well with a good strategic blueprint, and a high execution quotient, they will turn around the economy of their States in the next two years because they will start generating wealth due to systematic reactivation of the production economy. This is achievable if State Governors properly enable the private sector to deliver.

     Furthermore, diversification to renewable energy is one of the key solutions to energy deficit and disruptions. Hence, the conversations about renewable and clean energy have also presented another opportunity for quick wins for the sector. Consequently, State Governors should include the unlocking of renewable energy assets like Solar, Wind, etc., in their states, as critical drivers for success. And I commend all stakeholders in the public and private sectors who are pushing for these initiatives. While the clean and renewable energy is onboarded, Nigeria should continue to leverage the traditional sources of power to ensure that we are able to accelerate our economic recovery and sustain going forward, while keeping our eyes on the importance of managing and regulating global climate change realities. Otherwise, success and development will continue to elude us.

  • Happy New Year

    Happy New Year

    Preamble

    The appearance of today’s title in this column once in a year often looks strange to most readers since this is not January.  In Nigeria, like in most other African countries, the idea of ‘New Year’ is ignorantly believed to be peculiar to January which is the first month of Gregorian calendar. That is the effect of colonialism in our continent. From whichever angle it is viewed, European colonialism has a thick Christian coloration that still paints African culture in the rainbow of colonial tradition.

    Islam has its own calendar. And, like other calendars of the world, there is a beginning and an end for every Hijrah year. Unlike other calendars which are manmade however, Islamic calendar, otherwise known as Hijrah calendar, is divinely ordained. This is confirmed in chapter 9, verse 36 of the Qur’an as follows: “Surely, the number of months ordained by Allah when He created the heavens and the earth is twelve. Therefore, do not wrong yourselves in them….”

    The twelve Islamic months are as follows: Muharram; Safar; Rabiul Awwal; Rabiu-th-Thani; Jumadal Ula; Jumada-th-Thaniyah; Rajab; Shaban; Ramadan; Shawwal; Dhul Qadah; and Dhul Hijjah.

    The four months specifically designated as sacred months are the last four months of Hijrah calendar. They are Ramadan, Shawwal, Dhul Qa’dah and Dhul Hijjah. Some of these months have 30 days. Others have 29. No more, no less.

    Yesterday (June 26, 2025) was the first day of Hijrah year 1447. It follows the last day of Dhul Hijjah which ends last Wednesday. Dhul Hijjah is the last month of Hijrah calendar. It takes a well educated person to understand this and relate to it as such. This is what distinguishes then Osun State Governor Rauf Adesoji Aregbesola from all other governors, especially in the Southwest of Nigeria. The declaration while in office then by him of public holiday for the event is a clear evidence of justice which had hitherto been denied to the Muslims in the state.

    To demonstrate similar justice, it was hoped that other governors in the region will follow suit as a mark of civility.

    Genesis

    Hijrah calendar took its name from Prophet Muhammad’s emigration from Makkah to Madinah in 622 C.E. The use of Hijrah calendar began when Umar Bn Khattab, the second Caliph, suggested that Islam should have its own distinctive calendar saying Hijrah, the Prophet’s emigration, was so much a significant landmark in Islam that it could not be overlooked. As a matter of fact, Hijrah is one of the three main factors responsible for the survival of the religion of Islam. The other two were the victory of the Muslims in the battle of Badr which was waged by Makkah pagans against them in Madinah shortly after the Prophet’s emigration. And the third is Allah’s great promise that became an everlasting fulfilment. That promise is contained in Chapter 15 verse 9 of the Qur’an thus:

    “It was ‘We’ (Allah) who revealed the Qur’an and We will preserve it…’ and who can doubt the Almighty Allah the Creator of the entire universe and its preserver”. But for these three fundamental factors, perhaps Islam or the Qur’an would have joined the legion of defunct religions. With Allah, all things are possible.

    Significance

    In Islam, the first day of the first Hijrah month (Muharram) is more significant than Mawlidun- Nabiyyi (the birth day of Prophet Muhammad (SAW). The Prophet had existed for 40 years before ‘The Message of Islam’ came to him and nobody celebrated his birthday. Thus without

    ‘The great Message of Islam’ he would have had no cause to emigrate.

    And if he had lived for 40 years without being known in history before he became a Prophet, why should his birthday now take precedence over ‘The Great Message’ which made him the greatest man that ever lived?

    Basically Hijrah institutionalised three important aspects of life: social, economic and political. In the social aspect when the first revelation was made to the Prophet (SAW) a period of twelve (12) years was devoted by him towards inculcating the religion in the minds of individuals while no pattern of a collective life based on true religious concepts could be presented to the world. The status of the Muslim individuals in Makkah gave rise to the misconception that Islam, or rather, believing in the mission of the prophet was one’s personal affair. This was believed to pertain only to the hereafter which had nothing to do with people’s collective life.

    Social Effect

    It was only after the Prophet’s emigration (Hijrah) that people began to see Islam clearly as a way of life which paid attention to and reformed every facet of human existence. It then became evident that Islam was the religion that gave directions regarding almost every moment of a believer’s conscious life. Hijrah also enabled the Arabs in particular to see what a Muslim’s matrimonial home should be in a Muslim society. Hence, it was only after this event that the world could see the aspect of human social decency and decorum prescribed by Islam.

    The second reason for the importance of Hijrah is its economic significance which manifested in the lifestyle of the pioneer Muslims’ emigration to Madinah led by Prophet Muhammad (SAW) himself. The unsurpassable hospitality of the people of Madinah towards the Muslim emigrants did not only provide a new peaceful home for the newcomers.

    It also showed the hosts’ passionate self-sacrifice. And with Hijrah, the Makkan emigrants who became immigrants in Madinah vividly came in contact with advanced agricultural acumen and ingenuous artisanship never experienced before.  These resulted in an unprecedented economic revolution for the city. Since the hosts shared virtually everything they had with the immigrants when the latter first arrived, a lesson was learnt by the immigrants not to continue to be a burden on their brotherly hosts. Thus, every one of them adopted legitimate ways of earning righteous income.

    Moral Effect

    Initially, the Muslim Immigrants in Madinah worked as labourers in the fields, gardens and construction works. But later, they, being traditional traders, started small trading activities which brought them into an economic competition with the Jews of Madinah. One aspect of the economic revolution was that the Muslim immigrants paid the right price for every product they consumed since the Prophet had forbidden the practice of acquiring products on reduced prices in return for loans given to the artisans or to the land cultivators. The practice was prohibited because it was considered to be a form of usury.

    Thus, it was only after Hijrah that agriculture, industry and trade freely helped the Muslims to bring about an integrated, balanced and unfettered economy for the Ummah.

    Judicial Effect

    The third reason which made Hijrah a very important event is the political freedom for the Muslims. Before Hijrah, the Muslims in Makkah had no say in any matter, internal or external. They were a minority against whom the hearts of the majority were full of enmity simply because they were an insignificant part of the dominating unbelievers’ society in Makkah.

    It was Hijrah, therefore, that made the Muslims Masters of their internal affairs, external relations and matters relating to war and peace. If there was any disagreement between the Muslims and the non-Muslims, the final decision was to be made by the Prophet. This indicated a kind of autonomy to be enjoyed by the Muslims for the first time. And it was the nucleus of a city-state which, within a period of ten (10) years in the lifetime of the Prophet expanded to the entire Arabian Peninsula. It is thus evident that the event of Hijrah turned a few hundred Muslims resident in Madinah into a highly successful society.

    An erroneous act

    If the Nigerian Muslim leaders were adequately informed at the time they were negotiating religious holidays for Nigerian Muslim Ummah they would have asked for Hijrah rather than Mawlidun-Nabiyyi. Apart from coming into the world through birth like any other human being, there is nothing the birth of Prophet Muhammad (SAW) contributed to the unprecedented revolution called Islam. And, the Prophet himself did not believe in the aristocracy of birth which celebration of birthday is all about. That was why he (the Prophet) never celebrated his own birthday the way some Muslims do on his behalf today. What is more, the Prophet’s birthday is never celebrated in Saudi Arabia where he was born. What is rather celebrated in that country is Hijrah Day.

    Whereas Mawlidun-Nabiyyi is about the personal life of Prophet Muhammad alone, Hijrah Day is about Islam and the entire Muslim Ummah.

    While celebrating Mawlidun-Nabiyyi, you can only praise the Prophet and nothing more. But when celebrating the Hijrah day, you are celebrating not only the Prophet’s migration but also the triumph of Islam as the everlasting password of the Universe. That is why we exchange pleasantries by congratulating one another and by chanting the slogan HAPPY NEW YEAR!

    Compared to Hijrah calendar, the Gregorian calendar is not only artificial but alien to Christianity. It was only adopted some centuries ago as a way of distinguishing the religion of Christ from whatever preceded or succeeded it. While writing about how Gregorian calendar came into existence, a British writer and newspaper columnist, Ben Snowden said in a descriptive article entitled ‘The Curious History of Gregorian Calendar’ thus: “September 2, 1752, was a great day in the history of sleep”.

    That Wednesday evening, millions of British subjects in England and the colonies went peacefully to sleep and did not wake up until twelve days later. Behind this feat of narcoleptic prowess was not just some revolutionary hypnotic technique or miraculous pharmaceutical discovered in the West Indies. It was, rather, the British Calendar Act of 1751, which declared the day after Wednesday the second day of that month to be Thursday the fourteenth day of the same month.

    Other calendars

    Prior to that cataleptic September evening, the official British calendar differed from that of continental Europe by eleven days—that is, September 2 in London was September 13 in Paris, Lisbon, and Berlin. The discrepancy had sprung from Britain’s continued use of the Julian calendar, which had been the official calendar of Europe since its invention by Julius Caesar (after whom it was named) in 45 B.C.

    Caesar’s calendar, which consisted of eleven months of 30 or 31 days and a 28-day February (extended to 29 days every fourth year), was actually quite accurate: it erred from the real solar calendar by only 11½ minutes a year. By the sixteenth century, it had put the Julian calendar behind the solar one by 10 days.

    In 1582, Pope Gregory XIII ordered the advancement of the calendar by 10 days and introduced a new corrective device to curb further error: century years such as 1700 or 1800 would no longer be counted as leap years, unless they were (like 1600 or 2000) divisible by 400.

    If somewhat inelegant, this system is undeniably effective, and is still in official use in the United States. The Gregorian calendar year differs from the solar year by only 26 seconds—accurate enough for most mortals, since this only adds up to one day’s difference every 3,323 years.

    Despite the prudence of Pope Gregory’s correction, many Protestant countries, including England, ignored the papal bull. Germany and the Netherlands agreed to adopt the Gregorian calendar in 1698; Russia only accepted it after the revolution of 1918 and Greece waited until 1923 to follow suit. And currently many Orthodox churches still follow the Julian calendar, which now lags 13 days behind the Gregorian.

    Read Also: Nigeria adopts tax dispute resolution to boost revenue

    The use of calendars

    Since their invention, calendars have been used to reckon time in advance, and to fix the occurrence of events like harvests or religious festivals. Ancient people tied their calendars to whatever recurring natural phenomena they could most easily observe. In areas with pronounced seasons, annual weather changes usually fixed the calendar; in warmer climates such as Southern Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, the moon was used to mark time.

    Unfortunately, the cycles of the sun and moon do not synchronise well.

    A lunar year (consisting of 12 lunar cycles, or lunation, each 29½ days long) is only 354 days, 8 hours long; that is unlike a solar year which lasts about 365¼ days. After three years, a strict lunar calendar would have diverged from the solar calendar by 33 days, or more than one lunation.

    The Muslim calendar is the only purely lunar calendar with widespread use today. Its months have no permanent connection to any particular season. Muslim religious celebrations, such as Ramadan, may therefore occur at any date of the Gregorian calendar.

    To compensate for the difference in the solar and lunar year, calendar makers introduced the practice of intercalation (the addition of extra days or months to the calendar) to make it more accurate.

    Gregorian calendar

    Despite its widespread use, the Gregorian calendar has a number of weaknesses. It cannot be divided into equal halves or quarters; the number of days per month is haphazard; and months or even years may begin on any day of the week.

    Since the time of Pope Gregory XIII, many other proposals for calendar reform have been made. For instance, in the 1840s, philosopher Auguste Comte suggested that the 365th day of each year be a holiday not assigned to a day of the week.

    The French Revolution also made an attempt to introduce a new calendar. On October 5, 1793, the revolutionary convention decreed that the year (starting on September 22, 1792—the autumnal equinox, and the day after the proclamation of the new republic) would be divided into 12 months of 30 days, named after corresponding seasonal phenomena (e.g. seed, blossom, harvest).

    The remaining five days of the year, called sans-culottides were considered feast days. In leap years, the extra day (Revolution Day) was to be added to the end of the year. The Revolutionary calendar had no week; each month was divided into three decades, with every tenth day to be a day of rest. This clumsy calendar, however, perished with the French Republic because of its clumsiness.

    Conclusion

    Of all the existing calendars, only Hijrah has been generally acknowledged as unique in effect and in workability. In commemoration of the great occasion of Prophet Muhammad’s (SAW) emigration from Makkah to Madinah in 622 CE, both the Nigerian Supreme Council for Islamic Affairs (NSCIA) and the Muslim Ummah of Southwest Nigeria (MUSWEN) have sent messages of felicitations to Nigerian Muslim Ummah just as ‘The Message’ column also says HAPPY NEW YEAR!

  • Canon Sowunmi: A great Nigerian passes on

    Canon Sowunmi: A great Nigerian passes on

    Professor Margaret Adebisi Sowunmi, professor of palynology and environmental archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, University of Ibadan passed on in May and was laid to rest on June 24. This has been a personal loss to me and a collective loss to the University of Ibadan, the Anglican Christian community and to the city of Ibadan and Nigeria as a whole.  This elegant and generally quiet lady who spoke slowly and effectively had unmistakably noticeable presence wherever she was.

    She was born in Kano in 1939 where her father, the late Anglican Bishop of Ibadan was a young cleric during the colonial days before coming back South and rising to head the Anglican Diocese in Ibadan where Adebisi grew up attending primary and secondary schools, including the iconic Saint Anne’s  and Ibadan Grammar schools before entering the University of Ibadan where she read Botany and earned a  B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in  palynology and environmental archaeology generally applying the study of botany to archaeology. She blazed the trail in this particular area of application of the science of botany to the study of environmental changes from the past to the present which is quite important here in Africa where radio carbon dating is important in dating the African past where written documentation is not available or very scarce.

    Those of us not involved in the arcane study of archaeology are most interested in the role of Professor Sowunmi in the church particularly in the Chapel of Resurrection, the main Christian church in the Ibadan university community.

    The church will miss her very much. Even those of us who are not regular members of the church were attracted to her regular homilies during the Passion Week ending the Christian Lenten season climaxing in Easter marking the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

    For the past 20 years, I drove from Lagos to Ibadan to attend the one-week Passion Week simply to listen and see Professor Sowunmi’s elucidation of the word of God as contained in the Christian Bible. I exchanged texts and calls with her, raising one issue or two on issues of the Christian faith and its application to our country’s problems. She sometimes asked me what we Christians were doing about our faith especially when Christians were in government or excluded from government. She once invited me to give a talk to the Christian community at the university chapel on the role of Christians in the global governments and what we can learn from it.

    I decided to focus my discussion on the Christian community in Germany since the end of the Second World War because I had just come back from Germany where I had been an ambassador from 1991 to1995 mentioning the significance of Christianity in the formation of the dominant political party in Germany, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of current German chancellor, Friedrich Merz and the first post-war chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

    I mentioned  that this party inherited the legacy of the largely Catholic Centre Party of the past as a foundation for the current CDU  which has built their support on the large Catholic community  in West Germany and now the Protestant Christian community in Eastern Germany both of which commands about 45% of the  nation’s population.  

    Read Also: Tinubu signs historic Tax Reform Bills to law Thursday

    I always mentioned the fact that although the sectarian nature of politics is hardly mentioned publicly but it is nevertheless important, I also said the fact of sectarian belonging in Germany is significant in that tithes were deducted by the state and forwarded to the sectarian bodies chosen by the citizens. I also told my audience then that major universities and their teaching hospitals were funded majorly by the churches obviously attracting state and federal grants as determined by government. I also alluded to the role of the Evangelical church in the USA, Republican Party and the Anglican Communion in the Conservative Party in the UK and the Catholic churches in Latin America especially, and splinter marginalised groups known as revolutionary Christianity of armed militants and I mentioned the role of the Muslim umma in the politics of Turkey, the Sudan and Northern Nigeria and the Catholic community in Eastern Nigeria. 

    After listening, she asked me why we Christians were so silent that we hardly had a say in government. She asked the audience what we could do about this. I know for sure she organised silently for the Christian candidate for governor in Oyo State irrespective of party affiliation in the last two elections. 

    Whatever radical opinions she held she kept to herself without being loud about it but occasionally expressing some of these views as a preacher on the pulpit. I don’t know how effective her effort was but it shows her commitment to social change. She also, I believe, took serious interest in national politics and held office of patron of a patriotic pressure movement basically in an advisory capacity. All I can say is that she was not happy with the way things have been with the political development in our country since independence.

    I dare say not many of us in the academic community and the general intelligentsia have been happy with the way the country is run without thought of the future. If Professor Sowunmi were a man, she would have been in the forefront of confrontational politics in the country. She held very dim view of academics in government. She made me feel this when I had a role in government no matter how tangentially a role I felt I had.

    I had a lot of respect for her restrained approach to religion and politics generally and was much impressed by her erudition in religious scholarship despite the fact that she did not quite train as a cleric unless one says she learnt all that needed to be learned under her revered father, the Very Reverend Jadesimi, one time Anglican Bishop of Ibadan. She also, like some us, had her religious baptism in Saint Anne’s and Ibadan Grammar School. I know this because those of us who went to schools like Christ’ School Ado – Ekiti, Lagos Anglican Grammar School, (CMS Grammar School), Igbobi College, Lagos, Dennis Memorial Grammar School Onitsha, Baptist Boys High School, Abeokuta, Saint Gregory College, Lagos, Old Holy Ghost College Owerri to mention the few that I know, had distinctive Christian approach to governance.  Of course, these schools have been polluted by government take over at certain times or the other so the moral standards have not been maintained.

    I regard the death of Professor Adebisi Sowunmi, beloved wife of the late Professor Segun Sowunmi, a distinguished mathematician as a great loss to the Christian community, the academic world and to her friends and relations and to her family to who she is simply irreplaceable.

    Rest in peace, Sisi Bisi, as I called you.  We all will miss you but I am sure heaven will rejoice at your coming. You have run a good race and won the crown of glory.

    Praise the Lord.

  • PDP to INEC: Tell us our secretary!

    PDP to INEC: Tell us our secretary!

    It was the most embarrassing and shameful question that any group can ask a non-member of the group. On Tuesday, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was at the Abuja headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to wait for it, ask the agency who the party’s secretary is. It was, as someone noted yesterday, one question too many.

    How can PDP expect INEC to determine who the party’s secretary is for it? What is INEC’s business with who the person is? It should be PDP telling INEC who its secretary is and not the other way round. But what will Nigerians not see from PDP? Its visit to INEC was prompted by the agency’s query over its correspondence on its forthcoming National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting. The party wrote to INEC, informing the agency of its NEC meeting fixed for June 30. The letter was solely signed by its national chairman, Ambassador Umar Damagum. Whereas, it should have been jointly signed with the secretary.

    So, you can now understand why it asked INEC: “who is our secretary?”. The bemused INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, there and then proceeded to lecture the party and its chieftains and asked them to return home to put their house in order. PDP cannot be easily forgotten in the political annals of Nigeria. It has played a leading role in the present democratic journey which began in 1999. It remains to be seen whether its NEC meeting will hold, as scheduled, because of the communication problem.

    PDP was the first party to rule Nigeria. Between 1999 and 2015 that it held sway, PDP was larger than life itself. It swept every other party out of the way, and at the height of its reign, it boasted in 2008 that it would be in power for 60 years. Since pride goes before a fall, that boast by its then national chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, was the beginning of its end. It fell yakata at the polls seven years later! A coalition of parties that became known as All Progressives Congress (APC) wrested power from it 10 years ago.

    The coalition comprised a rump of PDP known then as nPDP, a breakaway faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), the dissolved Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). These legacy parties, especially CPC and ACN gave up their identities to form APC, but PDP and APGA remained in one form or the other. Indeed, some PDP and APGA members who played leading roles in the formation of APC have since returned to their original parties.

    Just as they did to PDP, some of those who championed APC’s formation like Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai, are now planning to give APC the same treatment. El-Rufai has left the party. Amaechi has not formally done so, but he is as good as gone. Both men are in the vanguard of what they call a ‘national coalition’ to unseat APC in 2027. Coalition appears the easy way to go, but those that they look down upon as ‘small parties,’ like the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the All Democratic Congress (ADC), may play the spoiler.

    Reason: these ‘small parties’ that they are planning to hijack and name as their new platform, is not playing ball. The alternative is to form a new party and that is not an easy route to take, going by the guidelines of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the registration of parties.

    Read Also: Tinubu signs historic Tax Reform Bills to law Thursday

    Invariably, some PDP stalwarts who are the  brains behind the coalition, incurred the ire of the governors and National Assembly members elected on the party’s platform, among others. Do not mind that these latter-day ‘die-hard’ PDP members were also in the not too distant past involved in this kind of game of building a coalition right under the nose of their own party that was then in power, just as Amaechi and a few other APC members, who have not left the party are doing now.

    Even, one of PDP’s leading lights, Atiku Abubakar, who has changed parties as often as a woman changes wrappers, in his hunger for presidential power can be assessed on the same parameters. Political watchers, are however, wondering why he should be talking of a coalition instead of working for the cohesion of his party. PDP is sharply divided. It has lost many of its members, including governors and National and state assemblies’ members to APC in the last few months. There is also trouble in its National Working Committee (NWC) over who the party’s secretary is.

    Senator Samuel Anyanwu held the position until he went to contest the last governorship election in his home state of Imo. The post was not filled in his absence. After the election, Anyanwu cashed in on the lacuna to take back his job. The NWC rebuffed his move, insisting that Sunday Ude-Okoye had been appointed as secretary. The NWC did that without recourse to the NEC, which has the sole authority to so act. The legality of the matter became an issue. At the end of the day, the Supreme Court, in a back to sender manner, ordered the litigants to go and resolve what it called the ‘party’s internal affair’.

    Since then, the party has been running from pillar to post and experimenting with different secretaries in its dealings with others, using the one that suits its purpose at any point in time. For its landmark 100th NEC meeting billed for June 30, it tried to be clever by half, but INEC saw through its trick. INEC faulted the party’s correspondence on grounds that it was not co-signed by the secretary and urged the party to go and do the right thing.

    The party insisted that it did nothing wrong since the NEC meeting is non-elective, meaning it is not for the election of its executive, which INEC must monitor upon being notified in a letter jointly written and signed by its chairman and secretary. But it was tongue-tied when it was told that on the 99 previous occasions that it wrote to INEC on its NEC meeting, the letters had always borne the signatures of its chairman and secretary. According to INEC, “we are happy that this is the 100th meeting. Meaning that 99 times in the past you wrote to us. On those 99 occasions, the letters were signed by the chairman and secretary”.

    In recent times, INEC recalled that it has been receiving letters from the party signed by different secretaries. “At a time, we received a letter signed by Anyanwu. We got another one signed by Ude-Okoye; then another came from Anyanwu and we got another from Setonji Koshoedo”. Who is really PDP National Secretary? It looks like a simple question, but it is not that easy for PDP to answer. It went to INEC to seek clarification and came out “more confused”, according to this paper’s lead headline yesterday. How can a party not know its own national secretary.

    PDP went to INEC pretending not to know who is its secretary, and asked the agency to bail it out. Oh, blimey! What a party? How come PDP led this country for 16 years with this kind of infantilism? For God’s sake, how can a party, not any party for that matter, but PDP and its chieftains go to INEC and be asking, probably with hands behind their backs, like schoolboys: “sir, please, who is our secretary?” PDP has become a joke of a party, and nothing portrays this more than its childlike act at INEC office. Is this the party that wants to return to power in 2027?

    Nigeria and its people deserve more than that. The country cannot afford to be led again by a party that does not know its right from its left. If PDP does not know who its secretary is, how then can it figure out what the country’s challenges are if given the chance to lead again? Nigeria cannot afford to return to Egypt. PDP should return to the drawing board and put its house in order, as Yakubu advised.

    •postscript: Anyanwu has been reinstated as secretary

  • Remember when we grew food in our gardens

    Remember when we grew food in our gardens

    There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm, notes Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac; one is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other, is that heat comes from the furnace.

    For the benefit of the superficial Millennial or Gen Z-er, the Curmudgeon paints a more fascinating picture of the source of all wealth. And in the true spirit of his portraiture, I’d say: Imagine yourself a ghommid, standing smack in the centre of Nigeria’s groundnut pyramids, animal ranches, and cocoa plantations, several decades ago.

    You take your ghommid’s shears and cut down surrounding flora to make a clearing for a farm. As the crops flower and animals fatten, you harvest the best grains and herd all the supple livestock into a giant pile, wave a magic wand, and it’s all turned into industry, buildings, and people spattered across gated high society and sprawling boondocks. You name this ‘progress’ and feign mutation from ghommid to giant.

    Such is the relationship between cities and the countryside, the modern and out-of-date, the dwindling past, and the silicon age. We must understand, however, that mortal Nigeria, as the metaphorical giant, is nothing but a dispensable minion in the economics of life.

    A Nigerian prototype of America’s Silicon Valley is the Millennials and Gen Zers’ most astute retort to the declining world foisted upon all by the older generation. But this has done too little to improve our fortunes. Ultimately, the burgeoning IT sector fosters ephemeral growth; rather than giving relief, it delivers a Siamese bundle of utopia and dystopia in one birth.

    Young Nigeria, like the rest of the world, is besotted by this twin grotesqueness for its dazzle and espoused freedoms. More fascinating are the manifestations of the now ubiquitous start-up and fintech. A peculiar thing is happening: where the government fails to show up, foreign financiers or angel funders, if you like, are extending their interventions with curious funding.

    Of course, nobody sees anything wrong with this. How could anyone deem such interventions scary in a world where oligarchs maul promising youths into armed bandits, career assassins, political hooligans, murderers, arsonists, and so on, while they embezzle public funds to entertain their wives and educate their children abroad?

    Read Also: Tinubu signs historic Tax Reform Bills to law Thursday

    Thus, the argument is that angel funding is great for the economy. These seed monies – irrespective of their slush equivalents used for funding regime change and dubious political springs worldwide –  are filling a crucial void in empowering youths who would otherwise be unemployed and left out of the loop of social interventions.

    Not all ‘seed money’ is a slush fund; a few agricultural startups have sprouted from the seeds of angel funders with stakes in diverse sectors of the agricultural economy. Some of their interventions subsist in the production of palm kernel oil (PKO), which is still currently inadequate for the companies that use it as raw material.

    Then, some support farmers’ scale-up from peasant farming to commercial farming by providing extension services, quality seeds, access to finance, access to mechanisation, and general advisory services on new and innovative methods in farming.

    These appreciable interventions deserve a sustainable partnership between the government and the so-called angel funders of Nigeria’s Silicon Valley. But technology, like the crude oil boom, is Janus-faced, often manifesting as development’s womb and tomb.

    Little wonder Silicon Valley subsists as the playground of nerds and mindless herds on a leash. It is also the modern arena of the surveillance state, our private perversions and mob wars: government and the governed, husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and their sexual nemesis, politicians and electorate, clash like gladiators – their mismatched whims the tools of shredding and seizure.

    The history of technology has often been characterised by a debate between enamoured romantics and dismissive sceptics. Neither divide, however, projects a convincing response to the opportunities and challenges that new technologies present; both in turn often exaggerate or downplay the impact of technology, and this leads to entrenched positions and polarisation.

    Such entrenched positions can be harmful even if politically correct and more media-friendly than the highly differentiated analysis fostered by reality and careful, longitudinal research.

    Advocates of technology integration in agriculture must understand the discourses that drive it and, in some cases, harm its acceptance, and find a balance between the technological innovations that can be sustained by sound policies and those driven more by Machiavellian interests.

    Technology is useless if it isn’t humane and doesn’t improve life. Given the soil’s contribution to all life and wealth, technology must be deployed to enhance its healing and restorative properties by which disease passes into health, age into youth, and death into life.

  • Put ‘sickle cell awareness’ in primary school curriculum

    Put ‘sickle cell awareness’ in primary school curriculum

    International medicine. The UK has introduced ‘Assisted Death’ for terminally ill and pain-ridden patients leading miserable terminal days. This means more control over Date of Death (DOD). In Nigeria, ‘terrorists’ inflict premature DOD on hundreds of healthy Fellow Nigerians in Plateau and Benue and Nasarawa states with vicious and callous regularity. Nigeria, where is your security as you retire over 400 senior officers in wartime? Too many Nigerians die from the disease ‘lack of adequate government security’.

    Elsewhere a billionaire had six ‘biological children and ‘had’ a further 100 children ‘fathered indirectly’ by him through sperm bank donations. Magnanimously, he has arranged a will equally favouring all of them amounting to $132m each. Fair!

    Already there are stem cell and gene manipulation methods to eliminate abnormal genes like sickle cell and other ‘bad’ genes from our babies, pre-birth or at birth or later. There are many inherited disorders causing a very heavy burden on families.  Soon it will be possible to prolong natural life, eliminate many diseases and even unwanted societal ‘no-no’ traits like inherited perceived stature, weight, facial ‘imperfections’. In Nigeria, we still grapple with malaria and typhoid and cholera, non-gene problems.

    The SICKLE CELL TRAIT is our most common genetic abnormality in Nigeria and especially in Western Nigeria occurring in about 25% the population. Not all of them get sick. Only the ones with SS are prone to more life-threatening sickness and SC will have less sickness. The AS and AC are never sickle cell sick but may occasionally have blood in the urine from exercise.

    If you have ever known the suffering of a sickle cell patient, you will appreciate the need to prevent your children getting Sickle Cell Disease. At nine, in the early 60s, I lost a six-year old cousin, Isho in a Yaba Lagos Flat. I sat wondering why someone playing football with me two hours before, was said by my father, a doctor and his uncle, to have died aka ‘gone to fill a vacancy in heaven’. Many years later as a registrar in Obstetrics and Gynaecology in UCH, Ibadan, I was devastated when informed that Isho’s senior sister, Yetunde had died in childbirth in Lagos. They both had Sickle Cell Disease.

    Of course there are more and more SCD patients surviving longer, but many more did not. Since then, many good citizens and organisation have combatted SCD through many other avenues including the Sickel Cell Foundation, Educare Trust, UCH Sickel Cell clinic etc  and improved government medical facilities etc, to prevent and to  care for those with Sickle Cell Disease.

    The sickle cell rate remains high despite the efforts by many including Educare Trust to educate, empower and encourage our youth to ask when meeting the opposite sex not only ‘what is your name?’ but to ask instead, ‘WHAT IS YOUR NAME AND WHAT IS YOUR BLOOD GENOTYPE’ . They should then only make amorous moves in cases where they are compatible. HB, AA, GENOTYPE is free to fall in love and have SS and SC free babies with anyone even SS. Those with AS AND AC SHOULD NOT RISK falling in love with AS, AC OR SS OR SC partners if they want to totally prevent the SCD in their future family. The Sickle Cell gene is believed to protective against severity of malaria but we have anti-malarials for that now.

    EACH OF OUR YOUTH SHOULD BE ASKED AND ASK OF EACH OTHER ‘IS LOVE WORTH THE RISKING SICKLE CELL DISEASE?’ Please AI research ‘SCD COMPLICATIONS’ which include misery, bone and abdominal pains, ulcers and deformities, blood flow crises, eye diseases and many days and months off school and work, limiting education and work opportunities. Sickle Cell Disease is not a political football. SICKE CELL DISEASE CAUSES PREVENTABLE DISEASES AND DEATH, debilitating the victims and their families. But all is not lost. YOU CAN SAVE A SICKLE CELL LIFE!

    Read Also: PRNigeria commends new book on Artificial Intelligence in Public Relations

    Nigeria’s primary, secondary and tertiary curricula must have sickle cell maths/logic, medicine, socio-economic impact lessons.   Millions leave school, abandoning ‘formal learning’ after just primary school. Therefore, it is not nuclear physics to logically introduce ‘SICKLE CELL LOGIC’ INTO THE NIGERIAN PRIMARY SCHOOL CURRICULUM WITH RELATED COMPULSORY QUESTIONS IN THE PRIMARY SCHOOL LEAVING CERTIFICATE AND COMMON ENTRANCE and added to with at higher knowledge content at secondary and all tertiary courses and subjects from Accountancy to Zoology and General Paper in all universities.

    Despite a National Health Insurance Service, NHIS and various state HIS organisations, few offer free service to the sickle cell population. They are now joined by Adekunle Gold and his AG Foundation’s five star care programme offering free health insurance cover for 1000 sickle cell children with LASHMA AND SAMI -Sickle Cell Advocacy and Management Initiative. HURRAY. God Bless AG and all teams involved.

    A FREE SICKLE CELL TEST & CERTIFICATE SHOULD BE MANDATORY FOR ALL VULNERABLE CHILDREN.

    THE UK’s NHS is about to ‘DNA screen’ all new-born babies for hundreds of illnesses which can be prevented by genetic modification treatments thus reducing or eliminating millions of hospital visits and bed occupancy days, countless medicine prescriptions and ‘missed work’ for illness. Serious ethical and data theft issues exist around discussing such results with the child’s family members. Should information be revealed pre-marriage to potential spouses and in-law families who may reject the individual if there is a potential for future severe or life-shortening disease. Medical ethical questions for the future.                    

  • 2027 coalitions and collisions

    2027 coalitions and collisions

    The undeclared kick-off of the 2027 general election campaign is something of a false start. It’s a start nonetheless – one laden with boasts, bluster and outright threats. To be fair, the stuff isn’t just coming from one direction: the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and those who would love to oust it, are giving as good as they get.

    Last weekend, the party’s high command descended on Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital, to formally receive Governor Umo Eno, who had finally executed his oft-threatened exit from the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP). Everyone from Vice President Kashim Shettima to the party’s entire slate of governors was present.

    The state is home turf for Senate President Godswill Akpabio who was once its governor. Naturally, he was in his element celebrating the bloodless coup that further enfeebled the main opposition party. Akwa Ibom, like most states in the South-South zone, was until recently died-in-the-wool PDP territory. So, it was no mean feat that the entire structure of the governing party would dissolve overnight into enemy camp without resistance.

    While applauding Eno for making the right political choice, Akpabio suggested governors of Bayelsa and Rivers would soon follow. It wasn’t the appeal of a suitor; it was a statement delivered with the certainty of a prophet. Were his prophecy to be fulfilled, not too many would be surprised given that stranger things have been happening lately.

    The punch-drunk PDP didn’t have much of a response to the loss of another heavyweight from within its ranks. It was probably too preoccupied trying to identify which of many claimants was its rightful National Secretary to worry about the rising number of rats fleeing its listing ship.

    With its 10 governors, 36 senators and 118 members of the House of Representatives, it remains, on paper, the preeminent opposition party. But it’s a measure of how low its stock has sunk that some of its leading lights like former Vice President Atiku Abubakar and ex-Senate President David Mark are among sponsors of the yet-to-be-registered All Democratic Alliance (ADA). 

    By their actions and utterances, the two men have written off PDP as a viable vehicle for prosecuting the 2027 election. Atiku has been arguing for months that the only way President Bola Tinubu and APC can be defeated at the next polls is for all opposition platforms to come together. Mark has been less voluble but no less committed to the cause.

    Unfortunately for Atiku, his passion for defeating his one-time ally by all means necessary is not shared by PDP governors who have declared they won’t touch his coalition with a ten-foot pole. This is a significant disagreement which suggests that those who now control the party are unlikely to make the former VP flag bearer given he’s lost faith in the platform. It’s also a pointer that he could yet exit to actualise his ambitions elsewhere.

    Although it remains very much work in progress, what the coalition, or a likely new party, lacks in terms of membership or office holders, it makes up for with bluster and threats. In the face of every setback dealt the opposition by way of high profile defections to the ruling party, its boosters head for television talk shows to offload incendiary interviews.

    Former Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, was at it again this week, regurgitating the same talking points. Apparently, he and his confederates had been conducting opinion polls which claim Tinubu had less than 10% approval in every corner of the country.

    For a man of his intellect and sophistication, this faith in his “scientific” polls is touching. Beyond offering comfort to he and his co-conspirators, El-Rufai should treat polls and pollsters with a healthy dose of caution. For one thing, their reputation isn’t what it used to be after they misfired badly in the 2016 Hillary Clinton versus Donald Trump presidential contest.

    For months last year they predicted a tight race between Kamala Harris and Trump – only for Election Day to reveal a chasm in support between the two candidates. What’s more, today’s polls may be meaningless in two years when actual voting would be taking place.

    Truth is wise men don’t rush to conclusions on the strength of dodgy opinion polls – especially in a country as unpredictable as Nigeria. If tough economic conditions were the only determinant of electoral success or failure in these parts, then Tinubu wouldn’t be president given the state of the nation between January and February 2023.

    Another noisy figure in the nascent opposition platform is one-time Foreign Minister and former Jigawa State Governor, Sule Lamido. What can be gleaned from his regular utterances is his readiness to join any grouping that can remove the incumbent from office.

    While the focus of these individuals is clear, how to transit from dreaming to reality has become a giant obstacle. For all their hot air, the would-be coalition hasn’t done much to inspire confidence about their project within the political class and in the wider polity. They can’t even agree on how to proceed.

    At the onset, the Social Democratic Party (SDP) was touted as their platform of choice. El-Rufai announced his defection there with much fanfare. But their ardour for the arrangement cooled rapidly. The party’s National Secretary, Dr. Olu Agunloye, now describes his would-be collaborators as “confused people” who are only interested in taking over.

    Former presidential adviser turned critic, Hakeem Baba-Ahmed, has been equally unsparing, describing the coalition’s promoters as only concerned with being the face of project. Just as many had predicted, a collision of egos and ambitions is already playing out.

    Baba-Ahmed laments that even before getting out of the starting block, Nigeria’s latest set of would-be saviours have blown the opportunity of offering a credible challenge to the administration.

    “The most important thing they’re doing wrong is putting themselves forward,” he said on Arise TV. “It’s a coalition of a few politicians who hope that they can arrive at some understanding and then open the door and say, ‘ok, fellow Nigerians, we’ve agreed. This one will be this, and this one will be that, and you can now come in.’

    Read Also: Brazilian-backed $1bn GIP to overhaul Nigeria’s agricultural sector – Tinubu

    “It’s the wrong way about it. None of these people should lead or be seen in a position where they’re determining who should be in that coalition. They can work behind the scenes. What they need is a generational shift and a political shift away from who they are, what they’ve done, what they want to do, to a different set of Nigerians who can give Nigerians hope.

    “These are not the people who are saying, give us trust. Trust us again to solve the problems that the APC is creating. This is the wrong thing. And it’s very difficult to convince politicians that Nigerians can see through you. They don’t have faith that you actually represent a future, a different future from this government. You just want to replace President Tinubu.”

    Put differently, those offering change are as stale as they come, laden with all sorts of unattractive baggage. Virtually all have been active participants in making Nigeria what it is today. That’s why their project is having difficulty scaling the credibility hurdle.

    It’s often said you don’t get a second chance to make the first impression. What those who claim to be speaking for the coalition have succeeded in doing so far is projecting vengeance and retribution, as well as the promotion of the interests of a section of the country, as their agenda.

    Bitterness and outpouring of venom against the incumbent president is no alternative to providing voters an alternative governance vision. All we hear is “we must remove Tinubu.” If that’s all Atiku, El-Rufai and company have to offer, they are set for a rude collision with reality in the not-too distant future.