The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Genocide, not wordplay

    Genocide, not wordplay

    In Hitch 22: A Memoir, Christopher Hitchens recalls his conversation with a genocide survivor in Rwanda. She lamented to him that there was now nobody left on the face of the earth, either friend or relative, who knew who she was. No one who remembered her girlhood, early mischief and family lore; no sibling or companion who could tease her about that first romance; no lover or pal with whom to reminisce. All her birthdays, friendships, kinships, gone. She went on living, but with a tabula rasa as her diary and calendar.

    I remember this every time I read or hear of the sobbing earth in Benue and Plateau States; how entire communities are being erased in blood and memory; every time I hear how lives are being razed and buried under dust stirred by stampeding feet of fleeing mothers clutching their babies under a pitiless hail of bullets.

    In recent weeks alone, about 150 lives have been claimed in Plateau and Benue States in a series of coordinated massacres. The attacks bear the bloody signature of a familiar horror: armed bandits, herders, and foreign mercenaries.

    Amnesty says that between December 2023 and February 2024, 1,336 people were killed in Plateau State, and Benue continues to bleed as villages in Ukum, Logo, and Katsina-Ala mourn their dead, amid smouldering ashes of their homesteads.

    Yet, some dare to call this “conflict.” No. This is not a conflict. This is a genocide. And no veil of ambiguity can soften its cruelty. The Plateau and Benue massacres are well-orchestrated campaigns of human erasure, driven by greed, emboldened by impunity, and justified by a macabre theology of land, ethnicity, and dominion.

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    There is no justification for taking human lives under any pretext. No faith, farm, or grievance warrants the annihilation of children in their sleep, or the decapitation of fathers shielding their families with their chests.

    Even more horrifying is the revelation that some of these atrocities are perpetrated by Nigerians acting in concert with foreign mercenaries. Intelligence reports and eyewitness testimonies reveal that captured terrorists often confess to collaborations that span borders and ideologies. But let us not allow the temptation of foreign scapegoating blind us to the truth: Nigerians are killing Nigerians.

    To ascribe these killings solely to foreign influence is to miss the deeper malaise at the root of the crisis. What drives this beastly bloodlust is a feral hunger for land, resources, and power. The fields of Benue and the hills of Plateau are not just beautiful, they are bountiful. Beneath their topsoil lie fertile treasures: water bodies, arable land, and minerals. Thus, the vultures who mastermind carnage in the states do so to conquer and dispossess.

    And here, we must tread carefully. It is dangerously reductionist to script this as a Fulani versus Christian battle. Such a narrative, while seductive to the angry and grieving, is fatally flawed. When Boko Haram terrorists massacred Zabarmari’s Muslim farmers in Borno, the same influencers chanting “religious genocide” in Plateau were mute. When bandits razed entire Muslim communities in Sokoto and Zamfara, there was no outrage or candlelight vigil, there were no threads linking it to an agenda to Islamize the north.

    What is unfolding in Benue and Plateau is not a religious war but a siege of interest, waged by profiteers who see land as conquest and human lives as collateral. Yes, viral posts abound with conspiracy theories and recycled fear. They say the Fulanis plan to march over the south and “dip the Quran in the Lagos Lagoon.” They warn of stealthy invasions and grand replacement agendas. And it hits differently, doesn’t it? When the genocide we rationalised abroad seethes at our doorstep?

    A childhood friend, a Christian and proud son of Bokkos, once defended Israel’s siege on Gaza. “It’s security,” he said, “self-defence.” Until his village was set ablaze and his cousin’s children were murdered and burned to ashes. “This is too much. Will no one arrest the culprits? There is no justice,” he cried. And I had no heart to say what I thought; that “Nobody savours the taste of the bitter herbs we season for others.”

    To applaud genocide anywhere is to plant its seed at home. This is not to draw false equivalence. It is to appeal to our common humanity. Whether the victim be Jew or Muslim, Tiv or Hausa, Igbo or Kanuri, blood is blood, and the earth does not discriminate. Genocide is not just about mass killing; it is mass forgetting, mass silence, mass complicity. It is the deliberate wiping of memory, the snuffing out of lineage, the razing of every song and story that binds a people to the world.

    Today, Benue and Plateau are bleeding into dust. In the same way, Borno, Adamawa, Yobe, Sokoto, Kaduna and Gaza bled and still bleed.

    The onslaught has decimated once-thriving agroeconomies, turning farming communities into famine zones and IDP camps. Granaries lie empty, irrigation channels clogged with ash and bones. Markets are ghost towns. The youth flee to cities, and the old pray to die easily. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu must approach this as a national emergency. As he grapples with inflation and economic dislocation, he must crush this hydra of terrorism and banditry. The institution of a nationwide ranching policy must move from paper to pasture. The Land Use Act must be refined to protect communal lands from predatory acquisition masked as modernisation.

    The National Security Adviser, Nuhu Ribadu, must root out terror, whether it comes masked as herdsmen, insurgents, or communal warlords. Nigeria needs intelligence fusion centres, community policing frameworks, and rapid deployment squads trained in both combat and cultural nuance. And above all, we need justice: swift, spirited and blind.

    Yes, this administration made commendable moves, deploying special forces, reviving the Civilian Joint Task Force, and improving aerial surveillance in flashpoint areas. And for a time, there was hope. Attacks waned. Farmers returned to the fields. Children to schools. But that dawn has dimmed to a blood-soaked tide of terror.

    The federal, state, and local governments must stop operating as silos, and approach security as a choir, not a dissonance. Intelligence should be shared, responses must be swift. Issues of poverty, land disputes, and marginalisation must be addressed with greater sincerity and less artifice.

    And let us, the people, look inwards. We must resist the siren call of profiling. To label all Fulani as murderers is as absurd as calling all Tiv men violent. No ethnic group owns virtue or vice. There are killers and victims in every tongue. We must quit homogenising guilt and start amplifying the voices that root for peace.

    Religious groups must preach restraint. And the Nigerian press must quit magnifying hate. Let us tell the whole story, not just the parts that flatter our biases and wordplay. A genocide is not an abstraction. It is not history. It is not just Rwanda, Bosnia, or Gaza. It is here in Logo, Ukum, Bokkos, Katsina Ala. And if we do not rise to stop it, it will consume us all, first in flames, then in forgetting.

    Benue and Plateau are reminders that the arc of the moral universe does not, on its own, bend, but by the trembling hands of those who choose courage over comfort, truth over tribalism, and life over land tracts.

  • Rivers: One month after emergency rule

    Rivers: One month after emergency rule

    A little over one month ago, President Bola Tinubu, placed Rivers State under emergency rule, suspending Governor Siminalayi Fubara and members of the House of Assembly for six months. In the intervening period, debate has raged non-stop as to whether the drastic action was necessary.

    Those who believe the president overreacted are probably only focused on the narrow aspect of individuals losing out in a power struggle; or of scheming for advantage ahead the next elections.

    They forget that this battle was playing out in a terrain hosting a huge chunk of the nation’s oil and gas assets. For a country struggling to get its economic reset right, any major disruption of its key revenue generation sources could be disastrous.

    Tinubu cited attacks on pipelines in his broadcast announcing emergency rule. He didn’t go into too many details as to the gravity of the situation. What is clear is that late in March, ominous storms were gathering over Rivers State following the Supreme Court judgment that castrated Fubara politically and empowered his foes – the 27 pro-Nyesom Wike lawmakers.

    The apex court recognised Martins Amaewhule as Speaker and the other 26 legislators as legitimate members of the assembly. The verdict voided all that the governor had done with the so-called Victor Oko-Jombo three-man ‘legislature’ and had harsh words for Fubara for demolishing the assembly which had been bombed intentionally to prevent the initiation of impeachment proceedings in October 2023.

    While the judgment threw up clear winners in the long-running saga, and appeared to open a window for resolution, what would follow was a hardening of positions. It was obvious that the two sides had travelled too far in opposite directions – deleting the word compromise from their dictionaries in the process.

    The assembly quickly issued a string of ultimatums. The governor, clinging to whatever was left of his pride, pushed back on the ground he was stilling waiting for the certified true copy of the judgment. That would be released in short order – leaving him no further room to delay compliance.

    The days following would be humiliating. He announced plans to present the year’s budget without first agreeing terms with the lawmakers – resulting in the televised embarrassment of his convoy being denied entry into the lawmakers’ complex. He was left to make his case to the court of public opinion outside the shut gates.

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    It was just the beginning of his troubles as on March 17, Speaker Amaewhule forwarded a notice of gross misconduct allegations – the initial step in the impeachment process – to the governor and his deputy Ngozi Odu. By this very move, Rivers entered into uncharted waters.

    To say the polity was heated up would be understating things. Ethnic tensions were ratcheted up, playing the crisis as an attempt to injure the Ijaws politically. Threats of attacks against oil pipelines and other facilities were openly made. It wasn’t long before they were carried out.

    But for the emergency declaration we may now be in the post-Fubara era in the state, given the overwhelming majority held by his foes in the assembly. The only thing that could have prevented that outcome would have been the appointment by the Chief Judge of an investigating panel that would have returned a not guilty verdict – short-circuiting the process. But that wasn’t a given.

    Had impeachment succeeded, control of the state’s entire power structures would have been back in the hands of Federal Capital Territory Minister Wike – a polarising figure who is as much loved as he is reviled by sections of the populace within and outside the state. Those who loathed that outcome would have been left with only extra-constitutional means to resist, seeing as whatever legal challenges they came up with would have failed.

    Notorious for his blunt speaking, the minister recently admitted that he preferred the permanent ouster of Fubara by impeachment, something he was certain would have come to pass. He then asked those criticising the emergency declaration to go bow at Tinubu’s feet for saving their man in the nick of time. Over a month ago he had boasted there would be no blowback from the governor’s ouster.

    Interestingly, Fubara’s reaction to his rule being truncated has been relatively tame. He has asked his supporters to be calm. A few days ago he told them to keep supporting the president. That isn’t the sort of rhetoric you would expect from someone who felt hard done by. If anything, it looks like the reaction of man who has assessed his chances through realistic lens and knows he was saved by the bell.

    The same cannot be said for some of his supporters who view emergency rule as an injustice. They are the ones sponsoring women protesters to take to the streets weekly, in the process triggering counter-protests by the same gender on the opposing side. How such demonstrations help the governor’s cause is hard to understand. But such is their belief that he would somehow have survived the impeachment storm he was facing before Tinubu’s intervention.

    Whether in medicine or other aspects of life, a key goal of emergency action is achieving stability. There’s no question that for all the street protests and legal challenges, the political temperature in Rivers is much lower today than it was a month ago.

    Within days of the Sole Administrator, Vice Admiral Ibok-Ete Ibas (rtd), taking the reins allocations and other funds which had been frozen by the Supreme Court judgment were released by the Federal Government, bringing succour to workers who face an uncertain future while the budget standoff between Fubara and the lawmakers lasted.

    Despite criticism, some semblance of governance has been restored to local councils which have also been caught in the political crossfire as well as grounded by the apex court’s judgment. Even the much-feared sabotage attacks on oil facilities have not manifested.

    That’s why rather than split hairs savaging the president for his actions in Rivers, all reasonable people should be working to ensure reconciliation and the restoration of constitutional order. The emergency proclamation indicates that the interregnum ‘may’ be extended if the conditions that caused it remain in place. Surely, that’s not an outcome anyone wants.

    Six months may look like six years to people who are used to exercising power. But in reality that’s just what it is – six months! This point is significant given widespread reports of a meeting in London between Tinubu and Fubara during his recent two-week overseas trip.

    Credible sources say the meeting is just a first step to a larger gathering of critical stakeholders in the crisis. Having stared into the abyss all sides now appear ready to make deals that would ensure the unusual governance setup in Rivers isn’t unduly prolonged.

    These are the same compromises spurned two years ago by parties that thought they could prevail by their own strength. Hopefully, those who influenced Fubara to dump the deal brokered by Tinubu in 2023, now realise that however powerful a governor might be, in certain states there’s a balance of terror that you can only navigate by compromise.   

  • Adamolekun reflects on governance, development

    Adamolekun reflects on governance, development

    This is only a forerunner of a 239-page book by Professor Ladipo Adamolekun, NNOM, titled, Reflections on Governance and Development in Nigeria, published in April 2025, by Caligata Publishing Company Limited, Ibadan. The book will be launched tomorrow, Thursday, April 24, 2025, in Akure, Ondo State. A more detailed review will follow the book launch later.

    It is important to recall that Professor Adamolekun is an Oxford-trained expert in public administration and development and had a nearly 20-year stint at the World Bank, after meritorious service as Dean of the Faculty of Administration, University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University), Ile-Ife, Nigeria. His expansive scholarship, typified by the publication of many books, monographs, and journal articles on administration and development earned him the award of the Nigerian National Order of Merit (NNOM) twenty years ago. Yet, he never slowed down. The present book is the latest testimony.

    The book sets out to answer three basic questions:

    •What are the major fundamentals of, and impediments to, good governance in Nigeria?

    •What are the major impediments to development in Nigeria?

    •How might good governance and development be achieved in Nigeria?

    In his elaboration on the first two questions, Adamolekun delved into the six central issues featured prominently in the development literature, namely, (1) electoral legitimacy; (2) rule of law; (3) civil liberties (to which human rights is central); (4) accountability and transparency (including anti-corruption measures; (5) administrative competence; and (6) development-oriented leadership. These issues are discussed in relation to the Nigerian situation but also set within African and international contexts, where necessary. These issues recur in various discussions on governance and development throughout the book.

    In addition, Adamolekun also raised a seventh issue, bearing in mind the peculiarities of the Nigerian federation—the issue of a devolved federation as a key macro-governance issue. This issue would later feature prominently in his recommendations discussed briefly below.

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    After teasing out these issues in several chapters, he goes on to provide answers to the third question. In order to fully appreciate his recommendations, Adamolekun sets Nigeria’s performance records since 1999 against similar data in African countries, using the Mo Ibrahim Index of African Governance. Nigeria never reached 50% score in the years data were available, nor did it rank higher than the bottom 20 poor performers every year, except in 2018 when it was ranked in the bottom 25, despite its biggest size and highest GDP. Adamolekun’s conclusion is not surprising: “The verdict is clear and unambiguous, the quality of governance in Nigeria is poor.”

    Although solutions to poor governance and development problems are embedded in several discussions throughout the book, Adamolekun brought the recommendations together in the book’s concluding chapter, titled, Path to achieving improved governance and good development performance. The recommendations are made with particular reference to Nigeria.

    Unsurprisingly, the recommendations centre on improvements on the central issues in the development literature elaborated upon at the beginning of the book and foregrounded in the third paragraph of this essay. Rather than summarize the recommendations here, I leave it to readers to read them in full and make their own judgement.

    Nevertheless, I find it necessary to provide my own assessment, especially since Adamolekun and I agreed that only a devolved federation could aid good governance, channel necessary development, and provide self-fulfillment to Nigerians. This convergence of opinion has different roots. Adamolekun came to this conclusion from the perspectives of administration and development and I from the perspectives of linguistics and anthropology.

    We both recognize that Nigeria is a multilingual, multiethnic, and multi-religious state. Atop these primordial divisions are geographical and administrative groupings—North vs South; Zone vs Zone; State vs State; and Local Government vs Local Government, each in competition with the other.

    Of course, the divisions are not neat as they are either colonial or military creations for administrative convenience. True, Muslims are concentrated in the North and Christians in the South, but they are both found in every region or state, each with its own base of traditional religion. Similarly, many ethnic groups find themselves scattered across regional, state, or even local government boundaries.

    But whatever “convenience” was meant to be achieved by the geographical or administrative divisions never came to fruition, partly because of the lopsidedness in the creation of the geographical or administrative divisions. For example, Lagos and Kano have comparable populations (Lagos is even believed to be more populated), but Lagos has only 20 Local Governments, whereas Kano has 44! By the same token, Ondo has only 18 Local Governments, whereas Osun has 30; yet, both states have comparable populations.

    Yet another source of lopsidedness is the over-concentration of powers and resource allocation in the central government. This has had two damning consequences for governance and development. First, the powers of the central government make it the locus of fierce competitions for political power. In the process, electoral legitimacy and the rule of law are undermined or believed to be so.

    Second, the central government has been the locus of corruption since the attainment of independence. Corruption was institutionalized by military dictators and escalated since return to civilian rule in 1999. Even while corruption is also rampant in the states, protests are often directed at the federal government because of its perceived powers. Similarly, separatist agitations are directed at the central government, because it is viewed as the locus of injustice and inequity.

    It is within the above contexts that a devolved federation is recommended as panacea to Nigeria’s governance and development problems. Adamolekun prescribed the following characteristics of the desirable devolved federation for Nigeria:

    • the existing six geopolitical zones as federating units instead of the existing 36 states, many of which are not viable;

    • the assignment of functions between the central government and the federating units, using the same principle of subsidiarity as in the 1963 Constitution;

    • the allocation of resources consistent with the imperative of fiscal federalism and increased functions for sub-national governments.

    I agree with Adamolekun that “A devolved federation is a necessity, not a choice,” and that “only a devolved Nigerian federation can become a well-performing state that is capable of achieving good development performance.” It is no wonder then that Adamolekun ranked it over his other recommendations.

    The issue of how to get there has been a major clog, despite several attempts at moving forward on devolution. We have had two major national deliberations, the 2005 National Political Reform Conference and the 2014 National Conference. However, their far-reaching recommendations were either selectively appropriated for selfish political agenda or totally ignored.

    I have always argued that, if a one-off comprehensive approach is not feasible for political reasons, a gradualist approach could be adopted to achieve the same result over time. It is within this context that the bill on state police now before the National Assembly should be expedited to combat insecurity. It may well be a first step toward a devolved security structure and the allocation of required resources for that purpose.

    But make no mistake about it. A devolved federation should happen sooner than later, if good governance and development were to be achieved, including a successful outcome of ongoing economic reforms.

  • Wages; Solar; Happi; 145; CSR

    Wages; Solar; Happi; 145; CSR

    Why is the West not increasing its minimum wage and cancelling its subminimum wage as a way of lifting their lower classes instead of blaming others for their poor and homeless people?

    Lagos State is setting up or approved a lithium battery plant costing $150m. Around 22 years ago, President Olusegun Obasanjo approved the tobacco factory in Ibadan built 21 years ago. Educare Trust objected and requested that he approve a cell phone factory instead. We lost the opportunity and today more people have and are addicted to totally imported cell phones than to locally produced cigarettes and smoking. Who lost?

    Federal government is banning solar panels. How soon? What is the solar panel production capacity today versus demand? This could just make life 100% harder for Nigerians in search of independence from the irresponsibly low 5-7Mw power supply when we need 100Mw for our population.   

    Congratulations to Professor Christian Happi, named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential Personalities worldwide. Google him to review his massive CV and contribution to African health through international laboratory upgrades and genome research. The falling funding for such health scientific work from the West is due to internationally politicised negative funding changes in science appreciation, application and responsibility. In addition, there is the West’s urgent requirement for diverting such allocated funds to increase budgets for weaponisation to meet the falling weapon support and falling funds from the sole Western umbrella traditional arms supplier in order to meet the increasing belligerent threat of a European war from the East.

    Africans and African banks declaring trillions in annual profit must be interrogated, graded, awarded on the ability to meet the Gold Standard of CSR 1% contribution. There is need to interrogate their over-glossy but usually poor-content Annual CSR Reports and grade them for their contributions to the arts, sciences and research versus self-advertorial jamborees – masquerading as Corporate Social Responsibility, CSR.

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    Nigerians raised N17-20b for Babangida’s Library. As an un-voted military president; is he entitled to a ‘Presidential Library’? This N17-20billion, added to the  trillions in profit by banks, added to the several EFCC revealed mega-government corruption scandals, each over N100b, cumulatively tell us that, properly motivated and monitored, there are hundreds of billions that can, with a strong political and anticorruption will, by committed to underfunded budgets for Nigerian and African Scientific, Medical, Arts, Research and Training -SMART, to take on the responsibility to fill the void in funding Nigerian and African research.

    Now, 145 and counting are the Fellow Nigerians murdered by so-called ‘land grabbers’ supposedly paid by ‘unknown financiers’ who want what is under their land. The land was owned since time began by the families of the killed and was lovingly tilled and handed down intact by the ancestral owners of those so callously slaughtered by machete, gun and dagger. These killing are not just random killing to satisfy vampire terrorists, spawned political criminality or escalated interethnic squabbles or even the bloody trail of herder-inflicted mayhem of communities nationwide that we know have killed over 150,000 and displaced over five million IDPs.

    This latest assault on the innocent hardworking, unappreciated and unrecognised ‘common man, woman and child has wiped from the earth a generational memory. All know which ‘big’ person dies, but nobody knows even the names of poor people when they die. If they are many, they, Fellow Nigerians, are consigned to a mass grave filled to the brim with ‘unknown’ or at most ‘unnamed’ citizens, killed for being citizens in a country which deliberately disarms them before the ‘kill’. So, we can add ‘unarmed’ to ‘unknown’ and ‘unnamed’ or dare we call them ‘unwanted’ Fellow Nigerians. We must reverse our apparent deliberate policy of underestimating, underpreparing for and under-weaponisation of our troops, before we are all eliminated.

    We should have the humanitarian responsibility to actually identify by name every victim, and humanise each person in an OBITUARY LIST, published widely in every media outlet and method. They deserve that we are forced to know their names and something of their lives. Surely that is documentary journalism? We ignore the very obvious security threats until the day after citizens are killed and then we miraculously discover enough security to swamp the place with a post-mortem security party for the cameras. But there is no obvious ‘First 24 hours hot pursuit’ of the murderous marauders while the trail is still hot. Perhaps politicians do these post-killing visits to each other, as high government officials, as mere photo-ops. Yes, they try to comfort and support the surviving citizens with compassion and or cash. But what can replace an entire family lost in a night? War has been declared on us for many years but our responsibility has been meek and weak. Security recruitment is a politicised challenge. A too high percentage of the undermanned police service provides exclusive security for the same VIPs, Nigerian and foreign, sadly including handbag and briefcase carrying, who may visit the deceased and the survivors, leaving very few police to keep us alive when the next attacks occur. We must get our ‘first 24 hours strategies’ up to scratch. Instead of chasing away, we should surround and capture the murderers once and for all. 

    When will this blood flow, civilian and military, started so long ago cease? How many more innocent Fellow Nigerians must, merely for owning their property and sometimes defending it, join our fallen gallant security forces who have paid the supreme price for being Nigerians?

  • Rivers as ATM without password

    Rivers as ATM without password

    Spending unappropriated revenue is a serious offence in a democracy. But that may not be applicable to us here where equality before the law is not only a myth but where our governors who are above the law can feely fritter away N300m. As if that is not bad enough, there are just too many ignoble fortune-seekers within the noble profession of law who will rather trade in chaos than in stability.

    If you are in doubt, just take one look at the two-year old war against Fubara’s government. What you see are reckless elders fuelling the crisis by talking from both sides of the mouth; hungry and angry youths who expect crumbs following and hailing Fubara after every act of sabotage against his own government, television platforms that lionize clueless Fubara every morning while they smile to the banks in the afternoon with millions they haul in through news commercialization.

    We cannot easily forget, Ugochinyere, an interloper from Imo State who became Fubara interpreter of court judgments. 

    And of course we now know those ignoble men in the judiciary who after collecting Fubara’s N300m gift, failed the people of the Rivers by not availing their governor of the proper interpretation of court judgments or bold enough to remind him the buck stops at his table. However, to make up for their betrayal, they are today blindly fighting the perceived enemies of Fubara – the executive, legislature and even the Supreme Court, moving from one television house to the other.

    But it must be said that we have always had ignoble fortune-seekers in our judiciary.  The first republic threw up Ben Nwabueze, the author of Unitary Decree 34 of 1966 which led to a civil war and whose effect continues to haunt the country. He also featured in the aborted third republic with his interim government decree that effectively aborted the third republic, paving the way for Sani Abacha, an evil dictator to wage a five-year war against Nigeria.

    In the second republic, we had Chief Kehinde Sofola, an attorney general and one-time chairman of Body of Benchers who sadly admitted that “the primary duty of the judiciary is to protect the judiciary”.  In the fourth republic, we have had an Abubakar Malami, attorney general who sabotaged Buhari’s anti-corruption war by attempting to smuggle and indicted fellow into the civil service, chased out of office the chair of the EFCC he had falsely accused of fraud, and misled President Buhari on the war against Nigeria by immigrant herdsmen whose illegal infiltration of reserved forest in the southwest he encouraged.

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    Now let us examine how the NBA chairman is prosecuting his defence of Fubara’s N300m gift.

    Governor Fubara, unable to manage his own government, committed an error of judgment by opting to deal with Victor Oko-Jumbo-led three-man House of Assembly, despite Court of Appeal affirmation of a Federal High Court order that it was constitutionally wrong of him to deal with only three of the 32-man assembly. Fubara had insisted that 27 members of his House of Assembly do not exist.  In February, the Supreme Court put an end to such conceit by declaring that:  “What is clear is that the 27 lawmakers are still valid members of the Rivers State House of Assembly and cannot be prevented from participating in the proceedings of the House by the governor in cahoots with the four other members” and made it clear that “Sections 102 and 109 cannot be invoked in aid of this unconstitutional enterprise”.

    The Supreme Court was to add that “As it is, there is no government in Rivers State… political disagreements cannot justify these attacks and contempt for the rule of law by the governor of a state or any person. What he has done is to destroy the government for the fear of being impeached”.

    Afam Osigwe who slept all through two years of what the Supreme Court described as ‘Fubara’s despotic rule’ did not wake up from his slumber long after the fallout of the supreme court judgment with the aggrieved 27 House of Assembly members whose salaries had been seized for two years, demanding their pound of flesh by slamming the governor with impeachment notice.

    Exploiting the ethnic divide as the first Ijaw man to be elected governor of Rivers State, Fubara was ready for a showdown. He publicly told jobless and marginalised Rivers youths who follow him around streets of Port Harcourt to wait for instructions. Less than 24 hours later, oil pipeline whether by fifth columnists as argued by his supporters, or his supporters, started exploding.

    The president chaired a security meeting of his security chiefs. He promptly shared the intelligence at his disposal with the National Assembly and what followed was declaration of six months of state emergency and suspension of the warring governor and his state House of Assembly members jointly responsible for absence of government in the past two years in Rivers.

    Since Rivers State allocation was ordered to be withheld by the Supreme Court following Fubara’s breach of one of the most serious impeachable offences in a democracy- spending taxpayers money without appropriation, a sole administrator needed to be appointed to ensure payment of salaries to essential workers such as teachers, medical workers and civil servants.

    It was not until this time Osigwe woke up from his deep slumber. But that did not stop him from concluding that the situation in Rivers did not call for declaration of a state of emergency. Osigwe, who is not privy to the information at the disposal of the president and the National Assembly that have upheld the decision of the president insisted the president’s action was illegal. He also declared the president’s suspension of the governor and other elected members of the state assembly unconstitutional ignoring the fact that the constitution gives the president discretionary power to do whatever he deems fit to avert anarchy.

    As an officer in the temple of justice, he did not wait to allow the courts that can make a distinction between the letter of the law and the spirit of the law to decide if the president’s discretionary powers cover suspension of the main obstacle to peace and the democratic process, i.e, the fumbling Governor Fubara and his vengeance-seeking lawmakers.

    Afam decided to usurp the role of opposition leaders like Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi who are at liberty to exploit every action of the president for political gain like opposition politicians; Afam started moving from one television station to the other selling what can at best be described as warped logic.

    But we now know, courtesy of the Rivers’ sole administrator, that Afam’s blind fury is all about Fubara’s N300m gift to NBA which the sole administrator insists must be returned. He anchored his argument on the fact that since the money does not belong to Fubara but to Rivers State programed to benefit from hosting the NBA’s conference, which Afam had unilaterally moved to Enugu as if Rivers has ceased to exist because of Fubara’s temporary absence, there was no basis to refund the money.

    As if taking  N300m that would have been enough to build an hospital or a cottage industry that could absorb some Rivers street boys was not enough assault on sensibility of Nigerians, the claim  by the chairman of the NBA 2025 Conference Planning Committee, Emeka Obegolu’s (SAN), that the money was “an unconditional gift to support the event” was insensitive.

    It is also not of any relief that while successive governors of Rivers including Fubara, Nyesom Wike, Rotimi Amaechi often try to outdo each other by bringing notable Nigerians to commission projects, the readily available jobs to the teeming youths of Rivers remain blowing up of oil pipelines when the elite want to blackmail the federal government or torching of government buildings, and visiting violence on each other when involved in intra-party feuds that have come to define every election in Rivers.

    It is reassuring that credible voices in NBA including that of Andrew Emwanta, president of the African Public Interest Lawyers Union are already warning Osigwe who after sleeping all through two years of Fubara’s ‘despotic rule’. He accused him of starting a condemnation of the emergency move “barely two hours after the broadcast”. For him, “The proper thing to do, “to save the image of our profession, is for that money to be refunded. It’s Rivers taxpayers’ money. If you are not doing business with them, return their money.”

     It is sad that NBA’s Afam Osigwe and some of his fellow travellers are not ashamed of joining PDP parasites whose elections Wike claimed he partly funded and their media enablers who regard Rivers as ATM without password.

  • It’s stunted parties, stupid!

    It’s stunted parties, stupid!

    Many felt it was reasonable compromise.  Others slammed it as reckless overreach — that April 14 decision, by the PDP Governors Forum, to sideline previous claimants to the PDP national secretaryship and impose a fresh one, even in an acting capacity.

    But again, this storm is only the symptom.  The real disease is 26 years on — on May 29 — since the return of democracy, the government could have bloomed.  But the party system is the reverse: it has wilted.

    Politics on frail parties is not unlike erecting a mansion on a very weak foundation.  It bodes ill: a doughty political party system is the bastion of participatory democracy.

    It’s looking even more dreary now — even if that may be the hard crash before the bounce — that the courts are throwing the issue back to our infantile party players: go sort out your internal troubles, you’re adults!  Leave the courts out of it!

    But instead of getting chaste and wise, at least two parties have descended into even more chaos.

    The Labour Party (LP) — opportunistic footstool of ace cynical populist Peter Obi — is effectively carved into three:

    The Julius Abure pack, which like Samuel Ladoke Akintola of 1st Republic Action Group (AG) has just “taku” — going nowhere; 

    The patrician wing that set up Esther Nenadi Usman as caretaker chair, hoping the majesty of its sole governor, Abia’s Alex Otti, with the promise of his office’s likely funnel of endless cash, would wow the other belligerents;

    And the Lamidi Apapa plebeian wing, giving the other claimants a ferocious push for their money, to claim LP’s troubled soul!

    But wait a minute: it could well be four! 

    The paternalistic Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), under the chaos-hugging Joe Ajaero, whose standard reflex is to unleash his Aluta army, even if they boast no winning tactics, talk less of enduring strategies! 

    There’s more to battles than running into them like headless chickens!  Hell is loosed upon the Labour paradise!

    You want a gripping study in buzzing chaos?  Take a ringside seat in LP’s current unravelling!  Perhaps that would teach the party — if it survives this present meltdown — not ever again to sell its platform (and ideological soul) for dirty election-eve lucre!

    Now, to the PDP.  Not a few have wagered that current PDP troubles are fitting karmic comeuppance for its past flagrant party abuses.  That’s dead-on-the-money correct — and no tears from here!

    PDP’s trouble started when empire-minded President Olusegun Obasanjo felt the late Solomon Lar might just have had too much gravitas for his comfort.  He would rather appoint fawning viceroys — what the Yoruba call ajele — to do his bidding as all-mighty elected president, that just towered above the platform that hoisted him for office.

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    Otherwise, he would not have inspired Ahmadu Ali to order elected Governor Rashidi Ladoja to bow before the late Lamidi Adedibu, illicit security vote gravy craving and all! The Alaafin Molete, unfazed emperor of amala-and-abula politics was Obasanjo’s Oyo PDP garrison commander!  It all ended in tears!

    So, from one weakened viceroy to another, PDP crawled into power wilderness!

    Now, with Atiku Abubakar and his Samson’s complex — ready to crash everything on everyone, with his diseased obsession to be president despite chilling realities — PDP is in for a long, long night. 

    As the 1st Republic federal ruling coalition — the Northern People’s Congress (NPC) and the National Convention of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) — put their worst foot forward after Nigeria’s independence, so did PDP, at the advent of this 4th Republic in 1999.

    And this uncanny parallel, too: as those least upbeat about independence corralled the cream of state from 1 October 1960, arch-plotters against the June 12 mandate of Basorun MKO Abiola grabbed the prime plum of state from 29 May 1999.

    Obasanjo himself, first 4th Republic elected president, counted among this wild breed.

    But back to PDP’s present troubles.  The PDP Governors meeting at Ibadan, Oyo State, of April 14, was probably well-intentioned. 

    The Supreme Court just created a further puzzle: embattled Samuel Anyanwu claimed it just validated his case.  Wannabe Sunday Ude-Okoye couldn’t swear he hadn’t run into a storm.  Neither could he crow he had a clear path to the cherished cake.

    What to do?  The PDP governors, in their wisdom — or arch-folly? — decided to shove both aside, as newly self-imposed Atlases, whose combined, rippling muscles should pacify everyone else — good try!

    But not so fast, Anyanwu balked. Beyond illicit self-projection, where did the governors derive their powers ? 

    Did they even remember that without the party secretary — the Leviathan that signed  signed their forms — they wouldn’t even become candidates, talk less of governors?

    So, why this newfound muscle-flexing, to decree the PDP national secretary, knowing they had earlier backed Ude-Okoye but fell flat on their faces?  Intrigue without end!

    Now, Anyanwu vs Ude-Okoye is done and dusted.  Looming is Anyanwu vs Setonji Koshoedo, the legit deputy national secretary and the governors’ new beloved.

    Post-Easter confusion looms on the PDP front!

    But where would it all end?  If you “checked out the real situation” as the immortal Bob Marley did, in one of his global hits, would it be as he predicted: “total destruction is the only solution”?  It’s Easter!  Let the PDP carry its own cross!

    Still, let no one think the ruling APC is sitting pretty.  Well, national chair, Abdullahi Adamu, even flush with hard-won victory in 2023, knew his goose was cooked.

    He was caught up in the ugly intra-APC sweepstakes, that nevertheless produced Bola Tinubu as candidate, not his preferred Ahmad Lawan, falsely rumoured as President Muhammadu Buhari’s choice, before PMB quelled the rumour.  It was payback time.

    Now, should Adamu have voluntarily fallen on own sworn?  Or was there a bit of Obasanjo in new President Tinubu who wasted no time to get rid of him?

    But replacing a national chair from North Central with one from North West has caused — and is still causing — some ripples in the party.  The logic — balancing.

    The likes of Salihu Lookman and Nasir el-Rufai have used that as excuse to storm out of the party, baying for some anti-APC coalition or another for 2027.

    But even el-Rufai’s body language — his presumption that he would join the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and pronto, re-make it in his own image, to fight his own battles — speaks volume about politicians’ general contempt for the party, even if it’s their only viable vehicle to power.

    For Nigerian democracy to thrive, there must be conscious and deliberate efforts to build the party system.  There are no two ways about it.

  • Duplicity by another name

    Duplicity by another name

    Nigerians must consider themselves ‘indebted’ to the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), first, for giving new meanings to the once-familiar concepts of ‘principles’, ‘morality’, ‘law’ and ‘constitutionalism’, and second, for insisting on operationalising them in their new, but self-assigned opposition role in the ongoing Rivers fracas.

    Thanks to the august body, the string of absurdities which started with the torching of the parliament building, the banishing of 27 in a parliament of 32 members into the proverbial Siberia and their subsequent replacement with three members, the running of the business of government without a duly passed appropriation law and other heinous constitutional infractions are supposed to count for nothing.

    Even less – in their view – is the unambiguous, declarative judgment of the highest court dubbing the Fubara-led contraption in Rivers State – and that is what it is – as the height of despotism. 

    In the eyes of the Afam Osigwe-led NBA, those fundamental infractions should still be deemed as tolerable and that is even long after the Supreme Court had pronounced on the death of law and constitutionalism in the aftermath of Governor Sim Fubara’s coup in the state!

    Wouldn’t that amount to defecating in the communal pond – in a moment of opportunistic exigency?

    Imagine, we are supposed to be dealing with a grave matter – the subversion of those fundamental tenets of democracy; one whose terrible derivative, was the treatment of the legislature branch as expendables! It is certainly a new day that the NBA has since deemed them as tolerable – including the open call for anarchy by the dictator!

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    Could the strident defence of those absurdities have also counted for the defence of principles and constitutionalism in the books of the NBA?

    Even with the above background, the tragedy is that the NBA continues to push the specious narrative that the problem in Rivers State actually started on March 18 when the state of emergency was declared by President Bola Tinubu. Ever since, the body has somewhat assumed the role of the judge in all things right and wrong. Finally, Nigerians are beginning to know why! And that is far from ennobling!

    Little wonder the NBA has pronounced the president wrong to have staved off the looming anarchy; wrong to have directed the combatants to take time to rest in the event that truce was nowhere on the horizon; and wrong with his appointment of a sole administrator to take charge to allow things to cool down. And then the National Assembly for approving the declaration as the law required.

    Talk of a body traditionally sworn to the defence of the rule of law and constitutionalism, finally revealed as having a dog in a most unnecessary fight!

    And the result? Muck everywhere. And so the predictable verdict by the same NBAS – the once-famed Garden City is no longer place to do business. Why? Because the government halted the spiral of impunity by a benevolent despot who once declared that the parliament can only exist to the extent that he allows it!

    In their sponsored anomie, we are supposed to be torn between the Supreme Court-declared constitutional aberration and the National Assembly-approved administrator temporarily holding the reins of government in the Garden City! Well, they, the NBA and their allies could not be more wrong!

    Yes, we grant our ‘principled’ NBA the right to its persuasion that living under the former’s jungle rule characterised by impunity would have been more dignifying than the mere thought of staging the high-octane event under the latter brought in to preserve peace and order. Only that we must give thanks that body does not have the last word!

    To be sure, no one is contesting the body’s freedom to take their AGC to Enugu or wherever! It is entirely their business. They also free to glorify their stance as a ‘principled stand against the unconstitutional governance of Rivers State’. Or even still, their insistence that continuing with the AGC in Port Harcourt would have amounted to “a tacit endorsement of constitutional violations and subversion of the rule of law.” And finally the declaration that the NBA “could not, in good conscience, hold its flagship event in a state governed unconstitutionally. These are entirely the body’s prerogatives.

    Except that in the exercise of their discretions, the body not only chose to lapse into an unforgivable amnesia, they forgot one little matter that was just as important to Nigerians and to the good people of Rivers State – the N300 million paid by the suspended governor to the NBA to host the event. The revelation obviously sheds some light into the dynamics at play as indeed the motivations behind them.

    For now, the issue is that the state has been denied the hosting rights to the event and the good people of the state of its potentially accruable benefits. And so the administration in the state wants the money back.

    That should ordinarily be fair or if you like – just, if you ask me!

    On its part, the NBA says that the state should not only perish the thought, but also that nothing of the sort is being contemplated – a case of double whammy. It says the fund was “a gift” to the association for its 2025 Annual General Conference, not tied to any hosting rights. It claims the NBA usually seeks support from organisations, government agencies and state governments due to the “enormous cost” involved in hosting the conference.

    While those may well be, still, they do not vitiate the issues of principle, of law and of due process. Here, it ought to be strange that the NBA would choose not be bothered that the fund could not have been lawfully appropriated by the three-man parliament that the donor (or is it their client) opted to work with.

    Even more deplorable is the very idea of holding on to what appears to be an unlawful item when the demand was made. For while the NBA might feel entitled to whatever pretences it deems fit to project, to most discerning Nigerians, that stance could only be a measure of the ingrained pathology of impunity that has led the state as indeed our beloved country to this sorry pass. Trust Nigerians to recognise duplicity when it manifests. The latter would seem one which no puerile legalism would wash.

    For now, Nigerians have to wait for the courts to determine who, between the NBA and the Rivers people, is right or wrong.

    Talk of the strange times we are in.

  • Resurgence of killings

    Resurgence of killings

    The perennial killings in Plateau and Benue states over the years seem to have resurged. The killings, associated with herdsmen, allegedly seeking to conquer victims and their pastured lands, many thought, had petered. But from recent incidents, the murderers were lurking around, waiting for an opportune time. Again, on the eastern flank, the Boko Haram resurged their terrorist acts in Borno State, while Lakurawa, the new terrorist group, which we thought had been driven back to where they come from, are on the upswing in the northwest.

    Perhaps, the increased jostling amongst politicians for 2027 is the opportune time for the destabilization plots by these local and foreign criminal agents. So, we urge our armed forces to redouble their efforts to allay the fears that foreign forces working to bring Nigeria to her knees may succeed.  To further compound the challenges over our nation’s security, the economic difficulties associated with the federal government’s economic reforms have so pauperized many Nigerians that they can easily fall prey to misdiagnoses of the solution to our problems.

    For the avoidance of doubt, this column believes that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT) administration’s economic policies would yield the desired result; but is that the case with the majority of Nigerians, under severe economic pressure? Even though we are already turning the bend, from the worst hyperinflation that came with the removal of fuel subsidy and the floating of naira, many Nigerians are still finding it difficult to eat one full meal, a day. So, while vigorously pursuing the economic reforms, governments across the three tiers, must rev up their poverty reduction programs.

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    The local government administration across the country that ought to gain a new lease of life with the judgment of the Supreme Court, which granted them financial autonomy, is still doddering. Yet, it is the local governments, through the town unions, cooperatives, guilds of artisans, traditional institutions and similar grassroots based organs, that are best suited to frontally attack poverty at its root. Any organ of the federal government, like the ministry of poverty alleviation, should work through local councils, instead of the bogus federal bureaucracy, that ennobles corruption.

    The first lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, is showing how to apply resources from the far-flung federal centre to alleviate poverty at the grassroots. While engaged in her Renewed Hope Initiative (RHI), she is relying on the wives of state governors, irrespective of their party affiliation, to drive that pet project. She is also attacking poverty in the health sector, by attacking specific health issues and others through small scale enterprises. If the wives of the state governors wish to have greater impact in poverty alleviation programs, they can also rely on spouses of local council chair persons, to cascade the impact further downward.

    This column urges the wives of state governors to initiate their own pet projects to alleviate the simmering poverty in the states. The local government administrations should also have poverty alleviation programs at the local councils. As a matter of priority, significant portion of the resources accruing from the removal of fuel subsidy, which has significantly stabilized state and local government’s finances, should be applied to reduce poverty in the country. The pretence by some governors and local government administrations that the challenge of economic hardship in the country should be the headache of the federal government is ridiculous. As I have argued here severally, they cannot enjoy the benefits accruing from the removal of fuel subsidy and leave the federal government to solve the poverty lurking in their backyards.  

    I guess most Nigerians would have noticed that many state governments have been engaged in infrastructure developments without borrowing, either from the capital market or the financial institutions. This is because the governors now have more monies accruing to their states, after the fuel subsidy was removed. The same is applicable to the local governments which enjoy more income than before. As I have argued, those at the helm of affairs, at the federal, state and local government should join forces, regardless of party affiliation, to tackle the crisis associated with gruelling poverty in the country.

    The other issue that the PBAT administration should confront frontally is the crises associated with farmer/herder clashes. This column wonders what the newly created ministry of livestock development is doing to help solve this problem. Nigerians had heaved a sigh of relief, after the ministry was created, to help solve the problem of herder/farmer clashes. Those who know the newly appointed minister, Idi Mukhtar Maiha, said the man is fit for the job, and yet five months after his appointment, he is not offering new insights on how that major national challenge for which he was appointed, can be solved. 

    While he is not expected to proffer solutions to solve the farmer/herder crises overnight, five months is enough for the nation to gain a glimpse of what he has in the bag or what he is cooking for the nation in that sector. As many commentators have severally canvassed, the itinerancy associated with cattle rearing in Nigeria by the Fulani, is outdated. Those who argue that traversing from outside Nigeria or within Nigeria, southwards, in search of pasture, is a peoples’ way of life which must endure, are responsible for the bloodbaths we witnessed in Plateau and Benue states, recently.

    It is bizarre that while there are political actors who readily defend the rights of the herdsmen to go wherever they want in search of pasture and water, we don’t see them own up and apologize when those they defend, use mayhem to push the agenda they promote. For emphasis, those who promote the right of herders to walk into any community with their cattle should be associated with the killings going on across the country in pursuit of that practice. It is deceitful for promoters of that practice to claim that those responsible for the killings associated with it come from outside the country. They know that the killings are the natural outcome of the rights of herders to graze without restrictions.

    Again, that misbegotten right to live in the forest as herders have resulted in kidnapping for ransom as business. Across the country, criminal minded herders, in some cases with local collaborators, have resorted to kidnapping for ransom, as a more lucrative business than herding. Some have turned kidnapping to the main hustle, while herding is a mere cover up. It is ridiculous that when state governments use legislation to combat the emerging challenge, political actors in the north speak up against such legislation, claiming that the business of their people will be affected. But when their people kill and burn communities, the actors are mum on the premise that the killers are unknown to them, and may have come from outside the country.

  • One Ponzi scheme, too many

    One Ponzi scheme, too many

    When some Nigerian investors took to the social media to lament how they were locked out of their accounts in the CBEX digital financial platform, it was apparent they had fallen victim to another Ponzi scheme. Trending videos from some of those affected showed frustrations with their inability to withdraw their investments highlighting fears that their money may have been lost.

    Some of the investors who complained on the private messaging service telegram of the CBEX were told by the digital financial platform that the problem was as a result of hacking and that things would soon be restored.

    Concerns on the fate of CBEX mounted when a popular X user wrote about an individual who reportedly invested $1, 000 and withdrew $5, 000. He further wrote, “Having done all the checks, the platform flies all the flags of a Ponzi scheme”.

    But instead of normalcy being restored as promised, the platform was quick to crash. CBEX locked its telegram channels and restricted WhatsApp groups. It also curiously introduced a verification fee where users were asked to pay $100 or $200 to supposedly unlock $1, 000 and $2, 000 respectively.

    These measures left investors without further doubt that they have been scammed of their hard-earned money by the phoney financial platform. Frustrated by the turn of events, some of them attacked the offices of the financial platform in Ibadan and Lagos, carting away chairs, air conditioners and solar panels in utter despair.

    The crash of the CBEX platform yet adds to the list of fake digital financial investment platforms that swindled Nigerians of their hard-earned money and left sorrow and misery in their trail. CBEX launched in Nigeria in July 2024 promising investors 100 per cent returns on their investments within 30 days

     It came with the usual strategy of encouraging users to refer others with promises of bonuses and rewards based on the size of their referral network. Early participants are paid from the contributions of new investors and those who benefitted become the mouthpiece of the scheme. The objective of this strategy is to spur spurs more investments and before you know it, the platform crashes with the funds of investors trapped. That was the ploy deployed by previous Ponzi scheme before the CBEX. And that was the pattern it adopted, followed and crashed out.

    It is estimated that the CBEX may have carted away over N1.3 trillion from their wallet after crashing penultimate Monday.

    Sadly, Nigerians are not new to this manner of investment scam.  The Mavrodial  Mondial Movement (MMM) had similarly debuted in 2015 promising mouth-watering returns of 30 per cent within 30 days. But in 2016, it abruptly froze its transactions leaving its investors estimated at over three million people stranded.

    Of the N911.45 billion which the Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation (NDIC) estimated in 2022 to have been lost to Ponzi and other related fraudulent activities in the last 23 years, MMM alone accounted for N18 billion. Before the CBEX scam, Nigerians had severally fallen victims to other Ponzi schemes such as Twinkas, Ultimate Cyber, Givers Forum and Get Help Worldwide etc.

    As I write, the running of similar fraudulent schemes cannot be ruled out. And the possibility of future victims looms large. Why this is so despite the bitter experiences of our people and in spite of warnings from relevant government agencies to investors to be wary of offers that look too good to be true will continue to divide opinion.

    But much of the answer can be found in the bogus, unrealistic and quick returns to investments which the schemes offer prospective investors. That is the prime motivation. That is why those who opt for such schemes shun the conventional banks with their low returns on investments. The Ponzi schemes came with 100 or 30 per cent return on investment within 30 days.

    So, it made better investment sense albeit foolishly, if they can reap such huge returns especially so when they can point at someone who had so benefitted. But the question such prospective investors failed to ask is the type of investment that will double returns in just 30 days. They should have interrogated the type of business that would enable the digital financial platform to double returns on investments within 30 days and still make its own profits to remain in business. That is where greed met ignorance.

     Given the experiences of our citizens with such Ponzi schemes in the past, one had expected that some lessons would have been learnt and precautionary measures taken. But the experience of the CBEX crash does not bear this optimism out.

    Curiously, most of those who patronised the CBEX scheme are urban dwellers as indicated by the pattern of attacks at the Ibadan and Lagos offices of the phoney company. The MMM scandal occurred barely nine years ago. There has been little change in demographics to suggest that most of the victims were not of age when it froze its transaction and shattered the future of its investors. Neither can it be claimed they had no information about the past.

     Greed pushes Nigerians into investing in such supposedly high interest-yielding ventures without figuring out the impracticability of any business yielding such profit within that short time frame. It is possible a few of the victims may not have been privy to the previous experiences of Nigerians with such scheme. But then, the lure remains the quick return to investments in manners that defy economic and rational calculations.

     This disposition is not entirely new. It tallies with the pervasive culture of corner cutting and quick fixes. You may even be surprised at the manner experts who are more versed in such investment matters may be dismissed if they try to discourage those eager to invest in such schemes. That shows the value we place on knowledge and expertise.

    That is not to diminish the importance of sensitisation programmes from the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and other relevant agencies of the government.

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    In March, the EFCC warned on the activities of about 58 illegal Ponzi scheme operators in the country. It said these companies were operating without registration with the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) or the SEC and have been identified as potential threats to the financial wellbeing of unsuspecting Nigerians. But CBEX was not listed among the 58.

    A breakdown of the list showed their activities spanned various sectors such as agriculture, finance, oil and gas, books etc.

    From the diverse fields they operate and the activities they purport to engage in, it will be very hard for investors to draw a line between the genuine and fake ones. In this list is a preponderance of agricultural companies that do not promise quick returns on investments but are still out there to scam the people. That is the real danger facing genuine investors. And that is why serious sensitisation programmes have to be called into quick action.

    SEC said its long-term goal is to launch a capital market radio to educate investors and ensure that Ponzi schemes are completely taken down. This is heart-warning. But the time for the capital market radio is now. We cannot continue to harbour the huge losses Nigerian investors incur each time their money gets trapped in the vaults of Ponzi schemes due to their inability to differentiate between the fakes and genuine investments.

    The N10 billion that the Senate approved for the commission to embark on market education programmes should be quickly deployed to the desired end. The relative ease with which Ponzi schemes operate within our shores, scam investors and disappear, point to something untoward about the monitoring roles of the relevant agencies of government. The SEC, EFCC and the CBN should publish dedicated telephone lines through which Nigerians can ask questions on future investments.

    CEBX had offices in Ibadan and Lagos. People manned those offices for the period of their ill-fated operations without detection by any of the government agencies. That says a lot. It is good a thing that SEC is considering the establishment of more offices across the country to get closer to the people. With such offices and effective monitoring, it will be easier to detect the existence of fake financial investment companies before they scam unsuspecting investors.

    But these fraudulent activities thrive because of the ease with which they evade justice. Nigerians lost huge sums of money to MMM and till date nothing came out of it. CBEX is following the same line. The EFCC said it is working with Interpol and other development agencies to bring to book those behind the scam. We wait for the outcome.

    But the psyche of our people needs serious rejig. The pervading culture that wealth can be procured through quick fixes-money doubling, ritual killings, Yahoo, organ harvesting, kidnapping and sundry criminalities is behind it all. Public celebration of huge quantities of cash is part of it. That is the war Governor Chukwuma Soludo is currently waging in Anambra State. That war against moral atrophy requires national dimension.

  • Who owns the land?

    Who owns the land?

    When the harvest of blood and innocence pried parts of Plateau State apart, this essayist looked back to history, and at a time when the locals ached for the Fulani. When they did not arrive early enough, they pined for them. They just did not want them, they needed them.

    No one would have thought, only two generations ago, we would see this today. They lob curse words at each other, guns reply guns, machetes glisten into crying flesh, sneers over screams and tears, corpse pile on corpse. At nightfall, many fall, including the grandma next door in her wizened glory.

    The halcyon times now belong to the ages. When this essayist learned of the slaughter at Bokkos and others, we also saw the message of the governor, Caleb Mutfwang, when he announced that over 60 communities have been colonised by foreigners in the state.

    In the good times, these foreigners were invited. Was their goodwill the reason for today’s ill-will? They are not even Nigerian Fulani. They are interlopers. But when they came in those days, it was because they gave them value. Everyone was a farmer, and everyone wanted a herder in their clan, in their villages. This was not restricted to the plateau area alone; it was all over the north.

    They were the brides of the farms. The locals craved fertilizer. The Fulani came with wife and sometimes kids. But their jewel of the bride was the cow. The herdsmen lived for their cattle then. No one knew they would die and kill for them. Their love for their jewel was hidden in their genes, and only revealed generations later in spasms of slaughter. The cows toiled then as they do today, going through what J. P Clark described: “From desert through grass and forest/To the hungry towns by sea/Does call at least for rest.”

    Indeed, the locals loved the cattle first, and later their human bearers. They wanted them less for food than their stools. Food for the farms. The cattle were jewels of wastes, and the  wastes were worth the wait.  When they arrived, they gave without measure and it made Clark wonder in poesy, “Your face of stool for mystery:/What secret hope or knowledge,/Locked in your hump away from man.”

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    Indeed, the locals scrambled for the arrival of the nomads. And when they came, they settled on the farms. Not as hostile takeovers but as welcome guests. The cows crouched and mooed and mated, and filled the soil with manure. Their filth was gold. The Fulani built temporary shelters.

    Only good locals were allowed to host them. In my biography of the former governor, Senator Simon Lalong, titled: Forty Days and Forty Nights, he relates to me his experience as a child growing up in that part. In a chapter titled: Everyone Wants a Fulani Herdsman, Lalong said: “In those days, you dared not say Fulani would not settle on your farm. If they came and they didn’t settle on your farm, it meant you are a wicked man because people were looking for them in advance. If it was a dry season, some went to ask a chief to allow them stay on their farms when they came around.”

    When they arrived, they would meet the village chief, and the chief would instruct him on whose farm to settle. It was not the Fulani that lobbied for a place.

    “The prize was breathtaking. Once the Fulani settle on the farm, the cows deposited dung. Dung was boon.” There was no fear that the Fulani would steal their crops. They were wayfarers of integrity. They lived in mutual trust of their locals. When their tour ended, they did not leave without gratitude. Sometimes they would  present valuables as gifts to their hosts.

    They slaughtered  cows for the host, and even butcher them. Sometimes, they would hand them live goats. Lalong relates a story when he and his friends thought the visitors had left, and shared their precious possesions like wrappers among themselves. Suddenly, the owners materialized, and the woman turned out a friend of Lalong’s mother who sold her favorite fura. All the boys were chided and compelled to return all they acquired.

    How did that paradise of harmony transform into slaughter? When did the person whose cow farted for plenty become a nightmare? The first sign was Gamalin, a chemical that poisoned the fertilizer.

    The fetish of modernity turned the love of the poop. They were done with dung. Welcome the fertilizer. Alas, the Fulani was no longer wanted on the farm. When the rains came, they flooded the farms, and the Fulani were gone. But the Gamalin did not only poison the farms, the flood carried the poison to the rivers where they fished.

    The apotheosis of peace was behind them. They had no fish, and no rice. Poverty beckoned. The first villain was not the Fulani. It was modernity. Then the Fulani wanted to graze, and gradually cooperation became suspicion, and suspicion turned to tension of hostility.

    If they did not welcome the Fulani who came from outside the country, why did they remain? That is the question. The land belonged to the locals. Gradually the Fulani lost cattle, and they blamed those who did not give them room to graze. They lost cattle because the locals resented them as colonisers. They also said the locals stole their cattle. The tension worsened.

    They told each other the words of Arab poet, Mahmud Darwish, “don’t ask of me, my love, the love I once had for thee.”

    Their numbers swelled, and now they have over 60 communities. They now own them with impunity. It is what Germans called Lebensraum in the days of Hitler’s Nazis. It is called living room. The Germans said they wanted areas of Czechoslovakia where the Sudeten Germans lived, and they did not care for the locals. It was an expansionist ideology with racism in its core. But some have said Babangida’s creation of a local government now known as Jos North empowered this impunity. But it is Hausa who live there, not Fulani. Yet, we cannot deny that official somnolence  allowed community after community to fall to people who are not even Nigerians. A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands.

    A lot of this happened under Buhari. To reverse this will mean extreme slaughter. The colonisers are ready for the kill. They recall Sophocles’ play Ajax about a man who slaughtered cows after cows under the delusion that he was slaughtering his human enemies. In this case, they slaughter humans after humans as though they are slaughtering animals. It is a play American soldiers are instructed to watch because of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. When the locals kill one or filch a cow, they can eliminate a thousand in revenge. Medics need to investigate that pathology.

    A group visited one of the communities, and the colonisers said even the mechanized army division in the state would be slaughtered if it tried to evacuate them. Who owns the land? An echo from Sunny Okosun’s grave.