The Nation Newspaper

Category: Columnists

  • Walking into an ambush

    Walking into an ambush

    They have started again. They are busy backslapping themselves as if the points deduction translates to getting the Group C’s 2026 World Cup qualification ticket. Nigeria’s game against Lesotho will be taking place in the next four days, precisely next Friday in Durban, a South African city, with no counter plans to ensure that fans depart the country to support the Super Eagles. They have forgotten that the bad blood arising from the three points’ deduction would play a definitive role in the outcome of the penultimate game between Lesotho in Durban.

    In their wild jubilations, it is important to remind our football chieftains that the South Africans are planning to appeal the deduction of three points and three goals from Bafana Bafana’s hitherto 17 points tally to its 14 points, which will see them to the second position in Group C’s World Cup qualification table. Trust our federation chiefs to wave off any fruitful results from SAFA’s protest without critically perusing its contents to the letter. Getting lawyers to advise them on the appeal’s merits won’t be a bad idea. Certainly not in our administrators’ character. What would shock you would be the laughable undercurrents employed by many of them to get FIFA to take a decision which the South Africans are saying was taken by one member rather than by the disciplinary committee. Isn’t this a likely case of walking into an ambush?

    SAFA members, in an official letter, have said they were disappointed with the decision and will launch a formal appeal within the next 10 days stipulated by the FIFA disciplinary rules.

    “As SAFA, we are deeply disappointed with this unprecedented outcome noting, that it was delivered by a single-member panel without reasons, and without affording the association an opportunity to present legal arguments,” read the official response in part.

    “The association confirms that we have requested written reasons for the judgment and intend to lodge a formal appeal with the FIFA Appeals Committee within the prescribed 10-day period under the disciplinary rules.

    Read Also: World Cup 2026 Race: Super Eagles offered lifeline amid ‘ides of October’

    Could it be true that only one FIFA member decided the decision to deduct three points and three goals from Bafana Bafana’s hitherto 17 points instead of the disciplinary committee members as required? Are the South Africans saying that they ought to have been asked to defend themselves for an issue expressly stated in the rulebook by FIFA? Of course, these posers by South Africans and many others to be submitted in their must be completed in the next 10 days.

    The pertinent question to ask FIFA chiefs would be if the appeal would be dealt with quickly, such that it doesn’t set the stage where the Group’s decider would be played on different dates and not simultaneously as stipulated on such matters for fairness?

    Bafana Bafana will face Zimbabwe for the crucial 2026 FIFA World Cup qualifier at Moses Mabhida Stadium in Durban on October 10. The Peter Mokaba Stadium in Polokwane, South Africa, will host the 2026 World Cup qualifying clash between Lesotho and Nigeria’s Super Eagles, also on October 10. The other poser would be which of the two matches in Durban and Polokwane would the South Africans want to watch? Isn’t this where the Super Eagles would be walking into an ambush in Polokwane with South Africans trooping out in their numbers to root for Lesotho?

    With exactly six days to the October 10 clash against Lesotho, it is quite refreshing to note that Osimhen will be playing the two matches. Super Eagles have tottered in all the matches that Osimhen was missing. It easily explains why we are in this precarious level where every second in the last two qualifiers could bring celebrations or grief, depending on our players’ attitude in the course of the two games.

    One would have thought that after missing the Qatar 2022 World Cup, our football chieftains, the players, coaches, and the sports commission members would have learned their lesson. Not so here.

    Shettima must hear this!

    Grapevine news around sports, especially in the football circle, is filled with tales that Nigeria’s Vice President Kashim Shettima Mustapha is the reason Golden Eaglets’ Coach Manu Garba wasn’t sacked after a shambolic outing with the team last year. I have chosen to bring it to Shettima’s notice because he is too busy to be identified with the dubious acts of idle people around the beautiful game.

    The more ridiculous thing about this nauseating tale is that Garba didn’t do well again with the Golden Eaglets this year. One would have thought the NFF chieftains would have sponsored Garba to yearly coaching clinics to brush up his knowledge of the game since he guided Nigeria to lift the FIFA U-17 World Cup diadem in 2013, which is what other soccer climes’ administrators do when such feats are achieved.

    In football-efficient countries, the FA members would have kept the winning coaching team of Garba, Emmanuel Amunike, and Nduka Ugbade intact and make sure that they upgrade their knowledge yearly, especially when Amunike and Ugbade guided another crop of brilliant Golden Eaglets players to retain the FIFA U-17 World Cup in 2015.

    Rather than smear the Vice President’s name with this mess, talebearers should persuade their trumpeters of falsehood to assemble Amunike and Ugbade to start the process of assembling a new set of Golden Eaglets for next year, while Garba is sent on a two-year course to update his rustic soccer tactics.

    The Vice President is too civilised, focused, and busy with other national issues to be involved in such dubious tendencies of encouraging failures to remain in positions that require qualified coaches, in this instance. Those dropping the name of the Vice President should back off! A coach is as good as his last game. Indeed, there are two types of coaches. Those waiting to be sacked and those already sacked.

    The period between now and 2013 is 12 years. Only remedial courses and upgrading of coaching licenses can make a football coach be in sync with the new trends of coaching that are always dynamic. In fact, in 2013, Ugbade and Amunike functioned as assistant coaches to Garba. Need I mention what Amunike received from reputable European managers during his soccer career, including being crowned the Africa Footballer of the Year? Recall that it was Amunike’s nifty chip in the Atlanta’96 Olympic Games’ soccer finals that gave Nigeria the 3-2 victory and gold medal. He also scored a goal at the 1994 World Cup, including other feats. It is also on record that Amunike has attended several coaching seminars, clinics, and has functioned in different Technical Committees for FIFA and CAF.

    Ugbade was captain of the Nigeria U-16 male soccer team that won the 1985 FIFA U-16 World Cup in China, beating Germany 2-0, with the intercontinental ballistic missile (apologies to the late commentator Ernest Okonkwo) shot from the left foot of Victor Igbinoba being the second goal. Ugbade was also a member of The Miracle of Dammam team, the name given to the result of a quarter-final football match between the Nigerian U-20 football team and the USSR U-20 football team at the 1989 FIFA World Youth Championship in Saudi Arabia in which the Nigerian team came back from four goals down to level up and go on to win on penalties. No disrespect to Garba’s records as a player. Indeed, being a great player doesn’t translate to being a successful coach.

  • Not by desperation

    Not by desperation

    “Are they (the umbelievers) claiming the possession of the right to distribute the bounties of your Lord? It is ‘We’ (Allah) that distribute among people their sources of livelihood in this world and ‘We’ exalt some in rank above others so that some may employ the services of others. Your Lord’s mercy is better by far than all their hoarded treasures”. Q. 43: 32

    Preamble

    History is resplendent with lessons for people whose steps in life are in tandem or not with Allah’s guidance. There is no life’s odyssey without a divine warning. Heeding or shunning such a warning is however a matter of choice. And the consequences or otherwise of such a choice will eventually become the heritage of the concerned person.

    We live in a world, today, that is quite different from that of the centuries past when the Qur’an was revealed to Prophet Muhammad (SAW). But surprisingly, nothing in the contemporary world has run counter to the predictions of that sacred Book or those of the last Messenger of Allah, Prophet Muhammad (SAW).

    For instance, business transactions in the time of the Prophet might not involve high technology or the sophistication of transport as of today but the norms which guided business in those days are still as vital today as they were then. Not even the introduction of mundane ideologies like capitalism, socialism, and communism has altered those norms. So far, the source of the wealth of the world has not changed from what it was in the past millennia. That source is the earth from which every atom of wealth emanates. Even the materials used to manufacture satellites or space shuttle aircraft are from the earth.

    Thus, from agriculture to nuclear device, no new norm has been introduced to warrant any new world order that can affect the faith of the Muslims. As a matter of fact, the world has witnessed the collapse of communism and that of socialism within a period of 74 years despite their overbearing influence when they held sway. It is just a matter of time for the current pervading capitalism to go the way of socialism and communism.

    Economic ideology

    An unlettered personality like Prophet Muhammad (SAW) did not need to formulate any mundane economic ideology to run a great Islamic government. He was not just a political leader but also an economic expert, a great law giver and an army general of impeccable status.

    Without necessarily going into details on how he managed the economy of the Islamic state which he established and ruled from the scratch, it is obvious that even his ascension to the seven planets which paved way for modern man’s exploration of the space is of immense economic value to the contemporary world which no sensible critic can logically dispute. Although the Quran which was revealed to an unlettered Muhammad (SAW) is seen by some ignorant people as a mere religious Book, the economic value of that Book has remained unquantifiable and will remain so forever. The fast-spreading Islamic banking in the West today is a clear evidence of that fact.

    Being the most read book in the world, the Quran has been translated into hundreds of languages making it possible for millions of people, Muslims and non-Muslims alike, to be employed at the various segments of the world’s economy. For instance, the writing of the Qur’an, its recitation, its proof-reading, its printing, its marketing, its teaching, its translation, its interpretation and even its criticism by unbelievers are all sources of economic survival for millions of people in the world irrespective of their religions. The global engagement in research on that glorious Book by various scholars and intellectuals either for acknowledgement of facts or for criticism are an attestation to the above assertion. There was no book like the Qur’an before its revelation and there will never be a book like it till the world will come to an end. The mounting hostility to it in certain quaters is largely due to ignorance about it. But that cannot continue forever.

    Islam as employer of labour

    If only one quarter of a billion people is gainfully employed in the workings of the Quran alone, today’s world economy would have been remarkably upheld by the religion of Islam. Yet, apart from the Qur’an, millions of people are engaged in various businesses relating to Hadith (Prophetic Tradition), Fiqh (Islamic Jurisprudence), Tarikh (Islamic History), Tawhid (Faith in the oneness of Allah) and Thaqafah (Islamic Culture) among others. All such specialized books which emanated from the Qur’an itself were advanced to compliment the sacred Book of Allah.

    Even, for hundreds of years that the Orientalists were busy citicising Islam through their satanic publications, it was undeniable that those destroyers were benefiting from the economic legacy of that divine religion through the sale of their evil publications.

    Today, even as the same Orientalists are busy reversing themselves on what they had maliciously published about Islam in the past they are still benefiting economically from that great religion.

    However, despite the vast economic advantages provided by Islam, some unscrupulous Muslims including Nigerians still engage in illegal businesses that contravene the tenets of that divine religion. Some of such Muslims are among the thousands of Nigerians who are now languishing in various prisons around the world. Some others are even sentenced to death, by various means, as punishment for their crimes. Incidentally, some of such people often commit their atrocities under the cover of Islam. This happened even during the time Hajj rites.

    This reminds yours sincerely of a fortuitous encounter with one of them as far back as 1981 which keeps my heart quivered even today. I had once relayed that ugly encounter in this column through an article entitled ‘Business made in Prison’. But I decided to repeat it here today because it was an experience from which young Nigerian Muslim men and women of today can draw a lesson from.

    Illicit act

    A Nigerian youth of about 30 years of age called Akram (not real name) did not have anything like poultry in his dream when he was going into Saudi Arabian prison as a convict in 1981. His only prayer was for Allah to influence the minds of the Saudi Authorities to have mercy for him and grant him amnesty after two or three years in prison. His service term was 15 years. He had earned the sentence through drug trafficking engendered by blind ambition to be quickly rich by all means.

    Akram is a quiet, easy-going young man from one of the Southwest Nigerian cities. He graduated from the Islamic University of Madinah in Saudi Arabia. I first met him in 1978 when I went for a first degree in that country. His University was in Madinah while mine was in Jeddah. He left Saudi Arabia after graduating in 1980 and settled down in Nigeria following a one year compulsory national service to the nation. In his plan, Akram did not want to work for anybody. His ambition was to be a big merchant of automobile and electronics. However, since there was no ready-made capital with which to start off such a business, he decided to take a short cut, typical of Nigerian style and he found Saudi Arabia, the country that funded his University education, as most suitable for such a dirty business. Thus, he embarked on his first illicit ‘business trip’ to the country of his Alma Mata in 1981.

    It was on my way back to school from a summer holiday of the same year that I met him at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA), Lagos. After embracing and exchanging pleasantries, we decided to sit together in the aircraft (of the then Nigerian Airways) in order to have a chat on the good old days and our expected future. Thus, from Lagos to Jeddah (a journey of five and a half hours), we really chatted to our fill.  Then It was as if we had not spent one hour when we arrived at King Abdul Aziz Airport in Jeddah after five and a half hours.

    Youthful dream

    As bachelors, we discussed various issues ranging from marriage, bearing of children to monogamy and polygamy as well as family structure. We gossiped on the political trend in our country as championed by the then ruling party, the National Party of Nigeria (NPN). We compared Nigeria’s pace of development with that of Saudi Arabia and concluded that our government had neither focus nor plan a situation which made Nigerian youths abroad feel like orphans.

    We also talked about world peace, the then cold war between the Western Capitalist World championed by the United States and the Eastern Socialist Block championed by the now defunct Union of Soviet Socialist Republic (USSR) and the future of Islam in Africa and the Middle East. We analysed the Middle East crises and the role of the two opposing world powers in those crises. We also veered into Nigeria’s micro economy by discussing the role of small and middle scale businesses in our country compared to those of other countries with similar status like Malaysia, Indonesia, Brazil, Singapore, India, Pakistan and Egypt.

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    Without gazing through any crystal ball, we concluded that with no middle class in place, our country might have no hope except through an accidental miracle. We also reviewed the use to which Nigerian oil was put vis-a-vis that of Saudi Arabia, Libya or Algeria. On this, we concluded that oil in Nigeria was a blessing from Allah which the country’s ruling class turned into a curse. But we were not experienced enough to suggest tangible solution.

    Thus, in that long conversation which touched virtually all issues affecting the corporate life of Nigeria and her citizens, we agreed on some and disagreed on some. However, we were satisfied to have delivered our minds of their pregnancies if only to broaden our horizon.

    Point of departure

    On arrival at the King Abdul Aziz International Airport in Jeddah, my friend quickly dashed into the toilet and requested me to help push his baggage to the security desk for checking. He promised to join me shortly. It was almost my turn for security check before an instinct gingered me into consciousness. For more than 30 minutes after he entrusted his baggage to me and went into the toilet, my friend did not resurface. Something just told me to abandon his baggage as I was approaching the checking desk and I did. My own baggage was checked and I went out of the arrival hall to wait for him at the taxi garage. After about one hour of waiting and Akram did not surface, I decided to proceed to my hostel where he was to pass the night in my room as we had earlier agreed.

    Breaking News

    While I was still expecting him in my hostel, the electronic waves throbbed with breaking news. The Saudi Television reported the arrest of a Nigerian who smuggled drugs into the holy land. His name was ‘Akram’. That was at 9pm Saudi local time. We had arrived in Jeddah at about 9.00am that day. About one hour after the breaking news, my friend was brought to the gleer of the nation through the tube and paraded on the Saudi national television as the suspected culprit in the illicit drug trafficking. That was one of the most frightening moments of my life. Akram wanted to be rich and I was to pay the cost of his richness.

    Rumination

    What would have happened if I had not heeded the warning of my instinct? Who could have imagined that a seeming gentleman like ‘Akram’ would ever think of trafficking in drug for whatever reason? If I had been caught with Akram’s baggage, what explanation could have exonerated me? Those were some of the questions that immediately ran through me like milk runs through water and changed my mind about sentimental friendship with people, no matter how innocent they might look. There and then, I decided never to assist anybody again in carrying his or her baggage while on a journey.

    After about three months of trial, Akram was sentenced to fifteen years in jail. He was lucky that drug trafficking at that time in Saudi Arabia had not attracted death as punishment. If it were now, the punishment would have been death sentence by beheading. I was also lucky that at that time the Saudi immigration authorities had not adopted the use of secret camera to monitor passengers.

    Prison for reformation

    For 15 years thereafter (from 1981 to 1996), Akram remained behind bars languishing in Saudi Arabian prison as an inmate among criminals as he anxiously expected to be let off the hook one day. But one good thing about Saudi Arabia as a country or any other Islamic country for that matter is the concept of reformation which imprisonment entails. Inmates are not just imprisoned as punishment for crimes they are also prepared for a better post-prison life and re-orientated for better world outlook.

    Besides, prisoners are paid a specific amount of money daily for their labour in prison. And that gives them hope of reintegration into the society after leaving the prison. Such money is kept in a special bank account opened for them. The total amount is paid to each inmate after his or her prison term.

    Thus, when Akram left the prison in 1996, the post-prison money paid to him by Saudi government became his main lot in life. He was deported to Nigeria but not without that prison labour reward that became his capital for a poultry business. Thus, within a couple of years thereafter, he had become a big poultry farmer but whether or not he learnt any lesson from that incident is another matter.

    Qur’anic admonition

    Most of the young men and women of today do not seem to believe in crawling before walking. To them, what matters most in their lives is how to quickly get money to spend and not how such money is made. That is the main cause of the high rate of crimes witnessed around the world today and the entailed short life span for those youths. In Qur’an, Chapter 43, Verse 32 quoted above, Allah had warned Muslims against desperate accumulation of wealth over 1,400 years ago even when desperate quest for wealth was unfashionable. However, the refusal by today’s youths to heed that warning and the aggressive greed of the privileged elders in power constitute the main cause of restiveness and insurrection around the world today.

    In Islam, desperation for accumulation of wealth is prohibited because it encourages a focus on the end result rather than the means and its entailed immorality. In the past decades, Nigeria had sunk so deep into the valley of corruption that no one cared to ask about the source of any wealth even as corruption became the taproot of Nigeria’s tree of existence. Now, with parents, teachers and even legislators getting so desperate to become rich even right before their pupils and children what future is expected for those wards?

    Parochial wealth estimation

    Desperation is not what fetched Nigeria the enormous oil wealth of today. If desperation ever had any role to play in accumulating wealth, perhaps Nigeria would have long become a country in penury. This is because people who were more desperate in this same country and had lived and died some centuries back would have discovered this oil wealth and they would have exhausted it long before our own generation. But in consonance with the above quoted Qur’anic verse, Allah deliberately preserved it (oil) for our own generation for a reason best known to Him. Yes, oil may be the source of wealth at this time it is surely not the last source of wealth in this country.

    There are other sources of wealth preserved for the future generations which no desperate ‘awks’ in this generation can discover. Those who see oil as the climax of wealth and want to own its control or die for it should engage in a rethink. You can only have the privilege of presiding over the wealth of a nation for a while and not for all time. The experience of some past regimes in Nigeria should serve as a sufficient lesson. And those in government today should also note this very well. The privilege of the past did not extend to the present and that of the present will not extend to the future. Every era is a transit. And every transit has a term.

  • Revolution is not cooking spice

    Revolution is not cooking spice

    Revolution isn’t cooking spice. It is not something you purchase in small nylon sachets on a busy street. Yet, folk sell it like spices, summoning its aroma in flavoured words, promising to make everything taste new.

    The sellers shout and the crowd leans in, clutching their coins and heady fantasies. But Nigeria is not a kitchen stall; it is an ecology of households and habits, of private demons and public horrors.

    If Nigeria is to mark 65 years of independence with anything resembling true rebirth, let that rebirth be a deliberate, internal jihad. It’s about time we shunned the fireworks of rage and mob grandeur frequently broadcast by conflict profiteers and romanticised by the disillusioned.

    Revolutions that do not tend to the seedbed of civic character result in anarchy. The consequences are better imagined: ethnic cleansing, random murders, rampant rape, burning markets, crushed neighbourhoods, displaced families and orphaned children.

    We must reject the rage-fuelled template. History and recent memory establish that uprisings, especially in a fragile polity, can be a match that sets dry tinder aflame; and the fire rarely knows the difference between palaces and boondocks. The so-called Arab Spring began as an earnest cry against corruption and tyranny; in places it yielded openings, but elsewhere it snowballed into protracted internecine wars, destructive vacuums and authoritarian relapse. Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Yemen, among others, show how revolutionary fervor without robust institutions or measured stewardship can produce catastrophe as often as it produces reform.

    The lesson is not that people must never act, but that action divorced from civic preparation and a plan for long-term governance risks annihilation of the very goods people seek: safety, livelihoods and dignity. Those who romanticise a fast, thunderous overthrow: demagogues, disgruntled election losers, and entrepreneurial rabble-rousers who dress ambition as moral crusade are desperate actors, who are less interested in the public good than in the power and patronage that follow breakdown.

    Others, sometimes foreign actors or ideologues, exploit youthful anger and digital fervour to accelerate outcomes that suit external agendas. Movements started online can be genuine, righteous and necessary; they can also be manipulated, redirected and weaponised. The #EndSARS movement of 2020, for example, began as a clarion call against police brutality and produced powerful civic energy and urgent reforms. But like most mass uprisings, its narrative was complex: genuine grassroots anger, social media amplification, and contested claims of outside manipulation and incendiary messaging all coexisted. The movement’s tragic collapse is a reminder that popular protest can be a force for accountability and also a prism through which external interests and local secessionist tensions play out, often leaving scars between communities.

    Nations do not emerge fully formed from constitutions or borderlines. Nations are neither remade nor redeemed by violent uprisings, but by the character of the citizenry. And the latter, in turn, are shaped by their most intimate institution: the family. The family is the receptacle in which the values of a nation are first kindled or corrupted. It is where character and social conscience are either nurtured or strangled in the cradle. The integrity of our public life, therefore, depends on the morality of our private lives.

    Family is key. From this sacred unit, a people’s sense of self, place, and purpose begins. If the family is compromised, then society itself becomes a ghost town of ethics: full of laws but lacking justice and compassion; rich in rhetoric but bankrupt of vision. Societal growth, therefore, cannot be engineered solely by policies or economic indices. It must be cultivated through the slow, careful evolution of the human spirit.

    Our collective persona as a nation is reflected in the governor who once stole $4.2 million from his state’s coffers and stashed it to fund his vanities abroad, not minding what good such loot could do in resolving the educational, healthcare, and infrastructure woes of his state. It is reflected in the shenanigans of the former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor who currently seeks a plea bargain to escape punishment for fraud running into billions of naira, among others.

    It is reflected in the former female Minister of Petroleum, who aggravated fuel scarcity and economic recession through reckless looting of public fund. Yet she fights to walk free.

    Our collective personae flourishes in the antics of youths feverishly flying ethnic flags in defense of their ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ lawmaker, governor, minister, and ex-CBN governor irrespective of the atrocities committed by them and the criminal charges levelled against them.

    Our public offices aid and abett dubious citizenship. They legitimise our culture of being, which enables and justifies a public officer’s immediate descent into a basement of opportunism right after emerging as an elected representative. The latter locks himself or herself in that amoral cellar and embarks on a quest of inordinate acquisition, counting his spoils in material possessions.

    Such characters are, however, mere fragments of our bigger cultural dilemma. They are our decadence; our disease.

    Yet even as we have rightly identified their emergence as an affliction of the eye and disease of the mind, our chances at healing are hindered by chinks in our surgical armour: the fissures of ethnoreligious bias, illiteracy, willful degeneracy, greed, poverty, savage ego, and sheer malevolence.

    Nigeria’s geographic, religious and ethnic  fault lines make reckless upheaval especially dangerous. Where social trust is thin, identities are layered and historical grievances fester unhealed, the romanticised revolt too often degenerates into intercommunal violence.

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    We must therefore be honest: to overthrow a corrupt structure is not the same as constructing a just polity. Too often the poor pay the heaviest price for our experiments in instant remaking. Thus, must teach a new civic grammar: that the right to revolt is philosophically bound to responsibility and respect for rule of law.

    President Bola Tinubu’s administration,on his part, must build institutions that make governance responsive, humane and honorable. His government must measure policy success by lives improved, not by patronage expanded. The incumbent ruling class must avoid financial recklessness and obscenities while urging the citizenry to tighten their belts.

    The youth on their part must be sceptical of leaders who promise instant catharsis. They must look beyond what their rhetoric destroys to see what it builds. Those who live by humiliation, intimidation and petty cruelty will never make a humane state.

    The revolution Nigeria needs must be borne of patience. It will not photograph as readily as a burning barricade, but its fruits are durable: trust, predictable markets, better schools, safer streets, and a political class kept honest by a public unwilling to tolerate theft.

    If Nigeria is to become a decisive actor in Africa’s future, economically, culturally and politically, it must first become a more decent assembly of persons. Nations rarely thrive by grand treaties and trade deals; they are made by how neighbours treat each other, how families rear children and citizens stand for truth. Every country’s reach in the world is directly proportional to the nature of its civic interior.

    It’s about time we renounced our easy romance of rage. We must stop inciting our youths to equate destruction with virtue and instead cultivate a different heroism: the courage to be honest when it costs us convenience and the patience to build institutions that outlast us. That is the revolution we must espouse; the type that moulds citizens into caretakers of our common destiny and Nigeria into an inheritance worth passing on.

  • Nigeria at 65

    Nigeria at 65

    Nigeria marked its 65th anniversary yesterday, without the commemorative parade, a major highlight of the yearly event. At 65, we have come some way as a nation. Our biggest test was the 1967-70 civil war. We came out of it united and indivisible.  We have remained one since then. There have been other anxious moments after that, with

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    The annulment nearly plunged us into another war. We came out of it badly bruised, but unbowed. The military, especially Generals Babangida’s and Abacha’s evil plan to destroy democracy failed. They wanted to subject us to perpetual military rule, but the vigilance of Nigerians saved the day. Since 1999, we have enjoyed uninterrupted democratic rule, the longest ever in our chequered history. It has been 26 years and counting. We have seen that the worst form of democracy is better than the most benevolent military rule.

    Things can only get better as we soldier on as a nation. There is no doubt that things are difficult, but the hope is that, as the President said in Ibadan, Oyo State, on Friday things are looking up. To borrow his words: “there is a bright light at the end of the tunnel”. May the light shine brighter and brighter, so that the people will rejoice. Happy anniversary, Nigeria.

  • This is 2025, not 1993

    This is 2025, not 1993

    There’s a time and season to everything under the sun…

    – Bible

    These opening lines of the third chapter of the Book of Ecclesiastes are deep and reflective. The words become more meaningful when they are applied to day to day life. What really is new under the sun? What are we witnessing today that has never happened before? Life is full of challenges. It is not a bed of roses. Nor is it only of thorns. It is a mix of both. It is full of ups and downs.

    It is up when things are going well and down, when they are not. We all prefer the former to the latter. Some people are luckier than others. Things are always looking up for them. In most cases, they do not lift a finger before things take shape in their lives. Thus, they become the envy of others because luck always smiles on them. This philosophy applies to groups too. Some of them are more favoured, or if you like more powerful, than others.

    One group that falls into this category is the oil workers’ union. Since it comprises workers, both at the junior and senior levels, it is strategic in the affairs of nations. But unions being unions, especially at the lower level, tend to overplay their hands most times. They arrogate to themselves the power they do not have, as their importance, or perhaps, power gets into their heads. They believe that at their say so, they can ground the operations of an organisation – and even paralyse a nation. At least, they did it in Nigeria in 1993.

    So, they use strike, which is a lawful labour tool of bargaining, to try to whip their management into line. Workers can go on strike, if negotiations break down. It is supposed to be the last resort for them after everything else had failed. It is not to be deployed as the weapon of first choice when talks are ongoing to resolve a labour dispute. But politically, the strike option can because of its potent force be adopted at anytime when the population as one is disenchanted with the government.

    It was deployed to maximum effect 32 years ago in the  wake of the political crisis engendered by the annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election. Oil workers as an association saved the nation from the tyranny of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (1985-1993) and the late Gen. Sani Abacha (1993-1998), two of the militaty leaders of that era. It was however not only the oil workers’ fight. It was the fight of every Nigerian, both young and old, whether working or not. It was a fight to save our nation, and the people spoke with one voice. It was a time to fight and reclaim our country from despots.

    The Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) and the National Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG) were the faces of that action because the foremost labour centre, Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), failed to show leadership. Then NUPENG general secretary, the late Frank Ovie Kokori, put his life on the line when the NLC leadership sold out. Ironically, that same NLC which lost its mojo when it mattered most is now flexing muscles over a dispute in which it should be a conciliator and not a combatant.

    Since Dangote Refinery started producing petrol in September 2024, it has been contending with issues in the shark infested oil industry. The truth is many players in the industry do not like the face of the promoter of the plant, Aliko Dangote, who they believe has come to supplant them from the industry. They see him as a monopolist, alleging that his record in the other industries where he is also a big player tends toward that. The Dangote-PENGASSAN face off can be located in this fear – the fear that ‘he has come to push us out’, and their body language is ‘but we go show am’.

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    But there is nothing to show anybody if everybody is ready to play by the rules. The oil industry is regulated and there is no way any player no matter how powerful he may be can be bigger than the  regulator. The  regulator may not be as big as that player, but it has the power of the state to take on anybody, and every sensible ‘powerful player’ is conscious of this fact. PENGASSAN and NUPENG believe that they can take on Dangote since in their own estimation the government is allowing it to get away with so many things to, as they claim,  ‘protect the multibillion dollars investment’.

    Let us make no mistakes about it, the ongoing Dangote-PENGASSAN face off is an extension of the earlier one with NUPENG. And the big marketers, many of who are depot owners, are happy with what is going on. They want the feud to fester so that there can be instability in the fuel value chain which will be of immense advantage to them. Dangote should not give them that joy. If you ask me, I will advise the refinery to review the sacking of the 800 workers which led to  the feud with PENGASSAN.

    The advice is based on the simple reason that the handling of the matter was not tidy. This is not to say that PENGASSAN was right in declaring war against Dangote, and going ahead to turn off the refinery’s supplies from source in order to forcefully shut its operation. This is economic sabotage that borders on treason. The feuding parties, however, believe that they are legally and morally right in the actions they have taken. They are not. Dangote cannot sack the 800 workers, just like that, for allegedly sabotaging its operations.

    It cannot accuse the workers of what amounts to a crime and sack them without judicial trial. In like manner, PENGASSAN cannot wilfully shut down the refinery’s supplies because it has access to those critical national assets and plunge the industry and the entire nation into chaos. PENGASSAN should be mindful of the security implications of its action. This is 2025, and not 1993, when it and NUPENG rode on  the wave of the moment to make the country too hot for the military to govern.

    They enjoyed the people’s backing then. They do not have such support now, so they should tread gingerly, and not give themselves a bad name – that is if they have not already done so. Dangote and PENGASSAN should give the ongoing dialogue brokered by the government a chance so that industrial peace can return. It is a time to embrace and not a time to fight.

  • Latest China-Africa summit

    Latest China-Africa summit

    I have written many times deprecating the phenomenon of African heads of state or government rushing in and out of major metropolitan centres like London, Paris, Washington,  Beijing,  Tokyo and others to provide them comic relief and inviting African heads of government or state to come and make serious people laugh at their penury and  global jamboree. It will soon be New Delhi, Lisbon, Madrid, Moscow and any global power that needs funny African rulers wearing what to them looks funny.

    Recently 52 or so African heads of state and government assembled as they do annually in Beijing to meet With President Xi Jinping in a one-way dialogue in which the Chinese are presented with a list of requests on developmental projects spanning civil and military spheres of life. Most of the African countries are already indebted to China and they are not really in positions of serious binary negotiations. Sometimes, the African countries are just like Oliver Twist asking for more and more without understanding Chinese oriental mentality of asking for their last pint of blood from them and their children when their loans mature.

    Orientals are generally not in the habit of forgiving creditors their debts. It is not just in their character and I am afraid that Africans will in future learn to their own detriment that the Chinese like other Orientals are incredible taskmasters not because they are wicked but because it is in their blood. There is no free lunch anywhere in the world! Whatever loans the Chinese are giving out now will be collected with interest in future or assets will be seized when the debtors are not able to pay. The experience of Sri Lanka which took generous Chinese loans for the development and modernisation of their ports and when they could not pay the Chinese simply seized the ports in lieu of the money owed.

    I hope the African states will open their eyes when taking Chinese loans or any loans at all because they are not grants. Many of the projects the Chinese funded like the TANZAM railways running from  Zambia to Tanzania  built  between 1970 and 1975 as the “UHURU RAILWAY” is now not running  and is virtually out of commission and has gone into a state of almost total disrepair and is being repaired with another loan of $1 billion provided by the Chinese. In our own case in Nigeria, the Kaduna- Abuja railway has been rendered hors de combat because of terrorists attack and bureaucratic thefts and it thus cannot pay its way. The Lagos-Ibadan railway is hardly a tale of success and the Nnamdi Azikiwe airport in Abuja runs fitfully and not always and only God knows the fate of the Kano-Katsina-Zinder railway all built with Chinese money. The intercity railway in Lagos stands as a case of success if the bureaucratic shenanigans and corruption are minimized.

    The problem of these railways is that only sections are complete. For example the Lagos – Ibadan railway is the southern portion of the line going to Kano. Without its completion, it can hardly be expected to pay its way.

    We also have the problem of Nigerians not willing to pay for infrastructural modernisation because they think government owes them a living! Toll roads and bridges are objects of protest and damage in Nigeria whereas in the civilised parts of the world, people are made to pay for new roads, railways and other means of modern transportation and communication. There is a need for civic education to inculcate into our people the primary responsibility of citizens to pay tax. Bill Gates on a recent visit to Nigeria pointed out that Nigerians do not pay taxes. Of course, it is generally known that only salary earners pay taxes while business people hardly pay taxes no matter how wealthy they are. They simply bribe their ways through. The complaint is that taxes are routinely stolen.

    I am afraid we have come to a point in our country when we have to put our feet down and say no more stealing and police the state to prevent arrant looting after all, thieves are people not spirits. If we are serious we can do it. China that we run with begging hats and plates in hand to was one of the most corrupt societies in the world. China and India used to struggle with each other about which country was worse than the other until China of Mao Tsetung decided to deal brutally with any rogue pilfering from state coffers. Anyone pilfering was met by bullets. People sat up and this severe retribution continues till today.

    Until we do this, corruption will continue until it destroys this country. The China we all run to borrow money was within my lifetime abjectly poor until the Chinese revolution in 1949. The country continued to engage in life and death struggle with poverty until Deng Xiaoping took power and ruled the country between 1978 and 1989 and completely transformed the country from being in the backwoods of development in the world into what it is today as the second most powerful country in the world, second to the United States and on the cusp of overtaking it in the next decade or two, all things being equal. The phenomenal development of China within a living memory should be what our people should try to emulate. Borrowing money and opening our markets to all kind of junks was not the Chinese way to development. The way the Chinese mobilised its huge population for development should be an example which a country like Nigeria should follow rather than importing all kinds of Chinese goods into our country.

    Instead of wasting our time and the little money we have on constitutional debates and writing and rewriting our constitution, we should take our ploughs, hoes and cutlasses and go to farms with the aim of not only feeding ourselves but the rest of the world as Americans do.

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    I am opposed to all the presidents of Africa queuing up in foreign countries to beg for assistance when we are endowed with available land, sunshine, water, air, minerals underneath the earth and flowing water that can be harnessed for hydroelectricity. It is not just the humiliation in Beijing that I am opposed to; I am also opposed to all African presidents going to Paris as begging children every year for France – Africa powwow. The same goes for the similar phenomenon in London, Washington, Tokyo, in New Delhi, Berlin with Madrid and who knows when even puny Lisbon will follow.

    These African rulers will fly in their executive jets costing millions of dollars to purchase, to beg for money which is sometimes not up to the cost of their planes.  We are told that the Chinese is sharing $50 billion among the 52 African states assembled in Beijing. This means some of these presidents would go home with less than $1 billion when prorated. It just doesn’t make sense when the monarch of Britain, heads of state and government in Germany, France, Spain, and Italy rents planes from their national airlines when they want to fly and make an impression. No one can begrudge the United States, Russia and even France for using executive personalised aircraft’s for  their trips abroad, after all, they make them and can afford them without borrowing or breaking the backs of their people to buy them

    If there is need for all African countries to meet with these powerful countries for assistance, let the OAU decide that as from now onwards, African ambassadors would represent their countries in bilateral relations one on one and if they have to be met as a collective, there should be no problem and for the countries that have no ambassadors in these major capitals, they should be represented by neighbouring countries’ ambassadors  or those of regional organisations like Economic Community of West Africa – ECOWAS or SADC or such regional bodies. This annual jamborees reminds me of what the late President George Walker Bush said about such International jamborees. He said the smaller countries speak longer than the bigger and more important participants representing important countries and that their long speeches are simply ignored. I hope this is not the case with these African jamborees simply providing comic relief for the government leaders of busy and serious countries!

  • Why many university graduates are jobless these days

    Why many university graduates are jobless these days

    Whenever I reflect on graduate joblessness these days, I cannot but recall the good old days when there were more jobs than graduates. My employment history reflected the spirit of the times. Upon my completion of secondary school education at Olofin Anglican Grammar School, Idanre, the School Principal, the late Mr. Titus Adeola Oke, gave me a hybrid employment to teach literature in form two and also assist him in his office, even before the West African School Certificate examination results were released.

    Years later, after completing my degree in English at the University of Ife, a job was waiting for me at the same secondary school. However, by September of that same year, I was called back to Ife to start my university teaching career. These early encounters with the job market were replicated over and over again throughout my career. I was headhunted for all my teaching and research positions at home and abroad. The truth is that every graduate I knew at that time had a job waiting for him or her somewhere. With only five or six universities in Nigeria at that time,  there were more job openings than there were university graduates to fill the vacancies. What is more, a number of my contemporaries in secondary school, who did not go to the university, aquired enough transferable skills and self discipline to study via correspondence tuition to become accountants, lawyers, and what have you, and they eventually rose to the top of their professions.

    Of course, the population has exploded since my undergraduate days, and higher education institutions have mushroomed out of control. Today, there are 307 universities and 812 Technical and Vocational Education and Training (TVET) institutions in Nigeria, according to latest figures from the National Universities Commission and the National Board of Technical Education, respectively. The TVET institutions include 194 polytechnics; 32 Colleges of Agriculture; 131 Colleges of Health Sciences; 154 Colleges of Nursing Science; 181 Innovation Enterprise Institutions;153 Technical Colleges; and 98 so-called Specialised Institutions. Altogether, there are 1,119 higher education institutions in the country, churning out hundreds of thousands of students every year.

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    It is estimated that 50 percent or more of graduates from these institutions today are unemployed or underemployed. There are many factors responsible for this unpleasant outcome. First, the unplanned multiplicity of higher education institutions has produced graduates far more than available jobs.

    Second, many factories and manufacturing industries, which are major employers of labour, have been shutting down in response to a slowing economy, high interest rates, poor or inadequate infrastructure, and insecurity.

    Third, educational standards have been on the decline due to numerous factors, including inadequate staffing, poor remuneration and incentives, lack of necessary equipment and facilities, decrepit infrastructure, and over-population of teaching spaces and labs.

    Fourth, institutions have not been keeping their curriculums relevant to the needs of the job market. To complicate matters, today’s graduates are hardly equipped with proper career orientation, which often makes it difficult for them to find a suitable job that matches their qualifications.

    Fifth, our graduates are victims of a skills gap. In other words, there is a serious mismatch between the skills and competencies our graduates have and the skills employers need for job vacancies. Such skills or competencies should normally be identified at the beginning of a class lesson, a lab work, or a workshop so that students are keyed into them. Students also should be trained on how to transfer skills from one area of knowledge to another in order to solve a new problem or adapt to a new job situation.

    I noticed this knowledge gap in my encounter with some graduates while conducting a workshop for teachers of English in a secondary school. I was astonished that a graduate of English had difficulty reading, understanding, and teaching a literature textbook outside the ones she studied before as a student. I also came across a graduate of statistics, who lacked the basic skills to assist in the analysis of data obtained in an opinion poll.

    Sixth, many Nigerian graduates are not sufficiently computer literate for today’s job market. They complete their education without adequate computer skills beyond the use of the telephone and social media Apps. They can use of Google to search for answers to homework assignments all right or hack into other users’ data for fraudulent purposes. But they lack basic knowledge of how computers work and can hardly use productivity software. That is why today, the integration of technology, especially Artificial Intelligence (AI) and automation, even in knowledge-based sectors, is displacing workers and contributing to graduate unemployment.

    Finally, and I blush each time I must repeat this: Most Nigerian graduates lack basic communicative skills in English, the official language, and the language of white-collar workplaces. This is especially true of graduates of public universities and even worse for polytechnic and other TVET graduates. Sometimes, I wonder whether English was their medium of instruction at all or how they succeeded if it was!

    I must add, however, that the various problems discussed above are not peculiar to Nigeria. These same factors also account for graduate unemployment across the globe. Nevertheless, the problems vary from country to country. So is the rate of unemployment. For example, on the one hand, university graduate unemployment rate is relatively high in the United States, where the rate is now about the same as the unemployment rate for those without university education.

    On the other hand, university graduate unemployment in Britain and the European Union is lower than that of the United States, with significant variations from country to country. A major reason for the difference is in the alignment of skills acquired in European universities and the job market.

    What is important for Nigeria is to tackle these problems headlong. President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has taken several major steps in this direction. First, he put a seven-year moratorium on the establishment of universities in the country to halt the overproduction of university graduates. The moratorium should be generalised across all higher education institutions. Besides, a thorough survey of all higher institutions in the country should be carried out with a view to closing failed institutions or merge failing ones with more successful or bigger institutions in order to consolidate resources.

    Second, President Tinubu has ordered the final revision and implementation of secondary education curriculum to better prepare students for entry into higher educational institutions.

    Third, he ordered a focus on TVET education, with attention on skills acquisition. Under the astute management of Professor Duke Okoro, the Rector, the young Federal Polytechnic, Orogun, Delta State, has invested in skills acquisition and skills transfer from the beginning, which enabled the institution recently to win first place in national engineering competition on “Applying Engineering Solutions to Tanker Explosion and Fire Outbreak.”

    But a lot more still needs be done. The remuneration of teachers across the education sector is long overdue for upward revision in light of current economic realities. There should be more effort on job creation through greater investment in infrastructure beyond road construction. More attention should be given to power and water supply as well as recreational facilities.

    The need to enhance security is also critical to attracting investment and creating a path to reindustrialisation. Still more effort should be made to make state and local goverments more responsible for education.

    Finally, it is necessary to inject new blood into the civil service and encourage old hands to retire quietly. This is one way to initiate changes in existing civil service culture with all its problems, while also creating jobs for new graduates.

  • 44th OLUBADAN; Nigeria @ 65: Great education expectations

    44th OLUBADAN; Nigeria @ 65: Great education expectations

    As we celebrate the enthronement of Oba Rashidi Adewolu Ladoja, aged 81, as the 44th Olubadan of Ibadanland and absorb his call for an Ibadan State, let us appreciate his personal journey through life from being poor to becoming a brilliant mathematics student to becoming senator and Oyo State governor in 2003. His dream as governor was to have 30 students a class; he himself had 26 students in his own class in school. He took his dream, as governor of Oyo State to Abuja.

    Sadly he did not serve as governor long enough to carry out his plan and Oyo State is the worse for it, all these years later even today. The then Governor Ladoja had his tenure truncated and he was removed due to the then reigning political evil of the day which placed presidential whims and caprices over and above the will of the people. The public domain is unaware if there was any presidential regret for the removal, but Oba Ladoja is certainly having the last laugh due hopefully to his God-given longevity, the righteousness of his case, and the unjustified quantum of political evil dealt him just for being naturally kind-natured. We wish Kabiyesi Rashidi Ladoja a long, exponentially progressive and peaceful reign. Amen.

    One thing government must take up is that we must teach that not everyone who wants to set up a stall or trade or even run a keke or an okada in every market can have that privilege or be accommodated in 2025. There is no longer space for everyone. Nowhere in the world can 50 tri-cycles (keke), 100 commercial motor-cycles (okada) and 500 traders be squeezed into existing spaces. They should be enumerated, given numbers and allocated spaces. Move the excess elsewhere, like in other areas. The encroachment of the unlimited traders with their baskets and wheelbarrows on the road lanes and keke lines strangles Ibadan at various points like the entire Mokola, Bodija, Agodi and Mapo areas making movement a nightmare in daylight and endangering even our children. Perhaps methods of numbering and allocation of spaces need to be revisited and updated to make better use of the amazing new roads in Ibadan to help speed up traffic and stop the unnecessary traffic jams. The inability of the authority to maintain two functioning lanes through the above markets, and the ease with which the police on duty ignore the need to open such roads daily makes things worse.     

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    Happy 65th Birthday Nigeria. It is difficult to be happy when so many Fellow Nigerians have been senselessly killed by terrorists and herders, also terrorists actually, and other individuals and groups who use murder of innocent unarmed citizens and sometimes armed and uniformed service personnel for no just cause. At this time of celebration, we are reminded, if we have forgotten, by our government at the Africa Union, that we still have 10+million children out of school in a country which started free education 60 years ago.

    Let us re-ask ourselves why a country like ours has over 10 million out of school children in spite of its God-given wealth. Let every thief in Nigeria, rich or poor, political or contractor or civil servant or ‘uniform’ or Bank and CBN beneficiary, accept responsibility for being the direct cause of those 10m+ out of school children. They must accept full responsibility for the consequence of their collective past and perhaps ongoing nefarious activities of depriving those 10m of schooling.   Ten million is a big army of youth to grow to adulthood without education. This is a recipe for state destruction in 10 years or more.

    Surely, we can all see the simplest, easiest and cheapest solution is to have a ‘MASSIVE 10 MILLION IN SCHOOL PROGRAMME WITH AFTERNOON CLASSES THE EXISTING CLASSROOMS RUNNING TWICE DAILY WITH EXTRA SETS OF TEACHERS OR EXTRA PAY FOR EXISTING TEACHERS’.

    Citizens are disgusted that the accused Ondo Church terrorists’ lawyers put forward a plea for bail. Do our lawyers not know that murder and any accusation which attracts the death penalty do not qualify for bail? Do they not get taught that in Law School? An appeal for bail in this horrendous circumstance appears like a strategy at time-wasting, a popular legal exercise in legal futility and a marked disrespect for the dead. It is also a rude slap in the face of the Fellow Nigerian citizens and relations who survived the deadly vicious attack which was calculated to mutate a simple Sunday church service into a terrorist funeral fire and a national tragedy.       

     Are we to suffer at the hands of yet another cabal in our long search for fuel self-sufficiency? We all get stopped abruptly and without any road safety concerns every day by union workers taking toll money from all passing commercial vehicles. One would have thought they would move to cashless payments but that would expose their true wealth. The face-off in the petroleum industry is really an eye opening event as it exposes the players for what they stand for and what they stand against. Please examine the case and ask who is really on the side the Fellow Nigerians as we celebrate Nigeria @ 65. The answer will make you think twice or thrice.

    Happy Birthday Nigeria @65. May you not suffer forever. Amen, 

  • Nigeria at crossroads

    Nigeria at crossroads

    At 65 years of Independence, Nigerians, surely have a tough decision to make. Will the majority go on with President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s (PBAT) administration’s far-reaching reforms or will they turn to those making a swansong of the challenges associated with the reforms? Historically, reformers like Mikhail Gorbachev of Soviet Union paid a huge price for his Perestroika and Glasnost. Will PBAT pay the price for being a reformer or will he survive?

    Nigeria’s economic challenges have been systemic, ranging from inflation, import dependency, foreign exchange crisis, erosion of the value of the local currency, food insecurity, hunger, to abject poverty of the majority of the citizens. Amidst these economic headwinds, Nigerians were literally subsidizing the fuel imports of her neighbours. To compound the situation, her rapacious elites were trading on her currency to the detriment of businesses and other genuine economic activities.

    The implication was that while the few elites connected to the seat of power, were making millions by getting direct foreign currency allocations from the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and trading on it, those engaged in genuine economic activities were substantially at the mercy of the ravenous economic saboteurs. The most impactful on the country was sourcing foreign exchange for the importation of fuel, as the three major refineries in Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna were comatose.

    The way out for the immediate past regime, was printing more money by the CBN, euphemistically referred by government officials, as ‘ways and means’. The challenge of sourcing foreign exchange to import fuel was further compounded by the opacity and massive corruption of the process. Nigeria experienced all manner of racketeering, as many so-called fuel importers presented fake documents for non-existent imports, and with the connivance of corrupt state officials got paid humongous sums to the detriment of the already bleeding foreign exchange reserves.

    Other businesses, like foreign airline operators, who after collecting the cost of tickets in local currency could not buy foreign exchange at the official foreign exchange rate to repatriate their earnings, either departed the country, or took matters into their own hands. Those that stayed, charged much higher for tickets sold in Nigeria, when compared to prices for similar tickets in neighbouring countries. Travels for students, businessmen and holiday makers became so excruciating that Nigerians went to neighbouring countries to connect Europe and America at huge costs.

    Many multi-national manufacturing companies, finding it difficult to access foreign exchange to import needed raw materials, closed shop, and moved to more economically stable countries. As unemployment skyrocketed, and more valueless money chased fewer goods, inflation soared into triple digits, and the national economy was on a tailspin. The impact on food inflation was so devastating that basic essential commodities, some of which were import dependent, were priced out of the reach of the ordinary Nigerians and the country was almost imploding.

    The insecurity in parts of the country further drove food prices to a dangerous level. With the north-central states of Benue and Plateau, major food baskets of the country overrun by murderous herdsmen, Nigeria was on the throes of asphyxiation. While the north-central was on the boil, farmlands further north were the grains come from, were in the grips of internecine war, waged by Boko Haram and the so-called bandits. While Boko Haram elements were fighting for their lives in northeast, the bandits were claiming territories in northwest.

    On assumption of office in May, 2023, the PBAT administration decided to confront the twin challenge of fuel subsidy and foreign exchange racketeering. The immediate impact was a runaway inflation and further depreciation of the official rate of the Naira, which had been artificially buoyed over the years by the CBN. Many commentators viewed the twin steps as bold, while some considered it reckless. Those who supported the twin policy of the administration argued that it was the only way to bring sanity to the national economy.

    Initially, the side effects of the twin policy were so devastating, as the nation witnessed galloping inflation, especially food inflation that even the core supporters of the administration doubted the wisdom of the policies. But the administration stayed course, and presently while Naira is gaining value by the day, inflation is tending downwards. The removal of the subsidy also made the nation buoyant enough to increase the minimum wage and for sub-nationals to have money to engage in infrastructural projects.

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    The implicit deregulation of the price of fuel has seen the price of that national economic driver now determined by marketers. Recently, the price of fuel has been moving up and down without Nigerians and especially labour unions pointing fingers and threatening the industrial peace of the country. Luckily for the Tinubu administration and indeed for Nigerians, the Dangote Petroleum Refinery & Petrochemicals came on stream to fill the huge gap left by the bumbling and incompetent Nigerian National Petroleum Company Ltd (NNPCL).

    But at the cusp of Nigeria’s 65th anniversary, the apparent redundancy that private sector-led Dangote has made of the two major industrial unions hegemons in the oil sector, NUPENG and PENGASSAN, rears its ugly or beautiful head, depending on which side, the commentator belongs. The two industrial unions were made nationally popular during the war for democracy in Nigeria, after the annulment of June 12 general election, which Chief M.K.O Abiola won, particularly under the leadership of late Chief Frank Kokori of NUPENG.

    But like NNPCL, the two unions appear to have fallen into disuse with the private sector dominating the downstream oil sector. Considering the alleged underhand tactics of the leaders of the union to make themselves wealthy at a huge price to ordinary Nigerians, the two unions have a herculean task to convince Nigerians that their ongoing tango with Dangote Refinery is not for private gain. Unfortunately for them, their relatively recent antecedent with respect to the federal government’s sale and repurchase of the three earlier named refineries makes them complicit in the economic sabotage of the oil industry in recent decades.

    While it would be unfair for Dangote Refinery to deny workers their rights under section 40 of the 1999 constitution (as amended), to belong to Trade Unions; the arbitrary, unconscionable and buccaneer trade practices of NUPENG and PENGASSAN, cannot cohabit with private capital, without their internal reforms. Of note, most of their officials live like oil Sheiks, from illegal dues, and the fallout of those practices, is on the ordinary Nigerians. As the country celebrate her anniversary, this column wonders which way Nigerians will go?

    Will Nigerians follow through with the Tinubu reforms, or will they fall for the antics of the rapacious elites mocking the ordinary citizens with their new swan song of ‘I am hungry’, when the humongous wealth the cheerleaders display, are far beyond what they could have gotten from their honest labour?

  • PENGASSAN: Same old tactics

    PENGASSAN: Same old tactics

    Save for the disruptive, needlessly atavistic waves generated in its wake, it is at once tempting to pass-off the latest showdown between Dangote Refinery and the Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria (PENGASSAN) over an alleged disengagement of 800 workers by the management of the refinery as the last kicks of a dying horse.

    However, with PENGASSAN not merely stopping at threatening fire and brimstone on a wearied nation, but apparently sworn to bring the roof over the heads of everyone, Nigeria and Nigerians ought to be alarmed at the extent to which our industrial unions, many of whose self-entitlement are as legendary as their resort to union power has become mindlessly destructive, could go to force their will on just any institution and anyone.

    Guess it was inevitable that PENGASSAN would again put the country on the war mode so soon after its alter ego, the no-less powerful tanker drivers unit of the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG-PTD) sought to disrupt the nation’s peace.

    Thanks to their nemesis, Dangote Refinery, it has been a case of each breaking of the dawn forcing new lessons on an unwilling, recalcitrant pupil.

    For NUPENG, it came to a challenge of their strange financial orthodoxy: a hefty levy of N50,000 delivered to the union coffers on every single truck loaded at the gantry – an imposition neither sanctioned by the industry regulators nor the tax authorities, but which has been accepted as convention to keep the union fat cats happy but for which business mogul, Aliko Dangote insists on applying its rightful appellation of plain extortion!

    Imagine calling out the Dangote behemoth for refusing to play the enabler for that extortion ring whose operative motif is power without responsibility!

    It is not exactly that the elements in the PENGASSAN industrial action are not worthy of careful consideration. Starting with the issue of the sack of 800 locals, PENGASSAN says Dangote Refinery has since replaced them with 2000 foreigners – an unpatriotic act, if true. PENGASSAN president, Festus Osifo noted that the problem actually started when close to 1000 workers filled forms to join PENGASSAN in accordance with Section 40 of the constitution. He claimed that the union wrote to Dangote Refinery to inform it of the development and that the company sent teams from unit to unit to verify those names only to issue them sack letters thereafter. 

    Dangote Refinery has since denied that this was not the case. It frames the entire saga as one of a union overreach; a schism designed to buoy the union’s fading relevance as well as enhance its purse. In fact, its summary of the issues as contained in the four-page advertisement in yesterday’s edition of this newspaper obviously says it all:  PENGASSAN, given its antecedents, has long ceased to be a force for good, in terms of enhancing the welfare of its members, but rather as a destructive force in the industry. One example it cited, and which has become an albatross on its neck, is the union’s role in aborting the sale of the Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries to Bluestar Consortium promoted by business mogul, Aliko Dangote.  More than a decade and half after, the entities have remained the relics they were, and these after billions of dollars of public funds were sunk into their Turn Around Maintenances (TAMs).

    So, to suggest that there is no love-lost between the Dangote and PENGASSAN is merely stating the obvious. Like parallel lines, their interests are as divergent as to be irreconcilable. The point here is that there is nothing new in what PENGASSAN has said of the Dangote Refinery or Dangote’s other business interests that have not been said by Nigerians in one way or the other.

    At this point in time, my guess is that the issue is not that those in charge of regulation and fair consumer practices are unaware, but a case of the behemoth being entitled to some forbearance given that the terrain could, for the most part, be described as uncharted. That it continues to find sympathy among Nigerians is essentially because, its promoter, Aliko Dangote, chose to plod on where his peers would rather engage in buying and selling. This, most certainly, could not be said of PENGASSAN whose role has been more of an enabler of the rot for which the industry has long earned notoriety.

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    Talking of union overreach: calling its members in various offices, companies, institutions, and agencies, including those in the field to cease all services effective Monday, September 29 offers of classic example of mindless use of union power.  Just as ominous was the strike instrument as signed by its General Secretary, Lumumba Okugbawa: “All processes involving gas and crude supply to Dangote Refinery should be halted immediately…All IOC (International Oil Companies) branches must ramp down gas production and supply to Dangote Refinery and petrochemicals.”

    It is akin to a declaration of war, not just on the refinery as an entity, but the citizens of this country; a case of the interest of the 800 workers towering above those of 200 million odd citizens. Perhaps lost to PENGASSAN is the irony of its invocation of the constitutional safeguards regarding the right of the workers to join any association to advance their interests and presenting those rights as so expansive as if to strip the management of its prerogatives to determine how their enterprise is run, while seeking to deny other Nigerians their rights to live in peace and to enjoy those services that they are ordinarily entitled.

    Where will all of these end? It seems doubtful that the two unions ever understood the import of the saying about ‘an unstoppable force meeting an immovable object’ else they would have been more restrained in calling for a war they could never hope to win. Between union power and management prerogative, who says the former is fated to win?

    Moreover, to the extent that the lessons of the past weeks has proven a revelation of their astounding lack of strategy, I believe that their very survival would depend on their ability to better appreciate the nature of the current time and the imperative of flexibility in the choice of means to fight whatever cause they deem fit. As of the moment, our two foremost unions in the oil industry, have, sadly not even begun the slow march to unlearning their old, destructive ways!

    Two weeks ago, I had ended my piece about NUPENG’s sunset and those of its DAPPMAN allies as potentially ‘slow and drawn out’, and that ‘hoping against hope that the ship that had long departed the shores could still be halted midstream would at best be an exercise in futility’; I believe the statement applies as much to PENGASSAN as those two.