The Nation Newspaper

Category: Segun Ayobolu

  • TB, LASU and the grace of selfless giving

    TB, LASU and the grace of selfless giving

    On Wednesday, this week, friends, associates, colleagues, government officials including the governor of Lagos State, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu and Minister of Education, Dr Olatunji Alausa and critical stakeholders in the education industry gathered at the Epe Campus of the Lagos State University (LASU), on the invitation of respected journalist, editor, columnist, lawyer, environmentalist, politician and public administrator, Mr Olatunji Bello. The occasion was the formal unveiling of a spectacular new physical structure donated to the institution by the Executive Vice-Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC).

    The 550-seat sprawling building is an architectural masterpiece. It once existed only in the thought and imagination of the man fondly called TB by large numbers of his mentors, mentees and admirers. Thought translated into action, mutated into vision and is today a phenomenal material actuality, adding value to LASU and by extension Nigeria’s beleaguered educational landscape. In his speech on the occasion, TB traced the genesis and trajectory from idea to concreteness of the project.

    In his words, “At my 50th birthday in 2011, I had committed to instituting an annual prize in five disciplines, namely, Law, Mass Communications, Social Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. I was very intentional about the criteria to qualify. Academic brilliance was one. Two,  coming from a poor background. And three, the beneficiary must be an indigene of our dear state of Lagos. The whole idea is targeting those brilliant minds at the risk of dropping out of academic pursuits on account of poverty. To the glory of God Almighty, we have been able to sustain that scholarship programme to date.”

    Fast forward a decade later as TB’s narrative continues, “So, as my 60th birthday approached in 2021, the concern was how I could do more. For me, the idea of throwing a big party to mark the occasion was completely off the table. My darling wife, Professor Ibiyemi Olatunji-Bello, the very able Madam Vice-Chancellor of this great university, is the one who initially mooted the idea of building something for LASU to mark my 60th birthday. She was not yet the Vice Chancellor then. I never gave much thought to her suggestion immediately until a few days later. Eventually, after much reflection, l agreed it has to be an auditorium, truly befitting and fit for purpose”.

    Although the architect, Mr Kunle Ayinla, came up with an impressive building plan, the projected cost, TB found staggering. Yet, he remained undaunted, ploughing on with determination and fortitude. Did not the Lord Jesus say that he who puts his hand on the plough and looks back is not worthy of the Kingdom of God? He put his fertile mind to work. According to him, “After days of wrestling with the architect’s budget in my head, it suddenly occurred to me I could ask those going to buy me gifts for the 60th birthday to monetise such and hand me the cash to do something really dear to my heart. It worked. A very wealthy friend and well-known businessman had wanted to surprise me with a brand new Toyota Land Cruiser Jeep. I appealed to him to convert it to cash. With donations from other able friends and well-wishers, we got started in 2021”.

    It was a tortuous journey filled with unanticipated challenges such as the drastic fall of the Naira’s value and the attendant inflationary spirals of 2023 and 2024, but TB’s trust in the faithfulness of God to facilitate the completion of the dream never wavered. In the process, he had to sell his property at Magodo Estate in Lagos to keep the project going. Thus, Mr Olabode Opseitan writes, “It is not the size of the gift that stuns – it is the source. By every reasonable measure – whether by asset declarations, Forbes rankings, or real estate holdings – Tunji Bello is not among Nigeria’s wealthiest citizens. Yet, he has done what perhaps fewer than 10 Nigerians have ever done: build a legacy structure for a public university – not with surplus, but with scarcity…What emerged is not just an auditorium – it is a monument to moral courage, a structure built not on concrete alone, but on conviction”.

    TB’s life has been built on the foundation of compassion, kindness, generosity, selflessness and a commitment to justice and the pursuit of public purpose. Myriads of those he has touched within and beyond the journalism profession over the years readily testify to his all too many acts of self-sacrificial giving, mostly getting nothing in return but gratitude and prayers.

    For instance, in the book, ‘In Pursuit of the Public Purpose’, a collection of reminiscences, memories and reflections onTB’s life, published to commemorate his 60th birthday in 2021, a journalist and former Chairman of the Concord Chapter of the Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ), Ogbeni Goke Odeyinka wrote, “I remember also how he assisted his first PA to study for his Master’s degree in Law in England. I know because the man involved happens to be my in-law.

    Incidentally, TB’s gesture of altruistic philanthropy at LASU is coming at a time when the world is entering a new phase of chronic individualistic selfishness and self-centeredness. Seek ye first the kingdom of your individual greed and personal egotism, and all other things shall be added unto you, seems to be the new human credo, especially with the advent of President Donald Trump and his ‘Make America Great Again’ mantra. Consequently, America has turned inward particularly during his ongoing second term, terminating its financial contributions to the World Health Organization (WHO), scrapping the USAID, turning its back on the gripping poverty and immiseration that grips much of humanity despite the world’s wealthiest and most powerful country’s capacity to do much good and help fashion a fairer, more equitable, just and compassionate world.

    This seems a far cry from the spectacular manifestation of amazing generosity of the spirit and overflow of the milk of human kindness exhibited by some of the world’s richest persons in the early years of this century. In his essay on different dimensions of this revolution in altruism, titled ‘What Should a Billionaire Give – and What Should You?’, Peter Singer writes, “In the same world in which more than a billion people live at a level of affluence never previously known, roughly a billion other people struggle to survive on the purchasing power equivalent of less than one US dollar per day”. Writing in 2007, Singer noted that most of the world’s poorest people were undernourished, lacked access to basic health services, including safe drinking water and could not send their children to school, with the result that at least 10 million children died yearly, according to statistics by UNICEF.

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    Responding to this dismal and desperate situation, Singer states that “Last June, the investor,  Warren Buffett, took a significant step toward reducing these deaths when he pledged $31 billion to the Gates Foundation and another $6 billion to other charitable foundations. Buffett’s pledge, set alongside the nearly $30 billion given by Bill and Melinda Gates to their foundation, has made it clear that the first decade of the twenty-first century is a new “golden age of philanthropy”. On an inflation-adjusted basis, Buffet has pledged to give more than double the lifetime total given away by two of the philanthropic giants of the past, Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller, put together. Bill and Melinda Gates’ gifts are not far behind.”

    What is intriguing is that many of the world’s billionaire philanthropists are atheists or agnostics, not excluding Bill Gates and Buffet. TB is a Muslim married to a Christian and pastor of the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG). Compassionate kindness is thus not limited to religious inclination or orientation. In their book, ‘Greed is Dead-Politics after Individualism’, published in 2020, two eminent economists from the United Kingdom, Paul Collier and John Kay, contend that the world, despite Trump, is moving from an essentially narcissistic individualism to a return to a more communal, cooperative ethos without which human survival in the long run cannot be guaranteed. This is because “humans are first and foremost social animals and our successes always depend on cooperation”.

    TB has shown the light for many more privileged persons to find the way to compassionate giving for the communal good. There are all too few affluent Nigerians, such as Aliko Dangote, Femi Otedola, Afe Babalola, Wole Olanipekun, and Tony Elumelu, among others, following this path relative to the number of Nigerians of considerable means. I am told that Anambra State, for instance, has the largest collection of billionaires in the country. How has that benefited their state? TB announced to the audience that, courtesy of another friend, Mr Biodun Omoniyi, Managing Director of VDT Communications, there will be free WiFi at the auditorium to enhance the learning experience of students. Moreover, the maintenance of the auditorium will be handled by another private management company for one year.

    Tracing his orientation to philanthropy and public service to the examples of his late father, Alhaji Azeez Olatunji Bello, his late boss and mentor, MKO Abiola and President Bola Tinubu, TB stressed that “this auditorium is my own token of appreciation to God Almighty for his grace and to my dear native Lagos State for the great opportunities given me. First, I have also been one of the beneficiaries of the Lagos State Government’s scholarship award as an undergraduate at the University of Ibadan in the early 1980s. And later the privilege to serve in public office in various capacities”. TB has obviously never forgotten that to whom much is given, much is expected. All too many of us disdain this truism all too often to the detriment of the collective good.

  • BAO and self-indictment of sacked agency boss

    BAO and self-indictment of sacked agency boss

    Soon after the unanticipated sacking of some members of the Ekiti State Executive Council on August 11, the unassuming and surpassingly modest Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji (BAO), has removed from office the former Chairman of the state’s Microcredit and Enterprise Development Agency, Akogun Abayomi Olumide. A terse statement by the Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Mr Olayinka Olabode, issued on 16-08-2025, simply described the sack to be “as a result of gross misconduct and dereliction of duty” and “was with immediate effect’. But in a statement released to the press, the sacked agency Chief asserted that it was untrue that he was sacked over “corruption”.

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    Elaborating on the reason for his sack,  Akogun Olumide said, “The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) said the agency should recover funds amounting to N1.6 billion. But along the line, we met bottlenecks. Politicians were interfering, saying the money was not disbursed by us. Because of these obstacles, we decided to stop and recommended that those who issued the money should be responsible for the recovery. So, in view of that, we continued with our mandate”.

    This curiously worded press statement does not indicate that the Chairman of the agency was directed to stop the fund recovery process that he was mandated to undertake in the first place. Rather, faced with resistance by those he was supposed to recover the money from, he desisted from carrying out the directive, advised that the responsibility be shifted to others, and “we continued with our own mandate”. Is there any description for this other than indefensible insubordination?

  • Louis Odion: Who the cap fits

    Louis Odion: Who the cap fits

    Easily one of the most engaging and engrossing journalists and public intellectuals in Nigeria over the last two and a half decades, Louis Odion’s trade mark essays in his inimitable columns combine uncommon literary flair, deep-seated historical context, with intellectual muscularity. If sufficiently provoked, the Edo State-born wordsmith can also engage in devastating polemical exchanges no less bruising than the art of boxing, of which he is an aficionado and amateur practitioner. President Tinubu has just tapped Odion’s immense cerebral resources by nominating him for confirmation by the Senate as Executive Director, Operations, of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC).

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    The FCCPC has witnessed a remarkable resurgence under its Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice Chairman, Mr Tunji Bello  – an outstanding journalist, editor, lawyer, environmentalist and public administrator – over the last two years, and Louis will certainly have considerable value. A former Editor and Managing Director of prestigious national newspapers, he was a former Commissioner for Information in Edo State and Special Technical Adviser to former Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo. This is wishing the industrious, meticulous and focused ‘Capacity’ all the best in his new assignment.

  • Kayode Opeifa and NRC’s’ Morning Yet on Creation Day’

    Kayode Opeifa and NRC’s’ Morning Yet on Creation Day’

    It was an unusual post on Facebook. It is not often that Nigerians have charitable or commendable things to say about occupants of public office. They are seen more as masters rather than servant leaders; more preoccupied with the pomp and grandeur of office as wealth acquisition rather than the opportunity it provides to add value to society and promote national development. There is a linkage between deficient leadership at all levels and an otherwise richly endowed country’s continued inexplicable romance with dehumanizing underdevelopment. But on the 5th of July, 2025, Engineer S. O. Yusuf, from Kaduna, had a post online tagged ‘Leadership by Example’.

    In his words, “This morning at about 7:46 a.m. inside a train from Rigasa to Idu, Abuja, I had a remarkable encounter that left a lasting impression on me about leadership in Nigeria. While seated in Coach 20 of the Nigeria Railway Corporation train, I met a humble and well-spoken gentleman who joined us on a three-seat bench. After exchanging pleasantries, he engaged me and my friend in a thoughtful conversation about Railway transportation in Nigeria, particularly our experiences along the Abuja-Kaduna route. We spoke openly, highlighting both the positive aspects and areas where we believed improvements were needed”.

    Engineer Yusuf continued, “Throughout the discussion, he listened with genuine interest, asked insightful questions, and responded thoughtfully.  His calm, respectful, and unassuming manner stood out. To our surprise, it was only after we introduced ourselves that we discovered he was the Managing Director of the Nigerian Railway Corporation. What struck me most was how approachable and down-to-earth he was. There was no air of superiority or entitlement. He embodied what true leadership should be, listening to honest feedback, and leading by example”. But what did Engineer Yusuf find even more fascinating? Hear him: “Upon arrival at Idu Station, he quickly got down and ensured the elevator was operational. For the first time in years of using the train, I was able to use both the elevator and the escalator; an immediate and visible impact of proactive leadership”.

    Incidentally, the current Managing Director of the Nigeria Railway Corporation (NRC), Dr Isiak Kayode Opeifa, who was appointed by President Bola Tinubu on 22nd January, stressed on an appearance on TVC’s breakfast show that the restoration of dignified and satisfactory customer service, which he described as a constituent key soul of Railway operations, is a cardinal goal of the organization under his leadership. The correspondence shared above by an impressed customer confirms that he is indeed walking his talk.  Other components of the soul of this mode of transportation, very critical to the management he leads, Opeifa avers, are affordable cost, comfort, connectivity and pride arising from the customer’s sense of fulfilment and safety.

    In articulating his goal at the NRC within the context of President Tinubu’s Renewed Hope Agenda, Opeifa situates one of Nigeria’s oldest public institutions at the very core of the country’s pursuit of economic growth and development, prosperity and national integration. Tracing the historical trajectory of the NRC, he notes that it had been at the centre of national economic development and integration as far back as 1898, up to 1912, even before Nigeria was formally christened with the famous name it bears today. Although he never used the then functional trains before he was born 21 May, 1965, he recalls with nostalgia tales he was told of how the train service moved people and goods from Lagos to Kafanchan, Kutuwenji, Kaura Namoda, Zungeru, Enugu, Aba, Port Harcourt and all over Nigeria. Historians surely have a duty to document for popular readership the role of the NRC over time in the emergence of a popular national consciousness.

    However, Opeifa laments that the NRC was allowed by successive regimes to become one of the foremost symbols of the abysmal decline of the country’s fortunes for a period of no less than six decades. Steps to reverse this decline, he states, started about a decade ago with the late President Muhammadu Buhari administration that jump-started the actualization of modernizing the country’s rail system. There are those who can see no positive gains of the PMB years in power. But even the blind can see the various rail projects either initiated or completed by the administration in eight years of frenetic activity in the sector. These include the Kaduna-Kano railway project; the Abuja Kaduna railway route; the Port Harcourt – Aba railway rehabilitation; the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge railway and the Kano- Daura section of the  Kano- Maradi rail project to name a few.

    Describing the national railway system he inherited as stable, not yet good enough but recovering, Opeifa, who holds a PhD in transport and mobility planning and logistics, is according priority to ensuring that investment of effort and revenue yield more efficient and effective outcomes. According to him, under the Renewed Hope Agenda, the focus as regards revitalization of the country’s rail system is to “optimize what we have to work for us; moving people as well as agricultural and other products; creating jobs; boosting prosperity and situating rail transportation at the centre of national development”. He explains that a cardinal but hardly noticed step that the Tinubu administration has taken in the direction of national restructuring has been to place the NRC in a prime position to promote development at the states and hinterlands by removing rail transportation from the exclusive to the concurrent list of the 1999 Constitution.

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    Consequently, infrastructure development around the national rail system has been taken back to the states where the people are no longer just users of the rail facilities but are now primed to benefit from the inclusive growth the decentralization of rail transportation engenders. As part of efforts to ensure that national assets entrusted to the NRC are utilized to the benefit of all citizens, Opeifa says that the organization will soon unveil details of how all parts of the country will be integrated into the national rail grid. Contrary to the view in some quarters that the new regional development commissions are wasteful and profligate, the NRC Chief Executive notes that one of their main preoccupations is the development of integrated rail networks for their various territories, which are now being connected to macro rail grid networks.

    Given the high cost of these ventures, he points out that provision has been made in the 2025 budget for financial grants to be made available to state governments willing to develop rail networks. The Tinubu administration is thus backing sub-national units of administration to develop infrastructure that belongs to them and not to the centre. While Kaduna and Niger States are collaborating on developing the Minna – Kaduna rail route, the Katsina State government is seizing the new opportunity to develop the Katsina -Kano- Maradi Jibiya- Funtua rail route. He enthuses that many state governments are eagerly working with the NRC to initiate new rail projects or reignite moribund ones. The Red Line Rail in Lagos runs on the NRC’s Lagos-Ibadan corridor, while Ogun State is taking advantage of the same corridor to develop a number of its inner city rail routes.

    In collaboration with the Plateau State government, the NRC’s ‘Railing on the Plateau’ initiative has resurrected and operationalized the Jos-Bukuru-Kava rail, moving large numbers of people at far more affordable costs than possible on the road. And in Niger State, the ‘Rail on the Niger’ scheme is moving farm products from various centres in the State to markets within and beyond the state. While the Apapa Port to the standard gauge has been completed to enable movement of cargo both from the narrow and standard gauge, the route from the Apapa Port to the Tin Can Port is at an advanced stage of work. On the Eastern axis, Opeifa is understandably excited that the Port Harcourt to Aba route has been completed and commenced commercial operations, moving people to and from the two commercial nerve centres at a cost of N700.

    Under the administration’s ‘Trade by Rail’  revolution, the NRC is now moving huge cargoes including cement, gypsum, soda ash and others by rail. The pipes used on the Ajaokuta-Kaduna-Kano AKK project were moved by rail from Warri to Itakpe. The NRC under Opeifa is rehabilitating and bringing back the moribund Lagos-Kano narrow gauge, while abandoned old coaches are being rehabilitated and returned to functionality. It has completed and tested the concept plan to replace diesel use with Liquified Natural Gas for its stations and locomotives, and considerably reduce its operational costs, while all the NRC’s generators will now be powered by Compressed Natural Gas (CNG), reducing operation costs by 70 per cent. In the sixties, Chinua Achebe’s collection of essays titled ‘Morning Yet on Creation Day’ indicated what he saw as a new spirit of resurgent creativity for African literature. The same spirit is stirred in an NRC on the rebound under Opeifa.

  • PMB: Simplicity in life, dignity in death

    PMB: Simplicity in life, dignity in death

    It would have been surprising if his death last Sunday, July 13, in a private hospital in London, had been received with universal approbation and adulation of a virtuous, unblemished life in a polity as complex and fraught as Nigeria. First, there are no human beings without fault. With the possible exception of the immaculately spotless Peter Obi, according to the holy gospel of the ‘Obidients’, mortal leaders are no angels. Again, an inevitable and unavoidable price of greatness is the intense controversy evoked by those who make a significant impact on history across time and space. Those who love them do so fanatically, and those who detest them are implacable in their hatred. And so it was with President Muhammadu Buhari, unassuming military Head of State for about 20 months between December 1983 and August 1985, and two-term elected President of Nigeria from 2015 to 2023. It was no different with Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ladoke Akintola, Murtala Mohammed, Odumegwu Ojukwu and several others who had played prime roles in Nigeria’s political evolution.

    When he died in 1987, the great sage, unrivalled administrative genius and first Premier of the Western Region in Nigeria’s First Republic, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was passionately mourned by his teeming followers and remorselessly reviled by those who could not differentiate him from Satan. The great novelist and thinker, Professor Chinua Achebe, had issued a public statement after Awolowo’s death, accusing him of supporting genocide during the Nigerian civil war, and vigorously canvassing against according the great politician a state burial. He did not believe that the dead deserved some respect, and he was no doubt entitled to his view in a free and open society. It is instructive in this regard that Awolowo’s arch political opponent, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, who defeated him in the 1979 and 1983 presidential elections, awarded him the National Honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR), even though Awo was never President.

    A near-unanimous refrain in the outpouring of emotions following President Buhari’s transition to eternity from both his friends and foes alike, however, was the unrivalled ethical pedestal he bestrode and the impeccable moral integrity that characterised his over five decades in public life. His aversion to material accumulation earned him the lifelong adulation, adoration and reflexive loyalty of millions of ordinary Nigerians, particularly in Northern Nigeria, where mass poverty is particularly pronounced, largely as a result of leadership lack of vision and elite venality.  Indeed, in his slim but powerful classic, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, Achebe had traced the excessive materialism that is the bane of contemporary Nigeria partly to what he described as the deficiency in the political thought of some of our key founding fathers.

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    As Achebe put it, “A perceptive student of Nigerian politics, James Booth, has drawn attention to the poverty of thought exhibited in the biographies of Dr Azikiwe and Chief Awolowo in contrast to the expressions of ideology to be found even in the more informal works of Mboya, Nyerere and Nkrumah! In a solemn vow made by Azikiwe in 1937, he pledged: ‘that henceforth I shall utilise my earned income to secure my enjoyment of a high standard of living and also to give a helping hand to the needy’. Obafemi Awolowo was even more forthright about his ambitions: ‘I was going to make myself formidable intellectually, morally invulnerable, to make all the money that is possible for a man with my brains and brawn to make’. Thoughts such as these are more likely to produce aggressive millionaires than selfless leaders of their people. An absence of objective and intellectual rigour at the critical moment of a nation’s formation is more than an academic matter. It inclines the fledgling state to disorderly growth and mental deficiency”.

    Though controversial, Achebe ‘s contention here in my view contains some grains of truth. Buhari was no intellectual and did not pretend to be one. He was a simple soldier who defended his country’s territorial integrity first on the battlefield, next in a war against indiscipline and corruption through ‘redemptive’ military statecraft between 1984 and 1985 and then on the partisan political terrain as a politician and emergent statesman between 2003 and 2023. Yet, he had a strong moral orientation to life undoubtedly influenced by his deep commitment to Islamic spirituality. It is amazing that a man who was military governor of the former North Eastern State comprising about five states today did not seize the opportunity to amass stupendous wealth. He was a former Chairman of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and military Head of State but never allocated any oil bloc to himself. He never acquired any property in Lagos. It almost sounds like fiction.   It was after he left office in 2023 that the succeeding Tinubu administration upgraded his house in Kaduna.

    When he assumed office as military Head of State in 1984, following the martial overthrow of a thoroughly corrupt and decadent Second Republic, the military still had the image of being a redemptive, messianic institution with the requisite reservoir of patriotism and professional integrity to rescue Nigeria from the havoc of predatory politicians. There is no doubt that Buhari and his deputy, Brigadier General Tunde Idiagbon, pursued their War Against Indiscipline and Corruption in essentially purist and uncompromising, Messianic terms. Thus, they set up anti-corruption tribunals that tried and jailed corrupt politicians of the Second Republic for terms that amounted to life sentences. They publicly executed drug couriers and jailed foreign exchange speculators. They drafted draconian punitive laws against a media they perceived as veering beyond the bounds of liberty into licentiousness.

    Even before his emergence as military Head of State, Buhari ‘s patriotic commitment to Nigeria was indisputable. In his thrilling and authoritative book, ‘Soldiers of Fortune’, the lawyer, writer and historian reputed for his extensive knowledge of Nigerian military history, Max Siollun, wrote, “Buhari was in charge of troops sent to Nigeria’s north-eastern border region in 1983 to prevent infiltration by armed rebels from the neighbouring Republic of Chad. After his troops successfully cleared the rebels from the border area, the troops advanced several kilometres into Chadian territory. The political hierarchy ordered Buhari to withdraw his troops, but he refused, arguing that the Chadian rebels would return to the area as soon as his troops departed… Buhari was finally persuaded to withdraw after President Shagari enlisted Buhari ‘s superior officers, Lt-Generals Jalo and Wushishi, to order him to pull back.”

    As expected and as Max Siollun writes, the incident created a tense relationship between top members of the Shagari administration and Buhari and that “It also caused enough concern in the government for the Transport Minister, Umaru Dikko, to place Buhari under surveillance. Dikko also pressured the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-General Wushishi, to block Buhari ‘s posting to Lagos…The strong-willed Buhari complained to President Shagari that Dikko had asked his movement to be monitored. When Shagari raised the issue with Dikko, Dikko did not deny the accusation, but simply warned Shagari that Buhari could not be trusted and should be retired. Dikko had woken a sleeping tiger.”

    Widely reviled by Nigerians, Umaru Dikko had a reputation for corruption, arrogance and contempt for suffering Nigerians. When asked on national television about the economic hardships being experienced by Nigerians under the Shagari administration, he responded by asking if any Nigerians had been seen eating from dust bins! The audacious attempt by the Buhari regime to abduct Dikko from Britain, where he had escaped to after the 1983 coup, an effort coordinated with the support of the dreaded Israeli intelligence outfit, Mossad, made global news at the time. Dikko had been successfully kidnapped outside his residence when he was taking a walk, anaesthetised into unconsciousness, bundled into a waiting van and driven away by Nigerian and Israeli security officers. He was later offloaded into a crate labelled “diplomatic baggage”, addressed to the Nigerian Ministry of External Affairs in Lagos and transported in a lorry to Stansted Airport, where a Nigeria Airways plane was waiting to depart for Lagos with its “diplomatic baggage” at 3 pm.

    Unfortunately, there had been a last-minute lapse in the operation and British security and immigration agents in and around the airport had been put on high alert. Attempts by the British authorities to inspect the diplomatic crate were vigorously protested by a Nigerian officer, Major Ahmed Jarfa Yesufu (rtd) and one Okon Edet, a member of the Nigerian High Commission in London. According to Max Siollun, “The vehement protests were dismissed and the police opened the crates with a crowbar. What they found inside was shocking. In the first crate was a bound and unconscious Dikko with his torso bare. Dikko ‘s captors had shoved an endotracheal tube into his throat to prevent him from choking on his own vomit when he was unconscious. His captors wanted him brought back to Nigeria alive. Besides him was Shapiro, brandishing syringes and a supply of additional anaesthetics to administer to Dikko if need be. Shapiro asked the customs officers, “Well, gentlemen, what do we do now?”

    Those were momentous episodes in Nigeria’s foreign policy at the time, resulting in a prolonged diplomatic face-off between Nigeria and Britain. Buhari’s transition from a feared military dictator to a democratically elected two-term President who governed with utmost respect for democratic ethos is unprecedented in Nigeria’s history. Obasanjo also governed as a two-term elected President after previously serving as a military Head of State who voluntarily handed over to a democratically elected President in 1979. But on his second coming as elected President, his attempt to secure a tenure extension for a third term in 2007 had to be thwarted by a concerted resistance of critical political stakeholders. Obasanjo sings his anti-corruption credentials from the rooftops and labels everybody else as corrupt. But the monstrous Hilltop mansion in Abeokuta and the expansive Obasanjo Presidential Library complex, as well as numerous multi-billion Naira private investments, give the lie to his rhetoric. Buhari has no such baggage.

    This column does not intend to join the debate on the achievements or otherwise of the  Buhari administration for his eight years as elected President.  His accomplishments are there for all to see, and his failings too, like any leader. One of these is that he was too trusting of some of his key aides who hid behind the cover of his unstinting integrity and credibility to amass humongous wealth without the slightest iota of compassion for the teeming talakawa that Buhari loved and who reciprocated his affection fervently. Yet, some of such unscrupulous persons see his consistently over 12 million votes over several electoral cycles as an asset they can inherit and trade with, even as the honest one leaves us in a blaze of glory. They should not underestimate the intelligence of Buhari’s masses.

    Flashback to October 1, 1974. In his address to the nation, Nigeria’s military Head of State at the time, General Yakubu Gowon, told his stunned countrymen and women that his earlier pledge to return the country to democratic governance by 1976 was no longer feasible. Aba Saheed, pen name of Akogun Tola Adeniyi, fiery and unsparing columnist with the then trail-blazing Daily Times, responded with a pungent and incisive piece titled ‘Death, I salute you!’. He warned about the transience of human existence, the ubiquity of death and the ultimate vanity of power. Buhari needed no such admonitions. According to his media adviser, as President, Femi Adesina, towards the end of Buhari’s tenure, he asked the former President, “after here, what next?” And he responded, “I’m looking forward to leaving. And from there, I go to my grave at the appointed time”. No wonder he was so indifferent to the obsessive accumulation of wealth and the arrogant utilisation of power. May the honest one rest in deserved peace.

  • Malcolm muggeridge and the end of Christendom (2)

    Malcolm muggeridge and the end of Christendom (2)

    In the first part of this review of the inaugural Blaise Paschal Lectures on Christianity and the University delivered at the University of Waterloo by the great 20th century British journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge, in October, 1978, we observed the distinction that the lecturer made between ‘Christendom’ and the Christianity that can be traced directly to the founder of the faith, the simple and humble carpenter from Nazareth. While Christendom derived its origin from the adoption of the Roman State of Christianity as the formal religion of the empire by Emperor Constantine and has sourced its authority, influence and prestige from state patronage in diverse countries, Jesus stayed far from the palaces of the powerful or the courts of royalty or the citadels of the intellectual elite but turned the first century world upside down through the faith and proselytizing zeal of ordinary men and women with no earthly acclaim or appeal. He declared pointedly that his kingdom was not of this world.

    Malcolm was of the view that though the Christianity traceable to Christ has continued to thrive and turn around lives, the State-centric ‘Christendom’ had come to an end in any meaningful sense as at the time he delivered his Paschal inaugural lectures. Nearly five decades after he rendered his thoughts on the issue, it is difficult to fault Muggeridge’s conclusions – indeed the situation may have worsened for a steadily declining ‘Christendom’. Given his latter conversion to Christianity, first in its Anglican and later Catholic, varieties as he grew older and wearied of the aggressively immoral, pleasure -seeking pursuits of his early youth to middle ages, Muggeridge was fitting to deliver the lectures of a Paschal whose mores and values he had come to identify with.

    Muggeridge was enthusiastic about delivering the inaugural Paschal Lectures because he admired the humble disposition of the French mathematician, physicist, inventor, philosopher and Catholic writer of the 17th Century who refused to be associated with the secular arrogance and disdain for the spiritual and supernatural that was increasingly associated with the life of scholarship and the intellect. As he put it in the lecture, “Although Paschal was a very proud man, but he put aside his pride to bow himself down at the altar rail with his fellow Christians, whomsoever they might be, in perfect brotherliness”. He was of the view that although a superlatively great scientist, Paschal eschewed the overweening arrogance characteristic of many scientists in our contemporary world and “practiced true humility, which is the greatest of all virtues. Indeed, as he points out, humility is the very condition of virtue”.

    One thing that stands out strikingly in Muggeridge’s Blaise Lectures is his passionate love for the written word, which is not surprising given his legendary success as a life-long journalist who practiced mostly in the first half of the 20th century in the United Kingdom, United States, India and the early years of the communist Soviet Union. Referring to what he described as the extraordinary skill and beauty of the language of Paschal’s magisterial apologia in defense of the Christian religion, ‘Les Pensees’, he avers that “I have always had a sort of mania about words – it’s the only consistent and abiding passion I have ever had. For that reason, if for no other, Paschal made an immediate appeal. I think the most wonderful sentence ever penned is in the first chapter of St. John’s Gospel, “In the beginning was the Word…”. How tremendous are its implications”.

    Continuing, he writes enchantingly, “In the beginning was the Word…”. It had to be the Word. It couldn’t be, for instance, “In the beginning was the video tape…”, “In the beginning celluloid…”, or “In the beginning was a microphone…” – none of that. In the beginning was the Word, and one of the things that appalls me and saddens me about the world today is the condition of words. Words can be polluted even more dramatically and drastically than Rivers and land and sea. There has been a terrible destruction of words in our time”. He laments the easy pollution of words like love, freedom or liberation and submits that “The truth is that if we lose the meaning of words, it is far more serious in practice than losing our wealth or our power… Without our words, we are helpless and defenseless; their misuse is our undoing. For instance, we speak of liberalizing our abortion laws, which means simply facilitating more abortions. Or we speak of reforming our marriage laws, when we mean creating more facilities for breaking more and more marriages”.

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    He argued that the beautiful lucidity of his mind and the wonderful clarity of Paschal’ s thought puts a lie to the widespread notion today that believers are credulous, sentimental people and that it is materialists and scientists and humanists who have a sceptical mind. Rather, he contends that “I believe myself that the age we are living in now will go down in history as one of the most credulous ever. How could anyone look at television advertisements without reaching that conclusion? All those extraordinary potions that are offered to make your face beautiful, those things you can swallow to make your breath fragrant, are all apparently believed in to the extent that people buy the products…here, in the Western world, the most highly educated, the most progressive, the most advanced part of the earth, there is a reservoir of credulity beyond the wildest dreams of a wizened witch doctor from Africa”.

    Muggeridge avers that Paschal was the first to warn about the deleterios consequences of the exaggeration of the importance of the human ego “in contradistinction to the cross , symbolizing the ego’s immolation” and the romantic, arrogance -derived expectation at the time of the Enlightenment “that man, triumphant, would bring to pass that earthly paradise whose groves of academe would ensure the realization forever of peace, plenty and beautitude in practice. But what a nightmare of wars, famine, and folly was to result therefrom”. He deplores the scholastic and philosophical arrogance responsible for the celebrated presumed ‘death of God’ at the Enlightenment noting significantly that it was Nietzsche who first announced the death of God and that “Then, growing bolder, he went on to insist that God had been murdered by his creature, man, this being, according to Nietzsche, the most glorious and promising event in human history”.

    He then continues ruefully that “Not surprisingly, Nietzsche ended in an insane asylum in Venice and continued his observations about the death of God from a padded cell. But in a world that has itself gone mad like him, in excess of arrogance and self-conceit ,his ravings continue to be seriously regarded, as for that matter do those of other lunatics down to and including the Marquis de Sade”. It is thus appropriate that Muggeridge quotes from the American critic, Leslie Fiedler, in portraying the pathetic dilemma of contemporary man, particularly Western man, thus, “God has been abolished by the media pundits and other promoters of our new demythologized divinity. We continue to insist that change is progress, self-indulgence is freedom and novelty is originality. In these circumstances it’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that Western man has decided to abolish himself, creating his own boredom out of his own affluence, his own vulnerability out of his own strength, his own impotence out of his own erotomania, himself blowing the trumpet that brings the walls of his own city tumbling down”.

  • 2026, 2027 and the PBAT, BAO model

    2026, 2027 and the PBAT, BAO model

    Given the perceived distance of the federal government from the grassroots where communities are located in the states and local government areas and the yet unrealized efforts to ensure effective financial and administrative autonomy to guarantee the efficacy of local government service delivery, the states still remain the most critical units of governance for the impactful delivery of democratic dividends to the populace. Thus, the performance and developmental strides of State governors are central to the electoral prospects not only of the chief executives at the state level but also of President Tinubu and other contenders for power at the centre in the forthcoming critical 2027 presidential elections. An interesting feature of centre-state relations under the Tinubu presidency over the last two years is the near quadrupling of revenue allocation to the states as a consequence of the courageous removal of fuel subsidy by the President immediately after being sworn into office.

    It is thus not surprising that most governors, including those belonging to opposition parties, have hardly expressed any negative disposition to the re-election of the President for a second term while we have had the wholesale transplantation of the governance and party structures of previously solidly Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) states in Delta and Akwa-Ibom to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). In taking such a radical step of drastically reshaping the partisan colouration of their states, governors Sheriff Oborevwori and Umo Eno, respectively, and the political leadership of their states have cited the favourable inclination of the Tinubu administration to their states and the resultant developmental outcomes.

    Ekiti State, one of the most politically sophisticated and educationally advanced sub-national jurisdictions in the country, offers an example of the electorally significant impact of centre-state amity for the re-election prospects both of President Tinubu at the presidency and Governor Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji (BAO) in the critical South-West state. Although both Tinubu and Oyebanji belong to the APC, the truth of the matter is that the struggle for electoral dominance in the state has always been a grim and tight battle between the progressives in their various mutations from the defunct Alliance for Democracy (AD), the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) to the current APC and the PDP. Under Governor Oyebanji ‘s leadership astuteness, however, we are witnessing a rare coalescence of disparate political forces across party lines in support of continuity in office of Tinubu and BAO.

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    Next year, Oyebanji heads to the polls to seek the electorate’s mandate for a second term, while aggrieved political elements within and beyond the ruling APC are already experimenting with possible coalitions to oust Tinubu from power two years before elections are due at the centre in 2027. It is obvious from unfolding events that Ekiti is one state where the politics of coalition to oust the incumbents at the centre and in the state, especially through the emerging mechanism of the African Democratic Congress (ADC), is not flying. An indication to this effect was the mass rally held in Ado-Ekiti on Monday, at which ex-governors of Ekiti State in this dispensation and diverse political leaders across partisan divides, in an unprecedented manner, emphatically and unanimously endorsed Tinubu and BAO for a second term in office.

    At the event, ex-governors Niyi Adebayo of the APC, as well as Ayo Fayose and Segun Oni, both of the PDP, cast their lot in support of the re-election of the President and the governor, with the governor of neighbouring Ondo State, Mr Lucky Aiyedatiwa, on hand to lend his contributory voice. The three ex-governors are no pushovers in the politics of Ekiti State. Although BAO’s immediate predecessor, Dr Kayode Fayemi, was not at the event, he was present at an earlier meeting where key stakeholders in Ekiti State had voiced their support for the re-election of President Tinubu and BAO. A former Deputy governor of the State and federal law maker, Senator Biodun Olujimi, of the PDP, a senior lawyer, Mr Obafemi Adewale (SAN) and a state lawmaker of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), Babatunde Omotola, also defected to the APC and declared their support for the re-election of the President and the governor.

    Federal and state legislators, as well as Federal Executive Council members and heads of federal agencies from the state, members of the executive committees both of the government and the party, local government functionaries, among others, all voted in support of the motion for the re-election of Tinubu and BAO. A critical factor in this rare near-unanimity behind the re-election of the duo in a state with highly enlightened and critical minds like Ekiti is the consensus of opinion as regards the exemplary performance of the governor as he heads into his third year in office in October. A non-performing governor would have been a political liability both to the President and to himself. But in diverse sectors from agriculture, education, health, security, road infrastructure and rural development, among others, the indelible and verifiable imprints of the BAO administration are obvious for all to see.

    In the face of biting food inflation, for instance, the aggressive promotion of higher agricultural productivity has been the preoccupation of many state governments, with Ekiti State being one of those at the vanguard in this regard. The BAO administration has resuscitated moribund farm settlements established in the state by the Obafemi Awolowo administration in the first Republic, resulting in the renovation of agricultural buildings and furnishing of upgraded accommodation for youths mobilised into farming at Erifun farming settlement. While about 200 participants have been empowered to go into horticultural production, about 1000 youths have been engaged in the Bring-Back-the-Youth into Agric Program, cultivating various crops in land clusters across the state.

    Diverse quantities of assorted agricultural inputs, including small-scale processing equipment, day-old chicks, poultry feed, bags of maize, fish seeds, goats, and pigs, have continually been distributed to hundreds of farmers in the state, while seven wet markets have been upgraded and several kilometres of farm roads upgraded. Following the payment of its counterpart funding of about N1 billion, the Rural Access and Agricultural Marketing Project (RAAMP) commenced the intensive construction/rehabilitation of rural roads across the state. The administration created at least 32 farm clusters in different parts of the state for communities and cooperatives, with the state government bearing the cost of land clearing in addition to other support gestures to activate and sustain the clusters.

    In recognition of the people’s fervent love for education, the BAO administration has recruited about 2000 teachers for primary and secondary schools while expending N14 billion in the renovation and construction of 203 public schools, payment of about N700 million as Running Grants to all public schools in the state and paying over N1.2 billion in examination fees for about 150,000 students who wrote junior and secondary school exams since 2023. The administration also paid over N2.5 billion as counterpart funding for the 2022 and 2023 Universal Basic Education Commission, procured instructional materials for primary schools worth about N174.1 million while paying car and housing loans, upgrading graduate teachers in primary schools to level 16 and provided diverse training and capacity building interventions for about 1,700 teachers.

    Within its first two years in office, the BAO administration had disbursed about N400 million as grants to about 922 micro, small and medium enterprises in addition to sponsoring certificates issued by the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) of 5, 400 micro, small and medium enterprises. The BAO administration secured an $80million facility from the African Development Bank (AfDB) for the Ekiti Knowledge Zone, which is projected to generate no less than 12,000 jobs in the state in the first instance. It also provided $100,000 each to 10 Cooperatives in partnership with USADF, secured N1 billion funding for the Ekiti Cooperative Industry and partnered with Access Bank to facilitate credit facilities worth N1 billion to boost small-scale businesses for women.

    Apart from investing massively in the provision and upgrading of rural and urban health facilities, the BAO administration is also executing expansive road rehabilitation/construction projects such as the Ikere-Igbara Odo; Igbara-Odo to Ikogosi; Ikere to Ilawe; Ikogosi Township roads;   Ikere-Ise-Emure to Eporo road; Ado Ekiti to Iworoko to Ifaki Dual Carriageway (federal road); Ifaki-Efon Alaaye; Omu-Ijelu, Ijurin-Ipoti, Ikole–Ara-Isinbode road and construction of Ekiti ring road among several others. The administration’s expenditure on security, including the re-equipping and re-arming of the Amotekun Corp has made the state safer than BAO met it while it has also invested substantially in upgrading the power supply infrastructure, including the supply of transformers to scores of communities across the state. At its last State Executive Council meeting this week, the BAO administration approved over N18.5 billion for various projects encompassing road construction, electricity supply, water, sanitation and hygiene, agriculture and security, among others.

    But then, the demonstrated performance in diverse sectors is not in itself sufficient to harness the wide scope of support that BAO has won for himself and President Tinubu. After all, it is all too easy for opposition politicians to deny and denounce accomplishments that even the blind can see and the deaf can hear. What is particularly outstanding about the governance style of BAO is the wisdom and maturity with which he has steered the affairs of a state that had been all too often associated in the past with political bitterness, acrimony and violence. Even his political adversaries testify to his disarming humility, patience, simplicity and modesty. This has no doubt ensured the harmonious relationship he has had with his predecessor and benefactor, Dr Fayemi.

    It is also why even erstwhile bitter political opponents are willing to bury their differences and join BAO in putting the best interests of the state above partisan considerations. The ex-governors who have endorsed the governor and the President for a second term have their fair share of disagreements and contrasting views and perceptions, but he has succeeded in getting them to transcend these through uncommon tact, diplomacy and dexterity. As ex-Governor Fayose declared at the rally, “I must commend Governor Oyebanji ‘s humility and his rare leadership style. He deserves another term. I hereby endorse, without reservation, President Bola Tinubu for a second term”. Echoing similar sentiments, Engineer Oni declared, “I’m here to say the Nigeria of our dreams is coming gradually. And since the Nigeria of our dreams is coming, the Ekiti of our dreams is near. One thing Governor Oyebanji has done better than us is his ability to bring people together…By working together, we can make Ekiti great and a state of our dreams”.

    A number of BAO’s associates are said to have deserted the APC for opposition parties but the impact of such has been as visible as pebbles in a vast ocean of positive approbation of his efforts. It is interesting that the endorsement of BAO and PBAT for a second term transcends the political class and includes the public and private sector workforce, artisan groups, trade associations, civil society organisations and transport unions. Some leaders in the state aver that the people are unhappy with the PBAT federal government because of the dilapidated state of many federal roads across the state. But the sophisticated people of Ekiti State realize that an administration that is just two years in office cannot justly be blamed for a situation that has steadily deteriorated over the last two decades.

  • FCCPC and corporate accountability

    FCCPC and corporate accountability

    In largely underdeveloped capitalist systems such as Nigeria with relatively low levels of institutionalization, weak judicial structures and processes as well as fragile law enforcement, the role of regulatory agencies established to mitigate the negative effects of the operations of market forces, check corporate abuse and irresponsibility and safeguard the interests of consumers and society at large is critical. The leading agency in Nigeria in this regard is the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), which was established through the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act 2018 to facilitate fair, rule-guided business practices while protecting the interests of consumers.

    As lucidly expressed in its mandate statement, the FCCPC’s oversight function is “geared towards promoting competition within the Nigerian economy while preventing any practices that could lead to the abuse of market dominance or monopolies, all for the benefit of consumers. In addition, it investigates anti-competitive practices, including price fixing, bid rigging, market allocation, and the abuse of dominant market positions, for possible legal actions against the involved parties”. Central to its operations is addressing consumer complaints and grievances as regards perceived exploitative prices, substandard goods and services and imposing sanctions or taking legal action against persistent corporate infractions.

    Under its current Chief Executive Officer/Executive Vice Chairman, Mr Olatunji Bello, renowned journalist, editor, lawyer and administrator, who assumed office in June 2024, the FCCPC has significantly scaled up its activities aggressively holding corporate organizations to account while meticulously addressing consumer complaints and grievances. In the statement announcing his appointment, President Tinubu had mandated Tunji Bello to “ensure the holistic realization of the Commission’s mandate of protecting and promoting the interest and welfare of Nigerian consumers, and ensuring the adoption of measures to guarantee the safety and quality of goods and services”. The role of the FCCPC has acquired added significance against the background of the economic hardships attendant on the painful but inevitable economic reforms of the Tinubu administration particularly the removal of fuel subsidy and the merger of the parallel foreign exchange markets that had engendered high inflationary spirals that are only gradually beginning to recede.

    Citing high operational costs, corporate organizations in different sectors have increased their tariffs to the consternation of already hard hit consumers despite the fact that many of them continue to report high profit levels. In the telecommunications sector, for instance, there has been a 50 per cent hike in tariffs. In the electricity industry, the regulatory authorities approved an increase in tariff for Band A customers from N68 KWh to N225 KWh but which was later pegged at N209.50. Banks have increased the cost of transacting on Automated Teller Machines (ATM). The Nation newspaper columnist, Sanya Oni, recently cited the example of the private entertainment company, MultiChoice and its subsidiary,  DSTV, and their penchant for arbitrary and incessant price increases.

    In the words of Oni, “For instance, in May 2023, premium package subscribers were hit with a 51.23% increment from N16,200 to N24,500. Six months after, another major increment of 20.41% would follow, pushing the price to N29,500. Yet again, in another six months, that is, in May 2024, the service provider would be back with a new price of N37,000, a leap by another 25.42%; and the latest adjustment effective Saturday, March 1, taking the package to N44,500, a 21% increase – representing over 300% increase using 2015 as a base year”.

    The new resurgent and activist FCCPC, under Tunji Bello, has not been dormant in the face of seemingly whimsical price increases by various corporate organizations. Some of them, unused to having their excesses challenged, have pushed back, outrightly flouting the regulatory agency’s directives or engaging it in legal duels.

    For instance, on Thursday, February 27, the FCCPC directed MultiChoice Nigeria not to effect any new price increases as it had announced until the conclusion of the Commission’s ongoing investigation into the proposed price hikes. It had earlier directed the Chief Executive Officer of the company, Mr John Ugbe, to appear before its investigative hearing to justify the envisaged increases. The FCCPC had stated that “Pursuant to this, MultiChoice is expressly instructed to maintain the existing price structure as of February 27, 2025, pending the Commission’s review and final determination on the matter. Maintaining the status quo on pricing is essential to prevent any potential consumer harm during this period”. However, in a reckless display of the highest disregard and contempt for not just the regulatory authority but Nigeria’s legal system, MultiChoice Nigeria proceeded with its price increase on March 1, 2025.

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    Consequently, on March 5, the FCCPC instituted legal proceedings against MultiChoice Nigeria and its Chief Executive Officer, John Ugbe, “for violating regulatory directives, obstructing an ongoing inquiry and engaging in conduct deemed violations of the provisions of the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Act (FCCPC). According to the FCCPC, “By disregarding the FCCPC’S directive and implementing the price hikes before appearing before the Commission’s investigative hearing on March 6, 2025, MultiChoice has not only flouted regulatory processes but also demonstrated a pattern of conduct that undermines consumer rights and fair competition”.  In any self-respecting country,  there should certainly be severe consequences for such contemptuous impunity especially by a foreign entity.

    Earlier, a shareholder of MTN Nigeria who is also a legal practitioner, Emeka Nnubia, had instituted legal proceedings against the FCCPC seeking to halt the regulatory agency’s investigation into suspected potential anti-competitive practices by the MTN. Nnubia contended that the FCCPC’s request for information from MTN violated data protection laws and that regulatory authority over MTN resided with the National Communications Commission (NCC) and not the FCCPC. In his ruling on February 7, 2025, Justice F.N. Ogazi, of the Federal High Court in Lagos, affirmed the statutory authority of the FCCPC to regulate competition and consumer protection across all sectors of the economy and that the regulatory agency’s request for information from MTN did not violate any data protection laws but was undertaken within its statutory powers.

    When the NCC approved a 50% adjustment in telecommunications tariffs, the FCCPC warned that “Issues such as network congestion, dropped calls, inconsistent Internet speeds, unusual data depletion, and poor customer service have remained prevalent concerns. It is, therefore, crucial that tariff adjustments directly translate into demonstrable and tangible service enhancements for consumers.”. The FCCPC took on the Ikeja and Eko electricity distribution companies (IKEDC and EKEDC) when they contemplated charging consumers for the cost of replacing ‘obsolete’ meters insisting that the Discos must comply with the order by the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) that “meter replacements must be prompt, without disrupting service and at no cost to the consumer; and ensuring that consumers are not subjected to estimated billing due to delayed installations”.

    The FCCPC had also, at various times, engaged other corporate giants like Guarantee Trust Bank (GTB) and Air Peace on alleged violations of consumer rights. It is certainly a new and welcome season of ensuring corporate accountability in Nigeria in the best interest of consumers and society at large.

  • PMB: Simplicity in life, dignity in death

    PMB: Simplicity in life, dignity in death

    It would have been surprising if his death last Sunday, July 13, in a private hospital in London, had been received with universal approbation and adulation of a virtuous, unblemished life in a polity as complex and fraught as Nigeria. First, there are no human beings without fault. With the possible exception of the immaculately spotless Peter Obi, according to the holy gospel of the ‘Obidients’, mortal leaders are no angels. Again, an inevitable and unavoidable price of greatness is the intense controversy evoked by those who make a significant impact on history across time and space. Those who love them do so fanatically, and those who detest them are implacable in their hatred. And so it was with President Muhammadu Buhari, unassuming military Head of State for about 20 months between December 1983 and August 1985, and two-term elected President of Nigeria from 2015 to 2023. It was no different with Ahmadu Bello, Tafawa Balewa, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ladoke Akintola, Murtala Mohammed, Odumegwu Ojukwu and several others who had played prime roles in Nigeria’s political evolution.

    When he died in 1987, the great sage, unrivalled administrative genius and first Premier of the Western Region in Nigeria’s First Republic, Chief Obafemi Awolowo, was passionately mourned by his teeming followers and remorselessly reviled by those who could not differentiate him from Satan. The great novelist and thinker, Professor Chinua Achebe, had issued a public statement after Awolowo’s death, accusing him of supporting genocide during the Nigerian civil war, and vigorously canvassing against according the great politician a state burial. He did not believe that the dead deserved some respect, and he was no doubt entitled to his view in a free and open society. It is instructive in this regard that Awolowo’s arch political opponent, Alhaji Shehu Shagari, who defeated him in the 1979 and 1983 presidential elections, awarded him the National Honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic (GCFR), even though Awo was never President.

    A near-unanimous refrain in the outpouring of emotions following President Buhari’s transition to eternity from both his friends and foes alike, however, was the unrivalled ethical pedestal he bestrode and the impeccable moral integrity that characterised his over five decades in public life. His aversion to material accumulation earned him the lifelong adulation, adoration and reflexive loyalty of millions of ordinary Nigerians, particularly in Northern Nigeria, where mass poverty is particularly pronounced, largely as a result of leadership lack of vision and elite venality.  Indeed, in his slim but powerful classic, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, Achebe had traced the excessive materialism that is the bane of contemporary Nigeria partly to what he described as the deficiency in the political thought of some of our key founding fathers.

    As Achebe put it, “A perceptive student of Nigerian politics, James Booth, has drawn attention to the poverty of thought exhibited in the biographies of Dr Azikiwe and Chief Awolowo in contrast to the expressions of ideology to be found even in the more informal works of Mboya, Nyerere and Nkrumah! In a solemn vow made by Azikiwe in 1937, he pledged: ‘that henceforth I shall utilise my earned income to secure my enjoyment of a high standard of living and also to give a helping hand to the needy’. Obafemi Awolowo was even more forthright about his ambitions: ‘I was going to make myself formidable intellectually, morally invulnerable, to make all the money that is possible for a man with my brains and brawn to make’. Thoughts such as these are more likely to produce aggressive millionaires than selfless leaders of their people. An absence of objective and intellectual rigour at the critical moment of a nation’s formation is more than an academic matter. It inclines the fledgling state to disorderly growth and mental deficiency”.

    Though controversial, Achebe ‘s contention here in my view contains some grains of truth. Buhari was no intellectual and did not pretend to be one. He was a simple soldier who defended his country’s territorial integrity first on the battlefield, next in a war against indiscipline and corruption through ‘redemptive’ military statecraft between 1984 and 1985 and then on the partisan political terrain as a politician and emergent statesman between 2003 and 2023. Yet, he had a strong moral orientation to life undoubtedly influenced by his deep commitment to Islamic spirituality. It is amazing that a man who was military governor of the former North Eastern State comprising about five states today did not seize the opportunity to amass stupendous wealth. He was a former Chairman of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) and military Head of State but never allocated any oil bloc to himself. He never acquired any property in Lagos. It almost sounds like fiction.   It was after he left office in 2023 that the succeeding Tinubu administration upgraded his house in Kaduna.

    When he assumed office as military Head of State in 1984, following the martial overthrow of a thoroughly corrupt and decadent Second Republic, the military still had the image of being a redemptive, messianic institution with the requisite reservoir of patriotism and professional integrity to rescue Nigeria from the havoc of predatory politicians. There is no doubt that Buhari and his deputy, Brigadier General Tunde Idiagbon, pursued their War Against Indiscipline and Corruption in essentially purist and uncompromising, Messianic terms. Thus, they set up anti-corruption tribunals that tried and jailed corrupt politicians of the Second Republic for terms that amounted to life sentences. They publicly executed drug couriers and jailed foreign exchange speculators. They drafted draconian punitive laws against a media they perceived as veering beyond the bounds of liberty into licentiousness.

    Even before his emergence as military Head of State, Buhari ‘s patriotic commitment to Nigeria was indisputable. In his thrilling and authoritative book, ‘Soldiers of Fortune’, the lawyer, writer and historian reputed for his extensive knowledge of Nigerian military history, Max Siollun, wrote, “Buhari was in charge of troops sent to Nigeria’s north-eastern border region in 1983 to prevent infiltration by armed rebels from the neighbouring Republic of Chad. After his troops successfully cleared the rebels from the border area, the troops advanced several kilometres into Chadian territory. The political hierarchy ordered Buhari to withdraw his troops, but he refused, arguing that the Chadian rebels would return to the area as soon as his troops departed… Buhari was finally persuaded to withdraw after President Shagari enlisted Buhari ‘s superior officers, Lt-Generals Jalo and Wushishi, to order him to pull back.”

    As expected and as Max Siollun writes, the incident created a tense relationship between top members of the Shagari administration and Buhari and that “It also caused enough concern in the government for the Transport Minister, Umaru Dikko, to place Buhari under surveillance. Dikko also pressured the Chief of Army Staff, Lt-General Wushishi, to block Buhari ‘s posting to Lagos…The strong-willed Buhari complained to President Shagari that Dikko had asked his movement to be monitored. When Shagari raised the issue with Dikko, Dikko did not deny the accusation, but simply warned Shagari that Buhari could not be trusted and should be retired. Dikko had woken a sleeping tiger.”

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    Widely reviled by Nigerians, Umaru Dikko had a reputation for corruption, arrogance and contempt for suffering Nigerians. When asked on national television about the economic hardships being experienced by Nigerians under the Shagari administration, he responded by asking if any Nigerians had been seen eating from dust bins! The audacious attempt by the Buhari regime to abduct Dikko from Britain, where he had escaped to after the 1983 coup, an effort coordinated with the support of the dreaded Israeli intelligence outfit, Mossad, made global news at the time. Dikko had been successfully kidnapped outside his residence when he was taking a walk, anaesthetised into unconsciousness, bundled into a waiting van and driven away by Nigerian and Israeli security officers. He was later offloaded into a crate labelled “diplomatic baggage”, addressed to the Nigerian Ministry of External Affairs in Lagos and transported in a lorry to Stansted Airport, where a Nigeria Airways plane was waiting to depart for Lagos with its “diplomatic baggage” at 3 pm.

    Unfortunately, there had been a last-minute lapse in the operation and British security and immigration agents in and around the airport had been put on high alert. Attempts by the British authorities to inspect the diplomatic crate were vigorously protested by a Nigerian officer, Major Ahmed Jarfa Yesufu (rtd) and one Okon Edet, a member of the Nigerian High Commission in London. According to Max Siollun, “The vehement protests were dismissed and the police opened the crates with a crowbar. What they found inside was shocking. In the first crate was a bound and unconscious Dikko with his torso bare. Dikko ‘s captors had shoved an endotracheal tube into his throat to prevent him from choking on his own vomit when he was unconscious. His captors wanted him brought back to Nigeria alive. Besides him was Shapiro, brandishing syringes and a supply of additional anaesthetics to administer to Dikko if need be. Shapiro asked the customs officers, “Well, gentlemen, what do we do now?”

    Those were momentous episodes in Nigeria’s foreign policy at the time, resulting in a prolonged diplomatic face-off between Nigeria and Britain. Buhari’s transition from a feared military dictator to a democratically elected two-term President who governed with utmost respect for democratic ethos is unprecedented in Nigeria’s history. Obasanjo also governed as a two-term elected President after previously serving as a military Head of State who voluntarily handed over to a democratically elected President in 1979. But on his second coming as elected President, his attempt to secure a tenure extension for a third term in 2007 had to be thwarted by a concerted resistance of critical political stakeholders. Obasanjo sings his anti-corruption credentials from the rooftops and labels everybody else as corrupt. But the monstrous Hilltop mansion in Abeokuta and the expansive Obasanjo Presidential Library complex, as well as numerous multi-billion Naira private investments, give the lie to his rhetoric. Buhari has no such baggage.

    This column does not intend to join the debate on the achievements or otherwise of the  Buhari administration for his eight years as elected President.  His accomplishments are there for all to see, and his failings too, like any leader. One of these is that he was too trusting of some of his key aides who hid behind the cover of his unstinting integrity and credibility to amass humongous wealth without the slightest iota of compassion for the teeming talakawa that Buhari loved and who reciprocated his affection fervently. Yet, some of such unscrupulous persons see his consistently over 12 million votes over several electoral cycles as an asset they can inherit and trade with, even as the honest one leaves us in a blaze of glory. They should not underestimate the intelligence of Buhari’s masses.

    Flashback to October 1, 1974. In his address to the nation, Nigeria’s military Head of State at the time, General Yakubu Gowon, told his stunned countrymen and women that his earlier pledge to return the country to democratic governance by 1976 was no longer feasible. Aba Saheed, pen name of Akogun Tola Adeniyi, fiery and unsparing columnist with the then trail-blazing Daily Times, responded with a pungent and incisive piece titled ‘Death, I salute you!’. He warned about the transience of human existence, the ubiquity of death and the ultimate vanity of power. Buhari needed no such admonitions. According to his media adviser, as President, Femi Adesina, towards the end of Buhari’s tenure, he asked the former President, “after here, what next?” And he responded, “I’m looking forward to leaving. And from there, I go to my grave at the appointed time”. No wonder he was so indifferent to the obsessive accumulation of wealth and the arrogant utilisation of power. May the honest one rest in deserved peace.

  • Comic coalition of confusion (2)

    Comic coalition of confusion (2)

    Addressing supporters who had come to receive him at the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos on his return from Abuja where he had ‘triumphantly’ emerged Interim National Secretary of the successfully hijacked African Democratic Congress (ADC) Airlines, (Sorry, political party), Ogbeni Rauff Aregbesola admonished party members not to engage in exchange of insults with the ruling in All Progressives Congress (APC) or any other party. Rather, the former two-term governor of Osun State and Minister of Interior advised his audience that “When they abuse you or call you names, don’t retaliate. Ask them to tell you if the lives of Nigerians are better for it now than before. Ask questions based on food inflation, the economy, rising cost of living and poverty, among others. Let your debates be issues-based.” Eminently commendable advice from Ogbeni to his party members, but for the fact that there are several viral videos, featuring the sonorous singer and enthusiastic dancer, the Oranmiyan himself, personally leading excited supporters in rendering satiric, abusive and provocative lyrics against his former friends turned adversaries.

    Of course, the politically wily Ogbeni calculates that if attention is focused on the economic hardships his coalition partners accuse the Tinubu administration of causing by its reform policies, large numbers of people will subordinate rational clarity for blurry emotionalism and enthusiastically sway to their anti-Tinubu partisan rhythms. But he forgets that there are also many APC leaders well acquainted with the issues and with the capacity to ask their supporters to ask pertinent questions and further interrogate Aregbesola ‘s interrogators. For instance, did Nigeria’s deep-seated economic crisis start just two years ago with the assumption of office of President Bola Tinubu? Were Nigerians living in paradisiacal El Dorado in the preceding administrations of both the PDP and APC? Despite the fact that the price of crude oil rose to as much as $100 per barrel for a good part of the PDP’s 16 years in power, for instance, till about mid-2024 when it fell drastically, why was it that it was President Muhammadu Buhari administration with considerably reduced revenues that commenced serious work on infrastructure modernization and expansion; an effort now intensified on an unprecedented scale by the present administration?

    Aregbesola’s questioners would further be asked if the country’s current severe electricity supply challenges would not have been more than two-thirds solved to the economy’s immense benefit had the $16 billion purportedly invested in the sector during the PDP’s 16 years in power not gone down the drain with not the slightest dent on the problem? Was the Tinubu administration responsible for the fraudulent privatisation of the assets of the defunct Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN), gifting the country Generation and Distribution companies that so obviously have neither the finance nor the expertise to discharge the responsibilities for which they procured the companies?

    If preceding administrations since 1999  had taken decisive steps to restructure and decentralize the country’s overcentralized security architecture, would the Tinubu administration have inherited the kind of hydra-headed security imbroglio it confronts today? In any case, what creative strategies did Aregbesola himself come up with to improve internal security in Nigeria during his tenure as Minister of Interior? Can he tell us how many jail breaks occurred in several correctional centres across the country under his watch while he wrung his hands in pathetic helplessness? Not only was there a huge backlog of hundreds of uncollected passports, which he inherited as Minister of Interior and which he was unable to find a solution to, but it continued to take interminable periods for citizens to collect their passports under his watch.

    Instructively, it took his successor, the current Minister of Interior, Mr Bolaji Ojo, less than two months to come up with a surgical solution, clear the backlog of accumulated passports and institute a system that enables Nigerians to collect and process their passports today within a two-week time frame. Pray, exactly what bragging rights does the otherwise likeable Ogbeni genuinely have? Why has it taken the Tinubu administration to audaciously commence work on such monumental infrastructure projects as the Lagos-Calabar Coastal Highway or the Badagry-Sokoto Expressway, among several others, although they had reportedly been on the drawing board for almost 40 years? Had such expansive road facilities spreading across several kilometers been emplaced years before now, at a time when it would have been much cheaper to actualize, would the economy not have been elevated to a pedestal for much higher productivity, capacity for employment generation as well as prosperity?

    Of course, infinite examples can be given of how successive governments, and key members of the emergent  anti-Tinubu coalition have been part of one government or the other at the centre or in the States since 1999, cannot be excused from complicity in the bog of inexcusable underdevelopment in which the country is trapped today. Since as interim National Secretary of the ADC, Ogbeni Aregbesola is understandably emerging as the coalition’s Arrowhead, the spotlight will naturally, most of the time be on him. Thus, his trajectory as a public administrator shows that he performed superlatively as Commissioner of Works and Infrastructure in Lagos State between 1999 and 2007 under a governor as team captain, Asiwaju Tinubu, whose competence and capacity he has waxed lyrical about severally in the public space and which are indelibly on record. Also contributory to his success in Lagos, was a strong finance team, particularly the Commissioner for Finance, Mr Wale Edun  and the Commissioner for Budget and Economic Planning, Mr Olayemi Cardoso, who ensured strong financial and budgetary discipline in the Cabinet.

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    When he emerged as governor and team captain in Osun, however, the story became a different kettle of fish altogether for Ogbeni.  His admirers tout him as the most ideologically -driven politician of this generation and this may well be so. This writer is himself strongly inclined towards ideology and cannot but be supportive of a leader with emphatic ideological proclivities. But in an emergent post-ideological world with increasing tendency towards technocratic and professional meritocracy, ideology is simply not enough and this was all too evident in Aregbesola’s Osun. Thus, he introduced several laudable and well-meaning welfare programmes such as the school feeding initiative and token cash transfers to the aged. However, his administration in Osun lacked the financial discipline and managerial expertise to run these expansive welfare programmes sustainably while at the same time being able to meet its other governmental obligations to the citizenry.

    It is public knowledge that before long, the relationship between Ogbeni ‘s administration and the state’s public sector workers had soured. Industrial relations was in crisis as the government could barely meet its wage obligations. A large cross-section of the workers were placed on half-salary for the duration of his tenure while the state’s debt burden escalated. While the government built impressive primary and secondary school structures, it seemed that these were not planned with meticulous attention to the school population size or the requisite sustainable maintenance costs of the schools. The truth of the matter is that none of the leading lights in the emergent coalition – Atiku Abubakar, Peter Obi, Rotimi Amaechi, Nasir El ‘Rufai – can boast a better track record of performance in the various public offices in which they have served than President Tinubu no matter how much they vilify him mostly out of dislike or outright hatred.

    In a widely circulated online post, another Nigerian stated that he was only waiting for the campaigns to start in order to ask members of the anti-Tinubu coalition which of his policies they would discard should they succeed in dislodging him from power as they have continuously boasted. For instance, would they reintroduce the fuel subsidy? Would they scrap the National Students Loan Fund? Would they abolish the National Credit Corporation to provide affordable credit to lower to middle level citizens? Would they halt work on the Lagos – Calabar Highway or the Sokoto-Badagry Expressway? Would they re-introduce multiple foreign exchange markets so that citizens with connections at the Central Bank could continue to reap humongous profit through the exploitation of arbitrage? Would they backtrack on financial autonomy for local government Councils? Would they reintroduce reckless printing of currency by the apex bank to fund federal government spending through ways and means?