The Nation Newspaper

Category: Segun Ayobolu

  • EL-Rufai, Ganduje, Tinubu and 2027

    EL-Rufai, Ganduje, Tinubu and 2027

    When he commented on President Bola Tinubu‘s administration during his presentation at an event in Lagos to commemorate the 21st anniversary of the death of radical lawyer and foremost human rights activist, Chief Gani Fawehinmi, the Emir of Kano, Alhaji Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, did not disagree with the thrust of the government’s ongoing economic reforms that have occasioned much controversy. Rather, he described the removal of the fuel subsidy as well as the merger of the parallel foreign exchange markets as necessary and inevitable policies that he would, however, not publicly rationalize or defend because he was not in a mood to help his friends in government who were not behaving like friends. At least he was characteristically honest and forthright about his personal grudges with the government and did not seize on the widespread hardships engendered by the reforms to react emotionally and stir up sentiments against the administration.

    This was a far cry from the position of a former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF) under President Muhammadu Buhari, Mr Babachir Lawal, a one-time ardent ally of President Tinubu who turned fierce opponent of the latter’s election because of the All Progressives Congress (APC) option to present a Muslim-Muslim ticket for the 2023 election. Despite the religious factor not being a hindrance to the APC victory as the likes of Babachir Lawal had anticipated, his adversarial stance against the President and his administration has hardened even when it is all too obvious that the government is not in any way pursuing an Islamaization agenda. And supporting former Kaduna State governor, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai’s strident criticisms of the administration, Babachir Lawal found it convenient to project the Tinubu administration’s economic policies as essentially anti-North.

    Without resort to logical rigour or clinical policy analysis predicated on sound knowledge, the former SGF, an indigene of Adamawa State best known for a proclivity towards rather extravagant grass-cutting adventures, submits that “The North is seriously mobilizing with a consensus that Bola Tinubu must give way in the 2027 elections… Everybody understands that if we continue with these policies for another four years, northern Nigeria will become one large refugee camp. So, there’s a consensus that for self-preservation alone, we must look for another candidate”. Lawal does not feel compelled to state the premises that led to his rather bizarre conclusion. All that is necessary for him is to assert, not attempt any empirical validation.

    Despite his demonstrated capacity for lucid policy analysis, el-Rufai himself, speaking at a recent two-day dialogue on democracy in Abuja, did not undertake a critique of the administration’s policies but based his opposition to the  Tinubu government on perceived lack of internal democracy and consequent inactive party structures in the ruling APC. In his words, “I no longer recognize the APC. No party organ has met in two years, no caucus, no NEC, nothing. You don’t even know if it is a one-man show; it’s a zero-man show.” Urging opposition parties to unite and form a broad coalition to challenge the ruling party and protect democracy, he said that the APC had abandoned its founding mission of combating corruption, rebuilding the economy and enhancing security.

    In his characteristic scathing manner, el-Rufai submitted that “For those of us who lived half of our lives under military rule, we know what it is. We don’t want military rule, but we also don’t want civilians behaving like the military in their babariga and suits”. But does el-Rufai possess the moral credibility to make some of these assertions? True, he made some impressive achievements in education reform and infrastructure renewal during his two-term tenure as governor of Kaduna State. But the truth is that the mostly Christian population of Southern Kaduna felt they were under a form of military rule under his administration. He dehumanized and showed scant regard for their dignity. He brutalized labour unions who dared to exercise their democratic rights to demonstrate. Under his watch, hundreds of protesting Ibrahim Zakzaky-led Shiite Muslims were allegedly murdered in cold blood and buried in mass graves. He openly threatened that foreign election observers would leave the country in ‘body bags’.

    So much then for his new found democratic profession. And while he claims that the APC has abandoned its objective of fighting corruption, a probe of his administration undertaken by his successor in Kaduna State, Senator Uba Sani, found his government guilty of alleged financial infractions running into billions of Naira. Some have accused el-Rufai of embracing his anti-Tinubu antipathy because he was not appointed a Minister in the administration as he had desired but the truth is that the tempestuous petrel has never hidden his dislike for the President’s politics if not his person. But even if his unceasing criticisms of the administration is a function of his frustration at not being the beneficiary of a political appointment, that would not necessarily invalidate the validity of his arguments because to question the motive of a contention is not to disprove its internal consistency or verity.

    Shortly after his expressed views at the Abuja summit on democracy in Nigeria, el-Rufai obviously endorsed and posted on his X handle (formerly Twitter) a view expressed by one Dr Uche Diala which suggests that rather than any iterated policy deficiencies or disagreements, his opposition to the Tinubu administration stems from an alleged disrespect and disdain towards the North by unnamed supporters of the President. An excerpt from the said Diala’s post reads, “Less than two years into the tenure, we are witnesses to how the relationship between the North and President Bola Tinubu or rather his administration is quickly deteriorating driven by the words and conduct of unfortunately many from the President’s geopolitical zone and tribe, truth be told. I have read and heard the arrogant posturing and braggadocio by some APC members and fellow supporters of President Bola Tinubu, especially from the Southwest geopolitical zone, I wonder if people have any sense of history and if they truly understand Nigerian politics.”

    Attributing President Goodluck Jonathan’s electoral loss to General Muhammadu Buhari in 2015 less to his administration’s non-performance than to “the disrespect and insult directed towards the North” by Jonathan’s Ijaw ethnic group and the Southsouth political zone as a whole, el-Rufai echoes and amplifies Diala’s view that Tinubu is headed for a similar fate. The post’s threat is thinly veiled when it thunders that “Love or loathe that fact, the North remains the kingmaker in Nigerian politics, at least, as of today. Any politician or political party that plays with that political reality might pay a steep political price for it. People who ignore history are bound to fall victim and to repeat mistakes of the past”. Unfortunately, Dr Diala does not name those from the Southwest who have disrespected or insulted the North or how and el-Rufai failed to fill the gap.

    There are those who have accused President Tinubu of unduly favouring the Southwest and especially Lagos in making critical appointments but such perceptions have not come solely from northerners and the allegation has not been backed by scientific empirical rigour. In any case, the same allegation was levelled against Buhari who was accused again in a rather loose manner of what was described as the ‘Fulanization’ of his administration. President Jonathan faced the criticism that his administration was skewed in favour of his ethnic Ijaw and the Igbo of the Southeast. A rather interesting case was that of President Olusegun Obasanjo whose administration was allegedly dominated by Igbo appointees even though he is of ethnic Yoruba extraction although some claim that he may not be genetically unrelated to the Southeast by some yet unproven accident of historical romantic adventurism. Given the ethno-regional configuration of Nigeria, it is unlikely that any President will in the foreseeable future escape this kind of perception and this cannot be a basis for the assertion that the Tinubu administration is anti-North.

    Of course, some analysts have rightly pointed out the over simplistic fallacy of assuming that the North is politically homogeneous and unidirectional. And in truth, the constitutional requirement for the emergence of Nigeria’s President is such that no geopolitical zone can solely play the role of kingmaker. This is why despite amassing at least 12 million votes from the North in three previous elections, Buhari did not realize his ambition until his political tendency had forged a working alignment with the Southwest. And in the same vein, Tinubu’s victory in the 2023 presidential election could not have been possible without the support he enjoyed from the North even though Alhaji Atiku Abubakar’s strategy of seeking to win the election solely through northern votes proved surprisingly effective but for Tinubu’s wide network and political astuteness.

    Atiku had pointedly urged northerners, mainly Hausa-Fulani not to vote for any non-northern candidate and ignored the clamour of five southern governors of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) to facilitate the emergence of a National Chairman of the party from the South following his clinching the presidential ticket contrary to the rotational zoning convention of the PDP. Waziri Adamawa calculated that his sweeping northern votes would win him the presidency. Thus, Atiku won in the core Northern states of Yobe, Gombe, Adamawa, Katsina, Bauchi, Kaduna, Kebbi, Sokoto, and Taraba while winning in only Osun, Akwa Ibom and Bayelsa states in the South. However, Tinubu came second in the northern states won by Atiku while also emerging triumphant in such Northern states as Kwara, Jigawa, Nasarawa, Niger, Benue and Kogi states. The electoral dynamics of the election that produced President Tinubu suggest that the ‘North as kingmaker’ hypothesis is overly simplistic and misleading.

    Read Also: Why we’re still in Togo, Benin varsities despite FG’s ban on their certificates —Nigerian students

    Responding to el-Rufai’s rather magisterial assertion that the North would not back Tinubu for reelection in 2027, the National Chairman of the APC and former of Kano State, Dr Abdullahi Ganduje, urged Northerners interested in contesting for President to wait till 2031. Basing his submission on the zoning convention as a political elite power-sharing compact in the Third Republic, Ganduje argued that “When a leader from the northern part of this country was in office for eight years, we advocated that the next president in our party should come from the South. Luckily enough, we worked very hard with the cooperation of Nigerians. Our President has come from the South and he is going inshallah for the second term in 2027. And then after that, it will turn to the northern part of this country”.

    But Ganduje ‘s position was as controversial as that of el-Rufai as some other Northern voices contended that neither man could claim to have a mandate to speak for the North and that they expressed essentially their personal views. In the opinion of a former Secretary General of the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), Anthony Sani, “There is nothing controversial about the statements of the two. This is because none of the two people you have mentioned speaks for the North in so far as partisan politics is concerned. This is because the North can be united politically on issues of real concern to Northerners but when it comes to partisan politics, the North does not act in unison”. It would appear to me that Ganduje struck a more relevant and poignant note when he spoke on the inevitable imperative of the Tinubu administration’s economic reforms and the fruits they are beginning to yield as the basis for urging support for the President’s reelection for a second term.

    According to him, “There is no doubt that many things went wrong over a long period of time and it requires surgery before we can get it right. We are happy that we have started seeing the outcome of the reforms, especially on the economic front, and we believe this will continue to yield positive results so that the legacy and the Renewed Hope Agenda will be achieved”. As I said earlier, the motives for el-Rufai’s criticism of what he regards as the organizational dormancy and institutional inactivity of the APC may not necessarily vitiate the cogency of his analysis. The PDP relied more on its control of the power and resources of the presidency during its 16 years in power from 1999 to 2015 rather than its structural vibrancy and organic linkage with the people. el-Rufai is right that there is a lesson the APC has to learn from the rise and decline of the erstwhile ruling party even though it is obvious that he desires the failure of a party in which he now perceives himself as marginalized.

    Much more than pronouncing with a seeming arrogance that is unhelpful to President Tinubu that there is no vacancy in 2027, Ganduje would be of greater help to the President’s reelection bid if he decides to run by ensuring that he has an efficiently, effectively run and organizationally vibrant ruling party that can add value to the policy process, enhance qualitative governance and astutely manage intra-party tendencies and conflicts. That cannot be said to be the case now at all levels of the party and nothing best illustrates this better than the clumsy impeachment process of the erstwhile Speaker of the Lagos State House of Assembly, Hon. Mudashiru Obasa, as if the legislators are independent members of the House not elected on the platform of a political party.

    Apart from the victories of the party in the Ondo and Edo State governorship elections, Ganduje’s most productive accomplishment as National Chairman of the APC so far is the launching of the newly established Think Tank and Resource Center of the party, The Progressive Institute (TPI) to undertake research and advice the Party on the performance and policies and programmes of all APC governments. In addition to such thoughtful initiatives, he should ensure that party structures and organs function so that its machinery is vibrant and alert to campaign and win elections with minimal reliance on monetization of the electoral process. But is there any rhyme or reason to Babachir Lawal’s rather unhinged assertion that President Tinubu’s policies are turning the North into a vast refugee camp? We will interrogate this claim shortly.

  • Wike’s intriguing politics

    Wike’s intriguing politics

    To his surge of supporters, former governor of Rivers State and now Minister of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Mr Nyesome Wike, has transformed into the status of deity. He is the object of their unending adulation and ululation. Among them, he is fast becoming the man who cannot be corrected because he is above mere mortals and thus can do no wrong. Alas! Wike knows more than anyone else the sheer ephemeral nature not just of power but of life itself. A leader who wants to succeed must beware of listening to the deceptive music of sycophants who desire nothing but to lure him to the cesspit of demystification and destruction. This is a factor that the incumbent governor of River State, Siminalai Fubara should also habitually keep in mind and meditate upon daily.

    On the other side, those who fervently support Governor Fubara detest his predecessor, Wike, with unmitigated passion and undisguised hatred. They do not see anything wrong with the governor turning so vehemently and venousmally against a mentor who not only sold his candidacy to the voting public but mobilized and deployed massive resources to ensure a little-known Fubara’s victory at the polls. Now that Fubara is in the governor’s seat, he has laid bare his fangs and set his claws like a feral beast waiting to pounce on any available prey. But it is a matter of moral integrity, character, loyalty and fidelity to truth. Of course, it can be argued that it was God who made Fubara governor of Rivers State. True, but God uses human beings to achieve his purposes on earth and in the case of Fubara, God’s tool was Wike and the governor must never forget that.

    It is difficult to understand how a man like Fubara who was a trusted aide to Wike and worked with him for eight years as governor, could so suddenly turn against a man who made him politically and helped build the political structure that enabled his victory to become Rivers State governor. Could he have been deceptive all along, hating his boss with all his might but disguising his true feelings in order to achieve his political objective? If so, Fubara should be Intelligent and wise enough to know that no matter which political party he gravitates towards in due course, he will not be trusted. His integrity will always be questioned as well as capacity for loyalty either to any person or group. Wike as it is now turning out to be, has little capacity to spot, recruit and motivate people of talent and ability to aid him add value to governance when he was governor of Rivers State.

    But then, despite his political astuteness and acumen, how could Wike have decided for and massively enhanced resources behind a Fubara who was his candidate for the governorship office in Rivers State? It is now obvious that if Fubara had any iota of loyalty to his then-boss, Wike, or any sense of commitment to the principles of truth and honesty, they were deceptive and only skin deep. But many of the Rivers State respected elders swarming around Fubara, singing his praises and denouncing Wike today are most likely to harbour some doubts within them about the character, constancy and dependability of Fubara.

    The lesson here is that rather than one person picking a candidate and imposing such an aspirant on the party, structured and institutionalized mechanisms must be put in place across parties to facilitate the emergence of candidates for elections in a competitive, transparent and credible process. But this also implies further that there must be a fundamental change in the way our political parties are funded and run. Rather than the current system whereby wealthy political entrepreneur’s fund and thus dominate the political parties, we should return to a new model where party members pay their dues through which the parties’ activities and obligations are funded.

    Read Also: Nigeria must build a resilient economy to overcome poverty — Makinde

    Both Wike and Fubara have their respective faults in the ongoing political crisis but the governor in my view has the greatest responsibility to bend over backwards to cultivate his mentor and former boss. It is certainly not too late. Moreover, it is the well-being and progress of the people of Rivers State that must be paramount. The speed with which he moved against and sought to decapitate Wike politically is amazing and creates the impression of a ‘Machiavellian’ for whom  the end justifies the means no matter how base or immoral. But a lesson of history is that adopting a Machiavellian disposition to life can often be counterproductive or outrightly self-destructive.

    It was not until he stormed the venue of the PDP presidential election convention and very nearly got the ticket but for the ethnic sleight of hand that gave Alhaji Atiku Abubakar the PDP presidential flag, that I began to take a serious view of Wike. If Atiku had picked him as his running mate, would that not have brightened his chances in the last presidential election? Well, that question lies in the bosom of time. Wike is energetic, focused and productive. Both as governor of Rivers State and now Minister of the FCT, even WIKE’s most ardent adversaries would admit that he is a star performer and an aggressive goal-getter. But his failure with regard to the Rivers crisis is his penchant for intervening unnecessarily in the administration of Rivers under Fubara. Many see him as too brusque, harsh, dictatorial and overbearing. Even as it is important to let Wike know the need to curb these traits, his shortcomings cannot be an excuse for what is widely believed as Fubura’s betrayal of his former boss.

    The Scenario in Rivers is no exception. We have continued to witness ceaseless confrontations between governors and their successors since the inception of this dispensation in 1999 and across party lines. And in most cases, it is due to a struggle between former governors who seek to play the role of party leaders in their respective states and newly elected governors who seek to assume control of the party structure and assume the leadership of the party in the state. It was this conflict between the leadership of the party and that of the government machinery that led to the

    breaking down of the relationship between Chief Obafemi Awolowo as Leader of the party and Chief SLA as Premier of Western Nigeria that later degenerated into widespread riots and demonstrations in the region and later led the country to civil war with excruciating implications for millions of people on both sides of the battleground. And it was to avoid such a situation to recur in future that in the Second Republic from 1979, Awolowo insisted that the governor in each state controlled by the Unity Party of Nigeria must also be the leader of the party in the state.

    How he walks the tightrope of being a Minister on the platform of the APC and also a still influential member of the PDP is intriguing  and impressive. But we can only wait in bated breath as events unfold in the near future. President Tinubu tried in futility to reconcile the warring factions. Their mutually agreed positions were soon jettisoned and the contenders were back in the trenches. It is surely time for elders in Rivers State to close ranks and help bring these two eminent citizens of the state together.

    Meanwhile, we will continue to closely watch Wike’s intriguing dance steps on the often treacherous terrain of Nigerian politics.

  • FCCPC’s ongoing rejuvenation

    FCCPC’s ongoing rejuvenation

    Established to provide speedy redress to consumers of products and services whose rights have been breached as well as protect and promote the rights of consumers and hold producers and service providers accountable among its core functions, not much had been heard in the public domain about the Federal Consumer Competition Protection Council (FCCPC) until the appointment by President Bola Tinubu of Mr Tunji Bello as the Executive Vice Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the agency on July 25, 2024. Ever since he assumed office, Mr Bello has swung into action, hit the ground running and commenced the repositioning of the organization to fulfil its mandate with a greater sense of urgency and responsibility. Now we regularly hear the voice of the FCCPC as an agency that actively puts providers of goods and services on their toes as it strives to protect the interests and rights of consumers.

    For instance, following the recent 50 per cent increase in tariff rates by telecommunications companies, the FCCPC moved quickly to remind affected service providers of the need to ensure that the quality of their services reflected their enhanced revenues as a result of the increase. In a statement by the agency, it noted that “The NCC’s approval of a 50% adjustment, which is lower than the over 100% increase initially proposed by operators, demonstrates a thoughtful effort to balance industry sustainability with consumer protection”.

    Read Also: Tinubu working hard to reposition Nigeria – Sen Nwoko

    Stressing that the recent Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) signed between the FCCPC and the National Communication Commission (NCC) emphasizes a joint commitment to ensuring robust consumer protection, fair competition and the eradication of exploitative practices in the communication sector, the FCCPC warned that “It is non-negotiable that telecom operators must prioritize visible and measurable improvements in network reliability, speed, accessibility and customer service as part of any tariff adjustment”. It will be recalled that as part of its resurgent vigilance, the FCCPC that in December last year, the FCCPC launched enquiries into widespread consumer complaints against leading players in the banking, telecommunications and aviation sectors. The companies engaged in the process were Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB), MTN Nigeria and Air Peace Limited. The agency stated that the enquiries would provide these companies”a platform to address consumer concerns, clarify business practices and enforce compliance with regulatory stipulations.”

  • APC, Aregbesola’s final parting of ways?

    APC, Aregbesola’s final parting of ways?

    Was the exit from the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) by two time governor of Osun State and former Minister of the Interior from 2019 to 2023, Ogbeni Raufu Aregbesola and his political tendency in Osun State, a development announced this week, inevitable and unavoidable? I don’t think so. The inability to resolve the festering crisis between Aregbesola’s ‘Omoluabi Progressives’ and his successor as Osun State governor who is now Minister for Marine and Blue Economy, Alhaji Adegboyega Oyetola, a disagreement that degenerated to a rupture of the political rapport between Aregbesola and his erstwhile political leader and mentor, President Bola Tinubu, vividly illustrates the weak crisis resolution mechanisms within the APC and political parties in Nigeria generally. In the run up to the 2023 presidential election, Aregbesola had in an unguarded moment at a public rally in Osogbo launched a blistering verbal attack against Tinubu, under whose administration as governor of Lagos State he served as Commissioner of Works and Infrastructure for eight years.

    Widely regarded as one of the closest aides and passionate supporters of Tinubu throughout his tenure as governor of Lagos State and for many years after the end of his tenure in 2007, Aregbesola cast his lot with former Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, in the latter’s futile bid for the APC presidential ticket in 2022. Under Tinubu as governor, Aregbesola was virtually in control of the APC political structure in the state through his influence in Alimosho Local Government Area and his leadership of the Mandate Group, a powerful tendency within the state APC. Tinubu could not be persuaded to whittle down the clout of Aregbesola by many of the detractors who envied the latter’s considerable stature both in the politics of the state and the administration of government. He enjoyed the absolute confidence of the then governor who was convinced of Aregbe’s unalloyed loyalty.

    Indeed, after serving as one of the most powerful commissioners in his government, Tinubu backed Aregbesola to the hilt materially, logistically, politically and financially to run for the governorship of Osun State. When Aregbe’s strong challenge for the governorship against entrenched political forces of incumbency in Osun appeared to have run into irredeemable stormy political waters through widely rigged elections, Asiwaju was solid as the rock of gibraltar behind the candidate as he challenged the purported outcome of the 2007 Osun governorship elections in court. No less a person than Osinbajo revealed at one of the annual colloquia to commemorate Tinubu’s birthday in Abuja the extent that Tinubu went in mobilizing both internal and external, legal, intellectual and forensic support to ensure the judicial victory of the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) in Osun and other Southwest states where the polls were fraudulently manipulated.

    Read Also: Abdulsalami Abubakar: Nigerian democracy has survived reactionary forces

    That Aregbesola could not only refrain from supporting Tinubu’s presidential bid but would back Osinbajo’s presidential aspiration as well as openly campaign against his leader indicates the depth of the animosity between he and Oyetola and his belief that the latter enjoyed Tinubu’s tacit support. Aregbe’s fervent support for Tinubu before, during and after the 1999 elections in Lagos State was understandable and unsurprising. As a student union leader in his formative years, he was an active participant in protests against military misrule and was also a passionate advocate for the end of apartheid rule in South Africa and the promotion of the dignity of the black man. During the struggle for the actualization of the annulled June 12, 1993, presidential mandate of MKO Abiola and to force the retreat of the military to the barracks, Aregbe was in the thick of the struggle at home just as Tinubu was at the forefront of the battle in exile. They were ideological and political soulmates as Progressives.

    Aregbe no doubt delivered on his mandate as Commissioner for Works in Lagos State ensuring the radical modernization and expansion of several key roads and allied infrastructure in the Centre of Excellence. As governor in Osun State, his record was mixed. He initiated laudable infrastructure projects in the state in the area of roads as well as modernization and provision of infrastructure in schools and health care facilities. He launched several programmes to cater for the vulnerable including the school feeding scheme as well as cash disbursements to the elderly. However, Aregbe’s ideological fervency and vibrancy was not matched by the requisite administrative acumen and managerial astuteness. Thus, the Opon Imo (Tablet of Knowledge) scheme was a revolutionary initiative to make text books and examination questions in key subjects available to students in a portable format but foundered on the altar of poor planning and conceptualization despite the humongous resources sunk into it.

    His school reforms proved to be poorly conceived and engendered considerable confusion and strife among stakeholders such as old students of prominent schools and could not be sustained. His administration’s far reaching programmes were not calibrated with availability and sustainability of resources in mind and thus he ended up with a legacy of incomplete or staggered payment of salaries for different categories of workers, a situation that had negative electoral implications for his political party. His successor, Oyetola, was a more restrained and reserved personality as well as a more sober and astute administrator and financial manager. Hence, he was able to achieve a modest level of infrastructure provision while paying all categories of workers their full complement of salaries.

    But whatever were Aregbe’s faults or weaknesses were, in my view, failings of the heart and not the head. The critical thing was that he meant well and was faithful to his ideological convictions and the philosophical orientation of his party. His strength lies essentially in his immense capacity for grassroots political mobilization and effective party organization. Perhaps the ideal thing would have been for Oyetola to concentrate on governance where he had demonstrated commendable proficiency and allowed Aregbe to handle political organization and popular mobilization. Oyetola is more in the mould of a technocrat and board room operator who is effective behind the scenes but seldom musters the infectious charisma and capacity for grassroots razzmatazz to rouse large numbers of people into political consciousness and activism, an art in which Aregbe is adept. It is not surprising that Oyetola’s dream of winning reelection for a second term was dashed as a result of the APC going into that election as a badly fractured house.

    There are those APC members in Osun and beyond that have described Aregbe’s exit with his group as good riddance. It is hasty and rash to come to such a conclusion. Is Aregbe’s disagreements with Oyetola and his subsequent fall out with President Tinubu final and beyond redemption? I don’t think so. There is nothing like an irredeemable or irreconcilable conflict where there is the requisite will, generosity of spirit and maturity. In the first Republic, Chief Obafemi Awolowo as leader of the Action Group and Chief Ladoke Akintola as Premier of the Western Region fought each other to a standstill until democracy in the West and ultimately in the whole country came crashing in January 1966. Surely, if they had the opportunity to relive their lives over again, they would have responded to issues, personalities and events differently and with greater maturity and tolerance. It is instructive that in the Second Republic, Awolowo was far less rigid in handling conflicts and differences.

    Perhaps Aregbe’s greatest error was the vehemence and bitterness with which he publicly excoriated the President publicly during the campaigns in a quarrel that was essentially between him and Oyetola. As a fallible human being prone to errors like all mortals, he can reach out to the President and make necessary amends. Luckily, one of President Tinubu’s most admired attributes is his largeness of heart and expansiveness of spirit which makes it easy for him to forgive repentant adversaries and genuinely reconcile with them. From his body language, Oyetola desires to stage a comeback as elected governor of Osun State. If so, having the Aregbesola political structure in his corner will be a valuable asset in terms of grassroots mobilization to achieve his objective. This will of course mean eating the humble pie of accepting Ogbeni’s status as a key political leader in the state.

    On his part, Aregbe has invested too much of his time, talent and energy in building the progressive political structure in the Southwest and beyond as well as projecting the Tinubu persona over the last two and a half decades for him to abandon his political habitat at this time for an unfamiliar political dwelling. There is every possibility that his considerable talents, experience and abilities can still be brought to play in President Tinubu’s ongoing quest to lay a solid foundation for the restructuring and modernization of Nigeria. With the present state of affairs, both Aregbe and Oyetola will be the ultimate losers in the unfolding politics of Osun State as there will be no stopping the dancing governor’s Second term.

  • Trump, immigration and capitalism’s global crisis

    Trump, immigration and capitalism’s global crisis

    Right from his near-miraculous reelection to the White House as the 47th President of the United States of America, a possibility that appeared remote given the perceived threat he constituted to that country’s democracy demonstrated especially by the insurrection he instigated against his defeat in the 2020 presidential election as well as his unsalutary record as a convicted felon, Donald Trump has given indications of his intention to effect disruptive changes both within America and globally. From day one with his inauguration on January 20, he has hit the ground running with a plethora of executive orders and verbal pronouncements to set in motion the implementation of the key planks of his campaign platform.

    These include stricter immigration control, mass deportation of illegal immigrants, withdrawal of US support for the World Health Organization (WHO), rolling back regulatory policies designed to safeguard the environment, introducing retaliatory and punitive tariffs in defense of US trade, granting pardon to those convicted for their attacks on the Capitol on January 6, 2021, and ensuring a speedy end to the Russia-Ukraine war among others.

    In many ways, Trump and the far-right ideology he has come to symbolize and benefit immensely from politically, are products of the ever-deepening crisis of capitalism and widespread uncertainty and insecurity as regards the continued economic prosperity of the advanced capitalist countries of the West. This is particularly so with the stiff competition that emergent aggressive economies like China and India continue to pose to America’s position as the world’s foremost economic power even if she still retains considerable dominance in terms of global military prowess as well as the technological innovation that sustains it. In the long run, however, economic decline can undermine military efficacy as the history of the rise and fall of great powers across time and space has all too frequently demonstrated.

    Trump was obviously right when he declared in his well-written and delivered inauguration address that “As our victory showed, the entire nation is rapidly unifying behind our agenda with dramatic increases in support from virtually every element of our society, young and old, men and women, African Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans, urban and suburban, rural and very importantly, we had a powerful win in all seven swing states, and the popular vote we won by millions of people”. With the emphasis of their campaign on reproductive rights, protection of gay, lesbian, queer and transgender sexual rights as well as the threat, Trump was seen as constituting to the constitution and democratic governance, Kamala Harris and the Democrats utterly missed the point that substantial numbers of the electorate were concerned about current economic hardships and were willing to believe that Trump had the keys to attaining greater prosperity no matter the moral baggage he was associated with.

    Indeed, the deepening crisis of capitalism is the key reason why far-right groups with their often extremist racist, nationalist and anti-immigration rhetoric have gained increasing political ascendancy not only in the US but also in many other advanced capitalist countries. Over three decades ago, a number of analysts had predicted the steady march of a character like Trump from the fringes of the American political system to general political acceptability and dominance. This was with the relatively impressive showing of non-mainstream candidates such as Ros Perot and Patrick Buchanan as independent or third-party contestants in the 1992 and 1996 presidential primaries and/or elections.

    Ronald Reagan in the United States and Margaret Thatcher in Britain had emerged as President and Prime Minister, respectively, in both countries and ushered in the neo-liberal capitalist revolution that sought to respond to the crisis that Keynesian capitalism and its extensive welfarist, interventionist state had run into as from the late 1970s after the latter’s ideological dominance since the end of the second world war in 1945. Under the intellectual suzerainty of the Conservative economist, Milton Friedman, and his disciples of the Chicago School of Economics, neo-liberalism and its orientation towards financialism, privatization, removal of subsidies for critical social services, de-funding of welfare support to vulnerable citizens, the rolling back of the state, deregulation of the economy and the subordination of large segments of society to the vagaries of market forces, maintained policy hegemony in advanced capitalist economies till the weakening occasioned by the global capitalist recession of 2008.

    The capitalist triumphalism that heralded the collapse of communism in 1989, with the fall from power of most Marxist-Leninist states in the Eastern Bloc, best exemplified by Francis Fukuyama’s prediction of ‘the end of history’ and what he saw as the unimpeded march of capitalism and liberal democracy into the unforeseen future, was short-lived. For, the defeat of a potentially viable political and economic alternative to capitalism and its liberal democratic accompaniment did not eliminate the fundamental, self-defeating contradictions of capitalism despite Karl Marx’s vivid description in his ‘Communist Manifesto’ of the historically unmatched creativity and capacity for prodigious production of the capitalist mode of production.

    Thus, it is the inherent contradictions of capitalism and its tendency to breed incessant cycles of economic booms and bursts and recurrent recessions with the attendant hardships that have created the conditions for the emergence of Trump and the serious danger that his ideas, temperament, disposition and bigotry constitutes to the survival of liberal democracy in a country, that despite its failings, has been a beacon for representative and responsive governance over the last two and a half centuries.

    Utilizing the Marxist geographer, David Harvey’s conceptualization of the contemporary crisis of capitalism in his book, ‘The Enigma of Capital’, Benjamin Kunkel writes that the origins of the crisis can be located “in the troubles of the 1970s, when the so-called Golden Age of capitalism following World War 11 – blessed with high rates of profitability, productivity, wage growth and expansion of output – gave way to what Brenner called “the long down-turn” after 1973…this long down-turn, with deeper recessions and weaker expansions across every business cycle, reflects chronic overcapacity – another variety of overaccumulation – in international manufacturing, a condition brought about by the maturation of Japanese and German industry by the end of the 1960s, and later compounded by the industrialization of East Asia”.

    Neo-liberal attempts to address the protracted crises of capitalism, Harvey argued, resulted in policies that curbed high wages to increase corporate profitability but also implied deficient demand with negative economic consequences. In his words, “Persistent wage repression therefore poses the problem of lack of demand for the expanding output of capitalist corporations. One barrier to capitalist accumulation – the labour question – is overcome at the expense of creating another – lack of market”. And how was the problem of lack of market addressed? Harvey cryptically observes that “The gap between what labour was earning and what it could spend was covered by the rise of the credit card industry and increasing indebtedness”.

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    One of Trump’s greatest appeals to his teeming supporters is his stance on immigration as substantial numbers of Americans believe that their economic woes are compounded by the large influx of illegal immigrants who take jobs that citizens should have and endanger society through criminal activity. But capitalism as scholars like Andre Gunder Frank and Immanuel Wallerstein noted long ago has become a global economic system that generates development in one part of the globe in the same process that breeds underdevelopment and deepening poverty in another.

    The prosperity of the West cannot be understood or explained without reference to its profiting from more than five centuries of slavery and colonialism largely responsible for the backwardness of those underdeveloped countries that Trump derisively referred to as ‘shit hole’ countries in his first term. After the attainment of ‘flag independence’ as from the 1960s, John Perkins, an investment banker, in his book, ‘Confessions of an Economic Hitman’, reveals how Western banks, some of which he worked for, coaxed and lured African countries into taking huge foreign loans and when the lending countries ran into economic crisis, they imposed huge interest rates on the debtor countries resulting in a protracted debt trap that compounded their indebtedness and grounded their economies.

    As the economic crisis in Africa worsened in the mid-1980s, the International Financial Institutions imposed Structural Adjustment Programmes (SAPs) demanding the devaluation of national currencies, privatization of state-owned enterprises, liberalization of trade, deregulation of the economy, retrenchment of public sector workers, removal of subsidies on fuel and essential services among other policy prescriptions that worsened poverty and deepened inequality. The resultant deindustrialization of these countries, astronomical inflationary spirals, increased unemployment and descent into political instability and internal strife created conditions in which large numbers of their citizens sought to escape their woeful existential realities and seek succour in more prosperous advanced countries such as the US.

    Teresa Hayter notes the grand irony that the Western imperialists who, as European imperialism expanded, obtained labour by force transporting between 10 and 15 million African slaves to work for plantation owners and emergent industrial capitalists thus creating the conditions for the pathetic state of these dysfunctional countries today. According to him, “So-called globalization, or latter-day imperialism, has created or helped to create new pressures to migrate. But the situation has changed. The governments of the rich countries, rather than forcing people to migrate against their will, are now intent on stopping them migrating when they wish to”.

    And as the late radical economist, Professor Bade Onimode, wrote “…the major sponsors of liberalization, globalization, in the North are strongly opposed to migration of labour. From France, Germany, the USA and other OECD countries, we read incredibly depressing tales of the harrowing experiences of immigrant workers…Why, this being the case, should the governments of developing countries not be allowed to exercise any controls on the entry of manufactured goods, capital, investment and technology into their countries, while the countries of the North stoutly shut out migrant workers from the developing countries…Why should free trade, liberalization and globalization be good for manufactured products, capital and technology (intellectual property rights) and be bad for labour?”.

    Trump has promised to end the ‘Green New Deal’, revoke the electric vehicle mandate, promote unfettered drilling of American oil all in a bid to promote manufacturing and prosperity in America. He has withdrawn the US from the World Health Organization which means stoppage of American funding for vital health programmes of the WHO many of which are of immense benefit to developing countries. Yet, the lesson of the Coronavirus pandemic is that not even the most powerful countries in the world will be immune when pandemics spread from one part of the globe to others.

    If his policies worsen the menace of climate change with the poor countries being the most adversely affected, this will only deepen the problem of poverty in these countries and heighten the desperation to migrate to more prosperous climes. Enthusiastic that America’s golden age has begun, Trump averred that “Instead of taxing our citizens to enrich other countries, we will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens. For this purpose, we are establishing the External Revenue Service to collect all tariffs, duties and revenues. There will be massive amounts of money pouring into our treasury coming from foreign sources”.

    This may well be a legitimate national aspiration. But Trump apparently does not realize that, no matter how powerful she may be, America’s prosperity cannot assure her security in a world in which she is surrounded by increased impoverishment and heightened inequality. The contradictions of capitalism are global and must be addressed by international cooperation with America best placed to play a leading role in the quest for a fairer, more just, equitable, safer and kinder world for all humanity. To make America great again, she does not have to strive to be mean again.

  • PBAT, hunger and the fierce urgency of now (2)

    PBAT, hunger and the fierce urgency of now (2)

    The radical political economist, Professor Claude Ake, wryly noted in his classic, ‘The Political Economy of Africa’ that “It is true that man cannot live on bread alone. But it is a more fundamental truth that man cannot live without bread”. Although Ake was taking a subtle dig at the Lord Jesus Christ’s contention that man needs spiritual nourishing as much as material sustenance, the truth is that implicit in Christ’s cryptic assertion is the realization of the vitality of food to human existence. Such is the degree of hunger in the country today largely as a result of the soaring prices of food items beyond the rich of the vast majority of Nigerians that a special report in the Vanguard Newspaper yesterday that many families are being forced to resort to desperate, unhygienic and dangerous means of feeding themselves with negative consequences for their physical, psychological and mental well-being.

    The insufficiency and unaffordability of food can constitute a huge security risk in a fragile democracy like ours where elements of the opposition are all too eager to exploit all means to discredit not just the government in power for which they harbour visceral hatred but also delegitimize democracy and destabilize the polity. For instance, the Tinubu administration’s implacable adversaries attribute the unfortunate deaths as a result of stampedes for food palliatives in some parts of the country during the last festive period to the degree of poverty created by the government’s policies while others derisively refer to the queues in front of the President’s Bourdillon residence in Ikoyi, last December waiting to collect Christmas and end of year handouts as indicative of the negative implications of his policies.

    Yet, this had been the practice during festive periods since the inception of this dispensation in 1999 long before Tinubu became President. Indeed, I recall that in the 1970s in the GRA area of Ilorin along Police Road where the late Senator Olusola Saraki had his residence at the time, large crowds always gathered at his house both at festive and other periods to benefit from his generosity. I am sure that this practice has been replicated across the country over time and has as much to do with our cultural orientation as a people as with the unacceptable degree of material deprivation and inequality in our society.

    In the same vein, rushing for food or other items as well as our penchant for poor organization during social, political and other activities involving large gatherings of people has been well known and has routinely resulted in avoidable mishaps, sometimes tragic, long before now. Even then, the government in power particularly at the centre will sound like giving untenable excuses if it resorts to offering such explanations. Rather, it should utilize the immense powers of the state to mobilize the people to produce food in abundance and allow the interplay of the forces of demand and supply to substantially force down prices when there is a superfluity of food available. The truth of the matter is that given the munificence of fertile land and Favourable climate in large swathes of the country, there is no excuse for our inability to feed our population or the continued high level of food imports in Nigeria.

    True, the administration has made large allocations of funds available to the state governments in several tranches since the removal of the fuel subsidy. As at the first half of 2024, for instance, it was estimated that no less than N570 billion was released by the federal government to the 36 states to expand livelihood support to their citizens in addition to the direct distribution of food items and cash disbursement to the vulnerable by the central government. While a few of the states have performed creditably in making food and other palliatives available to large numbers of their people, most of the sub-national units of government have been adjudged as being ineffective and making a negligible impact in this regard. In any case, the distribution of palliatives is too susceptible to corruption and diversion and can, even in the best of circumstances, reach only a limited number of people to be a sustainable policy is all too obvious now.

    There is thus no alternative to taking necessary measures by all levels of government but especially the sub-national units to dramatically ramp up food productivity to bring down food inflation considerably thereby mitigating current poverty levels. Here again, the Tinubu administration cannot be credibly accused of not making desirable and well-meaning efforts towards achieving this objective. For instance, during the week, the Minister of Agriculture and Food Security, Senator Abubakar Kyari, disclosed that 255 tractors of the 2,000 to be supplied to the country have been delivered and the remaining are expected to arrive on schedule.

    Along with each of the 2000 tractors, he explained, 2000 harrows, ploughs, seeders, planters and boom sprayers will be supplied. Accompanying equipment included in this procurement are 1,200 trailers, 9000 sets of spare parts and 10 combined harvesters of 330 horsepower. According to Senator Abubakar Kyari, “These are huge combined harvesters that will be able to do about one and a half hectares per hour. So, if you just imagine, in one hour you’ll be able to do nothing less than 10 hectares. 10 hectares is like 13 football fields…We also have service vehicles, about 12 service vehicles that will come, it’s a mobile workshop with all the items that will be placed in all these areas that we’re going to have those tractors.”

    Again, the Agriculture Minister said work was in progress towards the recapitalization of the Bank of Agriculture (BoA), before the end of the first quarter of 2025 to enhance funding of smallholder farming activities. Noting that the recapitalization of the bank had been stalled for several years, Senator Kyari stressed that repositioning and strengthening the bank would ensure adequate funding of commercial agriculture to redress a situation whereby the highest commercial loan to the agricultural sector between 2014 and 2021 was N1.04 trillion, a meagre 5.15 per cent of overall commercial bank loans for the seven-year period. In the words of the Minister, “BoA has branches in all the 109 senatorial districts and can reach out easily to those farmers. Smallholder farmers lack capital. We are reorganizing BoA to support what the government is doing in the sense of public financing in the budget and what have you.”

    In a similar vein, the sum of N132 billion was provided in the 2025 budget to support farmers through the National Agricultural Development Fund (NADF) being set up to address identified impediments to the effectiveness and productivity of the agriculture sector. The Fund would be channelled to achieve improved seedlings through targeted interventions as well as provide grants and subsidies to promote mechanized agriculture, storage facilities and advanced agricultural facilities.

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    No less significant is the report by the Minister of Education, Dr. Tunji Alausa, that the Federal Government has approved a N30 billion grant to 30 public universities of agriculture to commence mechanized farming. Stressing that agriculture is a key sector that must be integrated into academic and research frameworks by these institutions to address rising food insecurity, create jobs and stimulate the economy, Dr. Alausa said each university would receive a take-off grant of N1 billion. This is indeed a radical initiative that will set the pace for the mobilization of the country’s underutilized intellectual resources to achieve set developmental objectives in diverse sectors. For instance, the expertise in the universities of agriculture can be tapped to promote mechanized agriculture and the much needed storage facilities to address the menace of pervasive food spoilage.

    Despite the destructive flooding in some states and continued insecurity that affected agricultural harvest in 2024, experts report a continued impressive level of food production in the country hampered, however, by logistics difficulties in transporting food produce from farms to markets across the country. In a statement during the week, the Nigerian-born founder of the Canadian Black Farmers’ Association, Tosin Ajayi, cited the excessive exportation of food as one reason for the food shortage in the country.

    He said that the high demand for Nigeria’s staple food items by the country’s citizens in the diaspora has led to a substantial amount of food produced in the country being exported. The problem with agriculture in Nigeria is thus not insufficient productivity but sustainable preservation and local retention of most of the food produced for domestic consumption.

    The government should certainly consider Mr Ajayi’s advice on the need to obtain accurate data on the volume and types of foods exported from Nigeria with a view to putting in place measures to control food exports. But then, the impressive policies and structures being put in place by the administration will not automatically translate into improved agricultural productivity without diligent and meticulous implementation as well as the effective mobilization and organization of critical stakeholders, particularly farmers to be active participants in the process. This much is a lesson to be learnt from public policy in the agricultural sector by successive administrations since independence.

    Contrary to the oft-repeated view that agriculture was neglected by government in Nigeria with the discovery of petroleum, considerable resources continued to be channelled into agriculture by various governments with only marginal results and the country remaining as food-dependent as ever. In a review of agricultural policy in Nigeria prior to the adoption of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) in the mid-1980s, Abdul Raufu Mustapha, asserts that “the problem of Nigerian agricultural investment from the 1970s was both relative neglect and wasteful expenditure”.

    Mustapha notes that “There was the ‘mass exhortation’ programme, Operation Feed the Nation (OFN), which expended much money and effort in getting ill-prepared university undergraduates to go to the rural areas to ‘teach’ the peasant farmers how to farm. Secondly, there was direct government involvement in production through programmes like the National Accelerated Food Production Programme, the National Livestock Production Company and the National Grains Production Company. Thirdly, massive irrigation schemes were constructed under the River Basin Development Authorities (RBDAs). Fourthly, World Bank-sponsored Integrated Rural Development Projects (IRDPs) were initiated in many parts of the country. Finally, there was the encouragement of large-scale capitalist farming through the Agricultural Credit Guarantee Scheme Fund…”.

    Under the President Muhammadu Buhari administration, for instance, humongous funds were pumped into the Anchor Borrowers Programme to boost local rice production and achieve self-sufficiency in the product. It remains unclear if there was any correlation between what was achieved in this regard and the amount of resources channelled into the scheme. The Tinubu administration would do well to study why previous efforts at positively transforming the agricultural sector in Nigeria failed so as to avoid past errors this time around.  Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s advice in August 1980 on the urgent imperative of organizing Nigerian farmers into modern Cooperatives must be taken seriously and pursued by the current administrations at the federal and state levels as a necessary condition for enhanced agricultural productivity and self-reliance.

    If we are to lift the farmers from the prevailing morass of social degradation and economic miseries in order to make them maximally productive, Awolowo argued, “Firstly, the State Governments should take immediate steps to mobilize and organize our farmers into Cooperative Societies throughout the country. A Cooperative Unit of between 100 and 200 practicing farmers, all depending on the type of crops to be cultivated, could be the optimum. In this regard, it must be borne in mind that the individual farmer, except a rich landowner, is not a viable proposition”. He advised that the cooperating farmers be provided with areas of farmland adequate for their aims and objectives as well as massive financial and technical assistance with the proviso that cooperating farmers must “register their organizations as limited liability companies under the Cooperative Law of the state. “

  • PBAT, hunger and the fierce urgency of now (1)

    PBAT, hunger and the fierce urgency of now (1)

    It is unsurprising that perhaps the key and most urgent goal of the President Bola Tinubu administration for 2025 is to reduce the inflation rate from the current 34.6% to 15% and especially to effect a drastic cut in the existentially threatening prices of staple food items and essential drugs. The removal of the fuel subsidy as one of the administration’s main economic reform planks in May last year had led to a spiralling of pump price of fuel with associated consequences for transport costs and the escalation of prices of basic food items such as garri, yams, bread, rice, beans, vegetables, tomatoes, eggs, groundnut oil, bananas among others beyond the reach of millions of Nigerians.

    While the administration and many economic experts believe that the elimination of the fuel subsidy and the merger of the hitherto existing parallel exchange rate markets are necessary surgical economic policies which are in the long run interest of the economy, the short term effects are excruciating and President Tinubu is right in according priority to urgently easing the pains being borne by the vast majority of Nigerians. For, as the great economist, John Keynes, famously observed, in the long run we are all dead.

    Understandably, elements of the opposition, most of whom are yet to come to terms with the outcome of the 2023 Presidential election, the most bitter in our political history, blame Tinubu’s policies for the cost of living hardships. They have even dubbed the President as ‘T-Pain’ depicting one who takes sadistic pleasure in inflicting agony on others. It does not matter to them that all the major candidates promised to remove the subsidy during the campaigns with Mr Peter Obi of the Labour Party emphatically asserting on national television that he would do so “on day one”.

    Those who heap all the blame for our current economic travails on the Tinubu administration are also unconvinced that the economic challenges we confront today, the country’s continued debilitating romance with poverty, backwardness and underdevelopment, are inevitable fallouts of the persistent dysfunctional policies of successive post-independence administrations that have kept the economy disarticulated, dependent, stunted and unproductive. But for short periods such as the mid 1970s to early 1980s when the country experienced the so-called oil boom or the early 1990s during the windfall from oil revenues as a result of the gulf war, for instance, the majority of Nigerians have lived in penury and hardship despite the country’s abundant resource endowment.

    It is however in the nature of politics that if the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) had been in opposition, it would most likely have also put whatever government was in power on the defensive in a similar manner. Rather than listen to ‘stories’ from the administration, most people want to see the impact of concrete policies that ameliorate their materially enervating conditions. Hence, PBAT’s avowal in his New Year message that “In 2025, our government is committed to lower these costs by boosting food production and promoting local manufacturing of essential drugs and other medical supplies”.

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    Indeed, as far back as June last year while speaking as a special guest at the 142nd meeting of the National Economic Council (NEC) in Abuja, in an indication of the fierce urgency his administration attached to the hunger question, the President called on governors to embark on massive food production in response to rapidly rising food prices. Since state governments control the land, he asked the governors to consult on how to achieve food affordability and revert to him within seven days. In his words, “Time is humanity’s most precious asset. You can never have enough of it. It is getting late. We must produce the food our people eat and it will require coordination and intentionality between members of the NEC”.

    It was obviously in recognition of the need to urgently bring down food prices that the administration announced the waiver of import duty as well as zero  per cent Value Added Tax (VAT) on basic food items, a policy which was supposed to last between July and December last year. The food items covered by this policy included maize, husked brown rice, wheat, grain beans and millet. A memo from the federal Ministry of Finance on the policy stipulated that “The importation of these items shall be limited to investors with  milling capacity and a verifiable backward integration programme for some of the items”.

    Surprisingly, despite the high expectations engendered by this policy announcement, it was not implemented within the specified timeline. Consequently, the phenomenon of food inflation worsened. A 50kg bag of rice, for instance, that cost about N30,000 before the fuel subsidy removal, rose to N100,000. The Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja, and at least 19 other states reportedly recorded food inflation rates above 40 per cent in 2024 while the country’s food inflation soared to 42.29 per cent by November last year.

    By December last year, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) and the Organized Private Sector (OPS) decried the inexplicable non-implementation of this policy, which would have gone a long way to cushion hardships associated with unaffordable food costs. Actualizing this duty waiver policy on essential food items at least in the first quarter of this year will be imperative to achieving the goal of significant reduction in food prices. The increase in allocation to agriculture from N362.94 billion in 2024 to N825.6 billion in the 2025 budget illustrates the seriousness accorded the sector by the administration. If the equally substantial enhancement of the allocation to security in this year’s budget helps to consolidate on current substantial gains in safety of lives and property across the country, this will also positively impact food productivity.

    PBAT no doubt recognizes that no meaningful progress can be made towards achieving higher food production and consequent lower prices without the active involvement and participation of the state governments and local government councils. This must have informed his attendance at the NEC meeting referred to earlier to mobilize the support of the governors. Shortly after that interaction between the President and the governors, the Southwest Governors Forum under the Chairmanship of the Lagos State governor, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu, announced that the six states in the region would work in concert to massively boost food production there.

    Unfortunately,  not much has been heard or seen of this joint action plan since then although some of the states have been making impressive strides in boosting agricultural productivity. A clear forerunner in this regard is the Ekiti State governor, the unassuming, ever modest but silently achieving Mr Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji. Some of the landmarks recorded in Ekiti in agriculture under Oyebanji’s leadership include the establishment of Ekiti State Agro Marshalls to secure farmlands; clearing and ploughing of about 1000 hectares of land for 400 farmers under the tractorization subsidy scheme; disbursement of N177,937,500 for land clearing under the Youth in Agriculture Scheme; engagement of 913 youths on different crops cultivation under the Bring Back Ekiti Youth to Agriculture partnership with YSJ Farm Limited; the laying of pipes for farm irrigation at Erifun, Ado Ekiti and the completed or ongoing construction work on no less than 23 critical rural road projects linking farming communities to urban markets.

    In an interview with one of this newspaper’s columnists, Abiodun Komolafe, governor Oyebanji said, “Interestingly, we’re renovating most of Awolowo’s farm settlements in the state. It’s remarkable that Awolowo had such vision back then, and it’s our duty to build upon his legacy. Building on our existing efforts, we plan to establish six more farm settlements across Ekiti in 2025. This expansion will not only provide decent accomodations for our over 1000 employed youths in the sector but also enable them to live on-site, work efficiently and earn a decent income”.

    But there is ultimately no alternative to the six states in the Southwest coordinating their efforts to leverage on their strengths to massively mobilize and empower youths in the region to take advantage of abundant fertile land and favourable climate to engage in massive food production. And the same goes for the country’s other geopolitical zones. Incidentally, the First Lady, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, has deemonstrated, through her Renewed Hope Initiative Agricultural Support Programme, how the energies of diverse segments of the population can be harnessed and channelled towards the goal of achieving higher food productivity. One strand of her agricultural support scheme is the Identification, training and empowerment with N500,000 each of at least 20 farmers in each of the six geopolitical zones to produce, cultivate and preserve different food crops.

    There is also the Renewed Hope Initiative ‘Every Home a Garden’ competition through which women are encouraged to plant a garden at home with the aim of ensuring the availability of food in every home. The initiative’s slogan is “#FoodOnEveryTable” and the winner goes home with N20 million. The Renewed Hope is partnering with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources to identify, train and empower young farmers and 75% of these will be female and 25% male farmers. There is also the Renewed Hope tant Initiative Food Outreach through which food staples such as rice, beans, spaghetti, garri among others are distributed to widows, people with disabilities, special schools and other vulnerable groups across the country.

    The drive to produce food massively and thus banish hunger in Nigeria must be prosecuted as an all out war in which failure or defeat is not an option. The federal government, sub national units, schools, non-governmental organizations, religious bodies, military and para military organizations including the National Youth Service Corp (NYSC) can be mobilized to achieve this objective within specified timelines. The increased Naira revenues accruing to state and Local government councils in the wake of the removal of fuel subsidy should be utilized to strengthen agricultural productivity. True, the Tinubu administration has sustained and improved on the attainments of the preceding President Muhammadu Buhari administration in diversifying the economy and enhancing agricultural performance.

    Despite the persistence of degrees of insecurity in some conflict-afflicted parts of the country, experts report a measure of improvement in crop harvests in 2024. Yet, transportation of perishable food items from areas of production to market destinations remains a logistical nightmare with the resultant large scale food spoilage. The problem with Nigeria is certainly not food scarcity but how to get agricultural produce to designated markets on time and at affordable costs.

    The Nation newspaper columnist, Sanya Oni, makes a pertinent point in this regard when he notes that “the other lacuna that has remained somewhat intractable is a reliable and efficient system of logistics on which  our hordes of farmers can count on… Here’s my candid advice on the matter: our old, disused, rail network might seem obsolete for moving people in this day and age; there  can be no denying its utility in moving cattle and produce particularly in the circumstances that the country has found itself. With good thinking, right investment and proper management, Nigerians might yet discover the gold on those old tracks”. This makes eminent sense to me and I hope the Ministers of Agriculture and Transportation can explore the possibilities of this suggestion.

  • Thoughts and non thoughts of OBJ

    Thoughts and non thoughts of OBJ

    So pungent, incisive, convincing and irrefutable have been the several reactions to former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s recent address at Yale University in the United States in which he not only excoriated the President Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration but, characteristically, held his own leadership record up as the ideal to follow, that there is no need to reiterate the well known arguments here. Sermonizing endlessly on the ills plaguing Nigeria and magisterially pronouncing solutions to them has been the routine pastime of the former military head of state and then elected President for two terms despite the fact that he did not avail himself of his latter day wisdom when he had the opportunity to steer the affairs of Nigeria and shape the destiny of the nation.

    The truth of the matter is that the Owu Chief, perhaps more than any other past leader, cannot escape culpability for the state of Nigeria today – her continued underdevelopment and poverty despite an abundance of natural, mineral and relatively qualitative Human Resources. Had he seized the opportunities placed on his laps seemingly on a golden platter to steer Nigeria’s ship of State particularly between 1999 and 2007 to deepen the country’s federal practice, diversify the economy, lay the foundation for the modernization and expansion of key infrastructure, revamp the country’s security architecture, institutionalize electoral integrity through the conduct of credible polls and pay more than lip service to the fight against corruption, the trajectory of the country’s socioeconomic and political development would be far different from what it is today.

    In his book, ‘Not My Will’, a personal memoir of his years in power as military Head of State between 1976 and 1979, Obasanjo, with characteristic lack of charity, derided the late Chief Obafemi Awolowo asserting that what the legendary politician and statesman had sought in futility all his life, which was to be elected President of Nigeria, he (Obasanjo) had attained at a relatively young age. Yet, he did not address his mind to the critical issue of whether or not he had maximally utilize this opportunity to pursue and promote the best interest of Nigeria and her accelerated developmental transformation. His military regime’s political transition programme ushered in a civilian dispensation in 1979 that was one of the most venal, corrupt and inept leading to the collapse of the Second Republic and the return of military rule within four years. Given another opportunity to redeem himself as elected President of Nigeria from 1999 to 2007, Obasanjo demonstrated that he had learnt nothing from his past foray in power.

    In his address at an event to honour the memory of the great novelist and intellectual, Chinua Achebe, at Yale University, Obasanjo’s unsparing criticism descended heavily on the incumbent Tinubu administration in the same way that he had subjected every government to since his exit from power in 2007. It little occurred to him, as many analysts have pointed out, that the naturally reticent Achebe was forced to trenchantly criticize bad and lawless governance under the Obasanjo presidency and even rejected the national honour bestowed on him by the Ota farmer as a gesture of symbolic protest.

    Some have attributed the former President’s relentless criticisms of successive administrations after him to a desire to be the focus of attention as well as the urge to portray his administration as the best in this dispensation if not in the post-independence history of Nigeria. Unfortunately, any such pretensions fly in the face of indisputable facts and cannot be supported by objective, serious minded analysis. It is my view that the former President’s serial critiques of Nigeria’s political economy under successive administrations and habitual indulgence in self-glorification stem from an innate lack of capacity to transcend superficiality in analysis as evidenced by the ephemerality of most of his books in which he makes magisterial pronouncements that have minimal impact on the polity because they are hardly deeply reasoned and well thought out. This is in sharp contradistinction to the immortal thoughts and works of Awolowo that still remain pertinent and relevant to Nigeria’s quest for a viable socioeconomic and political order decades after they were written.

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    For instance, Obasanjo loves to flaunt his self-proclaimed patriotism and incomparable love for Nigeria. Yet, from his conduct when he had the opportunity to preside over the country’s affairs, there was no indication that he had reflected deeply on what patriotism really means beyond mere cliches and empty sentimentality. For instance, when a 20-man delegation of the League of Northern Democrats led by a former Governor of Kano State, Ibrahim Shekarau, visited him in Abeokuta recently, the former President reiterated once again his fabled love for Nigeria. In his words, “You said I am a believer in the greatness of this country. Yes, I am. I am also an incurable optimist in this country. I am totally committed to the goodness of this country. But I believe if we look back and we want to be sincere with ourselves, we can see some of the mistakes of the past which we must not fall into again”.

    But it is no less a person than Chinua Achebe who gives us an insight into the shallowness of Obasanjo’s understanding of patriotism and love for country. On page 15 of his slim but powerful classic, ‘The Trouble with Nigeria’, Achebe writes, “In 1978 or 79 General Obasanjo paid an official visit to the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Of the academic community assembled in the Niger Room of the Continuing Education Centre and which rose respectfully to its feet on his entry, General Obasanjo made a totally unexpected demand. He asked them to recite the national pledge! A few ambiguous mumbles followed, and then stony silence. “You see,” said the General bristling with hostility, “You do not even know the National Pledge”. No doubt he saw in this failure an indictable absence of patriotism among a group he had always held with great suspicion”.

    Achebe then goes on to dilate lucidly on patriotism. His words, “Who is a patriot? He is a person who loves his country. He is not a person who says he loves his country. He is not even a person who shouts or swears or recites or sings his love for his country. He is one who cares deeply about the happiness and well-being of his country and all its people. Patriotism is an emotion of love directed by a critical intelligence. A true patriot will always demand the highest standards of his country and accept nothing but the best for and from his people. He will be outspoken in condemnation of their shortcomings without giving way to superiority, despair or cynicism. That is my idea of a patriot”. It is thus obvious that Obasanjo’s address at Yale and his several scurrilous denunciations of previous administrations both of the PDP and APC fall far short of Achebe’s thoughtful and exacting standards of patriotism.

    In the same address to the League of Northern Democrats, Obasanjo spoke on the vexed issue of Igbo presidency which is yet to be a reality in the country. According to him, “I think all of us in Nigeria have to rethink…It bleeds my heart when people say because the Igbo had carried out a secession and so an Igbo man cannot be the President of Nigeria. I say what nonsense? There is no section of Nigeria that has not planned secession? What is “Araba” in the North? The North planned to break up Nigeria…What is treasonable felony? So, who among us can say I am better than the other? None!”.

    In the first place, it is untrue that there is no part of the country that has not planned a secession. There were certainly tensions in the relationship between various parts of the country leading to threats and heated exchanges at various times which is natural in a complex, plural polity like ours. But it is only the Igbo of the Southeast that had actually carried out the threat of secession, an attempt that was militarily crushed after three years of bloody conflagration. Even then, I am unaware as Obasanjo posits that anybody worth taking seriously has ever suggested that an Igbo man cannot be President of Nigeria because of the abortive secession attempt. Indeed, as I have previously said in this column, within nine years of the end of the civil war, an Igbo man, Dr Alex Ekwueme, had become the Vice President of Nigeria. There is every possibility that within the dynamics of democratic politics an Igbo man would have since become President of Nigeria but for the truncation of democracy by military intervention in 1983.

    In the last presidential election, Mr Peter Obi, directed his campaign mainly at his fellow Igbo as well as Christians of the North and South and his support base was restricted to that limited constituency which cannot deliver a presidential victory in a vast country like Nigeria. A candidate who engaged in church tourism campaigns and openly called on Christians to “take back your country” understandably did not win a single state in the core Muslim North which constitutes at least one half of the electorate. In any case, if Obasanjo is so passionate about Igbo presidency, why did he emerge from nowhere to snatch the PDP presidential ticket from Dr Ekwueme in 1998 with the support of retired northern Generals even when Ekwueme, one of the founding fathers of the PDP, was on course to winning the ticket?

    Reporting Obasanjo’s address to the visiting League of Northern Democrats, The Punch newspaper wrote, “The former President blamed regionalism as practiced before obtaining independence in October 1960 as the foundation of the country’s prolonged lack of cohesion, adding that “the truth is that at independence, Nigeria emerged with three leaders and so it is a situation of three countries in one ever since”. Again, it does not appear that this submission is a reflection of rigorous thought.

    For one, it is simplistic to base an analysis of post-independence Nigerian politics on the three major ethnic groups when ethnic minorities have increasingly asserted their influence within the polity. Again, it is as misleading to blame the regional structure of the first republic for the collapse of democracy in 1966 just as it is to proffer a return to regionalism as the solution to current challenges. Rather than regionalism per se being the problem with the First Republic, it was the attempt by the ruling NPC/NCNC coalition at the centre to forcibly seize control of the Western Region from the Action Group (AG) and impose an unpopular Ladoke Akintola of the NNDP on the region through the brazen massive rigging of the 1965 Western Regional elections that ignited the flames of anarchy in the region which then had national implications bringing down the democratic edifice on everybody.

    Obasanjo lectured his northern visitors to the effect that “Yes, you have identified your group as the League of Northern Democrats, but how I wish you had called your group National League of Democrats, because where you come from should not be a problem. Where I was born should not be the enemy of my ‘Nigerianess’. I will be increasing by being a Nigerian rather than being a member of the Republic of Oodua”. This is hardly realistic. When asked to respond to allegations that he was a tribalist during his campaign for the presidency in 1979, Chief Awolowo submitted that he could not be a good Yoruba man without first and foremost being a good and responsible indigene of Ikenne and that he could not claim to be a good and patriotic Nigerian without first being a good and responsible Yoruba man. This sounds eminently sensible, practical and honest to me. The point, as the Premier of the Northern Region, Sir Ahmadu Bello, was said to have told the great Zik is not to deny our differences but to understand them.

    • This article was first published November 13, 2024

  • Salihu Lukman and PBAT’s media chat

    Salihu Lukman and PBAT’s media chat

    Appraising President Bola Ahmed Tinubu‘s maiden media chat on Arise Television’s ‘The Morning Show’ programme, the immediate past National Vice Chairman (Northwest) of the All Progressives Congress (APC), Dr Salihu Lukman, said the president was in denial of the fact that his administration’s ‘so-called’ economic reform policies have failed. He was of the view that the president’s responses to questions portrayed him as “a President who is not listening” and likened Tinubu to an emperor operating in a dictatorial manner antithetical to democracy. Ordinarily highly articulate, one would have expected Lukman to critically interrogate the President’s responses to questions on specific policies and why he considered them inadequate even though I must confess that I only read reports of his Arise Television interview and did not watch it live.

    In the media chat, Tinubu spiritedly defended his administration’s economic reform policies including the removal of the fuel subsidy, merger of the hitherto existing parallel foreign exchange markets and the proposed tax reform bills while insisting that he had no intention of downsizing his Cabinet which some critics consider too large in view of the need to cut down on governance costs. But then, the President acknowledged his awareness of the severe hardships brought about by the reforms, expressed his empathy with the people and was optimistic that beyond the current pains, there would be enduring gains including a stronger, less dependent and more prosperous economy.

    All of this in my view does not suggest a President who is not listening or one who is alienated from the existential realities of the vast majority of Nigerians. Rather, it is akin to the surgeon who firmly believes that putting his patient under the knife, though a painful process, is imperative to save the latter’s life. Or the dentist in Wole Soyinka’s novel, ‘Season of Anomy’ who has to inflict the pain of dental extraction on his patient as the lasting panacea to an excruciating toothache.

    Lukman insinuates that if Tinubu were a listening leader, he would jettison his reforms on a wave of populism due to the attendant hardships. But Tinubu insisted during the media chat that only the reforms could save the country from the perilous path it had charted for decades. Successive post independence governments, civilian and military, had identified the need to remove the subsidy but could not summon the courage to do so. Those who did, sought to eliminate the subsidy in trickles and phases with little impact on the economy as fuel importers continued to criminally amass humongous amounts from the gargantuan fraud associated with the subsidy.

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    True, Tinubu as leader of the opposition had opposed the partial subsidy removal announced by the President Goodluck Jonathan administration in 2012. But then, the country at that time was earning huge revenues from crude oil sales with the price of a barrel of oil considerably exceeding a $100 while the country’s crude oil exports were also substantial compared to subsequent years when crude oil theft on an industrial scale led to a sharp drop in the capacity to export. Unfortunately, previous administrations particularly during the PDP’s control of the centre between 1999 and 2015, did not utilize the opportunity of relatively high crude oil prices and the resultant munificent revenues to resuscitate dormant refineries to boost domestic refining or concretely address the country’s chronic infrastructure deficit in roads, railways and electricity, for instance. These inherited deficiencies have contributed to the intensity of hardships being experienced today as the country continues to adjust to life without fuel subsidies.

    The removal by the administration of subsidy in the electricity sector leading to increase in tariff for certain categories of power consumers have also contributed to the prevailing economic hardships. But it is so easy to forget that under the PDP, no less than $16 billion was expended on the power sector with negligible impact on electricity supply. To compound matters was the largely opaque and fraudulent privatization of the defunct Power Holding Company of Nigeria (PHCN) with individuals and entities without the requisite expertise or financial capacity buying the distribution and generation companies and thus leaving the sector no better than before the privatization. Dr Lukman is no doubt aware of all these factors but is motivated more by partisan considerations in his contribution to the discourse on the presidential media chat.

    Incidentally, the Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed, also toes the line of Salihu Lukman in accusing the Tinubu administration of not listening to the voice of the people. Speaking on the administration’s proposed tax reforms when receiving the Christian community in his state at the Bauchi Government House, he said, “These tax reforms are not only anti-North but also a threat to the unity of our country. The government must listen to the people. This is a democracy not a dictatorship or oligarchy. Policies should never be imposed on the people without considering their welfare…No leader should feel too proud or arrogant to admit when a policy is not working. If something is not popular with the people, change it! This is not about religion or tribe; it is about fairness, justice and the unity of Nigeria”. But courageous and visionary leadership is sometimes about a leader charting an unpopular course in the short run confident that it is in the long term interest of the people and that, ultimately, history will vindicate the just.

    In any case, Bala Mohammed and Salihu Lukman assume that there is a uniform and cohesive voice of the people to which a leader must listen and respond. As far as they are concerned, their narrow views, naturally based on their interests and prejudices is the sole authentic voice to which the President must listen and bow to. But this is not necessarily so. On the tax reform bills, for instance, the Archbishop of the Anglican communion of Kadina Province, Timothy Yahaya, has a different view. According to this newspaper on Thursday, the Archbishop told reporters that “The Tax bills will stimulate the economy, but the sharing of money is not the best for this country…Leaders must think outside the box and think of creating wealth instead of thinking of sharing what we extracted from the ground”.

    And the Senate Leader, Opeyemi Bamidele, citing available details from data accompanying the Bills, has argued that the proposed Value Added Tax (VAT) model will guarantee more income for states in the North and a reduction for states like Lagos and Rivers. In his words, “As credible data have shown, for instance, the new model recommends 6.17 per cent to Kano compared to 0.89 per cent due to it. It recommends 1.21 per cent for Zamfara compared to 0.05 per cent. Currently, Lagos gets 80.26 per cent but the new model only recommends 15.28 per cent representing an 81 per cent decrease. Under the new model also, Rivers’ share will decline from 7.74 per cent to 4.6 per cent accounting for a 41 per cent loss. With these figures, the narrative around the new derivative model is utterly incorrect and unfounded”.

    Continuing, Senator Bamidele reveals further that “For the record, the Tax Reform Bills, when finally enacted, utterly exempt all employees earning N1,000,000 annually or N83,000 monthly. The Bills exempt start-ups, shared services and technologically driven services from taxation and recommend zero VAT on essential services and consumptions. Even though it reviews the derivation formula to 60 per cent, this proposal is guided purely by the principles of equity, fairness and justice”. This is obviously why President Tinubu insisted during the media chat that the Tax Reform Bills are essentially pro-poor and seek to modernize the anachronistic tax laws that date back to the colonial era. In any case, why should Salihu Lukman and Bala Mohammed presume that the economic reform policies of an administration that is less than two years in office have failed without providing any empirical justification for their assertion?

    Yes, an already high poverty rate has been worsened by the administration’s drastic fuel subsidy and exchange rate policies. But some economists have also pointed out that there are signs of emergent recovery and future sustained growth. The country’s foreign reserves has hit the $42 billion mark and continues to grow. The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) has cleared authenticated humongous foreign exchange owed to various sectors including foreign airlines. The country has recorded trade surpluses of no less than $6 trillion each over the last three quarters indicating steadily increasing domestic productivity.

    For whatever it is worth, the Naira accruals to the Federation Account has almost tripled and most states have declared their ability to pay the nearly doubled new minimum wage. Stakeholders report remarkable improvements in agricultural harvest this year although getting agric produce from rural farms to urban centres to curb spiraling  food prices remains a challenge. Even though the exchange rate of Naira to the dollar remains undesirably high, it has at least attained a level of stability that can enable businesses plan and make more reliable projections. Competition in a deregulated downstream petroleum sector is gathering momentum and we are gradually seeing the impact on fuel prices, a process that is likely to intensify as more refineries come on stream.

    Dr Lukman cites what he describes as the dormant state of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) as the major reason why he believes that the Tinubu administration cannot deliver on its promises to Nigerians. According to him, “The party cannot offer the country what it does not have. The APC is currently practically dead. There are no meetings at the level of the organs of the party. No platform to ventilate and aggregate opinions or ideas to enrich the governance system. The party members only come together when there is an election a candidate. Such candidates do not usually emerge from the internal arrangement of the party. Such candidates are not usually the most eligible and what the party does is to mobilize men and resources to rig them in”. To be fair to him, Lukman had always advocated for internal party democracy and the unhindered functioning of party organs even while he was in the APC.

    However, his description of the APC is no less true of what obtains in the other parties particularly the PDP and Labour Party (LP). This is why the opposition parties are crisis-ridden and, unless they are able to put their houses in order, are in no state to challenge effectively for power in current and future elections. But here, Lukman is guilty of a degree of hypocrisy. His benefactor and close associate, the temperamental Nasir ‘el rufai, former governor of Kaduna State, is essentially authoritarian in temper and outlook. He ran the affairs both of Kaduna State and the APC in the state with despotic arrogance riding rough shod over diverse interest groups including labour and religious constituencies. The current governor, Senator Uba Sani, is working hard to heal the wounds inflicted on the state by el rufai. Yet, Lukman never perceived the combustible former governor as an emperor. Lukman reveals that he and other like minded politicians are working hard to birth political parties that can produce the right leadership “amid a groundswell of recognition by leaders of the opposition to come together”. It will be interesting to see what kind of party they come up with especially with egotists like el rufai at its helm.

  • The Kemi Badenoch challenge

    The Kemi Badenoch challenge

    Her narrative of Nigeria, the country of her birth, is essentially a monotonous, one-track and static tale deliberately designed to further endear her to those who already have a jaundiced, perverse and derogatory perception of the capabilities of the black race and its claims to civilization and a shared equality of dignity with other races particular of the Caucasian variety. Mrs Kemi Badenoch has been especially voluble since her meterioc rise in British politics as leader of the Conservative Party and the opposition as regards the dysfunction, corruption, poverty and decadence that characterize contemporary Nigeria. It is difficult to fault her assertions that most Nigerian politicians are in public life for purposes of selfish aggrandizement than for the pursuit of the common good; that an institution like the Nigeria Police Force, for example, parades a good number of personnel who fall far short of the requisite professional and ethical standards or that essential facilities for a dignified life in a modern polity are inexcusably unavailable to the vast majority of the people.

    That is the reality of the Nigeria Kemi grew up in as a child in the 1980s and from which she has escaped courtesy of her British citizenship by birth and is responsible for her decision to tenaciously cling on to her adopted country and aggressively seek to cut all physical, emotional and psychological ties with the land from which her parents and their ancestors sprang. The opportunities offered her by Britain not only to acquire qualitative education but to also ascend to the elite rungs of that country’s politics may seem to validate Kemi’s strident and unrestrained denunciations of Nigeria’s failings. It is doubtful if her obvious ability and brilliance would have been given such fertile soil to flourish in this country.

    But there is also the danger that her negative narrative of Nigeria will help reinforce the prejudices of many of the far right white elements she seeks to court who may see her as another opportunistic black person from a failed country incapable of developing itself who has come to take advantage of a country built by the labour of others. It is impossible for Kemi to denigrate Nigeria in the way she is going about it without also devaluing her essence as a black person.

    Many Nigerians have identified with and supported Kemi’s vehement criticisms of the country for essentially partisan reasons – their grievances against the outcome of the last presidential election and the resultant current political status quo in the country. Thus, the opposition has chosen to read her scathing comments as directed against President Bola Tinubu and the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC). Vice President Kashim Shettima’s take that she is free to drop her Nigerian name, Kemi, if she detests the country so much further spurred many in the opposition to rally to her defense.

    Yet, the incidents that she cites to illustrate her negative depiction of Nigeria dates back to the late 1980s suggesting that the situation predates an administration that has been in office for less than two years since May 2023. Kemi’s criticisms, which cannot be dismissed as entirely baseless, thus constitute an indictment of the Nigerian political class as a whole across party demarcations as well as successive administrations in post-independence Nigeria.

    I certainly do not agree with those who argue that patriotic love for country should restrain any citizen from publicly and unreservedly condemning Nigeria’s all too obvious failings. But the enterprise of such criticisms must be predicated on intellectual honesty and factual balance. Kemi’s lived experience of the Nigeria she paints in putrid colours to the world is of the Lagos of the 1980s and possibly early 1990s. Can it be empirically valid that Lagos, as an example, has remained static and unchanged since then? Has there been no improvement in infrastructural facilities since then? What about the light rail or Bus Rapid Transit system which now define the city’s landscape but was absent at the time Kemi references?

    Before 1999, daylight Bank robberies were near daily occurrences in Lagos and armed robbers lay siege to estates and communities at night. Traffic and street lights were few and far between on Lagos roads; children carried chairs and benches to and from school daily while adults and children could be seen with all kinds of containers in search of water across the state. What about the mountains of refuse that defaced the state from Ikoyi to Ikorodu and Ikeja to Badagry?

    Can Kemi and her supporters honestly say that there have been no positive developmental attainments from the situation nearly three and a half decades ago that informed the Conservative Party leader’s experience of Nigeria and now even if we admit that much more progress ought to have been made? In the same vein, is Mrs Badenoch right in depicting Britain as a model of perfection devoid of the kind of flaws such as pervasive corruption that taint Nigeria? The answer is an emphatic no.

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    Listen, for instance, to Carol Vorderman, the Welsh journalist, social critic and tv celebrity on the menace of corruption in the UK. Her words, “Yesterday, there was the Public Accounts Committee put out, and nobody’s reported it in mainstream media, that in the two years preceding Johnson becoming Prime Minister, there was an approximation of five and a half billion pounds of fraud and waste on government departments. In the following two years when Sunak was chancellor, that quadrupled to 21 billion pounds of fraud and it’s not being investigated. And this report said,  not that mainstream media reported any of it at all, that of the 7.9 billion pounds that went into COVID testing, 6 billion pounds of that was given to the companies recommended by Tory MPs and ministers and peers. It goes on and on and it’s not being reported. I could go on for hours about the corruption”.

    So much then for Mrs Badenock’s unceasing attempt to contrast an angelic Britain with an irredeemably demonic Nigeria. The reality may be far more complex than that and this is not in any way to suggest that the existence of corruption in Britain justifies its prevalence in Nigeria. But every community of flawed mortals has challenges with which it grapples not excluding the advanced western countries that she idolizes so uncritically. Indeed, the Conservative Party leader’s outlook may subconsciously be a function of the chronic inferiority complex arising from centuries of Nigeria and Africa’s encounter with slavery and colonial imperialism, which is a key factor in the continent’s protracted underdevelopment.

    Yet, her analysis sees no linkage between about five centuries of slavery, colonial exploitation and neocolonialism and the wealth of the West in contrast to the poverty in Nigeria that she contemptuosly refers to. Of course, this is not a line of argument worth pursuing too far as it gives the impression of seeking to find excuses for Africa’s indefensible  dismal post colonial developmental performance. Nigerians have ruled Nigeria for six and a half decades since 1960 and must bear the responsibility for whatever they have made of their country. On that, Mrs Banedock cannot be faulted.

    But then the disturbing poverty of historical consciousness in the Conservative Party leader’s analysis is evident in her response to Vice President Kashim Shettima’s jibe about her retaining a Nigerian Kemi identity of a country she so passionately detests. In her words, “I find it interesting that everybody defines me as being Nigerian. I identity less with the country than with the specific ethnicity (Yoruba). That’s what I really am. I have nothing in common with the people from the north of the country, the Boko Haram where the Islamism is, those were our ethnic enemies and yet you end up being lumped with those people”. In the first place, she appears oblivious of the diverse multiethnic, multicultural and multi religious composition of the North. There are substantial numbers of Yoruba who have lived in the North from pre colonial times just as the Hausa-Fulani communities in many of the Southwest states date back to over two centuries ago.

    Many states in the Northcentral and far North have considerable Christian populations just as Islam is deeply rooted in Yoruba land. Since precolonial times, there have been trade, marital, cultural and sometimes conflictual relationships between different primordial states and communities in the areas that today make up southern and northern Nigeria. And as Sam Omatseye pointed out in his column on Monday, the negative experiences she often narrates about Nigeria occured in Lagos in the Yoruba Southwest where she lived. When she talks about the north being “our ethnic enemies”, she is perhaps unaware of the protracted intra-Yoruba wars that lasted for over a hundred years before the colonial subjugation.

    But then, in the final analysis, Mrs Badenoch is entitled to her worldview and the extreme conservative ideology she has opted to identify with. There is little that anybody can do about that. However, there is much that can be done about the undeniable dysfunction and poverty in Nigeria she describes and the corruption, ineptness and lack of vision of the political class responsible for this. Part of the missing link in her analysis and those of her supporters is that, despite its own shortcomings and the complex context in which it operates, the Tinubu administration is taking far reaching steps to address the root causes of the country’s debilitating challenges fundamentally.

    The removal of the fuel subsidy that has saved humongous amounts of funds that has made it possible for most states to pay the new mininum wage of N70,000 with a number of states even exceeding this amount. The coming on stream of domestic crude oil refining through the new Dangote and rehabilitated Port Harcourt refineries, processes that had started under the preceding Buhari administration, and the envisaged ultimate mitigating impact on fuel prices. The merger of the parallel exchange rate markets and the elimination of the opportunities it provided for privileged and connected individuals to make instantaneous stupendous wealth without industry through arbitrage. The fiscal liberation of the local government councils from the financial asphyxiation of the states to promote the prospects of grassroots development.

    The empowerment of  states to generate and distribute electricity within their jurisdictions – an opportunity that a number of states are now taking advantage of with huge potential impact on the economy. The proposed thoroughgoing tax reforms which experts claim have revolutionary rejuvenating potentials for the Nigerian economy. These are a few of the key policy thrusts of the administration and they are beginning to bear tentative fruits. The country’s foreign reserves currently stands at about $42 billion, a considerable improvement. And the country recorded balance of trade surpluses of N6 trillion, N6.5 trillion and N6 trillion respectively over the last three quarters indicating steadily growing domestic productivity.

    The fierce opposition in many quarters to the reforms despite the cautious and restrained approach of the administration shows just how difficult engineering change in a complex polity like Nigeria can be. But the challenge of critiques such as those posed by Kemi Badenoch is that there is no option but to deepen and sustain the reforms until the country is placed on an irreversible trajectory of growth, development and prosperity. This long term goal must be calibrated with urgent and effective short term measures to tame current astronomical inflationary spirals, drastically bring down food and transportation costs in particular and address the biting poverty that breeds citizen cynicism and generates support for extremist perspectives of the Kemi Badenoch variety. There must also be a more concerted effort to tackle the corrosive corruption at the root of high levels of inequality and deepens the high rate of poverty in a richly endowed country where the vast majority of the people have no business being poor.