The Nation Newspaper

Category: Femi Orebe

  • Nigeria: What manner of a Senate (2)

     Saraki has gone this far in public life because the Nigerian political space is a product of continuous manipulation. 

    “Nuhu Ribadu was removed over Saraki Societe Generalle issue,  Lamorde was removed for investigating Saraki’s wife; Magu is not being confirmed because, he is probing Paris Club funds diversification involving Saraki.
    With profound respect, Section I7I of our laws takes precedence over Section 2.2, so the president needed not have sent Magu’s name, to the senate, in the first place.’ –Femi Falana SAN.

    When last week I wrote the first part of this article, there were two things I did not foresee, namely: I did not envisage I would so soon be writing this final part nor that I was dealing with a serious issue of character flaw in the leadership of that very important institution of state. Even though I did not fail to compare the literal bedlam in the senate with what now essentially operates in the lower house which I said had become more like a church  and where the citizenry can now observe a much more serious and focused  concern with state affairs, a deeper reflection, as well as others’ views on the senate, which has increasingly turned itself  to nothing more than a labour union, given its increasingly adversarial approach to  everything from the executive, have combined to give me fresh vistas. Why, for instance, have serial allegations of illicit behaviour, running over several years, and in different positions, both in the family business and in public service, cleave to Senator Bukola Saraki, like bee to honey? Why, rather than show remorse, does he continually hide under the woolly saying that an accused is innocent until proven guilty which, in fact, is not the case in some jurisdiction? Is he the only politician in Nigeria? Is he so beyond shame he can’t say enough? Why are otherwise respected senators tagging alongside Saraki? I am sure it has nothing to do with the senate itself, whose integrity, in case they don’t know it, suffers a diminution with every new allegation levelled against its highest ranking member. Or is it voodoo; some collective amnesia?

    The comparison between the house and the senate becomes particularly germane when you reference what is currently happening in the legislative arm of government in the United States of America. It is not without justification that the Senate is always treated with utmost respect as the house of wisdom in any nation practicing democracy. Usually, because of the average age and worldview of members of the lower house, and its much higher number, people are willing to tolerate a measure of  youthful exuberance totally unacceptable in the senate. Therefore, while one is not surprised at the shambolic manner the House Intelligence Committee is handling the ongoing investigation into the issue of Russian interference in last year’s U.S Presidential election, the counterpart committee in the senate has demonstrated not only impeccable seriousness, but an absolutely responsible approach to its own investigation. Where the House Intelligence Committee Chairman has been hobnobbing with the White House, reporting his findings to the President about whose associates the investigation is all about, the senate committee has shown sincere bipartisanship and has since become the trusted reference point for information on the matter.

    That, I believe, should be the natural order of  things but certainly not in the Nigerian senate where the president and his muscle man have become the star attraction either furiously doubling down on whoever catches their fancy or unerringly attracting opprobrium to the otherwise sacred chamber by their actions. Witness, for instance, the fraudulent housing deals allegedly perpetrated through the FCT. One is  beginning to see another member, a senator Nwaobishi, who must have envied  Melaye’s unrestrained aggressiveness for a long time the way he now must be the one to lead in denigrating any citizen or national institution, who they believe have crossed their way. The other day we saw him rail uncontrollably against Professor Itse Sagay, an accomplished citizen whose student he would have been mighty proud to be. I think braggadocio has become their way of covering up their misdemeanours and Nigerians may not have too long to wait to hear about this senator.

    And talking about character flaw, it cannot be more gratifying that it is from Kwara State, where the following came from: Wrote the Vanguard Activists for the development of Kwara State, (slightly edited):

    ”Is Nigerian Senate now Saraki’s Senate?

    1. Lamorde attempted to arraign Saraki’s wife and he was promptly summoned to appear before the Senate.
    2. Saraki was arraigned before CCB and swiftly, the Chairman was summoned, followed by serious attempts to change the laws governing CCB. To demonstrate their love, the entire senate was emptied, with literally all members lining, shamelessly, behind him to court.
    3. The AGF initiated his arraign-ment on forgery charges and he was summoned to appear before the ever available Senate.  Magu’s case is too recent t delay us.
    4. Col Hamid Ali, the Comptroller – General of Customs crossed his path and we know the rest.
    5. The SGF said constituency projects are not for legislative contractors and the heavens must fall.

    The relevant questions are (1)

    Is the Nigerian Senate now Saraki’s Senate? (2)Is Saraki acting on behalf of Nigerians or on his own behalf?

    (3)Must Saraki continue to hold Nigeria to ransom as he does Kwara?”

    Praise be to God Nigerians saw the senate perform under other presidents so we are really not asking Saraki to invent the wheel. What we are seeing daily in this senate is more like a legislative disaster.  lf Saraki  still has  these senators swooning behind him before he  named  members to  senate committees , with what exactly is he now tying them to his  own apron strings? For answers, I think Nigerians  should  set  their sights on  money; billions and billions of  unapproved earnings – that is by RMAC –  coming to them in form of  allowances, oversight manipulations, constituency funds  and  many  others Nigerians  would  never get to know.

    But I ask, for how long shall we play the captured by a people we claim to have elected?

    I can only fittingly conclude this  article  with  a bit of  this slightly edited,  perspicacious  piece  on the  senate  and the executive brouhaha which  Wale Adeoye, a multiple award winning journalist, shared with us on the Ekitipanupo web portal  this past week.

    He wrote:

    “Both the Senate and the Executive have their   faults which we can only ignore to our own peril. While Nigerians elected the President, only a minuscule part of Kwara State elected Bukola Saraki with probably less than 200,000 votes. The current Senate has not demonstrated any higher moral ground to command public respect.  Can’t you see that most of the time the Senate is only half filled?  The Senate President has cases of corruption against him. Nigerians know his personal history and his records from the era of the  Societe –Generalle  Bank, part of which Ibrahim  Magu is still, allegedly, being haunted for.  Saraki has gone this far in public life because the Nigerian political space is a product of continuous manipulation.  Why should individuals seek to cover their iniquities under the guise of building strong institutions? Building a strong society is far more important than building a strong Senate. The Senate is not interested in building a strong society, otherwise, it should have been discussing things like   restructuring Nigeria. These senators are only interested in discussing their individual comfort. What the Senate is doing is even more grievous, because it is on a mission to destroy the entire democratic institution, not build it. The Senate is a house built on vendetta and vengeance. The Executive is not faultless. For instance, the DSS should have submitted its report before Magu’s appointment. If there are strong institutions, Saraki should have been disqualified from contesting the senatorial election given the many allegations standing against him.  It is also a question of failure of party discipline that Saraki was allowed to emerge Senate President. And remained unpunished by the party.”

    Nigerians should not be surprised to see Senate President Bukola Saraki contest the 2019 Presidential election on the platform of the PDP. For that purpose, I suspect that everything is being done to completely weaken the APC ahead of that election.

    Therefore, APC had better beware.

     

     

  • Nigeria: What manner of a Senate?

    Nigeria: What manner of a Senate?

    With their N36M monthly salary, have they ever asked themselves what the president earns per month? 

    “If you want to be a true Nigerian, tell the present government where they are going wrong. Power is transient. The only thing that is permanent is what you do for the people when you were alive. If  you are a President or  Minister  (even a Senate President), it does not matter how much you have; you will be remembered  only for service, not the amount of money you have which you cannot even announce” – Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi11.

    For some time now, this column’s concern with Nigeria’s ballooning corruption has ensured that I couldn’t get published here the very timely views of Mr George Umeh on the parlous state of manufacturing in Nigeria. In a mail to the columnist, the concerned citizen wrote as follows in reaction to one of my articles on our literally incurable corruption:

    “Nigerians are to blame. We have a lot of resources and the markets (the demand) but we do not want to manufacture many of the goods we consume. Otherwise how do you explain a nation using 90% to 95% of its income to import 90% to 95% of products it uses? There will be nothing left. Above all, it leaves us with huge economic and social problems – unemployment, crime, prostitution, etc. It has also led to our once cherished social values like honesty giving way to corruption and nepotism as public servants want to avoid economic insecurity. Japan and Italy, for example, have had over 60 prime ministers since World War 11 but their economies are stable owing to manufacturing. Manufacturing creates jobs, reduces imports and makes currencies valuable. It is one stage of development Nigeria wants to avoid thus creating problems for us. Lagos as an industrial centre is too small for a large country like ours. We need three to five ‘Lagoses’ in Nigeria. I have sent a 7-page letter to President Buhari on the only way out in which I told him clearly that he was unlikely to solve the economic problem even in eight years, and why”. As comments on the above, it is hoped that the Central Bank, giddy with our rising foreign reserve, will be patriot, and responsible  enough to ensure that  forex allocations go to only serious manufacturers  and  not to pseudo ones only interested in round tripping.

    May your tribe increase, Mr Umeh.

    For reasons that are very obvious and negative, I found myself unduly involved with matters pertaining to the Nigerian Red Chamber this past week. The immediate leitmotif though, was the withering comments on the Facebook wall of my dear brother, Kayode Samuel. Forever keen on lampooning the APC, he had tried to present the Senate,this same senate in glowing colours, sentiments, which he, being a very perspicacious Nigerian, I know were only skin deep in view of the totally reprehensible things coming out of that chamber.

    Even where the uninitiated would have thought that they  mean well, as in the cases of both the Secretary to the Federal Government and that of the Comptroller-General of Customs, largely because it is not in our senators’ habit to be people friendly, they still managed to shoot themselves on the arm. Take, for instance, the case of the SGF: what rational person would argue that the man does not have questions to answer, not only as to why allegedly unexecuted contracts were awarded to a company he established, not minding the usual phony resignations from the company which such compromised persons claim (even Obasanjo once claimed a blind trust), but also the fact that the awardees were reportedly fake, and untraceable, for contracts running into over a billion naira. This discovery should have drawn commendations to the senate had they afforded Mr Babachir Lawal fair hearing. Even with that lacuna, they still proceeded to recommend his sack by the President. If the senate truly wanted to be respected by the Presidency, they should have remembered that despite all the pressures mounted by the 7th Assembly on President Jonathan, he did not remove Ms  Arunma Oteh who, in any  case, they did not appoint for him. The same thing is now playing out in the CGS case even where they know the man does not have to wear a uniform to be able to explain the rationale for his misplaced policy of wanting to punish vehicle users whereas he should have simply surcharged his officers, retired or still in office, who took bribes in lieu of appropriate custom duties. At least, as INEC and NNPC have indicated they would do, their terminal benefits and pensions could have been converted to that purpose. Again,where they would have received accolades, their desire for vendetta completely smothered that as they were keener on punishing the officer for seizing the senate President’s alleged N300M jeep cleared with fake documents.

    Now, in which depressed country of the world will any serious senate, or its President, be importing a N300m bulletproof Range Rover Sports Utility Vehicle (SUV) even as manufacturers are paying through their noses to get the forex they need for raw materials? Do these people think at all or do they consider themselves more important than every other Nigerian? Since they claimed to have paid, read as bribe, the electorate for their electoral victory, apparently they no longer bother about the fact that many Nigerians do not know where their next meal would come from. With their N36M monthly salary, have they ever asked themselves what the president earns per month? And must we Nigerians continue to watch these people lacerate us every which way like we are bewitched? Are we such zombies?

    This takes me to those Face book comments I referred to earlier.  Kayode Samuel had jabbed the APC claiming that the much criticised senate is a product of the party. While I agreed with him, I had gone further, to say that  the crises in the senate is a result of  both the selfishness and shortsightedness of  both the CPC and the A C N which failed to allocate the Senate Presidency to the N-PDP after they had  each taken the Presidency and Vice –Presidency, respectively. After all, APC owed its victory in the entire North-Central to the N-PDP, adding, however, that as things stand today, Bukola Saraki has taken party disloyalty to a new low.  My final contribution to that topic was that had the framers  of the  Nigerian  constitution anticipated we could ever have a senate like this one, there’s no way they would have assigned to it the heavy and sacred duties allotted to it. Or what with the barrage of allegations, some criminal, daily being made against its members while a least one is in court? In comparison the House of Representatives now looks like a church.

    Allegations of the Senate President importing a vehicle with fake papers had barely broken when Melaye, its most outstanding member, was alleged  to have not graduated from the Ahmadu Bello University. While he has gone to court to redeem his integrity, a fresh scandal has erupted, this time against its President, Deputy, and their House counterparts. In  a petition to the EFCC, the same one they want to behead,  the highly regarded civil Society Network Against Corruption (CSNAC) is asking the EFCC to prosecute the named officers  for alleged fraudulent practices. Signed by its National Chairman, Olarewaju  Suraju,  they are alleged to have converted their private residential properties to official residences so they could collect rent. These officers are believed to have collectively defrauded the country to the tune of N630,25,499.90. According to the petitioners, the men, using some fictitious agents as decoy, “approached  the Federal Capital Development Agency to provide them with residential accommodation, having made arrangement with the agent  who claimed to be the landlord for the purpose of the transaction, purportedly renting to the Federal Capital Development Authority a five bedroom detached duplex for the use of one of the principal officers of the National Assembly at the rate of an annual rent of N50 million, the FCDA having paid for two years in advance. This fraudulent tactic was used for each of them with a common feature of  the transactions being that they were all approved within 48 hours, followed with immediate disbursement of funds, having presented companies that doubled as estate agents and property owners for the exercise”, they wrote.

    Considering all these, and those not yet in the public space, four questions readily come to mind: one, are our legislators beyond shame? Two, must these shenanigans go on unchecked? Three, is President Buhari’s government weaker than the other governments we have had since 1999? And finally, have we, Nigerians, been bewitched into complete inaction or irrelevance?

  • Magu: Corruption adds legislature to its fighting Arsenal

    That Magu is competent, and performing, is easily confirmed by the number of foreign agencies  which indicated interest in observing how a jaundiced senate would handle his confirmation hearing.

    Sources at the presidency said there has been a cold war between Magu and members of the President’s kitchen cabinet who seek to interfere with ongoing corruption cases at the EFCC.  Matters reportedly came to a head recently when Sahara Reporters did an exposé that revealed how the Chief of Staff prevented an investigation that the commission had commenced against a powerful indigenous oil company, and Magu was accused of being the brain behind the leakage of the story. Related issues of contention include the planned commencement of the trial of the businessman, known to have been involved in multi-billion oil deals with former Minister of Petroleum Resources, Diezani Alison-Madueke. He had apparently been assured that he would not be prosecuted by the EFCC. Our sources revealed that Magu’s letter of nomination to the Senate for confirmation was delayed by the same individuals because of what they described as Magu’s “intransigence.” On the part of the DSS, sources within the administration say Magu was held to have stepped on their toes by constantly questioning why they usurped the role of EFCC in carrying out raids into the homes of corrupt former government officials, which is the domain of the EFCC. The DSS reportedly raided at least 30 homes of officials and aides of former President Goodluck Jonathan, but only managed to deliver a meagre N47m and $1.943m.”

    The above is a slightly edited, yet uncontroverted story, published by Sahara Reporters on June 22, 2016.  It should readily explain why the senate, never a friend of the president, nor of the executive branch, could so perfunctorily conduct what it called a confirmation hearing even where a decision had long been taken, a priori, to mess up an absolutely performing anti graft chief. That Magu is competent, and performing, is easily confirmed by the number of foreign agencies  which indicated interest in observing how a jaundiced senate would handle his confirmation hearing. It turned out that their fears were not misplaced.

    Even if it is not illegal as asserted by Femi Falana, SAN, nothing can be more immoral than having several members of the senate, currently undergoing trial/investigations that can readily see some of them to jail, by the EFCC under the same Magu, as Acting Chairman, actively participating in his screening for confirmation as the substantive head of the anti corruption agency. Only in Nigeria can this macabre dissonance ever happen. As things stand today, Magu’s fate would have been sealed even if Bukola Saraki, the senate President, were the only member of that chamber having issues with the agency for sundry malfeasance. However, the fact that not less than 10 of them, especially former state governors who have turned the senate to a sinecure, at least seven governors believed to have illegally profited from the diversion of N19B out of the N388.304B Paris Club refund, and several other high profile politicians currently being probed for stealing the country blind, is more than enough reason to achieve that unfortunate decision by the senate. Happily it is labour lost as the president must treat it with benign disregard just like President Jonathan did in the much protracted case of Ms Arunma Oteh, who some lazy bones in Nigeria wanted to mess up but is today the Treasurer, and Vice President of the World Bank. They are, forever, jealous of success even where not a few of them were rigged into our legislative houses.

    And why do I say this?

    I say this because there are only two ways to resolve the Magu conundrum: either President Buhari kowtows to the assemblage of  Nigeria’s  corrupt , and thereby, promptly erases the one reason – his integrity and  incorruptibility –  why  Nigerians voted him overwhelmingly in 2015, as well as  continue to repose great confidence in him as recently demonstrated by the huge crowd which welcomed him back home from his medical leave, in spite of the loafers  who want him dead, or he sticks, like  President Olusegun Obasanjo did with Professor Lola Borishade then, and remain  unwaveringly committed to a  Magu  who has proved beyond any iota of doubt that he is Nigeria’s best anti corruption chief ever.

    Without a doubt, it is only in Nigeria that an agency like the DSS could twice shame a Head of State by submitting reports which would lead to the non confirmation of the appointment of a candidate in whom he had demonstrated ample confidence by twice recommending him. President Buhari must now begin to see why not a few of us  criticized him when he chose to pack his kitchen cabinet as well as  the security agencies with members of his Fulani ethnic group many of who are believed to be his blood relations. Their recent behaviour is absolutely demonstrative of the saying that familiarity breeds contempt. But Nigeria belongs to us all. Nothing lasts forever except the grace of God. Robert Azibaola and George Turnah were once untouchable in this country. We can only hope that they will learn from history, even recent history. It is the height of disrespect for elements within the executive to so shambolically disgrace the president. If Magu’s case were to be so bad, the DSS should have convinced the president as to why he should not be recommended a second time to the senate, an arm of government which has shown, time and again, that nothing interests it more than shaming the executive branch. That this happened means that we cannot put anything beyond some elements in this government. Only this past week, we heard that some officials in the foreign affairs ministry deliberately worked against the country’s interest in the election of officials to a continental body. We can only hope that one of these seemingly untouchable public servants, would not one day bring war upon the country.

    News had filtered in a long time ago that Magu would only be confirmed on their death just so they can protect individuals who had robbed Nigeria silly. And since this is also the wish of the senate, the president must rise to the occasion and save a young man who is completely dedicated to the service of this country. It will be a great shame if Magu is laid bare for total enemies of Nigeria to deal with as they wish and the consequences will be truly dire.  Unfortunately, Magu has added another set of enemies made up of those state governors who are alleged to have turned themselves into consultants in the Paris Club refund issue thereby pilfering about N19B of funds that should have gone into paying a huge backlog of salaries and pensions. For days, many Nigerians could not eat after seeing the ghost-like pictures of two elderly Nigerian women who were going to be paraded on pension lines to be able to get paid the miserable amounts these governors pay them.  They have forgotten that God is on the throne and that they would not have to get that old before He repays them in full measure. God is not man that they would deceive Him and, like it or not, they will get their due comeuppance. Amen.

    The Attorney-General and the Sagay committee must do everything to prevail over the selfish designs of the president’s kitchen cabinet and all those working in cahoots with the senate in the Magu matter. They must let the President know the negative consequences of having a new man foisted on the agency; a new man who, from the first day would be beholden to the senate. He will simply become a slave to the Melaye’s of the senate; those who believe that Nigeria is theirs to deal with as they like. The President must also be made aware of how dispensing with Magu at this point in time will complicate, if not completely erode the massive assistance the agency is currently getting from foreign agencies both financial and in intelligence sharing because for  them Magu has been tried and tested  and found  worthy. Above all, taking Magu off the job now will be the end of most of the ongoing cases and President Buhari would, by that singular act, completely erode all the successes he has achieved in his anti graft war. Time is even against him.

    He must, therefore, not play into the hands of his enemies.

  • Arise O Nigerians, take your country back: A story of two patriots

    One day soon, Nigerians will meet these people-hating kaffirs who think only of themselves.

    Nigerians are no longer ready to take prisoners; ravaging hunger has seen to that and before long, I can see them properly holding looters accountable either through the legal system or by direct, physical combats , if the courts would not change their complicit ways – no thanks to some identifiable senior lawyers who you see happiest defending looters, all smiles in newspaper photographs after they would have bludgeoned judges into granting long adjournments to persons who, in China, would not even have the luxury of a trial. Nigerians are still wondering whether the jailing of former Adamawa State governor, Bala Ngilari, was a dress rehearsal or a mere token to frustrated Nigerians. They have profaned the temple of justice enough you don’t know what to make of the Ngilari comeuppance.

    I had the distinct pleasure of meeting with Mr. Adedayo Kolade, 84, this past week; a very distraught, super Nigerian patriot, whose pain is so huge you can cut it with a knife. He is so sad about what has become of Nigeria, he now believes he has what can be described as a ‘heart agony’, a yet undiscovered medical condition. His story shortly, with copious quotes from his dirge of an article, written as far back as October, 2016 on what corruption is doing to Nigeria. So miffed is he that he is not averse to suggesting that Nigerian constitution should be suspended for four years and President Muhammadu Buhari be given all the powers he would require to save Nigeria from the ravages of  a corruption that has become so systemic it is comparable only to the drug epidemic President Rodrigo Duterte is handling with unprecedented savagery in the Philippines. Consider this excessive, if you like, but so compulsively nauseating has what Steve Osuji of this paper recently poignantly described as ‘an acute and chronic systemic corruption’ become in her ‘compressed economy’ that nothing should be considered over the board. Though this is somewhat impracticable, it is the feeling you get after listening to the soul-twitching video recording by Dr Sota Omogui, one of the co-authors of our National Anthem; an anthem whose tenets are now being completely stood on its head.

    If that doesn’t get you yet, then this trending Whats app chat. And, concerning it, should our legislators feel perjured, they should, tomorrow morning, through their respective spokespersons, address a press conference at which they will bare it all to Nigerians, and unlike Senator Ndume, none of their members would ever again be punished for having the guts to want to know the details of their, for now, shadowy budgets. I have re-named it CHANGE CAN START WITH THE NASS:

    “Here’s a thought-provoking suggestion to the government of President Muhammadu Buhari.

    A senator earns N36 Million monthly.

    If this is divided into two, he gets N18 million and the balance N18 m can be used to employ 200 Nigerians who will earn N90,000 per month

    200 persons multiplied by 109 senators = 21800 employees.

    This means that 200 Nigerians can live comfortably on half of a senator’s

    monthly pay.

    A House of Reps member earns N25 Million per month

    If this is divided into two, he collects N12.5 Million per month. The balance of  N12.5 million will employ 135 Nigerians who will earn N92,500 per month..  135 Nigerians multiplied by 360 members in the house = 48600 employees.

    135 Nigerians can comfortably live on half of a monthly income of just one rep.

    This government can employ 70,400 Nigerians who will earn N90,000 and N92,500 from this simple reduction in the salaries and allowances of our less than busy legislators.”

    But then, there are more surprises from our ‘servants turned masters’ as just to ensure that the miliki continues, as a result of poor Nigerian masses paying more for an already overly expensive kerosine and other petroleum products, the senate in its wisdom, and speaking through Marafa Kabir Garba, Chairman, Senate Committee on Petroleum Resources (Downstream), now wants the removal of subsidy and a total deregulation of fuel price.

    One day soon, Nigerians will meet these people-hating kaffirs who think only of themselves. With the ravaging economic recession, which has seen some Nigerians commit suicide, what minutest sacrifice have these people made to show that they empathise with the people?

    All days for the thief, indeed!

    Back to Mr. Kolade whose article you read with your lacrimal artery almost surrendering to tears (for Nigeria) which he actually once did.

    “OH NIGERIA,” he wrote, “a land blessed with milk and honey but has been turned into ANGUISH and HEART BREAK for her citizens! An English colleague of mine, who knows my disposition towards Britain concerning the predicament of this nation, asked me one night in August, 2013: ‘Dayo, as things are in your country today, is the British still the problem?’ I cried till I slept off that night because it was such a dispiriting question. The number one problem is corruption, a pungent recalcitrancy which President Buhari is fighting tooth and nail. But corruption is aggressively fighting back, using very senior lawyers and the courts; lawyers who, in other jurisdictions are the bulwark of society. Or isn’t it a shame that individuals who should be languishing in jail houses are shamelessly gallivanting about being celebrated by the people, the very victims of their malfeasance, by royalty and even the church. It is such a shame,” he concluded.

    Dr Omogui’s a pathetic rendering of the Nigerian condition. Brother to the amazing ex- FIRS boss, Mrs  Ifueko Omogui-Okauru, the U. S based medical practictioner was, at youth, highly bullish about Nigeria and showed that by co-authoring the Nigerian national anthem. The leitmotif for his story is the gruesome loss of his mother, Mrs Grace Omogui, a lawyer and life-time public servant, who fell, in Benin city, to the ferocious hot lead of some god-forsaken armed robbers who trailed her from a bank. The pity of the story is that at the very time mama needed a country she  served  ever faithfully, both as Vice Principal of a Federal Government College and in the Lagos state judiciary, Nigeria, with its decrepit and archaic infrastructure, failed her miserably. Omogui dwelt extensively on the first line of the Nigerian anthem he co-authored which is: ‘Arise O Compatriots, Nigeria’s call obey’, which he regrets no longer means anything to Nigerians. The country, he says, is totally broken, more like Somalia, a war-torn country, with nobody being held accountable for anything whatever. He bemoans the total lack of pipe borne water which, in the 60’s, was everywhere on Benin streets at a time you won’t find a single bore hole. Then, he says, there were functioning institutions of higher learning, land telephone lines that worked, hospitals with running water, whereas today, even in the intensive care units of teaching hospitals, water has become a luxury. There was, also an airline that was the pride of a nation. But, he laments, returning after a 30 sojourn in the United States of America, he meets a country which has become a shadow of its self; all gone down the drain.

    No thanks to corruption and impunity.

    A country where customers are trailed from the bank and attacked, even fatally, with anybody being held accountable. One in which Fire Services have neither diesel nor water and so cannot put out the minutest fire outbreak. Politicians, he says, amass huge amounts of money illegally, and yet, nobody is in jail.  His is a description of Nigeria, as it actually is, by a proven patriot.

    And so, I ask: where do we, as a country and people, go from here?

    The only man we all know in our hearts as having a record of unimpeachable public service record as: a former state governor, former Head of State, former head of an oil agency and  our serving President; a man who, in spite of  having been all these, has no hilltop mansion, no Presidential library, no petrol/gas station, not to talk of an oil block, yet we continue to demonise him,  with not a few sully Nigerians wishing he would just drop dead. As I have always said, it is those who want President  Buhari dead  who will replace him in the morgue. Together with him, patriotic Nigerians will arise, and save this largest agglomeration of Blacks, the world over.

    Itsee.

  • Nuggets of the week

    We have predicted earlier on these pages that, very soon, sons will give up their fathers for a hefty five percent of recovered loot.

    The one anguish that has continued to torment Nigeria got a decent mention from different quarters this past week. It is our intention to draw attention to a few of them, at least, one positive but most, absolutely unnerving for a country that hopes to ever escape the corruption quagmire. First, on the positive side: a highly distinguished elder statesman, Mallam Alli Ciroma, was quoted as paying tribute to President Muhammadu Buhari, who he reportedly described as a military officer and a Moslem whose religion permits to marry four wives but chose to have only one and equally as a distinguished Nigerian who has occupied very high offices of state but was never accused of abusing his position.:

    Just as you read the above, and you feel elated about such a man being the leader of your country, you are immediately confronted with the brutal reality of what two of Nigeria’s most prodigious men of letters, Professors Itse Sagay and Segun Gbadegesin, have to say about our present; a present marked by an unmatchable, crippling corruption, where mountains of looted money, in their billions, are being ferreted out of all manner of crevices – thanks largely to whistle blowers. We have predicted earlier on these pages that, very soon, sons will give up their fathers for a hefty five percent of recovered loot.

    Declared Professor Sagay: “Corruption is omnipresent in Nigeria. High and low office holders, public and private sectors, the executive, legislative and judicial sectors, immigration, police, the civil service are all involved.  What is extremely disturbing is that peoples’ attitude to corruption has hardened. There is no longer any fear of consequences’. Going on, he said Nigeria has become overwhelmed by an epidemic of kleptomania; asking if we have a collective psychiatric problem. What, he further asks, would make a person steal what he could not spend in 10 lives while exposing the rest of society to misery, hunger, poverty, wretchedness, even death. Professor Gbadegesin was no less hard hitting in his description of what he called an outright Nigerian malady. According to him, something obviously ails this country or, he asks: “how do you go round the world, no matter who you are, with your heads high up given the common knowledge concerning the troubled state of your home land?” He asserts, assuredly, that God has actually turned his back on Nigeria until we come back to our senses.

    What an oddity; what manner of men/women are Nigerians that wherever they are on terra firma, they are, first and foremost, associated, rightly or wrongly,  with corruption, corruption, corruption? Where on earth were we told that money is spent in heaven or who has ever been buried with his millions? What is eating us up that neither shame nor fear of jail can tame again? What manner of people are we and why are we all so much beyond shame? What we have seen severally, with the single exception of President Muhammadu Buhari, is that the higher we are, the more the opportunities at our behest to do good, the more unashamedly corrupt we have all become. To quote Professor Sagay again on how even judges work against the anti corruption war: “In spite of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act providing that ruling on preliminary injunctions shall be made at the time of delivery of judgment, some judges are still granting adjournments running into months, and worse still, will adjourn their cases to give a ruling on a preliminary objection instead of giving the ruling at the same time of the judgment on the substantive matter concluding that the outcome of all this is that over 100 high profile cases are not going anywhere”. Obviously, DSS has every cause to carry on with those sting operations.  And concerning Customs which Nigerians  had believed a man with the reputation and integrity of Col Alli – for which reason he was appointed from outside the service – would tame their long throat, pre computer age accessories for corruption like their long and short tables are still  alive and kicking, facilitating endless  bribery all the way.

    If there was anything particularly galling during the week, and which must be brought promptly to the attention of the Acting President, it is the following story of how unbelievable scams are ongoing at the Central Bank. I read the lame attempt by its spokesperson, Isaac Okoroafor, to explain it off, but to be taken seriously, the apex bank must do much more. .

    From the wall of  citizen Maigari Sani Auwal, I culled this brief edited  snippet so that the appropriate agencies of state will not only take action but report, copiously, to poor Nigerians who have been at the receiving end  of what Professor Soludo calls, not recession, but compression.

    1 March at 00:57 · Kano ·

    BREAKING:

    Naira Gains; Why is DSS Still Detaining Mr. Gbadamosi who exposed The Govt Forex Fraud., Mr. Babatunde Gbadamosi, a Lagos Businessman and former governorship candidate, who exposed in details the monumental organized foreign currency fraud by the Buhari government and officials of CBN was arrested and still detained by the Department of Security Services (DSS) since February 22, 2017.

    In a social media video which went viral, Mr. Gbadamosi frowned at the shabby practices where those that genuinely need foreign currencies for Business are not provided with any, while the President’s allies and the cronies of CBN big-wigs are receiving them at ridiculous low rates of N3/$1.

    Every effort to secure Mr. Gbadamosi’s release has proved abortive. The DSS has ensured that no one visits or sees the incarcerated voice of the Nigerian opposition in the secret detention centre he was dumped six days ago and sources close to Hope For Nigeria within the secret police headquarters in Abuja are claiming that Gbadamosi was accused of blackmailing the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Government by releasing those classified information about forex sales.

    Re-echoing the concern of Nigerians including that of the former CBN governor and the Emir of Kano, Sanusi Lamido who revealed the operation of over 20 different foreign exchange rates by the CBN and some Nigerians making billions of Naira daily from their gardens trading dollar they bought at an alarming low rates, Mr Gbadamosi demanded that these sharp practices should stop in other for the country to survive the self-induced recession.

    Gbadamosi quoting various media sources in the Video, stated that the CBN was selling forex to some close allies of President Muhammadu Buhari for as low as N3 to $1 through what is called Bills of Collection. People were given dollars with cold claims that their Form M was filled and submitted like 35 years ago but forex was not released. They only has to claim that they made their importation in 1985 but forex was not released to them despite submitting duly completed Form M.

    With all documents perfected, the forex will then be released at the prevailing rate in 1985. They will get $3 million at N5/ $1 and selling to end users at say N480/ $1. The said customer will be making about N1.425billion in one transaction.

    He listed transactions by some individuals that got $4,327 at the rate of N23.34 to $1 through “credit card payment” for “invisible” purpose and under “invisible sector”. A bank also got $3,589.11 at the rate of N3.19 to $1 also for “invisible” purposes and under “invisible” sector. There was a transaction involving sale of $66.72 at the rate of N0.62 to $1. There was also a sale of $5.56 to a company at the rate of N0.61 also for “invisible” purposes. A particular transaction also involved the sale of $570.8 at the rate N3.17.

    In contrast, there was a company, who purchased $1,462,480.83 at the rate of N425 to $1. The document shows that individuals and companies got foreign exchange for purposes ranging from importation, PTA, school fees, “invisible”, family maintenance allowances, mortgage payments and medical travel among others…”

    If the executive has something to hide, and has therefore brought in the DSS, the legislature, working through its respective Banking Committees, should  please come to the aid of  poor Nigerians, expose this scam and save Buhari’s entire anti corruption war.

  • Memo to South West governors on economic integration – Chief Dele Falegan

    Memo to South West governors on economic integration – Chief Dele Falegan

    The first meeting of Southwest governors held in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, gave Chief Falegan an impetus I have not seen him display in my over half a century close relationship with him.

    As I have had cause to say once or twice on these pages, I speak with Chief Dele Falegan every day of the week. Unlike before, I now make the calls as early as 7 am lest he calls. Chief Deji Fasuan’s calls, fewer though, come much earlier than 7 am. My prayer for these Ekiti icons is that the good Lord will continue to preserve them in good health. Amen. They are archetypical of many elderly Ekiti who love Nigeria like they love their Ekiti – even though they have had to endure tremendous psychological pains, arising from the punishing inability of both Nigeria and Ekiti to attain to the lofty heights they believed were readily available to the two entities given their natural endowments. They had both attended the prestigious Christ’s School, Ado-Ekiti, a privilege the columnist proudly shares with them and were in a pole position, long before independence, to see the huge possibilities awaiting Nigeria.  That their hopes for country and motherland fatally miscarried must be chalked up to our rapacious politicians and an equally gluttonous army of ‘anything goes’.

    It should, therefore, be no surprise, to say that I have seen both men agonise severally over many facets of the Nigerian nation, many times expressing their views in full length newspaper articles or in Letters to the Editor. The first meeting of Southwest governors held in Ibadan, the Oyo State capital, gave Chief Falegan an impetus I have not seen him display in my over half a century close relationship with him. He has, literally, never stopped talking about how unfairly treated in infrastructural development the Southwest had been from one Nigerian federal government to another. In confirmation of this, I remember that at the AGBAJO YORUBA a few years ago, under the leadership of Lt. General Ipoola Akinrinade, we had to set up a 3-man rapid response group to protest the constant neglect of the Southwest when, at the end of every of Obasanjo’s executive council meetings, with Muktar Shagari as Water Resources Minister, huge irrigation projects were being announced in favour of the North with none to these parts.

    I digress.

    For Chief Falegan, the next meeting of the governors’ forum scheduled for Ado-Ekiti was divine. I promptly linked him up with Biodun Famakinwa, the indefatigable Executive Secretary of DAWN.

    Out of respect to the Southwest Governors’ Forum, I shall refrain from going into the nitty gritty of Chef’s memo. Instead, and as a pointer to his thoughts on the subject matter, I reproduce below my article of 30 November, 2011.

    IN PURSUIT OF REGIONAL INTEGRATION IN NIGERIA

    It is for me a great pleasure to present below, the views of Chief Dele Falegan,0a trained Economist and banker, former Director of Research at the Central Bank of Nigeria, and the pioneer Managing Director of the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria, as he writes on how Economic Integration can see our country out of its current economic morass.

    Wrote Chief Falegan: “As a former banker, Femi Orebe’s paper on South-West Regional Integration at the recent EKITI ECONOMIC SUMMIT (14th – 15th October 2011), provided0 for me, an opportunity to dilate further on how such proposals, both 0within 0and , even across geo-political zones, can hasten the much-talked about economic take-off of the0country. It is therefore my view that we have to rapidly put in place, a project along the ROAD MAP already outlined in the DAWN document.

    One specific proposal/project I have in mind is aimed at resolving the problem of neglected federal roads in0Ondo, Ekiti, Osun and0Kwara State in the Northern axis with the0South-West0serving as the fulcrum.

    I do not think that the neglect of federal roads in this part of the country is deliberate. But the crying lack of attention relative to other parts of the country in this respect0cannot but give room for concern. The daily carnage and loss of lives on these roads cannot but raise eyebrows, especially the inability to drive safely along Ondo and Ekiti States where the federal roads linking them have been rendered completely impassable. These include the roads from Ikare in Ondo State and Ado-Ekiti, the Ekiti State capital;0 the one 0between Ikere0 and Akure, the Ondo State capital, which has 0become totally impassable, all collectively impacting negatively on the economy of these states. It is unthinkable that as you read this, there is no dedicated Lagos-Abuja highway in spite of all the huge fortune that fell on our laps during the Obasanjo years.

    I concede that apart from financial constraints, there is in addition,0a gaping lack of0executive capacity within the federal government, the Federal Ministry of Works and its direct agency in this respect, FERMA,0which makes it impossible for them to cope with the challenges inherent in this massive business of keeping our road network in top shape as one would normally expect. This cannot, however, be an extenuating reason for the humongous level of carnage on these roads as well as the attendant disruption to economic life

    These are the reasons I like to propose that the named states in the South-West and Kwara State should jointly0access the0facilities available at the International Development Association (IDA), which is the soft loan arm of the World Bank to0 fund the0reconstruction0of all the0federal roads0 in the0 zone/s.0 Should the IDA require a guarantee from the federal government, the states should not hesitate to approach the Jonathan-led federal government, for same.

    IDA loans have long term0gestation periods0lasting between 40 to 50 years; with a grace period of 10 years during which there is no repayment, and with interest charges at less than 1%. This means there will be no repayment burden for the present generation, and the future, paying generation would have benefitted immensely from increased economic activities to be generated there from.0Repayment will therefore be0almost painless. It is worthy0of note too that0IDA facilities have0no hold on the borrowers’ existing resources which can thus be devoted to0other pressing developmental needs.

    The roads within the proposed co-operating states0 pass and cut the states vertically and diagonally from (a) Akure in Ondo State, 0Ado-Ekiti in Ekiti State to Omuaran in Kwara State: (b) Ikare in Ondo State to Ado-Ekiti 0to Ilesha in Osun State: (c) Iyamoye in Kwara 0to Ikole in Ekiti State via Ogotun-Ekiti 0to Ikeji 0in Osun State.

    It is suggested that the roads should be dual carriage. They will be about the only major federal project in this part of the country since independence. The recent inspection of federal roads (and indeed all federal projects) in this part of the country confirms the need for a concerted effort by these states in making this joint effort0 and for a federal government, eager to join the group of the most developed 20 economies barely nine years from now, to eagerly0lend 0its support.

    A committee of experts on infrastructure procurement made up of members from all the 0states can be set up immediately to work out details. This should be far and beyond politics and partisan politics must not be allowed to kill it off. Details should include (a) the project coverage showing the number of0kilometres from each state which will determine the financial0commitment of each state (b) the total financial package which will determine the proportion of repayment by each state as at future repayment schedule (c) debt burden sharing and typology of debt per state.

    Fortunately, these states, individually or collectively, have very low current debt burden and are under-borrowed whether from the point of view of external or domestic debt or both.0To make0each state a major beneficiary of this scheme is to maximally improve overall economic activities in the country. As at today, only about 10 states are benefiting from IDA facilities in Nigeria. Japan has identical facility and repayment terms as the IDA credit and it is a great pity that Nigeria is not maximally utilising0IDA to massively build up its infrastructure stock.

    This proposal, if accepted, will add value to the overall development and growth of the entire country. The example 0can 0be replicated in other zones of the country so as to cut down on the carnage and 0the unnecessary loss of the lives of the most active and productive0segment of our population just as it will generate massive employment opportunities for our horde of unemployed youth and, without a doubt, enhance security of persons and property.”

  • Ekiti: Yes, thunder can strike twice

    The question to ask, therefore, is why such persons would like to deliberately imperil the chances of the party in an important election like this. 

    O yes, PDP can win in Ekiti again, and heavens will not fall. This, however, will not be because of anything Governor Ayo Fayose, the quintessential, practical Nigerian politician, does, or does not do, but principally because of the complete disharmony that now envelopes the Ekiti chapter of the APC with its current 26 but still growing, number of wannabe governors. Let me quickly say, though, that this piece does not contemplate a serious look at the forthcoming governorship election. That will come sooner than later, God willing. Rather it should be seen as an essential input into what should reckon as the  unavoidable efforts to properly reposition the party ahead of the election which will obviously not be a walkover, incumbency at the federal level, or not. It therefore seeks to encourage true lovers of the party to ensure that a reasonable synergy emerges within the party ahead the 2018 election. There is a massive, and urgent need to immediately dissuade many of those indicating interest in contesting the election.  It is a mad house as it presently stands. The APC leadership must therefore move like it is being pursued as the Ondo  crisis which considerably fissured the party must not be allowed to repeat itself in Ekiti. It is sincerely hoped that APC is a serious enough party to know that this huge number is no indication of party popularity. Rather it demonstrates a putrefying self interest, simplicita. Many of them will not be bothered, whatever happened to the APC, as I shall try to show.

    Ordinarily, the party should not have been in the current mess in Ekiti but for a totally unexpected misunderstanding which erupted shortly after the 2014 governorship election but which, happily,  appears to have since run its course. Had that not happened, the party should, by now, be at its strongest ever, in the state.

    Not unexpectedly, therefore, party activities was in the doldrums for a long time with none of the former state governors – Adebayo, Oni and Fayemi (unwilling to upset the apple cart) – showing up to champion a permanent détente. This situation continued until a measure of anxiety led some respected elders like former governor Bamidele Olumilua to step in to forge a rapprochement which was well received by the highly traumatised party members and supporters.

    But gubernatorial ambitions would appear to have returned matters to the status quo ante bellum.

    While most of these contestants are men of honour, in Ekiti, we sure know ourselves. Our people will, therefore, have no difficulty identifying those who are mere place holders, just as they know the jokers among them who are hardly of any significance back in their home towns. They equally know those whose primary motive is to use the occasion to make money in form of contributions from friends.  The question to ask, therefore, is why such persons would like to deliberately imperil the chances of the party in an important election like this.

    It is called enlightened self interest.

    To properly validate the huge joke going on in Ekiti APC right now, I present below, a cast which would give most Ekiti people a belly laugh. They are those whose names have been paraded as contestants on the platform of the APC, without a rebuttal. Any questions should be directed at the Ekiti Whatsapp groups where this has been running, uncontested, for quite a while.

    Hon. Olufemi Bamisile

    1. Dr. Adebayo Orire
    2. Hon. Bimbo Daramola
    3. Hon. Bamidele Faparusi
    4. Senator Gbenga Aluko
    5. Senator Babafemi Ojudu
    6. Senator Ayo Arise
    7. Hon. Debo Ranti
    8. Hon. Opeyemi Bamidele (MOB)
    9. Otunba Yinka Akerele
    10. Dr. Femi Thomas
    11. Dr. Owolabi S.
    12. Chief Sesan Fatoba
    13. Dr. Oluwole Oluyede
    14. Mr. Yemi Adaramodu
    15. Hon. Funminiyi Afuye
    16. Hon. Bayo Idowu
    17. Otunba Bisi Aloba
    18. Chief Dele Okeya
    19. Mr. Bodunde Adeyanju
    20. Mr. Kayode Adaramodu
    21. Engr. Segun Oni
    22. Captain Sunday Adebomi
    23. Mr. Bayo Babalotin
    24. Mr. Muyiwa Olumilua
    25. Mr. Kola Alabi
    26. Mr. Kola Adu
    27. Mr Kole Ajayi
    28. Hon. Diran Adesua
    29. Mr. Kayode Oladipupo
    30. Mr. Ishola Fapounda
    31. Mr. Olajide Akinyemi Junior

    One of Ekiti’s most poignant philosophical sayings is: Aan tan ra oni je, I ri re meaning you can never profit from deceiving yourself. It is analogous to the farmer who planted 200 heaps of yam but claims he has a thousand heaps. There is no reason, whatever, to think that our people will be deceived, this time around. They know each of these men like their palms.

    I decided to put out this list for two main reasons. One, that family members – parents, wives and children, would critically examine their interested family member, and since two heads are better than one, properly counsel him as to its reasonableness, or otherwise. At a recent social outing in Lagos, I ran into a friend, who contested as the governorship candidate of a major party in the state, and, indeed, performed fairly well, but never mentioned a word of his intention to his wife until he had spent over N250 Million. Because these things do happen, relations on seeing their names here should be able to give proper advice. This is a humongous contest you do not get into in a flight of fancy. An adjunct to this is that his town’s people should also have a role to play lest an unserious contestant jeopardises their chance of striking an agreement with a more viable candidate.

    The more important reason, however, is to draw the attention of the party leadership to what could very well be far worse than the Ondo conundrum. Writing to me from London on the matter only this past week, Banji Ogungbemi, former Managing Director of the Republic of Benin National Oil Corporation, wrote: “Egbon, this motley crowd brought memories of Lagos just before BAT chose RAF. I am still amazed at how the “me-too” succession chaos was managed without any collateral damage to the Lagos team. However, because of our unique Ekiti characteristic of obduracy, the APC risks acrimony and fragmentation that may give the incumbent governor a chance of installing his man”.

    This exactly is why APC should allow history be its guide. Many of  those indicating interest  are decampees from the PDP. While it is a truism that politics is a game of numbers, it must not escape the party leadership that back in 2007, about 12 members of the AD, inclusive of some of these contestants, left the party to join the PDP directly after the primary elections which they lost. Many of them rose to prominence in the PDP, a party that is now aggressively, and feverishly, going round the country, wooing its aggrieved members. In this, not even men of timber and calibre like former Vice Presidents, Alex Ekwueme , and Atiku Abubakar or Senate President Bukola Saraki, are spared the renewed onslaught. APC should therefore be extremely careful as the PDP will eagerly be awaiting their members defeated at the APC primary. Also, it must be understood that Ekiti politicians are uniquely obdurate. Towards the 2011 elections, I served as a member of the national Screening Committee of the A C N, for Ekiti. Of all the constituencies, it was only in Gboyin where Dr Wale Omirin, later Speaker, comes from, that had a consensual arrangement. Everywhere else in Ekiti, because of inability to agree on anything, virtually all towns presented contestants for every elective position, a times, 2 or 3 from the same town for the same position. The party must therefore not expect any gentlemanly agreement to reduce the number.

    As a first step, before putting in place an absolutely transparent primary election process, the outcome of which will enjoy sustainable acceptance by most contestants unlike what happened in Ondo State, I will like to advise that the party enpanels a committee of solely, non-Ekiti, members to weed the field.

    The committee must call for a comprehensive bio-data of every contestant, which a committee of the state chapter must forensically ascertain with the assistance of the security agencies before they are remitted to the national committee. Given the absolutely unwieldy field, APC must improve on the PDP requirement of a minimum of two years period of unbroken membership, or a waiver, to qualify to contest elections. This must be increased to a minimum of 36 calendar months as it is far less painful to disqualify when an intending contestant has not spent much money or sold property, than to want to propitiate him after losing at the primaries.

  • Once upon a misdirected protest

    Once upon a misdirected protest

    They should also touch NDDC where over a billion naira projects were duplicated.

    “Do we have a conscience at all in this country? President Goodluck Jonathan met more than $50b in foreign reserve, result of his predecessors’ savings when oil prices were not half as robust as during his administration when it sold for over $100 per barrel with oil production capacity in excess of 2m barrels per day. Rather than save, he depleted our foreign reserves and resorted to loans to pay even salaries. Expenditure on infrastructure dropped, forcing a collapse of productivity resulting in job losses, especially in the organised private sector. Many PDP rogues, after looting CBN vaults, hauling dollars in Ghana Must Go bags, are today facing trial. Yet  some shameless  Nigerians, who say we must not  as much as recall these  heists, are railing at about the only Nigerian alive, who can make the looters earn their  due comeuppance.

    Not done, they now sponsor attacks on pipelines to disrupt crude exportation as well as hinder gas production to power electricity supply. They shared arms’ money meant to fight Boko Haram, forcing Buhari to spend afresh, in billions, in a recession to fight Boko Haram rather than spend such money on job creation, infrastructural development as well as further widen his government’s huge welfare programme. These predators shared pensioners’ funds, rendering weary, elderly Nigerians unhappy and dying in abject conditions. Not forgetting how they stole billions of dollars in oil subsidy fraud. Absolutely  unashamed, they are now edging the young, and not so young,  victims of their unmitigated  depravity into  a protest that was ill thought through; regurgitating problems known to even a primary school pupil without  the minutest suggestion as to their solution”  – Wole Olujobi, writing, mutatis mutandis, on Ekitipanupo.

    Giving judgment in a suit filed by Femi Falana SAN, on behalf of the defunct All Nigeria  Peoples’ Party (ANPP) challenging the constitutional validity of a police permit for rallies  in Nigeria, the Appeal Court, in a majority decision, observed “that police permit has outlived its usefulness and declared it null and void, and of no consequence”. With such lofty court pronouncements in place, it was totally disingenuous of the Nigeria Police to have attempted to disallow the recent   #ISTANDWITHNIGERIA protest against the Buhari administration. Essentially, the protest, tagged ‘Enough is Enough’  was against  what the organisers described  as the current economic hardship being experienced by the Nigerian masses  as a result of the harsh economic policies of  the Buhari government which, they claim, have resulted in  a massive hunger in the country, amongst other sufferings.

    Without a scintilla of doubt, it is obvious there is every need in today’s Nigeria for a peoples’ protest, not even for only one day but for days, even weeks on end as we see in other countries. Unfortunately, this particular protest was terribly misdirected.  I ascribe that error to  the fact that the whole idea  had originated from  a fun loving gentleman who, in an  Instagram  jive, suggested the idea of a protest to his huge followers who are, of course,  mostly impressionable young persons,  ready, at all times, to follow an  icon like the music maestro. Not  surprisingly, that obviously denied the effort the much needed intellectual back grounding that a mammoth, national protest like that  should have been imbued with. And this is certainly not meant as a slur on the wave-making music cognoscente who has held his own nationally and internationally for years.

    To properly situate this charge, permit me to quote from a critique of the protest by Pastor Tope Popoola who erected the following immutable platforms on which a meaningful protest must be anchored. Wrote Tope: “To be effective, protests must carry a message, a rallying cry; a raison detre to sustain its essence and around which people can gather, damn consequences and march.  Also, effective protests do not merely highlight problems, regurgitating them, since they are already well known in the society at large”.  Unfortunately, that was precisely what the planners of the anti-Buhari protest did. Next time they are at it, individuals like Professor Chidi Odinkalu should not just immerse themselves into it midway, but join at the planning stages and impregnate the effort with some sense. Both the SNG/OCCUPY NIGERIA protests of 2012 and the one by the Nigeria Labour Congress, staged later the same week, passed these tests admirably. While the latter went with a demand charter consisting of 18 items to the presidency, planners of the 2012 protests which were aimed at a renunciation of subsidy removal by the Jonathan government did not stop at merely demanding that subsidy remained. Rather, day in day out, they churned out impeccable statistics which put the lie to the Jonathan government’s claims. They proffered suggestions as to the way forward many of which later formed the basis of the committees which government later set up. It was as a result of this diligent, and theoretically solid, organisation of the protest that Nigerians would later  come to know that  the huge oil subsidy scam was perpetrated by PDP  top guns; amongst them, sons of  two former PDP  Chairmen  who merely leveraged on their father’s position  to steal  billions of naira  in an oil subsidy scam,  claiming  that  ships which  never visited the  West African coast, delivered  thousands of tonnes of  fuel in Lagos, Nigeria. The’ enough is enough’ crowd, well meaning though they are, did no such thing. Nowhere in all their homily, and bombast, did you hear them articulate a single solution to the myriad of problems they merely rehearsed, paving Abuja and Lagos streets.

    But the protest could still have been passable if those were the only problems with it.  It’s a shame that a protest which very easily reminded one of the 1905 leaderless revolution in Russia – which, of course, failed miserably – had its only achievement – albeit a negative one –   in its blaming the victim; exuberantly censoring a President Muhammadu Buhari who has done nothing besides fighting the ugly legacies, the Augean stable the Jonathan administration inflicted on him at his inauguration.  Whether with regards to the country’s internal security or the intractable economic problems which birthed the punishing recession, President Buhari has done everything to turn things around even if our ever cynical, unappreciative opposition politicians and the millions they lead by the nose together with the self-declared freedom fighters, will choose to live in denial, claiming that the ancien regime was not the cause of our current problems.

     Even while I accept that the buck should stop at the president’s desk, were the protest  planners properly attuned, there were some obvious targets they could have spent their , no doubt, humongous energies  to picket, for far better results.

    I submit, below, a brief checklist of such:

    The domain of former President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Happily, nobody has traced any loot to Dr Jonathan. However, that is not the case with his wife, the former First Lady, Mrs. Patience Jonathan. By sending a contingent to Otueke to demand that the former First Lady willingly return all the monies EFFC claims she is sitting on, and ask that those eye-popping real estates and hotels be turned over to Nigeria, would have been  much more  profitable. There is no way Mrs. Jonathan could have owned those properties even if she served as permanent secretary for nine lives.

    MRS DEZIANI MADUEKWE

    Whether in Nigeria, the UK or in hospital anywhere, the planners ought to have sent another contingent to this woman. That team, in turn, could have come back with Nigeria billions of dollars richer. And talking about the NNPC, our dedicated protesters should have equally touched the Kaduna home of   Mr.  Andrew Yakubu ,former GMD NNPC, where it is reported the EFCC  had a shock find of  $9.2 Million and £74,000 cash. Using the rates supplied me by Uba Magani, my ever reliable currency dealer, I crashed my calculator trying to let you have the naira equivalent. Our protesters should have hauled these to the nearest CBN branch.

    The National Assembly.

    With the judges’ raid in mind, they won’t find much cash here. But they could have forced these legislators to drop their entire bank details. Or make them sell those luxury wonder on wheels. After all, the recently sacked Senate leader told Nigerians his offence was insisting that the Senate budget be made open, even to senators.

    NIGER DELTA STATE HOUSES

    There is more where that mountain heap of alleged Governor Wike’s cash to INEC people came from. So they should go grab billions. They should also touch NDDC where over a billion naira projects were duplicated.

    Well planned protests like this will make China loans unnecessary, and our recession, history.

  • Nigerians: To pray or not and the unassailable need for urgent restructuring

    But prayer alone cannot, and will, certainly, not save Nigeria.

    What you will read in this piece is not apocryphal. But since Nigeria has become the prayer capital of the world, it looks rather insidious to even begin to ask the question as to whether we should pray, or not. We must, however, bear in mind the teachings of Apostle Paul concerning faith: In James 2:14-26, he says: 14 ”What does it profit, my brethren, if someone says he has faith but does not have works? Can faith save him? 15 If a brother or sister is naked and destitute of daily food, 16 and one of you says to them, “Depart in peace, be warmed and filled,” but you do not give them the things which are needed for the body, what does it profit? 17 Thus also faith by itself, if it does not have works, is dead”. And our Lord, Jesus Christ himself gave us the strongest link between faith and prayer when, in Matthew 21:21-22, he said: “Truly I say unto you, if you have faith, and do not doubt, you shall not only do what was done to the fig tree, but even if you say to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ it shall happen. (22) And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive.”

    If we see the essence of work to prayers according to Apostle Paul above, then consider the following which has circulated serially on the interne but which I will not ascribe to who it is alleged authored it because I did not see the name mentioned in my source:

    “After independence, in order to build a great nation, each country went to work. But in Nigeria, after independence, our people went to pray and fast.

    So, while we were praying, Malaysia came here and took our palm seedlings and built a great factory of it.

    While we were praying, Singapore went into investment in technology.

    While we were praying, India went into ICT.

    While we were praying, China went to massive industrialisation.

    While we were praying, UAE went into massive infra structural development.

    While we were binding and casting Lucifer, Japan went into technological development.

    While we were speaking in tongues, Denmark went into education of her citizens.

    While we were mounting big speakers in our places of worship, USA was mounting man on the moon.

    After our prayers, God, being a wise God, decided to reward us according to our labour.

    Since those that went into industrialisation, technology, infra structural development, ICT, education etc have been rewarded accordingly. It’s only wise God rewards us with our efforts in prayers.

    That’s why today, Nigerian pastors are competing in building the biggest churches. That’s why there are more prayer houses and worship places than hospitals and schools. That’s why people rush to prayer houses for medical and business solutions instead of hospitals.

    That’s why we don’t do business feasibility before jumping into it since we are going to back it up with prayers. And when it collapses, we blame the devil.

    That’s why it’s a sin to say anything negative about Pastors and Imams.

    That’s why our Pastors don’t consider the opinion of engineers while building and blame the devil when the building collapses.

    That’s why faith in God replaces building pillars and when it collapses we blame it on Lucifer.

    That’s why our Pastors are making sure they plant church branches instead of schools on every street in Nigeria.

    That’s why we always wait for God to do for us that which ability would’ve accomplished.

    That’s why we want our teachers to labour on earth and go to heaven for their rewards.

    Nigeria is a prayer-loving, God-fearing, nation. Religion has taken the place of technology, infrastructure, education etc.

    When travelling, we ignore all the necessary road requirements, servicing of our vehicles and pray. And, once we pray, we can put half serviceable vehicles on the road and blame our step mothers or mothers-in-law if anything goes wrong.

    That’s why there are more people dying on our roads than wild animals in the forest.”

    When you juxtapose the above with our geo-political realities, it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to see prayer as about the only thing holding, not just the country, but the individuals together in our totally blighted country today.  As I wrote on this page last Sunday, President Buhari, who many wrongly hold responsible for the state of the nation, was gifted an Augean stable not even Hercules could have completely cleaned up in two terms of four years each. It is that humongous.  As I have said time and time again, it will be extremely difficult to match the depravity of PDP’s 16 years’ stranglehold on Nigeria with any in modern history. I am a historian and should know. What debauchery chieftains of that party could not effect by themselves, we saw children of two of their past Chairmen do, fleecing Nigerians of billions of naira in the oil subsidy scam. And that is not counting those who were paying billions, in cash, buying houses in Abuja or those turning money for equipping the army into eye-popping real estates in Abuja. I have asked those who think they have a punching bag in Buhari to do only a little introspection to see how wrong they are. And this is nothing like exculpating the president from blame, the most egregious of which is surrounding himself with an Hallelujah chorus in the name of a kitchen cabinet complete with a cast of shadowy Second Republic advisers who, being mainly Fulanis, must have wrongly advised his mode of appointments and the extremely poor, if not deliberately, unfair handling of both the ongoing herdsmen’s murderous exploits, and the carnage in Southern Kaduna. All these three have called to question President Buhari’s fair mindedness but I know only too well that he did not cause the ravaging hunger in the land; did not crash oil prices nor did he rev up the naira exchange value to the dollar which is a direct consequence of the former.  Those who carried truck loads of dollars to Yoruba palaces during the last presidential election must certainly carry that inescapable cross and burden of history.

    I digress.

    Nigerians cannot, and, certainly, must not cease praying or they are lost. Let us see how Emeritus Professor Jide Osuntokun (UP SCHOOL!) captured Nigeria’s present day realities in his column  in The Nation of Thursday, February 02, 2017 : “Some three or four years ago, a friend and colleague of mine from Bauchi State told me he was going on a flying visit to Azare. Knowing the terrain, I told him to go to Jos and then Bauchi and then to Azare. He laughed and said that it would be suicidal of him to take the road to Jos because on seeing him, a Fulani man, the local people would kill him. Because of this, he said he would drive to Kaduna then Kano and from there to Bauchi. This was some kind of Israelite journey. To be sincere, I did not know things were this bad. Now even driving from Abuja, the seat of the federal government, to Kaduna has become problematic because I am told the road is infested by all kinds of highway robbers and ethnic militants. The picture is not good at all. The north-east is not safe because of Boko Haram. The Delta is unsafe because of Niger Delta militants. Cattle rustlers are making the north-west problematic, the Biafra militants are challenging government’s hold on the south-east. The Fulani herders are making life difficult in the north-central zone. It is only a matter of time for peace to disappear in the south-west. The area is now under threat of Ijaw militants from the Niger Delta and herdsmen from the north. The picture of countrywide insecurity is complete. In this kind of environment, we should forget about foreign investment without which the problem of unemployment will become more acute’.

    But prayer alone cannot, and will, certainly, not save Nigeria.

    Therefore, in spite of the debilitating socio-economic problems the president is daily grappling with, he must, if he truly loves this country, immediately set up a panel of very responsible, patriotic and capable Nigerians who would pull together the reports and recommendations of all past National Conferences and, from them, distil recommendations that will give this country a new lease of life.

    Their recommendations should then go to a referendum but without the slightest input from this National Assembly; not even as little as a coma.

    The bell is tolling. Nigeria’s situation is dire, and extremely precarious. The president must not wait for it to unravel by itself.

  • Building a successor-generation: Reflections on values and knowledge in nation building

    Building a successor-generation: Reflections on values and knowledge in nation building

    He therefore concluded this segment by saying that knowledge alone, is not enough nor is character, by itself, sufficient. 

    “In its classical usage, the term ‘elite’ refers to the enlightened segment of society. The ‘terms’ elite and enlightened share the same etymological origins. Thus, elitism is actually defined by the reference for knowledge, the acuity of intellect and the depth of reason. The elite are the enlightened class, that segment of society that devotes themselves to the pursuit of knowledge and wisdom. It only then follows that any society’s elite should by default be the society’s problem solvers” – Dr Kayode Fayemi, CON

    Nigeria’s Minister of Mines and steel development, Dr Kayode Fayemi, was back at his well travelled lecture circuit this past week as he delivered the convocation lecture at the 2017 convocation ceremonies of his Alma Mata, the University of Lagos. Preceding  the lecture proper , the distinguished chairman of the occasion, Major- Gen Ike Omar Sanda Nwachukwu (Rtd), a former Nigerian  minister of Foreign Affairs, had wetted the appetite of the overflowing audience at the University auditorium, freshly named after one of the most iconic Vice Chancellors  of the  first generation university, the legendary historian , Prof J F Ajayi, with an absolutely dispassionate analysis of the Nigerian conundrum, concluding  that rather than the benumbing recycling  of  our old, if not  jaded  politicians,  the younger generation  should be given a chance since we cannot be doing the same thing over and over and expect to have a different result. He gave examples of our First Republic leaders many of who were in their 20’s and 30’s when they assumed national responsibilities. Much as I agree with his thesis, let me quickly posit that Nigeria, in my view, absolutely  needs two solid terms of Muhammadu Buhari, the incumbent Head of state,  to enable him tame our corrosive corruption bug bear, as well as put Nigeria back on a solid moral and ethical footing from where  our jet age young men and women can then launch it  into an economic and industrial super power because, all told, Buhari stands  shoulder high, over and above, any other  Nigerian today, in the terms  of  the requisite integrity  for that humongous assignment. He has serially demonstrated his incomparable integrity in public office   and nobody in his /her right frame of mind can even begin to question that. As you read this, persons in comparable offices with him, both before and after him, are now holed up in hilltop palaces. It must be said, in addition, and without any fear of contradiction, that all the demons currently tearing at Nigeria’s innards, are harvests from the better forgotten duo of military era rapacity and PDP’s 16- year stranglehold over the country – years of rotten depravity.

    Dr Fayemi’s lecture can be subdivided into three segments namely: the place of the university, the role of government in firmly positioning higher education and the responsibilities devolving on the graduating students. It can be inferred from his lecture that inherent in the university’s .primary functions of teaching and research is, as a centre of knowledge production, impacting positively on the country’s human capital stock by grooming the next generation of leaders as well as its citizens. In his words: “implicit in this is the notion that theatres of higher learning are places where scholars and students reflect upon the peculiar problems of their milieu. Each environment, he said, throws up a host of unique challenges which true scholarship commits to tackling frontally for the betterment of the given society. This is the reason society looks to institutions of higher learning to produce its core of problem solvers, i.e its elite which, unfortunately in our country is derisively categorized as  a group of ‘capitalist fat cats, or  a class of oppressive rich. In my opinion, this obtuse categorisation will matter nothing as long as they are patriotic and true to their calling. After all, conscience is an open wound and only the truth can heal it.

    Flowing from that expectation from our institutions universities, the lecturer had no problems appropriately situating the role of government in ensuring that our tertiary institutions are provided with the wherewithal to accomplish their mandate. In what he describes as Retooling the University for National Development, Dr Fayemi said: “Universities, like the people within them, must embrace change, re-imagine possibilities, and revitalize continuously (Faust, 2012).  In contemplating the challenges of leadership and development in Nigeria therefore, we have to critically reappraise our educational institutions and make necessary interventions to ensure they not only have adequate funding, world class physical structures, and  functional teaching equipment, but also the right social environment that supports the education of the total man. He  went further to affirm  these self evident postulations by quoting  the Avatar, Chief Obafemi Awolowo as follows: “whether we are conscious of or acknowledge it or not, the fact remains stubborn and indestructible that poverty, disease, social unrest, instability, and all kinds of international conflicts have their origins in the minds of men … It is only when minds of men have been properly and rigorously cultivated and garnished, that they can be safely entrusted with public affairs with a certainty and the assuredness that they will make the best of their unique opportunity and assignment”- (Awolowo,1967).

    In addition therefore, the Federal Government must just not be interested in daily approving  new higher institutions based mostly on man know man but with little or no  regard, for their sustainability, fully equipped  with the necessary infrastructural facilities and, above all, lecturers of verifiable capabilities to meaningfully instruct the half baked graduates of our primary school system. Those familiar with goings on in our universities today, in spite of the advertised thousands of  those graduating with  first class, will know that below these brilliant ones, are more thousands of those making hay with third class and mere pass degrees; fellows whose ability to advance whether at work or in further studies is in great doubt.

    As Dr Fayemi rightly put it, year in year out, thousands of young people graduate with many of them merely swelling the ranks of unemployed and unemployable leading to a massive youth unemployment crisis that has calcified over the years with grave socio-economic portents for the future. He questions whether the universities themselves are paying attention by ensuring that the students, while in school, are well equipped to respond to this and other challenges. He therefore concluded this segment by saying that knowledge alone, is not enough nor is character, by itself, sufficient. A fit and proper UNILAG graduate, he said, is one that has successfully straddled the obligations of being found worthy in both character and learning.

    Concluding, he  shared his UNILAG experiences with the young men and women and  provided six key lessons and life skills that the university taught him. As I listened to him, I concluded that not a few must have missed the opportunities he lapped on in his days.  For instance, any of the graduating set who had spent most of his/her time in cultism or other waywardness will certainly have no opportunity of making up for lost time. That notwithstanding, there is still a lot to gain from Dr Fayemi’s experience. We would, because of space constraints, merely itemise them.

    They are:

    1.KNOWLEDGE IS POWER – LEARN HOW TO LEARN

    The centrality of academics to university life is such that your ability to prove that you have learnt what you ought to, in accordance with the curriculum, is the singular criterion for progression from level to level until you graduate.

    1. DISCIPLINE – MASTER YOURSELF

    Know that without discipline, knowledge is useless.

    3 ADAPTABILITY –BE FLEXIBLE AND DYNAMIC

    The university environment is a universe of itself. It offers you the unique opportunity to interact with different people from different parts of the world – people of different cultures, faith etc.

     Learn with, and from them.

    1. TRULY LIVE –FOLLOW YOUR PASSION

    Going to the university is your first time of having total control over your time. Learn early that this comes with corresponding responsibility.

    1. SEIZE THE MOMENT –JUST DO IT

    The university environment imbues you with so much power. If you have applied yourself meritoriously

    You should by now have not only intellectual capacity and ethical awareness but also some degree of experience and a vast network to leverage on for your personal and professional development.

    1. QUIT WHINING –NO ONE OWES YOU ANYTHING

    You must quickly wean yourself off any debilitating entitlement mentality. The earlier you realise that nobody owes you anything the better, and the more prepared you would be to face life challenges.