The Nation Newspaper

Category: Femi Orebe

  • Again as the world sees us in Africa – A learning curve

    I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff.

    A gargantuan pity it is that our politicians, like Africans in general, do not read: the reason it has been said that if you want to hide something from an African, simply put it in a book. Some two months ago, or thereabout, I showcased on these pages, a typical example of how foreigners, mostly whites, make fools of our leaders, and, ipso facto, us. That was in an article I captioned: “Nigeria, No Africa, as the outside world sees us” but which I am sure hardly any of those we call leaders read.  Fortunately, today’s piece is a continuation but it also contains a learning curve for us Africans. The piece, written by a US-based Zambian, says it all.  It is what any patriotic African should describe as a dirge.

     ”They call Africa the lazy man’s purview; the sluggishly slothful and languorous prefecture with its people sleepy, dreamy, torpid, lethargic, and therefore indigent; penniless and poverty-stricken, with no discoveries or inventions to their name. “It’s amazing how you all sit there and watch yourselves die,” the man sitting next to me said. Get up and do something about it”.

    When I first discovered I was going to spend my New Year’s Eve next to him on a non-stop JetBlue flight from Los Angeles to Boston I was angst-ridden. “My name is Walter,” he extended his hand as soon as I settled into my seat. I told him mine with a precautious smile. ”Where are you from?” he asked.

    “Zambia.”

     ”Zambia!” he exclaimed, “Kaunda’s country.”

     ”Yes,” I said, “Now Sata’s.” “But of course,” he responded. “You just elected King Cobra as your president.”

    My face lit up at the mention of Sata’s moniker. Walter smiled, and in those cold eyes I saw an amenable fellow, one of those American highbrows who shuttle between Africa and the U.S.

    “I spent three years in Zambia in the 1980s,” he continued. “I wined and dined with Luke Mwananshiku, Willa Mungomba and many other highly intelligent Zambians.”  ”I was part of the IMF group that came to rip you guys off.” He smirked. “Your government put me in a million dollar mansion overlooking a shanty called Kalingalinga. From my patio I saw it all—the rich and the poor, the ailing, the dead, and the healthy.”

     ”Are you still with the IMF?” I asked.

     ”I have since moved to yet another group with similar intentions. In the next few months my colleagues and I will be in Kenya to hypnotize the Raisi. I work for the broker that has acquired a chunk of your debt.

     We’ll be in Lusaka to offer your president a couple of millions and fly back with a check twenty times greater.”

     ”No, you won’t,” I said. “King Cobra is incorruptible. He is …”

     He was laughing. “Says who? Give me an African president, just one, who has not fallen for the carrot and stick.”

     Quett Masire’s name popped up.

    “Oh, him, well, we never got to him because he turned down the IMF and the World Bank. It was perhaps the smartest thing for him to do.”

      ”This is white man’s country’. “We came here on Mayflower and turned Indian land into a paradise and now the most powerful nation on earth. We discovered the bulb, and built this aircraft to fly us to pleasure resorts like Lake Zambia or Lake Kenya.  ”That’s what we call your countries. You guys are as stagnant as the water in the lake. We come in with our large boats and fish your minerals and your wildlife and leave morsels—crumbs. That’s your staple food, crumbs. That corn-meal you eat, that’s crumbs, the small Tilapia fish you call Kapenta / omena are crumbs. We the Bwanas (whites) take the cat fish. I am the “Bwana” and you are the “mtu”. I get what I want and you get what you deserve, crumbs. That’s what lazy people get—Zambians,  Kenyans  , other Africans, the entire Third World.”

     The smile vanished from my face.

    “I see you are getting pissed off,” Walter said and lowered his voice. “You are thinking this Bwana is a racist.

    Okay. Let’s for a moment put our skin pigmentations, this black and white crap, aside.

     Tell me, my friend, what is the difference between you and me?”

     I said, “There’s no difference.”

     ”Absolutely none,” he exclaimed. “Scientists in the Human Genome Project have proved that. It took them thirteen years to determine the complete sequence of the three billion DNA subunits. After they were all done it was clear that 99.9% nucleotide bases were exactly the same in you and me. We are the same people. All white, Asian, Latino, and black people on this aircraft are the same.”

     I gladly nodded.

     ”And yet I feel superior.”  ”Every white person on this plane feels superior to a black person. The white guy who picks up garbage, the homeless white trash on drugs, feels superior to you no matter his status or education. I can pick up a nincompoop from the New York streets, clean him up, and take him to Lusaka and you all be crowding around him chanting muzungu, muzungu and yet he’s a riffraff.

    Tell me why my angry friend.”

     For a moment I was wordless.

     ”Please don’t blame it on slavery like the African Americans do or colonialism, or some psychological impact or some kind of stigmatisation. And don’t give me the brainwash poppycock. Give me a better answer.”

     I was thinking.

     He continued. “Excuse what I am about to say. Please do not take offense.”

    I felt a slap of blood rush to my head and prepared for the worst.

     ”You my friend flying with me and all your kind are lazy,” he said. “When you rest your head on the pillow you don’t dream big. You and other so-called African intellectuals are damn lazy, each one of you only going for leadership;  just to fill their own stomach and steal from poor. It is you, and not those poor starving people, who is the reason Africa is in such a deplorable state.” Poor and uneducated Africans are the most hardworking people on earth. I saw them in villages toiling away.  I saw women on Kafue Road crushing stones to sell and I wept. I said to myself where are the Zambian intellectuals? And in Kenya l saw women as bricklayers. Where are these intellectuals? Are the Zambian or Kenyans engineers so imperceptive they cannot invent a simple stone crusher, or a simple water filter to purify well water for those poor villagers? Are you telling me that after thirty-seven years  or more of independence your university school of engineering has not produced a scientist or an engineer who can make simple small machines for mass use?

     What is the school there for?”

     I held my breath.

     ”Do you know where I found your intellectuals? They were in bars quaffing. I saw with my own eyes a bunch of alcoholic graduates  calling themselves policy makers. Zambian, Kenyans , other African intellectuals work from eight to five and spend the evening drinking. We don’t. We reserve the evening for brainstorming.”

     He looked me in the eye.

     ”And you flying to Boston and all of you Africans in the Diaspora are just as lazy and apathetic to their country. You don’t care about your country and yet your very own parents, brothers and sisters live there. Many have died or are dying of neglect . They are dying of AIDS because you cannot come up with your own preventive measures. Too much immorality .You are here calling yourselves graduates, researchers and scientists and are fast at articulating your credentials once asked—oh, I have a PhD in this and that so what?

    What next? Handouts from IMF ? Then repay?

     I was deflated.

    “Wake up you all!” he exclaimed, attracting the attention of nearby passengers. “You should be busy lifting ideas, formulae, recipes, and diagrams from American manufacturing factories and sending them to your own factories. All those dissertation papers you compile should be your country’s treasure. Why do you think the Asians are a force to reckon with? They stole our ideas and turned them into their own. Look at Japan, China, India, just look at them.”

     He paused. “The Bwana has spoken,” he said and grinned.

    Dream big; make tractors, cars, and planes, or  forever remain inferior.

  • Southern Kaduna, murderous herds men and their sponsors: Issues in a misbegotten federation

    Apparently, El Rufai, the Fulani prince charming, in a classical demonstration of Aryanism (the master race), cannot bear to see Fulani blood spilled. 

    “”God sent me as His apostle of liberation to this continent to stop it from decadence. “I heard from God and He has proved it beyond measure. Therefore, every occultic root, every political root of this uprising is cursed today!
    “All the northern forces that are sponsoring this uprising and killings, I decree the curse of God upon them.
     ”Lord, if it is your will to break up Nigeria, break it now!” – Bishop Oyedepo on the Southern Kaduna genocide.

    It cannot be funny that the same General Muhammadu Buhari who, as a former Head of state, wearing a long face, leading Arewa top guns which included the likes of General Buba Marwa, Alhaji Aliko Muhammed, Alhaji Abdulrazak and Alhaji Hassan  on 13 October,  2000 to storm the offices of Alhaji Lam Adesina, the Oyo State governor, to protest alleged killings of Fulani herdsmen  in Saki, Oke Ogun, is the same man who, as Nigeria’s incumbent president, looked askance as hundreds of poor Southern Kaduna Christians were being mowed down by an increasingly murderous Fulani herds men. El Rufai, the megalomaniac Kaduna State governor, would not rouse himself to action until it became obvious that the killings were becoming equal opportunity as those who were being slaughtered, and their villages burnt, started to kill the marauders in return. Apparently, El Rufai, the Fulani prince charming, in a classical demonstration of Aryanism (the master race), cannot bear to see Fulani blood spilled. You would not but wonder if this is the same Muhammadu Buhari Nigerians trooped out to vote into office less than two years ago.

    I am no blue-eyed, sentimental or petulant columnist. Rather, I am over 70 years old and,  if at that age I cannot speak truth to power, then my education is not only a bloody waste, my age is worse. For those who think that this country cannot rapidly unravel or, as some like to kid themselves, that its unity is non-negotiable, I have the following contributions to a discussion of the Southern Kaduna crisis by individuals who are ordinarily cool about the Buhari government to ask that they think again. As is my wont, only my contribution will be ascribed.

     I wrote: “Reading through these two stories, the words of Pastor Adeboye, praising Gov Fayose, came poignantly back to me. With the two different approaches to the problem of these murderous people by both the two governments, it goes without saying that Governor Fayose will long remain a hero of Ekiti people. That the president has not spoken on the horrible killings in Southern Kaduna – not even during his last major radio and television address  to the nation – and his equally appalling handling of this problem especially in mostly Christian areas of both the North central and many parts of the southern stares, shows clearly, as I said in a recent article, that President Buhari obviously prefers his Fulani people to other Nigerians even where they were never able to take him to the presidential gloryland he now occupies until he had reached out beyond them to other parts of the country during the 2015 election.

    Incidentally, the gory picture of killings in Southern Kaduna was mailed to me via WhatsApp all the way from America. When you juxtapose that with the graceful Obama farewell address in which he said only ignorance could make any group think that some Americans are more American than others, then you know we are absolutely in the backwoods here in Nigeria.

    While these Fulani herders kill at will, their political leaders are also all out, both at the executive and legislative arms of government, trying to force grazing routes on Nigerians with a view to having Fulani settlements, complete with some of these killers, planted in each part of the country. No wonder, it  has been suggested in very serious quarters that  all these herdsmen’s antics are, indeed, a precursor to some devilish religious scheme and it is getting increasingly difficult not to believe them.

    My candid advice, if the federal government continues to treat non Fulani’s like they are lesser Nigerians, is that those aggrieved victims of the mindless Fulani killings, and governments and citizens of states who hold their freedoms sacrosanct, must take a page from the Fayose book, get their peoples prepared and – here governors as chief protectors of their peoples must pro actively act in their support – and get them ready for whatever is coming. After all, President Buhari has himself said that these killers, assisting their ethnic Fulani compatriots in the killings, are well trained men, armed with superior and sophisticated weapons they brought all the way from the Maghreb as if Nigeria has no government to defend it against these marauders.

    Fayose has shown the way, Nigeria is a federation and state governments must rise up to their responsibility of safeguarding their people. There can be no two ways to it. After all, we die but once”.

    Wrote a seasoned lawyer next:

    “Reading the way Alhaji Lam Adesina and his Security Chiefs dealt with those Fulani supremacists who  today are holding the” kuku ida “ (in power) set me thinking , made me proud and shed a tear at the same time. Nigeria was a country not too long ago; there were leaders who knew their briefs, there were Security Chiefs who manned their duty posts. It now appears that the carrying of begging bowls, monthly, to Abuja has reduced men to children.  Honestly, it appears as if we have forgotten that Nigeria is a Federation and not a feudal enclave under the Lordship of one powerful Emir.

    And our people who ought to discern the times are so blind by reason of stupid politics that they would scurry to defend their oppressors to their shame and hurt. The only thing I know is that some of us are conscious of our free born status and can never agree to this second class citizenship being engineered by those whose days in power could be numbered.”

    And then, an Engineering Professor interjected:” Looking at those mass slaughter of fellow human beings is simply awful, and I have since stopped thinking that all this is really about cattle rearing. I have come to accept the claim, in some quarters, that a form of expansionist agenda is surreptitiously being undertaken. What could midnight burning of houses, raping of women and killings all over the country have to do with cattle rearing?

    * Fayose may be anything, but his approach to this matter will stand the test of time. Chief Awolowo, asked what he would  have done if he were to be Shagari when the Cameroonian gendarmes trespassed our territory, killing our citizens, had replied :

    “if you wake up every morning to find your neighbour pointing a gun at you, you need to buy a gun and hold it conspicuously each morning, for him to see”. What is absolutely inexplainable is the dumb refusal of other Southern governors to adopt the Fayose strategy. Seeing the carnage, in what has a semblance of genocide, I started to look beyond the herdsmen. Nasir El Rufai, the Kaduna State governor, eminently qualifies for arrest on the strength of some of his statements over the Kaduna South mayhem. He confessed to have paid some Fulani killers, who are from outside the country, so that they stop killing! Hogwash! The failure to do anything, but look the other way, until immersed in an unmamanageable public outcry, says a lot. It sounds so unbelievable that this president, who swore to protect the lives of Nigerians, could look the other way while citizens were being beheaded in their hundreds. That  this president, who as an ordinary Nigerian, led a crowd of Miyeti people to invade the government house, Ibadan, could look the other way as children, pregnant women and able bodied citizens of Nigeria were being butchered by those Nasir described as foreigners, is beyond belief.  Clearly, this president seems more interested in protecting the lives of cows, the rustling of which he has deployed soldiers to fight, than protect ours.

    • We Yorubas are obviously in a culture shock; for here, human life is sacred and we believe that only the Almighty who gives it, can take it. We will now have to decide whether, or not, we want to be made no more than slaves in our own land or continue to watch, helpless,  the continuing defilement of  sacred aspects of our culture  by co-habiting with unruly beings to whom cows’ lives  are obviously more valuable than humans’”.

    Lesson of all these: Nigeria’s unity should not be taken for granted. I can only hope this is internalised.

     

  • Is the Villa bureaucracy also padding the budget?

    Is the Villa bureaucracy also padding the budget?

    At this rate, by 2019, this government would’ve succeeded in buying enough “Motor Vehicles” to drive the entire country off the edge.

    Thanks to Hon (Dr) Abdulmumin Jibrin, the suspended member of the House of Representatives who had to be suspended, unprecedentedly, for a whole legislative year because the highly compromised souls of the House leadership will be too gutted to always find him too close by. Conscience, they say, is an open wound. As a born again, conscientious objector after being personally implicated as chairman of the House Appropriation committee, Jibrin had turned round to be the peoples’ only source of knowing that: “after the Appropriation Committee received all the budget reports from standing committees, an analysis was conducted. We discovered that about 10 only out of the 96 Standing Committees of the House had introduced about 2,000 projects without the knowledge of their committee members amounting to about N284, 000, 000, 000. I was alarmed. But I was cautious because at our pre-budget meeting with the committee chairmen, I was clearly warned not to touch their budgets. I reported the matter to the speaker. He did nothing about it obviously because he was working behind the scene with the committee chairmen.”

    Although that remains an allegation, Nigerians know only too well that if this happened in the lower House, the Senate must have accounted for double. Or how do you account for some members’ love of exotic cars?  Jibrin, having been so un-comradely, and with President Muhammadu Buhari breathing down their necks over padding, Senate has very quickly – thanks to the distinguished senator, that one of the armoured cars’ fame – come up with a bill that will see them get through the legislative front door, an amount, double if not triple, what was hitherto, being embedded in the budget, annually.

    As is now well known to Nigerians, a bill, sponsored by Senator Oduah, which has since passed the second reading, will when it becomes law, hand over to them 20 percent of the national budget for constituency projects. The about N1.4 trillion will be handed over to them,  they being contractors, so they can construct bore holes, erect market stalls, buy  sewing machines, grinding machines, knitting machines, motorcycles, tricycles etc for their constituents. If President Buhari cannot stop this nonsense, tell these folks they are elected to make laws and perform oversight functions and not to take on executive functions at either the national or sub national levels, then he should seriously consider resigning from office.

    Enough of this utter rubbish like this is the only national assembly on earth.

    The Yoruba say it is one smart Alec that can police another. (ole lo nmo ese ole to lori apata). Given this wise saying, Nigerians must plead with the legislature to, this time around, take a critical look at the budget provisions for the Villa which keep increasing in spite of our very parlous economic circumstances. The legislature should help us to know whether a worse padding had actually been going on at the very seat of power when all we have been doing is put the legislature to the guillotine. Not a few commentators have called attention to these ever ballooning figures and all I need do here is copy and paste their findings. While one of the most popular, or was it ludicrous, aspects of the 2016 budget, that is,  before Nigerians got to hear about padding, was the N3.6 billion earmarked for the purchase of an unspecified number of BMW saloon cars, the items calling for very careful interrogation in the current budget have more than tripled, as we would show.

    One of the commentators referred to above wrote, mutatis mutandis: “The first item is the “Sewage Charges” budget of the State House Headquarters”. It was put at 52,827,800. That means 144,733 per day. Compare this with N 6,121,643 for 2016. This simply means that the vote went up by 1050% compared with the 2015 budget, and 850% when compared with the 2016 budget. The State House Headquarters budget for “Honorarium/Sitting Allowance” is N 556,592,736 while the Jonathan government budgeted 174,471,371 in 2015, and this government, in 2016 jacked it up to 507,518, 861. Have these allowances been increased while workers’ salaries remain stagnant? There is the nebulous thing they call “Residential Rent.” This is something I have failed to understand up till now and I wouldn’t mind someone explaining it to me. That aside, the amount budgeted for this in 2015 was 22,459,575; in 2016 it was 27,735,643. But in this year’s budget of “Recovery and Growth,” this same “Residential Rent” budget went up to 77,545,700. What abracadabra is this? There is an 8,539,200 budget for “Anti-Corruption” and I’m perplexed as to what exactly it is. The last time there was a budget for “Motor Vehicles” or anything like that was in the 2014 budget by the last administration and it was a total of 132,200,000. This government came in 2016 and somehow concluded that the State House Headquarters did not have enough “Motor Vehicles,” so they started by budgeting 877,015,000 which was something like a 650% increase over the 2014 budget for the same item. Yet in 2017, 197,000,000 has again been budgeted for the purchase of “Motor Vehicles” and “Buses.” At this rate, by 2019, this government would’ve succeeded in buying enough “Motor Vehicles” to drive the entire country off the edge. 2016 will go down as one of the darkest years in this country in relation to power supply. So, where is a budget of 319,625,753 for “Electricity Charge” in 2017 coming from for the State house? This was 45,332,433 in the 2016. In 2016 State House Headquarters budget for the “Rehabilitation/Repairs of Residential Buildings” was 642,568,122, while in 2017, it is 5,625,752,757. Meaning that an enormous asteroid most probably managed to destroy the residential building at the State House Headquarters. This goes on until you hit what Olatunji Dare described as a curious affliction in his column in The Nation of Tuesday, 3 January 2017 referring to the never-failing humongous vote for kitchen equipment.  As is Professor Dare’s wont, he put it crisply as follows: “This disorder consists in an obsession with “kitchen equipment,” with cutlery and crockery thrown in, and a predilection for purchasing them year after year, without reference to the quantity purchased the previous year, without having to justify any new purchase, without having to account for the previous year’s purchase, and without the least consideration for cost or consequences”. Of the princely sum of N42billion earmarked for the Villa in the budget, expenditure on food, cooking gas and kitchen utensils is expected to gulp  over N850 million when, specifically, N100, 820,300 would be spent on the purchase of kitchen utensils such as forks and knives.

    It is totally befuddling how the 2017 budget proposals failed completely to take into account the country’s prevailing economic circumstances and all Nigerians can do is plead with the legislature to, for once, do a decent  day’s job by taking a critical look at these budget proposals.

  • Nigeria 2016: Annus horribilis

    President Buhari has many reasons to urgently change course in some critical areas

    “The scale of embezzlement in Nigeria is astonishing. Politicians,  judges, senators, former governors and first ladies, bankers, etc, have all been swept off in recent months in an unprecedented anti-corruption drive. Seven judges, including two Supreme Court judges, have been arrested on corruption allegations. A sacked head of the military is being tried on charges of stealing $3.1 million from the Nigerian air force to buy houses just as the former national security adviser is on trial on charges of diverting millions of dollars meant for the military.” – a foreign commentator on Nigeria

    I do not own the patent to the above title. Rather it belongs to Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth 11 who, at a royal wedding described 1992 as “annus horribilis, meaning a horrible year. Sans August 1983 when I almost saw death during the atrocious Ondo State governorship election. I have never, in life had as much internal turmoil as I experienced in the year of our Lord, two thousand and sixteen. In the giddy days immediately following the victory of candidate Muhammadu Buhari of the APC, this column, on which I had written my fingers sore canvassing his candidature, went on a literal overdrive, proposing an agenda for the president-elect. So cocksure was I that one or two of the items on my menu list would have a look-in given their importance to the country’s revival, and wellbeing. After all, candidate Buhari, alongside his party, has waoh-ed Nigerians with his change mantra which has seen an all-powerful sitting president, a-washed with U. S dollars – which they had spent like the United States was about decreeing the currency out of existence – eating the humble pie of ignominious defeat.

    I must, however, quickly say that the turmoil I felt was not out of material insufficiency – for God has been faithful – but resulted from the almost total loss of the mental and psychological investment one had put in the Muhammadu Buhari presidency. I have written serially on these pages, telling Nigerians that his coming was going to be a complete rebirth, a regeneration of sorts, from the total banality we had experienced under the somnambulist Dr Goodluck Jonathan. So literally drunk on a Buhari administration was I that I wrote as follows in: ‘President Muhammadu Buhari: This Simply Gladdens The Heart’.  All the way from Houston, Texas in the Sunday 1 June, 2015 edition of this paper, I wrote: “It is heartening that a man I had, Nostradamus-like, long seen as about the only Nigerian who can wipe away our tears, and restore Nigeria to its rightful place, was inaugurated, this past week, as president of the Federal Republic.  I have always believed that this day will come and I need cite only two examples. In ‘The South West: Between Buhari and Yar’ Adua’, 21 January, 2007, I wrote: “It is therefore our good fortune that Gen. Buhari (Rtd) has not taken the Yoruba for granted. He has come soliciting the support of the critical segments in the Southwest, promising to do that one thing that is dear to us – Restructure the country”. Then on 26th September 2014, in ‘Periscoping The Ideal APC Presidential Candidate (2)”, I  also wrote : “… despite all the attempts  to  dress him  in the robes of a Taliban, General Buhari, a  Spartan soldier/politician,  has more than demonstrated the ability to lift Nigeria far beyond its present morass.  And I make bold to say that Nigeria, in its current dire straits, needs Buhari more than he needs Nigeria”.  I am mighty proud that this man of destiny, this unusual Nigerian who was not only an Oil minister, Chairman, Petroleum Trust Fund, but also a Head of State, yet had no single petrol (gas) station, finally made it.”

    Earlier on, I had yielded this column to Houston-based Segun Badipe, a nuclear medical scientist, who also weighed in on the Buhari phenomenon, suggesting the following: ‘On the political front, he must go after all the treasury looters. This is sure to enjoy tremendous political support from Nigerians since they understand the connection between the excesses of the PDP and the political problems currently facing the country. It is unfortunate that the judiciary has been thoroughly bastardised. The president-elect must very quickly flush out corrupt judges as it would otherwise be difficult to get convictions against corrupt politicians and their associates. On the economic front, there is a lot that can be done to give people hope. Nigeria is about the only country I know where politicians don’t feel any remorse for not delivering on campaign promises. There are obviously no quick fixes for the power problem but I would suggest that the government proceeds rapidly with the rehabilitation of moribund or uncompleted projects that can increase deliverables in the short run. In this way, the government can increase available electricity to something around 6000 megawatts in no time, at all.

    ‘Insecurity, as exemplified by the Boko Haram menace, is a major problem that must be tackled head-on as failure to defeat it will be a huge hindrance to the country’s security and economic development. Finally, the monster of it all – corruption, for which the president-elect must device novel instruments to deal with. Using agencies like the EFCC or ICPC is hardly more than asking the ruling class to prosecute members of their own class. The president must, necessarily think out of the box, and do something truly revolutionary. He could come up with an amnesty programme whereby those who willingly confess to acts of corruption could, after making full restitution, be allowed to keep some of the recovered loot but strictly for their basic sustenance. He should also institute a whistle blower programme. This is a low cost technique the essence of which is for persons intimately familiar with details of some corrupt acts to squeal on the perpetrators with a fraction of the recovered loot going to them in compensation. The whistle blower will assist the country recover the proceeds while such fraudsters are made to reap the full weight of their malfeasance.  They must, however, have legal protection.’

    The president must be congratulated on his achievements on both the security and corruption fronts. Boko Haram has been massively degraded just as corruption, though fighting back, is beginning to lose out.  Some allegedly corrupt judges are already being made to face the law.

    Unfortunately, and this is the sad part, the president has failed woefully in co-herring the country. He has shown, beyond any scintilla of doubt, that he is more disposed to governing on behalf of the north, especially the Fulani, as I will show, and this is absolutely dispiriting. President Buhari’s kitchen cabinet, so clearly demonstrative of his generally parochial, insular and ethnic-dictated appointments, has been so disappointing it is difficult to describe. I have personally come to the conclusion that whilst the president said he was busy thinking of those to appoint ministers, he most probably had a think tank working on which Fulani to appoint to the most sensitive positions in government and those, whose names were omitted, appear to have since been recruited, sleeping in their houses as the First Lady patriotically told Nigerians in her BBC interview. The result is that today, apart from a fully north -dominated national security apparatti, we also have some unelected, past masters in divisive geo-political contestations of the First and Second Republics, only a breath away from the president, taking decisions behind the shadows; amongst them, an uncle of the president who was a key member of the Kaduna Mafia, as well as a former spook and diplomat, who once held a very top position in the government of the federation. These men, I believe, are the ones who advised the president’s unbending opposition to restructuring despite it being on his party’s manifesto. His absolutely lukewarm attitude to the murderous Fulani herdsmen which has accounted for tens of thousands dead must equally be attributed to the same ethnic motivations. All these have made one incredibly sad in a particularly bad year in the country. President Buhari has many reasons to urgently change course in some critical areas. No part of Nigeria is more important than the other.

    Let me conclude by wishing Nigerians a much better 2017.

  • Magu: On the way to demystifying President Buhari

    Magu: On the way to demystifying President Buhari

    All he needs do is feed Magu to the hounds baying for his blood for no other reason than his stinging effectiveness at the agency

    About the only thing that can be chalked  up for President Muhammadu Buhari to date, besides his having considerably humbled Boko Haram, is the anti-corruption war on which a huge portion of his integrity , personal and corporate, is built;  despite the considerable number of people stigmatising  it as being  selective . Thanks  largely to Ibrahim Magu, the  EFCC Acting Chairman , who not only exhumed the agency  from its  grave-like ineffectiveness of the Farida Waziri years, but as a  focused, uncompromising and principled crime fighter,  has returned it to the lofty heights Nuhu Ribadu left it,  naming and shaming many of those now  baying for  his blood. But if one may ask, is it the thinking in some high government quarters that the EFCC is a Northern Nigeria colony to be populated, both at the directorate and operational levels, by only northerners? Not only are Ribadu, Waziri, Lamorde and Magu from a single part of the country, all the others now being canvassed to take over if they succeed in seeing Magu’s back – Alli, current Customs boss, Biu, or those who may be roused from slumber in their houses, as alleged by the First Lady in her BBC interview, are all from the north. Without a scintilla of doubt, not many Nigerians are likely to believe that this state of affairs could still be happening almost two years into President Buhari’s administration. It is most unfair that, as I showed in my article: What informed President Buhari’s Security Architecture?, (The Nation on Sunday, ) a  single part of the country has this total dominance of the country’s security  apparatti and the earlier President Buhari effects some drastic changes to reflect balance and equity, the better for his legacy. Incidentally, what we see playing out today in the Magu case is the direct consequence of the insularity of his kitchen cabinet which has resulted in turf wars amongst members angling for power and access. Most of these persons have been with him either directly on the field, or in spirit, since his political odyssey of well over a decade.

    It has been common knowledge for quite a while that two opposing groups within the president’s inner circle are at each other’s throats regarding whether or not Magu should be confirmed as chair of the EFCC. That the president could not even forward his name to senate months after his nomination must have been indicative of which group had the upper hand. This situation subsisted until the president went on leave and the vice president, as acting president, was reported to have transmitted Magu’s name to senate but, unfortunately, without ensuring that the nominee was pre-cleared by the security as should have been the case.  That lacuna is what the Magu enemies, and they are many, are now exploiting, completely unmindful of the ripple effects of their action on a President Buhari whose roaring international reputation rests solely on his anti-corruption standing. Not in recent history have we seen a Nigerian Head of State this respected by President and Secretary of the United States of America as well as Heads of State of many influential European countries.

     That the Senate, in its eagerness to rubbish a sworn enemy would not present to be as democratic as to allow Magu defend himself against whatever the spurious charges against him was not in any way surprising as it shows, in its deafening clarity, the animus some powerful forces in that chamber have always nursed against the no nonsense Magu about who even Ribadu, whose fear used to be the beginning of wisdom for the corrupt, had been very effusive in his praise. What we see in the senate is nothing short of corruption fighting back. In a decent or civilised society, half the number of former governors  in  that chamber would not be anywhere near it since they have corruption charges  hanging on their necks just like its president would be attending his trial at the CCT  as a former senator. Should it therefore lie within such a chamber to be making a pronouncement on a Magu whose head they preferred to shave in his absence? So certain is the Senate today that it is beginning to have the upper hand on the executive that since the president is doing everything to kill off budget padding, they have now proposed a bill, that has since passed the second reading, to appropriate 20 per cent of annual federal budget to constituency projects which they will personally implement so that what they were getting before illegally, they can now take through the front door.  I hope Nigerians now know that there is no political Messiah anywhere in this polity and that they will most probably remain virtual slaves unless they stand up to fight for themselves. It thus seems, essentially, that in Nigeria, the bulk no longer stops on the president’s table. Nauseating! Nigerians would one day have to storm that chamber former President Obasanjo has perspicaciously described as a den of unarmed robbers. It has come to that.

    It is not funny either that the president has chosen to refer this matter to the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, for investigation.  In the first place, the AGF’s intervention in the Kogi governorship electoral brouhaha was not particularly ennobling nor is his being a member of the president’s cabinet a matter for cheer. Worse, however, is the fact that it easily reminds one of those occasions when the late President Yar Adua referred matters of this nature to his National Security Adviser, a General Muktar. Not on a single occasion did Nigerians hear a whimper again about such matters. Muktar was the grave yard of any case referred to him for further investigation, a very sore one being the embarrassing manner INEC officials were bribed by the PDP in the 2010 governorship rerun election in Ekiti State. Had he not killed that matter, who knows whether we would have been spared the recent Rivers State electoral debauchery and beheadings. It has also been rumoured that Magu is tenaciously prosecuting some characters who the AGF did not as much as wish to be investigated at all. I doubt if that would make him a honest broker. The president should have handed the investigation over to a retired judge or a respected silk of unimpeachable integrity. It is not too late.

    Magu’s rumoured sins are legion. Amongst these: he is rumoured to have once insisted that the mother of a powerful legislator should personally come to his office to explain how she came about a huge sum of money. And within the president’s kitchen cabinet, the rumour is that he angered the more powerful caucus by hauling before the courts, a supposedly corrupt oil magnate they ordered him not to touch. The man’s offence is believed to include oil liftings not paid for, outright oil thefts and sundry illegal deals with a former oil minister now in total disgrace. It is no surprise too, that a former president of the Nigerian Bar Association has been shouting himself hoarse as to why Magu can no longer be confirmed. Given the EFCC’s shaming and naming of many senior lawyers in both the Malabu and Halliburton cases, I can only pity our man.

    Without a doubt, the war against corruption is President Buhari’s one unarguable success. But the president can very well help obliterate even that one. All he needs do is feed Magu to the hounds baying for his blood for no other reason than his stinging effectiveness at the agency. Once those hounds see Magu out, as is the practice, his enemies will quickly follow up by ousting from the agency, everybody who ever worked with Magu. Consequently, all on-going cases, whether at the stage of investigation or already in court would, ipso facto, be dead; files will develop legs and vamoose and where allowed to remain, at all, vital evidences would vaporise. Then the enemies of President Muhammadu Buhari, both internal and external, would have set in motion, the process of completely demystifying him to clear the way for their own 2019 ambitions.

  • Nigerian politicians: Grieving the old, the young and just about everybody

    Nigerian politicians: Grieving the old, the young and just about everybody

    Nigerian politicians, almost to the last man, are a class by themselves; a bunch of selfish, inconsiderate and conscienceless people

    “As far as I am concerned, politics is the art of selfless service to our fellow men. Let me assure you that I can never and will never play pranks with the suffering masses of our country. To do so, as some others had done and are still doing, would be despicable and damnable. “Man is the highest being in all creation. God created him in His own image; and he has certain rights, which are inherent and inalienable. Among these are the right to education, health, employment and good living. He also has the right to dignity, and to be treated with esteem by his fellowmen.

    “However, because some political leaders see your manifest destiny as a plaything, they do not take their promises (during electioneering campaigns) seriously. Indeed, they do not intend to make any binding undertakings to you. They have postulated no political theories, nor have they prepared any coherent or unequivocal (political) party programmes.” – Chief Obafemi Awolowo (in) Voice of Wisdom, pages 91 – 92

    Nigerian politicians, almost to the last man, are a class by themselves; a bunch of selfish, inconsiderate and conscienceless people. For them, nothing besides self matters and were  we  to need any evidence of this, their total unconcern during this spiralling recession under which the poor is being  thoroughly wrenched  as if they were the ones who burnt billions of  the now disappearing  dollars during the 2015 elections, stole and round tripped the rest, is more than enough. They were so callous they thought nothing of stealing the funds that should have saved tens of thousands of our unfortunate compatriots now forever lost to Boko Haram, on top of the millions who have been completely uprooted from their ancestral homes and now live as Internally Displaced Persons in their own country.  For these IDPs, I doubt if they are any better than those trapped in Aleppo where a crazed Putin and the Assad, the butcher of Syria, have been raining tonnes of bombs on thousands of hapless children and women, completely deaf to appeals from the United Nations for a few days’ ceasefire.

    Given Nigerian politicians’ copious acts of man’s inhumanity to man, their utter selfishness and total disdain for the common man, I decided to write this  article ahead of their usual hollow ritual of seasonal greetings in which they attempt to dwarf us all during festivities. I was, however, finally  prompted  by the reaction I received to one of the articles on these pages from the respected 87-year old,  Pa G.O. Okoobo ( FCA 478).The obviously traumatised patriot who, as one of the earliest members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, has certainly put a lot into life, and served this beleaguered country meritoriously for decades, wrote as follows: “Former President Olusegun Obasanjo in The Nation of 24 November, 2016 accused the National Assembly of corruption. I am worried that after more than five years after Prof Itse Sagay first blew the whistle on NASS bogus pay/allowances, government has not addressed the fraudulent action as they now want to do with the Supreme Court secret account where unapproved allowances were allegedly paid to judges and Supreme Court staff. As a nationalist, what can you do to urge the AGF or the EFCC to do about this? God bless Nigeria and her honest anti-corruption crusaders.”

    Without a doubt papa, these clowns obviously do not see politics as service to posterity as the immortal Awo described it in the epigram to this piece.

    Let me now begin to properly situate my obviously grievous charges against this colony of cheats we call leaders.

    Fortunately, only this past week, Nigerians heard Senate President Bukola Saraki singing rhapsodies to his constituents who, like his colleagues in the National Assembly, he remembers only at Sallah or when elections are at hand. Let us hear our very concerned Senate President: “Mr President,” he sang, “the feedback we get from our visits to our constituencies is that there is hardship in the land. We can see it. We can feel it. (Who, you?) This recession therefore commands all of us as government to greater essence of urgency. Our people (indeed) must see that the singular preoccupation of government is to search for solution for the current economic hardship and the commitment to ease their burden. They have trusted their fate in our hands and they need us now more than ever before to justify that trust they have imposed on us.

    “And that is why the two chambers have taken their position, whatever may be our differences, our opinion on the issues of the economy we will work with one common purpose for this reason.”

    Nigerians are asking: since when? They are not deceived, even if you succeed in deceiving the president. What exactly has this preacher and the National Assembly, over which he presides, done about their outlandish, self-awarded allowances which take their monthly earnings to well over N20M since Nigeria went into recession? Why is he and some of his colleague former governors, now in the Senate, getting paid monstrous monthly pension from  their states on top of the eye popping houses(2) they forced their  rudderless Houses of Assembly to gift them? When will the sinkhole they call constitution amendment scam, which has gulped billions of naira for some five years running, end? They have, indeed, heard the cries of their constituents. As I observed earlier, Saraki may succeed in deceiving the president but he should very well know that Nigerians would not take kindly to any wuruwuru at the Code of Conduct Tribunal where he is standing trial, as one is beginning to suspect in the Orji Uzor Kalu case, now that he is in the APC. Our mumu e don do! Former Governor Peter Obi has just told us that “In Nigeria, House members sit for about two times in a week, yet it is a full time job”. I do not know a worse cheating of an entire country.

    However, things are far worse with state governors, another set of those politicians that literally bring down radio and television houses with their loud, meaningless greetings during Sallah, Christmas, New Year etc. Hear governor Obi again: “In education, the federal government wanted to invest 22.5 billion naira, but the states said they did not have money to pay as counterpart. How can we get 25 billion naira? A Governor in Nigeria uses 25 vehicle convoy, the wife 15 and Deputy 10. I started with it. Today’s average cost of one vehicle on the convoy is 25 million naira. It is therefore approximately 1.25 billion per state, and 45billion naira for the 36 states. All they need is reduce the convoy to 12 vehicles for governor, seven for the wife and five for the deputy and there would be enough money for the counterpart. In my own time, we discussed it in EXCO. I used five vehicles and my deputy three. Using small convoy vehicle does not make you less a governor.

    “It is criminal and irresponsible, that some states receive three to four billion naira every month and take over one billion naira as security vote per month. Even if we are in a war situation, we should even declare surrender.”

    I appreciate that the states are co-equal with the feds but President Buhari would be a huge let down if, whether by moral suation, or whatever, he fails to rein in this  total debauchery during his first term.

    With his stance on corruption, I think it is logical to think that the total depravity of the executive branch, which we saw under former President Goodluck Jonathan, is no longer the case.

    Since Nigerian politicians are so powerful they have proved to be not our servants but masters, and since we cannot start praying for military coups as that is no longer in vogue and many top military men have proved so unworthy of their calling and the sensitive posts they held/hold, we shall leave these marauding politicians in God’s own hands, confident that they and their children will not escape His wrath if they continue in their wicked, unfeeling ways. Isaiah 3:14  – “The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes (politicians) of His people, “It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the plunder of the poor is in your houses.” I am confident that the Quo ran is replete with similar prescriptions for wicked rulers and leaders.

  • Corruption in the ivory tower

    I think the greatest problem, today, has to do with the quality of those in the commanding heights of our universities

    “Suddenly, education that was considered to be the corner stone for the development and modernisation of Nigeria was ignored, neglected, and starved of the necessary funds and policy initiatives needed to move it forward. Increasingly, national and state governments started cutting educational funds, thereby, creating the impression that education was no longer an important strategic tool in directing the country’s growth.  With this development, the looting of educational funds became acceptable.  Thus, it became fashionable to loot funds allocated for academic enhancement, capacity building, infrastructural development, modernisation, and rehabilitation of educational institutions.  The looting involved educational policymakers, bureaucrats in various educational ministries, and school officials responsible for administering the schools.” – Priye S. Torulagha

    The above caption was the title of a recent article by Professor Niyi Akinnaso, my contemporary at the University of Ife, Ile-Ife. Having been weaned largely on about the same moral principles at the great university of learning and culture, it was no surprise that I found myself agreeing with many of his views on the subject. This article is an attempt at situating when the rain actually began to fall on our universities.

    Niyi almost brought tears to the eyes recalling the past glorious years of Nigerian universities. I had the distinct privilege of working in three of the best, but more importantly, I worked directly with two of the very best Vice Chancellors ever in this clime: Oluwasanmi at Ife and Akinkugbe at Ilorin. Either of them would faster have drunk the hemlock than steal a penny of university funds. I think the greatest problem, today, has to do with the quality of those in the commanding heights of our universities. Besides the great Vice-chancellors of old, compare those we have in these institutions today with the Alukos and the Aboyades of that era. They were also matched in integrity in the administration – both registry and the bursary – with men and women who would not have allowed any errant Vice-Chancellor play games with university funds.  Besides, there were also some conscientious objectors; men like my late uncle, Dr  Remi Olaofe and his friend, Dr Sowumi  at Ibadan, and at Ife, Drs  Segun Osoba, and Toye Olorode, men of incomparable integrity ready at any time to call any Vice-Chancellor  to order.  At Ife for instance, the fear of Ife Dialogue, edited by Dr Osoba, was the beginning of wisdom. I should know. I was in the Vice-Chancellor’s office and had to do some rejoinders to their articles though strictly in my personal capacity. Unfortunately, those days are, forever, gone from Nigerian universities as most people have become far more concerned with self, than for the common good.

    Some two weeks ago, I toyed with the idea of writing an article on what I considered the new, totally abrasive preoccupation of the SSANU, a union I believed, considering its role in the crisis at Ife, Abeokuta and Akure, was fast becoming something of a nuisance. To this end, I spoke to a university Pro Chancellor, a Vice Chancellor and was going to speak with another Vice Chancellor, himself in the eye of the storm, and the National President of SSANU. The arraignment of two officials of the Federal University of Agriculture, Abeokuta, put paid to that. I have since been told, by a gentle man who should know, that members of SSANU are in the best position to know of any underhand dealings with the funds of any university  as, at least, one or more of its members would, willy nilly, be privy to the act. That for me, however, did not remove the fact that SSANU, as a union, has a plethora of selfish reasons to wish to deliberately make life difficult for an uncompromising Vice-Chancellor; some being financial demands not approved by government policies and succession battles for the outgoing Vice-Chancellor’s position. Unfortunately, the deafening corruption in universities is more than quintupled at the National Universities Commission as Prof Wale Tomori, a former Vice Chancellor, brilliantly captured it last year in a convocation lecture.

    First, a word about union activities in Nigerian universities. Hardly would any union, indeed, any Nigerian organisation, claim to be more, or even be as democratic, as the Academic Staff Union of Nigerian Universities. As thoroughly befits it, decisions are taken with every segment of the membership, except at Ilorin, taking part. And considering one’s personal contribution to the very beginnings of that institution – I was a foundation staff – I consider its solitary, negative approach to ASUU very regrettable. ASUU, despite the interruptions it sometimes causes to the university calendar, has been a distinct asset to higher education in Nigeria. But for it, our universities would be an arid zone devoid of both physical, as well as learning and research infrastructural facilities critical to university development. SSANU was rather genteel at its first coming, concerned more with its members having training opportunities comparable to their academic colleagues. I knew these, being a member of the inaugural Executive Committee of the then newly established Association of University Administrators with the likes of Ebenezer Babatope (Lagos), the late Charles Balogun (Ibadan), Talib Umar, Tom Adaba (ABU), and a few others. The junior staff union was, however, another kettle of fish entirely, conceiving of itself solely as an adversarial association against university authorities. Their greatest weapon, it seemed, was their unfailing election of the most illiterate of their members as president so as to be able to feign ignorance of university rules and regulations.

    And what trouble they gave university authorities!

    However, in the ‘70s and early 80s, corruption, either relating to money or sexing up marks was not a major problem and plagiarism was hardly an issue. Then a virulent military government emerged on the Nigerian scene and while corruption in universities did not begin with them, they torridly worsened it.  Corruption has started to rear its ugly head when some senior academic staff, desirous of promotion, started going to military governors complaining that their Vice –Chancellors were not giving them ‘chairs’, which, in a particular case at Ife, the governor misconstrued as settees when he confronted the Vice Chancellor who would not give a whole university lecturer, mere chairs when there was no dearth of carpenters in town. From that benign beginning governors, as well as presidents, civil and military, as visitors to the universities, began packing university councils with their friends and acolytes, so they could do whatever they wanted there. The worst happened in a Southwest state not too long ago when a governor appointed two siblings as Chancellor and Pro- Chancellor in a state university.  Appointment of Vice Chancellors would, however, take the cake in corrupt activities. They were mostly schemed into office, and knowing how he/she got there, the first thing a ‘smart’ Vice Chancellor does is to pamper, and ‘capture’, the Council chairman who is probably on first name terms with the Visitor. That done, and with troublesome council members also made members of juicy council committees, the Vice –Chancellor is now free to do as he wished. From then, not even the minister or the commissioner of education, who is hardly permitted by the Chief of Staff to see the president or governor can, any longer, call the Vice-Chancellor to order.  Nor is the distinguished, but rather  aloof Chancellor, most probably a high ranking king or VIP, close enough to know what games the Vice -Chancellor and the chairman, in collusion with their already compromised council members, are playing with university funds.

    Any wonder then some university funds are believed to have been lost to wonder banks?

    However, while the above has been the dominant theme, as in other areas of the Nigerian polity where corruption is king, it must be said, without the slightest equivocation, that there are some chairmen and Vice-Chancellors who have been clearly above board; those for whom no temptation is strong enough, to make them sacrifice their strict moral principles. There are even instances of council chairmen and Vice–Chancellors being at loggerheads.

    Given the above common scenario, however, it seems the only way to effectively fight corruption in our universities will be through the efforts of internal whistle blowers who must, however, be sure that they are not being driven by morbid personal or group interest.

  • A pot –pour-ri of events

    The rapidity with which events happen in our country today is such that one will literally have to be extra human to keep pace

    I have juxtaposed potpourri and Matters Arising a few times on these pages but I never forget to mention our glowing journalism teacher who owns the patent to both. He is none other than Emeritus Professor Tunji Dare, himself a co-columnist on this stable. His umbrella is large enough for us all.

    The rapidity with which events happen in our country today is such that one will literally have to be extra human to keep pace. I am, however, lucky that I can always count on Ekitipanupo, the exciting Ekiti intellectual e-roundtable, which aggregates the views of not less than two thousand elite Ekitis, both at home and in the Diaspora.

    This week was so particularly busy but Bloomberg’s usual meddlesomeness in the affairs of third world countries which Western institutions, like itself, would prefer to see become another Venezuela or Greece, takes the pride of place followed rapidly by the patriotic exploits of Mrs Osho, the Eyeloja of Ado-Ekiti, against some market women who would rather sell off their customers than sell their goods at reasonable prices. As usual, there will be no ascription, by name, of the contributions except mine.

  • Still on the Central Bank of nigeria

    Still on the Central Bank of nigeria

    As the government’s banker, financial and economic adviser, one would have expected that it needed no external push, however minuscule, to do the needful.

    “Experience has shown that corruption in public life in Nigeria cannot be obliterated by mere probes and commissions of inquiry or by the invocation of the criminal code under the ordinary legal system. The compelling need, therefore, arose to evolve and devise a system of justice swift enough, fair enough and serious enough to deal a lethal blow on corruption in public places’ –Gani Fawehinmi, recalled in Dare Babarinsa’s ‘One Day and A Story’. True today as when first made during Buhari’s first coming.

    Nigerians woke up Wednesday, 23 November, to read about the advice from the Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) of the Central Bank of Nigeria to the federal government to settle its domestic debts totalling N10.6 trillion while that of  the states stand at another N2.5 trillion, making it a staggering N13.1 trillion, because, according to the committee, “the accumulated debts have slowed business activities of economic agents most of who are indebted to the banking system thus compromising the integrity of the financial system.”

    I haven’t the slightest doubt, and this has nothing to do with any bragging rights, that last week’s article on these pages, titled, “Is the Central Bank of Nigeria Broke?” must have been the leitmotif for this sudden decision as it must have not only jolted, but completely rattled, the Central Bank Governor who must have felt not a little diminished by its negative import. At its 3rd quarter meeting, the committee took decisions on interest rates that were completely at variance with the views and wishes of Mrs. Kemi  Adeosun, the Finance Minister, who had canvassed that interest rates should, preferably, go south given the fact that  Nigeria is in recession. While affirming the independence of the CBN to act, it did not come as a surprise that the immediate consequence of that decision was that the rate of inflation soon rose up to 17.9 per cent, a more than 11-year high and the eighth monthly rise in a row, highlighting the depth of the country’s economic crisis. Most seasoned financial experts agree with the minister that what a recession calls for is a reduction in the lending rate.

    Coming so soon after my referenced article, the advice to government to settle her domestic debts leads naturally to the question of when, exactly, the Central Bank became seized of the deleterious consequences of such a huge domestic debt in an economy literally on its belly; where economic activities have not only petered out but in which a massive de-industrialisation was apace? A few weeks earlier, I drew attention on these pages to a recent action of the apex bank which involved its indiscriminately adjusting upwards, the exchange rate on previously approved Form M’s at a time when the companies affected were already expecting to take delivery of the raw materials they had previously paid for. As  recently confirmed by Babatunde Odunayo, the Apapa branch local Chairman of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria in his  address to the 45th Annual General Meeting of the Association, this has since turned into a nightmare, a massive N500B  loss to members of the association. Not unexpectedly many of the companies are now closing shop with the attendant loss of thousands of jobs in an economy crawling with millions of unemployed youth, especially university graduates, some of who completed their compulsory National Youth Service three, four years ago with nothing to meaningfully engage them. If the situation is this dire, why should it take the Central Bank this long to appropriately advise the government on the urgent need to pay off, or at least, substantially reduce its huge domestic debt? As the government’s banker, financial and economic adviser, one would have expected that it needed no external push, however minuscule, to do the needful. The reasons for this are legion. In addition to the MPC’s admission that the hanging debt has negatively affected economic activities, the Bank ought to have realised that besides institutional domestic creditors, millions of small, local suppliers, contractors and service providers constitute the bulk and bear the brunt of this humongous debt. As I showed here last week in the case of the Needs Assessment Programme in Nigerian universities, some of these debts go back many years with the result that many of the individual creditors have lost properties they pledged to banks as collaterals since many of the banks are themselves barely surviving. Besides their being the main lubricant of their local economies, these creditors are the parents of the millions of unemployed youth many of who have since resorted to extra-legal means to survive as their parents can only barely support themselves. Were the Central Bank acutely alive to its responsibilities, it should have informed government that paying off these debts would have been a lot more impactful on society, and the economy at large, than government’s so-called welfare programmes which, even if fully executed, can only reach an infinitesimal percentage of those affected but whose parents are obliged to, willy nilly, take care of.

    I am beginning to believe that the inability of key public officials to appropriately advise government, especially the Buhari government, derives from the fact that the president’s unimpeachable integrity has a way of intimidating them. His persona scares them so much that all they do is begin to first observe what they consider his body language on the matter at hand. In the instant case, I reckon that the Central Bank authorities, despite the advantages attributable to settling these domestic debts, could not face up to a president who is, seemingly, sweating, trying to get the funds to execute his  current budget. This attitude of our public officials is, unfortunately, not a monopoly of the Central Bank egg heads. His incandescent incorruptibility and, of course, age  – the latter, especially amongst his mostly insular kitchen cabinet of key advisers, must have turned them reticent in giving him needed advice on many issues, that is even when they do not believe that he knows better than they do given his cognate experience as a former Head of State. But truth is, nobody knows it all.

    In this particular case of  the government’s domestic debt, it is either the president is shielded from knowing its huge size, or officials of both the Central Bank and the Debt Management Office are scared stiff to raise the issue of payment to local creditors. At a colossal N13.4 trillion, alarm bells should have literally deafened the eardrums of the relevant officials in the two agencies. It  has therefore become unavoidable that the two institutions should now rapidly develop the appropriate synergy to enable them put in place an efficient debt management policy that will make a positive impact on the country’s economic growth and national development, especially, in reducing the debt stock as well as the cost of public debt servicing in a manner that will save resources for investments in poverty reduction programmes which is, in fact, the core function of the Debt Management Office. It is hoped that President Buhari will endeavour to act promptly on this matter in the interest of the country. Also, all officials who will be involved in crafting government’s response to this timely advice from the MPC, which has, indeed, unduly delayed in so doing, must be mindful of the present reputation of the Buhari government with majority of Nigerians who see it as a punishing government under which the people are going through unprecedented hunger. Only the other day, former President Olusegun Obasanjo who has, as yet, not shown his atavistic side to the Buhari government, could not help holding the government responsible for the poverty in the land. Yes, the Goodluck Jonathan’s government was an all-round disaster, suffused as it was by all manner of scams and the grandest looting ever in the country’s history, but this government’s failure to show that it has answers to the myriad of problems confronting the citizenry has not helped matters at all. This lacuna has continued to energise former President Jonathan on his lecture circuit from where he throws barely concealed darts at his successor.

  • Is the Central Bank of Nigeria broke?

    Is the Central Bank of Nigeria broke?

    Yes, Nigeria is in recession, but is it as bad as the CBN not being able to honour an e-payment advice in three months?

    In my part of the country, it is often said that there are some things which are worse or more embarrassing than stealing.  It is also often claimed by economists that the Central Bank, being the bankers’ bankers, can never be broke.  The question that then arises, as this article will show is:  Is the Central Bank of Nigeria broke, even though it has itself made a hash of claiming that the health of Nigerian banks is unassailable?

    Eons ago, in what now looks like ancient history, ex-President Jonathan, granted Nigerian universities some huge funds in respect of what is known as the Needs Assessment Programme in Nigerian universities, graciously extending it to state universities. As I once showed in an article regarding the subject on these pages, the result on the universities was instant and dramatic. Not only did new facilities spring up, members of the academic staff who had literally been asphyxiating, unable to acquire learned journals or attend conferences were re-invigorated as the new injection of funds changed all that. Sundry facilities, especially befitting, and much needed buildings, literally erupted from under the ground to make the work environment much more conducive. But for more than two agonising years now, many of the contractors who handled those projects have remained unpaid by the federal government.

    Then in August, 2016, something dramatic happened: the Federal Ministry of Education finally roused itself and sent an e-payment advice in respect of the contracts to the Central Bank. Ordinarily, being an electronic payment advice, the accounts of the universities should have been credited within 24 hours of its receipt.                              But not on your lives! As you read this, a whole 12 weeks after, many of the universities, and, ipso facto, the contractors, are still waiting, though some universities, selected on the usual demons of ethnicity and man-know-man, have since been paid. Needless to say that some of the contractors have long laid off many of their staff and some have, indeed, had their properties, pledged as collateral’s sold off by the banks. I doubt if the education ministry is aware that the payment advice the Minister signed on, and forwarded to the CBN three months ago is yet to be honoured since no responsible government agency would so advise, if its accounts with the CBN were not appropriately funded.

    Where exactly is a Nigerian building contractor then expected to turn if for three  years he remains unpaid in respect of a federal government project which he not only delivered on schedule, but which  has since been put to use by the respective universities? Worse is the fact that he has nowhere to go to demand payment; not to his client, the university, which will promptly send him to the federal government, nor to the ministry, where he won’t even know who to talk to. He has thus been left in the lush in a classical demonstration of man’s inhumanity to man especially when the same government has, during the same period, paid hundreds of billions of naira to road contractors to enable them return to their abandoned projects.

     I think it is time the Minister of Finance and the Central Bank governor came clean with Nigerians on the real state of the country’s finances. Yes, Nigeria is in recession, but is it as bad as the CBN not being able to honour an e-payment advice in three months? I think the Central Bank governor should find in his heart, the milk of human kindness, to end the agony of these traumatised Nigerians within, at most, the next 72 hours.

    A  plea now that the Ondo State governorship election beckons

    For reasons that will remain ever fresh in my memory, the 1983 governorship election in Ondo State remains about the most brutal event I have witnessed in my life. I was an observer/ participant just as was a much younger and very active Olusegun Mimiko, who is unlikely to forget those days of blood, tears, mayhem and death either. As we approach the 2016 Ondo governorship election, so increases my fears and my prayer is that Ondo State will never go back to those days. Party leaders in the state and the falconers from outside the state, beating the drums of war, but especially Governor Mimiko, must do everything to ensure that those days of  rampaging murderous gangs carrying severed heads are never again repeated in the state.

    While it appears like the maverick Jimoh Ibrahim, with no political structure he can call his own, would successfully play the spoiler for the PDP, I have been as concerned as the distinguished, Ibadan-based man of God, Pastor Ajibola Esan, who has dispatched series of peace appeals to dozens of progressive political leaders in the Southwest, regarding how best to ensure peace before and after the election. Certain that it will be in the best interest of the state to now find its way back into the progressive political fold with a victory for Oluwarotimi Akeredolu  of the APC, I contacted him some two weeks ago to ask in which area he needed the most help and his answer, which is anti-party activities, came  very promptly.  Because this is largely the result of some unhelpful meddling from party headquarters, I would like to use this opportunity to plead with all APC members, as well as the supporters, to kindly bury the hatchet and look ahead at the bigger picture. Why, in the year of our Lord, 2016, would the good people of a resource-rich Ondo State, whose complete buy-in is needed for a successful Southwest regional economic integration be heading into a totally peripheral political party like the AD where the likes of elder statesmen Mojisola Akinfenwa and co, with their well-known atavistic politics, will be the ones to look up to for direction? That Ondo State prospered somewhat under Governor Mimiko, as a lone ranger in the orphan-like Labour Party under its then showy, and grandiloquent chairman, was due mainly to the governor’s own enterprising persona and his ability to exploit his dalliance with a President Jonathan who could have given anything for his hoped-for victory at the 2015 presidential election. The AD candidate, Oke, on his part, shunting from one party to the other, has neither Mimiko’s charisma, nor the political reach to positively impact Ondo State. If Mimiko, with his political connections, still had to abandon the Labour Party for the PDP, a Governor Oke,- should he win – will forever be bogged down with concerns for political survival.

    These facts, in essence, is why I would like to plead with a consummate Senator Borrofice, my good friend of many years, and the highly regarded  Olusegun Abraham, to please let bygone be bygone. This, of course, cannot be the easiest of choices, given the efforts and sacrifices they have made, but they must look at the bigger picture, at the place of Ondo State and Yoruba land, going forward. Writing about a not too dissimilar circumstances in recent Yoruba political history, the highly perceptive Hon Wale Oshun commented as follows in ‘The Kiss Of Death – Afenifere and the infidels’: “Many people have argued that Afenifere’s problem started with D’Rovans. My view is that D’Rovans was not the beginning, but the most visible and irreversible manifestation of the Bola Ige’s problem in Afenifere. If there had been no problem, there would have been no need for D‘Rovans. And the Alliance for Democracy convention would just have been a coronation for the Ige candidacy. That there was D’Rovans at all, was a symptom of an existing disease.”

     I leave APC leaders in Yoruba land to appropriately factor that quote into the present Ondo State conundrum and then ask themselves: In Yoruba land, must we always be wiser after the event?