The Nation Newspaper

Category: Femi Orebe

  • The 8th Senate

    The more I read his subsequent responses, the more I saw a public servant who considers himself beyond, and above,  being questioned by citizens from whom he, and his other colleagues, earn grotesquely more than a fair share of the national patrimony

    I wish to start off this article with an honest caveat, which is, that Professor Sola Adeyeye, a senator of the Federal Republic, is a man I respect very much. That affirmation made, I shall proceed to write about Senator Adeyeye, not as the Omoluabi I  thought I know, but rather as a typical member of the 8th senate given the fact  that the rodomontade, the arrogance, the bluster and the haughtiness Nigerians now see daily  oozing from that hallowed chamber, must surely  have gotten to  this  otherwise respected academic. Even as disreputable as the 8th Senate has turned out to be, with its members absconding from the duties for which they earn disproportionately, in droves, daily following its president to a tribunal defending a barrage of  truly horrendous charges apart from  mercilessly mutilating the  annual budget and making it completely inoperable, I had naively believed that we still had some exemplars  there, amongst  them, Senator Adeyeye. But no more; not with the incident I shall proceed to painstakingly report here. A socially responsible Dokun Adedeji, a Medical Doctor, and dye in the wool Buhari supporter, had felt so serially mentally assaulted by  the shenanigans  of  this senate that he decided to intellectually engage with its members. In groups, he wrote to them as follows and the subsequent dialogue between him and Senator Adeyeye ensued: “Are you with your constituents on the matter of CHANGE for our country? You sold your majority to reactionaries for immediate advantage. You have betrayed us! We regret”. It was to this very simple question and observation  to which, completely out of sync, an otherwise distinguished Professor Sola Adeyeye who, as a result  of his education, long sojourn within that hallowed chamber of supposedly elder statesmen  as well as  his having logged decades, living and working in the U S,  one had come to see far beyond falling victim of the Yoruba wisecrack: ‘aguntan to ba ba aja rin … – a sheep found in the colony of dogs eating dung, responded in this  thoroughly unexpected  manner even though he must have realised that  the  question  was not addressed to him in his  personal capacity: “I have stood steadfastly with my party and constituents because there is neither enough weapons in Nigeria to frighten my soul nor enough money to buy my conscience,” a line I once heard him say on television. “Only Liars and bastards accuse the innocent. May God forgive you, Dokun Adedeji.”

     Still eager to have a decent dialogue rather than some haughty insults, Dr Adedeji replied: “Prof, I understand your anger but your response is inexcusable.  You belong to this Senate and I have no barometer of assessment save your statements and reports of your dissension, if any. Prof, I know, for instance, that you lived and lectured in America. Were you in doubt at any time as to where Senator McCain stood on any issue? Is that question too much to ask of you? I am not an Internet noise maker like your colleague- the Common Sense Senator – but I ask that you try to Google me if you have the time! Our nation is in dire need of leaders who care and love her!  If you allow the reactionaries to hold sway, your coming back is a waste.”

    Rather than soberly interrogate the dire issues raised by Dr Adedeji as both an academic, a professor to boot, as well as a member of that otherwise respected chamber from whom much is expected, Senator Adeyeye behaved, true to type, like one of Nigerians’ new ‘bosses’ at the National Assembly from where the likes of Hon. Abdulmumin Jibrin usually talk down to us. He furiously wrote back: “Unfortunately, I do not know you enough to say that I am equally disappointed in you. Suffice to say that I am disgusted at anyone who would do no fact finding before lying against me and hauling needless accusation on the innocent.”  Conversely, a much calmer Adedeji wrote back: ‘Prof, did u truly write this? I am thoroughly disappointed to know that a ‘Distinguished’ Senator of Nigeria would descend this low with such language! Very sad.”

    It must be said that Senator Sola Adeyeye is, indeed, the Senate leader, if that will tell us anything about this red chamber.

    When I saw the earlier exchanges, as the senator’s responses were meticulously served on our web portal, the Ekitipanupo, I assumed they came out of an exasperation with a senate  that has become famous for  all the  wrong reasons  which  could, in turn, enervate any decent member. The more I read his subsequent responses, the more I saw a public servant who considers himself beyond, and above,  being questioned by citizens from whom he, and his other colleagues, earn grotesquely more than a fair share of the national patrimony. All these would have been funny were we not talking here of an otherwise, sober and respected member of the senate  who had popped up many times in that chamber to, unlike most of his colleagues, show that he has a place in his heart for the poor masses of this country.  In this respect, he had many times been literally about the lone ranger. However, this below par performance, which saw a senate ranking member resort to absolutely repugnant words in answer to a responsible and politically aware citizen, is one reason the senate must very quickly  re-examine itself lest Nigerians give it the ‘Senegal treatment’ at the next available opportunity.

    While at this, it may not be out of place to observe that the shenanigans of Senate President Bukola Saraki may not abate until the entire Nigerian judicial system is brought into complete disrepute.  He has not only been lawyer- shopping – he currently has as his lead counsel, Kanu Agabi, the alleged mentor of not only the chief prosecution counsel but that of the tribunal chairman as well – and as we saw this past week at the Code of Conduct Tribunal where he was asking the judge to disqualify himself, he may yet be back asking the Supreme Court to reverse its earlier decision in this very case. Now it seems to me like the problem with this country is no longer just the National Assembly, repugnant as it is, but Nigeria itself. What exactly is it with Nigeria? Are we now reaping the whirlwind of the winds sown by the likes of IBB and OBJ? One was the father of what was called New Breed politicians but which Nigerians regard more as New Greed politicians or is it Obasanjo’s unremitting impunity that has come back to haunt us? A study of the dramatis personae on our political spectrum today will show that a greater preponderance of those presently in our political life have their roots in the Babangida -Obasanjo era; a period during which the Nigerian moral fibre suffered its greatest diminution as epitomised by an increase in corruption and election rigging beyond anything we ever knew in this country. If in 1999, Obasanjo exposed budget padding by the National Assembly leadership and ensured they had their day in court, today budget padding has become the norm; not just with the leadership  but just about anybody in those chambers can insert billions in the name of his/her ‘constituency’ where he most probably has no office. Heading to courts, like our 99 SANs or accompanying the wife of their boss to EFCC offices has become the norm in preference to making laws for the good governance of the country. Indeed, our legislators would now rather bring down the house, the way they rushed their CCT amendment bill through the first and second readings, even when the PIB bill, unattended, has taken a permanent residence in their custody. And in the particular case of the Senate President, I think the time has come to plead with him to spare that distinguished chamber the ordeal and low esteem it has ominously attracted to itself. Senator Bukola Saraki, scion of the redoubtable Saraki family of Ilorin, should be told by whoever loves him, that there is life after Senate Presidency. He should also be informed that, sans being able to dispense patronage as he had generously done in that chamber, he would hardly find a quarter of his so-called supporters behind his back. I think they should realise that it is time Nigerians stopped asking: what a senate? What manner of senators?

    Enough is enough.

  • Matters Miscellaneous

    Of course, I appreciate that the Speaker has tactically emasculated the reps through their standing orders, and Senate President Bukola Saraki through Senate committee appointments, they should know that the next election is not eternity – they will have to more than justify a re-election.

    No Nigerian, aged 25-30 years and can read newspapers, would ever forget that Professor Olatunji Dare it is, who owns the patent to the title of this article. He used it to great effect in his Guardian days, trying to catch a whiff of the ‘zillions’ of events, some of them macabre but most certainly outrageous, cascading daily in the country  especially during the long  military era, now aptly dubbed the years of the locust. We are obviously back to those days and given a group of unreflecting northern legislators who seem bent on bringing back those years of a repugnant Hausa-Fulani hegemony, Nigerians from other parts of the country must let them know that what we will not eat, we will not as much as sniff. Apparently buoyed by the return of a northerner as Head of State, I haven’t the slightest doubt they are out to demonstrate their usual arrogance once again. Hear what Hon. Abdulmumin Jibrin, Chairman, House Committee on Appropriation, told Nigerians on why the North-dominated leadership of the National Assembly threw out the one project that was sure to open up the deep South and create jobs for our educated, but unemployed, youth in their thousands: “It is true that there are projects allocated to my constituency just like other members did. Just because I’m the chairman of the appropriation committee, my constituents should not get projects? Are my constituents not Nigerians? “Every member has one project or the other in his constituency, so I don’t think I did anything wrong by having some projects in my constituency”. Their preferred projects, in place of the rail project, included such mundane state and local government projects that it is a surprise they forgot to include their ancestral shrines. They included such things as tricycles, town halls, classrooms; solar street lights, rehabilitation and construction of roads in Kiru/Bebeji, pedestrian bridges, boreholes etc. This 40 -year-old, PhD degree holder, who allocated a princely sum of N4.169 billion naira to his constituency from cancelling the Calabar-Lagos Rail project, should be asked how much his entire geo-political zone contributes to Nigeria’s GDP.  It is worse that Speaker Dogara, who ideally should give an example of even-handed leadership, allotted N3billion to his own constituency. Jibrin, the ethnic champion, did not stop there. Knowing that cancelling that rail project, while simultaneously increasing the allocation to a project in the North from N80B to N92Billion,  was a geo-political  conspiracy that had to be defended with the last drop of their blood, if necessary, The Guardian quoted him as sending out a text message  intended to rally his conniving troops. The text message allegedly read, inter alia: “to all Hon Chairmen and Deputy Chairmen of Standing Committees: As you are aware, we have transmitted details of budget 2016. After consultation with the leadership of both Chambers, the reports of all standing Committees were sustained in the details. Though all items submitted by Committees were retained, you will see additional inputs that were necessary to be accommodated via little cuts. You are therefore enjoined to be prepared to justify reports both in media and elsewhere; in case, the executive arm disagrees. We are already justifying your reports, but you must join in doing so, especially in the media…’ Now, if these people would do this to a project meant for the most productive parts of this country –South-South, with its oil and Lagos, accounting for more than 60 percent of Value Added Tax, to which the North contributes only a miniscule portion, what would they not do to other areas not known to bring that much to the table. It would have been great if this was done for love of their communities. But as Nigerians have come to know of our politicians, it is intended to cream off billions so that they too can build their own hilltop palaces.  If Yar Adua and Jonathan allowed it, Nigerians will be highly disappointed in President Buhari if this kleptomania continues in an era of change. Any threat of impeachment, as the Senate is beginning to do  through innuendos, they will have Nigerians to contend with.Increasingly, one gets the impression that Southern legislators have forgotten their primary purpose in the National Assembly, i.e to be the ears and eyes of their people. Of course, I appreciate that the Speaker has tactically emasculated the reps through their standing orders, and Senate President Bukola Saraki through Senate committee appointments, they should know that the next election is not eternity – they will have to more than justify a re-election.

    The above warning becomes more germane when Nigerians get to know of the so-called “ National Grazing Reserve Bill”, about which my friend of over half a century, the inimitable Tola Adeniyi,  wrote a sparkling article titled:’Grazing Bill an insult to Nigerians’, this past week.

    According to Tola, “the National Assembly is about to pass a Bill that is set to kill whatever is left of our so-called over-centralised federal System. The Bill, if passed, will be the greatest rape on our democracy and the biggest insult on our collective sensitivity as a people and as a country”. Continuing, he wrote: ”The Fulani National Grazing Reserve”, is presently before the National Assembly. The bill has successfully scaled through second reading in both the Senate and the House of Representatives. For it to become law is for it to pass through the third reading. “The bill seeks to provide for the establishment of national grazing reserves and stock routes. It is sponsored by Senator Zainab Kure. “It proposes to establish a National Grazing Reserve Commission (NGRC) for the country. The NGRC will be charged with the responsibility of using funds received from the Federal Government to forcefully acquire farmlands from Nigerians in all the 36 States of the country, develop same at government expense through the provision of bore holes, water reservoirs, etc; for the exclusive use of nomadic cattle rearers.  The issue here is very clear wrote Tola. Fulani Herdsmen are cattle farmers. They could as well keep their cattle in ranches. They could devise whatever means like their counterparts in Argentina, Australia and the rest of the civilized world to do their animal husbandry. The men and boys roaming the streets, roads and bushes driving cattle are not the owners of these animals. They are just employees. The owners of these cows like Generals Obasanjo, Nyako, Abdulsalami Abubakar and our president Buhari are big time farmers. They are businessmen. It is immoral to ask tax payers to finance the operations of these businesses. Cattle owners must provide capital through bank loans or whatever means to create their grazing lands in their localities…” Commenting on this elsewhere, I wrote, “If this bill passes, and we in the South sleep walk and allow it, then any Zainab Kure can wake up tomorrow and present a bill to the effect that Nigeria is an Islamic country”.

    What is more important, however, is that President Muhammadu Buhari must, post haste, let  Nigerians and the world know that he is no party to this seeming, aggressive but incipient  recrudescence and rehash of the dead and buried Hausa-Fulani hegemony of yore. One way of doing this, which the Zainab Kure in-your face ploy is not, and will never be, is to propose a meaningful way out of the Fulani herdsmen’s  needless killing of Nigerians in their own farms and homesteads.  Multi-millionaire Cattle owners, who are believed to provide them with arms more sophisticated than what our policemen carry, should provide the wherewithal to do their businesses and stop the  marauding  Fulani killers they have let loose all over Nigeria. It is worse that DSS operatives are now investigating those who killed 3 of them whereas they kill in hundreds, without a whimper from the security agencies.

    The DSS should be told that no Nigerian is superior to another.

    Far from being an ethnic bigot I can, at 70, proudly describe myself as a realist of the first order. We either have a country or we don’t. No part of this country should see the other as subservient to the other in anyway. Indeed, were it so, it would be the other way round. I would like to see a northerner who supported and publicised candidate Buhari more than I did. If there is any, I challenge him or her to let us come out with the facts.

     Enough is enough.

  • Coincidences or the columnist as prompter?

    But it just gladdens the heart that after deeply and reasonably interrogating goings-on in the politics of the country, one is able to offer pragmatic advice on resolving apparent logjams with a view to smoothing the way forward, to those whose responsibility it is to make lives better for all of us.

    I am neither about to gloat nor claim to be a re-incarnation of the redoubtable Mohamed Heykal (23 September 1923 – 17 February 2016), the Egyptian journalist and editor of Al-Ahram who, for more than 50 years, was a highly informed commentator on Arab affairs, using his famed friendship with President Nasser and relationship with Sadat to so uncannily predict the two presidents on both Egyptian and Pan –Arab affairs. But it just gladdens the heart that after deeply and reasonably interrogating goings-on in the politics of the country, one is able to offer pragmatic advice on resolving apparent logjams with a view to smoothing the way forward, to those whose responsibility it is to make lives better for all of us. So has it been for this columnist and it matters nothing whether these were mere coincidences; that is, whether or not the political actors read, or did not read, the articles containing those pieces of advice. That the columnist’s thoughts coincided with the big man’s subsequent actions is more than enough satisfaction for one’s weekly efforts on these pages. One thing is sure though, even if they did not personally read the relevant article, the possibility exists that other persons could very well have mentioned it to them.

    In the article: RE: THIS BUDGET –WHY HEADS MUST ROLE, 2 February, 2016, which was  shortly after it became public knowledge that the 2016 budget had been mercilessly padded, the columnist wrote as follows:

    “Why on earth are Jonathan’s appointees sitting pretty as head of critical agencies of state when he (President Buhari) knew that their track record during the campaigns and presumed voting pattern during the election point unerringly to the fact that they neither believe in his candidacy nor his policies. No, as bona fide Nigerians, nobody is suggesting that they should lose their jobs but for Christ’s sake why were many of these people not moved to less sensitive posts?”

    It was certainly not  difficult for any hard-headed observer of events in our country to know that too many of those in key positions in government during the Jonathan  era owed primary allegiance to him or to the First Lady and, going by what transpired during the campaigns, it was obvious they wanted none of Buhari. It was therefore obvious that, remaining ensconced in those posts, there was nothing they would like more than for President Buhari to fail. This is eloquently attested to by the fact that some of the permanent secretaries he worked with at the commencement of his administration were so disloyal, and corrupt, they were aggressively illegally  lining their pockets and now have questions to answer from the EFCC. In the same vein, it was this disloyalty that largely accounted for the budget padding to show that nothing changed Buhari or not. Happily, the president reacted within 24 hours of that publication but not with just juggling positions. Rather, over 20 of such officials were shown the way out especially from the ancien regime’s propaganda redoubts of the NTA, FRCN, VON, NOA, NBC, and NAN.

    Again, in RE: THIS CHANGE IS KILLING US, March 20, 2016, seeing the total dysfunction within the ruling party and the government arising largely from the intra-party power contestations amongst the legacy parties, I wrote:”Their victory, I surmise should, ordinarily, have strengthened the bond amongst the merging political parties. Unfortunately, there  is a sprinkle of the likes of the ever ambitious Saraki’s and the Dogara’s who have since successfully widened their legislative power grab through political enticement i.e  – a carefully choreographed allotment of committees’ membership and posts. Ever scheming and conspiratorial, they gifted a defeated PDP, via the likes of Ekweremadu and Akpabio, such positions and inherent powers; it now looks like APC is, indeed, the opposition party. About the only way out for the APC, is for the president to know that he may belong to all, but not all belongs to him or love him. He must go back to those God used in bringing this dispensation about”.

    Shortly after these words were written, President Buhari was at the 8th Bola Tinubu Colloquium where he not only congratulated Tinubu on his birthday, but was particularly effusive in commending his role in the APC victory in the 2015 elections. Said President Buhari: “There are very few patriots, alive or departed, who can match the commitment, resilience and creativity that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has, over the past few decades, demonstrated in organising Nigeria’s public life for good.” In an earlier message, he had described Tinubu as a visionary leader, thanking him for creating a formidable opposition party which, within a short period time, ousted a party that had been in power for 16 years. These should give the lie to mischief makers who said Buhari’s ‘I belong to nobody’ statement at his inauguration was aimed at the Jagaban. More fundamentally though, they should go a long way in returning the party to the status ‘quo ante bellum’. The effect of this obvious reconciliation on party cohesion and overall governance  should be enough to see APC change from being a ‘party in government but not in power’, as a fellow columnist recently described it, to both a de jure and, de facto government.

    What would, however, pass for the mother of promptings was also in that same article of 20 March, 2016. Poignantly appreciating what disequilibrium an unsettled Southwest APC could cause in both the region and the nation at large, I  suggested that Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, the party’s ‘numero uno’ leader in the geo-political zone should, like Uncle Bola Ige had intended to do for the AD before he was cut down by enemies of the Yoruba race, do everything  within his power to smoothen all the rough edges within the party in the Southwest adding that as the lodestar and  undisputed pathfinder, he should commence the process of an all-encompassing rapprochement which would, amongst other things, give him a solid home front from which to launch frontally into the party on the national arena, helping to resolve issues in other parts of the country and getting prepared for whatever intra-party, geo-political contestations that may arise in the future.

    Neither Nigerians nor the columnist had long to wait to see evidence of efforts in this direction. Ahead of the 2015 general elections, a thoroughly messy intra-party feud had arisen in the Ogun State wing of the APC occasioned by the very stiff competition for legislative seats especially at the National Assembly. The main protagonists were the state governor, Senator Ibikunle Amosun, and Aremo Segun Osoba, a former governor of the state and the acclaimed party leader in the state, each joined by his subalterns who were, in turn, big players in the party as senators, Reps etc. So bad was the crisis Osoba said not even God could resolve it and promptly left, with his supporters, for another party. You can then imagine the hard work Tinubu, the leader of the party in the Southwest, and others must have put into reconciling the two sides to see Aremo return jubilantly into the party from what he has since described as a sabbatical. Osoba is a lifelong progressive and, in his own words, would remain one for life. Despite that, nobody can doubt his being a highly principled politician. For him to have come back to the party, therefore, a lot of water must have passed under the bridge and without a scintilla of doubt, Asiwaju must have been central to the effort. Even if he did not initiate it, he must have subsequently coordinated the entire process with the assistance of other party leaders like Chief Bisi Akande, Otunba Niyi Adebayo, Ogbeni Rauf Aregbesola, to mention but a few. However, his job of reconciliation, is only half done. Since there is no success without a successor, Asiwaju must now move rapidly, bottom up, to reconcile with all his estranged younger colleagues. He would need them, as much as they need him, going forward, in the man-eats-man jungle that Nigerian politics has become. Also, for development and for the region’s economic integration to proceed uninterrupted, the Southwest also needs such all-round peace within the progressive fold as the dominant political perspective, having effectively banished the Jonathanians to political Siberia.

    I cannot wait to see the Southwest progressive family return to its 2007 status of solid camaraderie.

  • Nigerian public/civil servants as malignant narcissists

    This impunity, this disrespect and total lack of shame on the part of our public/civil servants, is  reprehensible and could only have been the result  of the president’s in-explainable failure to dismiss from office, all those who were implicated in the initial budget padding

    “I often wonder if our country’s problems aren’t simply beyond the capacity of any civilised form of governance. The Nigerian citizenry, not just its politicians, has derailed just as norms had long been re-defined. I have since come to the conclusion that we need to divide the solution to corruption into two phases:
    Phase One – From Today onward.
    Phase Two – Everything before Today.
    There is no point setting today’s thieves after yesterday’s thieves. That will be fighting corruption of yesterday with today’s corrupt officials which will lead us nowhere.
    From Today Onward: all corrupt law enforcement officials, judges, police, customs, immigration, prosecutors, EFCC, ICPC, Civil Defence, FRSC, and the military should be executed in front of their ancestral homes within one week of the commission of the crime. If we need lessons on how to hold speedy trials and execution of criminals, we can invite the Chinese to share their experience with us.
    Over the years, teaching Economics of Corruption at the post graduate level, I have come to the conclusion that the only condition, that is both necessary and sufficient, for corruption to thrive is lawlessness. Once you eliminate corruption in the system that is supposed to enforce the law, corruption itself will be tamed.
    Think about it, you just read about a police man selling guns to armed robbers.” -Dr Hakeem Bakare.

    Let me, first and foremost, seek the readers’ indulgence to define narcissism as the ‘excessive love of oneself”, the very decease underpinning most of the massive systemic corruption enveloping Nigeria today; one in which public service thieves, and politicians, no longer steal in millions, but billions. Given what now passes muster as Public/Civil (Evil) servants in Nigeria, the likes of Chiefs Simeon Adebo, Jerome Udoji and Sunday Awoniyi, all of blessed memory,  must be squirming in their graves. The other day, Nigerians saw a contrite President Muhammadu Buhari apologise to Nigerians but not so with our  all-powerful,  self-loving public servants who continue to show nothing but disdain and  outright disrespect  for Nigerians. Were this not so, a member of the Senate Appropriation Committee would not have claimed, again, only this past week, that their committee discovered a FRESH (emphasis mine) padding of over N500 billion in the budgetary proposals for MDAs and Service Wide Votes in spite of the overwhelming hue and cry by Nigerians over the initial padding which probably ran into trillions. This impunity, this disrespect and total lack of shame on the part of our public/civil servants, is  reprehensible and could only have been the result  of the president’s in-explainable failure to dismiss from office, all those who were implicated in the initial budget padding. But nothing epitomises the Nigerian public servant more than the story below.

    That national budget embarrassment of a few weeks back pales into insignificance compared with the shenanigans allegedly going on at the Central Bank of Nigeria to properly situate which, I paraphrase Sam Omatseye in a recent lecture where he defined impunity as the impossibility of bringing the perpetrators of violations to account- whether in criminal, civil or administrative proceedings, arising from a failure by state to investigate violations and take appropriate measures in respect of the perpetrators.

    By the time readers are fully seized of the inherent illegalities in the matter under discussion, their only question would be: are these people above Nigerian laws? I don’t think anything would compare with the cheer effrontery of the Emefiele-led management of the Central Bank of Nigeria which, in its now well-known tradition of illegalities, allegedly surreptitiously recruited over 100 children and relations of the Nigerian high, and mighty, against all known employment protocols in the Nigerian public service. These are the children of  persons who had lived  literally all their  lives, or are even currently living large, on the country who, were they considerate, should have spared a thought for the children of  the poor and needy who remain unemployed many years after graduation. These are people in the same opportunistic class of those who EFCC alleged bought houses costing hundreds of millions of naira for their children who, in turn, rejected them for better ones. They did not insult Nigerians in this manner because their children could ever lack anything but simply because they have this stupid notion of entitlement over and above every other Nigerian.

    And, once again, nowhere do you find this nauseating attitude as much as amongst the northern elite who not only assume a superiority over and above other Nigerians but actually believe they can readily get away with murder, no matter how heinous. They pose like they are the most religious but probe deep to see how unfeeling they are towards the poor and down trodden, even in their very neighbourhood. It was this lack of empathy for the poor around them that led some disconcerted young men, especially in the Northeast,  to believe that education is ‘haram’ since going to acquire degrees did not make them any better than the ordinary almajiris. That is how we eventually ended up with Boko Haram with all the disequilibrium it has brought on Nigeria. In other words, the northern elite, by being so selfish, sowed the wind but Nigeria as a whole is today reaping the whirlwind, not only in the billions of dollars spent fighting terrorists, but  much more in the countless deaths and the millions of their own poor and needy now living as internally displaced persons. It is so unnerving that you hardly find these super rich coming to the aid of these victims of their actions, preferring instead, to make their care the sole responsibility of government.

    I urge readers keen on knowing the full story of CBN’s impunity, as well as its effete defence, to Google saharareporters.com to see who and who took advantage of  us, poor Nigerians,  and where a preponderance of them come from. You would discover that among them are those who are, indeed, richer than some states in the country; persons who can very well appoint these heirs over pampered children managing directors of companies the very day they graduated.

    The poor is treated this unfairly because we have a Central Bank Governor who, having permitted himself to be used  anyhow by the former government, is now only too willing to do just about anything to retain his high office. Those who Google the story should please look out for the serial illegalities committed against extant laws in Nigeria. Not only did the CBN allegedly tweak the employees’ names, turning their surnames into middle names, it completely turned a blind eye to the government’s federal character policy. By the way, what names are on these super brats’ certificates? Can a trained head of a personnel department, in any organisation whatever, let these anomalies pass? Worse still is the fact that although this sordid story has trended for over a month, with the name of the president’s niece opportunistically thrown in, mum has been the word from the presidency. It behoves his media aides, who cannot claim ignorance of the putrid story, to please urgently draw the president’s attention to what could be its putrefying consequences. The other day, the Minister of Education appointed 3 or 4 Vice-Chancellors from Kano; it should not be heard again that President Buhari’s niece is a beneficiary of this mother of illegalities. Nigerians believe too much in him to let that happen.  Indeed, niece or no niece, the president should immediately call the bluff of these social climbers and order the sack of all those so illegally employed and due comeuppance visited on all the implicated CBN staff. Those who wanted to take advantage of a country of 170 million people will have their conscience to contend with; that is assuming they still have.

     

  • How the Supreme Court inadvertently turned elections to war in Nigeria

    How the Supreme Court inadvertently turned elections to war in Nigeria

    But then what are the consequences of upholding the result of an election which the entire world saw was characterised by unprecedented violence, murders, beheadings, decapitation and incineration of human beings, even when the electoral law provides that such elections must be invalidated? 

    Is it remotely possible that none of our eminent Justices of the Supreme Court has ever heard of the Electoral (Amendment) Bill 2015 which Femi Falana (SAN) said legalised the use of card readers at elections? According to Falana, prior to the amendment, section 52 of the Electoral Act had prohibited the INEC from the use of any form of electronic voting.

    But following the amendment of the provision, the INEC has been conferred with the power to determine the procedure to use for any election. Specifically, section 52 states that “voting at an election shall be in accordance with the procedure determined by the Independent National Electoral Commission.” With the amendment of the law the INEC was on terra firma when it determined to use the card reader machine for the accreditation of voters for the 2015 general election. As confirmation, Falana quoted a socially responsible Ogbuinya JCA who, in the case of APC v Kolawole Agbaje did not only pronounce but traced the genesis of the card reader when he said: “The evolution of the concept of smart card readers is a familiar one. It came to being during the last general election held in March and April, 2015 in Nigeria. On this core it is a nascent procedure injected into our infant and fledging electoral system to ensure credible and transparent election. Specifically, the erudite judge said,  “it is aimed to concretise our fragile process of accreditation – the keystone of any suffrage”. With the above as background, what are Nigerians expected to believe when Governor Wike, in a moment of unguarded enthusiasm, committed the unreflecting gaffe at a Thanksgiving service that he owes his victory at the Supreme Court to former Governor Odili who we all know has a not inconsiderable relationship with the apex court – who served as his legal consultant, telling him where to go and who to meet, all of which he dutifully did? Or when, in a yet unrebutted allegation, a non flippant Dr Dakuku Peterside claimed that Wike severally met with some members of the Supreme Court panel of Justices both here in Nigeria, and in faraway Dubai?

     In a well-written article in the Tuesday, 22 March, 2016 edition of this newspaper, Joseph Uwua, a legal expert, could not help describing Supreme Court judgments as a cobweb of intrigues; a conclusion he then proceeded to prove with copious references to past decisions of the apex court.

     If neither Uwua nor the columnist would have the temerity to accuse my Lord Justices of any underhand dealings in the Rivers governorship election case in which they reversed the decisions of the lower courts – it was a majority decision at the Appeal Court – matters of corruption in the Nigerian judiciary have been severally commented upon by those who should know. While the late Honourable Justice Kayode Esho, unarguably one of Nigeria’s most distinguished and honest judges ever, had cause to bemoan happenings at the election petitions tribunals through which he said some judges have become billionaires overnight, Aare Afe Babalola, SAN, another stellar and distinguished legal mind, and Chairman Chartered Institute of Arbitrators of Nigeria, could not hold back lamenting that “time was when a lawyer could predict the likely outcome of a case because of the facts, the law and the brilliance of the lawyers that handled the case. Today, things have changed and nobody can be sure. Nowadays, politicians would text the outcome of the judgment to their party men before the judgment is delivered and prepare them ahead of time for celebration”. Major -General Ishola Williams (Retd), Chairman of Transparency International (TI) Nigeria, a man widely believed to have the moral authority to speak on these things, not only corroborated these eminent legal authorities but went ahead to ask judges to challenge him if they can.

    I am personally prepared to accept that the Lord Justices acted without being in any way compromised, knowing full well they are serving God and humanity and would one day be called upon to account for their actions. But then what are the consequences of upholding the result of an election which the entire world saw was characterised by unprecedented violence, murders, beheadings, decapitation and incineration of human beings, even when the electoral law provides that such elections must be invalidated?

     What I am saying, in essence, is that with their decision, the Supreme Court has, unguardedly, endorsed violence as a legitimate tool in our elections. Elections in Nigeria have, ipso facto, been turned to a theatre of war. It is, indeed, a sad day, given the laudable achievements and mileage the INEC recorded under the sterling leadership of Professor

     Jega in making elections far less prone to violence. These are milestones which the decision has completely wiped out as we saw in the rerun election in the same state this past week. Elections have again regressed to the analogue jungle in which voters registers are easily compromised.  There are times I wonder if truly it is the law that is the ass when reflecting on many of the decisions in our courts, especially in election petition matters which the late Justice Esho said had turned many judges into instant billionaires. One also begins to wonder whether, unlike Ogbuinya JCA, some of these justices were somewhere extra-terrestrial, when the issues they are called upon to adjudicate, before God, happened. Who, in Nigeria, would not remember that Rivers State was suddenly transmogrified to a killing field ahead of, and during, the 2015 elections? Who, in this country can claim not to have heard how, in bright daylight, in Madam Patience Jonathan’s birthplace, the entire Dakuku campaign became fair game for thugs and militants who opened fire on that humongous body of humanity? Who could have forgotten how, acting on orders from above, security forces looked the other way as PDP thugs went on a killing spree, beheading, decapitating and torching the remains of APC members who they slaughtered in their tens and twenties? Okay, if legal aficionados would like to ask whether or not these issues were pleaded at the Supreme Court – and of course they were at the lower courts, shouldn’t we ask what constitutes the essence of law? Must it always, as in the instant case, be made to serve only the interests of the filthy rich, the influential and the connected?            The dangerous consequences of that decision came to full bloom at the rerun elections last week. Consequent upon that Supreme Court judgment it will be extremely difficult to see, anywhere, a more violent electoral jurisdiction than Nigeria. Ahead of the elections, Governor Wike had severally threatened to kill and maim, advising some people to write their wills before coming. So violent were the elections that even as you read this, more than a whole week after,  INEC has not been able to conclude the election process in about 8 Local Government Areas and as has become the norm in Rivers State, there were beheadings and killings aplenty, even of security personnel. I doubt if Governor Wike knows that all these do not ennoble him either as state governor or as the Chief Security Officer of the state.

     He was, no doubt, emboldened by the Supreme Court decision which turned a blind eye to the killings and all the violent crimes that occurred during the general elections in the state in 2015. All things considered, it is necessary that all levels of courts be mindful of the social consequences of their decisions because for law to be truly law, it must serve the public good.

  • Re: This “Change” is killing us

    Re: This “Change” is killing us

    Dripping with bile and inundated with a list of how, 10months after, Nigerians now wallow in unprecedented suffering, I was moved to ask whether some people really thought they elected  a magician, a Professor Peller  who, with a silver bullet, will cure Nigeria of all  her  problems at a go.

    This past week was a particularly interesting one on our e-forum as we discussed the above topic which was the caption of an open letter to President Muhammadu Buhari. Dripping with bile and inundated with a list of how, 10months after, Nigerians now wallow in unprecedented suffering, I was moved to ask whether some people really thought they elected  a magician, a Professor Peller  who, with a silver bullet, will cure Nigeria of all  her  problems at a go.  There has,  of  recent, been a slew of such letters, incidentally, literally all authored by persons from the same part of the country; some claiming they prefer  the Jonathanian regime of  corruption to what now obtains in Nigeria. Since I do not have their permission, contributors’ names, except mine, will not be given. In summary, the letter, like others, is a damning critique of the Buhari administration and, corroborating its claims, a member wrote: ‘Buhari has a one-year grace period, starting from his inauguration. A grace period for him to demonstrate performance inertia. The masses are not happy with him so far. His electoral value has been dwindling in the last six months”. He was immediately challenged by another to speak for himself and not for the generality of  Nigerians. Wondering why anybody would take these 3-a penny letters and their authors seriously, a Diasporan member interjected : “these  wailing wailers are also the thieves who are being exposed and tried. It would make sense for them to wail. It wouldn’t make sense for us to listen to them. A ruined Rome was not built in a day. The Ebelechukwu disciples ruined Nigeria. It would take years to rebuild.” Stung by that massive shellacking, the member who had given President Buhari a year of grace hit back, widening the canvass to take on both Buhari and his party headlong: “the southern division of APC is not really in power. They have been checkmated by their northern associates within the party. Chief Oyegun, Chief Akande and Alhaji Bola Tinubu have been very quiet for some time. They are probably attending a refresher course on political theory and political strategy, in preparation for 2019. In terms of memorandum of understanding on power sharing, party ideology, party manifestos and cardinals, the APC merger was not properly consummated. The party never thought that they could win, hence their poor preparation for governance. Also, APC as a party thrives on propaganda. The effects of their poor conceptualisation of governance are apparent now. If a selected team of southern APC members are deeply involved in the kitchen cabinet of this government, Buhari will not be making these avoidable mistakes. In public, as in business administration, when a manager assumes a position of authority, he/she inherits the associated assets and liabilities of that institution or position. Blaming your predecessor is not acceptable because it is expected that you will take charge, you will start on a clean slate and perform, based on predetermined goals and objectives.” Performance evaluation in an organisation, he said further, “is not based on EFFORTS but on RESULTS. All these blame game and name calling are mere propaganda.”

    It was at this point I weighed-in showing my disappointment with both the president and his party even as I appreciate the militating factors, especially Jonathan’s Augean stable and the slump in oil prices. I wrote: ‘I agree with many of the points raised but disagree where you think that after 16 years, and the bottomless hole PDP put Nigeria, a successor party would simply close its eyes to the past. Where in the civilised world is that done? What killed off Jeb Bush campaign if not the consequences of the Bush wars? In view of  the government’s avoidable errors, however, many must have seen the president’s mistake in appointing an insular,  literally all-northern kitchen cabinet which has shut him out of much needed  quality advice as many of these persons are inexperienced  in public service. Their incompetence has merely opened  wider the doors to the likes of El Rufai and sundry northerners we may never know, calling the shots in almost total exclusion of those from the South, who not only  helped in conceptualising the merger, and did as much as any other person, if not more, in ensuring its victory. I also agree with you that those mentioned in your post seem hardly involved in decision making today. The result is that whether or not President Buhari contests in 2019, this is bound to have serious repercussions for the APC. Indeed, with the ruckus in Kaduna and Kano, we are already beginning to see ambitious northern politicians angling for that position ahead of 2019.  Matters will become more worrisome for the APC when you factor in the likes of Saraki, with his many problems which he says are political, Dogara, with how he generously gifted PDP members chairmanship of critical House committees, as well as their soul mates in the National Assembly and elsewhere, who are now most probably already out of  the party. These are some of the reasons PDP can now begin to hope ahead 2019 although that is bound to be a chimera given how prostrate they laid the country in their 16 years of the locust. Unlike you, I see nothing wrong in not fully adumbrating all the issues among the merging political parties ahead of their victory as defeating a powerful, seemingly omnipotent Jonathan  and the octopoidal ‘largest rally in Africa’ was enough motivation. Their victory, I surmise, should have strengthened the bond amongst the merging political parties. Unfortunately, there were a sprinkle of the likes of the ever ambitious Sarakis and the Dogaras who have since successfully widened their grasp through political enticement. Ever scheming and conspiratorial, they gifted a defeated PDP, via the likes of Ekweremadu and Akpabio, such positions and inherent powers it now looks like APC is, indeed, the opposition party. About the only way out for the APC, is for the president to know that he may belong to all, but not all belongs to him or love him. He must go back to those God used in bringing this dispensation about.

    Of a truth, mistakes were made on both sides. Even if Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu had some recalcitrant younger colleagues with whom he disagreed, he should have used his well known perspicacity to win them over; not try to deny them the opportunity of being part of a government to whose victory they hugely contributed, as was widely believed. Agba ti o binu, lomo e npo jojo – it is the elder who forgives that has children/followers aplenty. Asiwaju, like Uncle Bola Ige, had intended to do, i.e return to the Southwest to shore up the Alliance for Democracy (AD) before he was cut down by enemies of the Yoruba race, should now reconcile with these young men who I know appreciate him and hold him in great esteem. He is a Lodestar, our undisputed Pathfinder and, as he preached at the launch of Chief Lanre Razak’s autobiography this past week, he must continue to make that sacrifice. Once he has solidified the home front, then he can go out, pan-Nigeria, and together with other leaders of the party, help put out the fires now simmering in places like Kano, Kaduna and Edo. Ondo State, in particular, should be of concern to him as APC must win the coming governorship election. There is need for a very transparent, totally unimpeachable process to be put in place. It is only in these ways that APC can re-invent itself, and help President Buhari to succeed. Finally, I must make the point again, that the president must remove all appointees of the last administration holding critical positions because their loyalty is to the former president and his wife – as they all made good in those posts but they should be replaced only by persons from their states of origin who believe in, and would like to see President Buhari succeed. A lot of sabotage is still going on in government as we saw in the budget padding and it remains completely inexplicable that the president refused to sack those found complicit in that horrendous act. The president must also be guided by the Federal Character Act in his future appointments if he wants to be seen as president for all’.

  • Are these people truly learned?

    Unfortunately the more you look at their new behaviour, acts or what they say, you begin to wonder if the word ‘learned’ has not taken a new meaning

    Writing in his column of 6 March, 2016 in this newspaper, Biodun Jeyifo opined: “almost without exception, most newspaper and news magazine columnists – the commentariat – nurse the illusion that what they/we write collectively has a decisive role to play in the fate of the nation, especially with regard to the terrible condition of the masses of the poor and the underprivileged in our country. He went further to suggest that about the only way for columnists to meaningfully impact society is “if what we write as pundits move the masses to act, to intervene…”  I have always known that between columnists and successive Nigerian governments, it has always been a dialogue with the deaf, and that is if they read you at all. In recognition of this, I have many times directed my exhortations on these pages to the Nigerian people directly: a good example being my no less than three articles  about” STORMING THE BASTILLE” in which I exhorted  the Nigerian hoi polloi  which Jeyifo  describes as  -“the bottom layers of the socio-economic order, the truly disadvantaged, “the wretched of the earth” – to move against a thoroughly anti-people  National Assembly,  with its members  ever desirous of milking the country dry as in its on-going effort to amend the constitution to gift themselves   hundreds of millions in pension payments,  after many of them, as former governors,  had thrown their states into an intractable debt peonage. Beyond what we write moving the masses to act, Jeyifo did not prescribe that columnists should, willy nilly, also be at the barricades. With the help of hindsight, therefore, the failure of the Leaderless Russian revolution of 1905, Jeyifo’s suggestion would then imply that there is a need for an intervening corps of activists to eventuate postulations by columnists since the masses appear incapable of acting of their own.  Fortunately, we do not lack such activists in the country; they will only have to add this to their repertoire anew.

    However, in order to ensure that I do not indulge in any sterile punditry today, I am directing this piece to a group/ individuals that we have been led, all this long, to believe, are learned. Unfortunately the more you look at their new behaviour, acts or what they say, you begin to wonder if the word ‘learned’ has not taken a new meaning. Take for instance the interesting case of some money which the EFCC insists was paid to a judge’s bank account.  Not only was the  agency reportedly told, initially, that the money was an assistance by some unnamed friends  towards the burial of the judge’s relation, the same source would later come round with a  “superior affidavit” to the effect that the account to which the money was paid was, indeed, not  the judge’s, but somebody else bearing the same names. That should remind us of one of Ibori’s many cases.  Nor was that all. In explaining another allegation, we were told that monies paid to another judge, by the same person or his chambers, were for ‘client recruitment’ services, rendered by the now serving judge when, aeons ago, he was a member of that chamber.  And this money kept rolling into the judge’s account from 2012 to 2015? Where is the logic, or ‘knowledge’ in all these or really, where is the learning? And, Pray, what do they take Nigerians for, fools?

    But the above pales into insignificance when one hears Olisa Agbakoba, a highly regarded member of the Nigerian bar and member of the Nigerian Judicial Council, to boot, weigh in on the issue of corruption in the judiciary as he says judges could not be blamed for taking money from lawyers because many of them are in financial difficulties and cannot meet most of their needs. This he attributed to their poor pay asking whether Nigerians expect a judge whose mother is dying of a terminal illness to be thinking of the Code of Conduct. This has naturally elicited reactions from many quarters. I quote below one of such reactions in the hope that these ‘learned’ people will benefit from the views of we, their ‘unlearned’ compatriots, learn to respect us and also, as a group, strive for much needed moral re-armament amongst their ilk.

    “I am hugely disappointed and terribly scandalised by these comments from Mr Olisa Agbakoba. Does it mean that we have over-estimated these guys these many years? Now, the chicken is coming home to roost. The wind is blowing and showing the rump of the chicken! Statements like this, if made by Ricky Tarfa? or his donating friends, one will not bat an eyelid but coming from an Agbakoba, it is as ridiculous as it is worrying. Should we then ask that his accounts be scrutinised too? Is the judiciary the only poorly funded organ in Nigeria? Does this ‘excuse’ permit corruption? Selling justice should then be justified? Are judges the only poorly paid public officers in this country? Would Mr Agbakoba excuse an armed robber who gives a seemingly pathetic story which he claims warranted his action? And would Agbakoba ask that he be freed because of the extenuating circumstances surrounding his criminal action? What kind of country and people are we turning into? Where are the values that formed the bedrock of our growing up years? Somebody, please tell Mr Agbakoba that he goofed, and badly, too! Why worry about corruption if we can give excuses for some perpetrators? How much of consideration will Mr Agbakoba give the Nigerian worker earning the pitiable minimum wage whose child needs a kidney transplant and goes to rob his millionaire boss and kills him in the process? What a sad day today has become?!!There are two great teachers of lawyers I sympathise with in this season of anomie – Professors Oyebode and Sagay. I can only imagine their pains!  Oh, we don’t seem to know what good looks like anymore!

     How sad and shameful!”

    ‘ABOVE WHISPERS’ DEBUTS

    It took my meeting Erelu Bisi Adeleye -Fayemi at the 15th Annual Lecture of Women in Business, Management and Public Service (WIMBIZ) where Dr Kayode Fayemi, her loving husband, and Minister of Solid Minerals, was the Guest Speaker, in Lagos this past week, to remind me that I had long wanted to ‘announce’ the arrival of ABOVE WHISPERS’ blog, whose debut emerged a few weeks back. Erelu Bisi Fayemi needs no introduction, nationally or internationally, in the areas in which ABOVE WHISPERS will concentrate its emphasis. An expert in Gender Studies, she is an activist, writer and fundraiser in feminist and human rights movements. She co-founded the African Women’s Development Fund (AWDF), the first Africa-wide grant-making organisation supporting women’s movement in Africa and served as its first Chief Executive Officer. Between 1991 and 2001, Erelu Fayemi was a Director of Akina Mama Wa Afrika (AMwA), an international development organisation for African women, based in the United Kingdom and with offices in Uganda and Nigeria. She is a former First Lady of Ekiti State, Nigeria.

    Before it debuted, Erelu was kind enough to have invited me on board as an ‘occasional guest blogger’, writing on anything I may wish.

    The blog will serve the following purposes:

    1. An opportunity for people to engage in discussions on politics, social justice, development, financial security, women’s rights, health, entrepreneurship, faith, parenting, relationships, etc.
    2. Learning from experienced people in various fields of expertise who will share their knowledge as guest contributors.
    3. A forum to find and engage with other people in an atmosphere devoid of rants or passing judgment on others.
    4. Showcase some of the unique ways we build communities in Africa through our personal and collective philanthropy that don’t get told in the international media.
    5. A place to mentor younger people as we share advice and experience.
    6. A safe space for women to: ‘exhale’ by telling their stories (in person or anonymously) so that we can learn from their triumphs and challenges, and in return, they will know that they are not alone.

    Above Whispers went online first week, February 2016, and I’m trusting compatriots to tap into what is sure to be a goldmine of information, education and mentoring.

    – Kudos Erelu.

  • Is Buhari’s anti-corruption war anexercise in futility?

    Is Buhari’s anti-corruption war anexercise in futility?

    But it would appear that President Buhari is shielding the former president from being invited to testify, even if only as a witness. 

    – The ‘Goodluck Jonathan Alibi’ diplomatic pussyfooting?

    “What component of our education is missing in the upbringing of our political leaders, who fight in the respected chambers of the national assembly, who loot the national treasury, so much so that 500 or so of them take 25% of the resources meant for 150 million of us? What component of our education is missing in the development of our Governors, who when caught in the net of EFCC, plea bargain or run away or use the court to cut the rest of us to pieces?  I ask what component of our education is missing in the upbringing of our parents that make them jam JAMB, squeeze the neck of NECO and fabricate certificates so their children can gain admission into our centers of decomposed educational excellence. What component of our education is missing in the training of our civil servants and contractors that make them inflate contracts, execute budget in the real sense of EXECUTION, and fiddle with documents to filch our finances. Finally, what component of education is missing in the upbringing of our pastors and preachers that make them defecate on the altar of celestial adulation” – Professor  Oyewale Tomori, FAS, former Vice-Chancellor, Redeemer University, and President, Nigerian Academy of Science in *BUILDING A NEW GENERATION UNIVERSITY: PROSPECTS AND PROBLEMS”.

    One needs not be an economist to know that Nigeria’s current economic circumstances demand a meeting of economically literate minds – not the all-comers jamboree some Nigerian Labour Union leaders are canvassing – to clinically interrogate our problems and plot a way out, at least in the short term, since only a fundamental restructuring of Nigeria can cure its many ills. Persons with whom I have interacted on the issue can attest to my vibrant enthusiasm about it all. But things must be put in their proper perspective and so it must be said that corruption sits atop every factor that brought Nigeria to its present circumstances. A good reading of our history, spanning, especially the regimes of General Ibrahim Babangida through Abacha, Abubakar, Obasanjo ( second coming) and President Goodluck Jonathan will affirm the view that dealers, rather than leaders, ruled Nigeria throughout that long period. This is, no doubt, a grave charge but I will proceed to prove it and before heading to the courts, they should first do Nigerians a small favour: go on prime time television and invite President Muhammadu Buhari to subject their records as Head of State to a forensic audit, the report of which should be published in at least ten national newspapers in English, Yoruba, Hausa, and Igbo languages. If they come out smelling like a thousand roses, they can, in addition to their legal victories, banish me to the Gulag Archipelago.
    In the first place, these are a group of people who, after opportunistically getting into office, rather than diversify the economy and moderate their greed, luxuriated in, and mercilessly frittered away the billions of petro dollars that poured endlessly into the country’s coffers. Rather than encourage massive investment in agriculture and solid minerals, their greater concern was for amassing huge personal fortunes that today see them holed up, almost solitarily, on hilltop castles. Yet, in spite of their bulging wealth, they remain so conscienceless they still collectively earn billions in unearned pensions and sundry benefits at the expense of the poor – monies they really do not need, nor are morally entitled to. But that was not even half the story of those Dr Jide Oluwajuyitan calls “Dealers as Leaders”, in his column in The Nation of Thursday, 3 March 2016, where he wrote as follows: “The real tragedy is that Buhari is yet to start the war on corruption. All he has done so far is attacking the symptoms of a deep rooted malaise unleashed on our nation through Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) and Obasanjo mismanaged privatisation programme. The former allowed Babangida’s ‘army of anything is possible’ to pillage our land like a conquered territory resulting in the betrayal of the vision of our founding fathers. Part of the fallout is the depreciation of our naira from Babangida’s pre-structural adjustment programme value of N1 to US$1 to today’s over N300 to the US$1. With the latter, Obasanjo presided over the sales of N100b assets acquired over 50 years (1958 and 2008) for a paltry $1.6b to dealers and wheelers who embarked on asset stripping to buy private jets and build skyscrapers instead of running the industries they bought at next to nothing, efficiently”. President Buhari cannot close his eyes to these, talk less of Halliburton and co, if he wants to win the anti corruption war. Too much is known of the dark goggled Kano general to delay us here and it will take his immediate successor, General Abubakar, to take up my challenge to prove his complete innocence. Their subalterns, as military governors all over the country did no less harm to the country’s financial an economic well-being – the scandals surrounding the sales of Cocoa Industries Limited under the Babangida liberalisation policy and the Ajaokuta Steel Complex during Obasanjo privatisation drive readily call to question the loyalty of the two to our nation, whatever the protestations to the contrary.
    Other individuals, even inanimate organisations like banks have been used in stealing the country blind. For instance, each and every penny of our stolen trillions went through Nigerian banks, one of which is known to have illegally helped a government agency to transfer huge sums of money to the accounts of some of the agency’s executives who thereby succeeded in stealing large sums. To imagine that these are the stolen monies for which Nigerian banks turned our mothers of tomorrow to well dressed prostitutes chasing after these lousy irritants. Nigerians can wait no more to see some of these banks heavily penalised and their executives hauled into jails if President Buhari really wants to make a success of this war that has clearly defined him.
    The same day that Oluwajuyitan wrote, a usually very restrained Emeritus Professor Jide Osuntokun could not help writing as follows in his column in the same newspaper: “The kind of looting we are being told happened is enough to depress any sane and patriotic Nigerian. The level of looting poses existential threat to this republic. In China, some of what happened in the recent past would have attracted the ultimate punishment (death). Some of the stories sound like they are from Ali baba and the 40 thieves. People walk into the office of the National Security Adviser, sign a piece of paper, and walk out with a mandate to go to the CBN or banks where government has money to go and collect billions for some spurious work for government or the ruling party or for no work at all! Nigerian oil was sold without the treasury being credited with the proceeds. People have come out to say their accounts were credited with huge amount of money without their knowledge or without having performed any assignments for government. Billions if not trillions were shared among party bigwigs as if people were playing the game of monopoly with the nation’s money. Government’s decision to bring the guilty parties to book had better been hastened and speeded up before people lose their patience. Money taken from these economic saboteurs had better be deployed to pay the millions of Nigerian miserably awaiting the payment of their salaries and pensions.”
    Another reason for the lingering fear that informed the title of this article is what Stephanie Findlay of AFP calls: “the Goodluck Jonathan Alibi”. This alibi, already pleaded by Metuh in his money laundering no case submission, and according to informed sources, former National Security Adviser, Col. Dasuki would also plead, is that both men were obeying President Jonathan’s orders. But it would appear that President Buhari is shielding the former president from being invited to testify, even if only as a witness. This is said to be on account of a so-called pledge to Jonathan by him on account of the former’s concession telephone call as if, with the President Gbagbo example, he had a choice after Obasanjo had earlier drawn his attention to Gbagbo’s travails. I am sure the president needs not be told that if any of these cases miscarries, there goes his anti-corruption war. And he should please put Nigerian survival first, before any diplomatic pussyfooting.
    However, whichever way President Muhammadu Buhari chooses to be remembered by history, is strictly in his hands.

  • Wither Jonathan’s intervention fund to Universities: Did it survive the elections?

    Wither Jonathan’s intervention fund to Universities: Did it survive the elections?

    Wike, it claims, “diverted  resources from the TETFUND and swindled  the Universal Basic Education Fund of massive amounts of money in addition to diverting huge sums from the Ministry of Education budgets in four years while he served as the minister of state for education and later as acting Minister of Education”.

    “The immediate effect of effectively implementing the above recommendations will be a single official foreign exchange market with all players (buyers, sellers, dealers, government) adhering to the same set of rules and regulations. The parallel market would die a natural death, and there will be an efficient pricing mechanism with a single exchange rate. This in turn will lead to an effective and efficient management of our foreign exchange reserves, and will enhance the attraction of foreign exchange into the system from other sources. Putting the tax and incentive mechanism in place will have the combined effect of encouraging supply and penalising the frivolous use of our scarce foreign exchange. This also creates a new source of revenue for the government, and acts as a check on those who would normally cheat on import-duty payments. The economic impact will be appreciation or depreciation, but not a devaluation of the value of the naira. Any attempt to devalue the currency for the time being would amount to treating an ailment without a proper diagnosis. In fact, many of these issues have been with us for over 35 years. They are not going away until we take a firm stance towards rendering the underground foreign exchange market insignificant and irrelevant” – An absolutely miniscule part of Femi Pedro’s wide-ranging suggestions in his article:  “Buhari And The Solution To The Currency Quagmire”.

    I suggest that the article be immediately brought to the attention of President Buhari who Nigerians know has the needed political will to rescue the economy.

    ASUU – the association of Nigerian university teachers – has fought truly momentous battles whose scars litter literally everywhere – from grave yards to exiles: from ruptured families to promising lives that got immolated at mid season. Battles against truly demonic, anti-intellectual Heads of State posing as friends of the intellect and adorning their rule with some of the glittering lights of the academic elite nor can I ever forget the peremptory expurgation of the teachers and their families from their homes by our youngest ever Head of State. If anything surprises me about this principled, long suffering association, it is the fact that none of its executive leadership, which always bear the brunt of its many struggles, has deemed it fit to commission that its titanic struggles be etched in a book for history. That struggle was at a time demonised by a truly demagogic bureaucracy as a fight for increase in salaries to buy fridges – a wicked parody of ‘fringe benefits’ which resonated very badly with a largely illiterate Nigerian population. Happily, this turned out a Pyrrhic victory for the regime when ASUU changed tactics and concentrated its struggles, not on benefits, fringe or not, but on the either non-existing, or thoroughly, degraded infrastructure in our institutions of higher learning, when research grants tapped out and sciences were being taught like literature and you could see a First Class graduate of Chemistry who had never seen a spectrophotometer. These went on for  many agonising decades, most of them during absolutely brutal and murderous military regimes, but the struggle which saw the federal government capturing state universities amongst universities to be assisted in infrastructural procurement and general amelioration of their facilities, must hold a special place for ASUU. It deserves to be celebrated not only by its members but it must equally be chalked up as one of the greatest achievements of the President Goodluck Jonathan administration, a truly commendable act which was easily explained off by the president himself not only being a PhD degree holder but a former university lecturer.

    What followed in the universities were more books in the libraries, generous research grants, increased attendance at learned conferences and a phenomenal increase in ICT procurement in addition to glittering campuses dotted with beautiful new buildings.

    Unfortunately,  that is where the good news ended, giving way to a still ongoing orgy of harassment and gnashing of teeth; of threats of foreclosure of collaterals by banks, where they have not yet sold them off, as well as a horde of supplier creditors making life an absolute hell for the university contractors who built those eye popping structures who remain unpaid for upwards of 15 -18 months after the universities have taken over the projects, commissioned them at great and grand events and have since put them to use. Unfortunately, the universities are almost completely helpless in pushing the payments; a fact which is sure to make many of their projects suffer in future as contractors would like to insist on better payment terms or deliberately pad their quotes. Many of the contractors are, today, languishing in heavy indebtedness with collateral consequences to their state of health.

    Before deciding to write this piece, I made some discreet inquiries and two things emerged: one hopeless, the other not so helpless. The first was that a large portion of the fund most probably suffered the fate of the 2.4 billion dollars earmarked for arms procurement but for which a former National Security Adviser is now standing trial. According to this source, both the presidential campaign, and a particular governorship campaign would not have been half as colourful without the intervention fund being thoroughly misapplied -apologies Admiral Augustus Aikhomu of blessed memory. I was told severally that if this is true, it would not be the former president’s fault if associates, indeed his appointees, decided to help in funding his campaign. Concerning the then Minister of Education, my attention was drawn to what was described as a yet un-rebutted allegation against Governor Wike by The Peoples Coalition Against Corruption, an anti-graft group, which has urged the federal government and anti-corruption agencies to investigate him. According to the group in a statement signed by Peter Iloagbeze, the governor is accused of massive theft spanning five years. Wike, it claims, “diverted  resources from the TETFUND and swindled  the Universal Basic Education Fund of massive amounts of money in addition to diverting huge sums from the Ministry of Education budgets in four years while he served as the minister of state for education and later as acting Minister of Education”. For both the anti-corruption war, but more for Governor Wike’s integrity, it is my considered view that the anti-corruption agencies should investigate these serious allegations. It is, however, apposite to add that my inquiries further revealed that while contractors hired by TETFUND had been paid, those to be paid directly through the intervention fund, which was warehoused directly at the ministry, remain unpaid.

    The information which should, however, bring smiles to the contractors’ faces, particularly in a government being driven by the CHANGE mantra, is the one to the effect that the money is not lost after all. Rather, I was told, the money was placed in an escrow account at the CBN.  It is hoped that this is the true position of things.  I also learnt, authoritatively, that the Ministry of Education has, in fact, conducted appropriate inspection tours of the various projects which, in any case, would not have been accepted, commissioned and put into use by the universities, if they were in any way substandard.

    All that remains to be done now, one would hope, is for the Hon. Minister for Education to ensure that everything is done to end the contractors’ misery by effecting their payments without any further delay. It should be one more reason for them, and Nigerians, in general, to thank God for both the CHANGE and the Change Agent.

  • Re-this budget: Heads must just roll

    Re-this budget: Heads must just roll

    If the president is, understandably, too busy, a document as important  as his first ever budget  should have been supervised by either  his deputy or the chairman of  his economic  team?

    “Why on earth are Jonathan’s appointees sitting pretty as head of critical agencies of state when he (President Buhari) knew that their track record during the campaigns and presumed voting pattern during the election point unerringly to the fact that they neither believe in his candidacy nor his policies. No, as bona fide Nigerians, nobody is suggesting that they should be made to lose their jobs but for Christ’s sake why were many of these people not moved to less sensitive posts?”

    So wrote this column last week and our listening president did not delay: in under 24 hours, most of the Jonathanian rodents were gone. As I wrote, elsewhere, even if their sack owed nothing, at all, to what we wrote, it is still good riddance to bad rubbish.  And when I heard that an errand girl of the former First Lady was complaining, my reaction was: she should first tell Nigerians how she could have transmogrified from her appalling supercilious closeness to that First Lady to become a loyal member of the Buhari administration.

    I have never had as many reactions to any of the articles on this column.  Here are two.

    Happy  reading.

    “Yours was a very good article but it would not sway me from appraising the president to see if he could be promoted ‘on trial’, to the next class. This is the same politician we ‘rejected’ three times at the polls but finally embraced when we felt that anything will be better than GEJ. He sold to us the change brand and we are not going to take anything less than the original from him. That should tell the fragility of the relationship between PMB and the rest of us now. Like millions of other Nigerians, I stuck out my neck to work and vote PMB, I have, however, since recoiled to my pre-Buhari mold of ‘not-yet-uhuru’ to, at least, avoid disappointment. I no longer expect a miracle since facts on ground do not show the expected change; at least not in scope. I did not show up at rallies but joined the vanguard of those who employed ‘word of mouth’ to convince bewildered Nigerians – friends and relations to work for a meaningful change. This made me to run on a collision course with my principal and pastors which nearly ruined long standing relationship with family and friends. I desired, voted and expected real CHANGE from black to white and not grey because I, like other Nigerians, knew the extent of the rot and thought candidate Buhari will be tough and strong enough to pull through, having shown that he knows how virulent corruption could be. So far, the president and his party have overpromised and under-delivered. I still remember his popular quote that if we fail to stop corruption, then corruption will kill us. Why then treat such monster with kid gloves? If he is busy cleaning the past, must he tolerate another spill under his very watch? A million excuses will not erase the pains of disappointment. Can we say that the president, his erudite VP and the star studded cabinet lack basic understanding of the depth of corruption in Nigeria where churches and other religious organisations have become breeding grounds for corruption? I regard the budget as the most important document and a tool to bring about CHANGE, but see how this important tool has been ruined.

    The argument that the past was bad is no good lyric for a change agent. That is the very basis for the  CHANGE mantra.  Nigerians, just like the president, know that the past is horrible, undesirable and should be avoided. That is why he should have watched  out for every single  manifestation of the vices of  endemic corruption everywhere in his administration and at all times, until he can deliver  the final blow to it in partnership with ordinary Nigerians, not the elite, especially the  lawyers we see daily, doing everything to make corruption prosper and luxuriate in Nigeria. It would have been soothing if the discrepancies in the budget were discovered at the compilation stage by the President and his men, not by an unfriendly National Assembly. Could it be true that such would have gone unnoticed if Lawan’s establishment – preferred Senate leadership was in place, or if Saraki’s like- minds has harmonised fully with the Presidency? That is a big sentiment in the public domain: that the country would most probably have been shortchanged, as usual, and made to bleed from its sick bed even under a trusted President Buhari since the budget mafia remains alive, and kicking.

    The president and his men, both inside and outside of government, will fare much better by accepting responsibility for this fatal flaw rather than indulge in any blame game. The buck must stop at the president’s desk. We voted for execution and not excuses. Unfortunately, the president’s constitutional powers have not been fully invoked to deal with corruption and that is why we see it fighting back ferociously. For instance, the power to hire and fire should since have been used to remove the CBN Governor who became a mere paymaster; an errand boy of sorts, for illegal disbursement of unappropriated funds  to politicians  and all kind of persons during the last administration, a position  totally against his job description. For instance, why did it take the CBN so long to appreciate the fact that BDC should not be funded through the official forex?

    If the Director of Budget is removed, what of the Minister, and the Permanent Secretary? The budget should have been read and carefully studied by a cabinet rank officer. He is equally guilty. If the president is, understandably, too busy, a document as important  as his first ever budget  should have been supervised by either  his deputy or the chairman of  his economic  team? It was all round negligence of duty.

    If the Budget Director is liable so is our president, his deputy, the minister and others who have been elected to serve us competently. The absolute minimum is for them to own up and learn the appropriate lessons. Such lessons must not be lost, ever, or they come back more tragic. The real tragedy will be to move on as if nothing happened. That will be better than merely  holding the conductor responsible for an accident caused by the driver. In an era of change, we will do  a lot better by changing the way we do the business of government, if only to get disillusioned Nigerians properly connected to a government they elected and can truly call their own; unlike the usual impositions. The president should pay more attention to these things so that we can, once again in unison, joyously shout: FEBUHARI again, when in February we will be approaching the midterm of his administration.

    Time waits for nobody! ” -Kunle Oladele

    Femi, do you really think we need bother those deservedly retired technocrats? We  also don’t  need the Head Of Service  or  Secretary to Government   to persuade  the  president but direct our appeal straight to him to put in place, a team  of patriotic young  Nigerians with the  expertise, as  Special Assistants, working directly under  his  or the VP’s supervision,  to initiate budgets  and policies,  where necessary,  but primarily,  to  monitor, evaluate  and report  on all capital projects  and  the monster recurrent expenditure with emphasis on detailed pre-fund release documentations  and  auditing. Between us, I am sure we know a few honest and dependable young Nigerians, both here at home, and in the Diaspora, who can do this  job.  The civil service is far too gone in debauchery; it requires a complete overhaul – Patrick, Abuja.

    COMMENTS ON: WANTED BY THE U.S: THE STOLEN MILLIONS OF DESPOTS AND CROOKED ELITES

    To have heard what Mike Igini, unarguably our best ever INEC Resident Electoral Commissioner, said on Channels TV, to wit:  that a Senior Advocate of Nigeria, accused him on a flight from Abuja to Lagos that by the introduction of card readers, INEC was stopping them from making money, is to confirm Olu Aluko’s views that some of these senior lawyers and judges, are kissing cousins. It is, therefore, no surprise that by one single stroke the Supreme Court nullified  all of  Professor Atahiru Jega’s robust achievements in office, thereby setting Nigeria back many decades.

    How unfortunate!