The Nation Newspaper

Category: Idowu Akinlotan

  • Until kidnappers get their just deserts

    Until kidnappers get their just deserts

    Whether the shocking cases of mass abductions convulsing Nigeria are economically or politically motivated should not immobilise the Bola Tinubu administration from angrily emplacing measures to stamp them out. The latest Kaduna abductions from LEA Primary School in Kuriga, Chikun local government area of Kaduna State, coming hard after a few other celebrated cases early this year, should serve as a reminder that the old, fitful system of fighting banditry/kidnapping has become jaded and ineffective. Bandits strike, abduct hapless Nigerians, riding motorcycles or marching victims hard and fast into their dens, and government throws verbal and flailing punches. Summing up the drama, some of the abductees are released after huge ransom payments; until the cycle repeats itself weeks later. It is time to cut the Gordian knot. To serve as a reminder, the Palladium piece for February 4 is repeated today to nudge the government to abandon old and unworkable methods of combating a security problem capable of upending the country, compounding the economic salvage mission of the administration, and rubbishing the image and credibility of the president himself.

    The recent Kaduna mass abduction of perhaps over 200 schoolchildren and the tale of woes accompanying it should tell the administration that pusillanimity is not an option. A community leader who spoke to The Punch last week gave an incredible insight into the Kuriga school abductions. If a community leader had such insight, including identifying the abode of the bandits, the routes they normally use for their operations, and the methods they deploy, how on earth would the security and law enforcement agents plead ignorance? And so while it is possible for the abductions and senseless killings to be politically motivated, there are enough indications in the methodologies of the bandits to help the administration respond adequately and effectively, regardless of any motives.

    Here is what the community leader told the newspaper: “Kuriga village, which is not more than 26 kilometers from Birnin-Gwari town in the Chukun Local Government Area, is situated along the Kaduna Birnin-Gwari highway. The village is not far from the terrorists’ enclave in Manini, which is the gateway to Niger State through River Kaduna; the terrorists from Zamfara pass through that place to Manini to Alawa and Shawara in Niger State. Three weeks before the abduction of the pupils, the terrorists had killed the principal of the Government Secondary School Kuriga around 4am, while his wife and two children were abducted. The wife and children are still in captivity. The secondary school was the first structure you would see on the road when you are coming from Kaduna before you enter Kuriga, but because of the proximity to Manini (six kilometres), the school was relocated to the main town of Kuriga where the primary school is also situated; that was why when the terrorists struck, they took away pupils of both the primary and the secondary schools.”

    By last Friday, there was still no confirmation that another set of about 200 people, supposedly from an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Gamboru-Ngala in Borno State, were abducted; but the Kuriga LEA school is without controversy. Merely releasing the victims, including paying ransoms, should never be the end of the matter. The government must not rest until the perpetrators of this hideous crime are apprehended. There is enough in the account of the Birnin Gwari community leader to help the security agencies do their job, if they are willing and determined. They should ask themselves why their response time is woefully slow, why their drones, choppers and fighter jets are not mobilised immediately the bandits strike in their hundreds and exit through well-known routes, and why the intelligence services do not seem to debrief community leaders and witnesses to these crimes in order to weave together the pattern of banditry laying whole communities desolate. Questions should be asked, and answers given, if Nigerians are not to start believing that the security and intelligence services are either inept or complicit. If kidnappers do not get their just deserts soon, the omens will truly turn apocalyptic.

    The Palladium piece of February 4 titled Insecurity, Forex: Tinubu’ll have to go for broke offers some helpful hints as to what can and should be done to stop the costly haemorrhaging.

    In one dizzying week, the Bola Tinubu administration has experienced probably its most challenging moment so far. Last Monday (January 29, 2024), gunmen believed to be kidnappers killed two travelling Ekiti State traditional rulers, while a third escaped the dragnet. On Thursday, the outlaws, but perhaps a different set, also killed another monarch in Kwara State, not too far from where the first set of killings took place. The killers acted like sleeper cells activated by remote control. They seemed to be saying that if other abductions and killings in different parts of the country would not ruffle the feathers of the president, these latest killings should. Hatred for the eight-month-old Tinubu administration is gradually ossifying in the North, while the Southeast has really never been placated, and the South-South continues to vacillate. With minor exceptions, the Southwest had remained a bastion of support for the administration; but now the killing of monarchs and abduction of schoolchildren may begin to stir passions.

    In the same horrendous week, foreign exchange dealers took their speculative lunacy to insane heights thus making Nigeria’s puzzled monetary authorities frantic about the plunging naira which fell to an abysmal low of N1,482 on Tuesday and N1,435 on Friday against the US dollar. Before the week ended, exchange rate for cargo clearance, which had been about N952/$ in December rose to N1,356/$. By last week, the news on the economic front was virtually apocalyptic, sending dangerous signals about an impending economic disaster. In addition, last Sunday, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger Republic announced their exit from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) without the mandatory notice. To complete his nightmare, President Tinubu is the current chairman of the regional body. But there is no need to placate the three military regimes. Just develop the remaining 12 contiguous member states, and make them a regional showpiece. Despite the security implications, the errant three which replaced French hegemony with Russian oligarchy simply lack the smartness and perspective to appreciate the implications of their actions.

    However, it is when things look dark that the true character of a man shows through. The economic/forex crisis had been simmering for decades unattended to, and the insecurity crisis has lasted for more than 15 years. The crises were expected to get much worse before the country turns the corner. However, because there are really no social safety nets, and the nets hastily cobbled together in the past few months had been poorly executed or even exploited by both elected and appointed public officials, the discontent among the poor may be threatening to boil over to the streets to the satisfaction of disaffected opposition forces. Worsening the crises are powerful elites and regional interests, many of them still hoping that somehow the whole democratic experience could be scuttled or truncated. Clearly, President Tinubu does not have the luxury of time. He needs to act now both to save his presidency as well as to deliver the country. He had tried to mollify the opposition, trodden gingerly over complex economic and social issues, and spoken cautiously to the powerful and highly connected, perhaps with an eye on future elections. Now, he will have to go for broke if insecurity and forex speculators are not to break him. Those angling for a collapse of the system foolishly think that once the process is triggered it can be controlled like specimens in laboratories. They are unrealistic.

    Firstly, the president must convince himself that the economic crisis, particularly the Forex logjam, has been handled with dexterity and the best expertise available in the country. Does he have a group of economic experts and advisers, other than appointed officials, with whom he meets minds and debates the dominant themes of the economy? He needs to rejig his staff. At first view, the panaceas applied by the administration, including palliatives, have been eclectic, reactive and often incoherent. The panaceas give the impression of a lack of surefootedness. Yet, the problems ought to be profoundly understood and clearly enunciated, and the solutions affirmed beyond a shadow of doubt, regardless of the maliciousness of economic exploiters and saboteurs implementing the scripts of opposition forces. The president must be keenly aware already that the economic condition of the people is indeed very dire, and he has a little time to remedy the problem. Yes, it must get worse before getting better, and it is also true that he is trying to grapple with issues and decisions evaded by his predecessors for decades, predecessors who opted for the low hanging fruits while jauntily passing on the rest of the nuisance to successors. But President Tinubu wants to be different. That should be lauded. He must, therefore, let wisdom direct him as he calibrates what pains the people can endure without threatening the safety of his administration and the stability of the country.

    Secondly, he has the more pressing and far more difficult job of stanching the flow of blood as a result of insecurity all over the country. Here he must really, really go for broke. He has to break tables and break eggs. In fact, he has little or no choice, for should the situation continue for a few more months, he will not only lose respect, even the myth of his invincibility will be shattered and the stability of the country threatened. One, a rash of informal state police imitations are springing up in many states in response to unremitting insecurity. President Tinubu should retake the initiative and kick-start the constitutional process of devolving state policing powers. This measure is urgent and cannot wait for comprehensive restructuring deals. Regional emotions are still too fragile and combustible, especially in the midst of economic storm and silly arguments about relocations of departments of federal agencies and ministries, to be added to the far more complex and sensitive restructuring process.

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    Two, while the state police devolution measure is being worked out, the president needs to assemble a tactical mix of police and military squads in all the states and designate them as rapid deployment forces to fight kidnapping. Previous measures have become impotent. He should also put the legal machinery in motion to enable him and state governors activate a statewide lockdown when kidnappers strike in order to hem them in and fish them out. Had this system been in place, when kidnappers took the schoolchildren in Ekiti or killed monarchs, Ekiti would have been immediately put on lockdown, and armed squads in surrounding states put on red alert patrolling Ekiti boundaries until the abductors were fished out. This process must not be terminated even after the release of captives; it must continue until the kidnappers are apprehended. The president should also consider the legal imperative of setting up special courts to try kidnappers, a trial that should terminate at the Court of Appeal, while the cases must be disposed of in a few months, say three months. This process should be applied to Plateau, Nasarawa and Benue where gunmen continue to rampage and carry out ethnic cleansing. Lock the states down when killings occur, and the government must not rest until the perpetrators are fished out, even if it takes weeks. If former administrations were fond of sending condolences and promising to rebuild destroyed communities, the Tinubu administration should toe a completely different line.

    The president should also set up a panel to resolve why big-time kidnappers who keep captives for months and negotiate with victims’ families endlessly could mystify and wrong-foot the intelligence and security services. Are security agents complicit? There should be no excuses. The kidnappers are known to communities which replenish them, some out of fear, others out of financial inducements. The Tinubu administration should be interested in why the intelligence services have proved both inept and impotent in the face of such open challenges to the peace and stability of the country. The president should be tired of playing the rule book of his predecessors who summoned security chiefs to Aso Villa when preventable tragedies occur. He should sit with them, formulate ironclad plans, task new and old agencies with arresting the situation, local hunters included, and saddle communities with the responsibility of overseeing their forests. Failure is not an option. It is time to stop the madness. With devolved policing, states should take part of the blame for insecurity. Old measures have clearly proved nugatory; it is time for a bold and innovative administration to find and apply new weapons of lifting the siege to which the nation has been subjected by nomadic criminals and their local accomplices. It is time the president fiercely combated the menace and set a six-month or one-year target to impose peace.

    • First published February 4, 2024
  • Trade unions reply Tinubu

    Trade unions reply Tinubu

    The Joe Ajaero-led Nigeria Labour Congress is the only labour union in the country that is blissfully unaware of its own political undertones and ambitions. Since the union’s fortuitous convergence with Peter Obi’s corrosive politics, the NLC has not remained the same. Before they lost the last presidential election as founders and members of the Labour Party (LP), they were generally quiescent and unenthusiastic about offending the previous administration despite the extreme hardship triggered by the December-February 2022-2023 currency swap policy. After the election, which they disputed in court but failed to make an impression, they became surly and inconsolable. Immediately after their legal defeat, they began to seek an occasion against the new administration, which they found in their reactions to the administration’s radical economic policies. From one strike to another, the NLC pushed and shoved the new administration to breaking point. It deployed those protests only to get the administration to make one concession or the other, growled Mr Ajaero.

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    Finally, an exasperated President Bola Tinubu blurted out a few days ago in Lagos that the NLC was playing politics, not union activism. NLC leaders denied the allegation. They said their main goal was to advocate good and effective governance, not vie for presidential election. But what the president was saying, which Mr Ajaero misconstrued, was that the NLC had become indistinguishable from LP, and that given the bizarre way the NLC president went out of his way to identify with the LP during and after the last general election, the union was simply doing its best to weary the administration with protests and cause it to fall into disrepute in the eyes of Nigerians. Of course it is not NLC that will directly contest the 2027 presidential poll; its precious baby, LP, might attempt the race a second time. Everybody knows that. Mr Ajaero, to all intent and purpose, is simply LP’s political forerunner, a label he will find hard to shrug off.

  • The coup scare

    The coup scare

    Last week, an online medium reported that there was a coup scare in Nigeria that necessitated an urgent meeting between President Bola Tinubu and his aides. The story had no substance, but it was strikingly inventive enough to elicit an angry Acting Director of Defence Information, Brig. Gen. Tukur Gusau, threatening to take legal action. The military needn’t bother. It would take the most impressionable person to believe the online medium’s far-fetched and clearly heedless story. The report was not only circumstantial, it was also vague and uncorroborated. It probably flowed from the Chief of Defence Staff’s earlier warning to those advocating for coup, particularly on social media, to desist from their errors. The CDS, Gen Christopher Musa, was obviously riled by the many calls on social media to the military to take over the government in the false belief that soldiers possessed the magic wand to end a few months of economic hardship.

    Gen Musa did not mince words about the irresponsibility of those campaigning for a coup; and he did not say there was a coup plot or coup attempt. Hear him: “Whoever is making that call (coup) does not love Nigeria. We want to make it very clear that the Armed Forces of Nigeria are here to protect democracy. We all want democracy and we do better under democracy. We will continue to support democracy and any of those ones who are calling for anything other than democracy are evil people and I think they don’t mean well for Nigeria. They should be very careful because the law will come after them. We can see that with democracy a lot of things are happening in Nigeria. Yes, we are going through trying periods, I mean in life nothing is hundred per cent…Everybody goes through a trying period in life and it is what you do with them. You can see the government putting efforts to ensure that we come out better. It is when you go through difficulties and come out better you will really appreciate what it is to build a nation. We are going through our trying period, but I can assure Nigerians that it will get better.”

    The media have a duty to handle sensitive national security stories responsibly. But given the discontent nationwide, and recent weeks of protest in some parts of the country, not to mention dire and threatening statements by some highly placed members of the ruling elite, there was always the temptation by the media to go overboard. Meanwhile, compounding the confusion, the dividing lines between the traditional/online media on the one hand and the social media on the other hand have either become wafer-thin or are gradually becoming obliterated. Sexed-up reports and fictionalised stories will consequently become commonplace, with devastating repercussions on the country. This may explain the defence spokesman’s exasperation with the coup scare report. The story was capable of feeding or enlivening a narrative suggesting the government’s weakness and helplessness. It could also begin to plant ideas in the minds of starry-eyed military adventurers, thus threatening democracy; or it could make the government desperate and discomfited. There was no way the story, even if it had any semblance of truth, could help strengthen democracy.

    The online medium coup scare story and social media calls for coup referenced by the CDS are a natural progression from previous administration’s ham-fisted attitude towards coup advocates. Shortly before the collation of the results of the last presidential election was completed last year, and it seemed a particular outcome was almost certain, there were some desultory marches on Abuja streets, some of them headed to the Defence Headquarters, calling for military intervention to abort the electoral process. The previous administration simply ignored the campaigners. But that was a mistake. No one who calls for insurrection or the overthrow of the constitution should ever be ignored. Then after the election was concluded and inauguration planned and scheduled, there were still calls for a coup. Again, the administration paid no heed. That was another capital mistake. The attitude of the previous administration was only a little better than the Ibrahim Babangida military government which outrightly heeded the call for a coup and went ahead to collude in the subversion of the constitution and the transition programme.

    It is not the business of the military, as the Defence spokesman tried to suggest, to arrest and prosecute insurrectionists, whether they actively plan a coup or merely verbalise it. That job is for either the police or the Department of State Service (DSS). However, the security agencies didn’t need to be ordered to do their job, nor need to be persuaded. It is indeed mystifying that the secret service and the police have balked at going after the coup advocates. Had they prosecuted a few of the coup proponents, the madness would have long been curbed. Instead, under the previous administration, the Defence Headquarters merely looked on grimly as loafers urged them to intervene. The DSS pretended to be unconcerned, while the police simply could not be bothered. As economic hardship intensifies, and with no restraint to the so-called free speech, online and social media will continue to give vent to unguarded frustrations, some of them expressed in the most bellicose and instigative language. The Defence Headquarters threatens legal action; but that is not the answer. Since hardship will continue for a little while longer, the solution to the coup hysteria is to make an example of some coup advocates. The law enforcement and security agencies know how to find culprits hiding under pseudonyms and other conspiratorially assumed identities. They should find and prosecute them, without necessarily being prompted by higher authorities.

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    The coup calls are a product of massive ignorance regarding the background of the country’s economic crisis. The crisis did not begin last month or last year. It gestated for more than two decades, until it began to fester a few years back. The last administration borrowed heavily to paper over the cracks and mask the cancer. The administrations before it suspected that trouble was looming, but they also chose to throw caviar to the general. Rectifying the problem will take more than a few months, or even years. The new administration, which turned nine months only last month, has meanwhile felt boxed into a corner by enraged trade unions and screaming, hungry protesters. Uncharacteristically, it has begun to promise utopia, including a great turnaround in the coming months. Perhaps they can work the magic; but it will certainly not be easy. However, all indicators show that the real turnaround will not begin earlier than next year. So, they have the onerous task of mollifying street anger and working their difficult magic on the economy. To help themselves, and to create elbow room for a sound reworking of the mechanics of the economy, they should deal with social media excesses, particularly those instigating unrest and baying for coup.

    Military intervention is not an alternative to democracy, as imperfect as the constitution is, and regardless of the inability of the administration to embark on restructuring. It is nevertheless still important to comprehensively review the articles of association of Nigeria’s over 250 ethnic groups, and find durable and workable political and economic formulae to undergird that association. Meanwhile, in some states, that imperfect democracy has demonstrated its immense capacity to deliver significant developmental advancement. At least one-third of the states have many projects to show for civilian rule. Truncating those tentative developmental strides, including the free speech many now take for granted and abuse, would be both counterproductive and catastrophic. Worse, there is actually nothing to suggest that even if the insensible desire of coup advocates were granted, forceful change would be carried out seamlessly without irreparably fracturing or damaging the country, thereby predisposing it to massive state failure, and throwing the sub-region into disarray.

  • NLC, TUC and opposition politics

    NLC, TUC and opposition politics

    The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has become predictable in its very casual manner of taking issue with the policies and programmes of the Bola Tinubu administration. The job which history assigned the party, after it lost presidential election thrice, is much huger than party leaders appear to appreciate. So far it has misunderstood and misapplied the tools of opposition politics. On its own, the Labour Party (LP) has never really functioned as a party, let alone opposition party, beyond the idealism, fantasies and statistical excitedness of Peter Obi. Since the party does not even operate as a political party, and Mr Obi is too distracted and impatient to function in the capacity a political party needs, he is far less likely than his opposite number in the PDP to imbue the LP with anything substantial or inspiring. Shockingly, it is actually the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), under the increasingly hysterical and myopic Joe Ajaero, that is stepping into the gap. The Trade Union Congress (TUC) arm of organised labour seems more eager to adhere to the technical strictures of a labour union.

    In the short run, the country had better get used to seeing the NLC operate as the official opposition. The Tinubu administration must factor that fact into its governance equation. The TUC too, and the rest of the country, must get used to seeing the NLC as a political transvestic, at least until Mr Ajaero completely diminishes and demystifies the union. The TUC must also finally come to terms with the annoying reality of a politicised NLC or cease riding the coattail of the senior arm of organised labour. When the TUC brusquely called out a national strike over Mr Ajaero’s Imo State debacle months ago, reflecting a needless personalisation of serious national issue, it ought to know that it was either setting itself up for total subordination to the NLC or diluting its own aims and objectives. The Department of State Service (DSS) must also now begin to factor the changes brought upon the NLC by the politicised Mr Ajaero. Dealing with the NLC in the past was a fairly straightforward thing; dealing with them today, when they seemed to have cut their political teeth on the national stage and are eager to sink those teeth into the jugulars of anyone that crosses their path, is a different kettle of fish.

    Everyone – public, TUC, DSS, federal government – must gradually begin to understand that the NLC has become indistinguishable from the LP, basking in the limelight and continuing to revel in its newfound fame. The problem, it must be understood, is not just that the NLC gave birth to LP and turned it into a feral social media beast, but that the immoderate and uncalculating Mr Ajaero has been asked to suckle and wean the ogre. No one has done a chemistry of the milk on which the LP is suckled, but what is known is that the baby is temperamental and pugnacious, and is unwilling to be tamed either by law or by the constitution. There is hardly anyone who does not know that a street protest today stands the very high risk of being hijacked; the DSS says so, the NLC and Mr Ajaero know it, and the government also fears the possibility. Even though it does not say so, the TUC also suspects that a protest could indeed turn very nasty very quickly. But regardless of any misgiving, and despite any DSS warning, the fanatical Mr Ajaero has sustained his obstinacy. He wants to go ahead with his protest, an indication that the NLC leadership has probably become zombified or is unqualified for the offices assigned departmental leaders.

    The clearest indication that the NLC has lost its wits is its readiness to call out a strike on a whim. It was so eager for a protest that it forgot to carry along the other labour centre, the TUC, yes the same second arm of organised labour that saved its bacon months ago when political hoodlums taught the witless Mr Ajaero a lesson on the dangers of meddling in local politics. Scorned by Mr Ajero and angry that it had been scorned, and perhaps was merely being tolerated, the TUC has written a fiery letter of protest against its mistreatment. It will not join NLC’s February 27 and 28 protests, it says. What the TUC’s Festus Osifo does not suspect is that Mr Ajaero is merely tolerating him. The NLC feels it can go it alone, and that the TUC is surplus to requirement. In the about eight months of the Tinubu administration, Mr Ajaero has threatened or called out a strike at least four times, like a confetti. He and his union had sought out reasons for battle, and determined where and how the battles should be fought. He is not a deep thinker, nor a chess player, nor even an orator who could stir an impassioned crowd, but he knows how to capitalise on the emotional deficit of his co-unionists and herd them over the precipice. He will not stop until he is embarrassed. He will not heed any warning. It is not in his nature to heed anything he cannot decipher, for few speak his language as adroitly as Imolites spoke it last November when he thought that the same diffidence he encountered at the national scene could be transmuted onto the local political scene, especially his state where they read his sinister moves far more competently.

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    In early January, Mr Obi adjudged the Nigerian political scene ready to host him and his party as the main political opposition. In a New Year message, he declared his readiness to outpace any other opposition party and fulfill the mandate he believed had been entrusted to him. He stopped short of describing it as a divine mandate in line with his religious politics. Yet, he is merely chasing shadows, conspicuously engaging in leisure of the theory class. The truth is far more intriguing than Mr Obi has made it. Mr Ajaero is actually the main opposition leader, backed of course by the Catholic Bishops of Nigeria. He is more discussed than Mr Obi, and seems well on the way to becoming capable of evoking fear and dread among the populace and in the corridors of power. Meanwhile, the NLC, not the more amorphous LP, is the main opposition party. There is no need settling any precedence between the two or publishing a change of name. Let the general public, as they say, take note.

    That abominable refrain, ebin pa wa

    For those really interested in why Nigeria has fallen on hard times, the economic and political facts speak for themselves without any obfuscating technicalities. More crude oil is being produced in line with OPEC quota, but the dollars are not available for the government to use, having being pledged by the previous administration in foreign exchange forwards that weakened external reserves to less than $4bn instead of about $33bn. Under ex-president Muhammadu Buhari, also, the government printed about N23trn through ways and means, and retroactively appropriated and passed the spending weeks before the end of his second term. And to cap the economic insanity, the last administration took over $30bn loan and added it to the $10bn it inherited. In one brutally short phrase, Nigeria was broke by the time a new administration took over – not only broke, but also broken. To fix such brokenness would take years; but Nigerians, particularly the youth and also the unenlightened and idealistic, not to say those who view every measure through ethnic prism, want the fixing done in months. They do not take issue with the measures designed to do the fixing, for these economic tools are hard to comprehend, instead they take issue with the symptoms.

    Nigeria is not insulated from the inflationary pressure dogging the world. But given the low income status of the country, and the relative absence of social safety nets, the effects have been felt rather more severely, particularly in the area of hunger. Long used to being fed almost for free as a result of oil wealth, Nigerians have elevated the hunger pangs flowing from the ongoing economic hardship to a crisis. This crisis is compounded by the creeping politicisation of every step, facial expression, and statement from the presidency. Fortunately, religion as a political factor has abated considerably. But ethnicity has continued to loom very large. Perhaps, over time, that factor will also diminish. But for now, whether it concerns fuel subsidy or relocation of a few departments in a few ministries, the ethnic factor is stretched to its elastic limit and made to look like a consistent and deliberate programme by the administration.

    But what is complicating the hunger crisis now expediently turned into singsongs and street protests is the erosion of the privileges of powerful men of yesterday who sense danger from probes launched into the financial dealings of ministries, agencies and departments. Some analysts justify the protests on the grounds that President Tinubu’s policies are iniquitous, misplaced, and brutal. This is incredible sophistry. In the first instance, the global economic downturn does not leave any country insulated. Secondly, the cumulative effect of poorly conceived national and economic policies implemented over four or so decades impoverished Nigerians, degraded institutions, obliterated local industries capable of backward and forward linkages, erased safety nets, and created a dismal and frightful future for the people. Rather than tackle the problems from the roots, fearful administrations took loans to cover the gaps, and fished for short-term reliefs. In summary, the problems metastisised years ago such that no palliative could mitigate or obviate them, let alone an eight-month-old administration assailed from the beginning by ethnic and religious jingoists.

    Until there is a better understanding of the root causes of the problems, and public enlightenment to guide Nigerians away from the sensationalism and idealism energising protests against the symptoms of the disease rather than the disease itself, the country will remain susceptible to manipulations by vested interests, ethnic irredentists, traditional rulers, and other freelance bigots masquerading as activists and rights crusaders. The answer to a crisis that took so long in maturing cannot be found in panaceas that take a few months to conceive and execute. That would be a silly resort to magic. The answer lies in patient rebuilding of the foundation, and careful bricklaying and structural engineering. It takes time to stay the course and do the right thing, despite the undue politicisation of the pains accompanying the country’s economic surgery. The administration may not have got its appointments right in all cases, and has been a little tardy in imposing discipline on erring officials indispensable to protecting the legacy it is trying to establish, but it must be firm in administering the medicine. Secure the farms and countryside, return to agriculture in the copious manner the regions did before and immediately after independence, fight crime and criminality in an active manner rather than the laid-back and passive manner it is being done, and completely eliminate rent-seeking. The easy options exist only hypothetically.

    Too many Nigerians have poured into the cities and urban centres doing little or nothing and expecting to be fed and pampered. They will go hungry, especially when global fluctuations and economic crisis occur. However, the government has an obligation to holistically reconstruct the economy to enable it cater to the needs of the people. Such reconstructions cannot but rest on the principles of federalism if the building is to stand and withstand periodic stress. It is time local and state authorities, in line with federalism, shared in the blame for decades of indolence and ineptitude. It is also time the Tinubu administration let the states know what they can and must do to placate their people and midwife life more abundant for them. The crisis is multifaceted; it requires deep thinking, not ad hoc solutions.

    Good thinking from Lagos, but…

    Lagos State government, like a few other state governments, particularly Niger State, has introduced far-reaching measures to mitigate the impact of the ongoing economic crisis on Lagosians. The state has been methodical, probably newfangled in its ideas, but nevertheless scientific. Among the measures are subsidised public transportation, expansion of subsidised Sunday markets for foodstuffs, fewer working days for civil servants, free child delivery at the state’s 31 general hospitals, and soup kitchens in each LGAs to feed 1,000 people per day. On the surface, these are laudable ideas.

    But the last two measures are problematic, very problematic. How do they hope to limit the number of people fed in soup kitchens to 1,000 without creating a stampede? The measure sounds well in the ears. Beyond that it is fraught with all manner of difficulties. One, who would the fed be, and would they truly be Lagosians?  Two, free child delivery is a counterproductive policy that would probably exacerbate Nigeria’s uncontrolled population growth. It encourages indolence and plays to the gallery to seek to underwrite childbirth. This measure should be replaced with a drugs policy that gives succour to those burdened by expensive lifesaving medications. More importantly, given the limit to what the government can offer, should the state not demand some kind of identifications’, say registration with Lagos State Residents Registration Agency (LASRRA), in order to derive any benefit? 

  • Euphoria of ECOWAS coups waning

    Euphoria of ECOWAS coups waning

    In Guinea, Burkina Faso and Mali, the coup euphoria that lathered their cities and other parts of West and Central Africa in the past few years has begun to die down. New realities are dawning, realities of abridged civil rights without a corresponding amelioration of the harsh economic and social environments that triggered the usurpation of democracy. In 2017, there was no part of the sub-region under military rule. By last year, four out of 15 Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) had succumbed to military jackboot.

    There is no end in sight to the nightmare, or of the misplaced hope, or of the military subterfuges. It was at first thought that certain underlying conditions, mainly France’s stranglehold on Francophone West African economies, created the unfair, exploitative and pauperising conditions those countries needed to get rid of. Systemic exploitation is a problem alright, indeed a very big problem, but in two of the countries, Guinea and Niger Republic, the coups were triggered by their elected president’s attempt to remove influential military officers, Mamady Doumbouya, Special Forces commander, in the case of Guinea, and Abdourahmane Tchiani, head of the presidential guards, in the case of Niger.

    ECOWAS has been exposed as powerless in preventing coups or reversing them when they occur. Border closures and sanctions have been generally ineffective, as President Bola Tinubu came to realise after the Niger Republic coup. While Guinea has been chary of the risks and inconveniences of pulling out of ECOWAS, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger Republic suffer no such compunctions. The three Francophone countries, now bonded into a tripartite arrangement, have jauntily pulled out of the bloc and dared anyone to stop them. They have also gone ahead to invite the beleaguered Russian military expeditionary forces to replace the French Foreign Legion, first through the late Yevgeny Prigozhin’s Wagner group, which was Russian state-funded, and later regular Russian soldiers, Russia now has an uncharacteristic foothold in Africa. It is uncharted territory for Russia and the three welcoming countries. No one can predict how the story will end: in farce, tragedy or comedy. What is certain, however, is that democracy is the main victim.

    Read Also: ECOWAS moves to deepen regional integration

    The fascination for coups, now afflicting mainly West and Central Africa, is hard to explain. There is not one of the countries in question, as their histories have shown, that was improved by military intervention. However, impatient youths searching for quick fixes and radical measures, including state-sanctioned killings, encourage military interventions despite a long history of state-sponsored violence and administrative and economic retrogression. One explanation may be the slim connection theoreticians draw between poor governance and military takeover. In fact, many Nigerian leaders, among them the uncritical ex-presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, have repeatedly harped on that linkage. But two reasons expose their fallacies. One, there is no proof that military officers who forcefully hijack power have either the competence to rule or the modernising instinct they pretend to possess. Two, there is nothing in their training to suggest that they have the tolerance for divergent opinions and perspectives or an understanding of the rudiments of governance in environments saturated with weak institutions.

    Reports coming out of Guinea and Burkina Faso are revealing ugly facts of their militaries clamping down on dissent and free speech. Critics are locked up, while there has been no perceptible change in the welfare of the people upon whose gullibility they rode into power. In Guinea for instance Lt-.Col Doumbouya overthrew President Alpha Conde in 2021, but has yet to announce a timetable for the return to civil rule. Instead in 2022, he announced arbitrarily that he would need some 39 months to transit to civil rule. He neither explained nor defended the timetable.

    Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger have waved off any election in the near future, with Mali whimsically changing transition dates. For those countries, military rule has at once become a mirage and a charade. It despoils rather than develops. It leaves permanent scars on the psyche of the people; it does not heal wounds or extirpate scars. Those who have been victims of military jackboots have horrifying stories to tell. It takes excess of stupidity to encourage or promote military intervention. Inundated with poverty, poor education, farcical notions of leadership, coup-ridden countries only get worse, not better, more tyrannical, less free. ECOWAS should forge ahead with new ideas of regional unity and development, including in the arts, sciences, entertainment and security. They should leave laggards alone.

  • Sultan’s unusual counsel

    Sultan’s unusual counsel

    As Nigeria is threshed by hunger, inflation and insecurity, all manner of doctors and pharmacists have gathered around her bed juggling dire diagnoses and offering baffling remedies. Until the patient recovers, there will be no end to the excitement that has seized everyone – the uninformed, the informed, and those perched ungainly between. It is not immediately obvious what equilibrium the Bola Tinubu administration has set for itself beyond which he would be compelled by protests to reorder his priorities or recalibrate his economic policies. He is accustomed to the art and politics of bluffing, without which he would not be president today; and like a poker player, he will continue to gauge by instinct national endurance before changing course. What is, however, obvious is that he is still titrating the economy, but getting the titre value may still be some way off.

    In contrast, the Sultan of Sokoto and Chairman of the Northern Traditional Rulers Council, Muhammad Sa’ad Abubakar III, proved last Wednesday from his contributions at the 6th executive committee meeting of the Northern Traditional Rulers Council in Kaduna that he is not a poker player. He was agitated by northern restiveness to sense revolt in the air, he wailed, insisting that he and others like him were tired of pacifying disgruntled, unemployed and hungry youths. What he was saying, as will be demonstrated shortly, is not that he was concerned about just forestalling protests, but that he fears the protests, should they break out, might be of such severity as to compromise the stability of the country. Poverty is very pronounced in the North, and its youthful population statistically significant. That the region had not broken out in revolt iwas perhaps a testament, as the Sultan pontificated, to the calming influence of traditional rulers doing yeoman’s work for peace despite being sidelined in the scheme of things.

    The Sultan’s remarks, however, need to be interrogated, despite resonating widely with the media and engaging and stoking the radical imagination and propensity of many Nigerians. Those remarks constitute his understanding of the restiveness coursing through the country. Hear him: “I believe talking about insecurity and the rising level of poverty are two issues on which we cannot fold our arms and think everything is okay. I have said so many times and at so many forums that things are not okay in Nigeria, and of course, things are not okay in the North. What are the real issues bringing about poverty and rising cases of insecurity? I don’t think it is the issue of a new government. To me, this government is a continuation of the former government; it is the same party. So, what really is the problem?… I have said so many times that we never lack solutions to our problems; what we lack is implementation…Education is important, so whatever issue you want to bring to us here, you must talk about education, you must talk about health issues, and of the two monsters that have been harassing all of us here, those are insecurity and poverty.”

    But here is the most ominous part of his remarks: “And let’s not take it for granted; people are quiet; they are quiet for a reason because people have been talking to them; we have been talking to them; we have been trying to tell them things will be okay, and they keep on believing. I pray to Almighty Allah that they will not one day wake up and say that they no longer believe in you (us). Because that would be the biggest problem, because we can’t silence these people as traditional spiritual leaders and diplomats forever… Let us be very honest with ourselves; let us be very frank about what we are going to tell ourselves here; it is no time to hide things. We have reached that level. People are very agitated, hungry, and angry, but they still believe there are people who can talk to them…So, we have this onerous task of reaching out to everybody, calming them down, and reassuring them (that) things will be okay, and they should continue to pray and pray and still do something good because prayer without work will not bring anything. We must find jobs for our teeming youths that are sitting idle, and I have said it so many times: we are sitting on a keg of gunpowder, having teeming youths, millions of them, without jobs, without food, we are looking for trouble.”

    Given the anger everywhere, none of the aggrieved is keen on knowing where and how the problem gestated; they just need food at affordable prices. However, it is important, not only to solve the problem at hand, but to also find lasting answers in order to forestall a repeat of the problem or its worsening. The country has lost control of its population growth rate, particularly in the North. With unchecked population growth, desertification, and corruption, particularly with no matching economic growth and remedial measures, there will always be more mouths to feed than wealth created. The hungry and unemployed referenced by the Sultan, not only in the North but elsewhere, are undisputedly potential cannon fodder for revolts of every kind. The Sultan is right to suggest that the North has become a tinderbox, while his insinuation that some governors are also badly remiss in governance cannot be faulted. But the region has the highest number of states and local governments depending on federal allocations rather than internal wealth production and internally generated revenue. Those allocations have not translated into wealth production. Instead, centralised distribution of revenue, which negates the fundamentals of federalism, has produced nothing but complacency, sense of entitlement, inefficiency, corruption and massive poverty.

    Correcting the distortions, reorienting the revenue generation process, and inculcating state or regional economic self-sufficiency will take much more than fine words, threats and protests. Had the country persisted till now in the appalling mismanagement of its economy and finances begun in the past two decades and more, it would have gone bust. Indeed, as the previous administration showed, it merely succeeded in delaying the bust by a combination of massive loans and deferred tough measures. It is remarkable that in the ongoing crisis, states and to a little extent, local governments, have abdicated their responsibilities while conspiratorially encouraging Nigerians to look up to the federal government for solution. By choosing to address the crisis systemically instead of symptomatically, a decidedly slow and fraught path to rebuilding the country’s finances, the Tinubu administration is sailing near the wind and courting massive disaffection and even rejection. It is this fear of revolt the Sultan described in frustrating and alienating terms.

    Read Also: Sultan, Emirs seek urgent action on insecurity, joblessness

    The ruling elite have been profligate with power and national resources for decades, but what are the traditional rulers in the North and South also telling their people? How are they mollifying the anticipated rage on the streets, rage which in some cases they helped fuel? As inefficient as the Muhammadu Buhari and other previous administrations were, the country’s rot was not only engendered by the federal administration, it was also co-authored and given fillip by the states. The solution will, therefore, not come from the federal authorities alone, it must also be inspired and executed by states and the larger population who all share in the blame. Restructuring the country along federal lines will produce the needed changes; but in the near term, as things remain desperately tight and precarious, no tier of government will profit from the blame game, and traditional rulers who are integral to both the problem and the solution, despite their denial, need to adopt a different mindset to national renewal and regeneration.

    Since the inauguration of the Tinubu presidency, trade unions deploying the tool of protests, opposition leaders, many of whom have still been unable to reconcile themselves to the end of the campaigns, and a large swathe of the angry public worsted by shrinking economic opportunities have taken oath to oppose the administration whatever the cost, overtly or covertly. They have not convinced anyone how blistering opposition would produce or rekindle economic growth stalled by previous administrations. However, by fiery and overwhelming negative portrayals on social media, caustic and unsparing characterisation of the administration, and persistent and iniquitous calls for a coup d’etat or revolution, the country has remained on tenterhooks, its initiatives and reforms stultified, its energies drained, and its esteem lowered in the eyes of the world. Other than occasionally giving short shrift to critics’ arguments and perspectives, the administration has not calculated how much its efforts are stymied by the opposition.

    In addressing long-standing economic maladies, the Tinubu administration has introduced a mixed bag of economic measures, some of them revolutionary in scope. Though the inflationary, disruptive and security consequences of those measures have been mindboggling, they are not fully explained by the fuel subsidy removal or the floating of the naira. The administration probably has a deeper insight into the crisis bedeviling the country, much of it obviously far beyond the ordinary pros and cons of economic measures, some of them related to the attempt to rearrange the country’s power equation and make it less ethnocentric and capable of withstanding future stresses and threats to national stability. Nevertheless, the administration cannot give excuses; it must deal with those issues as they arise, even if they are daunting and conspiratorial, even if culturally opposition has become so apocalyptic and destructive rather than corrective. If the traditional rulers who expressed their frustrations last week in Kaduna do not understand the political and economic, indeed existential, nuances at play, then their boast of being closer to the people, or their campaign to be politically and financially empowered to join in pacifying the country, are merely buncombe.

  • ‘Hardship’ protests and tangled responses

    ‘Hardship’ protests and tangled responses

    Last Monday, protesters mobilised to Minna and Kano city streets over what they described as unremitting economic hardship compounded by insecurity. Though the Minna, Niger State, protests were at a point hijacked by hoodlums, both protests in the two northern states were neither violent nor unmanageable. Days later, civil society organisations in Osun State, particularly youths, also staged a protest against rising cost of living. They said they had reached the end of their tethers. In none of the three states was the angry crowd overwhelming. But in Minna and Kano, the governors were sensitive enough to comment on the protests as well as attempt to take some remedial measures. Governor Mohammed Umar Bago of Niger State may not have taken impeccable actions to grapple with the issues raised by the protesters, but of the three states where protests broke out, he was probably the most responsive, if not proactive. Niger State is governed by the national ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC).

    In his reaction to the Kano protests, Governor Abba Yusuf promised to meet with President Bola Tinubu to intimate him with the reasons for the protest and discuss solutions. Kano is governed by the populist New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP) led by ex-Kano governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso. Mr Yusuf gives the impression that the protests transcended state political and economic dynamics. In Osogbo, Osun State, where youths, including students’ union organisations, also took to the streets, the protests ended with an imperial two-week ultimatum to the federal government to address the hardship in the country. Where some human rights activists are exploring legal options to compel the government to fix prices in a free market economy, and while the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) are opting for a national strike, other groups think a massive street protest should compel an administration they say is dithering to rouse itself from slumber. With incredible casuistry, some are even advocating a revolution.

    The Niger, Kano, Osun and NLC actions may presage a massive reaction against the Tinubu administration’s policies. The ruling party is wary of the protests, and its spokesmen have insisted that the demonstrations and threats are politically motivated, especially given opposition leaders’ spontaneous identification with the protesters. The ruling party does not doubt the prevailing economic hardship, but it argues that reforms take time to gestate and bear fruits. It adds that the simultaneousness of the Minna and Kano protests indicates something sinister and premeditated. Mr Bago’s findings attributed the Minna protests to misinformation about truckloads of food items being transported through Minna, which some hoodlums had planned to intercept and ransack. Kano’s Gov Yusuf gave no casus belli for the protests other than that he planned to meet the president for a review. Overall, no one doubts the problem associated with rising cost of living occasioned by fuel subsidy removal, floating of the naira, insecurity in the countryside and on farms, and a needless centralisation of authority in the hands of the national government. When things go wrong, as indeed they have, the blame is consequently not decentralised. The president takes all the blame. And until the constitution is amended and powers devolved, the president will continue to take all the blame, justified or not.

    The protests make a few things urgent. One is that the administration has a little time left to ameliorate the hardship ravaging the country. Whether the reforms embarked upon by the government are unimpeachable or not, the hunger and hardship experienced by the poor and downtrodden make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to be amenable to the logic and niceties of economics. The first few protests should, therefore, be viewed as an opportunity for the government to familiarise itself with the feelings and pains of the public and have a little time and leeway to make amends. That the economy was battered years ago before the advent of the current administration means nothing to the hungry. Two, the protests give the government the opportunity to reassess its diagnosis of the problem and, more importantly, retool and recalibrate the prognosis. Even if the administration is cocksure about the problem, it needs a second look and second view to convince itself that there is no other way of resolving the crisis or that those saddled with the crisis are the best hands for the task.

    The third urgent task before the administration is to see whether from the disparate views of national lawmakers, economic analysts, and opposition critics there are no pearls of wisdom in following a different trajectory to solve the crisis at hand. It is possible that the administration’s diagnosis is flawless, but are the identification and execution of the solutions also flawless? History lessons show that the best of governments, not to say the best and most perceptive of statesmen, have sometimes been honestly mistaken. Costs have risen astronomically, and the dispossessed have had little or no succour: it, therefore, makes the country’s situation somewhat flammable. The protests give the administration the opportunity to review itself and the capacity and competence of officials saddled with the responsibility of helping the president to run, reform and stabilise the country. The protests, even if they were instigated by the opposition and other saboteurs, indicate that the administration cannot maintain its present course, either in terms of the solutions or in regards to palliatives. There is too much chaos in the system, particularly the economy, to obviate the forebodings many fear may be imminent.

    Read Also: Sanwo-Olu to flag off N750 million ‘trader money’ for 15,000 beneficiaries on February 14

    Notwithstanding the genuineness of the protests and the reasons that inspire them, critics, labour unions, protesters and opposition parties must mind their methods and the language they use in communicating their anger and disappointments. They have sometimes spoken and acted like they desire the collapse of the country, and with it 25 years of democracy. The security and intelligence services have sometimes been tardy in exposing and dealing with such subversive inclinations, but nevertheless, it is time the country as a whole exercised caution and restraint. Decades of economic mismanagement have brought the country to a difficult pass. Yet, the current administration has only spent eight months out of a four-year term. Wishing or, worse, plotting the administration’s collapse could produce dire and unintended consequences whose course no one can predict or manage. Leaders of the opposition have been particularly irresponsible, as if they have it all worked out how to benefit from a total collapse. And too many ignorant critics and activists are simply unmindful of the end result of their actions. They unduly romanticise revolution, and hope that if any blood would be shed, it would be other people’s blood.

    But history begs to disagree. Iranian Revolution overthrew the Pahlavi dynasty in 1979 but only managed to replace one dictatorship with another, with the Islamic Revolution a far cry from the more refined and cosmopolitan Persian Empire it has unsuccessfully tried to imitate. Russians had their own revolution in 1917 and managed to acquire close to 12 million people dead in the civil war that followed, about 1.2m executed during Stalin’s purges, and an estimated seven million dead from the famine that followed collectivisation. The French also valorised revolution and procured one in 1789, leading to the death of most of those who inspired it, replacement of their monarchy with Napoleon Bonaparte’s dictatorship which took close to six million people to early graves through needless wars. The Nigerian political opposition may loath their electoral losses, and other so-called ‘owners of Nigeria’ may still be miffed by the outcome of the February 2023 presidential election, but wishing or plotting the collapse of the country in order to mitigate their electoral losses and justify their prophecies is as foolish as the remorseless Ibrahim Babangida military dictatorship that prevented MKO Abiola from assuming the presidency he won in 1993.

    It is time the culture of protests was regulated to entrench systemic survival. Protest is a constitutional right that cannot be abridge, but it must not enable a few to instigate a catastrophe upon the nation. In any case, a single term is only four years, after which elections will be held to either endorse an old administration or elect a new one. Britain proved that point in the 18th and 19th centuries by opting for gradual change when Europe embraced revolutions. Critics and unions breathing and speaking fire must be made aware of the consequences of their actions. However, the Tinubu administration cannot pretend not to suspect that his panaceas are indeed not working the way he expects.

    It is time the Tinubu administration recognised, and perhaps started to voice it out, that much of Nigeria’s existential crisis was caused by a badly structured federation that needs a comprehensive overhaul. He may not be able to inspire that holistic reworking of the constitution now, but he needs to urgently begin to isolate, amend and implement some of the provisions of the constitution. Too many people and regions have a sense of entitlement that must be discouraged from taking further roots. Niger State governor probably realised this, which was why he took control of the protests that convulsed his state last Monday. His panaceas may be unimplementable in some respects, and his accusations of those behind the protests may be unfair, but he was smart enough to take control of the situation and deal with it the best way he deemed fit. Kano’s Mr Yusuf should borrow a leaf from Mr Bago. More, President Tinubu, whose record of democratic activism is probably incomparable, must also through constitutional and legal changes begin to encourage governors and local government chairmen to take responsibility in their states. Abuja does not hold all the aces; some of the aces, as insecurity at the local levels and in their forests show, are in the hands of proactive state and local leaders.   

  • Insecurity, Forex: Tinubu’ll have to go for broke

    Insecurity, Forex: Tinubu’ll have to go for broke

    In one dizzying week, the Bola Tinubu administration has experienced probably its most challenging moment so far. Last Monday, gunmen believed to be kidnappers killed two travelling Ekiti State traditional rulers, while a third escaped the dragnet. On Thursday, the outlaws, but perhaps a different set, also killed another monarch in Kwara State, not too far from where the first set of killings took place. The killers acted like sleeper cells activated by remote control. They seemed to be saying that if other abductions and killings in different parts of the country would not ruffle the feathers of the president, these latest killings should. Hatred for the eight-month-old Tinubu administration is gradually ossifying in the North, while the Southeast has really never been placated, and the South-South remains unsure. With minor exceptions, the Southwest had remained a bastion of support for the administration; but now the killing of monarchs and abduction of schoolchildren may begin to stir passions.

    In the same horrendous week, foreign exchange dealers took their speculative lunacy to insane heights thus making Nigeria’s puzzled monetary authorities frantic about the plunging naira which fell to an abysmal low of N1,482 on Tuesday and N1,435 on Friday against the US dollar. Before the week ended, exchange rate for cargo clearance, which had been about N952/$ in December rose to N1,356/$. By last week, the news on the economic front was virtually apocalyptic, sending dangerous signals about an impending economic disaster. In addition, last Sunday, Burkina Faso, Mali and Niger Republic announced their exit from the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) without the mandatory notice. To complete his nightmare, President Tinubu is the current chairman of the regional body. But there is no need to placate the three military regimes. Just develop the remaining 12 contiguous member states, and make them a regional showpiece. Despite the security implications, the errant three which replaced French hegemony with Russian oligarchy simply lack the smartness to appreciate the implications of their actions.

    However, it is when things look dark that the true character of a man shows through. The economic/forex crisis had been simmering for decades unattended to, and the insecurity crisis has lasted for more than 15 years. The crises were expected to get much worse before the country turns the corner. However, because there are really no social safety nets, and the nets hastily cobbled together in the past few months had been poorly executed or even exploited by both elected and appointed public officials, the discontent among the poor may be threatening to boil over to the streets to the satisfaction of disaffected opposition forces. Worsening the crises are powerful elites and regional interests, many of them still hoping that somehow the whole democratic experience could be scuttled or truncated. Clearly, President Tinubu does not have the luxury of time. He needs to act now both to save his presidency as well as to deliver the country. He had tried to mollify the opposition, trodden gingerly over complex economic and social issues, and spoken cautiously to the powerful and highly connected, perhaps with an eye on future elections. Now, he will have to go for broke if insecurity and forex speculators are not to break him. Those angling for a collapse of the system foolishly think that once the process is triggered it can be controlled like specimens in laboratories. They are unrealistic.

    Read Also; Tinubu’s quest for living wage for Nigerian workers: 37 to the rescue

    Firstly, the president must convince himself that the economic crisis, particularly the Forex logjam, has been handled with dexterity and the best expertise available in the country. Does he have a group of economic experts and advisers, other than appointed officials, with whom he meets minds and debates the dominant themes of the economy? He needs to rejig his staff. At first view the panaceas applied by the administration, including palliatives, have been eclectic, reactive and often incoherent. The panaceas give the impression of a lack of surefootedness. Yet, the problems ought to be profoundly understood and clearly enunciated, and the solutions affirmed beyond a shadow of doubt, regardless of the maliciousness of economic exploiters and saboteurs implementing the scripts of opposition forces. The president must be keenly aware already that the economic condition of the people is indeed very dire, and he has a little time to remedy the problem. Yes, it must get worse before getting better, and it is also true that he is trying to grapple with issues and decisions evaded by his predecessors for decades, predecessors who opted for the low hanging fruits while jauntily passing on the rest of the nuisance to successors. President Tinubu wants to be different. That should be lauded; but he must let wisdom direct him as he calibrates what the people can absorb without threatening the safety of his administration and the stability of the country.

    Secondly, he has the more pressing and far more difficult job of stanching the flow of blood as a result of insecurity all over the country. Here he must really, really go for broke. He has to break tables and break eggs. In fact, he has little or no choice, for should the situation continue for a few more months, he will not only lose respect, even the myth of his invincibility will be shattered and the stability of the country threatened. One, a rash of informal state police imitations are springing up in many states in response to unremitting insecurity. President Tinubu should retake the initiative and kick-start the constitutional process of devolving state policing powers. This measure is urgent and cannot wait for comprehensive restructuring deals. Regional emotions are still too fragile and combustible, especially in the midst of economic storm and silly arguments about relocations of departments of federal agencies and ministries, to be added to the far more complex and sensitive restructuring process.

    Two, while the state police devolution measure is being worked out, the president needs to assemble a tactical mix of police and military squads in all the states and designate them as rapid deployment forces to fight kidnapping. Previous measures have become impotent. He should also put the legal machinery in motion to enable him and state governors activate a statewide lockdown when kidnappers strike in order to hem them in and fish them out. Had this system been in place, when kidnappers took the schoolchildren in Ekiti or killed monarchs, Ekiti would immediately have been put on lockdown, and squads in surrounding states put on red alert patrolling Ekiti boundaries until the abductors are fished out. This process must not be terminated even after the release of the captives; it must continue until the kidnappers are apprehended. The president should also consider the legal imperative of setting up special courts to try kidnappers, a trial that should terminate at the Court of Appeal, while the cases must be disposed of in a few months, say three months. This process should be applied to Plateau, Nasarawa and Benue where gunmen have continue to rampage and carry out ethnic cleansing. Lock the states down when killings occur, and the government must not rest until the perpetrators are fished out, even if it takes weeks. If former administrations were fond of sending condolences and promising to rebuild destroyed communities, the Tinubu administration should toe a completely different line.

    The president should also set up a panel to resolve why big-time kidnappers who keep captives for months and negotiate with victims’ families endlessly could mystify and wrong-foot the intelligence and security services. Are security agents complicit? There should be no excuses. The kidnappers are known to communities which replenish them, some out of fear, others out of financial inducements. The Tinubu administration should be interested in why the intelligence services have proved both inept and impotent in the face of such open challenges to the peace and stability of the country. The president should be tired of playing the rule book of his predecessors who summon security chiefs to Aso Villa when preventable tragedies occur. He should sit with them, formulate ironclad plans, task new and old agencies with arresting the situation, local hunters included, and saddle communities with the responsibility of overseeing their forests. Failure is not an option. It is time to stop the madness. With devolved policing, states should take part of the blame for insecurity. Old measures have clearly proved nugatory; it is time for a bold and innovative administration to find and apply new weapons of lifting the siege to which the nation has been subjected by nomadic criminals and their local accomplices. It is time for the president to fiercely combat the menace and set a six-month or one-year target to impose peace.

    Wike’s difficult and imposing dilemma

    Former Rivers State governor and Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister, Nyesom Wike, will sooner or later have to face and resolve the terrible dilemma that has dogged his path since he opted to side with the All Progressives Congress (APC) in last February’s presidential election. He was a natural Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) man and politician, not to say leader and financier when others played ducks and drakes with the affections of the opposition party. But he threw his weight behind the APC in 2022 when a few PDP hierarchs led the party to renege on its unwritten presidential zoning formula and for effect cap it up by emasculating him. That weight tilting, it must be admitted, was crucial to the success of the APC last February. But that tilting has also put Mr Wike in a quandary, unsure how to proceed politically and how best to hedge his electoral bets in the turbulent months and years ahead. He is a ministerial appointee of the APC-led federal administration, but his roots are still firmly, as far as the eyes can see, in the PDP. In short, he is the classical personification of the idiomatic expression of running with the hare, and hunting with the hounds. How far he can walk that tightrope remains to be seen.

    For Mr Wike, a part of the problem is that the APC in Rivers State is still embroiled in some kind of leadership and identity crisis, though they have invited him to defect to the party and assume leadership. Since the APC is still crisis-ridden in the state, becoming a member or assuming its leadership is fraught with a lot of uncertainties. Should Mr Wike defect, there is no proof he can quieten the storm raging in the party. Former governor Rotimi Amaechi is a part of the storm, and he still breathes down the neck of the party despite defecting to the PDP and was outmanoeuvred by Mr Wike. Mr Amaechi’s men are, however, still in the APC and are fomenting trouble and waiting for an opportunity to revenge the humiliation of their mentor. They sense that Mr Wike cannot walk the tightrope forever. They believe that he cannot stay as minister in an APC government and be fighting guerrilla wars in the PDP. They assume, with plenty of common sense, that he cannot have his cake and eat it. But the boisterous Mr Wike may soon discover that proving an idiom wrong is far easier than proving his bilious enemies wrong. The reasons are legion.

    One, a titanic battle for the soul and leadership of the PDP is afoot. At the centre of that battle is the party’s former presidential candidate, the geriatric Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president and footloose party defector. Alhaji Atiku is a vicious and vengeful political fighter who brooks no opposition, despite his geniality, nor gives quarters, despite his glib talk. Notwithstanding his age and baffling lack of substantial investment in advancing the cause of the PDP, not to talk of inspiring the refinement and reformation of the party’s essence and modus operandi, the former vice president seems bent on reusing the PDP as a special purpose vehicle for his sixth or seventh bid for the presidency. Mr Wike was his nemesis in the last election, probably the main reason he lost, if the spoiler role played by the upstart Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) is discounted. Alhaji Atiku is eager to demand his pound of flesh from Mr Wike. Fighting the former vice president off while remaining a minister in the APC administration will be difficult for Mr Wike. Indeed, Alhaji Atiku will make it doubly difficult for the fence-sitting former Rivers governor to get a foothold in the party to fend off his enemies.

    Two, Mr Wike will find it somewhat comforting that the main opposition to Alhaji Atiku is constituted by the former Group of Five (G-5) governors who broke rank with the main PDP before the last presidential election as well as those who sympathised with the power shift argument which Mr Wike and the G-5 advocated. Led by Bauchi State governor, Bala Mohammed, who is himself interested in running for the presidency sometime in the future, the anti-Atiku group is determined to neutralise the influence of the former vice president. They have labeled him a serial presidential election loser and harbinger of bad luck. In addition they do not see him as an inspiring and refining force in the party, nor do they see him as a committed democrat and ideologue capable of rebuilding the party into a formidable electoral machine. Eager to rebuild a party that has now been thrice defeated in the polls, the PDP governors have had it up to their necks with the kind of politics and ideas Alhaji Atiku represents. Importantly too, the opposition governors know that Mr Wike has no interest in contesting the presidency on the platform of the PDP, and would probably lend a helping hand in their fight against the former vice president. In short, Alhaji Atiku’s enemies in the party, who are beginning to rouse themselves, are many, implacable and regicidal. Decapitating him is cakewalk.

    All things considered, Mr Wike is perched precariously on the horns of a dilemma. He will have to make up his mind whether to defect to the APC or stay put in the PDP. But staying in the PDP is becoming more and more untenable, as his unseemly fights in Rivers State are indicating. If he keeps his PDP membership, how would he play his politics in 2027? And if he leaves the PDP, how would he keep Rivers upon within his orbit? Mr Wike is not in an enviable position at all. Not taking the ministerial appointment would have opened him up to a terrible drubbing by the tactless Governor Siminalayi Fubara of Rivers State. Indeed the former governor’s dilemma would have been largely inexistent had he turned down the FCT appointment; but his hands would have correspondingly been weakened. Are his friends and enemies underrating his political skills? Perhaps. Maybe the feisty politician is after all more ambidextrous than most people guess.

  • Adamant Kwankwaso versus Kano Emirate

    Adamant Kwankwaso versus Kano Emirate

    In an interview two Thursdays ago, former governor of Kano State and leader of the Kwankwasiyya movement, Rabi’u Musa Kwankwaso, disclosed that the splitting of the Kano Emirate into five emirates in 2019 as well as the dethronement of Muhammadu Sanusi II in 2020 would be revisited. In May 2019, former governor Abdullahi Ganduje had assented to the Kano House of Assembly bill splitting the emirate. With the assent, the emirate was split into five: Kano, the surviving rump, and Rano, Bichi, Karaye, and Gaya. Barely a year later, Emir Muhammadu Sanusi II was deposed, for, among other things, disrespecting the office of the governor, and land racketeering. Dr Kwankwaso insisted that the former emir was deposed because of Dr Ganduje’s inferiority complex. The former governor, however, countered by flaunting his own PhD and his wife’s professorship, mocking his traducers for not having professorial wives.

    The Kano quagmire has become a huge entanglement, punctuated by bitter quarrels, deployment of trenchant language, and now almost irreconcilable differences triggered by a spectacular falling out due to unmet expectations of loyalty. Dr Ganduje was twice deputy governor to Dr Kwankwaso (1999-2003; 2011-2015), though punctuated by a two-term interregnum filled by ex-governor Ibrahim Shekarau. They have rich CVs in Kano: highly educated, urbane, articulate, but cantankerous and unforgiving. Days after the Supreme Court gave judgement in the last governorship election dispute, Dr Ganduje invited Governor Abba Kabir Yusuf, a civil engineer who also brandishes a master’s degree in Business Administration, and Dr Kwankwaso to abandon their party, the New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), and defect to the All Progressives Congress (APC), but added that he would automatically become their Jagora (leader). The invitation has incensed the duo, Dr Ganduje’s sense of humour being lost on them. Though Kano’s leading politicians have so much in common, particularly the more than a decade of camaraderie between Dr Kwankwaso and Dr Ganduje, they are likely to remain irreconcilable and will continue to bait one another.

    It is mainly in this context that the promised review of the Kano Emirate split should be understood. Dr Kwankwaso will remain adamant until it proves politically costly. It is obvious why he is at the forefront of campaigning for the review of the emirate balkanisation, but it is not altogether clear that it makes political sense to champion the cause instead of the governor. Gov Yusuf hails from Gaya, one of the beneficiary emirates consequent upon the Kano Emirate split. Whole new infrastructures and economies have followed the split; reversing history now will be more contentious than before the split. But this has not deterred DR Kwankwaso. According to him: “Honestly it (the Kano emirates issue) is one of the things that nobody has sat with me to discuss so far, but I am sure we are going to sit and see how to go about it. Is it going to be allowed, demolished, corrected, or whatever? It will be revisited, and what’s supposed to be done will be done. There were a lot of things and this was a trap. All these things were not done in good faith or intention. It was brought with some bad intentions which every one of you here and our listeners are aware of. Sometimes you come with things that are good and they turn out to be bad while sometimes you bring bad things and they turn out to be good…”

    For now, two things seem uppermost in the mind of the NNPP leader. One, he wants the Kano Emirate reunified. The previously monolithic emirate has a nostalgic hold on him and perhaps on many other Kanawa. It was a symbol of bigness, power and influence. But has the rump Kano Emirate become less influential in the cultural and political scheme of things in the state, and indeed in Nigeria where everyone is still besotted to Kano as a thriving and powerful emirate and entity? It is doubtful, for water is finding its level and course, especially after five years. To begin rebuilding the emirate through reunification will probably throw up fresh uncertainties. Will it not be better to let sleeping dogs lie, regardless of the politics that underscored the balkanisation? As the Hausa idiomatically put it, “A bar kaza a cikin gashin ta’. It is, sadly, very tempting not to let bad enough alone. The itch to tamper with things based on sometimes indefensible or untenable sentiments is always high. That the split was also ‘bad intentioned’, as Dr Kwankwaso said, and coming from, of all people, the hated Dr Ganduje, seems especially galling to the leader of the Kwankwasiyya movement and protector of the emirate council.

    Read Also: We will welcome Kwankwaso to APC – Bashir Ahmad

    Two, somehow, either because of the goodness of his heart or for reasons not even he can properly decode, Dr Kwankwaso wants the ‘historic wrong’ done to Emir Sanusi II redressed. The deposed emir was not even Dr Kwankwaso’s first choice when he was appointed in 2014, a year before the former governor’s second term ended. Obviously he has grown to like him immensely. But since the NNPP controls the legislature, the lawmakers can of course be made to do the NNPP bidding. However, the emir wasn’t just deposed for thumbing his nose at Gov Ganduje, he was also probed for unregulated and liberal spending habits and then queried for land racketeering. The NNPP will have to get all those inconvenient details expunged to legitimately return him to office. Reinstating Emir Sanusi II may not be the chief goal of Dr Kwankwaso, but he will do anything to rub Dr Ganduje’s nose in it.

    Targeting and trashing his former deputy and now chairman of the APC may, however, be far easier than managing his new mentee and governor, Mr Yusuf. On both the emirate matter and possible reinstatement of Sanusi II, the more candid and less bashful Dr Kwankwaso has thrust himself forward and spoken more authoritatively than the governor. He forgets that a new sheriff is in town, and his obtrusions will be resisted more and more as state affairs get more volatile. It is inevitable. All it takes is a little more consolidation by the governor, and the new helmsman will begin to assert himself, differ from his mentor in policy perspectives, and eventually strike out from under the shadows of his leader in whose government he was once a Commissioner for Works, Housing and Transport between 2011 and 2015. Sooner or later, Mr Yusuf’s mollifying and conciliating rule will contend with Dr Kwankwaso’s fierce and adamant disposition until something gives. No state has yet balked this trend. It won’t begin with Kano.

  • Hysterical Sen Ndume on CBN, FAAN relocations

    Hysterical Sen Ndume on CBN, FAAN relocations

    Senator Ali Ndume (Borno South) has seemed to master the art of propaganda for political self-preservation. He has embraced the art wholeheartedly, profited from it, and may have no reason now or in the future to abandon what has served him well. Last week, Sen Ndume, who is the Senate Chief Whip, was on television berating the planned relocation of some Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) departments as well as the headquarters of the Federal Airport Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) from Abuja to Lagos. The senator has inspired a campaign that views the relocations from the regional and ethnic prisms. Political consequences would follow the relocations, he roared. Working in tandem with the Northern Senators Forum (NSF) and the Arewa Consultative Forum (ACF), both of which incomprehensibly view the relocations as a ploy to stymie the development of the old political North, the sometimes controversial senator swore that the measures would be reversed for peace to reign.

    Both the CBN and the Aviation ministry have tried to justify the movements on the grounds of administrative expediency. The former Aviation minister, Hadi Sirika, relocated FAAN to Abuja in 2020 against advice and sound judgement, despite Lagos remaining the country’s Aviation business hub. Relocating some five departments of the CBN to Lagos and other places, particularly Banking Supervision Department, in a country where most banks are headquartered in Lagos, makes a whole lot of administrative and financial sense. The northern political elite, who erroneously see Abuja as a regional preserve and conflates its role and location with northern goals and aspirations, argue that the relocation plans were inspired by a Lagos cartel misadvising President Bola Tinubu in favour of an ethnic agenda. The campaign has caught fire and massaged the sensibility of many northerners inured to the economic arguments for the relocations.

    Sen Ndume may not have triggered the hysteria, but his habitual lack of reflectiveness, have led him to become the public face of the regional campaign for the revocation of the relocation plans. In fact, last week on television, he seemed assured that the relocations would be reversed if political consequences were not to follow, obviously in reference to the 2027 elections. There is nothing anyone can say to mitigate Sen Ndume’s hysteria. Hysteria is woven into his DNA, and he is never embarrassed even when his arguments are proved to be fatuous. Last October, he was proved wrong after walking out of Senate plenary following a minor altercation with Senate President Godswill Akpabio over what was termed a ‘procedural infringement’. It followed a motion he attempted to raise on the closure of Nigerian borders with Niger Republic. It became clear later that he acted in a huff; but he waved off his walkout as a coincidence. He refused to concede he was wrong, and the Senate which was unwilling to be distracted by a needless controversy did not push the matter.

    In 2014, the senator was also embroiled in a controversy over Boko Haram, with the government prosecuting him for failing to inform law enforcement agencies on the activities of the terrorist group. Between 2003 and 2011, he represented Borno State in the House of Representatives. And since 2011 till date, he has represented the state in the senate. He is incontrovertibly well on the way to becoming a lawmaking legend from Borno State. But his rise and fame have not been matched by a corresponding assimilation of the calmness and maturity that come with age as a political leader, nor by the peerless experience that flows from longevity as a national lawmaker, nor indeed by any lawmaking sublimity. Armed with a master’s degree in Business and Computer Education from the University of Toledo in Ohio, United States, he is regarded as a brilliant educationist and a bold but probably impetuous politician and lawmaker. Yet, his judgement in regards to some weighty national issues had often fallen short of expectations. He had problems with the Bukola Saraki-led 8th Senate over his support for the Ibrahim Magu-led EFCC, and in 2022 was Rotimi Amaechi’s director of campaign for the presidency.

    Read Also: Court orders remand of Sen Ndume over failure to produce Maina

    How much of his dissonate politics is coloured by a lack of enthusiasm for the Bola Tinubu administration is hard to determine, especially seeing how his political predilections has been suffused by an absence of ideology. It is, however, significant that he is not inconvenienced by ideology, despite his long-term membership of both the Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the All Progressives Congress (APC). Like most Nigerian politicians, he is eclectic, dilatory, and prone to easy disaffection and defection. He has represented Borno State in both chambers of the National Assembly for a cumulative 20 years. Those years should have forged in him a transcendental grasp of lawmaking, and imbued him with ideas and methods that supersede but do not obliterate his ethnic, religious and regional affiliations.

    Yes, Sen Ndume is at liberty to be conservative or progressive, indeed even unideological if he so wishes, but he does not have the freedom to be insular or reactionary, vices that war against the politics he claims to project. Indeed, in reality, and in the past few years, his politics has been marked by opportunism and desultoriness, vices and limitations that have disabled him from rising to the stature of a legend his immense talents and boldness should naturally confer on him. Indeed, if he was assisted by brilliant and remunerated aides seconded to senators of his rank by the state, and if he had taken time and caution to study the CBN and FAAN relocation issues beyond the private interests of the northern elite, he would have been less stentorian in assuming that the measures would be reversed. No, they won’t be; and this is mainly because they make a whole lot of sense economically and administratively. What is more, he must know by now that the administration under whose purview these changes are contemplated have never shied away from taking difficult and unpopular measures. They won’t start now, for vacillation is not their forte.