The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • El-Rufai’s burdens

    El-Rufai’s burdens

    After the senate rejected his nomination as minister last year, former Kaduna State governor Nasir el-Rufai instantly became a goldfish in a pond. Whatever he said or did since then acquired new and sometimes far-fetched political meaning. There were speculations regarding his senate rejection, with most unconfirmed, but he probably knows why. If he has gone beyond that rejection and who or what was behind it, the next one year or so will tell. But meanwhile, his Ramadan breaking of fast with the National Security Adviser (NSA) Nuhu Ribadu, Kashim Ibrahim-Imam, an All Progressives Congress (APC) chieftain, and Shehu Musa Gabam, Social Democratic Party national chairman, among many at his Abuja home last Tuesday has given fresh impetus to political speculations concerning him and 2027. He can’t avoid the rumours, nor does he seem to care. More, he probably enjoys how the rumours conspire to sustain and even advance his political relevance.

    The newspapers which published stories of his Ramadan interactions with the high and mighty would give anything to have an insight into what Mallam el-Rufai discussed with his guests. Surely it couldn’t be all about Ramadan, notwithstanding the spiritual lessons the Ramadan iftar practice confers on devotees. In the heyday of the military in government, coup plotting was believed by some observers to be catalysed by pepper soup kitchens. Analysts have probably extrapolated the breaking of fast practice to transcend religion, perhaps politics in particular, much more than business. When Mallam el-Rufai hosted Mallam Ribadu and others, he did not intend it as a cloak and dagger affair. Reacting to an attempt to forbid photographers from uploading the visits and interactions, he blurted out that he didn’t care what was done with the photographs.

    Mallam el-Rufai hosting Mallam Ribadu was nothing strange, going by their long-standing friendship. Until he hosted the SDP chairman, Alhaji Gabam, few Nigerians, particularly in the agitated and apprehensive South, knew that the two politicians had been friends for a long time. Indeed, after the Tuesday hosting, Mallam el-Rufai proceeded to return Mallam Gabam’s visit, and was received by his host and members of the SDP national working committee, thus heightening speculations. However, it will probably take a little longer to know exactly what the politicians discussed, whether it related, as some speculate, to Mallam el-Rufai’s integration into the government at one level or the other, or whether it concerned 2027, as many rumour-mongers appear convinced.

    But for Alhaji Gabam, the el-Rufai visit “…is a welcome development (indicating) that concerned Nigerians are cross-fertilizing ideas on how to salvage the nation’s present unpleasant socio-economic challenges of the times. The prevailing circumstances call for bipartisan and robust collaborations that transcend ethnic and religious lines to address the nation’s woes and find sustainable ways to redeem the situation.” This may be a loaded and probably incontrovertible proof that politics in one way or another was at the centre of their discussions. However, for Muyiwa Adekeye, the former governor’s media adviser, “People have personal histories and relationships that predate political affiliations. It cannot be a hallmark of civilization to have friends from within only your political party. When people visit each other or mingle across party lines, it is because human relationships exist, distinct from the political or the partisan.” Mr Adekeye is obviously more reticent than Alhaji Gabam.

    What can, however, not be disproved is that since the rejection of his ministerial nomination, Mallam el-Rufai has become generally more assertive, a little more bellicose and acerbic, and as usual idiosyncratically restless. His wheeling and dealing, as those close to him know, is almost wholly without principles and consideration for the feelings of his mentors or mentees. Indeed, nothing, not ethnicity, nor religion, nor class, nor political divide discomfits him or constitutes a dissuasive factor in his unique brand of politics. He seemed a pillar of support for then aspirant and later presidential candidate Bola Tinubu, but his detractors insinuated that he was also running with the hare and hunting with the hounds as well as flirting with a lot of political permutations. They acknowledged it was within his rights to engage in political cavorting, but concluded cynically that his political capriciousness matched his legendary Machiavellianism. They also note that since his senate rejection, he has engaged with a few notable political rejects given the cold shoulder by the Tinubu administration. He was flighty before the general election, and after just one little setback and rejection, he has again demonstrated his characteristic impatience. They wonder whether, despite his enormous gifts as a politician and orator, he is really dependable.

    Whether anyone likes it or not, and in spite of himself, Mallam el-Rufai will be talked about in earnest in the coming months. Though irreverent and highly opinionated, he is too brimful of ideas to be restrained by circumstances or animosities. Whether by rumours or incontestable facts, he will be the subject of many discussions and debates. He has a huge capacity for defending both sides of a good or bad coin, and is straight-faced and straitlaced about his defences. His admirers would, however, wish he was capable of bringing his limitless endowments to the cause of a greater or ideological principle. They would wish he could take temporary setbacks with the perfect equanimity he sometimes displayed as Kaduna State governor in his jousting with those who accused him of ethnic and religious prejudices.

    Read Also; NLC, LP battle for supremacy

    Lifting the Kaduna siege

    Few Nigerians would disagree that bandits are laying siege to Kaduna State. Between January and March, more than 400 hundred people have been abducted for ransom in the state, particularly from Chikun, Igabi, Kauru, Kajuru, and Kachia local government areas, among others. The siege did not start yesterday; it has lasted for years without any adequate and tactically superior response. The crisis preoccupied the former governor, Nasir el-Rufai, who famously advocated for saturation bombing of the bandits. From all indications, the siege will also preoccupy the current governor, Uba Sani, who has been jolted wide awake by the sheer scale and audacity of the March 7, 2024 Kuriga LEA Primary School, Chikun LGA, abductions where more than 280 pupils were estimated to have been taken, leaving security agencies flatfooted and flabbergasted.

    There has been no initiative to lift the siege; none whatsoever. The governor supports state policing, and would probably have used state police effectively to checkmate the devilry suffocating his state, had the country been restructured already. But for now the constitution disallows him from running a state police, and he must wait almost eternally for the rest of the country to come round to the idea of law enforcement devolution. As for the federal government, the country is perhaps too vast for its security network to cope with. It could not spread a dragnet for the ubiquitous bandits because of the scale of logistics needed to execute that measure, and has thus been condemned to only reactive measures to salvage whatever is left of its pride as federal authority. So far, the feds have disavowed lockdowns, yet troops in Delta State are believed to be rigorously executing that measure over the killing of 17 officers and soldiers on March 14. Governor Sani will be wondering whether anyone is really interested in destroying and defeating the bandits. Nigerians wonder too.     

  • NLC, LP battle for supremacy

    NLC, LP battle for supremacy

    The many battles within the Labour Party (LP) and between the party and its surrogate mother, the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), have exposed the timidity of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) and law enforcement agencies, particularly the police, in their handling of political discord. INEC registers and delists political parties based on constitutional provisions. Strangely, on the long-running skirmishes within the LP, the latest of which came to the fore last week between NLC and LP leaderships, INEC has remained impassive. The police have over the years been swift in tackling intraparty rascality, in many instances shutting down party secretariats until the courts decided; but in the case of the LP, for reasons not clearly stated, they have been flatfooted, allowing crimes and malfeasance to be committed at will. No one is sure what scale of conflict must occur in the LP before the relevant agencies put their foot down.

    In managing an economy driven to ruin over the past one decade or two, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) has appeared beleaguered. It runs the federal administration, and through the attorney general’s office, everything involving party conflicts that border on breakdown of law and order or self-help falls within its remit. But it has seemed content to watch the LP pulverise itself into a coma. Why help an enemy intent on destroying itself, especially after that enemy exhibited vacuity and total lack of ideology and principles? Intervening, the APC probably fears, might shift the focus away from the brigandage happening in the LP to the supposed meddlesomeness of an intolerant and discourteous ruling party. It probably reasoned that if it had intervened when the NLC/LP condominium was up in arms against the Lamidi Apapa faction, it would have robbed the country of the current spectacle contaminating the party in its entirety and deprived citizens of the ringside seats they covet to behold the weaknesses and vacillations of the party’s former presidential candidate, Peter Obi. But perhaps the various agencies empowered by law to intervene in intraparty conflicts are holding their peace because the constitution and Electoral Act already made provisions for the resolution of such conflicts. At what point then do these agencies deem the affected parties, in this case the LP, to have lost control?

    The LP is split into three ungainly and paradoxical factions. The NLC component remains the mafia don, the godfather and surrogate mother wrapped into one faction. It would stop at nothing and does not respect any law or convention in maintaining its stranglehold on the party. It boasts of no ideology other than the promotion of workers’ welfare, but it feigns to run a national party committed to regenerating and reforming the country. How it hopes to carry out that inspiring task without structured and coherent ideas is not spelt out in clear terms. The second faction is the Mr Apapa/Abayomi Arabambi faction whose casus belli are the alleged crass ethnicisation of the leadership of the party by Mr Obi and the NLC president, Joe Ajaero, allegations of illegal substitution of candidates in the last polls for which more than N2bn was reportedly deployed, and the NLC president’s undue militancy and disrespect for the rule of law. With the LP national chairman, Julius Abure, now crossing swords with the cantankerous Mr Ajaero, a third faction has now been formed headed by Mr Abure himself, an incredibly wily, obstinate and hugely underestimated politician. In summary, the LP is now balkanised into three factions, and its disputed leadership comprises one meddlesome NLC president and an ineffective and unideological former presidential candidate, Mr Obi. Can they resolve the logjam?

    In nearly every piece on the LP in the past nine months, this column had suggested that the party would implode sooner or later, and that Mr Obi, who is been framed as the next political messiah on account of essentially his parsimoniousness and nothing more, was clearly punching above his weight. The column insisted that Mr Obi had always been a political joiner, never a founder of any party; and that when he joined any party, even his loyalty could not be taken for granted. Worse, said this column, Mr Obi had no administrative acumen to run any party, let alone a political party formed by deeply fractious and unprincipled unionists unfortunately led today by a militant opportunist. Even if the LP is sustained into the next polls, concluded this column, the diminution of ethnic and religious politics, and the probable resolution of the country’s economic crisis, would rob Mr Obi of any campaign leg to stand on. In the event, the economy is responding to treatment, and the LP, because of its lack of a steely core, is being subjected to implosive legal, administrative and ethnic triggers. More alarmingly, if Mr Ajaero does not restrain himself, the NLC might suffer collateral damage from his noisome forays into the LP.

    The NLC president, in strict disregard to the law and the constitution, argues that the LP is owned by, rather than formed by, the NLC. As a result of that faulty premise, and perhaps because NLC leaders and workers won’t abdicate the prospect of building a formidable political machine and enjoying its perks, he led the NLC into taking the law into their hands when he went after the Lamidi Apapa faction last year. Last week, he again inspired the NLC into another insurrection to take over the offices of the LP. The police and INEC are predictably mute. In the fight he is leading against Mr Abure, his former ally, the NLC president has made the Freudian slip of accepting that the NLC is politicised. They were not content with forming a party, they are also deeply involved in running it; and if push comes to shove, they would gladly dethrone and enthrone party chairmen and leaders. Last week, in the heat of the battle with Mr Abure, the NLC president said he had no political ambition, and had not filled any form to so indicate. But he indeed has political ambition to the extent of using all the resources of the NLC to promote the interest of the LP. In his fight against the Bola Tinubu administration, he has clearly been unable to draw a line between his interests in the LP as an opposition party and the deployment of NLC instruments to fight both intraparty and inter-party wars.

    Mr Ajaero constantly overreaches himself. By flagrantly deploying NLC instruments to wage war against opponents, he risks fracturing the trade union and provoking leadership rebellion. He thought nothing of deploying NLC instruments to lend a helping hand to the LP candidate in last year’s Imo State governorship poll, until he was brutalised and humiliated by a throng of roughnecks. For months, he has also employed the same abhorrent tactics to fight the Tinubu administration over workers’ welfare. In his daily harangue to the administration, it was all too clear he had become incapable of differentiating LP from NLC, and union matters from partisan politics. No matter the setback he encounters in his many internal and external wars, Mr Ajaero will still be incapable of the moderation and finesse many have insinuated into his cause. There will be no one to restrain him, not the NLC leadership, and not Mr Obi. Instead, the former LP presidential candidate will watch carefully which way the cats are jumping before taking the partisan plunge. Judging from his statements so far, many of them bland and noncommittal, he thinks Mr Ajaero and the bellicose NLC will have the upper hand.

    Yet, regardless of the constitutionality of the NLC president’s position, Mr Obi appears very likely to distance himself from Mr Abure who served him dutifully during the last polls. In any case, the former presidential candidate has little patience for legal and administrative niceties. Once he sees which way the cats are jumping, he will align. And if the ship is sinking, he will follow the rats. It is dangerous opportunism; but he sees it as impeccable optimism and expediency. Mr Ajaero’s men have now taken over NLC offices and left Mr Abure with the short end of the stick. Why would anyone back the leprous Abure horse? When expediency rather than principles determine the course of action, there is no telling just what depths of infamy the LP would plumb in the months ahead as the neophyte which presumptuously prides itself as the main opposition party continues to unravel.

    The siege of Okuama and controversial questions

    Since militants murdered four military officers and 13 soldiers in Okuama, a sleepy Urhobo, Ughelli South LGA community in Delta State of perhaps hundreds of residents, neither they nor the army has slept. The community is deserted, according to Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, and much of the surrounding settlements, down to Igbomoturu in Bayelsa State, are in lockdown. Surrounding communities have declared Okuama indigenes, many of whom are stranded in swamps and nearby forests, persona non grata for fear of military reprisal. The military, however, said it would deliver ‘measured response and injurious consequences to the perpetrators’ of the gruesome killings, insisting that stories of burning villages and military reprisals were mere propaganda. Perhaps concluding that the crime scene was still an active military operational area, the governor has not visited Okuama, but has ordered the affected communities to give up the suspects.

    There are too many conclusions already on the Okuama tragedy. The Defence Headquarters insists the murders were a communal conspiracy. The governor insinuates that there could be some attempts to shield the perpetrators of the violence. And most commentators, citing the sacking of Odi, Bayelsa State, and Zaki Biam, Benue State, during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency, as examples have reconciled themselves to the logic, if not legitimacy, of military reprisals. And nearly all analysts, including advertorials by Urhobo and Ijaw groups, not to say the feuding Okuama and Ikoloba communities whose boundary conflict triggered the murder of 17 military personnel, have struggled to distance themselves from the murders, condemned the killings in very strong terms, and prayed for the successful apprehension of the killers. In fact, it has been difficult for anyone to counsel the military to be restrained in its response, given the increasingly gory manner in which the army is framing the brutal killings. The federal government said the murders were an affront to Nigeria’s sovereignty, while the National Assembly charged the military ‘to smoke out the outlaws’ who perpetrated the barbaric killings. Given the mood of the country, it is difficult for anyone to talk of on the one hand and on the other hand. The scale of the killings and the barbaric mutilation of the bodies of the slain soldiers make it even much more difficult for anyone to be objective. But a few commentators have tried to swim against the tide.

    The scale of the military reprisals is not yet fully chronicled. Whether the manner in which the troops are executing their mission is provocative or not is not clear, but it is already established that the soldiers were ambushed and wiped out. The country’s official response was likely to start from that ugly and tragic premise, and as expected, it did. But like Odi and Zaki Biam where troops and policemen lost their lives by the dozens, the military reprisal unfortunately overshadowed the tragedy, solved nothing, could not even instill fear in the hearts of those tempted to take on the army, as banditry and Boko Haram have shown, and no lessons were learnt and no attitudinal changes were effected either among the increasingly militant populace or among troops themselves. The Okuama murders are truly and monstrously tragic. But it was another chance for the military to adopt a different template of combating this kind of provocation. There are no indications that it even contemplated a different template, preferring instead to ride on the instinctive wave of popular sentiments that condemn and damn the insolence and audacity of civilians and militants.

    Regardless of whatever template the military uses or does not use, whether diligent and painstaking law enforcement sleuthing or brute deployment of force, the killers will be apprehend. Someone will always snitch. Putting the suspect communities on lockdown is, however, not the problem; the problem is the reluctance or inability of soldiers to distinguish between the innocent and the guilty, an indication of the ongoing polemical contest between the democratic norm of being considered innocent until proven guilty and the military norm of being deemed guilty until proven innocent. Then there is of course the allegation of military high-handedness, which the army hopes would be expiated by either the shocking scale of the crime or the inevitable success of apprehending the suspects. That method has been used over and over again, in Plateau State when a retired major-general, Idris Alkali, was brutally murdered in 2018, and elsewhere. The problem is that after all is said and done, the military’s image is often sullied. For whether they accept it or not, or whether it makes sense or not, how a crime is solved is as important as the solution itself. The tactics of militants and brutal, sadistic killers, such as the Okuama militants, whether they were local youths allegedly led by Endurance Okodeh, aka ‘Gen.’ Amagbein who has denied the charge, or mercenaries from elsewhere, must always be objurgated. The military has a responsibility, even in their justifiable anger, to be inured to the tactics of the beasts that perpetrated the Okuama killings. This is not just nicety; it is the surest way of dealing with crimes and provocations while retaining the love, admiration and respect of the civil populace. The police are being compelled by the law and the proficient actions of the civil society to abjure torture; that abjuration must be nationwide, institutional, unapologetic and total.

    The loss of 17 officers and men of the Nigerian Army is truly disheartening. The slain men will never return to their families. Those who survive them in the army, including the rest of the country, have a responsibility to avenge them lawfully. But the military has an even greater responsibility of inquiring into why and how their men were deployed in Okuama, and why to secure the release of one abducted Okoloba man or placate boundary dispute between the Ijaw and Urhobo, a battalion commander, two majors, and a captain had to lead 13 soldiers into a fray quite beneath the status, and far removed from the training, of the Nigerian military. The military must inquire into the cheapness of their death, whether they were ambushed or not, and learn lasting lessons. Wiping out such a highly trained contingent in peacetime does no credit to the nation. The slain officers and men will not return, and as the authorities said, would be buried as heroes. Many more soldiers are deployed in almost all the 36 states of the nation, especially in the face of mounting insecurity. The Okuama deaths must, therefore, be investigated from the military point of view in order to ensure that next time, in more defensible deployments, no contingent dies so cheaply. The military owes their men that much, and the country a sophisticated precedent in interdicting a beastly enemy.

  • How not to end farmers-herders conflict

    How not to end farmers-herders conflict

    In February, after eight months of verbal commitment, Vice President Kashim Shettima unveiled the Bola Tinubu administration’s Pulaku initiative, a Fulani code of conduct that responds to the farmer-herder conflict and ‘integrates cultural and ethical value system specific to the Fulani’. The initiative is designed to engineer ‘a large-scale resettlement programme’ to address the root causes of the conflict. While inaugurating the steering committee to midwife the initiative, the vice president announced that some seven northern states had been designated to pilot the programme as a major part of the non-kinetic approach to resolving insecurity in the Northwest particularly. Pursuant to this, while inaugurating Niger State’s agricultural mechanized programme in Minna last Monday, President Tinubu spoke of his readiness to end the farmer-herder conflict in weeks if states provided grazing lands. Mr Shettima had announced last month that Sokoto, Kebbi, Benue, Katsina, Zamfara, Niger, and Kaduna states had signed up for the programme.

    A few more states in the northern part of the country may still sign in to the programme, but the initiative will stir passions in the Middle Belt and find no takings in the southern part. The reasons are rooted in history, conflict and bloodshed. In theory, the initiative IN February, after eight months of verbal commitment, Vice President Kashim Shettima unveiled the Bola Tinubu administration’s Pulaku initiative, a Fulani code of conduct that responds to the farmer-herder conflict and ‘integrates cultural and ethical value system specific to the Fulani’. The initiative is designed to engineer ‘a large-scale resettlement programme’ to address the root causes of the conflict. While inaugurating the steering committee to midwife the initiative, the vice president announced that some seven northern states had been designated to pilot the programme as a major part of the non-kinetic approach to resolving insecurity in the Northwest particularly. Pursuant to this, while inaugurating Niger State’s agricultural mechanized programme in Minna last Monday, President Tinubu spoke of his readiness to end the farmer-herder conflict in weeks if states provided grazing lands. Mr Shettima had announced last month that Sokoto, Kebbi, Benue, Katsina, Zamfara, Niger, and Kaduna states had signed up for the programme.

    A few more states in the northern part of the country may still sign in to the programme, but the initiative will stir passions in the Middle Belt and find no takings in the southern part. The reasons are rooted in history, conflict and bloodshed. In theory, the initiative may resonate with many stakeholders, particularly in the core North and among the Fulani; but in practice, it will instigate many already skeptical states into implacable opposition. The skeptical states, especially Plateau and Benue, now riddled by ethnic conflicts and genocidal skirmishes, point at the Fulani/herder settlements in their midst as the loci of ongoing unrest and conflict. To ask them to cede more land and accommodate cattle herders may be asking for too much. They recall with great alarm the Muhammadu Buhari presidency calling on them to cede land in exchange for their safety and security as pointer to a hidden land grabbing and ethnic cleansing agenda, not to say outright political Fulanisation of the Middle Belt. Some of those states had countered the call by promulgating anti-open grazing laws. They are thus unlikely to embrace any Pulaku scheme soon.

    President Tinubu’s Minna statement, while unduly optimistic, will do nothing but aggravate suspicion in some parts of the North which have declared open animosity to open grazing and covert land grabbing schemes. The president had said: “We must reorient our farming population, including livestock programme. I don’t see why Nigeria can’t feed all our pupils with one pint of milk a day if the dairy system is well harnessed. I know what it means as an economic sabotage for cows to eat up the crops and vegetations of our land. When we reorient the herders and make provisions for cattle rearing, governors must provide the land and I as the President am committed to giving you, in two to three weeks time, a comprehensive programme that will solve this problem.”

    Read Also: Arewa Initiative call for Senator Ningi’s unconditional reinstatement

    In Minna, and elsewhere before last Monday, President Tinubu had given the impression that weeks were all he needed to resolve the farmer-herder conflict if states donated land. He did not say whether he had all the 36 states in mind or just a few, particularly in the North; nor did he say how he would execute the programme, especially con sidering the many things that should be put in place to engender widespread acceptance of the initiative among the Fulani. However, all things considered, a few weeks, let alone three weeks, would be overly optimistic. In the first place, the anachronistic open grazing method of cattle herding has been unfortunately infused with political undertones. Old habits, they say, die hard. The old culture of animal husbandry will not go away in weeks, nor will the tantalizing political and land grabbing advantages it has been infused with for centuries, as exampled by the ethnic and political smorgasbord Southern Kaduna and a few Plateau local government communities have become over the years.

    But what is even direr, as the administration will discover, is the adamantine resolve of parts of the country to resist Fulani colonies among them. Already, the Southwest blames those colonies for the restiveness in their countryside, and the humongous scale of kidnappings and insecurity on highways and farmlands. The Southeast, which stridently bemoans their land shortage, will have nothing to do with any such ceded land. Their militias have warned the region’s governors not to contemplate a scheme certain to be resisted with everything at their disposal, legal or otherwise. With a wide swath of the country potentially excluded from the initiative, what are its prospects of success? The administration hopes that if federal investment in the pilot states manifests clear financial and developmental advantages of hosting Pulaku schemes, more states might ask to be enlisted. The skeptical states do not doubt the ability of the federal government to elevate Pulaku into an enviable economic hub, but they chafe at the miscon ception and misplacement of animal husbandry which is supposed to be an essentially private economic undertaking. Individual herder or their cooperatives, like any other economic grouping, are free to lease lands anywhere in the country, possibly with federal incentives. But to position herders as exceptional and priority to the detriment of farmers and other landowners simply because of their capacity to levy violence appears to many states as unwise and ill-considered.

    The Pulaku initiative may be discriminatory and poorly thought-out, but it stands a chance of yielding fruits in parts of the North and lowering the conflict temperature in those regions in the long run. However, any attempt to extend it to other parts of Nigeria, whether in the Middle Belt wracked by farmer-herder conflicts or the deeply suspicious and increasingly nationalistic South, may be pushing the administration’s luck too far. Pulaku, by its structure and design, can only achieve partial success. It will not end farmer-herder conflicts in the country. Indeed, by the very nature of its conception, it is nothing more than the definitional equivalence of ranching. It should be a private initiative supported by wide-ranging federal subventions and incentives rather than the hue of exceptionalism with which it is covered. Ceding lands for Pulaku, a shortsighted solution for a long-term problem, will in many states sow future seeds of conflict rather than extirpate them. The Buhari administration was in the end forced to make the land cession policy optional. It should remain so, and it must not be a precondition for peace. The farmer-herder conflict, which in some cases was actually herder violence on farming communities, has transmogrified into banditry and kidnapping. If it had attracted decisive kinetic rather than non-kinetic responses, the crisis would have long been obviated.

  • The N3.7trn budget padding kerfuffle

    The N3.7trn budget padding kerfuffle

    Bauchi State Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senator Abdul Ningi stirred the hornet’s nest last week when he insisted that the 2024 Budget was padded with N3.7trn to inflate the original N25trn appropriation he claimed was passed by the National Assembly. The padding, he argued, was inserted for phantom projects regionally skewed against the North. His legislative colleagues, including northern lawmakers, pooh-poohed his claims, insisting that his claims were the product of ignorance. Since then, though he stood his ground, he had been on the defensive, isolated and ridiculed for his appalling budgetary arithmetic and wild ethnic extrapolations.

    Read Also: Abiodun promises 10,000 housing units by 2027

    But the controversy he inadvertently stoked relates to discriminatory constituency projects allocations. Those allocations have in turn led to acrimonious debates between sceptical public and angry and disadvantaged lawmakers. Sen Ningi has been suspended for three months; but Nigerians can rest assured that lawmakers, whose image had never been flattering, will resolve their differences one way or the other. They always manage to turn every serious policy dispute into a kerfuffle.

  • FOR JIMI  SOLANKE

    FOR JIMI  SOLANKE

    (Maestro with a Thousand Masks)   (2)

    SNAPSONG  213      

    The Total Artist that you were/are

        That voice and its divinity of honey 

    Its surprise-studded soprano

         Its clear command of reverence

    The supple fluidity of your body

         When talkative drums sent

    Your legs on errands and your hands

         Ruffled the rafters in their tender places

    The smoothness of your motion

         The magic of your movement

    When your maestro wonder burst the chart

         And Onilegogoro** roared into the clouds

    That was when Highlife was high life

        And all Stars knew their niche

    In the galaxy of celestial Lights

         Before the blinding blackout by Eating Chiefs

    Then stage-centre

         In the measured melody of The Chattering

    Read Also: Arewa Initiative call for Senator Ningi’s unconditional reinstatement

    And the Song; Ovoramwe, regal victim

         Of imperial hubris; Elesin’s bounteous bravura

    And the deadly twilight of Kurumi’s*** uncanny courage….

         Light on, fade out, and black out

    Your masks were many, the stage was your home

         The cyclorama loomed large behind your shadows

    ** A chartbuster highlife record by Roy Chicago in the sixties. Jimi Solanke authored  the lyrics.

    ***  Reference to four important plays that had Jimi Solanke as main feature: The Chattering and the Song, a stupendously lyrical play by Femi Osofian; Ovoramwen Nogbaisi and Kurumi  by Ola Rotimi; Death and the King’s Horseman by Wole Soyinka.

                 (CONTINUED NEXT WEEK)

    FOR-JIMI-SOLANKE-1Download

  • Haiti and the future of the Black Person

    Haiti and the future of the Black Person

    For the umpteenth time in its chequered history, Haiti has descended into chaos and disorder, a smoldering inferno of confusion fuelled by hate and national disorientation. Port- au- Prince, its grossly misnamed capital, is a haunting scene out of some surreal and apocalyptic novel. In the horrific carnage, charred corpses compete with the incinerated carcasses of animals with people reduced to feral existence roaming listlessly about.

       The situation reminds one of the horrors of Gaza and the circumstances of some postcolonial nations in Africa. But Haiti’s dilemma is much more distressing and fear inducing.  Whereas postcolonial African nations retain a semblance of the colonial state put together by the colonial masters which often allows them to reassemble their scrambled wits and pick up the pieces, Haiti has never been able to boast of a properly functioning state ever since its proclamation as a nation in 1804 by a band of dare-devil former slaves. Haiti can be described as a nation without a state. The reason lies in its storied history.

       The presiding deity or demon of Haiti’s current House of Horrors is a man named Jimmy Cherizier, aka Barbecue, a former cop turned street strongman, who has about eighty percent of the capital under his unruly writ. With the well-armed thugs, Barbecue had already occupied the main airport which had prevented the embattled prime minister Ariel Henry from returning after a peace mission abroad. He became effectively stranded in Puerto Rico.

       Even before the hapless and heedless Ariel Henry announced his resignation during the week effectively handing over his beleaguered country to the international community, Barbecue already had his rifle sight trained on the Presidential Palace. The Haitian Armed Forces were nowhere to be found in all this. Talk of the state withering and evaporating before the might of non-state actors.

       But listen to the hate-filled rant of this former cop and drug-suffused rap and you cannot but conclude that he is on to something. In all likelihood, and any sham election without legitimacy or popular endorsement notwithstanding, Haiti faces another period of occupation by foreign forces which must first try to restore order and normalcy before statehood can be redeemed.  Ever since its proclamation, Haiti has practiced a strange system of fetish autocracy moderated by assassination and occupation.

      The occupation, particularly by the United States, sometimes lasting decades in a stretch, often takes on the hue of colonization by any other name. But since the Americans themselves often boast that they do not do nation-building or engage in state reconstruction, Haiti always reverts to its default setting of an anarchic and stateless anomaly. This is the root of the tragedy that has overtaken post-Saddam Iraq and the swift decapitation of American influence in Afghanistan by the resurgent Taliban after two decades of American occupation and trillions of dollars down the drain.

       It is the Americans themselves who put the economic motivation of their interventions in Haiti in striking perspective. It is immigration control at source, it was claimed. It was in America’s economic self-interest to prevent Haiti spiraling out of control, otherwise it could prove very difficult to prevent the hordes of Haitian refugees swarming and scrambling across the US border.

       The assassination that sparked off the current unrest in Haiti happened in 2021 when its president, Jovenel Moise, was killed by Colombian marauders who came in the dead of the night mainly from the sea. No one has been brought to justice for that dastardly murder. Interestingly enough, a recent report fingered both the outgoing prime-minister and the wife of the late president as being accomplices in the elimination of the president.

       It speaks volumes about the fragility and endemic infirmity of the Haitian state if a ragtag force could so easily overwhelm the presidential guard and eliminate the nation’s foremost citizen without any repercussions. The nation has not known any peace ever since as armed thugs and non-state social misfits rose to the occasion making the country ungovernable.

      Unable and unwilling to organize any proper election, Henry stalled and stonewalled hoping to profit from the misery of his people. As he did, Barbecue expanded his writ and dominion over the beleaguered nation by sacking the main prisons and making life impossible for everybody. The consequences of this contrived stalemate came when Ariel Henry discovered that he could not return to the country he had left in ruins.

      Haiti’s problem can be likened to the plight of the lame fellow who asked people not to judge him by the state of the misaligned luggage he was carrying but by the circumstances of his misshapen limbs. The problem is more fundamental. There is no foundation all the way down the line.  Toussaint L’Ouverture and his conspirators faced overwhelming odds.

    Despite their bravery and unusual courage, the military genius that saw them defeat their colonial oppressors in the first pitched confrontation between an army made of black people against their imperialist oppressors, was not nearly enough. They lacked the bureaucratic knowledge, the philosophical wherewithal and the scientific nous to run a modern government and its state apparatus.

       They could not have learnt this in the forest redoubt they fled to in order to escape the colonial noose. They would have been too preoccupied with how to ward off the encircling predators. But despite their tribulations, they managed to forge a common identity among the disparate groups of runaway slaves. It was an identity forged in suffering and uncommon struggle.

      It was the birth of a great African nation out of Africa. Haiti was without any doubt the first authentic Black nation. But without any commensurate state, it wasn’t going anywhere. Unable to master the rudiment of scientific modernity either in statecraft or societal development, the new nation quickly dissolved into a self-disabling compendium of sorcery, mumbo-jumbo and Black magic which has remained its organizing imperative till date.

    Read Also: 22 soldiers confirmed killed in Delta community

       This is not to talk of the naval blockade, the crippling war reparation imposed by France and the sheer hostility which forbade shared experiences. The new nation was cut adrift from birth unable to enjoy the economic and political freedom that ought to go with its military freedom. This is what Toussaint meant when he passionately pleaded with his French tormentors and subsequent abductors not to substitute the aristocracy of class they have just violently dismantled at home with the aristocracy of race abroad.

      But it fell on deaf ears. The new French revolutionary victors would have baulked at the thought and contumely of it all. How could former slaves demand equality from their masters? They had not even forgiven them for their old infractions of thinking they were free. The alarm bell started ringing in the new American Republic of Jefferson and co. If people they had classified as sub-humans without any right to vote could constitute themselves into a new nation, then all was not well with the new world.

       The Haitian tragedy can now be placed in its proper universal perspective. It is a colonial tragedy on a monumental scale. It is not a question of whether Africans can do the modern state or the modern nation but whether in the last six hundred years, they have been allowed to develop along their own steam and initiative. A modern and scientifically primed and inquisitive Haiti would have been a magnetizing hub, a rallying Mecca, for subsequent African nations created by colonial fiat.

    In the circumstances, it is now Haiti that is more in need of salvation and civilization than desperately ailing African nations. In a replay of the biblical paradox, Haiti, the first African nation, has become the last just as Portugal, the first truly modern nation-state, has become the least developed European nation.  Yet as the founding continent and originating home of all humanity, Africa has a profound capacity to produce regenerative genes which cannot be found anywhere else.

      This is why the lacklustre performance of some of the continent’s prodigiously endowed nations continues to be a catastrophe for the Black race. The wager is that a few of these countries are destined for global stardom once they get their act together. How and when that African renaissance will come about, whether it will be by peaceful evolution or after some epic transformative showdown, remains a subject of historical conjectures.

     As for the hapless Haitians, it is obvious that they have been victims of a double jeopardy. Having been abducted from their original African homestead, they were abandoned in the middle of nowhere like orphans for having the temerity to ask for freedom. The foul and fetid smell of the open sewers, the suppurating slums, the turgid hens, the fearsome cats and the wild goats that roam their anarchic capital right in the heart of western civilization will constitute an open sore of humanity for a long time to come.

  • Awo and the longest goodbye….

    Awo and the longest goodbye….

    While we are still on the plight of a historic and heroic people, it is meet to dwell on the plight of the greatest conglomeration of Black people. History is a cruel and unforgiving taskmaster and the more you try to ignore it, the more it refuses to ignore you.  Almost forty years after what was mortal of him was laid to rest, the man behind the horn-rimmed glasses continues to haunt the nation with his icy stare and the hint of sardonic bemusement.

    Exactly twenty years ago on March 15, 2004, yours sincerely journeyed from his base in America to deliver the inaugural Afenifere Lecture to an enraptured audience. It was titled, Awolowo and the Longest Goodbye. Penultimate Wednesday, it was obvious that the spirit of the old titan from Ikenne was still very much around as the Awolowo Foundation gave its prestigious Leadership prize to Akinwumi Adesina. It has been, and remains till date, the longest goodbye in postcolonial Africa.

      It will be recalled that in his last interview, the late sage, a man of occult and oracular wisdom with a very deep understanding of the mysteries and mysticisms of historical occurrences, had informed his interviewer that were he to come back in thirty years and Nigeria were still a cesspit of corruption and political malfeasance, he would be found at the head of a stone-throwing mob. 

    No one is sure whether Awolowo, thirty seven years after his heroic recall, has not berthed in Nigeria again. An ominous cloud is gathering in the horizon. Corruption and legislative larceny seem to have gathered a fresh and irreversible momentum. There is a foul and nasty distemper everywhere, accompanied by a resurgence of ethnic baiting and political gaming which feeds on the mismanagement of diversities.

    Once again spurred on by a delinquent political class, Nigeria is in danger of dissolving into its ethnic particularities as the north spirals out of control from mass abduction and radical predation. The hegemonic party appears lost and totally incapable of either providing stirring political leadership or reining in its openly errant members.

    The internal mechanisms for party coherence and for maintaining and instilling party discipline appear to have collapsed. To be certain, the major opposition parties are in an even worse shape, unable to provide the nation with quality alternative policies or conduct themselves with the honour and discipline required of serious political parties.

       What will Awo think of this radical devaluation of politics and ideological meltdown which according to sages and soothsayers are usually the harbingers of far more ominous developments? The answer could be found by decoding the mixed signals emanating from the banquet hall of the glitzy Intercontinental Hotel where Adesina’s investiture took place penultimate Wednesday.

     It was indeed a gathering of the best and brightest of the land; a moveable feast of class and political panache such as befitting the memory of the greatest African organizer of all time. Everything, including the sitting arrangement, was organized with precision and meticulous attention to details. The melodious music wafting unobtrusively in the background was as sober as it was soul-stirring, reminding one of happier and more benign times in this land.

    Read Also: Speaker Abbas, Deputy mourn Olubadan

     Yours sincerely chuckled to himself as some bounders whose sense of unearned importance has become a social menace in this country, were put in their place either by a disobliging stare, a courteous frown or by more direct and brisk restraining. The Yoruba have a saying that it was only the God of yesteryears that could be slow in effecting retribution and swift restitution.

       Hesitant and a shade timorous in dumping their political and traditional leaders probably because of their social and emotional investment in them, the Yoruba political multitude can nevertheless be prompt and punitively proactive in their hostilities and disavowal of errant aspirants to political nobility. From the acerbic comments emanating from where one sat about so many men of yesterday struggling for recognition and relevance which never came, one can only shudder in premonition.

      There is nothing anybody or any society for that matter can do about an idea whose time has come. When Adesina mooted the idea during his lecture that the solution to Nigeria’s restructuring impasse might lie in reconfiguring the nation into a United States of Nigeria, the heart warmed up instantly. About twelve years ago when the idea was pushed in this column using exactly the same words, an irate reader shot back accusing the columnist of harbouring treasonable thoughts. It is the treason of ideas whose momentum can no longer be halted.

    Awo was made to pay a stiff price for his intellectual temerity. But that we are still discussing how to reconfigure Nigeria almost eighty years after the avatar wrote The Path to Nigeria’s Freedom shows why it will be impossible to shake off the man behind the horn-rimmed glasses until we do the needful. It is the longest goodbye indeed.

  • Blame game

    Blame game

    How to break the jinx in the power sector

    It is difficult to blame the Minister of Power, Chief Adebayo Adelabu, if he appears to be angry or impatient with the DisCos and other players in the electricity value chain over the incessant blackout in the country. The administration that he is serving under has ambitious targets and stable power supply is a sine qua non towards attaining them.

    There is no Minister of Power that would not be worried with power supply going south at a time it is expected to be going north. It is particularly worrisome because things had appeared to be looking up in the sector up till the end of last month.

    I am a living testimony to this fact. In the Agege area of Lagos where I reside, power supply was relatively stable such that I consumed an average of about eight units per day as at December, last year. This dropped to about seven units at some point and even far below between February 2 and February 23, to a paltry 3.05 units. I had thought I was going to come up with a new formula to reduce the energy consumption in the house when early in the year Ikeja Electric hiked its tariff without informing its customers, but had to change my mind.

    Why? Power supply had worsened despite the high tariff. As at yesterday when I was putting this piece together, we have not had electricity for five consecutive days. Yet, our other adjoining areas have been benefiting from our darkness as power supply to them suddenly improved. I called Ikeja Electric Customer Care on Thursday through yesterday and the excuse they gave me was not particularly convincing but I had no choice than to take it. After all, this is Nigeria. If electricity consumers are going to be in darkness for as long as we have been in my area, then they deserve to be told so they can prepare. Rather than thinking the blackout is the usual one that would soon give way to light, when they know beforehand, they would, where necessary, postpone stocking their refrigerators with perishables. This is the least the DisCos owe their customers.

    As far as I am concerned, only an earthquake should make such long period of darkness possible more than a decade after privatisation. It speaks to the same problem of the warped exercise that saw most of the power entities in the hands of the present owners. It is important to stress that Ikeja Electric was not alone in the unilateral tariff increase though; others similarly did. At a point the minister himself was confused over this issue because he seemed to have spoken from both sides of the mouth. On one breath, he said government had not withdrawn subsidy on power and at the same time said government did not have the resources to continue to finance the sector! As a matter of fact, I had planned an article to be titled ‘Emi ni minista nwi na’ (What was the minister saying?) when he made these obviously confusing statements. Somehow, other issues of national importance pushed that out of my focus.

    Be that as it may, the big question now is: what suddenly happened that things began to deteriorate in the power sector since the beginning of this year? Is it that our power sector is particularly jinxed to be epileptic: an ‘abiku’ today and a normal child tomorrow? Is it so jinxed that we cannot even attain stability of supply for just 30 days so we too can roll out the drums that we have attained such feat? Thirty days of uninterrupted power supply nationwide? Is it not ‘washable’?

    At a time one thinks there are good reasons to be optimistic, something would just throw spanner into the works and we would be back to square one. As a matter of fact, I have learnt to restrain myself from telling people who ask me how power supply is like in my area. I don’t know the kind of coincidence, it is whenever I respond in the positive that things start to fall again.

    Read Also: 22 soldiers confirmed killed in Delta community

    But, as I earlier said that we were having relatively good power supply in my area last year, I knew of areas not too far away from us where they always had tales of woe because they would tell you that in the best of times, they hardly had power supply for four hours a day. I am talking of Tunde Lawal Street in the Abule-Egba area of Lagos. Yet, adjacent to them on the same street, the residents used to have power supply almost 24 hours a day. You can imagine how those on the ‘Maroko’ side of the street would be envying their ‘Ikoyi’ neighbours! The part that had light issues, I was told, used to have their power supply from Ile-Epo while the adjacent lucky side was connected to the Abule-Egba axis.

    Sadly, I hear the difference is no longer clear because the side without light seems to have infected the lucky side with darkness. I also know of an area where they used to have a similar problem with electricity such that they arranged to be moved from one transformer to another because those on that transformer had relatively stable power supply. Ever since they did, neither they nor those that had been enjoying steady power on that transformer before they joined them are having light now. As a matter of fact, it was as if the new comers took bad luck to those people there because their power supply had since deteriorated too. The line that they abandoned now seems to be better than where they rushed to.

    The truth is that you would get as many answers as many people you ask the otherwise simple question of what power supply is like in their areas. While some would tell you it is getting better, others would say it is getting worse. And they are both right.  So, what is the problem? When will seemingly ‘local’ issues (like the one that have kept us in darkness for over five consecutive days in my area) be handled with dispatch such that they won’t take that long to resolve? Five days and probably still counting, at least as at yesterday.

    Ours is a case of ‘the more you look, the less you see’ in the power sector.  All manner of things prevent Nigerians from having light. I remember at a time we were told that a rat clogged the Kainji system network, resulting into nationwide blackout. At another time, it is too much water at Kainji Dam. At another, it is too little water. Head or tail; we lose. We seem to get no advantage from too much of something or too little of it. At some other time, it was gas shortage. If any or some of these issues are not cropping up, vandals would be doing their thing with our expensive cables and other power equipment.

    When one minister tells us that the issues have been resolved finally, it is only a matter of time for such challenges to rear their ugly heads again. So, what is wrong with us?

    A lot.

    Yes, a lot is wrong with us, I can tell you that for free. First, the botched privatisation. It has become obvious that those to whom many of the entities were sold in 2013 lacked both the technical capability and the financial muscle to see the companies through. It was more of ‘paddy-paddy’ arrangement. That is why we are having light in fits and starts.

    Metering is another issue. A farmer that is worth the name knows the basic tools he needs in the farm. Our DisCos, for instance, do not seem to know the minimum requirements they need to operate as DisCos. If they did, we would not be where we are with metering. How could DisCos be set for operation when millions of their customers did not have meters? Yet, that was what we have been dealing with for over a decade. It is obvious the DisCos do not want to operate with prepaid meters. They would seem content with the estimated billing or crazy bills that entitled them to revenue without productivity.

    Even when the government came in to assist, the exercise was mired in corruption. You don’t blame the DisCos, though; the government too was culpable because it allowed both its own meters and those of the DisCos to be distributed simultaneously. This was recipe for fraudulent practices and we had a surfeit of it.

    Of course we also have the issue of DisCos not willing to take power even when the generating companies (GenCos) had been worked on to increase capacity. We have vandals who are making money from power cables and transformers, etc.

    All of the challenges have combined to make the power minister issue a stern warning that the licences of DisCos that fail to measure up would be withdrawn. I don’t have problem with this because we cannot continue like this if truly we want to move forward as a country. Power is pivotal to whatever greatness any nation wants to attain. But then, the minister has to be methodical by isolating the issues to be able to appropriate lay blame. For now, it is blame game galore.

    Let us deal with the problem of gas and know that we are through with that once and for all. Not that gas would be available today and would be scarce tomorrow. Let us deal with incessant grid collapses. Let us deal with vandals, however the government wants to handle them. If the punishment for their crime had to be made tougher, so be it.

    It is when all of these challenges have been addressed and we have power supply to sell to the DisCos and they still cannot deliver, then revocation of their licences would not be a bad idea. Recent developments decentralising power supply are also good. One grid for over 200 million people is putting one’s eggs in one basket; it is a recipe for disaster.

    As the minister himself had said, he would first of all sack whoever constitutes himself or herself to a cog in the wheel of stable power supply before he is handed his own sack letter. In other words, he would let something do those saboteurs before something do him. The non-performing power entities should not be the ones to survive Chief Adelabu. It should be the other way round.

  • Questionable media awards

    Questionable media awards

    There is nothing wrong in individuals, organisations, institutions and government officials being commended and given awards for excellent performance.

    Even if what they did is in the line of their duties or roles expected of them, they can still be acknowledged for being outstanding compared with others, especially in a society like ours where not many are not committed to the tasks expected of them.

    However, while the media should not hesitate to commend good performance of any sort through reports, opinions, editorials and commentaries, organising awards, apart for the industry related ones , for elected officials, other sectors and individuals is not something they should over-indulge in for whatever reason.

    As watchdog of society which is supposed to hold the governments and others accountable, the media should avoid compromising situations where they are honouring those they should be subjecting to critical assessments and told how to not only to do their expected duties, but do better to meet the expectations of the people.

    It's against this background that one finds it difficult to understand why media unions or groups and media houses should regularly organise all manner of awards to honor government officials, institutions and individuals which questions their integrity.

    The recent Internal Security Meritorious Award by the Nigeria Union of Journalists (NUJ) conferred on the Chairman of Tantita Security Services, High Chief Government Ekpemupolo alias Tompolo is uncalled for and amounts to cheapening the status of the union that should be more concerned about enhancing the professional status of it's members.

    The explanation by the NUJ President, Chris Isiguzo that the award was in recognition of the sterling contribution of Tompolo and his firm, TSSL, to the critical campaign against crude oil theft in the country is not tenanable.

    If Tompolo has “risen to the occasion and gathered an array of young men who have taken it upon themselves to help this country continue to survive as a peaceful nation, united and continue to fend for itself and helped to address the issue of crude oil theft,” as NUJ President claims, the union and members can acknowledge the contributions, but should not give him an award in an area of work that is not their expertise.

    Read Also: Speaker Abbas, Deputy mourn Olubadan

    It's indeed shameful that the NUJ President had to lead a delegation to confer the award on him in his home town. Its should not be something to be proud of as achievement as Isiguzo is making it seem.

    Why should the NUJ give the impression that Tompolo through his company is doing a charity work in the Niger Delta when it is currently the sole contractor awarded the pipeline surveillance multi- billion naira contract by the Federal Government.

    The union through its award is giving the wrong impression that the work being done by TSSL cannot be better done than any other company even when there have been calls by other stakeholders in the region to decentralise the surveillance contracts to avoid what a group called “ineptitude and enthrone collective protection of the nation’s assets and resources in the areas.”

    No matter how well Tompolo’s company is implementing the contracts awarded to him, the task of assessing its performance to give him an award should not be that of NUJ, but that of other security experts who have better indicators to determine what is required to be done in the region.

    It’s time NUJ, other media groups and organisations stop awarding questionable awards which are based on other ulterior motives than outstanding performance of those awarded.

     If the media wants to be taken seriously as it should, the practitioners should remain the watchdogs they are supposed to be instead of being seen as lopdogs.

  • Rain

    Rain

    Rain when used as a metaphor is instantly recognised by any sensate human being, even the very young. A baby may not quite understand what is going on when it rains but in spite of that it responds naturally to the steady beat of rain on the roof top. A few years down the line, the baby, now in childhood may respond to rain by rushing outdoors as soon as it starts and cavorts  under the showers  with  joyous abandon enjoying the feel of raindrops on their young skin. It is not clear at what point rain is seen as something of a nuisance, one which can ruin  freshly coiffured hair or a new suit of clothes. For others, it may be the absence of rain that causes anxiety as a prolonged absence of rain may lead to a drought which in turn leads to widespread and profound catastrophe. More often however being beaten by the rain becomes a metaphor for unmitigated disaster as it engenders a strong feeling of helplessness. The only help for it is to get out of the rain as quickly as possible. When you are caught in the rain far from any shelter you are likely to feel utterly abandoned at which point any shelter however inconvenient would be gratefully exploited. If you really want to look for a victim of the rain however, you need look no further than a chicken. A chicken which has been caught in the rain looks absolutely miserable, with feathers blatantly ruffled and dishevelled. It is never a pretty sight.

    There are some who liken our present predicament in Nigeria to being caught in the rain, a merciless howling gale that leaves no room for any mitigating circumstances. What more, we are in such a miserable state that we have nothing on a chicken in a rain storm. The question on many lips, is, when did we get caught in the rain which is now depriving us of any crumb of comfort? There are some others who are convinced that there can be no end to our extreme and largely collective discomfiture unless and until we go back to identify at what point in time the rain started beating us and begin the process of recovery.

    One thing about rain is that, it hardly ever starts without warning even if the cloud that grows to cover the sky and blot out the sun completely is no bigger than a man’s hand when first sighted on the far horizon. The deluge, the effects of which we have been suffering from, started with that proverbial cloud, smaller than a tiny hand but of course the warning which that tiny, wispy cloud constituted was ignored out of hand and so, we have only ourselves to blame for the wet condition we are stuck in. After all, it is only a wise cripple that hot foots it out of an area that is threatening to become a theatre of war. By the time the mentally challenged cripple sets out on his journey to salvation, it is too late and he gets caught up in the rush to escape from toil, trouble and turmoil, ending up as a casualty of what at the appropriate time was no more than an avoidable  situation.

    When we talk about the patently uncomfortable situation we are in today, there is no shortage of ideas as to how to reach dry ground as quickly as possible. For some, all we have to do is strengthen the Naira without any delay and everything will be well. Even for this simple solution nobody is sure about how it can be engineered. Some others think that what is necessary is to slay the fire snorting dragon of corruption and all dividends of normality and well being will fall into our laps. When we are not talking about corruption, we turn to the issue of leadership, followership, public finance, patriotism and other intangible elements on the backs of which we are to ride to salvation. In the meantime, there is no sign that there is any identifiable path leading us to the promised land in which case, we have many years of wandering through the wilderness in front if us. More than any of these we are still blissfully unaware of when the clouds began to gather in the sky above our befuddled heads.

    It is clear there is a case for identifying the gathering of the clouds as when our soldiers, betraying their oath to protect the country from harm instead decided to rape the country by engaging themselves in activities which plunged the country into what can only be described as a ruinous civil war. There was every chance that the country was going to be torn asunder, the whole structure collapsing under the weight of multiple contradictions. However, that did not happen and the country, like a person who has been brought face to face with a decidedly fatal situation seemed to have  recovered her senses in the nick of time especially since the national economy survived the internecine conflict relatively unscathed.

    I was out of the country between the years 1973 and 1976. In those years without the internet and instant news, I could only look at Nigeria from all that distance through a telescope. The coup which overthrew Gowon floated to my ears through distant airwaves and letters from home. When Murtala Mohammed was slaughtered like a sacrificial lamb on a street in Lagos the news reached across the ocean carrying with it the outrage unleashed by that murderous deed. Were the clouds already gathering menacingly at that point in time or, is it that the first rain drops were already dropping as scattered and inconsequential splashes?

    Whatever are the answers to the above questions, I can say that the country I arrived in in 1976 was clearly another country from the one I left three years earlier even if those I left behind only three years before did not seem to be aware of any changes to the metrological situation of Nigeria, if we are to persist with the metaphor of rain that we started this article with.

    I felt the winds generated by the coming rain at the back of my neck within a couple of hours after I touched down in Ikeja. Earlier in the day, we had a stopover in Kano. On getting into the terminal, I saw a telephone and toyed with the idea of phoning ahead to Lagos to confirm my arrival. The telephone did not have a dialling tone, a capacity it had obviously lost a long time before. I had not encountered that level of impotence associated with a utility service in the three years I had been  away. Welcome to Nigeria!

    Read Also: 22 soldiers confirmed killed in Delta community

    Almost as soon as I got home my mother wanted to know what she could cook as a treat for her son returned to the nest after a long absence. To tell the truth I  had not missed any home cooking as I ate the same things in Manchester as I ate before I left home. I saw the disappointment in her eyes as soon as I refused her offer of a home cooked meal. It was then that I remembered that all the time I was away, no chicken worthy of the name had passed my lips. Anyone who lived in Britain would remember probably with a shudder that what passed for chicken there was worse than what was worthy of being written about with any enthusiasm. My teeth longed for the opportunity of being challenged with chicken bones which did not melt in the soup or fell apart as soon as it encountered any pressure exerted by any reasonably healthy teeth. I immediately brought back the smile to my mother’s face as soon as I  ordered some soup made of a chicken with bones worth cracking with my teeth. I waited a few hours for the chicken to be brought from the market, to hear it’s cackling noise as it was killed in the backyard before being made into soup. I waited in vain for any sign of a chicken being being prepared for the pot. In the end I had to ask about the chicken being prepared to welcome me back home. Not only that, I wondered aloud if the chicken had been bought as I had not seen any chicken being brought into the house.  I was then given the assurance that my chicken soup would soon be ready.

    ‘But you haven’t even bought a chicken’ I replied.   I was then reassured that an uncle’s wife had been immediately despatched to the market to get a chicken as soon as I expressed the wish to be treated to chicken stew.

    ‘But I saw her arrive and she did not have a chicken in her hand’ I insisted.

    ‘Oh, the chicken was in her bag’ I was told. I was confused. Since when did live chickens come in a bag? I was then informed that frozen chickens, imported all the way from New Zealand were now available in Nigerian markets. The Nigerian economy was blooming and doing so with uncommon vigour which was why we were now importing chickens from a place more than half a day’s distance from Nigeria. The explanation was made with more than a touch of pride because as far as those around me on that day were concerned,  Nigeria had arrived in style on the the world stage and could now order chickens all the way from New Zealand and beyond. Since then, we have all but wrecked our economy by importing a whole lot of things which were once provided by the local economy. A lot of the people who were once involved in producing all those things we now import are now unemployed and desperately poor. They are drowning in the deluge of cold rain which has destroyed our collective welfare. The harm done to that economy was immense and after fifty years of that criminal frivolity, the economy has been forced to its knees and the rain hammering on our bowed head with a ferocity which has brought us to our knees.

    I looked around me that day trying to make the point that it was because it was that kind of chicken I had been coping with and that I was sick and tired of eating such garbage but it was clear to me that my point was not well taken. Nigeria then had the capacity to buy frozen, tasteless chickens, beef and mutton from New Zealand and as far as they were concerned that was a clear sign of progress. The point that was made at the time was that the availability of frozen meat on the Nigerian market had forced down the price of that commodity making it possible for more people than before to afford to buy meat. Unconvinced, I was shaking my head as I forced that tasteless chicken stew down my constricted throat. Looking back it is clear that even if the rain had not started at that point in time, the clouds had begun to gather above us. That was some fifty years ago.