The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Issues in social and political engineering

On neoliberal economics and its discontents

Social and political transitions in postcolonial nations riddled by internal schisms are always a difficult affair to manage. It is like watching a slow-motion movie with its tormenting turns and tragic somersaults. But no force on earth can stop an idea whose time has come. This is why Nigerians must thank God for small mercies.

An elite consensus seems to have coalesced around the imperative of restructuring the country away from its current unitary stasis and structural logjam. Experience, they say, is the hardest and harshest of teachers. Nigeria has taken a bad mauling from insecurity and generalized terror before the veil of smug comfort and complacency is torn off the illusions of centralized security and its dismal inefficiency.

It has been an epic slog. The debate has been intense and occasionally hurtful, exposing ancient prejudices and ancestral biases. As we write, there is a huge tome on our desk which chronicles the travails of restructuring in Nigeria. Written by Professor John Imonbhio Abhuere, an engaging public intellectual, researcher and pan-Nigerian patriot, it is a fascinating study in the challenges and management of leadership in post-independence Nigeria.

It must be admitted that what we have is a consensus at the level of intellectual elite and not a generalized consensus among the political elite. It is not a done deal yet. There are still some hegemonic formations in the nation whose political worldview can simply not comprehend what is meant by restructuring. There are others who see restructuring as a firm route to secession. Yet there are a few who are secretly thrilled about the prospects of restructuring as a firm exit clause out of the nation.

Under conventional expectations a government that is still grappling with the plague of a severe economic crisis that is the fallout of a sharp and sudden economic engineering cannot be expected to take on the additional burden of restructuring without threatening its own political foundation. Unconventional wisdom may however suggest that restructuring itself may be the solution to the crisis. It is a classic Catch 22 conundrum.

In fractious multi-ethnic nations seething with polarities and cultural tensions, it is only a democratic leader with exceptional courage and political guts who can grapple with the horns of restructuring without batting an eyelid. In the post-independence history of Nigeria, only the government of the First Republic has achieved this feat. Even then, that particularly exercise was distinguished more by malice, vindictiveness and an attempt to cut Awolowo down to size than by genuine patriotic zeal.

In Nigeria, the political lot has always fallen on undemocratic and authoritarian military rulers who have gathered all the reins of power around themselves to effect an administrative restructuring of the nation: Ironsi and his ill-fated provinces, Gowon, Mohammed, Babangida and Abacha.

Famously, while announcing the change in the internal configuration of Nigeria from twelve to nineteen states, the fiery and tempestuous General Murtala Mohammed warned his compatriots that neither jubilation nor condemnation would be tolerated on the occasion. About a week after, he was assassinated on his way to work.

It is in the light of the plague of crises, conflicts and contradictions that has marked the evolution of modern Nigeria that it has been broached in some quarters that if President Tinubu succeeds in bringing about an even-tempered and far-reaching reconfiguration of Nigeria, he would have gone on to become the most consequential democratically elected leader in the history of Nigeria.

But to make a dent on the issues involved, the Nigerian leader must first scale the hurdle erected by deepening misery and accelerating poverty in the land. There can be no doubt that the situation has been compounded by the sudden removal of the subsidy regime package without a well thought out, integrative and inclusive package of amelioratives. Steadily fuelling the rising tide of public anger is the perception that government is slow and tardy in combating the scourge of corruption.

We must not forget that these are symptoms of a more fundamental disorder. Traditional authoritarian societies forcing a transition to a market economy with its decentralization of power and dispersal of authority face a difficult, uphill task even when the society is in the grip of a military despot. Market economy turns tyrants into little men and little men into tyrants.

Despite its anti-people ravages when unleashed against vulnerable Third World societies, market economy, with its dismantling of traditional hierarchies and disruption of financial hegemonies, can be a radical and economically liberating force in advanced societies.

When he was asked why he always targeted weak and vulnerable traditional societies as prime objects of market reforms, Milton Friedman, the archpriest of monetarist fundamentalism, responded that no human society ever moves forward without huge social upheavals and political dislocation. The danger for a Third World country like Nigeria and many other African countries embracing market fundamentalism is the terrible devastation and colossal wastage of their most precious assets which is prodigious human resources.

The challenge for African thinkers is how to come up with an authentic and original synthesis of   countervailing economic orthodoxies without sacrificing the natural advantages of traditional African economies. Those who merely mouth received notions and the economic shibboleths of the Bretton Woods institutions in the face of the economic miracles of several nonwestern societies have a lot of mileage to cover.

In the light of the foregoing, can it be said that President Tinubu is wrongheaded in the brutal short shrift the Nigerian president made of the whole discredited notion of the subsidy regimen in his opening address to the nation? Could he not have done it the way of General Babangida by offering a debating sop to the chattering classes while concluding arrangement to impose a sweeping regimen of adjustment on the nation?

   It will be recalled that the Minna master-dribbler, while allowing an exhaustive debate on the issue, simply went ahead to do the needful just at the time the debaters thought they had seen off the last of the Washington lobby. Arrangement had already been concluded to take the IMF loan and all its grim conditionalities. The ensuing devaluation of the national currency and the liberalization of the banking sector unleashed a huge social and economic dislocation so impactful and consequential that the effects are still being felt more than three decades after.

The snag, however, is that the IBB regime itself never recovered from the trust, credibility and integrity deficit . As we have said, even the presence of a despotic regime with all its coercive apparatus and power of repression cannot stop an outraged and indignant people fearing extinction from rushing to the barricades.

    As the IBB regime crunched its way through several real and imagined enemy formations with the brutal and chilling efficiency of a master executioner, you always had a feeling that something nasty was in the air. After a failed coup, unsolved murder riddles, rumoured unrest in the military and ethnic turbulence, the chicks finally came home to roost in the momentous SAP riot of 1989. It was a seismic upheaval which devastated the entire landscape.

Despite its stranglehold on the military institution, the regime never regained the political initiative even if it was to last another four years. Several months after, even the regime’s chokehold on the military was badly shaken by a military uprising which shook the nation to its foundation. The savage retribution has been unequalled in the annals of military bloodletting in Nigeria.

   The social and political tempest continued to plague the country. So did the authoritarian intolerance and contempt for the populace which led IBB and his honchos to annul the freest and fairest election in the history of the nation. It proved a bridge too far for the military and the career of its arguably most gifted but misdirected general. It is instructive that few hours after rumours of an Abiola victory began circulating ahead of the peremptory annulment, the price of rice fell nation-wide.

Read Also: Police kill notorious kidnappers destroy camps in Abuja

   We can now draw useful conclusions from all this, particularly in the light of efforts in some quarters to impose another IMF-inspired, right of centre, Chicago School, neoliberal social engineering on the nation in all its harsh and inhuman Darwinian triumphalism. The original data and conceptual framework for monetarist economics was a product of sustained local research and the application of prodigious intellect to empirical data.

Unfortunately, and in one more example of academic colonization, its conceptual formulations and refined products are henceforth applied as a one-size-fits-all-panacea without any regard for local culture and historical condition.

The circumstances and conjunctures cannot be more different. After the Second World War, the western victors under the agency of a visionary America embarked on a frenetic spending free to rebuild infrastructure and reflate the western economy.

In Britain, the scars of the war quickly healed as huge housing estates, low cost schools, health facilities and affordable public transportations became the norm. By 1958, thirteen years after the end of the war, the prime minister, Harold Macmillan, famously proclaimed that the British people had never had it so good.

Of course such a society in which people are over-pampered by an indulgent state, in which citizens have grown lazy and indolent from government largesse and in which government itself has become a huge economic almshouse freely dispensing subversive munificence to the populace is bound to develop some serious economic distortions which require the massive shock therapy of structural adjustment.

This is how advanced western economies correct structural anomalies in the system and stimulate further growth in contrast and contradistinction to backward African economies already hobbled by massive infrastructural deficits, accelerating de-industrialization, educational decay , mass immiseration and generalized poverty occasioned by a mono-cultural economy in which state larceny has become the norm.

   It was on this underwhelming economy that Nigerian coup victors and their IMF specialists sought to impose a western-style structural adjustment regimen barely fifteen years after a ruinous civil war and after four years of unremitting pillage by civilian kleptocrats. It was an economic death sentence by any other name. Almost forty years after, Nigerians are in a better position to judge whether their lot was better before they were herded into the military laboratory of economic vivisection.

This is why Nigerians demand fresh and better economic ideas from the current administration about how to figure their way out of the present all-pervading darkness. With Margaret Thatcher, the shrill cry was that there was no alternative to the SAP regime. It was a war-cry that earned the Iron Lady the sobriquet of TINA or more devastatingly Margaret the milk snatcher.

But when the question was put to the late Professor Sam Aluko, he retorted that there was always an alternative to death. Aluko, an anti-Marxist leftwing economist of the old Keynesian school who famously authored a pamphlet on why he was not a Marxist, was well-grounded in the local economy and its peculiar intricacies and could see much further than the IMF and its fanatics. For his pains, he was dismissed by the ideological sophisticates of the Bretton Wood lobby as an economic illiterate.

   The joke was on them. Aluko would later team up with Asuquo Tony Ani during the Abacha regime to give Nigeria an economic respite. Throughout General Abacha’s tenure, there was commendable growth and the stability of the national currency was never disrupted for one single minute, despite General Abacha’s state of the art burglary of the exchequer. After the initial petrol hike, the goggled one never went in that direction again till he died in mysterious circumstances.

Perhaps it all boils down to the fact that economy is too serious a calling to be left in the hands of professional economists. We must hope and pray that we may not find out the hard way once again.

February 11, 2024
Basorun J.K Randle pitches for Ogbeni Oja, his childhood friend

We must thank God for small mercies. It is heartwarming to find out that true friendship in all its ennobling and soul-purifying essence survives among Nigerians despite all the tribulations. A man must keep his friendship in a state of constant repairs, admonishes Oscar Wilde, the great Anglo-Irish wit, dramatist and essayist.

Genuine friendship requires constant cultivation and nurturing. It is not a transactional barter. Neither is it an enforced cohabitation for the purpose of seeking opportunistic advantages. This perhaps why it eludes many contemporary Nigerians, just like the gift for empathy or compassion. A British social rebel and implacable scourge of its literary establishment put things in extreme formulation when he insisted that if he were to choose between his friend and his nation, he would gladly choose his friend.

Basorun J.K Randle, notable accountant, gifted social diarist and enfant terrible of post-Victorian Lagos who recently turned eighty is no stranger to extreme formulations. Scion of the illustrious Randle lineage, the usually mild-mannered and urbane JK does not take hostages when it comes to protecting the Randle franchise which he believes has come under mortal threats from successive governments of the state. In the process of unrelenting altercations, a classic man of the establishment has become a local scourge of the establishment.

Read Also: Police kill notorious kidnappers destroy camps in Abuja

Snooper once tried to intervene in the unseemly dispute. After some initial explorations, the whole thing ended in an uproarious fiasco in Akin Ambode’s office with the younger accountant going toe to toe with the more famous accountant until a testy silence fell. In his haste to leave, Snooper probably forgot his trademark cap in Governor Ambode’s office.

Despite this warrior side, Basorun JK Randle is a man with a remarkable appetite for making and maintaining friendship. He has just penned a riveting tribute to his childhood friend, Olorogun Sonny Folorunso Kuku, the new Ogbeni Oja of Ijebu Ode. It is as entertaining as it is hilarious, rippling with wit and bon mots and replete with rare historical vignettes. Ogbeni Oja is the highest title any freeborn Ijebu Ode indigene could aspire to and with that Sonny has reached the very pinnacle of the social hierarchy.

A friendship which began when two callow youths entered Kings College the same year in 1957, the association has matured with years. Without any hint of jealousy, envy or subservience, JK appeared occasionally dazzled and mesmerized by the extraordinary and legendary brilliance of his friend. It was a brilliance which shone through secondary school, medical school and post-graduate colleges.

But the new Ogbeni Oja was no jaded nerd or self-absorbed wonk. He participated fully in all college pranks and subversive activities. The jokes continued till their old age. Basorun Randle once approached his friend complaining about a rare condition known as spondylosis.

After listening patiently to his friend, Dr Kuku informed him that he had just mastered a new procedure which would involve cutting off his neck and stitching it back after operation. JK Randle quickly excused himself and flew downstairs whereupon he instructed his driver to make a dash for safety. Here is wishing the two jolly friends an unhurried stroll to the departure hall.

February 11, 2024
Tinubu must restructure Nigeria now to avoid national meltdown

The core of Nigeria’s problem is the lumping together of diverse peoples with different cultures, different world views, different ambitions and directions in life. Nothing besides geography links Nigerians, and even that – geography – clearly delineates us – as the river Niger eloquently epitomises. Nigeria is a mere geographical expression as Chief Obafemi Awolowo put it nearly a century ago. Indeed, Sir Abubakar Tafawa Balewa put it more brutally. According to him:”Since 1914 the British Government has been trying to make Nigeria into one country, but the Nigerian people themselves are historically different in their backgrounds, in their religious beliefs and customs and do not show themselves any signs of willingness to unite. Nigerian unity is a British invention”.

Not a word of that statement has changed since it was made in 1948.

So it has remained an unmistakeable truism, no matter under what manner of rulership; military or civilian. The earlier we appreciate this, and put an end to this endless attempt at making one country out of a multi- ethnic, multi- cultural, multi – religious and multi – lingual amalgam of nations, the better”.

The above was essentially my contribution this past week during an interrogation of the Nigerian conundrum, a conundrum which ensures that every successive attempt to make things better for the country, or her citizenry, turns out worse.

Nigeria is at the crossroads, with multidimensional poverty and multi – sectoral insecurity making life much more hellish than at any time in recent memory.

It is so bad that a week ago in Minna and Kano, in Northern Nigeria, of all places, where there wasn’t as much as a whimper during the humongous #EndSAS# riots, thousands were on the streets protesting the unbearable hardship Nigerians are going through.

In the same manner, the Southwest, generally regarded as the safest part of the country, has lost its innocence, with two Royal Monarchs needlessly killed two weeks ago in Ekiti.

At the personal level today, there’s hardly any love lost amongst the various ethnic groups, just as there’s no longer any mutual understanding or cohesion.

Things are that bad.

Professor Bayo Williams, a well regarded intellectual, who has devoted considerable time to these matters has, severally in his articles, fingered elite dissonance – what he calls lack of elite consensus, as the cause.

But I beg to differ.

I believe instead that, as Sir Tafawa Balewa put it, Nigeria is simply not configured to be one united, peaceful and prosperous country. Not a single hagiographer has ever alluded to that as the reason for the British unification of Nigeria. Rather, trade was the sole purpose and, even religion, was an afterthought.

President Bola Tinubu had hit the ground running, courageously taking on those tough national issues which his predecessor, President Muhammadu Buhari, had left severely alone. Not a few Nigerians had, in turn, began to think that we had hit it off for once, that a lion heart, the man who courageously faced off the all- knowing former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who he severally bested as Lagos state governor, has arrived to rescue Nigeria. But 8 months down the line, it is obvious that those very demons that have always imperilled Nigeria’s development, are all still alive and kicking, and will most probably do everything to frustrate him, which will be a great pity, because it would not be for lack of trying.

You only have to listen to, not just the loud murmurings, but the heavy guffaws of millions all over the country, to know that there’s far less appreciation than you would ordinarily expect,n for President Tinubu’s yeoman’s efforts.

Obviously, not many now, any longer, remember the ‘Emefielian Plague’ that sunk the country into a N22.7Trillion Ways and Means debt peonage, most of which Emefiele gifted members of the then Villa cabal and others very close to President Buhari in sweetheart, low priced, foreign exchange deals that ended up being round tripped, massively devaluing the Naira.

The CBN governor, Olayemi Cardoso, in a recent Arise Television interview, gave Nigerians the following details of Emefiele’s ‘achievement’ in office:

” $7 Billion in unpaid FX obligations about which a forensic audit by Deloitte revealed the following:

$2.4 Billion had no valid import documents;

Non- existent entities got allocations; Entities which asked for FX got more than they asked for, while those that did not even apply for FX got allocations”.

That is where President Buhari and Emefiele left Nigeria on May 29, 2023.

These are only a few of the challenges President Tinubu must now, willy nilly, find answers to.

To do that, however, he should advisedlt, share with other Nigerian federating units, the responsibility for turning things around in the country.

Here the President must bear in mind Ngozi Okonjo – Iweala’s admonition that:”no matter how strong the credentials, one person alone cannot implement reforms, adding that comprehensive economic reforms are by their nature multifaceted and difficult”.

But I am, indeed, calling on President Tinubu to do far more than economic reforms.

This is why, despite the many problems I have identified as requiring urgent solution – general insecurity, the looming food insecurity, extreme poverty etc, I wish to humbly recommend the suggestions in my referenced article below for the President’s serious consideration even though it would mean that he will have to seriously multi – task, finding solutions to Nigeria’s existential, as well as structural, problems, all at the same time.

Titled:’That June 12 Recognition May Not Be a Hollow Ritual’, and first published 17 June, 2018 but now substantially edited for space, it reads as follows:

“Beyond our wildest imagination President Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general and member of the narcissistic military that guillotined June 12, on 6 June, 2018, proclaimed an executive order, recognising the election, and the winner, Chief MKO Abiola, on whom he conferred the GCFR, the highest honour in the land, all in a bold attempt to put a closure to a very pernicious phase of Nigerian history.

Before we get lost in the euphoria of the moment, it is necessary to let the President know that rather than being the closure to June 12, that event is only the very beginning of honestly answering the National question.

The fact today is that Nigeria is no where near a federation, properly so called.

What then is a federation?

To answer this million naira question, I will, respectfully, press into service, my two- time teacher, Professor (Senator) Banji Akintoye.

Writing, mutatis mutandis, on the topic: “What is restructuring?” on 6 January, 2018 the elder statesman opined as follows:

“The basic idea of a federation is that the various distinct parts of a multi – ethnic country should be a federating state.

Each state should have the constitutional power to manage its unique problems and develop its own resources for its people. It should manage its own security and make its own contributions to the well-being of the entire country.

The centre should manage common issues like defence, international relations, currency, and general principles like the defence of human rights.

Read Also: Why Ondo businessman reportedly killed wife, committed suicide

That, he said, was the federal arrangement Nigeria’s founding fathers agreed upon in the 1950s”.

“But, since independence, our politicians, and military leaders have gradually destroyed this structure and replaced it with one in which the federal government is the controller of virtually everything, meaning that states have no control over their own resources, and have to depend on federal allocations for their sustenance.

The federal government is (therefore) over-burdened, controls too much money, has become egregiously inefficient and corrupt and is, essentially, destroying Nigeria because the states have become impotent. They cannot develop their resources, cannot fight poverty or insecurity in their domains, and cannot contribute to the progress and prosperity of Nigeria. The cumulative effect , he concluded, is that Nigeria, as well as Nigerians, have become extremely poor. Most public facilities – roads, electricity, water installations, public administration, etc – have degraded, and are not working, with the result that most of our youths have become unemployed and hopeless. Inter – ethnic relations has degenerated into enmity and hostility. Crimes have made life very unsafe all over Nigeria. So bad have things become that some sections are asking to secede”.

In view of all these, President Tinubu should not be seen continuing with a status quo which brought about all these negativities that have continuously derailed Nigeria’s progress.

Fortunately, he is here not being called upon to re – invent the wheel since his party, the APC, set up the El Rufai Committee on Power Devolution which did an excellent, but unappreciated work.

As captured by The Guardian of 26 January, 2018, “the committee recommended that states should have considerable control on the solid and oil resources in their domains. It recommended the creation of state police, alongside a federal force with specified areas of jurisdiction. It also proposed more revenue for states and a reduction of the Federal share of national revenue. It further recommends that: “All minerals, including oil, and gas that are onshore, should be vested in the states of the federation. “Minerals, oil, anything in the land, should belong to those that own the land, said the committee, adding the clincher:”We believe that the time has come to take this bold step and move away from over centralisation”.

“The Petroleum Act would need to be amended, so that states can issue oil-mining licences. The Nigeria Minerals and Mining Act would also be amended to give states the power to do this. The Land Use Act will equally be amended to recognise the provisions in the Minerals and Mining Act. The Petroleum Industry Act will need to be amended too”.

These are irreducible parameters for the creation of a new Nigeria where peace will reign and measurable progress will be made unlike the unequalled crisis presently ravaging the country.

President Tinubu should urgently consider unearthing the report of the El Rufai Committee from wherever those experts in reading President Buhari’s body language buried it so that Nigeria can earn a new lease of life.

February 11, 2024
Overdue ban on sachet alcohol

The recent announcement of the commencement of the enforcement of the ban on the importation, manufacturing, distribution, sale and use of alcoholic beverages in sachets, as well as pet and glass bottles of 200ml and below by the National Agency for Food and Drug Administration and Control, (NAFDAC) is long overdue.

Typical of how every opportunity is abused, the sale of alcoholic beverages in sachets and small bottles is now so common that anyone, irrespective of age limit can buy and consume them at various outlets. The sale of sachets alcoholic beverages has become one of the most thriving retail businesses that they are openly displayed at even points like motor parks, shops near schools and others where they should not.

Indiscriminate drinking of alcohol beverages has become a daily ritual nowadays that many are seen, including those below the age of 18 who are not supposed to take alcohol, with the drinks early in the morning and other times of the day.

As the Director General of NAFDAC Professor Mojisola Adeyeye rightly stated, the agency should be more concerned about the implementation of the regulations and regulatory measures towards safeguarding the health of Nigerians, particularly the vulnerable youth, against the dangers of reckless consumption of alcohol instead of allowing the companies to continue to produce the drinks because of whatever amount they claim they would lose.

It’s unfortunate that the producers of the drinks and their sympatisers are giving the impression that the NAFDAC decision was sudden which they didn’t foresee.

If as far back as January 2022, as NAFDAC stated, it stopped the registration of alcoholic beverages in sachet and small volume, while should the producers and sellers still have the large quantities they claim still want to continue selling.

Following the decision said to have been based on the recommendation of a committee of the Federal Ministry of Health and NAFDAC, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, and the Industry represented by the Association of Food, Beverages and Tobacco Employers, Distillers and Blenders Association of Nigeria, in December 2018, the producers of alcohol in sachets and small volume reportedly agreed to reduce the production by fifty per cent with effect from January 31, 2022, while ensuring the product is completely phased out in the country by January 31, 2024.

Apparently, the producers of the drinks must have thought that the agreement would not be enforced and have now resorted to playing the victim card with all the noise of how much they will lose and how many jobs would be lost. The ban is not total as they can still produce other sizes other than the sachets and 200ml bottle size.

Read Also: Police kill notorious kidnappers destroy camps in Abuja

More than the profits to be made from selling the alcohol sachets and bottles, the health implications and dangers outlined by Professor Adeyeye during her press conference should bother all stakeholders on the matter, including the House of Representatives that is probing the decision.

“The World Health Organisation has established that children who drink alcohol are more likely to use drugs, get bad grades, suffer injury or death, engage in risky sexual activity, make bad decisions, and have health problems.

“The WHO also stated that harmful consumption of alcohol is linked to more than 200 health conditions including infectious diseases – Tuberculosis and HIV/AIDS; and non-communicable conditions- liver cirrhosis and different types of cancer. It is also associated with social problems, such as alcohol addiction and gender-based violence.

“To curb the menace of abuse of alcohol, WHO recommended some actions and strategies to policymakers that have shown to be effective and cost-effective, which includes regulating the marketing of alcoholic beverages, and regulating and restricting the availability of alcohol.”

February 11, 2024
A game of numbers

Figures released by the UN claim that the number of human beings alive on our planet at any one time crossed the magical figure of one billion in 1804. It has to be said however that this is no mean feat as there was time, albeit a very long time ago when the global population was hovering around one million. All the same, it is also worthy of note that we had to wait for another one hundred and twenty-three years before the global population added another billion people even if that meant a doubling of the population. Today, ninety-seven years later there are close to eight and a half billions of us swarming all over this planet which has expanded, at least figuratively to accommodate all of us, each one according to his or her station. Comfortingly however, there is yet a great deal of space to accommodate many more of us. World population increase has been nothing if not revolutionary over the last one hundred years. Without all the senseless global wars, low grade but frighteningly murderous conflicts in the way of Boko Haram and a couple of pandemics in the last hundred years, there certainly would have been many more of us. But that is another story all together.

Looking at human population figures a little more closely, the figure of 40% leaps out with considerable force because this is the figure of human beings who were born since the dawn of human occupation of the earth but could not live long enough to see their first birthday. This shows just how inhospitable our natural environment is, as surviving long enough to propagate the species is one huge obstacle course, the survival of which cannot be taken for granted. This is why it is only in the last two generations that all over the world, humans have become more relaxed about the survival of their children. This is also perhaps why we are now much more indulgent with our offspring than ever before in human history. A couple can now limit the number of their children to two or three, secure in the knowledge that but for wildly unforeseen circumstances, all of them would live long enough not only to have their own children but to be present at the respective funerals of their parents. It is thus reasonable and psychologically rewarding to invest a great deal of emotional and other forms of expenses on each child. In the days when only two or three of ten children were likely to survive childhood, it would have been foolish to lavish a great deal of care and attention or any particular care on some child who under normal circumstances was just passing through and was not likely to be around long enough for any lasting bonds to be formed. Better to regard them as transient tenants who were likely to simply drop out of the nest one day, never to return. This is why all over the world, children were the recipient of truly horrifying treatment at the hands of their own parents. In both Britain and the United States, in the closing years of the nineteenth century children needed the protection of special laws from the wanton cruelties, some of them quite extreme, from both their parents and unscrupulous industrialists who put children to work with dangerous machinery at an age when they should have been handling nothing more lethal than stuffed toys. It has to be said however that it was not only children who died long before their time. Many of their parents were only a little less vulnerable so that there were a large number of orphans for which nobody, not even the state was responsible. The adventures of Oliver Twist or Little Dorrit as narrated by Charles Dickens suggest that life was far from being a bed of roses for children who had the misfortune of having been born two centuries ago. Across the pond in the USA, Jack London in his book The Jungle, tells the story of a child immigrant who worked in the stockyards of Chicago. His main job was to fetch beer for his older co-workers throughout the day as they butchered an unending succession of cows, sheep or pigs. To pep himself up, or perhaps to assuage the many difficulties of his young life, the poor boy took little sips from each cup of beer he delivered. At the end of one fateful and very hot working day, with the smell of blood and guts swirling around his brain the boy had succumbed to the soporific effects of the alcohol he had ingested throughout the day and fell asleep in one corner of the work place. He was eaten up by ravenous giant rats overnight. No child deserves to be exposed to such danger in the name of earning a few pennies to augment the meagre wages of his parents who were only marginally less exploited than he was. It is sad that all over the economically challenged parts of the world including Nigeria stories like this have not yet been consigned to the dustbin of history. As one of my waggish friends who is now quite out of it all, would have said, we are still at the mouth of it.

From the point of view of child survival, we entered a brand new world about one hundred years ago when childhood mortality fell dramatically and in doing so changed the world fundamentally and forever, first in the rich nations and then slowly but surely practically all over the world even in places in the back of beyond like some of the barely accessible parts of Nigeria and other such countries where poverty rules. The one difference between the rich and the poor is that the rich took note of changing conditions and set a limit to their child bearing whereas the poor have continued to produce children in the imitation of a magician effortlessly pulling fluffy rabbits out of a top hat. This is why the population of Nigeria is increasing in the manner of a fully laden lorry running out of control, a towering danger to all and sundry. The population of Nigeria in 1918 was put at eighteen million of which no less than half a million died in the influenza pandemic of 1918/19. Today, there are an estimated two hundred and fifteen million of us, to quote one of the fewest numbers attributed to it. Thus, the population of Nigeria has been multiplied by twelve in a hundred years or just over three generations. The problem of dying children has now been replaced by that of swarms of children with a dodgy future.

Before the pioneering work of Louis Pasteur in France and Robert Koch in Germany, mankind had no clue as to what was responsible for the illnesses which unchecked, claimed human lives apparently with careless abandon. Children with their immature immune system were especially vulnerable to microbial infections, an inordinate number of which were around to terminate the earthly existence of large numbers of children, cutting them down like ripe wheat in a field during harvest. Polio, chicken pox, small pox, diphtheria, whooping cough, diarrhoea, malaria and many other swift killers competed among themselves as to which of them could do the most damage within any environment that could be mentioned. Given the terribly poor nutritional status of most people, it is a wonder that any of them survived long enough to have children.

Read Also: Why Ondo businessman reportedly killed wife, committed suicide

One thing that is clear from human history is that until recently, in the last hundred years of the 300,000 year existence of the human race has man been able to stand up the zillions of microbes with which we share this planet. The irony of this situation is that without the activities of these microbes billions of which live within our body, the earth as we know it will collapse and die in next to no time. Actually, of all the many million species of these organisms whose primary function is to regenerate the earth, only a few of them have the intention or the capacity to harm their human neighbours and hosts. But the few which have the potential to harm us can kill us within a few days. Two of such organisms were responsible for small pox and tuberculosis which killed at will over the last twelve centuries or so. For most of that time, mankind had no answer to their infestation. For example, small pox is reputed to have killed 400 million people in the last century even though the disease was eradicated twenty years before the end of that century. As for tuberculosis, there was no cure for it until the early fifties when it was found that the newly discovered streptomycin had excellent activity against the organism responsible for this infection. D. H. Lawrence died of it and although George Orwell was treated with streptomycin, he reacted so violently to the drug that it had to be withdrawn from treatment with it and so, the man died, another artistic victim of what the Europeans called the white death. Until the fifties therefore, a diagnosis of tuberculosis was a death sentence waiting to be executed. Today, tuberculosis is still killing in excess of a million people every year but we now have many effective drugs with which we can force a stay of the execution of the death sentence which tuberculosis was only sixty years ago.

Man has battled against sickness and death ever since he acquired the power of critical thinking and acute observation. He was even able to assemble an impressive armamentum of drugs, most of them plant derived. In spite of these herbal drugs however, man continued to be knocked over by illness like pins in a bowling alley. Shamans, sangomas, babalawos, spiritual healers as well as con men of every description have stepped up to the plate to work their magic against illness and death of the sudden variety but when we look at available figures, we can only come to the conclusion that unfortunately, they were all uniformly unsuccessful. Man continued to die sometimes at an alarming rate throughout the period of recorded history. It was not until scientists, those hard headed men and women began to tackle microorganisms with keen and tested scientific methods that we began to make any headway against the diseases which shortened the life expectancy of human beings. Within the last hundred and twenty years global life expectancy has more than doubled from thirty-two years to seventy-one and in some parts of the world it is significantly in excess of eighty years. How this has been achieved is worthy of comment.

February 11, 2024
Don’t worry, Jagaban’ll break barns and silos to banish hunger from your homes

It was another exciting week at the Villa last week, especially with President Bola Tinubu rallying his team to meet Nigerian’s needs, while he was still in Paris. You will remember that he had gone on some days of rest in France two weeks ago and while there, his deputy, Vice President Kashim Shettima, had been in the saddle, steering the ship till the return of his principal. The President eventually returned on Tuesday evening and it was a return to more serious work.

While in France, one festering crisis threatened to throw the nation into a life-size chaos, threatening all the hard work of the administration to refocus the nation’s socioeconomic direction. For a while now, the issue of food security had been on the administration’s front-burner and it has not folded its arms in the face of the threat. However, reports from various statistics monitoring outfits have been highlighting the effect of food inflation on the economy.

During the last week, that crisis got to something close to a breaking point as people in some parts of the country hit the streets to protest hardship and hunger. We read of protests in some parts of Niger and Kano and from the look of the trend, there might be more from other parts if nothing changes.

Although this is a very serious issue, the issue of escalating hardship, which streamed from the removal of the fuel subsidy and the depreciating value of our Naira, claims have also emerged that the opposition is taking advantage of the situation and using it to stoke the protests. The ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) managed to sniff out that piece of intelligence; just to make the Tinubu administration look insensitive, they incited the people against the government and the party that brought it to power. According to the APC, the opposition parties are magnifying the situation, stoking panic and inciting protest.

However, in his proactive pattern, on Tuesday, Jagaban immediately convened the Special Presidential Committee on Emergency Food Intervention to come up with solutions to the hunger dilemma and continue with other plans of banishing the prevailing hardship in the country. The committee brainstormed for three straight days and came up with some desperate measures to go on with.

You will remember he was still in France when the committee started meeting on Tuesday, he later returned in the evening after the first meeting had been concluded. The point is even when he is not physically available, President Tinubu does not allow distance or space deter his determination to set things straight. Thankfully, he is surrounded by very capable and reliable hands. The meeting was convened, on the President’s behalf, by his Chief of Staff, Honourable Femi Gbajabiamila, and the National Security Adviser, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu.

At the end of the three days of brainstorming, the committee advised him and he gave the directive on steps to immediately fight back the hunger that seems to be pushing the people to the edge, which has also given the opposition a pretext to stoke panic and protest. On Thursday evening, he gave directives that target short-term a solution; inundate the markets with excess food items and get hoarders of food items to release them to the markets, one way or the other.

At the end of the Thursday evening, Minister of Information and National Orientation, Mohammed Idris Malagi, addressed journalists at the State House, disclosing a number of steps to be taken to shut down the spell of hunger that has disturbed the peace of the nation, the peace we have managed since the subsidy removal-induced hardship perched on the country.

“The first one is that the Ministry of Agriculture and Food Security has been directed to release about 42,000 metric tons of maize, millet, garri and other commodities in their strategic reserve so that these items will be made available to Nigerians; 42000 metric tons immediately. The second one is that we have held meetings with the rice Millers Association of Nigeria, those who are responsible for producing this rice and we have asked them to open up their stores. They’ve told us that they can guarantee about 60,000 metric tons of rice. This will be made available and we know that that is enough to take Nigerians the next one month to six weeks, perhaps up to two months.

“Government of course is also looking at all those who are hoarding these commodities because actually these commodities are available in the stores of many traders. Government is appealing to them, that they should open up these stores, make these commodities available in the interest of our nation. There is no point when the whole country is looking for this food, you are looking up these products so that you make more money and then Nigerians suffer. ⁣

“Like I said, these are all measures that are taken to immediately, and as an emergency measure bring down the cost of food items. In the long run Federal Ministry of Agriculture is going to invest massively so that Nigeria will recover its potential as a food basket and we don’t expect that going forward we are going to be faced with these challenges again. The President has directed that whatever it will take, food will be available to Nigerians at a cost that is also very reasonable. And that is what the summary of this meeting entails”, he said.

Also on Thursday, Jagaban touched on something very critical to all Nigerians; old and young, rich and poor, the issue of housing. The housing deficit in Nigeria has worsened over the years and it is currently put at 28 million. The Tinubu administration, in its Renewed Hope Agenda, already created plans to bridge the housing gap in the country. In its plan, the agenda intends a 24 million housing units between 2023 and 2028.

On Thursday, President Tinubu led Nigerians to Karsana in Abuja, to initiate the actualisation of his administration’s housing plan by performing the groundbreaking ceremony of the 3,112 housing units of the Renewed Hope City. The Karsana project is just part of the 20,000 housing units that will be delivered in Abuja alone, just as there are plans for those to be delivered in the states.

The outing at Karsana was just an indication of his desire to see the least of Nigerians, no matter how pitiable their source of income or condition is, live in minimum comfort and feel their government’s impact.

While speaking at the event, he said the new housing programme represents the first practical expression of his administration’s desire to implement a new city development plan under the Renewed Hope Agenda, adding that under this plan, integrated living communities that will redefine the essence of residential living for Nigerians, nationwide, will be built. He also revealed that his vision is to build dynamic, integrated, and self-sustaining communities, equipped with amenities to enhance the quality of living for residents.

Read Also: Police kill notorious kidnappers destroy camps in Abuja

Also at the event, Baba debuted another idea; he directed that handlers of official government events include the recitation of the National Pledge, along with the National Anthem, in all events. He said “before I left home this morning, I asked for a printout of the National Pledge, and we have to re-launch it again at this event. The re-launch is about being committed to the values, greatness, and hope of our country. It is our pledge to Nigeria, our country, to be faithful, loyal, and honest. To serve Nigeria with all your strength – we saw it on the field of play yesterday. We were all rejoicing. Everyone one of us loves victory. We love to win. When you are positive and you are hopeful, Nigeria is winning.

“We did not say it will be Eldorado and smooth all the way. But we are confident that this country will excel in all ramifications. We will defend our unity and uphold Nigeria’s glory in every way possible because we are Nigerians, and we have no other country”, the President said.

The week would not have been complete without the super win by the Super Eagles against the Bafana Bafana of South Africa on Wednesday evening. We have all become familiar with the very huge interest the President has in football, especially when it concerns Nigeria. Right from the group stages, Jagaban has been following the national team’s progress and as they moved gradually towards the finals, it grew and he has shown it by ensuring not to miss any of the matches.

So towards the semi-final match, he took a step bigger than the one before the quarter-finals, when he called to speak to team while in the dressing room. Last week, he asked the Vice President, Shettima, to leave whatever other programme he might have and head to Stade de la Paix in Bouake, Cote d’Ivoire, to cheer ‘our boys’ to victory. The idea, no doubt, contributed to the win for Nigeria.

He sealed everything after the win with his words of encouragement on his verified X handle, @officialABAT, saying “from the Southernmost cape of Africa to the Plains of Mauritania and the coast of West Africa….You have made us all Proud to be Nigerians! Go… Soar in the AFCON Finals. Well done, boys”.

On Friday, he signed the Electricity Act amendment Bill 2024 into law. This is a law that dedicated to the welfare and development of host communities. It sets aside five percent of the actual annual operating expenditures of power generating companies (GENCOs) from the preceding year for the development of their respective host communities.

Like I said, it was an exciting week, a week in which our resolve as a nation was tested and the acumen of our leader, as an astute administrator and politician, were tested. But the week is over and we can only wait and hope that the new week gives us something better.

February 11, 2024
SNAPSONG 208

Big Battering Blast (1)

The year was young
Our woes were old
The day went unfazed
By the harmattan haze

Then came the wails of a lampless night
When supper lost its way to penniless homes
And the night masticated the moon
Like a hapless morsel

The minaret was mum
The bell tower stayed forlorn
In its tongueless height
The wind wound a whisper

Round the restless lips of absent horns
Pigeons coed ceaselessly in their little holes……
And suddenly, so suddenly,
A blast, a big, battering blast

And the evening’s uneasy quiet
Was shattered into a thousand bewildering shreds
The ground shook beneath our feet
Solid mansions crumbled like cardboard boxes

Flipped luxury cars littered the streets
Like piles of scrap yard junk
The road is a running tale
Of broken glass and mangled metal

February 4, 2024
Edo, Ondo polls signpost troubling future

Kogi State governor Usman Ododo has so far spoken and acted like someone undeserving of the office his predecessor and kinsman Yahaya Bello single-handedly gifted him. Everything about the new governor betrays his mindset: his wistful look, his unspeakable subservience to the former governor, his first set of appointments, his deferential statements. He will not be the first man to be imposed on a people, nor will he be the last. Those who claim to be his betters, such as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, had done much worse in imposing misfits and ruining whole destinies. There is indeed hardly any former governor not susceptible to the itch to aggregate to himself the interest of the state’s electorate. In nearly all the impositions, Nigeria has been worse for it. Now, a different kind of farcical electoral shenanigan is playing out in the governorship polls of Edo and Ondo States, for obviously no lessons have been learnt. The field is crowded in Edo State, which will be the first to have a go at imposition in September, and for the November Ondo poll, Lucky Aiyedatiwa, probably the most remorseless of governors, given the way he handled the illness of his predecessor, has a head start in an uninspiring field of aspirants.

Edo first, then. Governor Godwin Obaseki has no conception of loyalty or finesse. Nor does he care anything about ideology or fairness. He is a member of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) over which, in the Edo chapter, he has a tenuous hold as leader. He will first need to get his protégé elected in the primary poll slated for later this month, but will almost certainly head into the September poll with a fairly divided house, an unruly field of political and governorship hopefuls, and a hardly disguised preference for Asue Ighodalo, a corporate lawyer and investment banker. But then there is also Omoregie Ogbeide-Ihama from the Dan Orbih/Nyesom Wike PDP faction, and the cantankerous and sometimes disagreeable deputy governor, Philip Shaibu, who is determined to be a pain in the neck of Mr Obaseki. The governor won his second term exemplifying the state’s suspicion of the godfather phenomenon, an electoral tool deployed with devastating impact against ex-governor Adams Oshiomhole who denounced his leadership and backed Osagie Ize-Iyamu, a pastor. The governorship primaries in the PDP and APC are therefore expected to be keenly contested, but the victors are unlikely to underscore the beauty and independence of democratic practice in Nigeria.

The dynamics of the Ondo governorship APC primary is unusually different. With a less congested field, which appears more worrisome than Edo’s in terms of leadership capacity, the state may head for an anticlimax. Sen Jimoh Ibrahim is a powerful and wealthy aspirant, but he will have to move mountains to best the incumbent. In his reactions to the late governor Rotimi Akeredolu’s health crisis and eventual death last December, Mr Aiyedatiwa hardly put one foot right. He needed to be patient, circumspect, calculating, and even dissembling if the situation demanded. Instead, he spoke brusquely, displayed abrasive and grating manners, and came across as unfeeling and dismissive. Since assuming the governorship, his tactlessness has left many people squirming and bewildered. But, for a governor, patronage is a powerful tool, and the Ondo governor has won many officials and ordinary people to his side. It is nevertheless too early to determine whether he would win, for his opponents will match him in every department of the game. But incumbency, regardless of how long a governor has been in office, can be stifling and unnerving to any opponent.

Edo and Ondo, however, reinforce and exemplify Nigeria’s deeply flawed succession politics that keeps churning out misfits as local government, state, and federal administrators. The administrators may have flattering academic qualifications, but leadership is far more than academics, far more than loyalty, and far more than looks, eloquence and to some extent even charisma. Decades of focusing on wrong leadership yardsticks have worsened Nigeria’s existential challenges. There will always be global economic pressures triggering or exacerbating domestic economic crisis. And there will always be internal conflicts sometimes consequent upon warped constitutional arrangements and safeguards incapable of mediating ethnic, religious or regional suspicions and pressures. No part of the world is immune to such disharmonies and pressures. What makes the difference is the capacity of their leaders and perhaps too their imagination and boldness. There is nothing in the coming elections in Edo and Ondo that encourages the belief that prospective governors will be judged using the right yardsticks. In Ondo, a flawed Mr Aiyedatiwa schemes his relevance by positioning himself, against all scruples, and even before his benefactor is buried, to take advantage of the state’s desperate situation. And in Edo, the controversial and overhyped Mr Obaseki, who spoke glibly about democracy and denounced godfather politics when he campaigned for a second term, is now desperate to reproduce his kind, with scant attention paid to democratic practices. He believes his preferred candidate’s impressive CV should clinch the argument.

The succession battle raging in Rivers State between Mr Fubara and ex-governor Wike should serve as signal lesson to political leaders eager to impose successors. Nothing is ever guaranteed. Most states where succession was midwifed by meddlesome political leaders have ended in a cul de sac. But no one takes history lessons to heart, and as Ondo may yet prove, perhaps even those who will vote at the party primary as well as at the governorship election seem absolutely incapable of learning anything. The choices facing Edo may be less complicated than Ondo’s; but simple or complicated, the chances of producing first-rate leaders, when the outgoing leader is himself third-rate, is one in a million.

Atiku, Makinde and Ibadan blast

A farcical drama played out in Ibadan last week when Governor Seyi Makinde, still smarting from the January 16 explosion in Ibadan, openly jousted with former vice president Atiku Abubakar over the latter’s lack of empathy for the people of Oyo state. Labour Party’s Peter Obi, a former presidential candidate, had visited the state to condole with Mr Makinde and Oyo people over the loss of lives and destruction of properties. The PDP’s former presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku, said the governor plaintively, had not deemed it fit to visit and commiserate.

The former vice president’s media aide, Paul Ibe, however, refuted the governor’s claims. Mr Makinde, a notable member of the famous G-5 was too busy minding other things, he said, to read the letter of sympathy published in the media and issued less than 24 hours after the blast. How the spokesman missed the inanity of his response is hard to say. Of course Alhaji Atiku’s statement was published in the media, but for a former vice president conversant with bureaucracy and officialdom, it is passing strange that he considered such impersonal methods adequate, let alone one a spokesman would openly boast about. Does vindictiveness not have a limit for Alhaji Atiku?

February 4, 2024
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.

February 4, 2024
Checking disinformation

Last week, a member of a WhatsApp group I belong to shared what was supposed to be the Anti-Kidnapping emergency numbers of the Directorate of State Service, (DSS) because he felt someone might find it useful considering the high rate of kidnapping across the country to call for help quickly.

He meant well, but the numbers were not on any of the official lines of the DSS when another member contacted the agency to confirm if they sent out the announcement.

When the member who shared the information on the group was told to stop spreading falsehood, he felt offended and said it was not his business to know if they were false or not. Whoever wants to use it according to him should verify it.

I had to respond that it is wrong for anyone to share unverified information which may mislead others. If anyone must share any information, he or she must be sure it is true.

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

There are too many false information being shared on various platforms these days which makes it necessary to be cautious of what to believe is true or reshare. While some share information they don’t know is wrong, some people engage in deliberately sharing false information for various reasons.

To avoid falling victim to misinformation or disinformation it’s better not to be eager to share any information unless it is necessary to do so. The source of any information has to be confirmed as the right one before anything online. If people want some important information, they know where to look for them and no one should feel compelled to be in a hurry to share any information to give the impression that they have access to information.

Even when some information is credited to some sources, there may be a need to double-check as there are those who manipulate various content and attribute them to those who didn’t originate them. With the present rate of infodemic, seeing is no longer believing. There used to be a saying in the Yoruba language which states that there is no cheating in how one looks in a photo. It’s how you sit that you will appear. That is no longer the case with the manipulation of photos and even videos.

A member of the same group once shared a supposed video of Bill Gates being interviewed by a United States broadcaster who accused him of some wide allegations and added that if the interviewer were to be a Nigerian, he would have been accused of harassing his guest. The line of questioning was unprofessional for me; all I did was search online for the same interview, which turned out not to be the manipulated version.

To maintain the sanctity of the various platforms where people share information, it is no longer enough not to share false information, it is necessary to mark them as such when they are shared. Those who engage in indiscriminate sharing of unverified should be warned to desist or be penalised as some social media platforms do. They should also know that their integrity is at stake when they don’t exercise necessary discretion.

There are several fact-checking organisations available in the country that can be contacted to verify information people want to be sure of instead of spreading falsehoods that have negative consequences.

February 4, 2024