The IMF*
Is
The doctor
Who heals
By killing
The patient
*
Sallah season
And the market forces
Proclaim the virtues of
Sacrifice:
The rope glides
From the neck
Of the ram
Straight to the neck
Of our ailing pockets
*
In the name of
The Mother
The Daughter
And the Holy Ghost
Life Everlasting
A-Men.
*
To those who say
“It’s not done”
And the fellow who asks
“Why not”
We owe a debt
Beyond measure
*
The Mind is
The Husband
Of the Heart
The Nnimmo Bassey Example
FIRST and foremost, my resounding congratulations to Nnimmo Bassey, founder and nurturer of Health of Mother Earth Foundation (HOMEF), whose ageless organization is one busy decade old this season, thus occasioning a commemoration that provides a much-needed platform for a sober consideration of the plight of this Earth, Our Earth.
Those with no adequate knowledge of the depth and range of Nnimmo Bassey’s commitments in the past three decades would think that his sole preoccupation is ecological activism and the defence, protection, and preservation of the Earth. And they would be right in thinking so; for this warrior has deployed virtually every literary genre (poetry, prose fiction, faction, polemics, satire, travelogue, and journalism), all in a passionate effort at waking up slumbering Humanity to the reality of the ecological Apocalypse that is sure to result from our present environmental nonchalance and denial arising most times from power blindness and unenlightened self-interest.
But Nnimmo Bassey is so many things at one and the same time: architect by training and profession, Humanist by deep persuasion, socio-political thinker-critic by conviction, ecological warrior-activist by inclination. A common thread there is to all these engagements, for Bassey the architect has designed and built for them all one large house with rooms whose doors open to one another, and whose walls are transparent on vital planes. And what makes him such an ‘equal opportunity’ landlord is his possession of that sympathetic imagination and boundless conscientiousness that derive from their sense and essence from intellectual polyvalence enhanced by visionary versatility. For, in the last analysis, what is an architect if not that thinker-doer who lives in a house before it is built? What is the visionary artist if not that curious imaginer who dreams up and fore-sees the future and its yet unborn possibilities?. A remarkable artistic impulse serves as the organizing principle in Bassey’s multiple thinkings and doings. When Bassey calls Earth our ‘Home’, he does so as an architect who thinks like a poet, and a poet with the intricate figurations of the architect. . . .
Dear listeners, I have come neither to praise Nnimmo Bassey nor to sell him to the world. I just thought you should know the artist whose risky fight for democracy and human dignity during those years of Nigeria’s murderous military dictatorship produced a collection titled Poems on the Run at the time when the poet himself was the one in hiding when General Abacha’s hitmen were out to thrust the bayonet in the mouth of the Human Rights activist, and that unpaid, unprotected warrior who enlisted himself in the Salvation Army of this Earth, Our Earth. That man who stood up for Democracy is the same one who keeps standing for the preservation of the Earth, our Home. The binding virtue between these two stances, these two darings, these two activisms is Justice – and its moral and existential imperatives.. . .
But as I have said above, I have not come to praise Nnimmo Bassey, but to show how his conscientiousness seeks to redeem our world, how his words and declarations strive to sustain our sanity; how his Pen protects our Planet.
Bassey and Company
To let you know he is not alone, here are the words of other thinkers, writers, and doers whose overriding missions pertain to the urgency in ‘writing’ this Earth, Our Earth, back to equitable health. Permit me to poach their eco-musings from one of the opening pages of my new book of poems Green: Sighs of Our Ailing Planet:
Ale ni nin a (The Earth owns us)
Ia ni l’ale (We own the Earth)
Ira aye, giri giri ko ni l’ale (People of the world, do not trample the Earth)
Tee jeje; tee jeje (Step gently on it, gently, gently; step gently on it).
—Yoruba song
We do not inherit the Earth from our ancestors; we borrow it from our children.
— A Native American saying
The care of the Earth is our most ancient and most worthy, and after all, our most pleasing responsibility
— Wendell Berry
The biggest enemy we face is anthropocentrism. This is that common attitude that everything on this Earth was put here for [human] use.
—- Eric Pianka
Today we are faced with a challenge that calls for a shift in our thinking, so that humanity stops threatening its life-support system. We are called to assist the Earth to heal her wounds and in the process heal our own – indeed, to embrace the whole creation in all its diversity, beauty and wonder. This will happen if we see the need to revive our sense of belonging to a larger family of life, with which we have shared our evolutionary process.
Today, over 50 years later, the stream has dried up, women walk long distances for water, which is not always clean, and children will never know what they have lost. The challenge is to restore the home of the tadpoles and give back to our children a world of beauty and wonder.
—– Wangari Maathai, Founder of The Greenbelt Movement,
Nobel Peace Laureate
Waters are dying, forests are falling. A desert epidemic stalks a world where the rich and ruthless squander earth’s wealth on the invention of increasingly accomplished weapons of death, while millions of people perish daily from avoidable hunger.
Tomorrow bids us tread softly, wisely, justly, lest we trample the eye of the EARTH.
—– Preface to The Eye of the Earth, 1986.
Delta Blues
Let us come right home, to the Delta, hotspot of Nigeria’s environmental degradation, showpiece of the country’s criminal neglect. Yes, the Delta, the goose that lays Nigeria’s golden egg. This region is not only the epicenter of the use and abuse of the country’s oil fortune, it is also home to and place of origin of some of Nigeria’s most accomplished literary figures whose works teem with deep and disturbing revelations of the plight of a once admirable eco-paradise.
This is the home and base of Gabriel Omomotimi Okara, Poet of the Delta, Poet of the World, Poet of the River Nun which, once a clean, majestic phenomenon, now flows “tiredly” towards the Atlantic Ocean, weighted down by the debris of a disintegrating environment. J.P. Clark surveyed the entire region, the wheeling and dealing involved in the oil trade and its deleterious consequences for the whole region. All for All was veteran Clark’s literary presentation of the situation, complete with its historical trickeries and their contemporary repercussions.
The Ken Saro Wiwa Legacy
How can we recount the tragedy of our Delta without a prominent but painful mention of Ken Saro Wiwa, the most famous martyr of the Ogoni resistance who called the world’s attention to the horrors of the Delta’s Darkling Plain before he and other patriots were hanged for telling Nigerian rulers that oil pollution was killing the land and poisoning the rivers even as gas flares burnt out the difference between night and day, and human life counted for a little less than half a barrel of the ‘sweet crude’. Ken never underrated the weight of the burden he had to shoulder, nor did he the reptilian ferocity of military (and complicit foreign oil companies) that were after his life. I remember with aching contemplation the last time I saw him during a brief but loaded visit at my humble University of Ibadan apartment, with a copy of his new book, This Darkling Plain in his hand. As he handed me this book, he said something to this effect: This is for you, Niyi. Read it and see if you consider it worth reviewing. May be in it are my last words. But if they kill me, they cannot kill my spirit; they cannot kill the Movement. They cannot kill ALL my people. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth; my eyes were wet. Ironically, it was Ken himself who patted me on my shoulders and said with a diplomatically easy assurance, ‘All will be well’.
But has it? The environmental and socio-economic justice for which Ken laid down his life never came the way he wanted it. But that short man stands tall with us as we gather here today, his patented pipe between his lips, his brainy, mischievous voice ringing in our ears. Those who denied him the right to a “decent grave” have only succeeded in securing one for him in the hearts and minds of all friends of this Earth, OUR Earth. Ken must have presaged Ogaga Ifowodo and that man with “a grudge in Warri”, who clinched his resolution with these immortal words: “I’m going to live even if I die first” The Oil Lamp, p. 62).
The Wiwa Legacy continues: the idea of the Writer as Righter; environmental justice; assuring Nature a place to breathe; picking your share and leaving the garden better than you met it; allowing the river to move and meander its way towards an ocean free of plastic debris; making acid rain a thing of some careless past; sparing the trees and the forests which sustain our lives; guaranteeing clean air, the vital friend of the lungs of our Planet, doing everything in every way in every place to secure the future, the future, the Future… .
The Wiwa Legacy is alive in Tanure Ojaide’s Delta Blues when he remembers, without forgetting to remind us, about those days “When green was the lingua franca” (p.12) in the Delta, “This share of paradise, the delta of my birth” (p. 21), where the Omoja River was source of life and soul and sustenance, before oil cartels turned the waters into a “poisonous brew” (p. 21)
Ogaga Ifowodo’s stupendously crafted, epic-like The Oil Lamp focuses in achingly gripping detail on the horrid happenings in this “Cesspit of the Niger Area” where Ogoni’s agony is grave and, like the beleaguered folks of Odi, the people couldn’t help wondering “what fate buried oil in their patch of earth” (p.31). The Delta’s oil lamp is the type designed to generate loss rather than light, mayhem instead of mirth, a frightfully accurate metaphor for the wickedly ignored oil flares that have turned the lives of the people, and the existence of the flora and fauna of the Niger Delta into a blazing nightmare. Ifowodo’s figurations compel stomach-churning similarities with those of Stephen Kekeghe, another poet whose Delta has been corrupted into a “wilting mangrove” whose “gas flares freeze your breath,/darken your lungs and livers” (p. 40); very much the same Delta in Ibiwari Ikiriko’s Oily Tears published about two decades before. There are two kinds of lamps in Ifowodo’s meticulously detailed body of poems: the one whose flares consume with exploitative, incendiary madness; and the other whose true and tender flame illuminates the path to sanity, equity, fellow feeling, unqualified respect for this Earth, Our Earth and the human beings who live on and with it. Ifowodo’s lamp is the type which knows how to illuminate the path to a just Future.
Nnimmo Bassey even “thought it was oil” before discovering “it was blood”. Blood and oil, oil and blood. Which came first? Which comes with a more frightening colour? Which is thicker? Which is cheaper? Which is dearer? Which is backed by a large, unaccountable army? Which has no army beside its moral force? Which issues from a kind and tender heart? Which has no heart and lacks a human soul?
We Thought It Was Oil represents Bassey at his most reflective, cogitative, and moralistic mode. Manifest here are themes such as existential interdependency:
Without
the sun
the moon
has no light
without
the woman
no man
is strong
(p. 6)
There is also the playful but sarcastic musing in “We are very rich…/That is why we are so poor” (p. 64); a mock-Edenic suggestiveness in “the garden of silence” (p. 62), “The tree of forgiveness” (p. 63), the scourge of amnesia – all culminating in a call for an end to indolent and/or willful complicity, and the urgency of the need for action:
Something
That’s what we can do
And must (p. 29)
The earnest, humanistic passion in this clarion call sounds like an anticipatory prologue to Bassey’s next collection, I Will Not Dance to Your Beat (2011), where a title cast in a simple declarative sentence serves as a faithful predictive intro to the poems which populate the book. The weird world here is one in which kids dance “in acid rain” (p. 54), a world of “cold summers and warm winters” (p. 41), where “today’s battles were lost yesterday” (p. 25), where the rich and powerful are busy “turning our forests into toothpicks for their absent teeth” (p. 61). The deliberative tone and purpose of virtually all the poems in this book are captured in “Reclaiming our humanity, our memory”, its frank, laconic foreword. Its combative, transgressive, “fist-clenched” (p. 38), “Justice now” (p. 31) method is reflected in the activist temperament that runs through the entire collection. Bassey’s ideological purpose assumes a missionary force in the last three lines of the foreword:
“Wielding every cultural weapon at our disposal, let’s raise our fists, our voices, and stamp our feet on the earth, reclaiming our humanity” (pp. 8-9).
Water Testaments
As if he heard Bassey’s loud exhortation before it was ever uttered, Greg Mbagiorgu, the Nigerian scholar, playwright, and theatre artist, dreamt up an anthology of poems on one of the most vital sustainers of human life: Water. And he took no time in prodding that dream into action. The result is a 152-page book containing poems by some of Nigeria’s prominent poets, with impressive variations on the chosen theme, and remarkable emphasis on the place of water in the Planet’s eco system. No one could have been clearer about the purpose and import of the anthology than Mbagiorgu himself:
“Water Testaments…. is an anthology of water-related poems designed to stimulate the process of finding lasting solution to the global water crises. It is interesting that this collection is coming from Africa, which is the continent worst hit by water scarcity and other water-related problems”. (p.13).
Mbagiorgu goes on to clarify the vision and drive behind his project:
“In this volume, a number of poets – all of them Nigerian – are exploring this medium as an artistic way of consolidating and supporting the World Water Council’s main objective which is ‘to establish water as priority in public policy’. One unforgettable lesson from the 4th Water Forum is that ‘solving water problem is everybody’s issue that must be tackled in a holistic and multi-disciplinary manner” (p. 13). In Mbagiorgu’s opinion, “Only poetry can provide the images and the metaphoric premises that can enable us to “transcend our ordinary ways of dealing with this indispensable natural resource (p. 5) The main purpose of the project, Mbagiorgu concludes, is to minimize “the extent to which we abuse water or take it for granted” (p. 16). In this refreshingly novel way of encouraging the creation of a “new world water culture”, Mbagiorgu taps into the thoughts and talents of some 68 Nigerian poets (including himself) with “diverse backgrounds” and “diverse experiences” (Emenyonu, (p.10). It is impossible to read the poems in this anthology without listening carefully to the vital testimonies of Water, its primordial preeminence, its liquid lyricism, and, alas, its perilous tribulations in the hands of eco-plunderers. Every poem sounds like a soldier in the salvation army of this Earth, Our Earth.
Environmental and Allied Forms of (In) Justice
Restoring our Planet to environmental justice is surely more than the responsibility of the writer, for that branch of justice is both a part and a consequence of other forms of justice. To address it, we must confront the monsters of political and socio-economic inequity at both national and international levels; for in the final analysis, there is a link between the brutality we inflict on the environment and the one which characterizes our relationship to fellow human beings. Historical and contemporary realities are replete with instances of such brutality and its recurring barbarity. One of them is the unholy alliance between advanced nations which ship off their hazardous wastes to the so-called developing, but actually impoverished, parts of the world where mercenary native agents are all too willing to accept and hide them for pecuniary rewards. Needless to say, this cannibal complicity has serious ecocidal implications. To this frightful situation must be added the often ignored logical connection between socio-economic well being and environmental health. You cannot sell the need for the preservation of trees to a poor community whose population depend on firewood for all its fuel/cooking needs. Nor can you prevent them from turning portions of their land into open dung hills unless you provide them with sanitary, accessible toilet facilities. In other words, a world in which the rich and powerful derive their power and wealth from the exploitation and pauperization of the less privileged cannot hope to achieve environmental justice. For one justice begets another.
Often overlooked (or tendentiously ignored) in our considerations is the fact that one person’s environmental problem may be everybody’s ecological concern. The same sky looms above our heads; our continents are washed by common oceans. This is why the Nigerian Delta which constitutes the major burden of this lecture is Nigerian by physical location but global by ecological implications. When one finger gets smeared by oil, the other fingers should be wise enough to know that they cannot escape the stain. The literary works featured in this study have not only drawn attention to the environmental horrors of one of Nigeria’s richest but most abused regions, they have also challenged us to think and feel, to see and hear. And act. For therein lies our will to power, and the test of all that is HUMAN is us. What better way to end this piece, then, than the way it began, with Nnimmo Bassey’s simple but emboldening lines:
Something
That’s what we can do
And must (emphasis mine)
Congratulations, my brother, Nnimmo, Friend of the Earth, Poet on the Run.
Thank you for the HOMEF initiative.
Niyi Osundare
Joy Mmesoma Ejikeme’s story which broke last Sunday reminded me of the belief in some quarters that in Nigeria, only about five per cent (of the population) know. Twenty per cent think that they know while the remaining seventy-five per cent do not know at all. I know some people would even disagree that Nigerians who know are up to 10 million. That is assuming there are about 200 million Nigerians. Of course, we do not need anyone to tell us that this is a poor performance in any examination. But my take is that the country would be a better place if as many as just 10 million people actually know in Nigeria.
I am somewhat comfortable with the estimated five per cent that know and seventy-five per cent who do not know. The problem, however, is with the 20 per cent who think that they know. Unfortunately, they are so loud in their ignorance that they dominate the online space such that their position is often mistaken as the preponderant position in the country on any particular issue.
The past week, one of ‘my mark is higher than yours’ controversy, with both authentic marks and the ones conjured by some Nigerian magicians competing for attention vividly support this Nigerians’ famed ignorance. Two of such cases readily made the headlines; that of one Atung Gerald in Kaduna State and Mmesoma. Interestingly, Gerald never sat for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) at all; yet, he claimed to have scored 380, “following which his ethnic group took the issue up requesting that he should be given special recognition, only for the Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) to disappoint them with the incontestable fact that Atung never obtained the 2023 UTME application documents, not to talk of sitting the examination”, Dr Fabian Benjamin, JAMB’s Head of Public Affairs and Protocol, said.
But the more celebrated of the two cases was that of Mmesoma, and apparently so. Last Sunday, news spread that the 19-year-old student of Anglican Girls Secondary School (AGSS) Nnewi, Anambra State, claimed she was the best student in the examination, with an aggregate score of 362. Meanwhile, she scored 249. She was awarded a N3million scholarship by Chief Innocent Chukwuma of Innoson Motors for the ‘feat’ while awaiting the Anambra State government’s honour, before a top government official in the state pulled a call through to JAMB to confirm the authenticity of the result. That was the genesis of the story that trended for the first four days of last week, with not a few people condemning JAMB, even as the board laboured to explain that Mmesoma’s result was fake.
The several reactions that trailed Mmesoma’s declaration of herself as the best 2023 UTME candidate call for sober reflections. Perhaps the most annoying was the ethnic dimension that some people introduced into the matter. This is curious though; especially coming from some of the least expected quarters, including some respected individuals. Even when JAMB did all that was humanly possible to prove that the result being paraded by Mmesoma was forged, they simply chose to believe the ‘small, innocent girl’ whose face (read tribe) JAMB did not like. Unfortunately, they failed to prove what JAMB had to gain by ethnicising a national examination. Such individuals and organisations failed to ask themselves who Mmesoma or her parents could have offended in JAMB that she was now suffering the consequences?
For me, however, I am more annoyed by the perception of the issue on the part of some people as that of a ‘small innocent’ girl versus the almighty JAMB. If for whatever reason JAMB had not been able to prove its case beyond reasonable doubt, or Mmesoma too had not chosen to come clean after about three days of her defending the indefensible, JAMB’s credibility would have been seriously eroded over this storm in a tea cup. And that would have come with a lot of implications beyond the examination board itself. It would have been an ample opportunity for criminal elements that have been waiting for an opportunity to rubbish the good record that the incumbent registrar of the board, Prof. Ishaq Oloyede, has laboured so hard to build.
It is not an overstatement to say that JAMB was in a shambles before Oloyede took over in 2016. We should not forget so soon how UTME time was time of national confusion due to the chaos that usually attended the examinations in the pre-Oloyede years. If we conveniently choose to forget the revolution that the registrar has brought to bear in JAMB, the Federal Government cannot forget that Oloyede’s first six years in the saddle succeeded in raking in about N50bn into government’s coffers, as against the N50m it remitted from inception in 1978 to 2015. That Oloyede was able to do this despite reduction in fees charged for the examination and sundry other fees is commendable.
But what this means is that several vultures that had been sharing the billions that Oloyede has been remitting have been rendered jobless. Those were the elements perpetrating corruption in the place and corruption would never go down without a fight. They had tried all manner of shenanigans to ridicule the registrar’s reputation without success.
Who says some of those examination fraud cartels or cabals (we have them in virtually all sectors of our system) could not have been behind the Mmesoma issue? They know Nigerians would always support the underdog in such matters and Mmesoma eminently qualifies for such underdog. At 19, she would be deemed a child even if she does not qualify for any benefit under the Child Rights Act. And that was what actually happened. Some people and institutions still prefer to see her as a 16-year-old innocent girl even after it had become public knowledge that she is 19.
While Mmesoma might not have been a party to the high-wire plot to rubbish Oloyede (that is if those he had stopped from stealing Nigerians’ money through JAMB were behind the forgery, in order to discredit the integrity of its exams’ results), she definitely knew, as she has now finally admitted, that the result she had been parading was fake.
Apparently, Mmesoma individually upgraded her score in cahoots with some criminally minded elements who knew what they were doing and possibly what they wanted. What is involved in being the highest UTME score is much and could be an attraction for the girl’s desperation to falsify her result. One, she could have been desperate to forge her result in order to meet up with the admission requirements of her choice universities. And, if her antics had not been discovered, she would have gone away with N3million scholarship from Innoson Motors. The state government would also have treated her to a queenly reception and probably announced other goodies to reward her ‘feat’. To show that what is at stake is big, Nkechinyere Umeh of the Deeper Life High School, Lagos, the authentic highest scorer in the 2023 UTME had already been contacted by the Nigerian Society of Women Engineers and was also offered a scholarship to study at the Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka, Anambra State. The Federal Government secondary school that refused her admission into Junior Secondary School because, as her father put it, the family did not have “connection” must be regretting that they rejected such a jewel.
I am elated that scholarships are now becoming the norm for exceptional students in the country. Apart from an institution like the Nigeria Liquified Natural Gas Ltd. (NLNG) and a few others that reward academic excellence, most other awards are offered to people in the entertainment industry. While I am not saying this is bad per se, that it is done at the expense of academic excellence is, for me, the problem. It is capable of sending the wrong signals to the new generation that entertainment is more rewarding than academic brilliance. Yet, we are the ones complaining over where the hearts of our youths are today. That they are more into frivolities, with many of them devoting their time to things that they see are fetching people who are into them a lot of financial rewards.
But, rather than criticise the individuals and institutions that are honouring those who excel academically with their substance, it is the intending beneficiaries that we should admonish not to attempt to cheat in order to benefit from such awards. Many Nigerians have won and keep winning scholarships in foreign lands. That is those countries’ own way of celebrating such whiz kids. We should commend Innoson Motors, the women engineers and others who had done similar things in the past, too. The lesson is for intending philanthropists to verify the results that intending candidates for such gestures present to be sure they are authentic.
In all of the Mmesoma story, we have technology to thank. Because technology was an essential tool of the revolution that Oloyede spearheaded in JAMB. Yes, we can say that it was also technology that those who helped Mmesoma and others to falsify their results used; but when technology jams technology, one must bow. Mmesoma finally capitulated in the face of JAMB’s superior technology. The board should continue to invest in technology so as to always be ahead of the exam fraudsters.
In the same vein, it should do more to push to the public domain the various methods used by fraudsters to cheat the system. Where possible, it could produce documentaries detailing parental involvement in some of these atrocities. How some parents, mostly the elites, write examinations for their children. How they pay others to do same; the various desperate attempts by the fraudsters to penetrate JAMB’s platforms, etc. With more of such information in the public domain, it would be easier for the board to win more sympathy than it got in the Mmesoma case. They would know that cheating in exams has nothing to do with age or tribe or colour or religion. Now that she has confessed that she scored 249 and not 362 out of the 400 marks obtainable, I wonder where those who were accusing JAMB of trying to mess up the future of an ‘innocent child’ would hide their faces. This was a girl they should have reprimanded for dishonesty if not outright fraud. A girl they should have admonished to live true to her name all the time: Mmesomachukwu (the grace of God). That should have been sufficient for her.
It is regrettable that some people are still talking about probe even after the girl had confessed her sin. I wonder what they intend to sniff beyond gathering dust in their nostrils.
No matter how hard the Southeast governors try, their region will in the near future remain under the rule of countervailing powers: elected leaders versus the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB). The former enjoy constitutional backing that enables them make laws for their states, and the latter visits anarchic, guerilla tactics upon the region. After months of IPOB pretending to have abjured its crippling stay-at-home order, few now believe that the militants are not behind the brutal enforcement of the policy to compel the release of their detained leader, Nnamdi Kanu, abducted from Kenya in June, 2021. The masks are off; so, too, are the gloves. The battle line has also been drawn and the battle is joined. The region is believed to lose billions from the oppressive order, hundreds of billions every month by some unverified calculations. It is not clear how accurate the computation is, but a former Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor and now Governor of Anambra State, Charles Soludo, insisted in 2021, about a month before he won the governorship election in November of that year, that his state alone lost close to N20bn every Monday under the stay-at-home regime.
After the assumption of office of newly elected governors, the Southeast has made fresh attempts to vacate the IPOB order and restore investor confidence in the region. The effort has met with little success despite threats by governors to sanction workers who absent themselves from work. The governors are sincere and desperate to return their states to normality; but recalcitrant workers are also desperate to save themselves from even far more brutal IPOB sanctions. Some sort of stalemate has appeared to reign in the region for more than a year after the regional elite began to balk at the unorthodox and self-flagellating measure devised by IPOB to free their leader. The governors have described Mr Kanu, who is being tried for treason, as central to the restoration of peace in the region, and have asked the federal government to release him into their care, promising to stand surety for him. Mr Kanu himself has not shown any remorse for his actions, nor talked of recanting his incendiary and subversive comments about Nigeria viz-a-viz the restoration of Biafra. Like Peter Obi of the Labour Party held hostage by his fanatical followers, the IPOB leader obviously recognises that his continuing relevance is qualified by his fidelity to Biafra’s separatist cause.
This stalemate could have been avoided had the Southeast elite shown courage and foresight in appreciating the crippling impact of separatist agitation. IPOB speaks about restructuring and self-determination, unsure which to embrace wholeheartedly, but it has acted more nostalgically in consonance with the Biafra of the middle and late 1960s. By going overboard in pressing for the actualisation of Biafra, and seeming to preclude the option of restructuring to which they paid only lip service, IPOB and Mr Kanu unleashed forces they had neither the ideology nor the administrative skills to control . The IPOB leader began to see himself grandiosely as a regional countervailing force superior to the constitution and the established order. He had, and perhaps still has, a mesmerising hold on the masses of the region; and tragically, after the agitation took a violent turn, there was hardly any elite willing to risk opposing or denouncing him. Today, it is even much harder for any south-easterner, leaders and followers alike, to denounce Mr Kanu or IPOB. The militants have taken wing and bitten the bullet, while Mr Kanu has waffled in detention, discreetly and feebly protesting against his men shooting their own people.
More tragically, too, the federal government, starting with the former president Muhammadu Buhari, has in exasperation paid only cursory attention to the disaster unfolding in the Southeast. Months of mismanaging the crisis morphed into paralysis of the worst kind. The region is bleeding economically, while progress and development have ebbed. Southeast opinion moulders like ex-Education minister Oby Ezekwesili and other sundry critics who thunder about issues in other regions have shied away from speaking definitively and courageously about the IPOB menace. This has led the federal government and many other Nigerians to fear that IPOB has wider support in the region than initially imagined. The Southeast elite may have been irresponsible and shortsighted in managing the IPOB crisis, allowing the cancer to metastasise, but the federal government cannot adopt the same cowardly stance. No one is sure that releasing Mr Kanu extralegally can assuage IPOB or arrest the hunger for Biafra, or even tame the fiery narcissism of the militant leader; but the Bola Tinubu administration must contend with the issue and find a closure. He has the option of allowing the court cases to run their course, but this will take an awful long time, with all the possible complications. He also has the option of extracting promises from the Southeast governing elite before cutting the legal Gordian knot and releasing Mr Kanu. What is certain in all this is that the federal government cannot free him unconditionally, given his antecedents and his blinkered and violent worldview.
But a second, slightly complex option also recommends itself. Where his predecessor dithered over the full mobilisation of security forces to crush the rebellion, President Tinubu could opt to face the militants head-on. The defeat in 2009 of the Tamil Tigers of Sri Lanka, after a 26-year military campaign costing over 70,000 lives, may serve as an example. This option will, however, be costly, probably prolonged, and the outcome uncertain in terms of the nature and duration of the peace that will follow. After all, the Nigerian civil war ended 53 years ago without delivering a closure. None of the two main options before the Tinubu administration will be easy, but inertia is not an option. The federal government opted to face the rebellion in the Northeast head-on, but the costly and debilitating war has lasted for about 14 or 15 years, with all sorts of intervening anomalies such as rehabilitation and reintegration of so-called repentant terrorists. And the bitter ‘civil war’ in the Northwest, more popularly described as banditry, has also proved brutally and bloodily disruptive. The Tinubu administration has not disclosed what kind of advice his security chiefs are giving him, whether to fully mobilise and crush these rebellions, or to dialogue. Whatever he plans to do, staying the ineffective and humiliating course of his predecessor is not an option.
The Southwest would probably have been battling the same kind of insecurity sapping the Southeast of its vitality had Yoruba leaders not taken the bull by the horns and stared into the eyes of agitators until they blinked first. The Southeast elite indulged IPOB, and purveyed all manner of silly and cowardly excuses for the militants, up to the point of even dressing Mr Kanu in heroic garb. The core North elite, in the name of religion, not to talk of greed and mismanagement, also alienated the poor and massaged the egos of Boko Haram and bandits until the rebels transmogrified into ogres. The country is left to budget and spend enormous resources to tackle needless crises birthed and given fillip by the elite. President Tinubu must be clear in his convictions that regional elites have been culpable in the horrors that overtook and pauperised Nigeria. But beyond name-calling and blame game, he must thereafter summon the tact, boldness and matching brilliance to bring the rampaging, countrywide madness to an end.
Given the negative publicity that accompanied the unraveling of Mmesoma Ejikeme, the self-professed highest scorer in the 2023 JAMB Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), it will take a lot of effort for her, her family, and her school, the Anglican Girls Secondary School, Nnewi, Anambra State, to live down the embarrassment. How she hoped to get away with sexing up her score from 249 to 362, especially at a time when the Internet has obliterated time and space, is impossible to understand. A few days after the scandal broke, she remained obdurate in lying, accompanied and encouraged by her perplexed father. Her school had been torn between their duty as a moral and religious force and their responsibility to the girl-child whom they had trained for some six years but were now loth to abandon to the wolves. But outrageously, a significant number of commentators who shared cultural affinity with Miss Ejikeme had rallied heedlessly to her side, probably unaware that the real highest scorer in that examination, Kamsiyochukwu Umeh is also from Anambra State. Embracing the victimhood that has wreaked havoc on Nigeria, the ethnic militants simply assumed that JAMB was promoting ethnic discord in order to pass the glory to another ethnic group.
By last Thursday, Miss Ejikeme was already yielding ground. She all but acknowledged that her score was the outcome of forgery, only that she was not a willing accomplice in what she insinuated was either a technical glitch from JAMB or that she was a victim of a cruel prank. Her examination result notification was out of date, last used in 2021. Worse, she left an Internet trail in accessing the JAMB portal that indicated unequivocally that she knew and had indeed seen and touched the truth. And she was also clearly apprised of the whole truth judging from her phone records. She was naïve in the extreme to imagine she could get away with such brazen resort to forgery and untruth. By Friday, she had confessed to the forgery. It is not known exactly what role her parents played in the affair, especially her doting father whose paternal instinct had led him to stand solidly but amorally by his otherwise bright daughter. Her school on the other hand was tentative but unwilling to be an accessory after the fact of forgery. Her state, Anambra, ordered a needless investigation on a subject matter which JAMB had within days dispelled all doubts and misgivings. The Department of State Service (DSS) also waded into the matter, perhaps initially prompted by the cry of ethnic witch-hunt raised by many Igbo commentators on social media. And the new House of Representatives, still fired up by the auspicious beginnings of the 10th National Assembly and the hysteria and jingoism of ex-Education minister Oby Ezekwesili, unwisely thought the matter was grave enough to merit their precious time.
The forgery is of course a terrible scandal, at the centre of which is an impressionable but misguided young girl. This case will probably blight her future and dog her all her days. It is immaterial whether JAMB had punished her enough or too hastily, the tragedy unfortunately played out online and in the presence of the whole world. Those who promised her scholarship have backed off, and despite psychological counseling, she will have to contend with this issue the rest of her life. She had a good enough legitimate grade to gain admission to any university, perhaps not to study the course of her choice. But this is precisely where the problem lies. Options and openings in Nigeria’s tertiary institutions are insufficient. The government must, therefore, deliberately plan to bridge the gap to avert the kind of desperation and folly displayed by Miss Ejikeme. But more importantly, parents and schools, assuming they have not lost their moral compasses, have a huge role to play in counseling schoolchildren about career and educational choices as well as anchoring them on the right values. It is not impossible that the moral rot in the society has permeated every sector of national life, every strata of society, and percolated its dross into much younger children than Miss Ejikeme. Nigeria and its governments have a duty to deliberately and systematically claw their way back from this immoral precipice.
Sadly, the forgery affair has again exposed the fault lines in the society, where mundane criminality is obfuscated by issues of ethnicity and religion. JAMB Registrar, Ishaq Oloyede, who was on a trip to Namibia, had no reason speaking with, let alone seeking to vitiate the hysteria of, Mrs Ezekwesili. She is in retrospect sadly too voluble and prejudiced to have risen to the position of Education minister. It is this kind of character flaw that the new administration must beware of in appointing people into high offices. Had the real highest scorer in the last UTME not been a fellow Anambrarian or south-easterner with Miss Ejikeme, it is not clear what sort of dangerous campaigns ethnic chauvinists would have pursued. As Charles Oputa, aka Charly Boy, depressingly demonstrated in a recent tweet inspired by the crisis in France, some people still recklessly and indulgently incite anomie over an election they could not statistically or geopolitically hope to win. Since everything must now be viewed from ethnic prism, they obviously won’t bat an eyelid to instigate rebellion over the clear moral failings of a tribesman, even if that tribesman is a foolish, pranking schoolgirl deploying the services of JAMB-Funfake app.
Last Tuesday, Oyo State governor Seyi Makinde openly identified with the effort by some chieftains of the Yoruba socio-cultural and political group, Afenifere, to unite its leaders, Reuben Fasoranti, 97, and Ayo Adebanjo, 95. Both elderly men are still compos mentis. There is no indication that the approval of either of the two statesmen was sought before the meeting. However, almost immediately after Mr Makinde spoke about the reconciliation move, Chief Adebanjo made short shrift of the governor’s effort. He warned him not to dabble into matters he knew nothing about. In any case, said the elderly statesman perhaps facetiously, no quarrel exists between the two Afenifere leaders.
But a quarrel exists, and it is an open, unhappy and divisive counterbalancing of perspectives. The realistic and practical Chief Fasoranti supported then candidate Bola Tinubu for the presidency, believing him to be more competent than any other candidate to steer the ship of state left adrift by former president Muhammadu Buhari. He understood instinctively, as an old political warhorse, that no other candidate had been able to convince the rest of the country. But the more wistful and conspiratorial Chief Adebanjo thought it was the turn of the Southeast to assume the Nigerian presidency, and Labour Party (LP) candidate Peter Obi fitted the bill. After years of proselytising progressivism, it was curious that Chief Adebanjo had regressed into conservatism. There were obviously other hidden reasons for his strange justifications.
There can be no reconciliation, however, no matter how hard Afenifere chieftains or Mr Makinde tries. The grudge between the two statesmen is anchored on pride, Chief Adebanjo’s pride. He is loth to accept that President Tinubu is far more qualified to rule than Mr Obi. Worse, he is doubly mortified that the hated Tinubu won. Reconciling with Chief Fasoranti means yielding to the argument favouring President Tinubu’s ascendancy. After weeks of being serenaded by the implacable ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo and the insolent and truculent mob that whooped and still fawns over Mr Obi, it would amount to taking hemlock to accept that he was wrong on President Tinubu. Perish the thought. It took a far more nimble-footed and jovial Bode George to do that sort of incongruous flip-flop. Chief Adebanjo will not be mollified.
Yours sincerely was a guest at the TVC News Breakfast of Monday 3rd July 2023. It was such an auspicious occasion to review the 30 Days in office of President Bola Tinubu’s administration. Undoubtedly, there have been many stakes in the ground signifying a seeming resetting of governance in a way that is uncommon with a new administration at the centre since 1999; the year the Fourth Republic kicked off with high – octane hope of Nigeria savouring democratic dividends. It is seemingly the first time Nigeria will be having someone sitting in the saddle, not thrusted on Nigeria as an accidental President by some hegemonic personae but one that is fully prepared for leadership in his own right. The apparently audacious and adventurous moves of the President in ending the subsidy scam regime; signing into law the Student Loan and the Electricity Acts; dissolution of boards of parastatals that took the previous government more than a year to effect for many agencies of government; election of principal officers of the National Assembly (NASS); appointment of Special Advisers by the President into key positions aftermath of approval by the NASS; and the trip to France titillated with concomitant interests expressed by Heads of Governments of nations and international organizations to work with Nigeria to shore up our dipping economy.
It is elating and exciting to pinpoint the positive feelers of anticipated foreign direct investment (FDI) as a result of leadership leanings specifically bordering on fuel subsidy removal and harmonizing the foreign exchange rate market thus dealing a deadly blow on rent seeking and corruption within the financial system of the country. The timely suspension of the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Mr. Godwin Emefiele, is good omen for investors as the head of the apex financial institution veered off the regulatory role assigned to the bank to publicly, with ignominy, identify with politics and politicking – first time in the history of Nigeria, and it distinctly depicted lackadaisical leadership leaning on the part of the previous administration taking cognizance of the wanton display of crass impunity and inanity of a person in such an exalted office.
“Leadership is not about merely riding inevitable change or even using it to gain an advantage… leadership is about serving others by harnessing and driving change … Successful change of any magnitude requires a balance. Preserve the best and re-invent the rest.” – Carly Fiorina, top American businesswoman and politician, former CEO of Hewlett – Packard (HP), and 1st woman to lead a Fortune – 20 Company in the USA.
There is no iota of doubt that the frenetic speed of the President in driving change within the socio – economic space of Nigeria has been lauded, even by some of his vitriolic critics. Among acclaimed leadership scholars and practitioners globally, there is a rallying point in serving the constituents: leaders do often confront and challenge the status quo ante. The overarching objective of effective and exemplary servant leadership, in the words of Carly Fiorina, erstwhile CEO of HP and 1st woman to lead a Fortune – 20 Company (USA), should be to “preserve the best and re-invent the rest.”
Even though President Tinubu has been appraised and applauded on initiating certain moves, he is to move further and deeper into the heart of the economy and reinvent the rest, in the words of Carly Fiorina. Specifically, and specially, the oil sector oozes with lethargic, laidback and lackadaisical leadership that the man in the saddle needs to reset and reinvent in resonating with his Renewed Hope mantra.
Realistically and rationally, it is not only ideal to deal a deadly blow on the nauseating fuel subsidy scam ravaging and rampaging the dipping economy, President Bola Tinubu should, as a matter of urgency, take some candid and courageous steps within the oil industry. The moribund national oil refineries, four in number, should be sold off without batting an eyelid as they have perennially done more harm to the country than good. It is high time reviews and reforms were initiated in the behemoth and amorphous organization referred to as the Nigeria National Petroleum Company (NNPC) group. The man in the saddle should apply the same treatment prescribed for the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and Economic and Financial Crime Commission (EFCC) to the ubiquitous organization without delay. Failure to confront this now may sound the death knell of some other reforms aimed at healing the hurting and halting economy of Nigeria. We cannot count on the same set of people with no sense of the change mantra manning and maintaining our country’s cash cow and be inching towards productive, progressive, prosperous and profitable returns whilst a lot of rot spanning years of the locust are swept under the carpet! If this continues, then the Renewed Hope mantra will likely be a charade!!
There is the need in the midst of myriads of reforms to push for agenda setting in defining or determining in earnest a template to end importation of refined oil products. It is imperative on the part of a serious oil producer, to urgently address this shameful stance. It drains the economy as it exerts negative pull on the local currency, Naira, whilst there is aggressive demand for the dollar. It will be recalled that despite expending gargantuan amount on the country’s government owned refineries, none has functioned for years. It is appalling and asphyxiating that despite the humongous amount budgeted for the apparent tsarist turn around maintenance (TAM) yielding no positive performance of the refineries. It is equally unsettling calculating the cumulative fiscal resources expended on TAM over the years. Could one refer to it as a bad decision or outright indecision; a sign or symbol of epileptic leadership of the past which must be crippled, once and for all, if this present government will be taken seriously by the followers? Just for a moment, imagine an astute businessman investing gargantuan amount on paying wages and emoluments of numerous staff producing virtually nothing whilst incurring other sundry expenses for the owner of the business, year in, year out! Will the Dangotes, Elumelus, Otedolas, Alakijas, Adenugas, etc. of this world keep such unproductive and unprofitable workers? Will they also act emotively in empathetic mien pouring their hard-earned income into such an enterprise? Definitely not! Is it not high time these epileptic refineries were disposed of?
Moreover, certain agencies of government need further reclassification, especially the Generating Revenue Agencies (GRA). There should be establishment of a benchmark: any agency of government with capacity and capability to generate and remit a threshold of 1 billion Naira upwards, should be classified as a GRA. It is recommended that Generating Revenue Agencies (GRA) should be digitally tracked. In addition, all government remittances should be done electronically (at no point in the process should any collected government revenue be spent). There should be a standardized system of releasing funds from the government purse than what exists presently that consents to wanton wastages of scarce fiscal resources. Henceforth, releasing of funds for governmental interventions should be electronically done passing through more gateways or verifiable signatures than what is presently in vogue. This should be the norm whether for capital or recurrent expenditure. The government should also ensure effective tracking by employing exemplary monitoring, evaluation, accountability and learning (MEAL) tools. In conducting this, experts on this emerging field of development should be engaged from within and outside the government to monitor and report for evaluation purposes in order to decipher whether there are outcomes dovetailing to impacts as a result of governmental interventions after some span of time. This is the heart of governance that works on data such as key performance indicators (KPIs).
Surmising this piece, on the heels of my being a guest at the TVC News Breakfast of Monday, 3rd of July 2023, there was the meeting of the President with the Service Chiefs the same day. Expectedly, the National Security Adviser (NSA) to the President, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, led the Service Chiefs to the meeting. This was officially the first meeting with the President after their appointment. It is instructive to point out that inter alia at my TVC News Breakfast, it was saliently stated the Presidency needs to set up goals and KPIs not just for the service chiefs but for all appointed men and women:
“… we then set key performance indicators for them having given them goals; this is followed up with meetings on quarterly basis, where the President will pointedly ask: where are we here? … and at any point in time, any of the appointed men may vacate office so that we need not wait for a time to change the whole service chiefs as anyone not meeting up will be shown the way out (sic).”
Aftermath of the meeting, the NSA briefed the press inter alia: “He (Tinubu) gave us the assurance that he’s with us hundred percent. He told us that we must work as a team and that there’s work to be done, he’ll expect us to deliver and we’re grateful for the opportunity. That’s why we are here” (Punch, 3rd July 2023). This expression smacks of mere tokenism taking cognizance of incidents of security breaches that citizens wanted ended as of yesterday in certain parts of our country. Howbeit, this type of taciturn is allowed as the meeting with the President and Commander -in – Chief was behind closed doors; this is the norm as security matters should not be discussed in detail publicly. The Office of NSA should come up with a modern digitized interactive platform for members of the public to give certain real time information, especially encrypting the identity of the personality behind such piece of information. The series continues, by God’s grace, next week. Feedback is welcome.
Edo State, and Edo North in Particular, will find Adams Oshiomhole, their former governor and now senator, enormously effective in projecting them at the national level with a fervour and adeptness uncommon among his peers. He is a member of the national ruling party, was a powerful and respected labour union leader, and even though his English is slightly heavily accented, he is nevertheless a polemicist and an orator. He was also an impactful governor, one with a great instinct, and he has retained his appeal with the Edo public since vacating office, despite leading the party to defeat in the September 2020 governorship election against his former protégé, Godwin Obaseki. Indeed there is something no one can take away from Sen Oshiomhole: his political perspectives undergirded by incredible astuteness and farsightedness.
He will be one of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s key men in the 10th National Assembly. His friendship with the president dates back to the time before he contested the Edo governorship in 2007 on the platform of the Action Congress party. However, the depth of his relationship with the president is sometimes questioned or understated because he is not obsequious. Yet more than most south-western protégés of the president, Sen Oshiomhole has hardly left the president’s side, and in fact displayed admirable resilience in absorbing political punishment due to his constancy. The reason is his instinct. In 2007, the president supported him and stood by him. He has felt obligated since then to repay the trust. It is true that he may not be a potent strategist like the president, which accounted for his loss of the state to Mr Obaseki in the 2022 governorship poll, not to say his humiliation as national chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC) in 2019, but his political character and instinct are admirable and unimpeachable.
As his interaction with his constituency in Iyamho, Edo State, showed last weekend, Sen Oshiomhole is endowed with many more gifts far beyond his resilience, his sound instinct, his brilliant perspective, and his loyalty to any mentor or great cause. He knows how to woo and entrance the public, even if that public hates him. Hear him in Iyamho: “I don’t know what would have happened if you had voted against me. My blood pressure would have shot up, and that is if I’m still alive. The jubilation by the opponent would have been such that they will come and lock my small door and break my small bones and harassed me out, but you said no. I thank Afemai people for that. There were sitting governors who contested for the senate across the country and many of them lost. I left office seven years ago and my people still honoured me with victory, how can I thank you enough?…During the campaign, I told you if you want to give me one vote, give it to Tinubu; I said to you it was better he won as a president even if I lost as a senator than for me to win as senator and he loses as president. In the end, I’m very proud to say and to repeat today here and now that in each of these six local governments, every ward, Bola Tinubu won, every ward Adams Oshiomhole won…Today, I can say I will proudly carry the results of Afemai people and I will say Mr. President this is my certificate; my people voted for you.”
Clearly, unlike many cocksure politicians, he did not take the support of his constituency for granted. He suspected he was still loved by his people, but he gave the impression last week at Iyamho that he could not accurately measure his popularity. Whether he knows it or not, whether he deliberately worked that sentiment or it came by happenstance, the fact is that he came across as humble, sometimes engagingly facetious. Humility before the electorate, as Mr Oshiomhole has consistently showed, assures the voters that legitimacy still resides with them. That is a healthy feeling for voters to have, and it helps to retain the relevance of the politician seeking office. Then of course, too, his hyperbole about dying if he had been rejected in the last National Assembly poll on February 25 was a quaint pointer to, and elaboration of, his expansive humour. And then the tour de force: “How can I thank you enough?” His sound instinct is now famously recognised; but there, in that pithy quote, was his much more resonating sentiment –succinct, resounding, impactful.
Sen Oshiomhole is of course also a resourceful and engaging fighter. But in Iyamho last week, he again spoke with self-abnegating candour about his opponents locking his ‘small doors’ and breaking his ‘small bones’ if he had lost the election. It is not known whether his opponents were capable of delivering the apocalypse he feared, for as everyone saw after the governorship poll, the victorious Mr Obaseki merely spoke daggers against his former boss but fell short of using them. Losing the senatorial poll would probably not have indemnified him against pain and punishment, but at least he spoke his anxiety with rhetorical flourish. That seemed to have painted a piquant portrait of him that he intended; and it worked.
Sen Oshiomhole is 71 years old, and ought really to have had his best days behind him, especially considering that he may no longer possess the kind of energy a naturally boisterous politician like him needs to continue to vibrate everywhere. But given the evident soundness of his mind, his fierce loyalty to both mentor and cause, his political consistency, his brilliant jocosity, the public, not to say his Edo North senatorial constituency, should expect far more able representation from him than he thinks he is still capable of giving. It’s the triumph of mind over matter. He will be a successful senator; and much more, he will play a significant role in the Tinubu administration. His instincts and his character fate him for that central role.
Governor Ademola Adeleke and ex-governor Rauf Aregbesola are birds of identical plumage. Both exaggerate their strengths and downplay their weaknesses, a sort of synergy now clearly extended into the cabinet of the governor. But while the incumbent governor is weighed down by his vacuity, the former governor is inflated with a false sense of ideological importance. At the moment, Mr Adeleke is the one in the eye of the storm, regardless of the futile attempt by the ex-governor to reclaim the state All Progressives Congress (APC) chapter. The governor’s plan to observe the Eid-el-Kabir prayer at the Osogbo Muslim praying ground ended in a fiasco when he inexplicably and needlessly disputed seating arrangement with former senate spokesman, Ajibola Bashiru. The complaint of the governor is that Sen Bashiru seized his front row seat at the praying ground. Such bizarre supplantation is unheard of, not when there are protocol officers and governor’s advance party to prepare the ground for a governor’s visit.
Perhaps worried that such old wives’ tale wouldn’t convince anyone, the governor and his aides went ballistic with the phantasmagoria of assassination plots, precisely the kind of mendacity that fascinates Kogi governor Yahaya Bello. But perhaps a more sinister reason for the tiff at the praying ground is that the Muslim Ummah was unsure of the religious identity of Mr Adeleke. Is he a Christian or Muslim? Indeed, can the governor himself tell the difference, who he is? He dances and gives testimonies in churches, but now wants pride of place at Eid ground. The worshippers at the Eid ground were unused to syncretism. At Easter and Christmas, he will probably again lend his august and rotund presence. It remains to be seen how the pastors will treat his proclivity for syncretism, especially given the bold rebuff he suffered at Eid. Mr Adeleke sees himself a governor; the Muslim Ummah saw an impostor. Instead of crying assassination, and instead of pushing and shoving his opponents at prayer grounds, the governor should first resolve his identity crisis.
I agree totally with Chief Asiodu that the reduction of the cost of governance is a priority for the new Tinubu FG. If he fails in this regard then his government will be considered a failure and a disappointment to the public” – Ambassador Dapo Fafowora, reacting to last week article on the column.
President Bola Tinubu’s arrival at the Villa, apart from seeing REUTERS’ Rachel Savage and Libby George nickname him BABA GO FAST, has TinuBull, as the brand new name the Nigerian Stock Market gave him after his government’s policies rallied the exchange to the world’s top three, hitting a 15-year high, and seeing investors gaining a mouth watering N4.3Trillion within a month.
All these are exemplary, by whatever standards judged; and are the result of having a round peg in a round hole – President Tinubu being a finance professional, with massive cognate experience – but whose shining armour could be undermined should Nigeria continue its extravagant ways with regards to governance which, for years, has been absolutely outlandish. Indeed, we have behaved like we do not think at all, or that, as a nation, we have limitless resources.
It is more than baffling that successive Nigerian governments were so remiss they could allow less than 10 percent of the population of 200 Million, literally eat up the country’s entire resources and almost run it bankrupt. Statista Market Forecast estimates that not more than 2.2M of Nigeria’s entire population are in the country’s public service, and of that, less than 20 per cent are financially running the country aground, despite Nigeria being the poverty capital of the world, spending according to the World Bank, no less than 96 percent of its gross earnings on debt servicing.
As indicated on these pages last week, there is an elephant in the room which, if not quickly reined in early in the Tinubu Administration, could significantly, negatively impact the President’s good works or, in fact, make Nigeria completely ungovernable.
Unfortunately, the ‘elephant’ is not alone as it has some smaller, contiguous “rivulets” which, when put together, could easily aggregate to a mighty ocean.
Fortunately, President Tinubu has been confronted with a not totally dissimilar dilemma before, all of which he creatively resolved.
On assumption of office as Lagos state governor in 1999, he inherited problems that have been severally described as follows: a dilapidated state with failed
infrastructure, a dwindling economy, a very dirty environment, decaying public transport system, a terrible healthcare system, massive insecurity, an educational sector on the brink of collapse, and a thoroughly disjointed judiciary, among others.
Most worrisome, however, was the state’s finances.
The state, as at May 1999, had not filed any financial report for the two preceeding years nor was there any coherent record of income and expenditure, except that it was common knowlege that the state was very low in revenue; generating no more than about N600 million or thereabouts, monthly – a very meagre gross revenue for a state with a population of over 10 million.
By the time he left office 8 years later, he had not only positively reversed those negativities, the state was generating about N15Billion monthly income.
For Lagos state, the rest is history.
Back then to the matter of the moment, that is, the challenge of reducing Nigeria’s unsustainable cost of governance in a country which, according to KPMG, will see its unemployment rate climb up to 41 percent in the current year (2023).
The real elephant in the house – if this is not becoming tautological – is the emoluments, as I wrote last week, of members of the National Assembly. While many woolly figures have been bandied about, especially on social media, with claims ranging from they being the highest paid legislators worldwide, or that it will take a minimum of 100 years for a Nigerian minimum salary earner to earn a member’s annual pay, RIPPLES NIGERIA, after FACT CHECK – ing the various claims, has affirmed the following:
“The German Bundestag gets the highest payment at $204,971.04 annually while the Nigerian Senator gets $70,911.69 annually which includes basic salary and statutory allowances”.
“Excluding allowances paid once in four years and loans given to them, a senator goes home with ?2,431,680 (US$5,909.31) on a monthly basis and ?29,180,160 (US$70,911.69) annually before tax, which faults the claim that a Nigerian senator receives a monthly salary of ?29,479,749 and annual pay of ?353,756,988”.
But this exactly is the crux of the matter.
With President Tinubu removing the opaqueness in the CBN management of our foreign exchange and unifying the rates, the rate today on the I & E platform is: 1 USD to NGN = 777.58 (06/7/23).
Do the arithmetic to see that this comes to a whopping N55,139,511.9102.
If the reader is not convinced about how disproportionally unfair this amount is, or if the National Assembly members are not themselves molified enough by the fact, then may be, the following facts would change their minds, and make the members apologise to Nigerians for this seeming robbery from the public treasury.
PayScale Salary data and career research centre (Nigeria) is a research platform based in the United States of America.
It has verifiably ascertained that a minimum wage earner in Nigeria would need 81 years(a life time if lucky), to earn a Senator’s salary.
But that is not all, nor the most mind boggling. Payscale also found as follows:
“A Nigerian senator collects what 81 workers on minimum wage, 36 nurses on average salary, 48 graphic designers, 23 engineers, about 10 project managers and 13 HR managers receive annually. What they collect includes their basic salary and allowances for the following: hardship( what hardship?), constituency, newspaper, wardrobe, recess, accommodation, utilities, domestic staff, entertainment, personal assistants, vehicle maintenance, leave, car and severance gratuity.
House Speaker Abbas has already appointed 33 Aides while we await the Senate President’s 45 – such waste.
The current budget allocated N100B for their constituency projects which a painstaking investigation by the Professor Bolaji Owasanoye – led ICPC showed had a N45B uncompleted projects in addition to discovering that “in connivance with executing agencies, they have perfected fraudulent means of pocketing billions of Naira”.
ICPC further discovered that one of the fraudulent means used is ” the duplication of contracts using the same description, same narrative, same amount, same location and awarded by the same agency”.
I shall not attempt to teach President Tinubu how to curb all these, but a single one of the mala fide must not survive his first year in office.
One simple thing he could do, however, is ensure that a few of those complicit in these fraudulent activities, no matter how highly placed, ends up in jail since the money can always be traced.
One of the two other things which should go immediately is the totally profligate provision of N11.92Billion in the ’23 budget for feeding and foreign travel under the Buhari administration which the Tinubu Administration has now inherited.
A breakdown of this shows that N331.79 million would be spent on the President’s feeding and N176.92 for his Vice. Local and foreign trips will gross over N3B for both the President and the VP.
President Tinubu must show very early that his government is cost conscious and will be most careful regarding debts. He must be very much unlike his predecessor in the use of Ways and Means through which President Buhari took a debt of N23Trillion without broaching a word of it to the National Assembly until too late.
Just as the President must find a way of cutting down on the emoluments of National Assembly members – the government is awash with serving and past members of the National Assembly whose sense of shame – especially the latter – can be counted upon to significantly reduce these unjustifiable payments , President Tinubu must lead the way in finally stopping the equally unjustifiable governors’ and deputy governors’ retirement pension.
Once he forgets the 50 per cent still allowed by Lagos state House of Assembly, it is certain that other states will take a cue and, outrightly, cancel it.
This piece will not be complete without my including the admonition in last week’s column of Lasisi Olagunju in the Tribune of Monday, 3 July, 2023.
He wrote: “The government is celebrating a crash in demand for petrol as an achievement. They call it life style change; the poor call it trekking, suffering and sweating. Where are Tinubu’s policies against the rich? Installmental death of the poor is afoot. The elite applaud appropriate pricing of petrol. But the poor wears that shoe, he feels the pain. Petrol marketers have served us another notice of misery. They said from this month, because of the realities of the new FX policy, they may start selling petrol for N700 per litre. If and whenever that happens, the people will most likely ask if this democracy is really about them. That will be very dangerous. Again, as Fredrick Douglass warned: “Where justice is denied, where poverty is enforced, where ignorance prevails, and where any one class is made to feel that society is an organized conspiracy to oppress, rob and degrade them, neither persons nor property will be safe.”
President Tinubu cannot, and must not, shy away from appropriately using the scalpel. Nigeria is already in the surgical ward.
Russia’s fate under President Vladimir Putin was bound to come to this miserable pass. For a once mighty empire and glorious Soviet Republics, the world was stunned on June 23 watching eerily as the mercenary Wagner private military company led by Yevgeny Prigozhin marched on Moscow to prevent the dismantlement of the group and to demand the resignation of the Russian Defence minister, Sergey Shoigu. Unseating Mr Putin was probably too ambitious, especially when Mr Prigozhin himself had no coherent political motives, and no manifesto as to what to do with power if snatched. So it makes more sense that it was probably to force the Russian military to perish their plan to absorb the more than 30,000-strong mercenary group operating under the name Wagner Group, and under the company name Concord.
The march ended a fiasco, halted some 200km from Moscow, after initially showing much promise and tantalising the world, especially Ukraine, with the prospect of overthrowing the dictatorship of Mr Putin and putting an end to the unpopular and costly Russo-Ukrainian war. Western countries were wary of Wagner’s chances, and kept their fingers crossed. Russians themselves were skeptical, but probably more amused and comically relieved. But for Mr Prigozhin, his statements, dilatoriness and complicated relationship with the Putin presidency in Moscow all appeared to indicate that he did not nurse the ambition to overthrow the government. The Wagner group has helped Mr Putin and Russia fight many proxy wars and retain influence in some parts of the world. They are in Sudan helping the anti-government Rapid Support Forces of Mohamed Hamdan Dagalo, alias Hemedti; they are in Ukraine doing the dirty job to sate Mr Putin’s empire thirst; they are in Mali propping up the government against jihadi insurgency; they are also in Syria, have a toehold in Libya, once operated in Mozambique, could soon move to Burkina Faso, and are at the moment the backbone of the Central African Republic (CAR) government in curtailing the overreach of militants.
But on June 23, Mr Prigozhin put his hands to the plough and looked back. Many analysts fear that the embarrassed Mr Putin might go all out to destroy the charismatic but intemperate Wagner boss who is now in exile in neighbouring pro-Russia Belarus. In fact, already, Mr Putin is attempting to take over the global operations of the mercenary group by sending emissaries and reassurances to countries where Wagner is fighting wars for a fee and on behalf of Russia. But as head of Wagner, Mr Prigozhin lends Mr Putin the alibi to distance himself from the allegations of officially sponsoring mercenaries or becoming vicariously liable for the atrocities committed by Wagner. The question no one can confidently answer is how Russia hopes to run Wagner as flamboyantly and efficiently as Mr Prigozhin. In addition, who will now be held liable for the laundered money trail, the atrocities committed by the mercenaries; and given the tardiness in the Russian military, could Mr Putin hope to replicate the style of the disgraced Wagner boss?
There are too many unknowns. Undoubtedly, Mr Putin himself will be in a quandary what to do with the Wagner boss, for clearly there is no replacement. Absorbing the mercenaries into the Russian military is for now difficult, if not impracticable, and was in fact one of the reasons for the short-lived rebellion. Mr Putin funds and profits from Wagner’s foreign wars, and uses the mercenaries to retain influence in Africa and the Middle East. Fighting these wars openly, instead of through proxies like Wagner, will open Mr Putin to embarrassing scrutiny.
Mr Putin is clearly playing Russian roulette. No possible outcome is pleasant. Whether Mr Prigozhin is disposed off or not, or whether Wagner mercenaries are successfully absorbed or not, the Russian leader could lose his hold on power, if not lose his life to the bargain. Yet, there was nothing inevitable about the whole affair, for the problem of Russia, not to talk of its long-standing internal contradictions, predates Mr Putin’s ascendancy. Tsarist Russia, despite intervening triumphs and rapid economic development, was inept at defining and executing great imperial policies. They encountered great difficulties during World War I, and were on the verge of losing World War II after greedy annexations of weak neighbours, if Josef Stalin had not recovered from his disastrous domestic policies to lead the war against Germany. But despite lofty imperial ambitions, Russian leaders have not always understood or had the capacity to implement commensurate policies to undergird their ambitions. It is as if there is a permanent chink in their armour.
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At great cost, Russia won World War II on the eastern front, established Warsaw Pact, exported their brand of Marxism, trumped China, and became the countervailing force in a bipolar world to the United States and Nato. Less than 50 years later, however, the whole house of cards came down, unraveling in a humiliating way that uncannily imitated both Germany’s defeat at the end of World War I and the ascendancy of Adolf Hitler as a result of the humiliation of Germany at Versailles. In short, it took less than 50 years to discard Stalinism. Unlike China which produced brilliant leaders who expertly managed the post-Mao era, Russia was incapable of producing statesmen and profound leaders capable of managing the post-Gorbachev era. First came the considerably distracted and enervated Boris Yeltsin, and then came the shallow, pedantic and megalomaniacal Mr Putin. Unable to read correctly the contradictions that weakened the Russian empire, and incapable of summoning the depth and virtuoso needed to offer a powerful and sensible challenge to the troubled West, Mr Putin unwisely embraced nostalgia and a strict and unadulterated return to its Warsaw Pact past. With China as the third leg of what seemed like a tripod a few years back, it was startling that Mr Putin could not summon the needed imaginativeness.
Yes, Russia might have failed to modernise its conventional capability, as the Ukrainian war is showing; but what Russia really needs to challenge the West is not proof of its invincibility from clash of arms or acquisition of territories in a replica of Hitler’s lebensraum, but a sensible analysis of the continuing and ongoing unraveling of the West as exemplified by their social and economic contradictions. In the next decade or so, the West could not be defeated in a clash of arms; they will be undone partly by internal contradictions, and partly by other powers like Russia offering the world better social and political templates through the introduction of stable and visionary governing paradigms. Had Russia respected its neighbours, produced and enthroned a stable democratic culture, no matter how ingeniously homegrown like China’s, and matched these with inclusive culture of race and religion, all the while cleverly shining the torch on the West’s Achilles heel, Russia would have made a huge impression on Finland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, Russia Republics, and Georgia, particularly the disputed Abkhazia and South Ossetia. There would have been less inclination for these neighbours to think or look West, and there would probably have been no annexation of Crimea, no war with Ukraine or Georgia, or the manipulation of Belarus.
It is a peculiarly Russian tragedy that at this critical juncture, the country has the shallow Mr Putin at its head. There are indications he might not last in power, having been demystified by Mr Prigozhin and the Wagner group. But it is useless putting a timeline on issues like regime survivability. How many people correctly predicted the collapse of the USSR and the Warsaw Pact anyway? China may be taking notes already and having a second look at its conventional warfare capability. But as world history shows through the lens of the European wars, global power dynamics are so fluid and uncertain that no nation can afford to rely only on hard or even soft power to project its dominance. Mr Putin may be learning that lesson the hard way.
Aregbesola fights back in Osun
After his rhetorical misadventure in Osun State before the July 2022 governorship election, former Internal Affairs minister and ex-governor of the state, Rauf Aregbesola, has found his voice and begun to fight back to regain the dominance he enjoyed in the state in his years as governor. He wishes to rule the roost in Osun, secure the state as his political base, especially having been displaced from his perch in Alimosho local government of Lagos State. The fight takes on added significance since he is now no longer a minister of the Federal Republic, nor does he have any other position or significant status and qualification to keep him in the limelight. He enjoys some renown in the estimation of the state’s governor, Ademola Adeleke, whom he covertly aided to win the governorship poll, probably on account of the war of attrition he conducted against the immediate past governor of the state, Gboyega Oyetola. But there is little else left of his former prominence.
Mr Aregbesola deploys two or three strategies to recover lost ground. The first measure was his inexpiable tactic of dining with the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) enemy to hurt his friends in the All Progressives Congress (APC) before last year’s governorship poll. His efforts were subterranean and he made it seem that his contribution to Mr Adeleke’s victory was nothing more egregious than his indifference to the APC effort to re-elect Mr Oyetola. His argument was that since he and his men had been given the cold shoulder in the APC, it was self-punishment helping the party to win. He complained that the APC in the state had spent nearly all of Mr Oyetola’s first term fighting and isolating him. Helping them to a second term would be counterproductive. What he was unprepared to answer at the time was whether he had done his calculations well in terms of whether his tactic satisfied his long-term or short-term interest.
Secondly, and this may be more philosophical than real, the former minister appears to believe that should Mr Adeleke win the governorship, his lack of depth and the manner he trifles with the grave issues of governance would make him easily beatable in four years time when Osun heads for the poll in 2026. It is incontestable that Mr Adeleke is incapable of soaring in style and governance, let alone in leadership gravitas, and would be unable to provide the kind of leadership the state desperately needs to forge ahead. But to assume that he, Mr Aregbesola, would still be relevant in four years, especially out of office, and with nothing substantial to do or hang on to, may be pushing his luck too far. Osun State has a reputation for biting its nose to spite its face; they are, therefore, unpredictable, obdurate
and resistant to the kind of logic that corroborates electoral punditry. They humiliated the genial and frugal ex-governor Bisi Akande, and have replicated the same appalling measure against the equally frugal and parsimonious Mr Oyetola. At any election, Osun will unfrock anyone that catches their otherworldly whims.
But a third facility recommends itself to the feisty Mr Aregbesola. He and his men wish to fight their way back into the APC, yes the same APC they pilloried, subverted and denounced in terms that are unexampled even in the accommodative Southwest. The former minister is incredibly flush with optimism. How he hopes to engineer that return without supplanting those embittered by his betrayal is impossible to guess. To return to the APC after first factionalising it would mean that his faction, in due time, would overwhelm the party and take its reins. No matter how temperately he postures, and regardless of whatever promises and undertakings he gives, the disaffected APC members and leaders will not trust him. It is true that reconciliation is profitable; but so too is wisdom. The current Oyetola-led APC, as naïve and awkward as its leaders appeared and acted during the last governorship poll, is not capable of committing class and group suicide. They believe Mr Aregbesola betrayed them. The former minister’s jousting with the APC may not fully explain the July 2022 APC loss, for there is much to be condemned about the state’s electoral behavior and Mr Oyetola’s finicky accounting and lack of generosity, but the Osun APC would be loth to reward betrayal.
In a bid to reignite his waning effort to regain fame, the former minister has spoken out about some of his achievements as governor; particularly regarding his education policy which he insisted was poised to produce world-class scholars. “By the time we left in 2018, 11 state-of-the-art, 3,000-capacity model secondary schools were fully operational,” he boasted in Akure where he had gone to receive an award. “With each school graduating 1,000 students every year, and a combined output of 11,000, we should have not less than 44,000 world beaters now, if the programme had been sustained. These schools were designed to produce world beaters and the fruits were already coming out. A student from our school topped the Senior Secondary School Examination while another topped JAMB examination shortly after we left. But our successor regrettably couldn’t continue with the tempo.” One of Mr Oyetola’s advisers, Jamiu Olawumi, promptly replied that the schools had already become dilapidated, and the project itself a terrible financial blunder. Only one of the 11 schools is fit for purpose, the adviser sneered.
Mr Aregbesola’s attempt to burnish his image is unlikely to succeed. Administration is not his forte, and he is also fond of hyperbole. His leadership style is largely instinctive, regimented and meddlesome. As governor, he did not endear himself to Osun, despite imagining himself a leader after the order of Cuba’s Fidel Castro. His ideological persuasion is only skin deep, and it is common knowledge among the Osun intelligentsia that he brought the standard of administration in the state abysmally low with his unguarded experimentations. His attempt to reintegrate himself is almost certain to come to grief due to his inability to subordinate himself to party discipline, even if it would cost the APC another election. He has fashioned himself an iconoclast, as his outburst against party leaders at the national level showed before the Osun poll. It is hard for someone unamenable to discipline and order to elicit cooperation and respect. He is undoubtedly a boisterous party organiser and enforcer, but such qualities have bred in him arrogance and cocksureness that make it difficult for him to receive and respect opposing perspectives. Returning to the party, let alone leading it, especially when the same APC is the national ruling party, is unfathomable.
I still shudder to think that the former Dean of the School of Communication, Lagos State University, Ojo, Professor Lai Oso is indeed dead.
Imagine being awake while I was supposed to be sleeping because my body system was yet to adjust to the time of the country I travelled to which is five hours behind Nigeria time only to check my phone and see the information about the accomplished media scholar and professional dying in an auto accident.
I kept checking various online platforms hoping that the information will be denied, but the shock and grief expressed by many online following the report of his death left in no doubt that the demise of the down-to-earth Professor is shockingly true.
I immediately went back to June 1, this year when he was the Keynote speaker at a media training in Lagos based on my assurance that I know the lead organiser to who I gave his contact. I had the honour of presenting him his portrait on behalf of the organisers and can still remember the pre-conference chat we had about his living in Sagamu and working in Lagos among other issues.
As usual, he asked after my wife, his former student at the former Ogun State Polytechnic, Abeokuta, while I was the Ogun State Correspondent of The Punch where I first knew him.
As I looked through the pictures of the event and watch the video of his insightful presentation, the truth of the Yoruba saying that death does not give notice of the day and month dawned on me. He was his usual boisterous self on the day of the programme exchanging greetings and jokes with participants, some of whom were his former students and other much younger colleagues who have heard so much about him but were meeting him for the first time.
Our meeting was weeks ago, but I can imagine how those he spent his last days with at the Delta State University where he went for external supervision would receive the news of his death while waiting for him to confirm his safe arrival in Sagamu.
I’m not surprised by the torrents of tributes and condolences messages over the demise of Professor Oso who through the years diligently discharged his duty as a teacher, lecturer and mentor which explains why many of his former students and colleagues have fond memories of his life and times at the various institutions he had served in different capacities.
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I was not his former student, but he if had his way, he would have ensured I enrol for a Doctorate degree in Mass Communication. He once even offered to collect the registration form for me at LASU if I was ready to spare time for the programme. I didn’t take advantage of the offer but was always glad to meet with him at various media programmes where he generously shares his intellectual and professional thoughts and experience.
We once co-facilitated a training for journalists in Bayelsa State sponsored by the United States Consulate in Lagos during which I asked him to share the story of how he moved from being a reporter to becoming a professor of Mass Communication.
The group of experienced journalists who attended the programme thanked him profusely for inspiring them to be more determined to make the best of their media careers. They were struck by his “un-Professoral” nature which made it possible for him to relate with them like a long-time colleague. Indeed that was his nature and easygoing self despite his top academic and professional status.
He will surely be missed by not only his family but so many he has impacted in one or the other. He will forever be remembered for his profound contributions to media development academically and professionally and many other good and unforgettable things he did in his lifetimes.
Time to unmask and bring them to judgement
Former Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, took the heat off my zone when, on July 25, he urged President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to bring the fuel subsidy cabal that had held the nation hostage for decades to book. Dogara bared his mind while answering questions from newsmen after attending a thanksgiving church service to mark the successful completion of the six-year tenure of Rev. (Dr.) Yunusa Nmadu Jnr as General Secretary, Evangelical Church Winning All (ECWA) in Kaduna.
“We stand by him on the subsidy removal, but he must be courageous to pursue the subsidy cabals, recover all they stole from them and prosecute them accordingly,” Dogara told the newsmen
This is exactly my position; except that I had wanted to do what elders advice in a situation like this, to wit; that we should first drive away the thief before chastising the owner of the stolen item for carelessness. I mean I had wanted to recover from the shock of the subsidy removal just like millions of Nigerians before asking that the big stick be wielded on those who so demonised fuel subsidy to the point that government had to jettison it.
Whereas there is nothing inherently wrong with fuel subsidy. Indeed, there is hardly any country that does not subsidise one thing or the other. It is only a question of priority. Even the almighty United States of America subsidises agriculture, oil and energy as well as some housing, automakers and healthcare. The U.S. spends $20bn yearly on fossil fuels subsidies, with a whopping $16bn on oil and gas alone and the remaining $4bn on the coal industry. Great Britain has spent about £40bn in energy subsidies since it began to help households and businesses cope with increased power bills caused by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine last year. Germany, France, Canada, etc. all subsidise one thing or the other. So, there is nothing inherently wrong with subsidy. The problem is with the Nigerian bastardisation of it.
Just last week Monday, former governor of Bauchi State, and former Minister of Aviation, Isa Yuguda, too restated the obvious: that the monies being paid as subsidy on fuel products in Nigeria was a scam. Yuguda, who spoke on Channels Television’s Sunrise Daily, during an interview added an incredible dimension to the subsidy story when he said that the subsidy cabal had become so rich that they besieged a former president to help end the scam.
“I remember a friend of mine in the oil industry, who during a meeting of an economic think tank. He called the then president aside and said, ‘Mr President, please stop this subsidy, we are tired of making money’”. He added that “We’re bringing in this fuel at an elevated cost and half of it is exported out of Nigeria by the same people collecting money for it.
“Subsidy was claimed on pipelines that never existed. Invoice is created and NNPC just pays”
Yuguda noted that as far back as 2009, a committee headed by him had uncovered the scam and drawn government’s attention to it. Now, the scam has grown beyond tolerable limits.
“The records are all there, and there is no time limit to investigate these people. If government has the political will, these individuals can be held to account”, he said.
Yuguda said former President Muhammadu Buhari cannot claim ignorance of the scam because he was not only president, he also doubled as Minister of Petroleum. This would seem to suggest that the matter could not have been frontally tackled because of the caliber of those involved. I agree with Yuguda that former President Buhari cannot totally escape blame in this matter, at least in the eight years he was in power. He it was that imposed the burden of overseeing the energy sector on himself. I wonder what he knows about the industry in this century. The fact is that the oil sector that Buhari chose to oversee when he was president was quite different from the oil sector he left in the 1980s. I have had cause to refer to the president several times even when he held sway that he was an analogue president in a digital age. Times have changed. So have oil and other scams. The result could not have been different from what Buhari’s government ended up with after eight years of unmeritorious service and unmitigated disaster.
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As for Yuguda’s subsidy thief friend, It is difficult to believe that any human being making money would ever want the source of that money to dry up. Money is never enough for the owner; the more you have, the more you crave for more. That is the lie in the claim that the cabal was tired of making money from the scam. The friend must have been tipsy or spoken in one of his unguarded moments as distinct from a statement from a penitent mind. If the cabal had been remorseful, or if they had truly had enough money and they didn’t want more, it would not have required government’s intervention to end the fraud.
Be that as it may, how Nigeria, a major producer of crude oil became a major importer of petroleum products bares restating even if it is well known. Nigeria has four refineries none of which has functioned for years despite huge sums allocated for their turn-around maintenance (TAM). Just how terribly wasteful and corrupt we are as a nation can be seen in what we have spent on the so-called TAM. A whopping $26.5bn over the years! This is capable of building three new refineries given the cost analysis of refinery projects across the world. Dangote Refinery, Africa’s largest petrochemical refinery and the world’s largest single train petroleum refining facility capable of processing about 650,000 barrels per day cost $19bn!
Despite not functioning, government has continued to pay workers in the refineries and pick sundry other bills. What we have spent on the TAM, according to The Guardian, is 10 times higher than our 10-year budget for education. As a matter of fact, the newspaper reports that the $1.5bn awarded in 2021 for the TAM of the Port Harcourt Refinery was higher than the total capital allocation to the health sector from 2009 to 2018.
Still, Nigeria became a net importer of fuel. At the last count, the country was said to be consuming about 60 million litres of petrol daily. We all knew this was a farce. As Yuguda noted, about half of the fuel we imported was being exported to neighbouring countries by the same people importing the fuel. That explained why our neighbours started groaning almost immediately the new regime of subsidy withdrawal took off in the country on June 1. But that shouldn’t worry us a bit because, in life, self preservation comes first. Even God did not enjoin us to love our neighbour more than ourselves. We could not have been dying in installments only because want to please our neighbours. If we fail to do the rightful on time, we and our neighbours would end up in the grave, or be forced to travel the routes we initially should have travelled but didn’t travel, at greater cost than we are paying today.
At this juncture, one cannot but ask what has become of the much celebrated subsidy probe that was conducted by the House of Representatives Ad Hoc Committee on Fuel Subsidy Management in 2012? The report, which indicted several operators and players in the downstream petroleum sector over their roles that led to the loss of about N1 trn to mismanagement and misappropriation of funds under the Petroleum Subsidy Fund also made what could be termed far-reaching recommendations. Part of its findings was that if our refineries produce at their optimum capacity of 450,000 bpd, it is more than enough to meet the local demand for petrol, then estimated at about 33 million litres per day and 10 million litres of household kerosine (HHK). This means there would even be excess of about seven million litres of petrol, for instance.
Similarly, some companies were indicted for collecting about $$337,842,663.86 and $64,767,763.22 forex in 2010 and 2011, respectively, without importing fuel. Although the chairman of the probe panel, Farouk Lawan, was later jailed for demanding bribe from Femi Otedola, one of the people whose companies were being investigated, this should not render the whole report useless. The government may find aspects of it useful. But if the government feels otherwise, it should institute its own probe.
What is important is that we get to the root of this matter once and for all. It is annoying seeing wicked people who inflicted so much pain on fellow human beings and who should be in jail, roaming the streets and flaunting their Ill-gotten wealth.
It is just that ours is not a nation that punishes for bad governance; otherwise all those who had managed our petroleum sector would by now be facing one probe or another for subjecting a major crude producer to perpetual importation of finished petroleum products. It is their failure or refusal to do their work diligently that has led us to the point of almost criminalising fuel subsidy. We cannot continue to sustain refineries that are consuming unproductively.
Who are those Customs officials who looked the other way when tankers fully loaded with petrol were taking our fuel to neighbouring countries? Every year, we promote several Ćustoms personnel, including those at the borders. For doing what? Who are the marketers involved. Who are their collaborators in NNPC, etc?
All of them must be unmasked, even if they are ghosts, and prosecuted. We have got to the point where we cannot continue to reward idleness, cluelessness, indolence and incompetence. If the government has to set up special courts to try subsidy thieves and others who had caused us economic adversity, so be it. We cannot afford their trials in the regular courts. Of course they would have all the privileges of an accused in the special courts, except that their matters would not take eternity to be decided. There won’t be room for time-wasting legal gymnastics. Their trial and judgment would be swift and those found guilty would be served their due comeuppance. The pains they inflicted on Nigerians and even the economy cannot allow their cases to drag intermittently until we lose track of their crimes.
I agree with both Dogara and Yuguda that; as for pursue, the Tinubu administration must pursue the subsidy thieves. As for catching up, it must catch up with them; as for overtaking, it must overtake them, and as for taking back what they had stolen, it must ensure they vomit or excrete same.
This is the least the administration owes millions of Nigerians, including myself, who are latter-day converts of fuel subsidy removal. It is the least the Tinubu government can do to bring closure to the matter. The big thieves must be made to understand that a king that does not know their Joseph has come. (130 LINES).