The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • JAMB’s last train

    JAMB’s last train

    BUT for the compassion shown by the Minister of Education, Mallam Adamu Adamu, about 706,189 graduates of various higher institutions in the country may have been parading certificates not worth more than mere pieces of paper. This would have been their punishment for gaining admission into the various institutions illegally. The implications are many. The Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) would not give such graduates intending to pursue post-graduation endeavours like housemanship, scholarship, or even enrolment into the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC), admission letters for such purposes because the board does not have any record of their being in such schools. Needless to add that they cannot secure employment in either the public or private sector. As a matter of fact, some of such candidates had been forced in the past to seek Direct Entry into other universities after graduation to, more or less, begin again. Of course this comes with a lot of physical, psychological and mental strain on such candidates and their parents. Yet, it could have been avoided if those who gave them the pyrrhic admissions had played according to the rules.

    Having been boxed into a corner, JAMB was in the past forced to condone these irregular admissions through a process known as regularisation, at least prior to 2017.

    However, the Prof Ishaq Oloyede-led management in JAMB came up with the idea of Central Admission Processing System (CAPS), in 2017, to harmonise admission processes. Yet, many institutions still continued to admit candidates irregularly, that is without recourse to CAPS. At the last count, about 706,189 candidates were involved in the shameful racket between 2017 and 2020. The polytechnics are leading with about 489,918 candidates; colleges of education follow with 142,818, universities 67,775 while Innovative Enterprise Institutions (IEIs) came last with 5,678 candidates. These were as per statistics supplied by the vice chancellors, rectors and provosts of the higher institutions affected themselves, because that was part of the conditions given by the minister before acceding to JAMB’s request to give the violators a last chance by mopping up the backlog of improperly admitted candidates after the introduction of CAPS. According to JAMB, “those minimally qualified would then be condoned to put an end to the period and finally put the matter to rest.”

    This note of warning is necessary for both parents and candidates in view of the fact that admission processes for the current year have begun. Registration for the 2022/2023 Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME) and Direct Entry (DE) began nationwide yesterday. Candidates are therefore advised to keep in touch on JAMB’s website, its bulletin as well as other media outlets to avail themselves of the new procedures introduced by the board to better serve their interest. They should also bear in mind that the era of ‘condonement’ or regularisation is gone for good and, hopefully, never to return again.

    One major reason why higher institutions bypass CAPS or engage in irregular admissions is because of the ‘born-throway’ nature of many of the institutions. Most owners, particularly state governments, just establish the higher schools and expect them to start fending for themselves right from inception. Since, as they say, experience is the best teacher, I want to believe that this writeup would be better served by beginning with the personal experience I was privileged to have about one state government-owned university more than 11 years ago. Then, I was part of a team that was meeting monthly with the governor, with a view to advising him on how to move the state forward, to use the typical Nigerian expression.

    I won’t mention that university’s name because illegal admissions is a nationwide problem. I may not remember the figures accurately, but will nonetheless paint the picture of what transpired at one of the interactive sessions with the governor on the university. At the time, the university generated more than N2billion revenue. Of course, this could only have come from school fees paid by the students. I think the governor, who was shocked at the revelation then told the vice chancellor that the state government would provide the campus with good road network and power generating sets (or so), but the institution should be ready to finance its other expenses.

    True, two billion naira at the time was a lot of money. Many of us did not see the harm in the university generating that stupendous amount, especially the fact that something had to give for this to happen. We were, like His Excellency, carried away by the stupendous wealth the university authorities could play with. It was many years after that the import of what that meant dawned on me: The university was apparently biting more than it was officially allowed to chew. Put pointedly, it was admitting more students than its facilities could cope with. We all know the result when about 25,000 students are admitted to study in a situation where facilities were provided for 2,000! This is no exaggeration; it was simply that bad, even though the statistics in absolute terms may not be exactly correct. But it is almost that bad in percentage terms. In this situation, your guess is as good as mine that many of the students would not be able to get the best, with some of them either sitting on windows or hanging by the door, or even staying some metres outside the lecture halls to receive lectures.

    But many parents seem either not to know about the challenge or just do not care. They are simply excited that their children have finally managed to secure admission into a university. It is therefore not surprising to see some of the products of the institutions today manifesting the tendency of the half-baked education they got. This pains my heart because the fault is neither that of the students nor parents; but that of our ramshackle educational system where anything goes.

    Because the central focus of most of these institutions, even though owned by governments, particularly state governments, is revenue generation, they engage in all manner of illegalities (indeed, some of their actions border on criminality) just to get the numbers to sustain themselves. Stipulated admission criteria are relegated. Candidates who do not possess the requisite admission criteria are given admission in anticipation that they would make up for it before their graduation. Thus, a candidate who is supposed to have credit in, say Mathematics as admission criterion, is given admission in anticipation that that candidate would be able to get the credit in Mathematics before graduating! Of course we know it is not all such candidates that would be able to scale that hurdle, even if they are given 10 years to make up. Even if they are able to, the fact is that such candidates should not have been given admission in the first place because the intention of those who set the standards is not anticipatory possession of the requisite admission criteria; they should have those qualifications as a prerequisite for being offered admission. In the end, the universities push such graduates into the unemployment market. Because they are half (or even one-quarter-baked), they cannot fit into the system. How can they in the circumstance narrated? Nobody can give what he or she does not have.

    So, you have a situation where otherwise knowledgeable and highly respected Nigerians running some of these institutions bend all manner of rules just to get the numbers. There is no other way to describe this but ‘creative’ admission. Not creativity in the real sense, though, but creativity in the Nigerian parlance, that is creativity in reverse. Yet you find the same people in the ivory towers who use all manner of high-sounding jargons to condemn accountants for cooking the books, or government officials for tampering with figures, also cooking the admissions processes in their own small kitchens!

    Another aspect of it that is somewhat related to the one I have been discussing is the place of connections or ‘long leg’ in the admission process. You can’t do this with CAPS. So the heads of the institutions sidetrack it. Here, we are talking about candidates getting admission not because they are qualified but because of who they know. The only admission criterion the candidates need is a note, probably on the complimentary card of whoever is pushing their case, or a phone call to the vice-chancellor or rector or whatever. It’s that easy. Unfortunately, it is some of these same people who helped break the rules that later turn round to say the products are not employable. How can they be employable? How can you build something on nothing and expect it to stand?

    There is also the issue of all manner of so-called remedial programmes most of these institutions created just to sidetrack CAPS.

    The truth of the matter is that many of the so-called higher institutions, again, particularly those owned by state governments, should not have been established in the first place because they have no resources to sustain them or because education is not their priority. Sometimes, some of those institutions were established to mop up indigenes who cannot compete with others in other places, so as to take advantage of ‘catchment area’ and what have you. But many of them also want to belong: other states have universities; we must have ours. As a matter of fact, some state governments that can barely sustain one higher institution have two and are still hankering for licence to establish a third one, simply because of the economic advantage but which in the long run turns to educational disadvantage since standards and quality are ultimately compromised.

    All said, candidates caught in the web of the irregular admissions since 2017 should take advantage of the massive media campaign launched by JAMB to join this last train now or never, to regularise their admissions. It is a lifetime opportunity that should not be allowed to slip by.

    But the National Universities Commission (NUC) and other approving authorities are complicit. They also have to join forces with other stakeholders to ensure sanity in admitting students into our higher institutions.

  • The portents of post-military Nigeria

    The portents of post-military Nigeria

    The political horoscope of Nigeria is full of foreboding and unhappy tidings. With the old west rumbling with intent once again, those who have been asleep in the past fortnight can return to sound snoring. It is said after all that the heavens cannot fall on one individual alone.

       It is just as well, then, that we return to these labours this morning with world and country seemingly out of joint. As this column is wont to assert, you cannot plant cassava and expect to harvest yam tubers. In any case, a rotten fruit does not fall very far from its parent tree. There is nothing magical about liberal democracy as it is handed down by our western patrons. It is a function of unceasing practice and ceaseless self-surpassing.

     But there is a basic conundrum. You cannot procure democracy in a society where authoritarian impulses and illiberal passions run deep. Even in the west, pious fictions about democracy abound.  Our repeated failure to inaugurate a functioning and passable democracy is not a function of a genetic disorder but institutional failure. The west also cries. There is as yet no ideal democratic nation in the world. What is on ground is often different from what is on paper.

      While on holiday, avid readers of this column continued to badger the columnist with the query: in the light of current and contemporary global development, is the so called liberal democracy not overrated and overvalued? Of what use is a system of governance which brings misery and impoverishment to the greatest number, which allows the few elite to get away with blue murder even while proclaiming itself as the classic instance of people’s power and inviolable will? Is democracy synonymous with ordained mass suicide?

      While New Zealand under the leadership of the youthful Ms Jacinda Ardern and Australia to a lesser extent continue to shine as exemplars of civilized procedures and purposeful governance, a British postcolonial establishment nurtured on abject cronyism and what one of its leading columnists aptly described as a “chumocracy” appears set to unravel. In France and Canada, Macron and the younger Trudeau are fighting for their political life.

       These questions and queries about the continuing viability of liberal democracy are no longer restricted to beer parlours and pepper soup joint punditry.  They are beginning to find their way into the hallowed sanctuaries of western intellectual power-processing and many global think-tanks. In some learned instances, liberal democracy is dismissed as nothing but a glorified dystopia with habitants of many so called western societies living in appalling conditions and unspeakable human degradation.

      This past week in this newspaper, a former colleague and an intellectual of the highest calibre echoed these concerns about the failure of liberal democracy while referencing this columnist’s constant allusion to the selectorate in Nigeria. It is heart -warming to note that this phrase has found its way to the portals of online dictionaries.

        As the demise of the Roman Empire has taught the world, a great nation does not die from a single stab wound but from multiple injuries. Since they do not arise lightly but out of the womb of significant events, empires and great societies do not dissolve easily either. It took almost two centuries of unrelenting adversity to topple the Romans.

       Yet it is always possible to pinpoint when a nation’s highest possibility has been reached and when irreversible decline must set in. The Trumpian debacle, the Covid-19 malediction as well as the humiliating exit from Afghanistan, have showcased America’s drastic political, economic and military decline for the rest of the world. Never in the history of the modern world has a great superpower been made to eat such a humble military pie while watching a malign virus devastate its populace. There is something grimly biblical about it all.

        Now with a Russia resurgent with Slavic hyper-nationalism running rings around America and NATO in Ukraine and the Crimea, with the Chinese dragon threatening to put American economic nose out of joint, with the rogue North Korean leadership unwilling to submit to any western tutorial about national self-interest, and with a fiercely independent India asserting itself through an almost hysterical Hindu revanchism, a new global order is taking shape right before us.

    Elsewhere in what is known as the Third World, the situation is even more depressing and uniformly unoptimistic as the denizens of several Latin American countries appear to have completely lost faith in the colonial cartography that produced nation-states.  Hunger and privation have forced many to abscond from their ancestral homestead in an epic migration which makes the biblical exodus look like a child’s play.

       As usual, Africa appears to be the worst hit with several decades of post-independence rule producing neither passable economic development nor the genuine liberalization of the political space. There are very few honourable exceptions to this continental logjam of hybrid autocracy. While paying lip service to the virtues of liberal democracy, most African rulers behave like tribal tin  gods, often changing the rules of the game at will or shifting the goal posts at their whim and caprice. When all else fail, they resort to egregious rigging to have their way.

       Most of the time they get away with this desecration of the will of the people either through the docility of the supine and superstitious masses or through the complicity of the civilized world which tends to look the other way rather than open a Pandora Box of civil wars and primitive genocide. When these authoritarian leaders are stopped in their track, it is either due to countervailing mobilization or superior military force or a combination.

       This combination of fragile nationality and fraught democracy is perhaps the most injurious legacy of western imperialism to postcolonial Africa. It is like trying to wake from a nightmare only to find yourself sinking deeper in the horrendous quagmire. Like a bad dream, the men on horseback are gradually returning to the centre stage. But rather than being stoned or pelted with sachet water, they are being welcomed as heroes and garlanded as avatars of political restitution.

       In the past eighteen months several military interventions have smashed the political process in many African countries. In Chad upon the death of Idris Deby, the military hierarchy terminated a process of democratisation that was well underway to install his son, a three-star general. There have been aborted military uprising in Niger and last week in the narco-state of Guinea Bissau. In Guinea, Mali and Burkina Faso military rule has returned with vengeance.

       The spectre of re-militarization has begun to haunt the entire continent. As was alluded to at the beginning of this essay, a substantial segment of the continent’s political and intellectual elite has begun to raise posers about the efficacy of liberal democracy and even its desirability as a panacea for the continent’s crisis of political and economic underdevelopment.

      What Chief Augustus Meredith Adisa Akinloye famously described as the other party in the struggle for political supremacy is beginning to gain considerable traction. A democratic audit of the beleaguered continent shows that even where the military are not directly in charge, they are responsible for installing civilian regimes and for superintending their overpowering presence. Zimbabwe, Mozambique, the Democratic Republic of Congo and Guinea Bissau, the old Portuguese plantation, come to mind.

      As usual, it is in Nigeria, the biggest and most populous Black nation on earth, that the factors driving this continental slide towards the delegitimization of politics and the democratic process assume their most interesting and perplexing dimensions. Twenty two years after the departure of the military, the nation continues to fumble and wobble its way towards some passable form of democratic rule.

      But if there is any broad agreement among the nation’s fractious and contentious political elite about the true worth of post-military rule, it is that the meddlesome soldiers have at least been confined to their barracks. Even here, loud murmurs of disapprobation are beginning to be heard everywhere in the country. What purpose is a so-called democracy that does not bring food to the table or security to the nation?

      The reasons for this rising tide of national disaffection and disillusionment are not far-fetched. If the truth must be told, the past six years have been a trying period for most Nigerians, what with escalating insecurity which has brought domestic and political terror to every sector of the nation, the virtual collapse of the economy which has turned the nation to a global poster child of poverty, the rise of ritualized poverty and its Stone Age bestiality and the polarization of the nation along regional, ethnic and religious lines in a way nobody has thought was possible up till now.

    With a posse of criminalized state actors and a police force that is beginning to look like an alternative armed robbery cartel, it feels like a perfect storm for Nigeria. Trapped in its cocoon of ineptitude and incompetence, the government appears to have thrown up its hands and given up completely.

       Increasingly lame duck and stripped of his mantra of holiness and piety, the president has taken up futile photo-ops abroad. Nobody is impressed. When a government still has about eighteen months to go and it is already written off by many compatriots including its own original core supporters, a dangerous void appears in the horizon.

      It was not like this when it all began six and a half years ago. There was a glorious feel in the air. It was like a dawn of probity and national accountability. Brilliantly captured by Femi Adesina, the then newly appointed Press Secretary, it appeared as if a new sheriff was truly in town. Many were those who were willing to trade General Buhari’s insistent provinciality and primordial instincts for his steely reputation for integrity and astringent incorruptibility.

       Unfortunately, it has turned out a damp squib and with colossal collateral damage, too. There were many who thought that the teaming up between the dominant segment of the progressive and libertarian old west and the new hegemonic arrow-heads of the conservative north would lead to a harmonization of vision about the state of the country and its future direction.

       This was not to be. Buoyed by General Buhari’s anti-democratic populism, his inability to conceive the modern nation as an organic community of equal stakeholders and exploiting some fatal chinks in the ideological armour of the progressives, the hegemonic party in the coalition simply steamrolled the other legacy parties turning them into mere office seekers and cheerleaders rather than political warriors of a new order. It has turned out that many of those parading themselves as progressives are mere moles in the tendency, mercantile reptiles looking for the next meal.

      But there is a stiff price to pay for this betrayal of the people’s trust which always makes one to wonder at the political intelligence of these soulless smart-alecks. The conservatives have little to lose. They know the price of everything but the sum total of nothing, hence all is well.  It is those who parade themselves as bearers of a new vision of an egalitarian and progressive society who have gone rogue that have everything to lose.

       Here is the trap. The devaluation of politics such as we have witnessed in this Fourth Republic leads to a progressive emasculation of alternative visions of the country. In such circumstances it is progressive politics that is harder hit. It will be an irony of momentous proportions if the attempt to link up with the north eventuates in the complete demolition of the progressive platform.

       This is why events unfolding in the old west should sufficiently exercise the mind of all remaining patriotic stakeholders. It always starts like this with the west combusting with fratricidal bloodletting which then sucks in and mops up the rest of the country. The fractious and tempestuous children of Oduduwa are at it again, tearing at each other like killer ants in a roiling cauldron. The political prompters and remote controllers as usual are wearing an unaffected grin and a mocking grimace. But as it happened before, it is the devil that will have the last smile.

       It is important for the extant traditional and religious institutions in Yorubaland to broker a truce and call on the political gladiators to sheath their swords. There are weighty and murky allegations from all sides. There is evidence of abhorrent nepotism and misdirected preferment which signpost a Yoruba relapse into full feudalism as it makes its way down south via political contagion.

      This development should be of great interest to future historians and political scientists investigating the debacle of the Fourth Republic. It is akin to a seed falling on hard soil. There is a mismatch of political habitat and a clash of countervailing cultures.

      Despite their own feudal history, the Yoruba people have managed to evolve a measure of meritocratic norms which extends to their choices of traditional rulership. This has been buoyed by seventy years of the crusade for free education pioneered by the old Action Group. It is a political consciousness which cannot be summarily abolished or suborned by whimsical fealty.

      This is probably why there is growing resistance and open rebellion all over the place. A political party defines itself and refines its ideological modus operandi through constant debates, internal intellectual dialogue, a healthy harmonization of contending views and unending consultation with all stakeholders.

     This was the case up till the Second Republic. It is now obvious that the two dominant parties have been deprived of this organic nourishment to a point that there is a consensus that they are two sides of the same coin. It is a particularly cruel denouement for a nation groping in the catacombs of political and economic underdevelopment.

    It is noteworthy that while all the spat in Action Group was going on, not for once did the much-maligned  Samuel Ladoke Akintola subject Chief Obafemi Awolowo to unworthy public scurrility,  obscene denunciation and crude castigation. This was because their quarrel was based on differences of strategy and ideological direction and not on office sharing.

      The imperfect foundation of the post-military republic in Nigeria, particularly the mode of party formation, recruitment, patronage and preferment, have now returned to haunt the country even as the selectorate busy themselves shuffling their cards of malign personnel reorganization. It is akin to rearranging the sitting order in a sinking Titanic. God help us in the coming months.

  • Building s3xual energy

    Building s3xual energy

    Every couple wants to discover the key to a better s3xual relationship. One of the ways to achieve this is to know how to strategically satisfy your s3xual urge and your partner’s s3xual preferences.

    This week, we are looking at how couples can seductively and erotically build their s3xual energy to the highest peak. The subject will show you the thrilling effect of skin to skin s3xual contact and it will enable married couples to prolong their pleasure.

    Love-making, otherwise known as penetrative s3x, is an intimate interaction between a married man and his wife, in which both of them can express their innermost s3xual feelings without fear in a totally relaxed and comfortable frame of mind. It is about an intensive physical sensation that also involves an invigorating process of deep discovery and s3xual fulfilment. This involves both parties releasing and sharing s3xual and emotional energy in their most highly charged state.

    Every married couple deserves to be satisfied s3xually. You can share this in a loving and understanding way by helping one another to discover his or her s3xual energy and also by absolutely tapping into your own fulfilment. The idea that bodies possess a s3xual urge was conceived in ancient times. In fact, the ancient Chinese believed that certain meridian points on the human body help to release untold s3xual urges if the body is correctly positioned, stimulated, and electrified. Ultimately it charges the affected individual and helps him or her to reach a hidden point of release. This makes penetrative s3x or lovemaking joyful and exciting. Note that even if you have been married for many years, you can learn to recharge your s3xual batteries.

    First, both husband and wife must invest a little time in preparing their minds and bodies for the oncoming pleasure. This helps to elevate the lovemaking to a higher plain. You both must relax by lying down comfortably, breathing in slowly, and making sure that you choose a quiet and comfortable environment.

    Then begin to make use of the power of touch. There is nothing that is as electrifying and erotic as the sensation generated by contact with warm hands on a receptive body. It restores confidence and the feeling that you are being admired and needed. Also it stimulates hope. When sick infants are stroked they gain the will to live. A dying patient in a coma has greater chances of recovery if touched. Similarly many marriages have been revived through sensual caresses.

    The friction caused by your hand when it touches a human body, particularly on the s3xual parts generates heat and energy. Couples must visualize their partner’s bodies as a great s3xual battery and their hands as the primary fueling catalyst. Skillful caresses can stir waves of wonderful feelings. Couples should not underestimate the power of their fingertips because it is capable of creating overwhelming sensation all over the body, but they should make sure they both have uninterrupted privacy.

    Remember that some caresses are more sensual than others and some parts of the body spark into life quickly under certain conditions. While caressing your partner, please be mindful of his or her needs, then go ahead and use your hands to find the most responsive hotspots areas.

    The breast is a part of the body that needs to be touched often to stimulate, arouse and increase urges. It must be handled with tenderness because the breast in both the male and female bodies is very sensitive. How to do it? Gently circle and then squeeze the nipple between a well-oiled forefinger and thumb, sliding them up and off it. For extra effect, you can use both hands alternately so that the action and resulting sensation is sustained. This always produces indescribable s3xual urges.

    Partners can go further to try intimate touching. No sensual massage would be complete without paying proper attention to the most erogenous areas of the body, especially the genitals. To achieve the best, couples should endeavour to embark on long, lingering erotic touches. Wives, in particular, can enjoy high levels of arousal and achieve orgasm through erotic touch. Erotic touch is when a man caresses his wife’s private parts with electrifying fingerprint touches. Erotic touch is when a wife sensual caress her husband’s private part with her lips and eyes, her seductive sweet talk.

    The quivering culmination of tease and tantalization is when you discover that partner neurons are plugged directly into your spouse’s fingertips. If you are the husband, you must never forget to caress the insides of his wife’s thighs first and ask her which touches she prefers. Then, using both your hands at the same time, you should gently pull on the outer lips of the female s3x organ. Take a step further, manoeuvre the clitoris, and do this carefully and with a touch that is almost as light as a feather. Don’t forget to use plenty of lubrication, run your finger first around the head of the clitoris and then, move it up and down the shaft of the clitoris.

    On her part, the wife should be aware that when she is caressing her husband’s body, she should avoid any action that may hasten him to achieve orgasm because reaching a climax is not a big deal to him. The problem of developing, maintaining, and satisfying s3xual urges is more on the side of the wife than the husband. But the wife should focus on giving the husband a wonderful time. Make sure you steady his organ by grasping it around the middle with one hand. Then rub the cupped palm of your other hand around the head, as if you are juicing an orange. Slide your cupped hand up over the head of his organ and down the shaft. And before it gets to the base, bring the other hand up to the head once more to repeat the caressing. Above all, endeavour to create an all-round arousal use your hands, lips and the warm pressure of your whole body to electrify your partner’s skin before moving to penetrative s3x.

    At this level, kissing is inevitable. I mean the sensual and erotic and way of kissing. Kiss can be many different things- a greeting, an expression of love, or an essential part of foreplay and penetrative s3x in general. Since the lips and tongue are the most sensitive parts of the body, gentle tender kissing and deep penetrative kissing alike, can be erotic s3x itself. Please never underestimate the power of kissing in your preparation for s3x, and in your love making it is an urge most effective breaker-forth tool. When you kiss, do it with confidence, kiss with skill. Skillful kissing usually enhances your own emotional state and helps to boost your spouse’s confidence, as well as hype the erotic and exciting level of intimacy. The result is a good s3xual urges and memorable s3xual performance. If you kiss very well it is possible that both of you will not rush into penetrative s3x immediately, but rather slowly work down your partner’s body with kisses and caresses. Remember your gentle strokes and caresses are unbeatable.

     

    Question

    We want to re-ignite our s3x lives

    You almost blew me up with your column last Saturday. Indeed, I plan to read it together with my wife as a starting point for re-igniting the fire in our s3x lives which is gradually going down.

    I will appreciate it if you can be kind enough to send me the concluding part of the article on how to keep one’s s3x life alive so that I can read both parts 1 and 2 with my wife.

    I look forward to your kind response. Have a great week ahead and may the good Lord bless you.

     

    Answer

    This is the concluding part and I know you will find it quite useful.

     

    Question

    My wife craves for s3x

    I am an avid reader of your column and I am highly fascinated by your mastery and delivery of the subject that most people consider a taboo to be discussed either in public or in their private closets.

    Your column has contributed in no small measure to the success and stability of many families that were hitherto at the brink of disintegration. I really commend your efforts.

    I want to know if it is normal for a woman to start craving for s3x in an alarming manner after the age of 40 and what can I do as a husband when I am not always around?

     

    Answer

    There is no reason to be alarmed or afraid. It is normal for some women. It shows that you are taking adequate care of your wife. When a married woman at that age craves for s3x, it means she has experienced all round fulfillments. And there is an untold inner joy that finds expression in s3xual relationship with her husband. All I would say is do all you can to make yourself available, and when you are unavoidably absent, try and explain to her. I am sure she would understand and cooperate with you.

     

    Question

    Is frequent s3x dangerous?

    I really want to know if too much of s3x is dangerous. I have a girlfriend now that cannot do without having s3x twice in a day – morning and night. I am not used to it. But I love her so much and I don’t want her to feel anyhow. She feels depressed and angry anytime I refuse to have s3x with her.

     

    Answer

    For those who are still single, s3x should be saved for marriage. You have no business experimenting with s3x if you are still single or unmarried. It is a dangerous ground to tread on. I can assure you that there are many dangers attached to it.

     

    Question

    How is sit bath method done?

    I enjoy the way you treat people’s challenges.

    Please, with reference to your answers, what is KEGEL exercise? How is a sit bath method like? What can be used in the sit bath method?

     

    Answer

    Please, read our past editions. You will get accurate information

     

    Question

    My fiancée is always in s3x mood

    I have I fiancée that I will be getting married. My concern is that she has noticeable hair around her upper lip, and she told me that she secretes excess vagina fluid, easily gets wet (hugs alone can get her wet) and she is always in the mood to have s3x.

    Do you think that all is well with her? She will be travelling for two years by November and I keep asking her how she will cope without s3x for that long. She is assuring me that she will cope, but I am not convinced.

     

    Answer

    She needs to see a medical doctor for the hair around her upper lip. There are creams that will easily remove such, when prescribed by the doctor.

    As for the urges and the secretions, most times, being a single lady could be a predisposing factor. Sometimes it could just be that she is a bit s3xually active and aggressive than normal. Though, it may be possible for her to manage herself while she is away. It may also be challenging as well. Even if you both get married, it does not stop her from being s3xually active. I will advise that she should do all she can to prevent things that will easily arouse her or set her on. Life is not all about s3x. It is also about determination, strong will and being focused.

     

    Question

    No man has ever discussed marriage with me

    I am a 28-year-old lady. I have been trying to keep my relationship, but it wouldn’t stand. No man has ever discussed marriage with me. Sometimes, I feel so disappointed. Please, advise me on what to do. My mates have been married with kids.

    Right now, I have no guy around me. I have been passing through a lot of heart breaks. Please, advise me.

     

    Answer

    There is nothing greater than God. Please, put it in prayers and God will provide the best for you.

  • Nigerian subsidy and the real subsidisers (2)

    Nigerian subsidy and the real subsidisers (2)

    We the Nigerian people subsidize

    Our school-less children, foodless stomachs

    Death-trap roads, crowded horse-spittles

    Murderous bandits and their blatant terror

     

    We the Nigerian people subsidize

    Moribund refineries and their mortifying debts

    Their viscous load no less crude than

    The brains of those who control our fate

     

    We the Nigerian people subsidize

    The endless tales about humongous ‘landing costs’

    Sponsored raids by untouchable smugglers

    In this land where Thief is Chief and Law is lame

     

    We the Nigerian people subsidize

    Oil-Block magnates from Power-Block mafia

    Who tip the scales from their golden bedrooms

    And swim and splurge in unearned preferment

     

    We the Nigerian people subsidize

    The crimes of rulers who think less

    Care less, love less, sin more; from whose

    Thunderous prayers minarets tremble and spires fall

     

     

    We the Nigerian people subsidize

    The rampant CORRUPTION of our rulers

    We the Nigerian people subsidize

    Their fatal incompetence and prodigal greed

  • Ekiti: I ask again must our politicians always fight to the death?

    Ekiti: I ask again must our politicians always fight to the death?

    The Seven Aspirants that walked out of the venue of the primary had promised to teach APC and Governor Fayemi a lesson if issues are not properly and quickly addressed then APC and  Fayemi  will have himself to blame” – Hon Bimbo Daramola.

    Being a good example of the haughtiness, and arrogance, youthful Ekiti politicians have deployed since about  2003, to make the state almost ungovernable, thereby rendering  it a literal economic backwater.

    Bimbo is by no means alone in this heedless dare devilry and showmanship.

    Thematically, since the totally unexpected defeat, after only his  first term, of the Omoluabi governor, Otunba Niyi Adebayo in 2003, as if Ekiti is under a curse, successive governorship elections in the state  has always been something of a fight to the death among both qualified, as well as totally unimaginable, Ekiti wannabe governors.

    Most astonishing in this unfortunate phenomenon is the  fact that the protagonists of the odious reality have always been young politicians who you would, otherwise, have described, at the particular time, as youths who would  lay the foundation for a glorious Ekiti future.

    Incidentally, one way or the other, some of  them did find their way to the governorship seat but were buffeted by intractable  inter – party squabbles which ensured that whatever they managed to achieve in office, could very well have  been quadrupled have they emerged from different circumstances. The scenario, which started in 2003, has remained with us since, to our eternal shame.

    Like Adebayo in 2003, Fayemi had, in 2014, also very sensibly walked away from going to court to contest the incoming Ayo Fayose’s ‘victory’, but instead, asked scholars to spend some quality time to research into the sociology of an Ekiti people who would rather choose to vote out a performing governor.

    He obviously spoke too early – thanks to  Sergeant Koli’s audio tape which surfaced later, Nigerians got to know  that it was not Ekiti’s  doing,  but rather, that it was the handiwork of a President Goodluck Jonathan who told his kinsman,  incumbent  Chief of  Army  Staff  that he, Goodluck Jonathan, and not Ayo Fayose, was the PDP candidate in that election.

    That is the same man some  people are, allegedly, now romancing to be Nigeria’s president , come 2023.

    God forbid.

    That presidential fatwa was all some rogue  INEC officials needed to release its sensitive documents ahead of the election and, days before the actual voting, the result had, a priori, been concluded.

    For almost the entirety of Governor Segun Oni’s tenure, not only was the state House  of Assembly equally divided   between the two main political parties, the legislature hardly achieved anything tangible  – indeed, confirmation of the list of state commissioners – a routine matter -could not be done,  and the governor, being in court defending his ‘victory’, could do pretty little before the Appeal Court, sitting in Ilorin, Kwara state, voided his election on 15 October, 2010.  But all these could not have happened had total strangers like former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Chief Bode George not, like a meteor,  suddenly appeared and insinuated themselves into the  state’s politics. That was way back  2003 when they overawed the almost faultless campaign of Chief  S. K Babalola, a greatly respected Ekiti elder, and gentleman per excellence, thereby  effectively muddled up Ekiti  politics, like forever.

    That  is since when the rain has been beating us, politically speaking, in the state as it eventuated in  the “bo ba o pa, bo o ba o bu lese” scenario –  the absolutely dangerous politics the state has come to witness, periodically, at every governorship election cycle,  and from which our politicians have not successfully extricated themselves.ever since.

    During the period, we had a one day governor, witnessed an Obasanjo – inspired inchoate impeachment, as well as saw Mama Ayoka’s infantile IDO-OSI  political abracadabra, to mention a few.

    We have now come to that point in time when any true lover of Ekiti among these politicians, especially thesue current  contestants, no matter on  which political party platform, who did not scale through the primaries, must sit down and ‘think Ekiti’, rather than self, no matter whatever they consider the rightness of their case because  he who fights and runs away  fights another day. Luckily, they all have age on their side.

    These Ekiti Patriots – yes patriots – must sit down and critically interrogate the question: ‘Why, at every governorship election cycle, must Ekiti be in the news for the wrong reasons?’.

    Although this article is aimed, primarily,  at helping to suggest a rapptrochement within  the APC, I feel concerned for PDP too,  because the Ekiti bird cannot fly with only one wing. Insecurity in the country has become so common place that we just must never allow anything   insecurity entrepreneurs will leverage  upon turn Ekiti into a killing field.  Our politicians should also know that no position is worth the blood of a human being.

    That said, let me confess that I am personally delighted at the news of His Excellency, Engr Segun Oni’s imminent departure from the PDP.  I can see why PDP can no longer sleep easy, both here at home, and in Abuja. Governor Segun Oni is a highly respected, absolutely incorruptible politician who would never  stomach the chicanery that played out at the PDP primaries which, but for eagle eyed soldiers,  was to have ‘seen’ hundreds of well armed thugs, being ferried all the way down from Ibadan. I think Engr Oni and his supporters deserve to let PDP know that he is worth every bit of his name in gold, through APGA’s showing in the coming election.

    Now to the APC, which is the  primary reason for this article apart from reminding our politicians of  Ekiti’s unsavoury political history.

    Let me start out by quoting from my article:’EKITI ’22 – In Order Not To Snatch Defeat From The Jaws Of Victory Warring APC Chieftains Must Sheathe Their Swords’, of Sunday, 9 January, ’22 wherein I wrote:

    “As far as Ekiti state is concerned, let me say, first and foremost, that my overriding concern, as it is for Nigeria in general, is peace. It is only in a peaceful atmosphere that the people can thrive and socio-economic development go on apace. I am in a pole position to know that most of those aspiring to be governor in Ekiti have made considerable  contribution to the growth, and acceptance, of APC in the state, and should, therefore, need no lessons on what we have suffered in the hands of a ruthless PDP,  dating back to the days of former President Obasanjo’s ‘FEHIN GBE PON’ when  APC’s victory, then as ACN, whether at elections proper, or at supplementary ones, and right through the courts, were  egregiously scuttled, until that glorious day in 2010 at the Appellate court, Ilorin, when truth trumped all the lies of the ruling behemoth. We must remember those days and realise that  it is time in Ekiti we abandon our penchant for: kaka k’eku ma je sese a fi sawa da nu, meaning – just spoil it all”. “It never helped us one bit, even as we had one day governors and an Obasanjo-inflicted inchoate impeachment which the Supreme Court later voided; both of which completely arrested the state’s socio- economic development. Another election cycle is here. Must we go the same rout again?”.

    That question is as good today as it was slightly over a month ago when it was first posed.

    The primaries had come and gone but all manner of sabre rattling is heard on all manner of media, print, radio and television, all unnecessarily aimed at heating up the polity and making our political opponents happy.

    Without a doubt one cannot but expect some of these things when one considers the huge egos involved, the resources expended and, of course, the hopes many have invested in their becoming Mr Governor as if a Rasputin has  told them they would be governor.

    The place to begin interrogaring the issues involved here is the very simple truism that Ekiti, qua state,  can have only one governor at a time. So where there are 8 contestants 7 will, willy nilly,  not make the cut. This realisation should, ordinarily solve all the logjam we have seen since except, I guess, for the allegation, by some, that one of them was ‘handpicked’, by the governor.

    This, however, is not true and we must quickly dispense of it even while the fact of the other 7 contestants echoing the same thing appears to gift it a ring of truth.

    And I say this on my word of honour.

    I did not stop at  merely writing my appeal of 9 January, ’22 as  the allegation literally ruled the airwaves, wherever you went in the country. Indeed, Professor Bolaji Aluko would confirm that long before the primaries, he and I, had worked behind the veil, trying to work out some things. We knew we were on our own but had  we succeeded, things might have turned out differently.

    I, therefore, made enquiries directly from the governor as to the truth or falsity of the allegation. My finding dear reader, and I have never had cause, not  even once, in our long years of very close relationship, which many of the contestants  are very well aware of , to doubt Governor Fayemi. They should, therefore, sleep easy, when they read here that Biodun Oyebanji was the product of a scientific process –  a  commissioned GALLUP POLL which had no names given to the pollster,  – a professional group of very solid repute –  whose remit was to identify, and prequalify persons with requisite political exposure, competence and experience and who could emerge the party’s governorship candidate in the June 2022 governorship election with the proviso that this be not limited to those in government. Far be it, therefore, that anybody hand picked the young man who is now the APC candidate for the June ’22 election. Instead, what played out  is that the idea of a home grown Biodun Oyebanji who, only  in his 20’s, was Secretary to the Chief Deji Fasuan – led committee of leading  Ekiti titans, and Kabiyesis for the creation of Ekiti state, as well as his having creditably  held many high public offices in the governments of both governors Niyi Adebayo and Kayode Fayemi, two of Ekiti’s most consequential governors, and the fact that he went round the state far more than any of his competitors, resonated very well with party members and supporters who were not just seeing him only at election time having just resigned as Secretary to Government (SSG). They could only barely conceal their enthusiasm for him.

    Indeed, if  other contestants would own this up, they cannot claim to have been surprised by Oyebanji’s margin of victory. Had there been no election, as some of them claim, or  were there untoward practices, as they keep on alleging, the 20 officials granted each of them by the team from Abuja should have, as Governor Badaru correctly observed, disrupted   proceedings in dozens of election venues as against a mere 11, where the elections were outrightly cancelled. One thing is certain, whoever wants to help resolve this problem must, like the typical Ekiti, be blunt and truthful; not minding whose ox is gored, keen only on speaking the truth.

    What should be the way forward now?

    What should matter to all now,  especially the contestants, should not be how many Senior Advocates they can hire, but what soft landing the party leadership can extend to them.

    They must appreciate that there are some equally eminent, and loyal, party members who are ogling  the  posts some of them currently hold,  but for the sake of peace and unity, and in particular, for the must win June ’22 governorship election, my plea to the party  leadership is that all current members of the National Assembly should be allowed to retain their positions.

    This plea, I must say, is in spite of the fact that Senator Opeyemi Bamidele , a highly regarded party leader, went through this same route in 2014, when he aligned with a neighbouring state governor, a good aburo of mine, to muddle up the election of that year for the party. Besides that, he has not been fair to Governor Fayemi at all. For instance, during the Governor’s visit to the APC National Leader,  Ashiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu to brief him on preparations for the governorship election, he was surprised that Opeyemi,  who had earlier visited  the National leader, did not mention a word of  Governor Fayemi’ s meeting with him – at the governor’s invitation, and long before the primary’s process kicked off  at all,  at which he told him that the party would be prepared to support his return to Senate. The idea was that he would become a very senior and ranking member of the Red chamber and thereby help impact good legislation for country as well as state. He didn’t even as much as revert back to the governor with his reaction. If that was not a favour, right from the apex of the party in the state, I dont know what is, because I was an observer/participant in how badly Ope wanted that opportunity only a few years ago. Has he suddenly grown beyond being a ‘Distinguished’, a position some party members in his senatorial district are eyeing?

    Ditto for Prince Dayo Adeyeye whose immaculate performance in the 2018 governorship election the party cannot forget  in a hurry. Unfortunately, this time around, he has subjected the governor to so much scurrility, and badmouthing, allegedly on  grounds relating to his case at the election tribunal. Pray, didn’t  Fayemi too lose at election tribunals? That not withstanding, my plea will still be that for him: ti a o ba tori isu je epo,  a tori epo je isu. For his  great electoral performance in 2018, mentioned earlier, and for reasons I cannot bring to the public space, I will plead with the party leadership to favourably consider  giving him the ticket for an opportunity to return to the Senate. The leadership must also try as much as possible to ensure that it gives safe landing  to all the contestants who, fortunately, are not half as many as the party had in 2018 when, happily, not a single contestant decamped to another party. And come to think of it, how many of them would like to go and play second, if not third or fourth, fiddle in the PDP in the state?

    That done, the leadership should critically look at meeting all necessary geo- political interests to further deepen  the peoples’ love for, and loyalty to, APC.

    With all these behin it , the party should be able to coast to victory, running on Governor Fayemi’s achievements since his first term. Since his coming in 2010, the governor has impacted positively on all Ekiti’s 131 towns, villages and communities. For instance, on most, if not all his visits to the palaces during the 2018 campaigns –  I was always one of the very few to enter into the Kabiyesi’s inner sanctorium  with him, the very first thing we  always heard was a ‘Thank You Mr Governor’, for so and so you have done for the town and this, invariably, always included either the building, or beautifying of the palace in which he was being received. For each town this also included beautification of schools, and building or equipping of health centres as well as good roads linking most of the towns.  The governor has not looked back on his developmental efforts. This time around a huge, world Bank funded water project, World Bank funded roads linking agricultural communities, as well as giant strides in education, social security for the elderly and development in ICT etc, are all ongoing among others.

    The  contestants should, in view of all these, not snatch defeat from victory but please sheathe their swords and let us all work together  to see the party continue its giant strides under another of our own?

    We need the APC family: members as well as supporters, to be totally united going into the   election, come June 18, 2022.

  • IBB: Who made you a judge over us in the 21st century Nigeria?

    IBB: Who made you a judge over us in the 21st century Nigeria?

    General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (IBB), the erstwhile self-styled Nigeria military president from 1985-1993, stated that he made ‘a mistake’ in annulling the June 12, 1993 election that would have brought the late Chief MKO Abiola to power. He said inter alia: “every leader makes a mistake, and I am not an exception.”

    ‘He went further to declare that his repressive regime should be lauded for conducting the best election in Nigeria history and then annulling same on lame excuses. He must be reminded of what he uttered in his infamous nation-wide broadcast of July 26, 1993 affirming the annulment. Dr. Olatunji Dare in his article in the Nation newspaper of 20th April 2010 titled: “Babangida: Never Again” quoted from the ‘maradonic’ speech of the maverick general: “In case Babangida has forgotten, here, in his own words, is what he said in his broadcast of July 26, 1993, about the very election that he is now celebrating as the crowning glory of his eight years as president. ‘There was a huge array of election malpractices virtually in all the states of the federation before the actual voting began . . . There were authenticated reports of election malpractices against party agents, officials of the National Electoral Commission and also some members of the electorate . . .”’

    (Excerpts of the article written by this columnist while conducting his PhD research studies in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia; published by Sahara Reporters, on 7th May 2010, titled: “IBB: Responsibility Not Synonymous With Apology: Nigerians Need Genuine Apology”).

    It is both ironic and intriguing that the celebrated June 12 election was disannulled to the chagrin of most Nigerians. Equally saddened were myriads of local and international observers who covered the events from inception to the interment. It was unanimously agreed, by a cross-section of Nigerians, that the election of 1993 was the best so far conducted: free, fair and violence free! Yet, it was sadistically and sarcastically scuttled by Babangida. It would be recalled that though the piece was written in 2010, the content and context are still in tandem with today’s realities in our nascent democracy. In essence, General Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida (IBB) needs to apologize to Nigerians for offending the sensibilities of Nigerians in annulling the June 12 election. Up till the time of writing, our own maverick elder statesman, IBB, as egocentric as he displays in character and conduct; even though he wants many to believe he is patriotic, has not find it conscientious and courteous to offer any public apology! IBB: you owe Nigeria and Nigerians a candid apology!!

    IBB: An Elder Statesman: No Doubt

    Having energetically served his country, especially with most years in the military, and with eight years (two – term equivalent of an elected president) as a military head of state (self – styled as president), IBB should withdraw from the public scene having done his best for the country. However, political hawks have turned his house to Mecca or Jerusalem to get an endorsement, that in today’s realities should not have counted if Nigeria’s followers are not sleepy and docile! It is high time the mass of Nigeria’s followers woke up from their deep slumber and participate fully in politics and politicking beginning from ward level to local government to state, and to the national level. There is no better time than now if we do not want the likes of IBB, with no positive political pedigree, to be dictating to followers what we should do or who to vouch or vote for in coming elections. Many Nigerians know that it was IBB’s government that annulled the June 12 election that denied Chief Moshood Kasimawo Olawale Abiola the golden opportunity of mounting the saddle in being sworn in as the President of Nigeria. However, unknown to many Nigerians, or seemingly many have forgotten, that it was IBB that cancelled, without proper justification, the presidential primary elections conducted by the two political parties that his government created. The outcome of the primary elections threw up Shehu Yar’Adua of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and Mallam Adamu Ciroma of the National Republican Convention (NRC). What plausible reason did IBB put forward for this callous and conscienceless decision in truncating a well – thought democratic process? IBB rejected the primary presidential elections because, in his own puerile and pedestrian perspective it favoured the ‘old guard in both parties’. Why change the goal post in the middle of the game? Of course, for those who understand the Machiavellian and maradonic maneuverings of the retired general, it was not a surprise! If the first presidential primary in the two parties had been allowed to stay, there was the possibility of not plunging the nation to the imbroglio that engulfed the country after the annulment of the June 12 1993 election.

    IBB: Was not our economy worsted under your watch?

    What actually triggered this article was a WhatsApp post from my cherished alma mater, Oyemekun Grammar School, Akure (OGSA) platform, a forum of eminent personalities. The post pontificated that $1 was equivalent to 0.75 Naira; 1 Pound was 2 Naira, even up till 1986 before the injection of the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) that sapped and sucked Nigeria’s economy. This columnist was serving his National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) in the then Gongola (now Adamawa State), and remembered with regretting nostalgia that a whole goat then was about 30 Naira, chicken was 3 Naira in Yola Market, travelling by air from Yola to Lagos was 99 Naira (with rebate applicable for NYSC members and students)! It was the injection and inculcation of SAP spearheaded by IBB rather than bringing succour to Nigerians that procured sorrow, tears and blood in its trail as Nigeria was made dumping ground for imported items, corruption exacerbated and prices of items galloped! Thereafter, the IBB government needlessly led Nigeria to the slaughter house of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and Nigeria took the bite and bitter gall of IMF loan, we are yet to recover from the ugly side effects decades after! Any trait(s) of servant or transformational or value laden leadership practice in the aforementioned context? Definitely not! Never again, corroborating the stand and stake of Professor Olatunji Dare, should we find ourselves in the leadership quandary and conundrum of the IBB’s era or should we blindly follow the path that the maradonic and enigmatic general is pointing to!

    Read Also: 2023: Ex-VP takes consultations to IBB

    Youths: It is time to partake in politics and politicking!

    It is high time youths discarded docility down the drain and stand up to bad leaders! It is distasteful reading the lips of one of them, Ojo Foluso, National Convener of the Osinbajo Grassroots Organization (OGO): “We came to consult the oracle and the oracle has spoken; IBB is an oracle because he understands Nigeria. . .” The Nigeria youths, if not attesting or alluding to the depiction of Nigeria’s youths as lazy as succinctly stated by President Muhammadu Buhari. It is imperative to pointedly state that the youths should not be lazy to delve into history that will enable them to glean and learn from a repository of wisdom and then, they could discern their friends and leaders they could follow, trust or listen to. It is not a question of age but of wisdom. In the run up to the 2011 elections, IBB might have forgotten, one phrase he used on youths: “youths of Nigeria are bereft of ideas.” Simply and squarely stated, the truth is that the ubiquitous elitist class he belongs has persistently denied access to the teeming youths to exhibit savviness and sagacity. This is making a clarion call to all our youths within the nook and cranny of Nigeria to come together and take their stand and stake in who rules over them from the local government to the state and to the national level in both executive and legislature. Youths must know that power is not served ala carte; and that power is not given, but taken!

    In another jamboree to the Hilltop Mansion of the gapped toothed general, the Abubakar Bukola Saraki (ABS), National Campaign Advocacy Council led by its Chairman, Professor Hagher Iorwuese, IBB responded in the affirmative in endorsing Saraki because he belonged to the youthful age that he would advocate for as if the youths are voiceless. However, it is interesting and intriguing to reflect on the statement of Professor Iorwuese: “Your son Saraki has your DNA and is following these beautiful footsteps of yours . . .’’ To any discerning youth, if the erstwhile Senate President, Senator Olusola Saraki, possesses IBB Machiavellian and maradonic DNA, then it is better to be watchful of this product being promoted by our own unchanging IBB! A word is enough for the wise!!

    Conclusion

    As 2023 beckons, it is imperative and instructive for Nigerians to be awake and alert politically. This columnist wants to specially and specifically galvanize the youthful population forming more than 50% of our voting population to be interested in who becomes what within their wards, local government areas, states and the national level. In this vein, register and procure your Permanent Voters Card (PVC); ensure you belong to a political group or party beginning from the ward; courageously interact or interface with candidates vying for offices; participate by voting in all elections. The mass of all registered and eligible voters – those who are 18 years and above – should wake up from lackadaisical and lethargic leaning and fully get involved in the democratic process and not leave the stage for recycled politicians and untiring militicians who are hungry for power at all costs. Enough of the likes of “Owners of Nigeria’’ (apology to Dele Momodu) dictating and directing the followers as if our brains are on holidays! Followers: let us take back our country before some personalities with questionable pedigrees in leadership positions constitute themselves to de facto Electoral College that is foreign to our constitution! We shall get there as Rome was not built in a day!!

     

     

  • Age, religion and 2023 presidency

    Age, religion and 2023 presidency

    NIGERIANS have ex-military heads of state Ibrahim Babangida and Abdulsalami Abubakar to thank for reviving the School of Politics popular in tertiary institutions. In the 1970s and 80s, some Nigerian universities boasted about their Schools of History, Schools of Politics, and Schools of Economics, for instance, such as the University of Ibadan and Ahmadu Bello University. Scholarly works of course accompanied the labels. It is perhaps nothing more than coincidence, but by echoing each other from the same neighbourhood in Minna, Niger State, the two ex-military leaders’ recommendation on the age factor as a prerequisite for the 2023 presidency gives the impression of a Minna School of Politics. Neither Minna nor the Hilltop residences of both leaders qualified for the label, but it is significant that of all the factors that should guide the election of the next president, age seems to preoccupy the minds of the two leaders.

    Was it the issue of public mood so conspiratorially spoken of by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) in zoning or not zoning the presidency for 2023 that guided Generals Babangida and Abubakar in settling so definitively on age as a leading factor in determining who should aspire and win the presidency? Neither retired generals gave any indication that their view was not guided by their private assessment of the convoluted elections ahead of Nigeria. The point is that they both believe that age is crucial for the next presidential poll, and that the age in question should not exceed anyone in his sixties. Might 69 years be okay then? And what is the difference between 69 and 70? Both Arise Television and Daily Trust Television that interviewed Gen Babangida in 2021 and January this year respectively did not take the former leader to task on the age question. Gen Abubakar on the other hand merely spoke on camera when an aspirant for the presidency, owner of Kaftan TV, Prince Adewale Adebayo, sought his prayers and support. No elucidation of the age factor was also forthcoming from the former head of state.

    According to the general, “Indeed, Nigeria needs the younger generation to take over from us the older generation. Like you rightly said, the world is going digital and I believe the younger generation is more exposed internationally in ICT than the older generation. I am happy that you are thinking of moving the country forward, and I believe with your ideologies and your youthful and vibrant ambition I think Nigeria is on the right part and wish Nigeria will be great. Nigeria with a population of over a 200million certainly is a great country and such leadership will go a long way to make it a greater place…You can count on our support always trying to do the right thing.” The social media may have dramatised and simplified the qualifications for the presidency, not only in Nigeria but all over the world, yet it is no excuse for a former head of state to elevate the so-called public mood to the level of policy or science. Leadership, particularly sound leadership, is too complicated to be trivialised or surrendered to indeterminate and capricious public mood.

    Last August and again this January, Gen Babangida reiterated the age factor as the major critical component in electing the Nigerian president. He was consistent. “I have started visualising a good Nigerian leader,” he told Arise Tv last August. “That is, a person, who travels across the country and has a friend virtually everywhere he travels to and he knows at least one person that he can communicate with. That is a person, who is very verse in economics and is also a good politician, who should be able to talk to Nigerians and so on. I have seen one, or two or three of such persons already in his sixties.” Then last month he also explicated his view on age during an interview with the Daily Trust TV. Said he: “Any person who fits in within these criteria, then he is the right person as long as he is a Nigerian: he is a politician, he is not old like I am, he is very conversant with the country, he communicates, and he is a very good communicator. He should be able to communicate because a president should be able to walk into a group of people and talk to them on issues concerning Nigeria; not all the time, but most of the time. He must have somebody he knows in every part of the country. It is not a tall order.”

    The communication bit was the only difference between the two retired generals, partly, it seems, because Gen Babangida, when he was in power, loved to hear himself speak. Gen Abubakar had no patience with fine speeches. He was practical, direct and less given to humbug. Had Gen Babangida, however, qualified his ‘communicator’ recommendation to include the issue of substance, ethics and breadth of discourse, his suggestion might have been redeemed a little. In his years in power, he doubtless proved himself a communicator, not of stupendous gift to be sure, but a passable one that at least entranced an indulgent and uncritical country. He did not match his communication skills with substance, as he has again shown in the two interviews in reference, but he got away with murder so to speak by taking the country on a merry-go-round and a wild-goose chase that eventually miscarried badly and predisposed the country to ruin.

    Between them, the two former heads of state spent about nine years in the presidency, albeit unelected. They ought to have known enough by practical experience and study, assuming they had the time and the patience for both or either, to author a book or occasional disquisition as the country’s mood and tumultuous events demand, on leadership. But it takes much rigour, farsightedness and deep study to apply oneself to a task that is nothing but ‘tall order’, to borrow Gen Babangida’s words in the Daily Trust interview. Nigerians should be drinking from the primeval springs of wisdom of both officers who had the distinguished honour of leading the country as military officers and contributing to its stability and peace as civilians. Their fixation with age, of all the factors conducing to leadership, let alone great leadership, is hard to explain or justify. Perhaps their memoires should still be expected. And it is hoped that the memoires would be original and educative, in fact classical.

    Given the amorphousness of the so-called public mood so inelegantly referenced by the PDP in determining where and perhaps who the next president would be, it is not clear what role religion will play in determining the next president. Former leaders, including Generals Babangida and Abubakar, have been fairly reticent on the subject. They would be scalded should they attempt to tackle it dispassionately, honestly and futuristically. Yet, the issue cannot be avoided. If it does not come into play as a factor in who takes the party ticket and wins the presidency, it will be relevant for who becomes running mate and just how adept he is at mining non-secular and often jaundiced feelings. Yet for most of the developed world, as this column argued some weeks ago, neither age nor religion has been a significant factor in the emergence of their leaders – not in China nor in Russia, and not in France nor in Singapore, and certainly not in the days of empires replete with either warrior-kings or philosopher-kings. But whether on social media or outside of it, expect in the months ahead animated discussions on the age and religion of the next president. The oppressive and loathsome burden of poverty will not dissuade the electorate from emphasising, embracing, explaining and justifying the incomprehensible.

    There are insinuations that last Sunday’s Lagos meeting of governors, ex-governors and other stakeholders, including businessmen, across the various sectors might have been inspired by the same totem of public mood. That mood, deciphered and perhaps deconstructed outside the public glare by the stakeholders, was probably meant to serve the purpose of selling a particular 2023 agenda. They hope to create a critical mass of believers in the agenda which would eventually be sold to the nation as an altruistic plan to save the nation from doom. But there is nothing altruistic about the agenda, not even the generational shift they hope to midwife. Though they have the two aforesaid generals as silent inspiration, and the social media as malleable tool, the agenda is unlikely to fruit. The so-called stakeholders have kept sealed lips over what transpired at the meeting, but those quivering lips will not stay sealed for long.

    Both the APC and PDP have their shortcomings, and their leaderships have been scheming and sometimes cultic. But they at least do not operate in the strictest sense of a camorra. Before the primaries are held sometime in the third quarter, many groups, army generals and other nondescript stakeholders will attempt to foist their 2023 agenda on the nation. Whether they will succeed will depend on how susceptible to propaganda and fearmongering the people have become due to decades of oppression and impoverishment. Age and religion will just be two discredited tools out of a plethora of disingenuous measures designed to obstruct Nigeria’s march forward.

    ASUU can’t take cognisance of anything

    ASUU

    THE Academic Staff Union of Universities is warming up for another strike. The union is inflamed by the federal government’s persistence in dishonouring agreements since 2009 or implementing them piecemeal and casually. Partially responding to their agitations two Tuesdays ago, President Muhammadu Buhari had appealed to the lecturers to ‘be cognisant’ of the fiscal pressures the government was contending with. The lecturers did not of course retort that they were also facing intolerable financial pressures of their own, but they have simply gone on with their plans. Labour minister Chris Ngige, whose sardonic wit sometimes drives unions up the wall, has continued to quibble. Without often meaning it, his supercilious manners offend even while entertaining. If the Education ministry officials can’t pacify their home, well, why would Dr Ngige kill himself to do it for them?

    Why the real problem afflicting education and other areas of national life escapes the administration is hard to understand. The competition for scarce resources will continue, for the country is not baking as much cake as should be enough to go round. Defence will ask for more funds, and when the country or the safety of the elite is threatened, more money will be voted. Health, Agriculture, Works, Transport and other sectors will also keep demanding more. Then of course youths and their empowerment programmes, not to talk of other sundry intervention programmes, have insatiable appetites. Loans have reached their limits, and debt servicing, Naira value and other fiscal issues all demand urgent and nightmarish attention. These are some of the fiscal pressures the president want ASUU to be cognisant of. ASUU is neither deaf nor blind. Its members will calmly hear the president, take cognisance of the problems he referenced, and simply continue to table their demands.

    It is not only the government that is on the horns of a dilemma, ASUU and other famished sectors are also facing dire challenges of their own. If the government can’t fully understand why the country has been frazzled by unending crises, how can it develop a comprehensive and workable solution? That is where the problem lies, not ASUU or the competing sectors. Government’s sermonising will make no difference whatsoever. As one union or sector is pacified, another angry and dissatisfied sector rears its head. How long will the government continue deploying fire brigade measures to deal with worsening existential crises? Two weeks ago, someone said Nigeria lost about $4bn to oil thieves in less than a year; the government itself weary of vacillating over oil subsidy groaned that high oil prices might drive fuel subsidy cost to over N3.5trn for the next 17 or 18 months; numbed by the tireless bloodletting in his state, Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai has asked for a military Theatre Command; then of course nowhere in the country is safe from kidnapping, ritual killing and highway robbery, while banditry/terrorism and insurgency are laying the society waste in much of the North.

    These problems have their internal logic, their leitmotif. All the Buhari administration needed to do in 2015 when some of these problems began to morph was to develop a comprehensive understanding of the crises. He had the instruments of government and a devoted and willing crop of experts to help him. Unfortunately, he started on a wrong foot, exacerbating the problem, ignoring the budding problems until they became cancerous, and blaming others, including secessionists, Libyan collapse, world economic downturn as a result of Covid-19, and of course, the previous government. Valuable time was lost. It is not ASUU that should take cognisance of anything, as sentimentally suggestive of patriotism as that may sound. The problem is the administration itself, for failing to appreciate the dynamics of the crises, complicating them by half-baked and misdirected solutions, refusing to conceptualise a reengineered society, and ignoring the urgency of enthroning new political and economic paradigms, a.k.a, restructuring, to tackle the dysfunction.

    The country’s present structure cannot take 200m people to safety and peace, not to talk of the desired development. The reigning structure is retrogressive, expensive, burdensome, feeble and unworkable. This is not just pessimism. Even if the administration is incapable of conceiving a deep and complex understanding of the issues at play, it at least has the opportunity to develop a commonsensical approach to governance. In the circumstance, there has been neither depth nor common sense displayed. What exists and reigns is utter paralysis, an ignoble refusal to acknowledge the failings of the system, a pathological fear of change, and an abysmal lack of anticipation of the future. They can’t manage and fund the police, but they insist on smothering it to death. They see secessionist agitations as regional and hegemonic threats, when it is no more than an existential challenge calling for paradigm change. For primordial reasons, they took so long in combating herdsmen atrocities, until it morphed into low intensity civil war in the Northwest. And now they are prevaricating over consensus candidates, slipshod Electoral Act amendment, zoning of the presidency, and imbuement of political parties with wrong ethics and values that atrociously deny justice, fairness and equity.

    It is perhaps too late for the Buhari administration to do anything radical and lasting. It will paper over the cracks until it hands over the baton, just like it has announced it would do on fuel subsidy. The only redemptive exercise it still has some control over is to ensure that the ruling party behaves nobly, fairly and justly. But even this has seemed to weigh it down. And in a season where the PDP has rationalised unfairness and political greed in its politics towards 2023, it is remarkable that the administration does not appreciate how close the country is to the precipice. Having stayed and cavorted too long in crises and infamy without collapsing, the country has become indifferent to danger and disintegration.

  • Unlawful airport harassments

    Unlawful airport harassments

    If it was not the Executive Director of the International Press Centre (IPC), Lanre Arogundade that shared the post of his being detained by men of the state security service at the International Airport last Thursday of Facebook, I would have doubted the report.

    I had to take a second look to be sure that it was not a case of someone hacking his account and making a false claim which could be denied later. I just couldn’t imagine why the journalist and human rights activist would be detained like back in the days of the military.

    Despite some cases of uniformed men still behaving as if they do not know the rights and privileges of every citizen in a democratic dispensation, I thought we had gone past that era when journalists, activists, civil society leaders and any known persons like Arogundade need to be worried about being questioned unnecessarily when they are flying out or returning to the country.

    I had thought that state security operatives, immigration and other security operatives at the airports would have known better that they can’t get away with detaining people like Arogundade unjustly.

    That he had tolerated them harassing him for long does not mean he does not know his rights, but he gave them enough benefit of the doubt until they went beyond the limits of tolerance last Thursday and he had to expose them for what they really are.

    Had he complained earlier, he might have been accused of not wanting to subject himself to whatever security checks others are being subjected to just because of his status. But as the former student’s union leader explained, the security officers just seem to take pleasure in singling out people like him for harassment and not expecting to be challenged.

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    Why would they be asking him who he is, where he is coming from, when he travelled out of the country and other not-sure-of-what to call it kinds of questions when necessary detailed are contained in the passport and flight documents?

    If the state security officers are as smart as they claim and understand what it means to be a security officer in an intelligence-driven age, they should have enough information on the movements of people like Arogundade without asking them the kinds of questions they ask.

    They knew when he flew out and what he went for was all over the internet while he was in the Gambia. The explanation that his detention was a case of mistaken identity is very laughable. Security agencies in the country are usually not ashamed of coming up with spurious reasons when it’s clear they acted beyond the limits of the law.

    Arogundade is a well-known person and should not have been mistaken for anyone by any security official that knows his or her job. The face-saving excuse amidst instant wide condemnations is unacceptable. They need to let us know who the Arogundade look alike is that he was mistaken for.

    They cannot just come up with an untenable excuse and expect that the embarrassing incident will be overlooked. Good enough, Arogundade has indicated that he will seek legal redress on the incident to put an end to any further harassment.

    Many other Nigerians who do not have the clout Arogundade has are regularly harassed at the airports and other places and there is the need to call the security agents to order.

    No one is asking them not to do their jobs, but they must not go about it in a way that the criminals they should be after walk past them, while law-abiding citizens are hounded at will.

    The federal government needs as much goodwill it can get and the security agents should avoid incidents that can further dent the human rights credentials of the Buhari’s administration.

  • Toxic fuel

    Toxic fuel

    JUST how sunk can a nation be? This is the question agitating the minds of millions of Nigerians who woke up to the rude reality of having to undergo another harrowing fuel scarcity in the past week or so, only because some people imported adulterated fuel into the country. What have eyes not seen in Nigeria? If successive governments can be so irresponsible as to be perpetually importing petrol despite our being blessed with crude oil, what stops some well-placed people from capping the irresponsibility with the importation of toxic fuel? Or, how else could we have better described the situation: you have a country that is a major producer of crude oil, yet the government cannot ensure local refining of fuel. So, we resort to importation, a thing we have sustained for decades; the only major crude producer with such senseless template.

    God gave Nigerians crude oil and government is probably waiting for God to come and refine it for them, despite the fat pay they take and in some cases steal on our behalf. Pending when that happens, the government is comfy importing petrol and therefore creating jobs for thousands of people outside the country and growing their economies at the expense of our own youths and economy

    Sadly, one week after, we are still dancing around the national embarrassment. But, can anything embarrass a government that is not embarrassed that the country is the only country blessed with abundant crude oil but is still importing petrol, not as a stopgap measure but as national policy? If this had happened in some countries with responsible governance, heads would be rolling on the streets by now.

    Knowing Nigeria for what it is, nothing concrete will come out of the matter, particularly if those involved are sacred cows. And we can be sure they are; fuel importation is not a forte for minions.

    A member of the House of Representatives, Ibrahim Isiaka (APC, Ogun), did the right analogy by  wondering what the experience would have been like if what was imported was adulterated aviation fuel, “… aircraft would have been falling from the skies. The originating country too should be held responsible for this heinous act because they only attribute something to this country when things are bad. There was a time they brought toxic fuel to this country which caused Nigerians so much damage.” My point of disagreement here is that the law maker wants the originating country to be held responsible. Is it not because of such bad tendencies that we have regulatory agencies here that should ensure countries with which we do business conform to our standards? So, it is more the business of such agencies to stop garbage from being dumped into the country than that of the originating countries.

    What has happened is a big slap on the face of a government that prides itself as anti-corruption crusader. And the only way the government can redeem its image is by ensuring that those who caused it such an embarrassment pay dearly for it. It would seem President Muhammadu Buhari understands this, at least in his words. He has directed that the matter be investigated and appropriate sanctions applied. Hear his senior special assistant on media and publicity, Mallam Garba Shehu: “The President directed that in line with the law, service providers must make full disclosure of relevant information with respect to consumption of their products and that dissatisfied consumers are entitled to a proper redress of their complaints.” Tall words, indeed. Whether this would translate to meaningful sanctions is a different matter entirely.

    But it is in the interest of the ruling All Progressives Party (APC) to do something drastic on this matter to prove wrong the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and other Nigerians who are anticipating, at worst, the usual slap in the wrist for the monumental harm done the country by the  unscrupulous importers and the regulatory agencies who did not discharge their responsibility well in this regard . In other words, Nigerians are afraid the matter would, in the end, be treated like the usual ‘family affair’ that the PDP was reputed for in their time.

    For me, however, whoever is behind this adulterated fuel import does not like the Buhari government. One of the few things going for the administration is that fuel queues seemed to have been a thing of the past under the government, even if it is largely imported fuel that we are using. The truth is that people are clamouring for fuel subsidy removal for different motives. There are those of them in government who just feel they need more cash to play with and this would only be possible if government stopped the subsidy.

    If people clamouring for subsidy removal because they do not mean well for the government could not succeed in making the government withdraw subsidy, they can at least cause other confusion around the fuel supply chain. The result would almost be the same: Nigerians would troop to the streets in protest. As a matter of fact, those who argue that subsidy removal would free funds for infrastructure and economic development should point at what we did with the billions of dollars the country has made from crude exports.

    Indeed, when I saw the queues at the filling station on Tuesday, what I thought was that the government was trying to play the type of game that the soldiers played when they wanted to increase fuel price; i.e. take Nigerians by surprise. I could never have imagined that the fuel queues had returned because some people had imported adulterated fuel, even though I could not have put anything beyond a country of anything goes.

    Now, all the people whose engines (vehicles and all) were damaged by the toxic fuel are getting from the government is assurance that they would be compensated. How government intends to do this I don’t know, especially in a country with a dearth of vital statistics, another failure of government. Those who say prevention is better than cure know what they are saying. This sort of scenario would have been averted if our refineries are working.

    Unfortunately, when the matter started, the regulatory agencies, including the Nigerian National Petroleum Company, NNPC, were not initially forthcoming with information as to what exactly happened. It was not until late Wednesday night that the company listed four marketers as those responsible for bringing in the bad fuel.

    Even then, Melee Kyari, NNPC’s group managing director’s statement on the issue, although written in what appeared to be simple straight-forward Queen’s English was more confusing than it was convincing. On the one hand, it said the fuel met the standard Nigerian specification, and that they don’t normally test for methanol levels. On the other hand, it talked about sanctions for the importers in line with the appropriate regulations. According to the NNPC, the fuel came from Antwerp in Belgium and it listed the vendors as MRS, Oando, Duke Oil and Emadeb/Hyde/AY Maikifi/Brittania-U Consortium.

    It is apt to quote Kyari extensively to understand the contradictions in the company’s response. “On 20th January 2022, NNPC received a report from our quality inspector on the presence of emulsion particles in PMS cargoes shipped to Nigeria from Antwerp-Belgium,” he said.

    “Cargoes quality certificates issued at load port (Antwerp-Belgium) by AmSpec Belgium indicate that the gasoline complied with Nigerian Specification.

    “The NNPC quality inspectors, including GMO, SGS, GeoChem and G&G conducted tests before discharge and also showed that the gasoline met Nigerian specification.

    “As a standard practice for all PMS imports to Nigeria, the said cargoes were equally certified by inspection agents appointed by the Nigerian Midstream and Downstream Petroleum Regulatory Authority (NMDPRA).

    “It is important to note that the usual quality inspection protocol employed in both the load port in Belgium and our discharge ports in Nigeria do not include the test for percent methanol content and therefore the additive was not detected by our quality inspectors” he said.

    Emi ni NNPC nwi no? (What is NNPC saying?) Even as a lay lawyer, the simple question to ask is: if the product met Nigerian standards as we are made to understand, what then are you going to punish the importers for, since you don’t look out for methanol levels as part of the quality assurance process? I don’t know if at any point here I am making sense. Someone should please help me, I need someone to break down the NNPC ‘s submission down to my level so I can thoroughly understand what they are saying. Kyari’s NMDPRA counterpart, on the other hand, said that “petrol with methanol quantities above Nigeria’s specification, was discovered in the supply chain”, adding that “methanol is a regular additive in petrol and is usually blended in an acceptable quantity.” At what point was this detected and why allow it to circulate, if this was so?

    Your guess is as good as mine: the importers are innocent as yet-to-be charged and even after they might have been charged! Case closed. If people who are in charge of our energy sector say they do not test for percent methanol content and therefore the additive was not detected by our quality inspectors despite what we have seen as its deleterious effects, what then are they testing for? This country is indeed in trouble. People doing in and out in their comfy cold rooms are just toying with our collective destinies.

    I agree with those who feel the only thing that can compensate for the embarrassment caused the government and the country is for those responsible for the negligence or whatever to resign or be shown the door by the president. But they should accept my sympathy because that would not happen. I do not think any embarrassment can jolt the Buhari government to take such action.

    Rather, my heartfelt sympathies go to the hapless Nigerians whose vehicles and equipment were damaged by the toxic fuel. They are the ones that will ultimately carry the can, as they would have if the government has had its way with subsidy removal. This is much more so as some of the alleged importers have been denying responsibility for the importation of the toxic fuel.

  • APC gropes its way to the convention

    APC gropes its way to the convention

    By the middle of last week, and more than two months after the rival Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) conducted its national convention, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) was still groping in the bush for a clear path to its national convention. All signs at first indicated the convention would miscarry or be postponed by a week or two. The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) was yet to receive the mandatory 21 days notice prior to the convention. The party’s caretaker chairman, Mai Mala Buni, who is also Yobe State governor, was also bemoaning the disunity in the party, rampant display of ego, elevation of private interest over national interest, and absence of internal democracy. He identified these disabling factors when he spoke through a member of the caretaker committee and former senate president, Ken Nnamani. But he was euphoric that the APC had become the largest party in Africa with a membership population of about 41 million people.

    Days after scoffers wondered whether the APC would ever get it right, party leaders finally relented and wrote INEC confirming the publicised date of February 26 for its elective convention. Some analysts insisted that there were initial attempts to shift the date, which President Muhammadu Buhari snubbed. But even if the president had nothing to do with the party finally making up its mind to hold the convention as first announced in January, it comes as a relief to party faithful that the APC has thrown down the gauntlet to its members and the opposition. It will sink or swim depending on whether the convention fails or succeeds. The suspicion is that they will patch things up and get the nightmare over with. The convention will, however, not put paid to the foreboding crises consternating party members and opening their flanks to the enemy.

    Might the party’s size be the reason for its unwieldiness and unruliness? Given the way the chairman basked in the membership drive that produced the 41m membership population, Mr Buni does not think so. As far as he is concerned, size should predispose the party to victory in the coming polls, and perhaps in perpetuity, until another party registers many more millions than the APC. There is absolutely no doubt that the ruling party can’t find its way through the political and administrative thicket it has intrigued into existence by its crazy and rampant conjurations. According to former governor Abdullahi Adamu, who heads the party’s reconciliation committee, the grievances in the party are so many and weighty that he and his committee would need another week to sift through the morass. He had last Monday submitted an interim report and indicated that there was still more to be done to achieve peace in the party. But as the Ekiti State governorship primary and the politics that lathered it showed, more grievances are still oozing out through the cracks. The party will likely be in perpetual turmoil, regardless of the outcome of the convention.

    If the party does not postpone its convention by declaring a force majeure but goes ahead to conduct it as planned, it will dismiss all mathematical formulae to make the fiesta possible. The reconciliation committee can’t of course reconcile everybody before the convention, and more petitions will still be written and presented in the weeks ahead. Those petitions will not be addressed to everyone’s satisfaction, but one way or the other, after being shamed by the PDP’s successful convention, the APC will conduct its own, if not on February 26 as it has indicated to the electoral umpire, then sometime in March. But by bringing to the fore their party membership drive, which they implausibly hope will make the difference in the polls and perhaps diminish or even make irrelevant their fratricidal proclivities, party leaders wish to draw attention away from the convention and intraparty nightmares giving them sleepless nights. They are unlikely to succeed, for the nightmares will dog their every step regardless of the subterfuges they employ. In 2019, when they subscribed to unconstitutional methods of removing their chairman, they had sown the wind, and must now reap the whirlwind.

    There is a silent dichotomy seething below the surface in the party. The governors now appear to have the upper hand, having engineered the aforesaid extralegal removal of their chairman and enthroned one of their own, the Yobe governor. Mr Buni has consequently and raucously danced to the governors’ tunes, and has remained at their beck and call. The party’s national assembly members are enraged, and last year attempted a putsch to institute direct primary in selecting party candidates for elective positions, whether at the party or general level, believing the mode would put the governors’ noses out of joint. It was an awkward but well intentioned coup. That it failed had nothing to do with the lawmakers’ bona fides or the logic and sanity of the proposed Electoral Act amendment. It failed because it simply did not make sense, regardless of the undisputable villainy and narrow-mindedness of the rampaging and haughty governors. There is nothing anybody can do to dampen the boisterousness of the governors, not until they are humiliated sometime in the future. The problem in the APC is in large measure the perverse interests of the governors. So when Mr Buni spoke on Monday of party members elevating private interest above national interest, could he be feigning ignorance about where the problem is coming from?

    Just as the party embraces the illusion of internal unity despite party leaders’ shenanigans, Mr Buni also rhapsodises the dangerous illusion of party membership as the ultimate decider of elections. Assuming the 41 million members the APC now claims is not an illusion, it remains to be seen how that number, in a free and fair poll, can be translated into dominance and victory. Founded nine years ago, the APC, according to its leaders, boasts more members than the United States Republican Party founded 167 years ago and has 35.73m members, and nearly as many members as the Democratic Party with 48.01m members and founded 194 years ago. What is more, the APC has nearly half the members of the Chinese Communist Party (95m members) founded about 100 years ago, and more than twice the members of the Indian National Congress founded 136 years ago. China and India have populations of 1.402 billion and 1.38 billion respectively.

    The villainous hope that populous membership ineluctably translates into election victory is trashed by the inability of the US Democratic Party to always win US presidential elections. Even when the Dems held the federal government trifecta (the presidency and majorities in both the US House and US Senate), it had sometimes done so narrowly. In the circumstance, the Democratic Party has won the US presidency only 16 times since its founding in 1828, and currently does not hold majority in state governorships (only 22 out of 50 states) and state legislatures (only 17), and state government trifectas (only 14). The Chinese Communist Party run a meritocracy, the British a parliamentary government, and the US a presidential system. Nigerian leaders and party officials with their poor logic, low scholarship and egregious lack of discipline and foresight do not qualify to lead anything.

    This column had suggested last November that the APC, though unable to hold a candle to the PDP in party organization, will eventually fumble its way into the maligned convention. Whether that convention will produce great party leaders and then produce standard-bearers that will go on to win elections next year remains to be seen. The jury is, however, out on whether the current set of party leaders and governors is altruistic. The governors, whose lack of moderation in everything has become obvious to the country, are overplaying their hands. They are unlikely to be restrained by anything, not even common sense or their chimerical love for democracy. In all the battles they have set their minds on since they worsted ex-chairman Adams Oshiomhole, they have won. Individually too, some of their members involved in legal escapades against opponents have won litigation jousts by defying jurisprudential gravity. Even the more numerous fighting ninjas of the National Assembly were humiliated in January when their main battle weapon of Electoral Act amendment was neutralised.

    It is said that there is strength in number, and the governors have continued to give a collective, false and intimidating sense of unity in the APC and PDP. But the unity of the more menacing APC governors will be tested on February 26 when they try to sleep with the same chairmanship maiden, despite some of them being well known political cuckolds. What binds them together is not a recognisable philosophy or even great public interest. They are kept in harness by a despairing and interwoven array of selfish and perverted private interests destined to come in conflict in February, and if not in February, then at the primaries. Sooner or later they will leave harness and exhibit their true preferences and loyalties. They may wish, on the surface, to project a common desire for a president they can trust, preferably one from their ranks, but in the end no compromise will be strong enough to withstand their tribal, religious and sentimental affiliations.

     

    Ekiti primaries prove sceptics right

    •Malami •Yakubu

    Between November and December last year, the country was animated by the Electoral Act amendment which proposed the direct primary mode for selecting candidates for elections. Judging from the fiery exchange between those in favour and against the amendment, it was feared that President Muhammadu Buhari might be swayed to assent the bill despite his private misgivings. Finally, Justice minister Abubakar Malami’s written objection probably dissuaded the president from assenting the bill. Last week, during the governorship primaries of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and the All Progressives Congress (APC), Ekiti State gave a definitive verdict on which primary mode was superior.

    Unfortunately, lost in the din of the controversy late last year was the conflation of the merit of the direct primary mode with the constitutional imposition of ordering all political parties to adopt that mode. Yet the two issues were different. In the end, the president declined assent; and in reworking the bill, the National Assembly eventually expunged the direct primary mode and replaced it with a provision mandating the parties to adopt whichever primary mode suited them out of the three modes of direct, indirect and consensus. Reworking the bill did not, however, mean that direct primary was not the best of the three options. Theoretically, direct primary still seems the most representative of all the modes. But theoretically is as far as the merit of the mode goes.

    In practice, Ekiti showed very clearly that the controversies over primary mode were superfluous. Former governor Ayo Fayose, who remained the PDP leader in the state, and had continued to nurture the party after he led it to ignominious defeat less than four years ago, breathed down the necks of party delegates as they elected their governorship candidate through the indirect primary mode. Angry and disaffected former governor Segun Oni, who also contested the primary, believed Mr Fayose had sold the governorship to the APC by cajoling delegates to elect, Bisi Kolawole, whom he added would be worsted by the APC’s Biodun Oyebanji. Nonsense, said Mr Fayose, the primary was free and fair, and the candidate would spring a surprise. What cannot be disputed, however, is that as arithmetically sensible as the outcome was, the former PDP governor heavily influenced the voting process to his desired end. It seemed as if the indirect primary mode was after all not immune to manipulation, as the National Assembly had feared.

    On the other hand, the APC deployed the National Assembly’s beloved direct primary mode. The first four aspirants on the APC governorship list were each probably stronger than the governorship candidate of the PDP, but that was where the comparison ended. The state APC claimed to have over 183,000 members on its register, out of which over 101,000, more than 50 percent, voted for the eventual winner of the primary. The percentage turnout was unprecedented in Nigeria’s electoral history, matched only by the dizzying turnout witnessed in last June’s Anambra governorship APC primary that produced Andy Uba as candidate with a stratospheric 230,201 votes out of a total 348,490 APC votes. In the main election, however, Mr Uba got a measly 43,285 votes, while the eventual winner of the governorship poll, Chukwuma Soludo, got 112,229 votes, about half of Mr Uba’s primary election votes. The turnout was a little over 10 percent. So much for direct primary.

    There is obviously no settling the precedence between the hammer of PDP’s indirect primary and the sickle of APC’s direct primary, between Mr Fayose’s irreverent politicking and Governor Kayode Fayemi’s Machiavellian tactics. In the hands of non-democrats, any primary mode is susceptible to gross influences of the most nefarious kind. It is unlikely the National Assembly, in contending for direct primary, thought their amendment through beyond its meretricious beauty and theoretical nicety. Both the national lawmakers and their supporters were sentimental and superficial in their consideration of the amendment in favour of direct primary. Hopefully, everyone has learnt a lesson. Without a massive restructuring of the country to settle many of the country’s foundational issues, including if and how the peoples of Nigeria must relate, tinkering with the system, including something as minute and undistinguished as mode of primary, will always end up with a worst tear of the national fabric.

     

    Zulum’s ISWAP warning

    Borno State governor Babagana Zulum’s warning that Islamic State in West Africa Province (ISWAP) might overrun a part of Nigeria, presenting a security conundrum for Nigeria, must be taken seriously. The state is the epicenter of a revolt begun by Boko Haram in 2009 that destabilises a significant part of the Northeast. Prof Zulum is predictably agitated. His state has suffered untold collateral damage, human and material, as a result of the insurgency, and is perpetually on edge. Both ISWAP and Boko Haram have not hidden their desire to establish a caliphate, and having seen Nigeria’s shambolic response to the revolt, not to say the corruption and confusion that have hallmarked that response, they believe they can outlast the country, and probably outthink it.

    Having lasted for all of 13 years, an embarrassment to the Nigerian military which proved itself and solidified its reputation during the civil war and many peacekeeping operations, including ECOMOG in Liberia and Sierra Leone, it has seemed to many Nigerians and more keenly to Boko Haram and ISWAP militants, that this could be a long, very long war. Prof Zulum is uncomfortable with the duration of the insurgency, and has asked for an upgrade of strategy and logistics to deal decisively with the situation before it gets out of hand. If not dealt with now, he warned, ISWAP would prove a major existential threat to Nigeria. And as far as he is concerned, his state, having borne the brunt of the human suffering and infrastructural damage, he believes no option, including contracting mercenaries, should be ruled out. He is right. The fight is urgent, before it metastasizes. The alternative is simply too grim to contemplate.