The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

Neocolonialism and petitioners of Nigeria

Reacting to the unsealing of Senator Natsha Akpoti-Uduaghan’s office after her six months suspension, former vice president Atiku Abubakar and self appointed leader of the coalition of opposition forces for the 2027 polls declared that the action was indicative of the retreat of authoritarianism. In his words, “It is reassuring that the voice of reason has prevailed at last with the unsealing of the office of Senator Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan. Though the precious time denied the people of Kogi Central in the Senate can never be reclaimed, this struggle has not been in vain. It has proven, once again, that when we stand together, we can triumph over tyranny.” Not only did he misread the unwholesome incident, as he has misread nearly everything in the last few decades, including his own political modus operandi, the country must take consolation that he left his former habit of petitioning global powers to the senator’s ‘useful idiots’.

But back to neocolonialism and the custom of Nigerians reporting their country to their former colonial masters. Having burnt his fingers in America over allegations of money laundering, the former vice president has been predictably reluctant to report his political enemies to the US, the superpower which has inherited Britain’s colonial mantle. He leaves that onerous task to ‘useful idiots’, a coinage adopted by Sen. Natasha to qualify agitators, publicists, and activists whom she suborns to energise her politics. But beyond her histrionics, too many Nigerians also ride that chariot of fire to political or social media prominence. On September 22, a group of women, inappropriately called Womanifesto, running errand for the senator authored a petition to the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls alleging that she was unlawfully barred from resuming her legislative duties despite a favourable court ruling.

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It is not clear where they got the idea that the courts ruled in her favour. The courts expressed sentiments in her favour and mused that the suspension was excessive, but to say they declared the suspension unconstitutional was a misreading and propaganda spread by the senator herself. Last February, she had alleged sexual harassment against her by Senate President Godswill Akpabio, but has so far been unable to substantiate or prove it in court. In March, she was suspended for six months for violating senate standing rules, a punishment the Federal High Court in Abuja last July said was harsh but constitutional. For the past one year or more that the senator’s affairs had riveted the public, she had sold all kinds of stories, falsehoods and misinformation to sex-up her position and send her supporters and the rest of the gullible public on a fool’s errand. Indeed, how the ‘useful nonesuchs’ came to the conclusion that the senator was being punished for speaking out is truly bewildering.

Too many false narratives swathe Sen. Natasha’s histrionics, most of the stories knowingly and mischievously advanced by activists echoing the senator’s phantasmagoria. As one-time presidential aide Reno Omokri, a former victim of the senator, said, she had a history of lying and dishonesty. But those traits have never discomfited her supporters. Nor have her tall stories and general extremes led former vice president Atiku to caution himself about giving a fillip to the senator’s campaign. He insisted on social media that the country stood together and thus triumphed over tyranny. Which national unity was he referencing? And over tyranny? What tyranny? And how on earth did a trifling misunderstanding in the senate become a fight against tyranny, let alone becoming a cause célèbre? Alhaji Atiku and his spokesmen have sometimes, if not always, subordinated substance beneath lexical and rhetorical flourish. It is a reflection of their superficialities, not the ingenuity, sturdiness or ethicalness of the senator, that she has successfully worked her sorcery over them.

Most Nigerian activists and agitators, like the rest of their compatriots, are at bottom suffering from inferiority complex. Having been colonised by White men, they have found it extremely difficult to get their cultural independence after securing political independence. Hence the constant report to their prefectural colonialists. The classical definition of neocolonialism indicates “a situation where a former colony, though officially independent, remains dependent on its former colonial power through indirect means such as economic, financial, political, and cultural pressures, instead of direct military rule.” This explains the abiding faith many Nigerians repose in skewed and culturally dominating global institutions, and at a time Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger Republic are exiting those oppressive and condescending world bodies. It explains why activist Deji Adeyanju is petitioning in the US against former Rivers governor and Federal Capital Territory (FCT) minister Nyesom Wike over house acquisition and money laundering.

The neocolonial hangover is so bad in Nigeria, the most populous black nation on earth, that some Nigerians sometimes organise protests to foreign embassies asking them to blacklist Nigerian officials and deny them visas. They also organise protests wielding foreign flags, denigrating their country, and idolising Western nations, including lauding their criminal justice systems despite those systems being hobbled by systemic racism.

The US may, through President Donald Trump’s shenanigans, be exploding the myth nurtured by Nigerians about the ethical, legal and cultural superiority of foreign countries, but old habits die hard. If ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo, citing practical reasons, could set up a few corrupt Nigerians governors in foreign countries and even report his former vice president to the US, it will take more than routine campaigns to exorcise the neo-colonial mindset from Nigerians and their leaders. Sen. Alhaji Atiku and Sen. Natasha proved how arduous the campaign would be, and many ‘useful idiots’ and mercenary activists will not allow themselves to be coaxed into increasing their self-esteem. And unlike old Sparta, which taught their young to endure unimaginable pain for heroic reasons, the ‘useful idiots’ would rather expose themselves to a judgemental world while being incapable of weaning themselves off the appalling neocolonial diet fed them by White societies.

September 28, 2025
El-Rufai on Tinubu’s life presidency

Exasperated by the noticeable improvements in the economy, and unable to cite hardship as justification for his acidic political campaign against the Bola Tinubu-led All Progressives Congress (APC) administration, former Kaduna State governor and chieftain of the political coalition assembled to take the presidency in 2027, Nasir el-Rufai, has changed tack. Instead of whining on behalf of the poor and hungry and angry, as he was wont many months ago, he has now begun to seize upon extraneous reasons to pillory the administration. If he is not drawing attention to what he described as the dictatorial tendency of President Tinubu, he is griping about his unsubstantiated fear that the president might want to be a life president should he win a second term.

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The former governor made the wild life presidency claim when former vice president Atiku Abubakar paid him a visit at his Abuja home last week. First he flattered his visitor by falsely describing him as a fighter who took on the military, and then went on to serenade him as a man of experience in democratic governance. In addition, he arrogantly suggested that Nigerians had made up their minds to unseat the APC in favour of the coalition, and without addressing the inconvenient fact of how the former vice president split the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and stood unmovable on that division, he also described Alhaji Atiku as a man of forbearance and diplomatic skills in bringing people together. Like everything about Mallam el-Rufai’s hyperbole, his insinuations about President Tinubu’s life presidency ambition remain unsubstantiated. But does he care?

September 28, 2025
The cloud lifts…..but only very slowly
- Further reflections on the Nigerian paradox
As Nigeria entered the week of its sixty fifth birthday anniversary, the mood of the nation is sombre and deeply unoptimistic. There seems to be no time for frills or fripperies. The people are not impressed by rousing figures of economic redemption and statistics that suggest a return to fiscal sanity as long as they do not translate to immediate cessation of hunger and amelioration of crushing poverty. If you tell them it could be worse and that under the watch of Robert Mugabe, the old wizard of Harare, Zimbabwe transited from buoyancy to national foreclosure, they retort that Nigeria is not Zimbabwe and that anybody aspiring to rule the country must have the basic skills and competency. Like the human organism, nations also grow old and weary from exacting punishment and unrelenting cruelty. But unlike human organisms that die and disappear forever into the cosmic void, nations can actually be revived and even resurrected.

It is this abiding hope and optimism in the magical possibilities of Nigeria as the greatest conglomeration of Black people and the charmed life the nation has lived so far that must inform contemporary politics of goodwill irrespective of faith, creed or ideological suasion. Without this hope, optimism and suspension of disbelief perhaps, no union of contraries like ours can be sustained or kept alive for long. After over a century of slavery, discrimination against the indigenous Black people and other manifestations of economic injustice, Sudan finally unraveled, the contradictions dramatically accentuated by military rule. Following on its heels is South Sudan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and many other flashpoints of disaffection and discontent on the continent.

Franz Kafka was a writer of rare originality and pained integrity. All his life, he felt insecure and not up to it. Feelings of worthlessness and unworthiness gnawed at his tortured soul. Shortly after his engagement, he wrote to his future wife promising her only a future of “unadulterated unhappiness”. “Unadulterated unhappiness” is unhappiness at its summit, pure, concentrated and undiluted. Sensing mortal danger that is immediate and pressing, the poor woman broke off the engagement and fled. Thus ended the marital career of a lonely and alienated genius even before it began.

Kafka remained a model celibate for the rest of his life. He was a victim of multiple identities each cancelling out the other leaving an empty shell at the heart of it all. He was a German-speaking Czechoslovakian Jew, a convoluted identity which merely reinforced his burden and misery since he was neither a German, nor a Czech or a Slovakian. It was little surprise that the whole post-Habsburg contraption unraveled with the Czechs and Slovakians being the last to bail themselves out in a courteous and friendly parting of ways.

   As a result of the endemic crisis of nationhood and unviable identity spawned by the whimsical malevolence of the colonial cartography of Africa, there are many Nigerians who believe that they have been at the receiving end of unadulterated unhappiness in the hands of their country. A lot of people believe that the coerced marriage of the mutually incompatible has produced nothing but protracted misery and retrogression. Many have gone to their grave regretting the nationhood imposed on them by the colonial masters. “What type of a country is this?” Ken Saro-Wiwa was known to have muttered after several crude attempts to hang him failed, before he finally gave his soul to his maker. The rudimentary and primitive execution contraption was reported to have been hurriedly flown from Sokoto Prison that same morning.

The late Justice Adewale Thompson was justly celebrated as a mystic, aficionado of arcane mysteries and exemplar of Black Exceptionalism. He believed that Nigeria and the Black race were the greatest things to have happened to humanity. But towards the end of his life when he was asked whether he would like to return to Nigeria to continue with his great work as he often hinted, the great man retorted that he had suffered enough. When Wole Soyinka, the Nobel laureate, was asked whether he could distinguish between hell and heaven, he responded that having lived in Nigeria for most of his life, he had a fair idea of what hell would be like. Before he died in exile, Chinua Achebe had already buried Nigeria.

These dismissals and disavowals of Nigeria by some of its most illustrious citizens ever are fairly representative of widespread disillusionment among the elite of the country. Yet there are many dissenting voices who also contend that the inability of Nigeria to cohere and solidify as a holistic and organic nation with a rock solid national identity is a result of the fractiousness and poverty of vision of its corrupt, avaricious elite. They must not be allowed to wash their hands off the problems. In an acidic reformulation of Count Leo Tolstoy’s original aphorism about all happy families being the same, some political theorists have expanded the vista to incorporate nations: all happy nations are the same it is only unhappy nations that are unhappy in their own unique way.

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   To corroborate the startling insight of this daring inversion, it is said that all civilized nations feel the same : tap water running, electricity flowing, the unsheltered reduced to a minimum, public transportation zooming ceaselessly and with clockwork efficiency, insecurity reduced to the barest minimum, public safety guaranteed by an efficient policing system and adequate medical facilities available to all citizens with affordable food available to all. It must be added that all these countries have also put in place systems of governance which guarantee free and fair elections and which allow the people to choose their leaders and representatives.

Apart from failing in all or most of these verifiable indices of modern civilization, a country like Nigeria is also seen to be plagued by its own unique combo of internal discontent and disaffection with the entire system. Multi-dimensional insecurity, with economic, political and religious insurrection in the entire north combined with urban terrorism in the South West and generalized disorder in significant sections of the South East have become the main drivers of agricultural collapse in the rural areas, particularly in the former food belts of the Niger-Benue confluence and the smooth transportation of goods in the entire country. Despite some heroic efforts to stem the tide, unfettered corruption and mismanagement remain rife and have hobbled industrial growth, stymied educational development and crippled innovative instances of infrastructural development. The only significant exception is Lagos and one or two of the old LOOBO states.

Yet with this dismal and dreary picture painted, it is easy to overlook some of the heroic and herculean efforts that have been invested in redeeming and sanitizing Nigeria over the decades, the June 12 struggle for example. But they appear too little and far between. When subsumed within the context of generalized incompetence and startling failure of leadership, the labours of our heroes and avatars appear to be in vain. For example, the first generation of Nigerian leaders, in particular a visionary and developmental genius like Obafemi Awolowo, who was touted by western experts as belonging to the front ranks of leaders anywhere in the developed world and the string of economic wizards such as the remarkable Odutola brothers, Louis Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Aminu Dantata and Odulate of the Alabukun fame who built industrial empires from scratch, would be weeping in their grave at the plight of their nation.

   As it has been observed by Louis Althusser, it is only the production of new heroes keeps old heroes alive. This is why it is important at this point to make a brief detour to some important conjunctures in our journey so far in order to plot the way forward. It is said that when youths stumble, they cast anxious gazes at what lies ahead, but when elders falter, they cast a retrospective glance at what led them to where. In early 1985, forty years ago, this writer was approached by the duo of Dele Giwa and Ray Ekpu of Newswatch magazine fame to contribute an article to commemorate Nigeria’s twenty fifth anniversary later that year. So important was the project to them that both drove down to Ife where one was based then to seek out the columnist.

The resultant effort was a landmark publication on the journey of Nigeria up till that moment with so many contributions of rare insights by distinguished writers that explored many aspects of the Nigerian condition in their multidimensional perplexities and overdetermined contradictions. Our own contribution explored the maddening paradoxes, ironies and ambiguities that have dogged the Nigerian condition since amalgamation. In the opinion of many, it was a rousing tour de force. Ever since, the concept of paradox has entered the Nigerian imagination and public discourse both as a framing referent and as a diagnostic tool for plumbing the depths of postcolonial disorder.

   Four decades after, one continues to be astonished and astounded by the magnitude and acuity of the insight. How else can one classify the plight of a nation blessed with the most arable land mass and such contrasting climatological conditions that it could produce anything under the sun yet is unable to feed its populace? How does one describe a nation that sits atop the most spectacular array of mineral riches that any society has been blessed with since the dawn of civilization but which has become a byword for multidimensional poverty? What would the Malaysians think each time Nigeria demands for the palm oil which they now produce with industrial ease? Are these not the same people that gifted them with the seedlings with which they took off a few decades earlier? Given its spectacular human endowments and natural resources, the nation ought to be in the front rank of leading nations but is instead dismissed as a monumental joke; a gross caricature of authentic nationhood.

The paradox even extends to the game of soccer so beloved by most Nigerians. Despite having thrown up some of the greatest soccer prodigies the world has seen in the last three decades, the country has so far been unable to come up with eleven men that will cohere and congeal into a solid national team that will be a global sensation. In the end, it is obvious that nothing can beat Henry Kissinger’s great insight that a nation’s football team is willy-nilly a reflection of the national character. With the problem now thrown into bold relief, it should be obvious that any government that hopes to make a significant dent on Nigeria’s acute dysfunction must roll up its sleeve to tackle the foundational problems of inauthentic nationhood.

More obvious is the fact that this cannot be done without significant political reforms which will broaden the narrow and severely limited base of the current national consensus, tackle the problem of corruption and misappropriation of national resources in a holistic and systematic manner and press for a more inclusive and egalitarian economic programme which conduces to more social harmony and national peace. The current government has tried to tackle these problems which presuppose that its instincts are in the right direction. But it will require far more integrative rigour, mental discipline and theoretical sophistication which allow us to borrow ideas from other places without having to subject ourselves to their cultural enslavement. Nations perish not because it is their destiny to perish but because they have refused to adapt their ways to changing times.
September 28, 2025
London spanks the legal charlatan

Oh boy, oh boy, has anybody heard from the bespoke, be-jeweled and hair-splitting legal superbrat and braggart after the humiliating debacle in a London court? Mum has been the word from the mountebank. It has been rumoured that such was the resounding shellacking that the old boy decided to seek treatment in a London infirmary. What he needs is an infirmary for the morally and ethically infirm. Another version has it that he immediately flew home to seek rehab from native doctors in the ravines of his local community. Just as khaki no be leather, London no be Lugbe. It is said that a child who is not well taught at home will be forced to learn his lesson from outside the home. Once again, it is London that has come to the rescue of Nigeria’s ruined judicial and legal system.

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The pomaded panjandrum had arrived in court hoping to bluff his way through the tangled web of lies, deceits, criminal forgery and perjury through the usual combination of blustery, braggadocio and boastful self-importance. He had let it be known beforehand that he was quite an important lawyer back home in Nigeria. But the intrepid and eagle-eyed judge who could see fraud from a mile off was having none of that nonsense as he made a short shrift of both the man and his case. By the time he was through with our SAN sans commonsense, he was said to have cut sorry figure indeed. The judge even called to question his basic competence in evidentiary procedure.

It was another sad day of disgrace and dishonor for the Nigerian legal system. It calls attention once again to the terrible rot in the system. With this tragicomic unraveling, our man’s claims to a sham doctorate degree and a yeye professorship procured from a wosiwosi , back alley trading concern based in Zambia and the Caribbean have all gone up in a bonfire of vanity and venality. The matter will not end there, we promise.

September 28, 2025
Salute to a citizen-journalist extraordinaire

Columnist joins many of our compatriots on the trail of commendation and appreciation of Femi Orebe, a must read columnist on this stable for almost twenty years as he became an octogenarian this past week. To be honest and truthful yours sincerely has never been a fan of the appellation ”citizen journalist”, for if there are citizen journalists, why can’t there be citizen doctors, citizen engineers, citizen lawyers, etc? Is this not another scam to further debase and devalue an otherwise noble profession? But now that everyone with a computer and plenty of data is a journalist, the deluge has made one to be appreciative of those who are willing to submit themselves to a modicum of the discipline of the Discipline.

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A news-making newshound born with an innate curiosity about unusual developments and a tireless addiction to political “gist”, there is a sense in which it was inevitable that the man famously known as Love me Obere, a deliberate garbling of his name by mischievous campus journalists chronicling his social adventures but also wary of litigation, to make a detour into journalism. As the editor of the Cobra, the most dreaded campus newspaper of the time, this writer counts himself as one of his principal posthumous tormentors, posthumous in the sense that even though he left shortly before we got in, we continued to regale readers with tales of his campus adventures. He took it all in the chin with laughter and cursing, blaming it all on awon omo radarada.

It is an irony of fate if that detour and side profession now threatens to overwhelm and elbow out his original calling as a gifted bureaucrat. He writes with such straightforward ease and facility that one cannot but recall the strenuous simplicity of the AJP Taylor school of historiography. Here is wishing bros many more years of distinguished service to the fatherland.

September 28, 2025
Dangote on my mind (II)

The elderly were venerated in pre-literate societies for several reasons, chief among them being their ability to recall events from the past and relate them to contemporary situations. Africa did not take to writing things down until quite recently which explains why old people are still held in high esteem simply for their longevity in many parts of the continent, especially in those parts where literacy is just taking root. Tucked away in the memory of such old people were events which needed to be retrieved from the past, to be of service to the present. Sometimes, such items of information were a matter of life or death and at other times, they were no more than items of passing interest. An example of this is found in Things fall apart, Chinua Achebe’s justly famous book about first contact. One episode in that novel concerned the arrival of a swarm of locusts in Umuofia, shortly after the annual gathering of the harvest. Locust invasions were a rare event, so rare that only a few long-lived individuals had lived long enough to be witness to two of such visitations in their life time. It was the wisdom of a few of the ancient survivors in their midst that made it possible for the visitation of the swarm of locusts described in the book to be effectively dealt with. There are other examples of elderly interventions which were of more critical importance to their society.

In current times when everything is sure to have been faithfully recorded somewhere, dependence on human longevity, for the sake of longevity is no longer of crucial importance as it once was. Even then, the old still have some bragging rights when it comes to reaching into the past to make a point. One of such instances must be the issue of the effect of petrol and diesel on our societal well being.

Before the magical year of 1972 nobody in this country gave any thought to the availability of petrol. True, there were only a few petrol stations giving service in any given locality but there was no time when any of them was ever out of fuel to sell. Many of them were also open for service at virtually any time of day or night. The first hint of trouble as to the availability of fuel came in December of 1972. At that point in time, two grades of petrol, super and ordinary were available everywhere with the super variety being more expensive than the other. You had a choice. During the Christmas period of 1972, the super grade fuel suddenly and for no apparent reason became unavailable. This was only noticeable to the big wigs who ran their expensive vehicles on super grade petrol. So light was the hiccup that those that were restricted to using the ordinary grade of petrol were unlikely to have noticed that anything was amiss. By the following year, the fuel situation had changed so drastically that throughout the Christmas period and well beyond, there was hardly any grade of petrol to be had anywhere. Long petrol queues appeared as if by magic and instances of people sleeping over on those queues became part of everyday existence. Unfortunately, this became an expected phenomenon which spilled out of the Christmas and other holiday periods in Nigeria and became an uncomfortable norm. Petrol sellers cashed in on this situation and the classical experience of the increase in price in periods of scarcity became the order of the day. Very soon, prices began to increase by government fiat. From 5 kobo per litre in the seventies, petrol climbed to the dizzy height of more than N 1,000 per litre at the time almost two years ago, when the scam called fuel subsidy was removed from the painfully constricted throat of long suffering Nigerians. For a period of fifty years, we suffered unbearable torture at the hand of the fuel mafia even as our need for their product increased exponentially from year to year until it became a burden which was too heavy to be borne. There just had to be a way out of that situation.

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At the height of the oil boom in the seventies, the government constructed four refineries which were supposed to keep us in regular supply of petrol, diesel and kerosene. Personally, I cannot remember if this was achieved at any time even before the refineries kept breaking down due to poor management and disdain for proper maintenance. Somewhere down the line, we have lived up to the fiction of being producers of refined petrol chemicals and became importers of these products. This was a painful paradox because we were one of the leading producers and exporters of crude oil but we could not enjoy this privilege in a world which hungered for oil as never before in human history. But we were supposed to enjoy this privilege and someone came up with the really clever idea of creating a government run monopoly which sold refined petroleum products at less than their landing cost. This made the cost of these products significantly less than it was in all our neighbouring countries. Naturally, a lot of our subsidised petrol flowed into those countries where there never were any long petrol queues as was the case in Nigeria. Whatever gains that accrued from any subsidy on refined products passed straight into the cavernous pockets of those in charge of running the subsidy scam and the smugglers who channelled the fuel into other countries. Between them, they swallowed our collective patrimony.

It is not difficult, especially in hindsight, to see that our economy was being subsidised at the expense of each one of us. Our currency situation was also in the gutter even as the crude oil which was supposed to pay for everything was being purloined on an industrial scale close to the points of extraction. So much of this oil was being cooked in makeshift kitchens in the Niger Delta region that loads of carbon particles were released into the air and breathing became difficult in many parts. The combined activities of the subsidy scammers, the smugglers and those of the cooks in the Delta were augmented with the damage inflicted on the economy by currency speculators. These were the round trippers who used their positions and enormous influence to gather hot dollars straight from the Central Bank at the official rate. These they then sold for huge piles of cold Naira. These were then processed through the Central Bank furnace, to turn them into piping hot dollars thanks also to the huge discrepancy between the official and unofficial values of the dollar.

It is not difficult to imagine that in the middle of all these, what could be called a Nigerian economy was practically nonexistent. The people who had money could not invest it in Nigeria if only because in the face of astronomical interest rates, they would have been barking mad to risk investing their money in Nigeria. They simply moved the bulk of their loot into safe havens far away as they lived high on the fat of the hog in all the fleshpots of the world. In the midst of all this, it would have been madness for anyone to think of risking 20 billion hot dollars in setting up the largest single train refinery in the world right here in Nigeria.

September 28, 2025
Add value or perish
- That was Tinubu’s message to African countries on exportation of raw materials. But we have been hearing that for some time. It’s time to put it into practice, probably with Nigeria showing the way
President Bola Ahmed Tinubu struck the right chord at the Second Africa Minerals Strategy Group (AMSG) High-Level Roundtable on Critical Minerals Development in Africa, held on the margins of the 80th Session of the United Nations General Assembly, New York City, where he called for a complete overhaul of the global financial architecture governing Africa’s mineral resources, to enable African countries take full control of such resources.

He was represented at the event by Vice President Kashim Shettima.

The President said, “First, I urge African nations to climb the value chain’’, adding, “We must end the ignoble cycle of exporting rocks and importing finished goods. From beneficiation to green manufacturing, Africa must build industries on African soil.”

“We must take the bull by the horns in financing our future. Never again shall we wait for capital to trickle in. With sovereign funds, blended vehicles and innovation tools like the Africa Mineral Token, Africa shall finance Africa. To safeguard this sovereignty, we must guard our cobalt, lithium, graphite, gold and rare earths not as fragmented states but as one continental bloc, wielding collective power in global supply chains,” the President was quoted as saying in a statement issued by the vice president’s spokesman, Stanley Nkwocha.

But Tinubu did not say anything novel. Several African leaders, international organizations like the World Bank, and economists have for long been making a case for value addition to raw materials before export, to boost economic growth and create jobs.

One such prominent figure is President Akufo-Addo of Ghana. ‘’ One thing that Ghana, and Africa, must do is add value to the sale of raw materials and natural resources. We need to transform stagnant, jobless economies built on the export of raw materials and unrefined goods to value-added economies that provide jobs to build strong middle-class societies and lift people out of dire poverty,” Akufo-Addo once said.

Also, our Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Dele Alake, has urged African nations to take sovereign control of their natural resources by halting the export of raw minerals and prioritising domestic value addition through local processing and industrialisation. Alake spoke in July at the opening ceremony of the 4th African Natural Resources and Energy Investment Summit held at the Presidential Villa in Abuja.

The minister said African countries deprive themselves of the immense benefits they could have enjoyed if they processed their raw materials before exporting them. According to him, the continued exportation of unprocessed mineral resources deprives the continent of critical economic benefits, including job creation, technological advancement, and sustainable development.

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Indeed, experts have for decades unanimously concluded that the only viable option for African countries is for them to add value to products and provide transport and production of African goods. They are of the opinion that failure of the continent’s producers to add value to their products before exporting them is part of the main reasons for the continents’ slow economic growth.

As the experts noted, whenever we export processed goods, we create jobs for our teeming jobless youths and add value to local economies. But it is the other way round when we export raw materials: we keep the industries of the receiving countries humming; their citizens employed at the expense of ours and generally help them grow their economies.

For instance, they said its better for Africa to learn how to export copper cables instead of copper and aluminum sheets

The Director-General and Chief Executive Officer of the Raw Materials Research and Development Council, Prof. Nnayelugo Ike-Muonso, gave an insight into what the horizon would look like if we begin to add value to our raw materials: He said, “Crude oil is a raw material. We export oil in its raw form and get back only fuel. We lose additional revenues because we just exported crude oil in that form.”

Ike-Muonso is not done: “If we process copper here, it will be difficult to hide or remove the gold content embedded in it. When exported raw, they smelted it abroad and made excess profits,” he stressed.

Now to specifics.

In the cocoa industry, Nigeria loses $1 billion annually due to limited local processing of raw cocoa beans into high-value products like chocolate. The country exports raw cocoa at $10 per kg, and the chocolate comes back at $100 per kg. That’s not good. Once we export raw materials, we don’t get much value.

Nigeria loses $3.7 billion annually from raw cashew exports, highlighting the massive opportunity cost of not processing these cashews into higher-value products.

Moreover, Nigeria exports most of its shea nuts as raw materials, with only about 18 per cent processed domestically, whereas foreign countries, especially in Europe, process these nuts into shea butter for cosmetics and food. This is why the ban on exportation of this produce by the Federal Government is welcome.

The case with petroleum products is even worse, especially with subsidy being paid on every litre of fuel imported due to the country’s inability to refine fuel locally until the Tinubu administration put an end to the subsidy fraud in 2023. Although what is paid for a barrel of crude oil and what is eventually spent refining it varies from producer to producer, one indisputable fact is the wide disparity between the cost crude oil is sold and the amount crude exporters like Nigeria spend on importing the refined products.

Of course, as we have always known, corruption exacerbates the problems in the Nigerian oil sector, with so many interested parties feasting on the misery of ordinary Nigerians. So, they can never wish for a situation where the country would stop fuel import. This is one of the bases of disagreement between Dangote Refinery and the unions in the oil sector, among others.

The government has to come down hard on the parasites feasting on the system in the oil sector if Nigeria is not to continue to experience fuel scarcity in spite of the fact that we are beginning to have some capacity to fuel our vehicles locally.

Even in the days when Nigeria was a major producer of palm oil, the raw products were exported almost for peanuts, while we imported the manufactured products from them at exorbitant costs.

Everyone that matters has made the points that needed to be made on this matter. But it should not be about speech-making. African nations need to move from the stage of reading well drafted speeches to concrete action.

Continued exportation of raw materials over the decades is part of the reasons Africa has remained potentially great perpetually. And, unless they change the narrative; that is the way the continent would remain in self-inflicted subjugation forever. Self-inflicted because it is a thing they imposed on themselves.

All of these call for domestic reforms by African leaders to harmonise their policies and increase trade among their various countries, to achieve sustainable development.

Nigeria must be ready to take the lead and take the idea of value-addition to the realm of implementation. This is one way of demonstrating its strength as ‘giant of Africa’. Perhaps a good way to start is to enforce the approved amended version of the Raw Materials Research and Development Council Act, 2022, which mandates that exporters must process at least 30 per cent of raw materials locally before exporting.

Sponsored by Senator Onyekachi Nwebonyi, the goal of the amended bill that was approved by the Senate on July 2, is to stimulate value addition, strengthen domestic manufacturing, reduce imports, and spur sustainable economic growth. Any exporter who fails to meet the 30 per cent processing threshold would incur a 15 per cent levy on the export value; it could also lead to the suspension or revocation of the exporter’s value-addition certificate.

However, the point must be well made that for the idea of value-addition to raw products for export to come to fruition, power supply is key. No nation can industrialise without a reliable power supply. And you can only add value by industrialising. Therefore, the Federal Government must be ready to further shake the power sector to deliver. Yes, some progress is being made gradually in this direction, but then, more needs to be done. Most Nigerians seem to have agreed that the extant template in the power sector cannot take us far.

The state government and private investors should take full advantage of the new vistas of opportunities being opened by the Federal Government to take a substantial share of the pie from the existing power players. May be that is the elixir that would jerk them to the reality of the fact that their best is not good enough.

Above all, however, African leaders must be ready to govern responsibly. The era of life presidency is over. The era when leaders sit tight as if their respective countries would collapse if they suddenly drop dead is also over. No one is indispensable. Here, the regional and continental bodies must be ready to be on the side of the people and not protect their friends and colleagues in power even when it is clear that such leaders have outlived their usefulness.

That Africa has so far spent so much of even the little she realised from exporting raw materials on arms and ammunition to protect corrupt and inept leaders is a notorious fact. This would not change if the mindset remains unchanged even after more money starts to come in from value-added to products that are being exported from the continent. It would only mean more arms and ammunition, more hunger and squalor, and more poverty, at least for the people, with the changing really never changing.
September 28, 2025
LET’S DO THE SING-ALONG 17

From coalition to collision

Here comes the Party – Shopper (1)

Tere pampa tere pampa

Tere minnan minnan tere

Hungry party shoppers

Are here again

     Here again

     Here again

Hungry party shoppers

Are here again

     Tere pampa tere pampa

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Their claws long deep

In our carton of cash

     Carton of cash

     Carton of cash

Their claws long deep

In our carton of cash

     Tere pampa tere pampa

Their eyes are red

Their noise is loud

      Noise very loud

      Noise very loud

Their eyes are red

Their noise is loud

     Tere pampa tere pampa

My big old party

Has done me in

     Done me in

     Done me in

My big old party

Has done me in

     Tere pampa tere pampa

When they gulped down the chicken

They threw me the bones

     Bones, bare bones

     Bones, bare bone

When they gulped down the chicken

They threw me the bones

     Tere pampa tere pampa

(To be continued)

September 28, 2025
Travelling salesmen take over politics

It is instructive that the three most frequently mentioned names in the political coalition being assembled to unseat the Bola Tinubu administration have neither completely divorced themselves from their former political parties nor fully identified with new ones. All three of them do not see their tentativeness as indecision, or anything to be ashamed of. In their eyes, they are being careful and calculating. In the estimation of their critics, however, they are indecisive, devoid of conviction, and lacking in the inner compass without which a leader could not have the breathtaking vision needed to redirect the future of any country. The three men, former president Goodluck Jonathan, former vice president Atiku Abubakar, and former Anambra governor Peter Obi, share something in common: they know that 2027 is their last chance to bid for the throne. In the view of this writer, however, 2023 was really their last chance.

In the past three or four weeks, the three men and their top aides and supporters have hit the road with a vengeance, becoming itinerant salesmen peddling political surecures they believe are capable of turning Nigeria’s captivity. Few Nigerians were at first convinced that Dr Jonathan really planned a comeback, for everything seemed stacked against him: the law and constitution, his shrunken support base, the irreversible transformations that had taken place in his political party and country, his undistinguished record as president, and the much diminished power and influence of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) which early this year was the first to plant the presidential race heresy in his head. The sceptics also wondered what he could prove were he to be given another chance which more than five years in office between 2010 and 2015 could not lead him to prove. They didn’t see him as effective then; they still can’t see him as effective now or going forward. They thought his judgement poor then, as he meekly allowed aides to clamber over him as president, perpetrating all sorts of sordid financial schemes; and they viewed his clumsy consultations in the past few weeks after Bauchi State governor Bala Mohammed planted the heretical thought in his mind as incapable of erasing their doubts about his constant vacillations.

Before the 2023 elections, when the former president Muhammadu Buhari also seemed unable to decide who to back for the presidency, thereby leaving the field wide open, Dr Jonathan flirted with the abomination of reentering the race. He had naively thought the discombobulated All Progressives Congress (APC) ruling party would unanimously give him the presidential ticket. He only dropped out of the race, not out of conviction, but because no one in the party would promise him the nomination, especially no one who could match words with actions. Scarred but unbowed, he has once again started to test the shallow waters of the nomination struggle at a time when there is no opposition party strong enough to give battle to the APC or wrest the crown from them. He has visited everyone that should be visited, has denounced those trying to compel him to renounce his interest, and to cap his visits, has conferred with the controversial David Mark who was only recently acknowledged as the chairman of the notoriously flirty African Democratic Congress (ADC).

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Details of the Jonathan/Mark parley have not been disclosed, but it is thought to be a follow-up to the former president’s quest for a legally controversial second term. But why on earth would Dr Jonathan confer with the chairman of the ADC, a fringe party consistently turned into a special purpose vehicle by all manner of political journeymen eager for office? Alhaji Atiku may have restrained himself from openly announcing his membership of the party, but it is widely known that he is its main financier and inspirator because he wants to run for the highest office himself. It is also acknowledged that the current ADC leadership is entrenched at the helms of the party because the former vice president willed it so, and in any case they are beholden to him. Except the public has been badly misled, it is mystifying that Dr Jonathan would explore anything in a party that has been locked down by Alhaji Atiku, financially and politically. Indeed, not too long after the unexplained meeting, the real movers and shakers of the party began their own conference. Dr Jonathan can of course meet with anyone in any party, but for his own image and prestige, and regardless of having not disclosed which hares he is running with, he needs to be calculative in proposing and actualising any meeting. After all, everyone knows that as far as the PDP is concerned, it is almost impossible for either Alhaji Atiku or former senate president Mark to return to the party. The door has been shut against them and their ambitions.

Days before Dr Jonathan met with the former senate president, Alhaji Atiku had visited the tempestuous former Kaduna governor Nasir el-Rufai, obviously in furtherance of their ambitions, the former to mount the presidency, and the latter to have his pound of flesh from President Bola Tinubu, whether the Shakespearean blood is shed or not. The meeting was as usual discrete, but not before Mallam el-Rufai engaged in his customary hyperbole, shooting multiple independently targetable missiles that fills his political armamentarium. The former vice president is unlikely to have visited his enraged protégé in order to restrain him from being so offensively hysterical, for the mentor himself is in fact as dangerously hyperbolic as his mentee, and would not mind raising an army of volunteers to hurl verbal missiles at the president. The safe bet is that both gentlemen met on how to finally end their dithering and how to safely berth in a party, whether ADC or any other; for once they are committed to a party, there would be no turning back.

In addition, they are in fact keenly aware that their long-running saga of not being bodily and spiritually committed to a party may, in the eyes of a wary and sceptical public, be painting them black as political leaders lacking in courage and judgement. Soon, however, it is expected that they will damn the consequences and throw in their lot with a party. And if they perish, they perish. Alhaji Atiku may also have become a salesman because he needs to shore up his support in the face of malleable political allies who have begun to see him or any northern candidate as a liability. This second reason may also explain why Dr Jonathan has become a salesman marketing all manner of surecures to harried political titans entertaining second doubts about the feasibility of an Atiku pitch for the presidency.

September was truly the month of the salesmen. On September 14, former Labour Party (LP) presidential candidate in the 2023 election took his consultation train to ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo’s Hilltop residence on a visit in furtherance of his presidential ambition. He went in company with some of his allies. No one on the Obi team has disclosed what they discussed with the former president, or what assurances he gave them. Chief Obasanjo can sometimes be fickle or pretentious in his political attachments, and so no one can be sure whether Mr Obi got any assurances during the visit or whether the former president has since surrendered to other suitors or blandishments. Whether he knows it or not, the former president is generally dismissed as incapable of reading the signs of the times and unable to accurately gauge the mood of the country or the polity. When he backed Mr Obi in 2023, it was a miscalculation he thought he could remedy by the force of his arguments and the weight of his support as a former president and military general. The arguments and efforts failed, not because he didn’t give it his all, but because he overrated his influence at a time the country had sensibly and pragmatically veered off in a different direction from what he was used to.

Mr Obi himself has embarked on relentless visits to anyone who cared to receive him, and has given all sorts of succour to the needy in an effusive display of penance by the rich instead of establishing foundations and structuring his contributions to a distressed society. Some five million naira here and N10 million there, he thinks, should be significant or even enough to fetch him the presidency. But no amount of gifts and offerings can replace a systematic and enduring effort to build networks and bridges across the country, the kind that made President Tinubu win the presidency in 2023. Building alliances is a long-haul formula for political relevance, an altruistic approach to convincing the electorate as to a candidate’s bona fides. Chief Obasanjo never structured his politics or campaigns for the long haul, and can, therefore, not advise Mr Obi or any other protégé on how to approach that time-tested formula. Neither Mr Obi himself nor even Alhaji Atiku has adopted the long-haul approach to their politics, hence their nomadic and itinerant salesman approach to vying for the top job.

No one or group exemplified the episodic approach to politics than former Osun governor and Interior minister, Rauf Aregbesola, and former Ondo governor Olusegun Mimiko when on September 15 both men visited former Oyo governor Rashidi Ladoja, who was the Olubadan designate, a day after Mr Obi met Chief Obasanjo. Photographs showed all three men grinning from ear to ear, the typical political photographs projected to convince the unwary. Mr Aregbesola, who is secretary of the coalition vehicle and archetypal salesman, has been travelling around the Southwest and Abuja, perhaps more than any other ADC apparatchik. He remembers as a commissioner under the Tinubu governorship that his estranged mentor cultivated the future Olubadan in the heady days of the Obasanjo presidency when the federal government in concert with local Oyo thugs fought their future monarch. Fire brigade approach, salesman pitch, and desperate, opportunistic politics seldom convince the electorate. That is a truism the new salesmen of Nigerian presidential politics – whether Alhaji Atiku, Dr Jonathan, or Mr Obi – may be set to find out soon to their dismay and lasting mortification.

September 28, 2025
Nigeria at 65: old but still impressionable

Using global parameters, including United Nations standard, Nigeria at 65 should qualify for the status of senior citizen. The surprise is that despite having an unimpressive life expectancy of less than 57 years, the official age for a senior citizen is 70 years and above according to the country’s National Senior Citizens Centre Act, 2017. However, in nearly all jurisdictions, 65 years is the average retirement age that qualifies a person for special privileges. At that age, whether 65 or 70, a man is not expected to still be impressionable, swayed anyhow by doctrines, ideologies, or prejudices. However, Nigeria is not a person but a country whose boundaries may sometimes be redrawn by wars and politics, but whose age may in fact be indeterminate.

Yet, by now, Nigeria should have transcended its existential conundrums, settling down into a fairly defined or predictable way of doing things, equipping its citizens with a sense of their country and what defines its character. Unfortunately, decades after its artificial founding, the country has roamed among infinite ways of playing politics, running its economy, and organising its society. Its people and leaders have so far been unable to overcome their colonial hangover and induced inferiority complex, and have embraced a warped understanding of diverse political concepts such as democracy. It bandies and applies fanciful economic terms, and apes and regurgitates studies and orthodoxies probably best suited to other climes and peoples. The result is that Nigeria has actually become a mimic entity confused about its own identity and incapable of transcending its inherited fault lines.

For its energies to be unleashed and potentials to be realised, Nigeria cannot avoid redefining itself. Embedded in that life-giving definition is the absolute inescapability of restructuring, a term so alienated by the elite, and so feared by the rabble that many analysts fear to mention it because of the hysteria it generates. The Bola Tinubu administration may have pragmatically tackled a few knotty issues skewing the country’s existence and stymieing its progress, such as the place and funding of local governments, but as iconoclastic as the administration has tried to be, it cannot attempt a more far-reaching effort to redo the wobbly foundation of the country. In 1999, the military bequeathed an inappropriate constitution to the country and the Fourth Republic. Since then, every administration has been stuck with it, sometimes angrily rebuffing any sympathetic effort to amend difficult areas of coexistence between religious and ethnic groups.

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For more than six decades, Nigeria’s founding elite have shown a lack of depth. But the tragedy is that their successors, though more educated, have been far less circumspect or deep, a chasm no one has been able to bridge. This may explain why the country has oscillated between parliamentary and presidential systems, including hiatuses of sometimes brief or toxic flirtations with universally corrupt and cruel military dictatorships or diarchy. Even today, the country is uncertain what system to run: the presidential system they regard as expensive and unwieldy, or the parliamentary system they clearly lack the discipline and fortitude to operate; or worse still, the abstract homegrown unknown prescribed by the eclectic and sometimes chaotic ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo. On some occasions, the country stumbles into fail-safe methods of rotating and sharing power, but its rambunctious and self-centred elite have often done their worst to counteract any serendipitous formulae. The future, sadly, is bleak, judging from the intense opposition to the structural realignments being undertaken by the Tinubu administration, while the present is even more fraught considering how bigoted indulgent political and entitled business elites have become.

If the country’s elite cannot selflessly grapple with the national question, they should at least have the decency and sense of responsibility to amicably part ways rather than subject hundreds of millions of people to bloodletting. At 65, they should reflect on and find ways to change the national narratives away from the sophistry the country has been inundated with and the pedantry that creates dichotomies between age groups, classes, and religious affiliations. You hear the ephemeral nonsense about ‘not too young to run’, almost as if the old should be subjected to legalised euthanasia. Donald Trump first won the presidency at 70, and got a second term at 79; Russia’s Vladimir Putin is still president at 72; Joe Biden won the presidency at 78; Winston Churchill won his last election at 75, left office at 80, and died at 90; and Malawi’s Peter Mutharika has just won the presidency at 85. It’s all about experience, imagination and competence, not age. It is time to redirect the national narratives away from mundaneness to competence and vision.

It is also time to remake democracy, a concept lionised by Abraham Lincoln and heedlessly accepted in many countries sometimes to their detriment. In light of happenings in Europe and America, contrary to what is happening in China for instance, it is urgent that Nigeria should rediscover itself, restructure its regional and ethnic relations, resolve the age-long contention between its secular tendency and theocratic fantasy, and completely eschew the sense of entitlement polluting and complicating Nigerian politics. The next elections may very well determine whether, despite its widespread systemic failings, the country can overcome its limitations and survive the fate many doomsday prophets have predicted.

September 28, 2025