The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • And royal patriarch, the Oloogi of Oogi departs

    Whilst we are still on the subject of our departed avatars, snooper mourns the transition to the royal chambers of his father’s friend, confidant and childhood buddy, the royal monarch of the ancient and historic Oogi town in the state of Osun, Oba James Adeleke Orisakeye. He was a master wit, raconteur and repository of ancient Yoruba culture dating back to the creation of Ile-Ife and the Oduduwa revolution. His power of recall of historical events dating back to centuries before was a tad short of the miraculous.

    By the time he joined his royal ancestors a few weeks back after a long, peaceful and prosperous reign dating back to over five decades, he had already passed into legend and a royal institution in his own right. He was loved and admired by many for his wisdom, cultural elan and sheer majestic presence. Through sheer force of character and charisma, he gave this ancestral homestead a presence and prestige which many thought was out of proportion to its miniscule size. But while there are great domains without a great king, there are also great kings without a great domain.

    Departed royalty was a star dancer in the Yoruba royal tradition of dignified calibration and measured regal goose stepping. Even in vibrant old age, you could pick him out in a crowd royally jiggling and making a splash as if he was in intuitive communion with the mystical deities of the talking drum. Even when advancing years inevitably slowed him down, you were more likely to find him suddenly lurching forward on his seat and shoulder-flexing while winking at the drummers as the pulsating beat got naughty and pleasantly irreverent. It all reminded one of the late Ooni Adesoji Tadeniawo Aderemi  and the departed Timi of Ede, Adetoyese Laoye, a master drummer in his own right.

    On driving his first car home all the way from Kaduna over forty years ago, snooper remembered being roused early the next morning to drive to Oogi for royal blessing. Nestling among palm trees, breadfruits and other bounteous blessings of nature, Oogi was an idyllic rural paradise. The Kabiyesi was very pleased to see his friend and crony. Shortly after blessing the car, domestic hostilities commenced. A carton of Top beer each landed on the feet of father and son. When snooper’s father protested that it was too early in the morning, the late monarch shot back. “Even if you cannot finish everything you must at least take six bottles each before departing”. Snooper began swooning in his chair. The Kabiyesi was such a great sports. May his royal soul rest in peace.

  • Merry Christmas

    I think we need to go on struggling to build this country because there are many people right now in prison even though they are living in their own homes. They need us to liberate them, set them free, help them find the way, even if the way is into their own brains

    Dear reader, I want to begin by apologising for the absence of your usual serving of depressing chuckles, grim mirth, sardonic laughter and joyful tears on this column last week. It was due to circumstances quite beyond my control. You know the way some floods just come and threaten to pack your things and you don’t know which ones to save first and which you think you can sacrifice to the greedy gods wanting to eat your plastic bowls? It was like that. So, I thank those of you who made inquiries as to why I was absent last week.

    In a few minutes, I will be wishing you a Merry Christmas. Before then, however, I want to take us on a trip. It’s a short one, I promise. The reason you see, is that I have found that Christmas just isn’t the same each year in this kingdom any more. For many reasons, including price changes and man’s inhumanity to man, the merry in Christmas is getting more and more silent or it’s losing its letters and threatening to become ‘Mere Christmas’.

    In the olden days, whenever the harmattan wind began to blow in and the dust particles began to fly into every visible and invisible crevice, we children knew that one important event would soon happen. We would once again eat rice. That was many Merry Christmases ago. You know, just as people say now that Christmas comes but once a year, we used to say that rice eating came but once a year. If your family was rich and lucky, it could come twice in the year. With my usual luck, mine was once, and so it was with great fanfare.

    Listen, this was how it went. On Christmas day, my grandmother had a way of cooking that rice. To my very young eyes, it seemed that she put only a few grains in the pot and before you knew it, the things had magically multiplied. I used to think that the process of multiplication had a lot to do with me blowing my little cheeks of air at the firewood and puffing and heaving and arranging and rearranging the little sticks. Indeed, I thought I was pivot to the cooking process. So, when the pot of rice was on the stove, I never let it out of my sight as I came and went perpetually until it was quite done. I don’t think you need to know about the eating process. There are children here.

    Today’s children now take rice for granted and I hear some even eat it for breakfast. How I envy them and wish I could join them. I can’t. Trust doctors to come in when you’re having fun. They have taken my weight and have brought out their calculating machines and have decided that I have come dangerously close to having the disease of the wealthy without actually being wealthy. I have been asking myself how on earth that is even remotely possible.

    If you want to know the disease of the wealthy in Nigeria, just look at the way the erstwhile governor of Delta State, James Ibori, was said to have been welcomed as he stepped out of a London prison just this last week. Honestly, I have been telling people that if you must go to prison, you better do it in London. That is the only place you can come out of as a Nigerian and get a hero’s welcome from your countrymen. I think the prison atmosphere increases your charisma level or something.

     I have heard stories about this grand reception but I find it difficult to believe them, I tell you. I only heard, mind, that Ibori’s friends and relatives gave him a rousing ‘Welcome Out’ as he came out of prison. From the reports, it would seem to be the kind of reception you would give to Kurumi as he came home from fighting and conquering seven Indian oceans, carting home all the gold of the Indian empire to add to the kingdom’s coffers and bringing with him thousands of slaves to populate the kingdom.

     Well, rather than being a conquering hero, I understand that Mr. Ibori has been in prison in London for offences sounding like money laundering or something like that. Not a very heroic act, but then I guess that depends on where you are standing. I hear that there are senators who are willing to swear that Mr. Ibori is a hero of sorts. They claim that from prison, the man was instrumental to the winning votes of senators, governors and even key senate officials. If you ask me how, you probably will not get any answer. I think we should ask those senators.

    True, there are many among us who are wondering what has gone wrong with the national thinking brain that a prisoner, who is said to have emptied his state’s coffers on himself and his family, is celebrated like a hero and the nation’s heroes are sent into bone-and-spirit-crushing rejection. Clearly, the wondering ones among us must have gone into some kind of mental deficit while those celebrating the ‘hero’ are clearly the ‘Strong Breeds’ even if they are in the minority. These were assisted into wealth and so their loyalty goes to the one who assisted them, not to the millions in that state who have been left behind in terms of development. So, there are many among us even now wondering whether we have any nation left. Why then must we struggle any further to do any nation building?

    I don’t know if I can attempt my own question. I guess, for the sake of the millions left behind not just in that state but all over Nigeria, we have to go on struggling. Perhaps, another Ibori will come along who will assist everyone to become governors, senators, Reps and so on. Then the whole nation can worship him when he comes out of prison for ruling the country from behind those closed walls.

    I think we also need to go on struggling to build this country because there are many people right now in prison even though they are living in their own homes. They need us to liberate them, set them free, help them find the way, even if the way is into their own brains. Yes sir, they have them brains, but those things are filled right now with sawdust of want, want, want. They want palaces, cars, chains of girlfriends, trips abroad to white people’s lands to go and enjoy the fruits of the labour of white people … They want the good life! And they are ready to worship anyone who will give it to them.

    Right now, I really want to wish you a merry Christmas but somehow it is stuck in my throat. It will come out, I assure you, just as soon as I get over the fact that some people think that an alleged convict is considered more important than me. I have been here all along, and no one thought to give me a rousing good morning let alone a good welcome home form… from… from the market. Yet, someone who went to prison is given…

    Worse yet, the chickens are not exactly clucking their way into my pots this year, maybe because of the recession. The turkeys are getting wiser and are actually running away from me. However, in the spirit of the season of peace and goodwill, I forgive them all and wish you a very merry Christmas. May it bring plenty of chickens and brains that work.

  • Numbering our days

    So soon, 2016 has ended and by this day next week, 2017 would have commenced another 365 days’ journey that makes a year. New Year always comes with a lot of promises, hopes and expectations.

    A typical year, made up of 12 months or 52 weeks, always seems like a long time to accomplish much, but like other years before the new one, it ends so soon.

    Not many individuals, organisations or even countries are usually able to accomplish their year-long resolutions or plans for one reason or the other, but the days never stop counting.

    Time, indeed, waits for no one and it is impossible to turn back the hands of the clock. Life is a race against time. Anyone who desires to accomplish anything must be time conscious. He or she must make a conscious effort to make the best use of time and days. Like the nursery rhyme says, ‘click says the clock, what you have to do, do quick’.

    Considering that no one is sure of how long he or she will live, the advice in the Bible which I find very appropriate for the end and beginning of the year is in Psalm 90: 12: Teach us to number our days aright, That we may gain a heart of wisdom.

    Except one knows how to count his or her days, to be sure one is making the desired progress, he or she will wake up one day to find out time has run out.

    Young people are usually amazed when I tell them I graduated 30 years ago. Many of them were not born then. If someone had asked me to imagine 30 years after, while in the university, it would have seemed like an eternity. But here we are, 30 years after and it seems like yesterday. How time flies, indeed.

    Since God created us, He can teach us how to number our days if we ask, but it is left for one to do what is required.

    One of the best ways to number our days is to set realistic timelines to accomplish major milestones in our lives. Other variables may make it impossible to accomplish some deadlines, but it helps to know how close or how far one is to a target. Conscious assessment and measurement is helpful instead of leaving things to time and chance. There must be things we should accomplish at some particular time in our lives if we don’t want to end up regretting wasted opportunities.

    Even when one misses targets set, ability to catch up and probably surpass them will depend on the seriousness one attaches to making the best of the time left.

    I have missed some targets in 2016 but I am more determined to run faster than I have been running with my visions in 2017 and beyond. It will require double efforts but that is the attitude required to finish well in the race of life.

    The end of the year is a good time to take stock of life journey. Life is said not to be how long but how well. For it to be well, every moment must count. Some opportunities can always be available, but some are not. Learn to make hay while the sun shines.

    If 2017 is going to be a happy new year, it will depend on how well you are numbering your days. You don’t need a calculator; things required are divine direction, the will, and doing the right thing at the right time.

  • Magu comes to grief

    Magu comes to grief

    AS his confirmation screening before the Senate drew near, Ibrahim Magu, boss of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), worked tirelessly, lobbied furiously, spoke conciliatorily, and waited with bated breath to see what fate had in store for him. He had done his best; he could do no more. In the end, more than six months after his name was forwarded by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo to the Senate, Mr Magu came to grief in a dramatic, almost predictable fashion. His kinsman in the Senate, Senator Ali Ndume, fought bravely to get him confirmed. The Senate would have none of it. Based on security reports authored by the Department of State Service (DSS), growled the Senate, Mr Magu was too compromised to be effective in that sensitive beat. The fate of the anti-graft boss was thus sealed in an executive session without him saying a word in his own defence.

    Theoretically, Mr Magu’s name can be represented by President Muhammadu Buhari once certain remedies are introduced. But given the circumstances leading to the anti-graft czar’s rejection at the hands of exultant and sniggering senators late last week, the president is unlikely to bother. It speaks volumes that the president himself did not forward the name of Mr Magu when there was no complication or any technicality barring him from doing so. He left that controversial and thankless job to Professor Osinbajo. The president could also have lobbied fiercely to get Mr Magu confirmed, especially given the fact that the country was abuzz with plans by powerful interests inside and outside the Senate to scuttle the confirmation. The president chose to be aloof, hiding behind the magisterial sentiment of letting institutions do their work professionally.

    Shortly before his Senate debacle, Mr Magu must have sensed that he was virtually alone in the task of securing confirmation. True, he had a few top legislators and officials behind and beside him, but it was nothing compared to the forces his enemies had mustered. And enemies he had aplenty. This column, strangely, was not one of them. It had shown reservations about how the anti-graft boss performed his functions, and on one or two occasions written harshly about his coarse methods, some of which taunted the rule of law, mocked common sense, and frayed national sensibilities. But it suggested that the passion Mr Magu brought to the job, not to say his apparent patriotic glow, should earn him the confirmation. On another occasion, the column suggested exasperatingly that though Mr Magu’s confirmation was a foregone conclusion, the Senate should grill him intensively and extract a promise to abide by the rule of law.

    It is, therefore, regrettable that Mr Magu has been dealt a devastating blow. He is unlikely to be represented to the Senate, and he is unlikely to continue working in the EFCC. There is no one to save him, though he would have been a rather competent czar of the organisation. Though his enemies were plentiful and adequately mobilised and motivated, what did him in was not whether he ran the EFCC competently or not, or whether they loved him in the Senate or not. He was unhorsed by the same forces that prop up the Buhari government he serves. He was done in from within, not from without. He belonged to the wrong camp, even though ineluctable fate made it impossible for him to belong to the right camp; and there was, alas, nothing he could do to remedy that unsavoury fact.

    Top officials of the Presidential Advisory Committee Against Corruption (PACAC), including its chairman, Professor Itse Sagay, prefer to blame the legislature for Mr Magu’s woes. They are wrong. If Mr Magu had not first been smothered in the president’s kitchen cabinet, the Senate would have had a hard time burying him. Mr Magu doubtless had few friends in the legislature — given the lawmakers’ reckless proclivity for corruption and fondness for unethical shortcuts — and even fewer friends anywhere else, considering how corruption had eaten deep into the national fabric. But his nemesis should be located squarely in the president’s kitchen cabinet where the anti-graft boss was a loathed outsider. Many civil society groups have also suggested that Mr Magu came a most appalling cropper because corruption was fighting back. This silly refrain masks terrible undercurrents in the seat of government, much of which even now remains a deep mystery.

    Yet, on the surface, it is difficult to ignore the official reasons given for Mr Magu’s misery. He had had a running battle with top shots of the DSS, with the two security and anti-graft organisations at sixes and sevens. A day or two after the DSS enacted their spectacular raids on the residences of some eight top judges, including two Supreme Court justices, and reporters were wondering whether the service had not crossed into the domain of the anti-graft agency, a secret service spokesman sneeringly told the media that the EFCC was too tainted to organise the raids. It was not until last week that Nigerians received substantiation for that objurgatory dismissal. According to the DSS security report cited by the Senate to disqualify Mr Magu, the anti-graft boss lived a double life, tainted life of luxury, engaged in financial dalliance with corrupt people, and made himself liable to be bought and kept. They cited names, figures and facts. The Senate took so much perverse delight in the report that it was unwilling to even give Mr Magu a hearing. It appeared to everyone involved — the powerful DSS that had the ear of the president, and the Senate that had the legislative powers to vet Mr Magu — that the anti-graft boss had been abandoned to the wolves. The story of how Mr Magu united his enemies against himself may not have been fully told yet. Certainly, it goes beyond the fight against corruption or corruption fighting back.

    Some eminent lawyers have asked the DSS report to be made public. The media has done that already. But neither the Senate nor the DSS, nor yet the presidency, will deign to answer questions from anyone on how and why they bumped off their chief enemy. The fight has been won and lost. On the whole, what is emerging is that corruption is much more entrenched than first believed. In addition, it is clear that the reason for the war between the forces arraigned on both sides of Mr Magu has little to do with extirpating corruption or finding a better replacement for the anti-graft boss. There is nothing altruistic about the turf war between the agencies; and there is little to give anyone hope that a better and more efficient person can be found to head the EFCC. After all, Mr Magu’s nemesis, the DSS, is itself being run more like a Gestapo than a constitutional, accountable organ designed to protect the nation from internal subversion.

    But if anyone thinks that the anticipated departure of Mr Magu will bring about a rapprochement between the EFCC and DSS, that person is an incurable optimist. The bitter, snarling rivalry will continue. But more than any of the armed or security services, the DSS will always have the ear of the president. It will be closest to him, not just because the president has put his kinsman at its head, but because of the peculiar nature of the secret service and their indispensability to the president’s safety and his government’s security. For now, the DSS boss, the imperious Lawal Daura, and the Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami, agree. Notwithstanding their own faults, their synergy will mean much to President Buhari whose government is now obviously and disturbingly riven by conflicts, rivalries and unhealthy competitions.

    Mr Magu may have come to grief, and the country, including this column, may be sad to see him go, but it is doubtful whether in the light of the controversy swirling around the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal, there is anyone left who thinks an incorruptible person exists anywhere inside or outside the government, especially inside. (See Box) If the accommodation scandal attributed to Mr Magu and his acolytes is established to be a true reflection of the facts on the ground, then, truly, the people and the government must begin to despair.

    Prof Sagay says no one can push Mr Magu out, and that if need be, he could continue in office in acting capacity. It is not clear whether the eminent professor made the statement after the publication of the DSS report. No constitution empowers anyone to stay in acting capacity interminably, for that would undermine the duty of the Senate to screen and confirm or reject a nominee. Except President Buhari experiences an epiphany and decides to back Mr Magu, the web spun around the anti-graft boss in the presidency is so tight that it is hard to see him breathing, let alone functioning. It is also hard indeed to see the president defying a conspiracy perfected between the DSS and the National Assembly. For if the president has experienced any epiphany at all, it is the realisation that most of those who surround him, not to say officials who are far removed from him, are embroiled in one corruption controversy or the other. If the president thinks himself a good man, he must by now be convinced that to find just one more person like him is like looking for a needle in a haystack.

    The Senate’s increasing assertiveness, if its less than altruistic side is peeled off, is a positive spinoff from the Magu controversy, and a natural consequence of the many months the presidency assailed key figures of the National Assembly either through the courts or by simply railing against them with unprintable epithets. The legislature is becoming more confident to check the excesses of the executive and vet their policies. Had the presidency been able to instigate a march on the legislature as it seemed dangerously poised to do in the giddy early days of the anti-corruption war, this salient and salutary role would have been buried under the canopy of sycophancy or lost altogether. Reassuringly, the legislature is now asserting itself, and may, despite its own greed and incompetence, inadvertently help to consolidate the principles and practice of democracy if Nigerians can somehow find the selflessness and discipline to elect the right lawmakers. But for Mr Magu, the war may already be lost.

  • Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Higher education and a different kind of corruption, a different order of corruptibility

    Cleansing the Augean stables, Nigeria, circa 2016 CE (4) Higher education and a different kind of corruption, a different order of corruptibility

    A mind is a terrible thing to waste.  Famous United Negro College Fund slogan                                                                                             

    Compared with Law, Politics and Governance and Religion, the other institutional locations of epic corruption that I have either been exploring or will explore in this series, Higher Education (HE) presents us with a relatively much “cleaner” profile than the perceptible “norms” of corruption in Nigeria. Dear reader, please do not get me wrong, for I am neither saying that corruption is rare in our universities and polytechnics, nor am I arguing that lecturers and professors are more honest than lawyers, judges, politicians and our fraternity of jet-set evangelists of wealth and opulence. Nothing could be further from the truth and I would be the first to admit that there are aspects of corruption in higher education in Nigeria that are pretty close to the scale of the corruption that we more commonly associate with the mega-looters now facing the music in the law courts on account of Buhari’s war on corruption. If this is the case, what exactly do I have in mind in pressing this claim that higher education has a relatively “cleaner” profile than what we see in many other institutions in Nigeria?

    Well, the exceptionalism that I associate with higher education with regard to corruption has two very specific and, as a matter of fact, quite ordinary or banal features. Here they are. Firstly, compared with Law, Politics and Religion, there’s not much money to loot and plunder in our higher institutions, since in fact, universities in Nigeria are typically greatly underfunded. Secondly, historically speaking, mega-scale corruption is a very new, a very recent phenomenon in our tertiary educational institutions. Indeed, in comparison with the outsize, super-scale corruption that has been in existence in politics and governance and in the Bar and the Bench in the Judiciary for a long time now, mega-corruption in higher education in Nigeria is a late arrival. Thus, what we confront here is a different kind of corruption, indeed a different order of corruptibility. This is the central idea in this week’s contribution to the present, ongoing series. Permit me to briefly explain what it means as the idea is crucial for enabling us to see how, on the one hand, corruption in higher education is like what we see in other institutions in our country while, on the other hand, it is different and in certain respects, much bigger and more alarming than corruption among lawyers, judges, public officeholders, politicians and evangelists of “holy” greed and graft.

    Though “corruption” and “corruptibility” are both nouns, they are very different orders of nouns. “Corruption” implies a thing that is in society and the world as a completed or consummated act; “corruptibility” on the other hand, implies a thing that exists in nature, society and the world as a never-ending process or possibility. To give a rather dramatic illustration of the difference between the two terms, think of the following proposition, dear reader: “corruption” is a thing, an act for which one is liable for arrest and prosecution, but no one has ever been arrested or will ever be arrested and prosecuted for causing or effecting “corruptibility”. Presented in this way, it seems that the difference between the two terms is marked by a chasm, but this is actually not the case and therein lies the challenge that corruption in higher education in Nigeria poses to us. I will now give an illustration that should considerably clarify what I am arguing here.

    Perhaps the single most outrageous manifestation of corruption in higher education in our country is the fact that though everyone knows that our tertiary educational institutions are grossly under-funded, cases of big and unconscionable looting and mismanagement of budgeted or allocated funds are becoming more and more common. Right now, as of this very moment, there are several high-profile cases being investigated by the anti-graft agencies, the EFCC and the ICPC. Indeed, it is common knowledge in our universities, polytechnics and colleges of education that to be appointed as Chairman of Council, Vice Chancellor or Rector is to be given a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get very rich.

    Of course, there are exceptions to the rule, the norm, but the degree to which people within and outside our higher educational institutions struggle to get appointed to these positions is universally and correctly regarded as an indication of the state of things, the depth of corruption in higher education in the country. So common, so systemic has this pattern become that it now operates as a sort of a recurring cycle: when a new Pro-Chancellor, Vice Chancellor or Rector is appointed, a new team arrives on the scene to make the most of the cash cow that is an institution’s meager budgeted or allocated funds. This is the most familiar or notorious face of corruption in our higher institutions and it is very recognizably “Nigerian”. What is perhaps a little un-Nigerian about it is the fact that, thanks to the unions and professional associations in our universities, it attracts more whistle blowers and more opposition than in the other institutions in the country’s public or corporate existence. If this is the essential face of “corruption” in our higher educational institutions, what about the face or faces of “corruptibility”? Prepare yourself for a confounding and simultaneously “national” and “universal” tale, dear reader!

    A university, a polytechnic is not a primary school or a high school; it is a place of higher education. As a matter of fact, for most of its more than a thousand years’ history, the university as we know it has been a place where learning was severely restricted to a very tiny proportion of the population, far above those whose education would never go beyond, at first, primary schools and later, secondary schools. Indeed, for more than the first 800 years of the evolution of the medieval and modern university, most of the populations of the countries of the world did not have education beyond primary school, not to talk of university. The idea that as many people in a national population who desire to have university education should have it is a post-Second World War social and cultural development. This is the “universal” dimension of this tale and the United States and India are two of its greatest national exemplars. In the last three quarters of a century, each has set up universities as briskly as primary schools are set up. However, fortunately for these two countries, the older, more established universities have been able to absorb the deleterious impact on quality and value that this rapid expansion of the national tertiary educational system has caused. The Nigerian “national” variation of this universal tale presents us with a more tragic narrative, a narrative whose immensely depressing theme is – corruptibility.

    A state or a private university is set up with a declaration that the intention is to make the newly founded institution a “world class” university within a decade or even less: I have lost count of the number of times that I have come across this phenomenon in reports and profiles published in our newspapers and magazines. “World class” universities need a long, long time and tremendous outlays of financial investment to emerge from the “ornery” level of the vast majority of the world’s universities most of which, for the most part, are content to be functional, user-friendly places of instruction and learning rather than self-important and elitist institutions. As a matter of fact, since Nigerian universities currently rank very lowly not only in the world at large but on the African continent, how could any newly founded university in our country realistically aspire to be a “world class” university? To this question, we can and indeed must add the following question: wasn’t the extremely rapid expansion of the number of universities one of the most crucial causes of the lowly ranking of Nigerian universities in Africa and the world?

    These two preceding questions lead us right into the heart of the crisis of “corruptibility” in higher education in Nigeria in the last three decades. Let it be noted that “corruptibility” indicates not a completed and finished act of corruption but a process in which value and quality are gradually but inevitably diminished, often with incalculably destructive consequences. At the core of the phenomenon is not the populist or even egalitarian though non-meritocratic idea of more and more universities; rather, it is the practice of creating more and more universities with absolutely minimal human and financial capital investments in them, turning the great majority of them into no more than glorified high schools. The great swindle, the extremely unconscionable scam is to have convinced parents, students and apparently the whole country that “universities” without the most elementary facilities for higher learning are universities. Lest the point I am making here be missed or underappreciated, let me make it absolutely clear: any place at all will become a “university” in our country once such a place has been declared a university; parents will send their children to it; professors and lecturers from the older and more established universities will help to get it accredited and “teach” in it for negotiated remunerations; and it will produce both “graduates” with impressive-looking certificates and diplomas and “professors” who will in time circulate around and within the entire Nigerian university system.

    A mind is a terrible thing to waste, so goes the epigraph to this piece. It was and still is the fund-raising slogan of the United Negro College Fund. Its historical resonance goes all the way back to the early 20th century when many advocates and champions of African American economic, social and intellectual emancipation felt that higher learning was a critical arena of struggle. Then and now, in the African diaspora as well as on the African continent itself, higher learning remains a valid and crucial arena of struggle for the expansion of the human and civil rights of our peoples. But glorified high schools turned by declaration and swindle into “universities” are the very antithesis of these rights. How do we know this? Well, think of this fact, dear reader: Nigerian universities are some of the most lowly and poorly ranked universities in Africa and the world and yet Nigerians in the Diaspora in Europe and North America consistently outperform most of the indigenes or citizens of other African countries in higher learning institutions. And there is also this fact: potential employers of the products of our tertiary educational institutions constantly and perennially complain that our graduates are so poorly educated and trained that they are “unemployable”. Only glorified high schools proclaimed as “universities” through swindle produce “unemployable” graduates!

    Here is the ultimate and profoundly confounding question that we face in this crisis of “corruptibility” in higher learning in Nigeria at the present time: are we really producing “unemployable” lawyers, engineers, doctors, chemists, architects, agronomists, scientists, mathematicians, journalists, teachers, etc., etc.? And are our universities producing women and men with well above average in quality of mind and discernment necessary for a modern democratic state that is built on justice, equality and dignity for all? If your answer is no, please have the arguments necessary to secure the truth of your opinion. If yes, what do you think we can and ought to do about it? I shall be giving my own response to this question at the end of this series next week.

    Biodun Jeyifo                                                                                                        bjeyifo@fas.harvard.edu

    • Next week: Religion as an institution and an occult economy
  • Same old mistake

    Same old mistake

    I insist, what Nigerians need is good governance, not pay rise

    NOTA BENE: This piece was first published on May 8, 2016, (except for a slight adjustment to the headline) when Labour made a proposal of N56,000 minimum wage to the government. It would appear that the statement by labour minister Chris Ngige to the effect that a pay rise was in the offing for workers was government’s response to the demand. I had said in the piece that workers should insist on good governance instead of clamouring for pay rise always because government would always be more than willing to grant pay rise. This position seems to be corroborated by the government’s decision, even at a time many state governments cannot pay the present minimum wage. Who would ever have thought that the Buhari government could be contemplating pay rise in the context of the economic milieu that the country is now? But, as I said in the piece, this is cheaper to grant than good governance. It’s only a matter of time, we’ll find out as usual, that it is not the solution.

    Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and the Trade Union Congress (TUC) on Tuesday (May 3) formally presented their minimum wage proposal of N56,000 to the Federal Government. “I can say now authoritatively that as of yesterday (Tuesday) we made a formal proposal to the Federal Government of N56, 000 to be the new minimum wage. The demand has been submitted officially to government and we hope that the tripartite system to look at the review will actually be set up to look at it”, NLC president Ayuba Wabba said. Whilst this might have drawn applause from workers in the country, it would seem to me an indication that Labour has not learnt any lesson with regard to minimum wage. The unions seem to be doing the same thing all over and therefore should not expect a different result. When in 2011 the present minimum wage of N18,000 was fixed, the same way they celebrated; now the euphoria is gone and the workers are back to square one.

    Of course Wabba advanced good reasons for labour’s position. One is that the law stipulates that minimum wage must be reviewed every five years. If the last review was done in 2011, then it is time to review it again, so that, to use Wabba’s words, workers would “not be seen as sleeping on their rights”. The logic, according to him, is that no worker should be taking salaries that cannot sustain him for 30 days. In other words, workers’ take-home pay should be able to take them home. Can the present minimum wage do that? I’m afraid, ‘No’. There is also the problem of manufacturers who will not be able to sell their products if workers are too poor to buy. Workers have to be empowered to be able to buy what they need. This is as well impeccable. Wabba crowned it all by alluding to the connection between corruption and good wages. If workers are not well paid, the temptation to steal will be high. Again, one can hardly fault this.Indeed, those who conceived the idea of five-year review of the minimum wage did so for very good reasons, chief of which is to index it with the rate of inflation. True, a lot of waters had passed underneath the proverbial bridge since 2011 when the minimum wage was last reviewed. As at the time they got the N18,000, crude oil was selling at about $111 per barrel and the exchange rate was N110 to the dollar. Today, not only has crude price fallen (around $46 per barrel), the exchange rate too has depreciated, with the Naira now exchanging for about N321 to the dollar at the parallel market. Ironically, it is now that Labour wants N56,000 minimum wage! Wabba noted the bad state of the economy: “Our argument is that, yes, it is true that the economy is not doing well, but the law stated that wages for workers must be reviewed after every five years”.

    There is, however, one point Labour has not mentioned, which is enough to knock out all the good points it made to justify its call for N56,000 minimum wage. And that is the fact that many of our political leaders have over the years proved that that they cannot be trusted with the noble responsibility placed on their shoulders because they care only about themselves. That is why they always think they must have access to whatever comfort money can buy, even when those who supposedly elected them (and they are representing) do not even know where the next meal will come from. It has been said time and again that our legislators are about the highest paid in the world. Some of those who made the assertion had often cited examples from different parts of the world, including the United States of America and Britain where lawmakers take public transport and live in moderate apartments. Also, they are not paid stupendous allowances in those countries as our own lawmakers, even as they do not have perks that are wrapped under the table. Everything about their worth as lawmakers is open and transparent.

    Let me therefore help Labour by adding the prodigal manner in which our political leaders live as one of the reasons to justify the new minimum wage. With our kind of politicians, it is quite a valid point for Labour and indeed all other Nigerians who do not have access to public funds to insist on having as much as possible of the national cake.

    Perhaps if the political leaders only live big at our expense, without stealing brazenly in a way that we had to notice, as in the immediate past, we would not be this aggrieved. But the way and manner many of these political leaders and their cronies help themselves to our common patrimony cannot but make us angry. I doubt if there is anyone that is angrier than me over this matter. Indeed, that was what made me become a proponent of the idea that Nigerians should always insist on having the best of good life that money can buy from government so that those who intend to steal will have very little left to pilfer.  The political leaders and their cronies have so much to steal because we often leave too much free money in their care, and because we do not ask questions.

    Moreover, you have people who served at best for eight years and after that, they award themselves mouth-watering packages that have no bearing with the country’s economic realities. These are more serious issues that Labour should fight; and not to keep asking for wage increases which the political leaders would almost always grant if that would make the Labour unions happy and keep their eyes from prying into what is happening in the executive, legislative and other chambers (of corruption) that dot the landscape.

    What I am saying is that I am now wiser.

    Indeed, this assumption (by Labour and the rest of us that increase in minimum wage is the solution to workers’ poverty in the country is analogous to the belief that chopping off the head is the cure for headache. We are where we are in the country because of bad governance. Even if crude prices have not crashed, the country would still have been in trouble, given the rapacious and primitive manner the country was stolen blind, particularly in the Goodluck Jonathan years.

    I can bet it, the government would most likely grant some concession, (that is after reminding labour that its members constitute only a fraction of the Nigerian population and can therefore not get all it wants) but whatever concession government grants will still not take most workers home, whether in cosmopolitan Lagos or in rural Ekiti or Osun, going by the prevailing cost of living which is not likely to improve unless we have good governance in the country. And I see the workers gladly embracing it. In a few years time, however, the reality would dawn on them that what they thought they got was not what they actually got. At the rate we are going, a time will come when we would have to buy a loaf of bread which can hardly feed two persons for N250.

    Why Labour has not thought along this line is what I do not understand. Could it be that it is shying away from this line of reasoning because it is also afraid of its own shadow? Whether we like it or not, Labour too is enmeshed in some integrity crisis, particularly concerning its housing scheme which remains as messy as ever. And for it to demand good governance, it must also put its house in order. You can’t go to equity with soiled hands. I have this feeling that Labour often capitulates in crises times due to the fear that government could want to blackmail its leaders with some of these messy deals. So, when the Labour should be in the forefront of struggles, its leaders suddenly develop cold feet and abandon the cause, citing some threats of treason charges from government as reason.

    A man with logs in his own eyes cannot be bold and comfortable to tell another person to remove the speck in his.

  • The unseemly David Lawal controversy

    The unseemly David Lawal controversy

    IN calling for the suspension from office and prosecution of the Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir David Lawal, the Senate has begun to revel in legislative activism on  a scale that probably astounds the lawmaking body itself. The Senate accuses Mr Lawal of gross abuse of office, particularly regarding the role he and his proxies are alleged to have played in awarding, receiving and shoddily executing about N2.5bn Internally Displaced Persons-related contracts. He denies wrongdoing. But the chairman of the Senate ad hoc committee that investigated the hastily awarded contracts, Senator Shehu Sani, insisted that Mr Lawal, an engineer, used his position to enrich himself by awarding contracts to companies he had interest in. One of those companies was Rholavision Engineering Limited.

    A livid Mr Lawal, however, shot back: “I can recognise a vendetta and witch-hunt when I see one; so, I am wondering if I should bother myself about it at all. You may wish to know that I was never invited to the hearing. Apparently, the Senate has an agenda best known to its leaders. Corruption is fighting to drag all good men down to its muddy, slimy level.” Considering the damage the DSS report on Mr Magu has done to the president’s team, the SGF will be under pressure to step aside or find ways very quickly of exonerating himself. That will, however, be difficult. Mr Lawal speaks obliquely of vendetta without indicating what offence his enemies allege against him or why he thinks that corruption is fighting back. Many officials of the Buhari presidency, including Lt.-Gen. Tukur Buratai, the Chief of Army Staff accused of buying houses abroad and living above his means, are under one pressure or the other to come clean on their assets and properties.

    It is helpful that the Senate is taking a more active interest in holding the government accountable to the people. That activism is a product of the initial alienation the legislature suffered when President Buhari assumed office and began his effusive display of sanctimoniousness. But whether that activism and seeming altruism reflect a principled and intuitive understanding of the Senate’s role in entrenching democracy, or it was simply a desperate cry for accommodation in the Buhari presidency, is hard to say. Furthermore, now that the legislature is playing a more active role in government, who is to hold it in check, when, as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo said, the legislature itself is also reeking of corruption in a galling way?

    It is not known how the SGF contract scandal will end, for it is still at its infancy. But it does appear that the initial disturbances and tremors in the Buhari government and the misunderstanding between various institutions and agencies represent nothing more than a ploy to create a situation of balance of terror or mutual assured destruction for the combatants. If democracy is to endure, the rule of law must not only prevail, institutions without exception and individuals in high places must be stringently held accountable. By an accident of fate rather than systematic deliberateness, the judiciary and the executive are now being held in some appreciable way accountable. The legislature must be made to follow suit, even as the public must slowly begin to understand that Nigerian democracy can neither mature overnight nor be sanitised comprehensively in one fell swoop. Under Chief Obasanjo’s prefectural brusqueness, institutions behaved fairly predictably and cooperated with one another, at least superficially. Now, thanks to a recalcitrant DSS, a more activist Senate, an insufferable EFCC led by the waspish Mr Magu, the alleged contract shenanigans of a beefy and accusatory SGF, and above all a disconnected, distracted and sometimes bemused President Buhari, the principles of natural selection are furiously nurturing an evolutionary soup from which, hopefully, if the economy permits, a better and brighter democratic tomorrow can emerge.

  • ‘Unitary Federalism’ and our other oxymora

    Good luck to those who are this optimistic about any issue that promises to give power and money to individuals in our dear country.

    To take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.—The Economist at its founding in 1843.

    ‘Unitary federalism’ in today’s title is a borrowing from Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president and man-times contender for presidential candidature under several parties including, most recently, All Progressives Congress (APC). I am not re-using the phrase of one of the leaders of APC to draw attention— positive or negative—to claims by Abubakar’s political associates and opponents who call the former vice president a born-again federalist. Such exercise is better done by professional power seekers. I have borrowed the title because it captures, among other things, the absurdity that underlies ongoing constitutional amendments in the National Assembly, an absurdity spawned by the fact that the ruling party under which Abubakar had contested for presidential candidacy also has high on its manifesto: “A NEW PARTY, A NEW NIGERIA, THE APC MANIFESTO” the pledge to Initiate action to amend our Constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit. 

    This column has in the last ten years addressed ad nauseam the issue of re-federalisation of the country’s polity and, consequently, its economy. The column has no intention today to re-tell the story of how the country came into its present dire straits. It seeks to expose some contradictions in the ongoing constitutional amendments that smack of obsession over a governance system that does have everything to pamper its political elite but lacks the structure that can create an enabling space for improvement of the life of the country’s silent masses. The current system, characterised by Abubakar as ‘unitary federalism’ has deliberately under-developed the masses, to ensure continuity of a system stacked against the interests of the masses: limited access to an education that can open the minds of the masses and push them to hold their political representatives responsible for their suffering; imprisonment of the few with above average education by religious merchants who promise miracles and prosperity in a political and fiscal system that restricts creativity and innovation; and saddling of post-military political rulers with a governance system that makes it more profitable for politicians to sustain rather than change. I prefer to leave consideration of the sincerity of Abubakar’s commitment to re-federalisation to political power speculators and focus on the potential of oxymoronic political reality to stymie national and regional development in a multi-national democracy.

    Now to the various contradictions being authored by current lawmakers.  Those criticising federal lawmakers for making laws to further dismantle federalism in the country need to go back to read APC manifesto that pointedly seeks to devolve powers and responsibilities to states and local governments: “Initiate action to amend our Constitution with a view to devolving powers, duties and responsibilities to states and local governments in order to entrench true Federalism and the Federal spirit.” It will be curious how many politicians committed to federalism in the APC paid attention to the promise by the party to constitutionalise local governments as a distinct federating unit completely autonomous of the state. Commenters who choose not to pay attention to subtle attempts to decapitate states and predispose the 774 communities (referenced as local governments in the 1999 Constitution) to eventually demand abrogation of the states to return to two tiers of oversize central government and 774 fragmented administrative units) should put on their thinking caps before it is too late.

    What is needed to reduce the current ‘unitary federalism’ is to recognise that most of the globe’s successful federal systems believe in the principle that the logical structure to have in a federation is national and subnational governance, not national, subnational, and sub-subnational governance structure, an absurdity designed by military dictators to sustain unitarism while at the same time glorifying federalism rhetorically. Some pundits have observed that the ongoing constitutional amendments are as oxymoronic as they are because the lawmakers do not expect the amendments to be approved by the states. Good luck to those who are this optimistic about any issue that promises to give power and money to individuals in our dear country. In the absence of clear ideological guide of lawmakers by their parties about importance of federalism to stability and development, the matter of getting the amendments approved may not be between federal and state legislators, but between potential premiers or mayors of local governments wanting to have their own fiefdom and citizens who are kept in the dark about implications of approving such amendments for their wellbeing.

    Another contradictions-laden amendment is abrogation of State Electoral Independent Commission (SIEC) currently under the supervision of states. The text of this proposal is to create a uniform (so-called national) electoral agency culture, largely on the assumption that INEC is better than SIEC, even though no verifiable research has been done to establish this fact. This is reminiscent of the fear had been generated against state police system. Opponents of autonomy to states have said that state police is likely to be corrupt, an assumption that the central police is not corrupt, a conclusion that has not been supported by any evidence. One erroneous assumption is that anything that is central is good and whatever is subnational is bad, an attempt to construct a metaphysics of sub-humanity for subnational entities in relation to the central government in a multicultural society. Those who are lucky to benefit from electoral power in the hands of the central government are likely to see this amendment as progressive and the insistence that subnational governments must be denied of the power to determine where and how to improve governance at that level very friendly to the electoral politics of the party in power at the centre.

    One contradiction that cannot be overlooked is the reticence of lawmakers from regions that have been clamouring for re-federalisation, particularly legislators from the Southwest, Southeast, and the South-south. For example, the average newspaper-reading or television-watching student in the Southwest is likely to be more at ease to remember names of lawmakers from the Northeast and Northwest than those from the Southwest, largely because nothing is heard from the latter group’s participation in the debate on constitutional amendments, especially changes that threaten the residual powers in the hands of states under the 1999 Constitution. Additionally, it is curious that lawmakers from the Southwest have not given noticeable attention to interacting with the electorate on issues as critical as constitutional amendment. Political leaders in a region that has championed the call for restoration of federalism consistently since the 1990s need to do two things urgently: remind Southwestern lawmakers in the National Assembly that they are representatives of  the region in the federal legislature and not appointees of the central government, and that consequently legislators from the region need to interact with citizens and show signs that they are contributing to debates in the legislature on behalf of those who voted for them.

    As APC prepares for the 2019 elections, it will be necessary for voters to demand from their political leaders the stand of each state in the region vis-à-vis the current unitary federalism upon which Atiku Abubakar from the Northeast has almost become an authority in recent times. A referendum on what citizens in the region want: unitarism or federalism should be conducted in each of the six states, to guide lawmakers sent to the National Assembly, particularly those that seem not to have any idea on the matter on the type of debates expected from them on matters of choosing between more federalism or more unitarism.

  • A Ruling Class tragedy in Nigeria

    A Ruling Class tragedy in Nigeria

    “For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places”—— St Paul’s letter to the Ephesians as quoted in This Present Darkness: A History of Nigerian Organized Crime.

    terrifying fog has descended on Nigeria. It is a fog that has spiritual, legal, moral, economic and political dimensions. Such is the enervating cloudiness, the occluding intensity, that it reminds one of a historic eclipse. In the blinding haze we can hardly recognize each other anymore. Great historical epochs often steal upon a people with leisure and at a friendly pace. We may be in for such developments. The Nigerian ruling class is at war with itself and against itself.

    On Tuesday 13th December, Justice Adeniyi Ademola of the Federal High Court and his wife, Olabowale, were arraigned before a High Court of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja on an eleven count charge of conspiracy and receipt of gratification, to which they pleaded not guilty. It was a dark moment for the Nigerian judiciary and perhaps the gravest instance of the judicial dimension of the crisis of the post-colonial state. For if those whose duty is to rein in lawlessness and preserve order are being arraigned on the suspicion of being lawless, then law and order are in a free fall.

    The case being before a court of law and effectively sub-judice, this columnist will not join in removing the last strand of bureaucratic rationality and authority from the Nigerian judicial system. But since this is a long-standing boil in a sensitive part of the anatomy that has to be lanced and drained of its pus, some extra-legal comments and observations are now in order.

    For Justice Ademola, it is a personal, professional and historic tragedy. Scion of illustrious Yoruba royalty that has contributed sterling products to the evolution of the modern Nigerian state, it was not supposed to go this way. His grandfather, Sir Adetokunbo Ademola, was the first indigenous Chief Justice of Nigeria; a 1931 Law graduate of Selwyn College, Cambridge. His father, Justice Adenekan Ademola, was an influential and respected jurist who retired from the Court of Appeal. An uncle, Justice Gboyega Ademola, aka Gbogus, was widely celebrated for his brilliance and originality.

    The founding paterfamilias was no pushover. Justice Ademola’s great grandfather, Sir Ladapo Ademola, was a consummate diplomat, statesman and master conciliator who had reigned on the Egba throne at a difficult period of transition to modernity while bringing much prestige and prosperity to the Egba people.

    History has it that Sir Ladapo was one of the early modernizing and westernizing Egba elite who strove and fought for the transformation of the Egba people in their new homestead. By the first decade of the twentieth century the Egba city-state had achieved considerable success in revenues from effective taxation, urban sanitation and security before it was forcibly incorporated into the Southern Nigerian protectorate. But when the Alake throne became vacant upon the transition of Oba Gbadebo the first, the then Prince Ladapo Ademola was the unanimous choice of kingmakers.

    A century down the line, the nation they struggled to create is floundering abysmally, turning and turning in a widening gyre as the falcon no longer hearken to the falconer. What will these departed avatars be thinking as they watched their scion in the dock turning away from the intense public glare in misery and humiliation even as his flustered wife clutched an i-phone to record this site of historic obloquy for posterity? It is surely a world out of joints.

    And the toll mounts. Two days after her arraignment with her husband, Olabowale was quietly disengaged as the Head of Service by the Lagos State Government thus terminating a commendable career which still had about six months to run. It would have been legally incongruous and politically unwieldy for her to continue in service.

    Now, consider these developments which may appear on the surface to be tangentially unrelated to the matter at hand. This past week, President Buhari submitted a budget proposal to the senate with much hype and hoopla. Two days later, the senate declined confirmation of Ibrahim Magu as the substantive chairman of the EFCC, citing security reports which indict the nation’s anti-crime boss for corruption and extortion. About the same time, a new version of what is known as Ponzi scam collapsed as a result of oversubscription.

    Known as MMM, the brain behind this scam launched into a barely coherent tirade against perceived enemies of the scheme. Sergey Mavrodi, a rogue speculator who looks straight out of the Russian oligarchy nightmare of the nineties, berated the Nigerian government for not providing for the people and undermining those trying to help. The goodwill CONvoy has since relocated to Kenya.

    Is this the rumoured arrival of post-state actors or some criminal grandstanding by a man habitually conditioned to cheating others? Meanwhile as this was going on, a nasty spat over allegations of sleaze and corrupt enrichment ensued between the Secretary to the Federal Government and the selfsame senate. While Malam David Babachir Lawal has dismissed the allegations against him as a charade, the senate is insisting on his dismissal. The report of the senate adhoc committee is straight out of a horror movie.

    Something must be terribly amiss. These developments are critical to understanding the current forlorn plight of the nation. As we have seen, the federal budget is the grand patron of legislative and executive corruption in Nigeria. Since it is not anchored on any integrative national developmental plan, since it is not tied to specific and rigidly delineated phases, it quickly unravels into an all comers open-ended bazaar with padding, constituency scams, outright stealing and other bizarre heists as its hallmark.

    There is nothing to suggest in General Buhari’s body language as the annual budget ritual proceeded in the senate that the tragic lessons of the last budgetary fiasco have been learnt or internalized by the presidency. If the truth must be told, the executive has shown a remarkable aversion for confrontation where corruption and sleaze in the upper and lower houses are concerned. Party and presidency have allowed those who are guilty of padding to remain in place while the whistle blower has been thrown out of the house and to the wilderness reserved for political orphans.

    But political deception also has its steep price. An objective appraisal of the forces in contention shows that as a result of executive dithering and dilatoriness, the balance of forces might have shifted in favour of the senate in a way that is not imaginable last year. This has emboldened its leadership to move from defensive rope hugging to rapid offensive. It is an offensive pointing ultimately at the political jugular of the presidency.

    When everything is in place, only an extraordinary counter offensive will rescue the Buhari presidency. The political hyenas in the senate have smelt blood and God help those who are in need of help. The swift political defenestration of the outstanding Ibrahim Magu and the determined bid to bring the Secretary of the Federal Government to heel are opening gambits on the political chessboard whose echoes will soon reverberate across the political landscape.

    Can we then rightly insinuate that this is a glaring and startling case of corruption fighting back? Unfortunately, matters can no longer be cast in such grim Manichean terms. The atmosphere is demonically foggy. The government has had enough time to demonstrate that it is a knight in shining armour ready to slay the demon of corruption. But it has sown enough doubts in the mind of the populace that it is probably motivated by something else other than fighting against corruption. The past two years have demonstrated that there are no saints in the Nigerian political jungle.

    So rather than fight against corruption or corruption fighting back, what we have is a war of political hegemony among different factions of the ruling class. It is a war of all against all and no holds are barred. With the PDP dead and interred and with the APC critically impaired as a change platform, the war against corruption is a mask for a deeper and more fundamental contention for the battered soul of the nation. After a brief respite, the repressed has returned. Centrifugal forces have returned to haunt Nigeria. As history has taught us, this kind of contention only ends with the mutual ruination of the contending classes and the nation as currently configured.

    Tragically enough, the Nigerian multitude and suffering masses who are expected to intervene very decisively in this hegemonic war of the ruling class have been so hobbled by poverty and immiseration that they have resorted to their own Ponzi scheme to get rich quickly. In a situation of deepening misery and biblical hunger, the ordinary people will be vulnerable to economic miracle workers and religious Rasputins.

    In a way, this development is good for the nation for it forces us back to the fundamental issue, which is the unresolved National Question. It has been said that history is something that hurts and that which will not ignore us however much we ignore it. Given the poverty of politics and the politicization of poverty and corruption, can this gifted but much abused country survive in its current structural configuration? Yours sincerely doubt very much.

    As for the docked Justice Ademola and his wife, since the current fog has made it impossible to distinguish between saints and sinners, they are likely to be remembered as inevitable collateral damage of a civil war for the control of Nigeria in which ethics and morality are fanciful tropes fashioned as weapons of political assault.

    This is not a development to be applauded by genuine patriots. In No Longer at Ease, a man trained with community funds returns only to be gobbled up by the cesspit of corruption that has turned out a prescient projection of the neo-colonial state. He was jailed. But that was not the problem. The problem was that he was the grandson of the illustrious and heroic Okonkwo.

  • Nigerian politicians: Grieving the old, the young and just about everybody

    Nigerian politicians: Grieving the old, the young and just about everybody

    Nigerian politicians, almost to the last man, are a class by themselves; a bunch of selfish, inconsiderate and conscienceless people

    “As far as I am concerned, politics is the art of selfless service to our fellow men. Let me assure you that I can never and will never play pranks with the suffering masses of our country. To do so, as some others had done and are still doing, would be despicable and damnable. “Man is the highest being in all creation. God created him in His own image; and he has certain rights, which are inherent and inalienable. Among these are the right to education, health, employment and good living. He also has the right to dignity, and to be treated with esteem by his fellowmen.

    “However, because some political leaders see your manifest destiny as a plaything, they do not take their promises (during electioneering campaigns) seriously. Indeed, they do not intend to make any binding undertakings to you. They have postulated no political theories, nor have they prepared any coherent or unequivocal (political) party programmes.” – Chief Obafemi Awolowo (in) Voice of Wisdom, pages 91 – 92

    Nigerian politicians, almost to the last man, are a class by themselves; a bunch of selfish, inconsiderate and conscienceless people. For them, nothing besides self matters and were  we  to need any evidence of this, their total unconcern during this spiralling recession under which the poor is being  thoroughly wrenched  as if they were the ones who burnt billions of  the now disappearing  dollars during the 2015 elections, stole and round tripped the rest, is more than enough. They were so callous they thought nothing of stealing the funds that should have saved tens of thousands of our unfortunate compatriots now forever lost to Boko Haram, on top of the millions who have been completely uprooted from their ancestral homes and now live as Internally Displaced Persons in their own country.  For these IDPs, I doubt if they are any better than those trapped in Aleppo where a crazed Putin and the Assad, the butcher of Syria, have been raining tonnes of bombs on thousands of hapless children and women, completely deaf to appeals from the United Nations for a few days’ ceasefire.

    Given Nigerian politicians’ copious acts of man’s inhumanity to man, their utter selfishness and total disdain for the common man, I decided to write this  article ahead of their usual hollow ritual of seasonal greetings in which they attempt to dwarf us all during festivities. I was, however, finally  prompted  by the reaction I received to one of the articles on these pages from the respected 87-year old,  Pa G.O. Okoobo ( FCA 478).The obviously traumatised patriot who, as one of the earliest members of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of Nigeria, has certainly put a lot into life, and served this beleaguered country meritoriously for decades, wrote as follows: “Former President Olusegun Obasanjo in The Nation of 24 November, 2016 accused the National Assembly of corruption. I am worried that after more than five years after Prof Itse Sagay first blew the whistle on NASS bogus pay/allowances, government has not addressed the fraudulent action as they now want to do with the Supreme Court secret account where unapproved allowances were allegedly paid to judges and Supreme Court staff. As a nationalist, what can you do to urge the AGF or the EFCC to do about this? God bless Nigeria and her honest anti-corruption crusaders.”

    Without a doubt papa, these clowns obviously do not see politics as service to posterity as the immortal Awo described it in the epigram to this piece.

    Let me now begin to properly situate my obviously grievous charges against this colony of cheats we call leaders.

    Fortunately, only this past week, Nigerians heard Senate President Bukola Saraki singing rhapsodies to his constituents who, like his colleagues in the National Assembly, he remembers only at Sallah or when elections are at hand. Let us hear our very concerned Senate President: “Mr President,” he sang, “the feedback we get from our visits to our constituencies is that there is hardship in the land. We can see it. We can feel it. (Who, you?) This recession therefore commands all of us as government to greater essence of urgency. Our people (indeed) must see that the singular preoccupation of government is to search for solution for the current economic hardship and the commitment to ease their burden. They have trusted their fate in our hands and they need us now more than ever before to justify that trust they have imposed on us.

    “And that is why the two chambers have taken their position, whatever may be our differences, our opinion on the issues of the economy we will work with one common purpose for this reason.”

    Nigerians are asking: since when? They are not deceived, even if you succeed in deceiving the president. What exactly has this preacher and the National Assembly, over which he presides, done about their outlandish, self-awarded allowances which take their monthly earnings to well over N20M since Nigeria went into recession? Why is he and some of his colleague former governors, now in the Senate, getting paid monstrous monthly pension from  their states on top of the eye popping houses(2) they forced their  rudderless Houses of Assembly to gift them? When will the sinkhole they call constitution amendment scam, which has gulped billions of naira for some five years running, end? They have, indeed, heard the cries of their constituents. As I observed earlier, Saraki may succeed in deceiving the president but he should very well know that Nigerians would not take kindly to any wuruwuru at the Code of Conduct Tribunal where he is standing trial, as one is beginning to suspect in the Orji Uzor Kalu case, now that he is in the APC. Our mumu e don do! Former Governor Peter Obi has just told us that “In Nigeria, House members sit for about two times in a week, yet it is a full time job”. I do not know a worse cheating of an entire country.

    However, things are far worse with state governors, another set of those politicians that literally bring down radio and television houses with their loud, meaningless greetings during Sallah, Christmas, New Year etc. Hear governor Obi again: “In education, the federal government wanted to invest 22.5 billion naira, but the states said they did not have money to pay as counterpart. How can we get 25 billion naira? A Governor in Nigeria uses 25 vehicle convoy, the wife 15 and Deputy 10. I started with it. Today’s average cost of one vehicle on the convoy is 25 million naira. It is therefore approximately 1.25 billion per state, and 45billion naira for the 36 states. All they need is reduce the convoy to 12 vehicles for governor, seven for the wife and five for the deputy and there would be enough money for the counterpart. In my own time, we discussed it in EXCO. I used five vehicles and my deputy three. Using small convoy vehicle does not make you less a governor.

    “It is criminal and irresponsible, that some states receive three to four billion naira every month and take over one billion naira as security vote per month. Even if we are in a war situation, we should even declare surrender.”

    I appreciate that the states are co-equal with the feds but President Buhari would be a huge let down if, whether by moral suation, or whatever, he fails to rein in this  total debauchery during his first term.

    With his stance on corruption, I think it is logical to think that the total depravity of the executive branch, which we saw under former President Goodluck Jonathan, is no longer the case.

    Since Nigerian politicians are so powerful they have proved to be not our servants but masters, and since we cannot start praying for military coups as that is no longer in vogue and many top military men have proved so unworthy of their calling and the sensitive posts they held/hold, we shall leave these marauding politicians in God’s own hands, confident that they and their children will not escape His wrath if they continue in their wicked, unfeeling ways. Isaiah 3:14  – “The Lord enters into judgment with the elders and princes (politicians) of His people, “It is you who have devoured the vineyard; the plunder of the poor is in your houses.” I am confident that the Quo ran is replete with similar prescriptions for wicked rulers and leaders.