The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sunday

  • What game is the north up to at inec?

    Mr President should right the impunity displayed by Professors Jega and Oba

    Can Professor Jega, a celebrated academic and former University Vice-Chancellor, double as an ethnic bigot ? Is the famous Professor Oba, former Vice-Chancellor of the University of Ilorin, working in tandem with Jega in his historic role of a northern irredentist? Or is it as simple as the Federal Character Commission becoming comatose or completely blind and toothless wherever in the Nigerian polity the North wields an unfair advantage? These and more questions agitate the mind on reading the advert:  THE TAKE OVER OF INEC published in the Monday, 20 August, 2012, edition of this newspaper by the  ELECTION INTEGRITY NETWORK  but which in itself emanated from an earlier story by  TheNews Magazine.  It will be a little disingenuous, even unfair,  to claim or even pretend that INEC has just so  suddenly become an ethnic enclave.  The story was the same when Igbo elements ruled the roust in the agency only that under Professor Jega  cronyism and outright nepotism has  assumed an industrial  scale, albeit, with  Professor Oba’s ludicrous connivance, no doubt.

    For ease of reference, let us quote directly from the advert under reference.  According to the publication, INEC’s top management is made up as follows: 1. Prof Jega (Chairman)- Kebbi  2. U.F Usman (Director of Logistics) –Kebbi  3.A. Muktar (Director of Human Resources) –Sokoto  4. A.A Uregi (Director of Finance) –Niger 5. M. Kuta (Internal Auditor) –Niger 6. E.T Akem (Director ICT) –Benue 7. I. Biu (Director of Voter Education) – North East 8.I.K Bawa (Dep. Director, Legal) –Plateau 9.Okey Ndeche (Director, Operations) –Anambra 10. Nyise Torgba  (Director M& E/Performance) –Benue 11. A.A Adamu Head, Commission, Secretariat) –Kogi 12. M.Ekwunja (Director, Civil Societies) 13. E. Umenger (Director, Public Affairs) –Benue 14. Regina Omo-Agege (Director, Political Monitoring) –Delta. 15. B.E Edoghotu (Estate & Works).

    It would have been mind boggling enough  if the above  was the  only  problem with  the  sheer crudity of the brazen institution  Professor Jega sits atop but it certainly does not stop there. The composition of INEC’s  national commissioners who head the vital committees overseeing  the most important departments as stated hereunder, according to the sponsors, is much more revealing:

    1.   Col. Hamanga  ( Chairperson, Logistics Committee) –Adamawa

    2.   Dr Nuru Yakubu ( Chairperson, Operations Committee) –Yobe

    3. Ambassador Wali (Chair person, Procurement Committee) –Sokoto

    4. Prof Jega           (Chairperson, F&GP) –Kebbi

    5. Prof Jega         ( Chairperson, ICT) –Kebbi

    6. Hajia Amina Zakari (Chairperson, Political Monitoring) –Jigawa

    7.   Membership of a newly constituted  INEC 9-Man Strategic Planning Committee  reads as follows: Nuru A. Yakubu, Istianus Dalwang, Mustafa Kuta, M.S Mohammed. Torgba Nyitse, Emanuel Akeem all from the North with only Mike Igini and Okechukwu Ndeche from the South. This is asides the fact that the commission’s secretary is also from the North. This Jega has ensured by all means in his two years.  How blatant can some supposedly educated people get?

    8. Pray, what is Professor Jega thinking? How on earth can a supposedly thorough-bred academic, whose appointment by a President  of Southern extraction  elicited rapturous joy across the entire country become so untidily insular and unfeeling? How can such an otherwise accomplished individual so conveniently forget that  Nigeria runs a federation  with a Federal Character Commission firmly in place in its constitution and  be so whimsical and selfish? What will he claim as alibi for this totally unacceptable lop-sidedness in an agency that is so critical?

    I found the following comments  by  Ifeanyi Izeze very useful in taking a look at the Federal Character Commission. Wrote Izeze in 2011 : “ When Nigeria’s Federal Character Commission (FCC) was established in 1996, it was supposed to enforce the federal character principles which aimed at ensuring fair and equitable distribution of posts; social-economic amenities; and infrastructural facilities among the federating units of the nation.

    The intention was for it to be the watchdog of government ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs) in ensuring an evenly distributed workforce that reflects ethnic diversity and the geopolitical divides of the country. It was  also supposed to ensure that socio-economic amenities and development infrastructure are equitably distributed across the country.

    ‘In recognition of its failings, wrote Izeze, the Commission after a Port Harcourt stakeholders retreat recounted as follows: The FCC  has delineated the country into national, state and local government levels as channels of distribution among the federating units for ease of implementation. Allocations at the national level, it said, will now be based on the 36 states and Abuja or the six geo-political zones or north and south …’

    Given Professor Oba’s roaring  success as Vice-Chancellor, University of Ilorin, I am not in the least surprised that the  FCC under his watch has decided not to have INEC  on the commission’s radar. After all, it is very convenient for the interests he ministers to, but as a federal agency, one is at a loss  as to why not even the Presidency through the office of either the Secretary to Government or that of the National Security Adviser could draw attention to this totally inexcusable situation. Even if some of these individuals are career officers, they should promptly be transferred to other sections of the bureaucracy, leaving only what is genuinely due to the North. This wrong must be corrected for the world to see that we are a country under the rule of law.

    What then are the probable calculations of the North which these eminence griise so faithfully represent  on the  count down to the make or mar 2015 general elections in the country? The Election Integrity Network  has some take on this question. It stated that the structural iniquity in INEC  displays nothing but a suspiciously skewed regional interest especially at a time when geo-political struggle for power has assumed a violent dimension. The body believes that this is a carefully planned restructuring in which the most important organs responsible for future elections are placed smack in the hands of  the North.

    The only time in recent memory that I can recall a similar scenario was during the Abacha era when you could hardly find  four Southerners on the list of  the topmost  twenty security officers and a security council meeting could hold with hardly a southerner in attendance, going strictly by ranking. Without a doubt, this arrangement  at INEC  cannot be a happenstance; rather it is the result of cold calculations aimed at far beyond the present. And to imagine that these are by individuals  who are loudest  in  proclaiming the inviolability  of the Nigerian  state.

    Must it  be an Animal Farm too?

    The sponsors of th advert in question  touched on the total absence of any Yoruba man or woman in the management team of such a crucial agency.  For me personally, this is a non-issue since some leading Yoruba  would rather  permit themselves  be consumed by their cry of mainstreaming than fight to be treated as equals with members of their party from  other parts of the country. If these  PDP  people already traversing  the South-West  ahead of  the next elections were treated as co-equals, having comprehensively lost out in the legislature, they should have resolved with their party leader and President, the urgent  need to be adequately represented in agencies like INEC. This, however, will never happen since they are experts at feathering their individual nests as opposed to corporate South-West interests. It is for this reason too, that we never heard anything about regional integration when for some six or seven years they held the region in a stranglehold.

    As things stand in INEC today, I think Mr President owes it a duty to Nigeria  to right this egregious display of impunity perpetrated by two professors who, ordinarily, should feel outraged at the management structure subsisting in an agency so crucial to the very continued, peaceful co-existence of the country itself. In its present state, should the North decide so to do, it can, through these individuals so completely influence the 2015 general elections in ways that the Kenya experience of a few years back could be nothing more than a child play in a country of over 150 million people.

    So Mr President, a stitch in time could more than save nine.

  • Cynthia and the beastly cousins

    Parents and children alike have lessons to learn here

    Sometimes, I feel tempted to agree with former Chief of General Staff, Admiral Augustus Aikhomu, who once said (I think at a press briefing) that the Babangida government that he was second-in-command in would ‘arrest and jail’ some suspects. Aikhomu characteristically forgot that after the police have made arrest, the judiciary is supposed to take over, and that it is only the judiciary that has the power to jail or convict. Even after one of his aides had allegedly reminded him of this serious error of omission, Aikhomu amended his statement to read that yes, they would ‘arrest, prosecute and jail’ the felons! The point, nonsensical as it seemed, was that the military had no patience for the rule of law. The point I am also making is that there are times when matters have resolved themselves, and we need not belabour issues by looking for what is not missing all in the name of rule of law.

    Two recent incidents in the country seem to have vindicated this position. The first was the death, on August 17, of Clifford Orji, and the second, the brutal murder of pretty Cynthia Osokogu, the daughter of Major-General Frank Osokogu (rtd), by two satanic cousins, on July 22. Orji came into limelight when people began to suspect his activities under the bridge at the Toyota Bust Stop area of the Oshodi- Apapa Expressway in Lagos in the late 1990s. He was arrested and subsequently arraigned on February 19, 1999, at the Ebute-Metta Magistrate’s Court in Lagos.

    Perhaps the most curious thing in his case was that for the 13 years that he was at the Kirikiri Prison, he was never tried in court for the allegations of cannibalism and being in possession of human parts over which he was arrested, ostensibly because he was mad. And no psychiatric hospital in the country could treat him! The next thing we were told was that he has died. So, we may never know whether it was some big men that actually planted him under the bridge to source for human parts for them, or not.

    We were yet to digest this when Cynthia’s death hit the news waves. The 24 year-old was the last child and only daughter of Major-Gen. Osokogu (rtd). She was killed in an hotel in FESTAC Town in Lagos. Two men who had reportedly admitted that they murdered her were paraded on August 22 by the Lagos State Police Command, Ikeja. The suspects are Echezona Nwabufor, 33, and Ezekiel Nnechuwu Olisa Eloka, 23. Eloka said they killed Cynthia because they thought she had a lot of money in her possession.

    From what they reportedly said, and as captured by journalists during the police parade of the duo, it would seem Cynthia’s blood was crying for vengeance. Otherwise, the two suspects would not have been singing like canaries the way they did, after they were caught. When the story broke, some people felt there might have been more to it than was initially reported. Unless those paraded are later found not to be the ones that lured pretty Cynthia to Lagos, or unless they repudiate the story they told the press when they were being paraded, it was clear there was nothing between the suspects and the late Cynthia. The suspects themselves admitted that they met on Blackberry group chat and began communicating from there.

    No doubt, one expected a lady doing post-graduate programme to have been more circumspect about the kind of people to trust, and not to jump at offers, particularly from strangers (that was a creed many of us were taught when we were growing up; I do not know whether such things are still being taught today), that might have been a weakness, and Cynthia’s eventual undoing. From what is in the public domain however, one gets the impression that she possibly might not have been in dire need of the free air ticket and hotel accommodation that her suspected murderers used to lure her. Parents have a job to do here. People addicted to the social networks also have to watch it. At any rate, whatever Cynthia might have been, sinner or saint, she did not deserve to die the way she did in the hands of the brutes in human skin that killed her.

    The suspects themselves probably realised this, and the consequence; hence, the song they have been singing that they never meant to kill her; that all they wanted to do was dispossess her of money and other valuables. As a businesswoman, they had thought she would come to Lagos with a lot of money to buy the cheap goods they promised they were going to offer her. But one should wonder what that means, considering that they admitted drugging her with 10 tablets of Rohypnol, which they injected into three packs of Ribena juice that they served her in her hotel room. They did not meant to kill her, yet, they kept her under ruffling sheets for 12 long hours, a thing they denied, yet, traces of semen were found on her private part! I do not know whether even professional prostitutes could have survived such assault.

    Again, the suspects denied having sex with her; they denounced the condoms found in the hotel room and stuff like that. Yet, they claimed she was about their fifth victim and that they had only always robbed and raped the other victims, that none of them ever died in their ‘protective custody’. The kind of stupid things they have been saying, and so incoherently too, once again shows that many criminals hitherto thought to be men become lily-livered when finally apprehended. How do people who claimed they had only been raping their other victims now say they never did in Cynthia’s case? And they want us to believe that? What pleasure would the lady have derived from using a vibrator (sex toy) on herself when she had two able-bodied suspected serial rapists in the same room with her? They want us to believe that, too? Cynthia’s first striking feature was her captivating beauty. Not to have ‘known her’ as the suspects want us to believe would probably have meant that their other victims were paragons of beauty too, whose shoe laces Cynthia would not have been qualified to untie. They did not mean to kill her, yet, they tied her mouth and hands; they also chained her legs! What bunkum? These beastly cousins should go tell all these to the marines! They did not mean to kill her, yet they referred to her as ’bastard’ after they were through with her.

    If we take into cognisance the items allegedly recovered from the suspects: seven driving licences (three belonging to Ezekiel, four belonging to Okumo with different names); the deceased’s belongings, including her shoes (found in Okumo’s house); 17 mobile phones, two Diamond Bank rubber stamps, two syringes, a pack of Ribena, 22 SIM cards, a chain, 12 debit and credit cards, we will know that they are big time suspects.

    In conclusion, it was a lawyer friend of mine who led me into the temptation of wanting to see some sense in what Admiral Aikhomu said: that we don’t have to take the luxury of the rule of law in cases that seem to have decided themselves; we should just ‘arrest and jail’ the suspects, when she said that if the suspects in Cynthia’s matter get a good lawyer, they might escape being charged with murder, or even receive a mere slap on the wrist for whatever the court eventually finds them guilty of. However, we should wait to get to that bridge before crossing it.

  • Why should the soldiers be withdrawn when I now have electricity?!

    it would be difficult to support the call that soldiers be removed from manning power stations when we are still having it so good

    I don’t know about you but in my city, many people have now been reporting that they have been experiencing some steadiness in electricity supply to their houses for some time now. When I asked what magic could be responsible, I was told that soldiers are now manning the power stations. Hurray, I thought, that makes sense. Soldiers manning power stations, unemployed youths manning traffic posts and civil servants manning the seas. Now, who mans our security posts, fishermen? What a penkelemesi!

    I’m just joking. It’s not the best thing to have soldiers doing anything other than soldiering but I am very happy indeed to welcome electricity once in a while now. You just can’t imagine what joy it gives one to return from a hard day’s work, turn into one’s street and be able to complain joyfully that some of one’s neighbours have once again forgotten to turn off their security lights! You see, after being so used to lighting our ways in the house alternately with Aladdin’s lamp, Luggard’s bush lantern or some smoke-belching generator and being afraid of every shadow because no one could see quite clearly, we can now run around corridors with our eyes closed and leave security bulbs on all day. What a warm glow that gives one.

    The problem with this country is that the government enjoys watching us all not doing our work with too lazy or sleepy an eye. Perhaps, because it does not do its own work, I don’t know. All along the government knew that the billions and billions of naira it doled out to provide a steady stream of electricity currents to my house (I honestly don’t know about yours) have, somewhere along the line, disappeared. While complaining very loudly about the problem (if only because the suffering populace will not let them sleep), the same said government had known all along where the problem was. Instead, it simply equipped its government houses, including Aso Rock, with the most powerful generator sets in the neighbourhood. Yet, the engineering manpower in PHCN can, if they connect their heads together, conduct enough electricity round Africa and the world if the rest of mankind would not mind. So, where was the problem? I am told that the problem is the Nigerian factor, and I just hate that.

    I cannot begin to count here many of the unconscionable things I am told PHCN field staff have done. I, writing this, have been present though when a then-NEPA staff told a woman he had been sent to cut off her electricity supply for not paying a crazy bill but he would hold off if she was ready to bring a certain amount of money. She accused him of being hardhearted; he said she was stingy and should stop wasting his time because he still had many houses to visit that day. So, he just upped on the tree and cut her off, just like that, one snip. Yet another now-PHCN group held off connecting a businessman’s hotel to the grid for the simple reason that he had failed to ‘see them’. I have listened to so many tales about electricity company workers and connections. What I have failed to understand, however, is why I had electricity constantly when a then-NEPA staff member lived in my neighbourhood; and when he moved out of my neighbourhood, the constancy moved with him. I just cannot figure out what changed.

    My take on this whole lot is that the government is to blame. It has been too slow on justice, just like our Almighty. Someone once said though if the Almighty were not slow on justice, where would I be? Touché! But just think, the government is not our Almighty; powerful yes, but not Almighty, so it has no right to be so slow. Otherwise, it should have drafted in the soldiers decades ago to man our power stations. Just think what unnecessary headache, heartache and whatever else ache I would have been spared when all along, it had the solution. And what a solution!

    So, are the PHCN people really serious about asking the government to withdraw those wonderful soldiers? I mean as in serious, serious? Has it ever occurred to these PHCN people that people do not really like them? The businessman and the woman I talked about do not and I also don’t. I don’t know how many articles I have written on them on this page and elsewhere but they have remained adamant like an adamantine stone. So, that makes three of us that I know, and I’m still counting. Now, how on earth do they think people can support them?

    Worse, the NLC now wants to sponsor them in a strike. I sincerely hope that that otherwise serious body will not attempt to test their popularity once again by sticking their necks out too far. They would just find themselves swallowing humiliation down a long throat after the head has been cut off. You know what our problem is? Our problem is that we lack a sense of history. I was going to leave this subject for another day, but we might as well tackle some of it now. The place of history is so clear that, right now, only the blind of this nation are seeing it clearly. The sighted are going around blinking like an owl and asking, where on earth did we leave our personality? You know how I know? Secondary school pupils do not take history any more.

    When I asked a recently graduated SS pupil if he did history, he wrinkled his brow and queried, history? It was clear he had forgotten what on earth that was. Another one said he did not take it but he thought one or two people offered it in their school. Then he laughed. It was clear he thought that those two must have been a little wanting in the head.

    The beauty of history is that it helps us evaluate our position at all times. By keeping us in constant touch with our ancestry, our hopes, desires and aspirations may remain in sight. What has evolved into this modern Nigeria from the ancient ruins of old Nigeria would be a sore disappointment to our ancestors were they to wake up into our midst right now. The only thing is that we would all run away from them as if they were ghosts (oh yes, they would be ghosts!). We do however still venerate their names. They, on the other hand, would throw stones at some of our names because we have turned their dreams into ashes. It would be a case of the dead casting out the living. Someday, we will still talk about history.

    The great members of staff of Nigeria’s power company have had their day. They have failed the history test because rather than move the nation’s generic dreams forward, they have hurled the country down spiral staircases of loss, regret, hopelessness and destruction. Ask people who have lost relatives to generator blow-outs, fumes or in hospitals. Ask people who have been laid off work because companies could no longer afford the overhead. Ask …

    Yet now, these same people want the nation to care because they perceive that they are being cheated. How can we when we are still chaffing from their tyranny? Few will support any attempt to deny any group of workers their entitlements, but it would be difficult to support the call that soldiers be removed from manning power stations when we are still having it so good. I’m not sure how long this arrangement will last but as I am writing this, I have electricity for the first time in a long time. That should count for something.

  • Ferment in Nigeria

    Ferment in Nigeria

    We have received an unusually heavy correspondence in connection with last week’s piece titled “The Rise of the Gainfully Unemployed”. These are unusual times in Nigeria. The nation is in ferment. There is a growing unrest, a radical disaffection among the young and a total disconnect between the governing and the governed that can no longer be ignored. Things cannot just continue like this. Something will have to give.

    In keeping with the promise of making this column an interactive coliseum of ideas in which there is no master voice, we are publishing some of the reactions this morning. If our rulers cannot learn from the pundits they can at least learn from the people. The House of Commons is not that common. This column will publish any reaction no matter how adversarial and personally offensive as long as it conforms with the ethics of civility and the law of libel.

     

    Tata Tata

    There would be no massive movement of the Nigerian poor from the village

    to the cities…quite on the contrary, in Nigeria the social cultural

    development trajectory is such that everyone comes from a village and

    commutes frequently. Most importantly, within a generation in Nigeria,

    you could move from being absolutely poor to unhealthily rich, and back

    again. It is fun, enjoy it. Revolution is for retards.

     

    Bola Awoniran

    Oga Tata, revolution is for the retards? So your Boko Haram boys are all retards then, for what they are doing in the northern realm of our fatherland is revolutionary – even though in a contorted and convoluted form. Since when has an emir been targeted for assassination?

     

    Tata Tata

    You are getting yourself all twisted up. We are conducting a proselytising Jihad, not a revolution. An emir is a commoner dressed up in funny robes in the eyes of Allah. We know no emir, only Allah and his messenger.

     

    Bola Awoniran

    O you old codger, Oga Tata you are now combining your jihadism with apostasy. Aren’t emirs Allah’s elect and his emissary on earth? And yet you are making fun of them about their funny robes. You know the emirs copy their funny sartorial styles from the House of Saud and the House of Saud are allergic to your kind of freelancing jihadism, alloyed with wicked, brilliant witticism at their expense. Please I don’t want you losing your limbs to that atavistic sadistic lot, for that will make my sojourn in the lands of the Maya very miserable.

     

    Tata Tata

    I lose a limb, I get an extra virgin.

    Bola Awoniran

    Oga Tata, at the rate you are going, there will not be enough virgins left in Aljannan to compensate you for lost limbs and consequences of evisceration. Remember there are competitors, from Afghanistan to Algeria. E ro dada oooooooooo, sheath your sword as Sir Snooper admonishes before it is too late.

     

    Sususu

    Tata has finally been congratulated by Prof Snooper on his recent appointment as OPC spokesman which takes immediate effect. Prof, what is always missing in your commentary is your “blindness” towards the primitive accumulation and elitist form of government. I know that you also “break your fast” and chop from there, hence the difficulty in criticising the “progressives”, therefore Prof, I ask that you please mind the gap.

     

    Ronke spot on

    Tata Tata

    How ya husband? You tell am before you come yab for Internet for Sunday morning? So re…

     

    Tata Tata

    What exactly does OPC stand for whose spokesperson I am supposed to be?

     

    Bola Awoniran

    Oga Tata, I think Sususu made a mistake, you are too nihilistic for OPC to accept you as a member and you are also too modernistic for their atavistic ways. You are at home with your Boko Haram boys. In OPC you will be a fish out of the water.

     

    Tata Tata

    Nihilistic? I testify that no one is god but Allah, alone, without a partner, and I testify that Muhammad is his slave and messenger. O Allah, make me among the frequent repenters and make me among the purified. Praise and thanks be to you, o Allah. I testify

    that no one is god but you. I ask you for forgiveness and I repent to you.

     

    Bola Awoniran

    Oga tata ,forgiveness and repentance ke, think the N.S.A. and his boys are getting closer to nabbing you guys, but Oga tata you and your acolytes must forget about it – that forgiveness and repentance boat has sailed. You are now indeed in a troubled shark infested shallow water.

     

    Imagine_2012

    Bola, please leave tata tata alone. Stop wasting your time. For me, just read, enjoy and ignore him. He is everywhere and nowhere…..just ignore.

     

    Xanthos

    Sat Guru Maharaji has been missing, we have not heard from him lately. Oga Snooper, help send Okon to Ibadan to find out from the perfect living one why the silence when obodo is on fire.

     

    Tata tata

    Guru has moved to Lagos. He had problems with the iwarefas, which we are trying to resolve.

    Bola Awoniran

    Oga tata, which one you dey? Are you of Ogboni Confraternity or a jihadist? We are getting tired of your osakala shokolo shaka position.

     

    Tata tata

    There is a saying where we come from, you do not lie on one side and sleep till dawn. Who knows who is going to stand at the gate at the time of judgment? Anyway, when certain forces are disturbed, those who know are called upon to setlle the land…only the deep can call to the deep.

     

    Bola Awoniran

    Oga tata, settling the land through your mayhem? So now you must destroy the land in order to save it a la Iraq and Afghanistan? Oga tata, Allah is my witness we will not permit that.

     

    Tata tata

    We? You and who?

     

    Bola Awoniran

    Me and the masses

     

    Obinnna75

    As Mommsen said in his History of Rome, about the first Caesar, the ordinary man does not disdain being led, so far as he is led by a master. Snooper’s literary mastery is acknowledged.

     

    Tata tata

    And as Prophet Muhammed said masters are anointed by Allah, not created.

     

    Imagine_2012

    The picture says it all. Unfortunately we are all on our own. One day this bomb shall explode.

     

    John

    Shalom, The Socratic Plato of our time, I am proud of you. To say the least, you are an amalgam of Socrates, Shakespeare, and the sum of the founding fathers of the American Constitution (1776). That you could stoop to notice this phenomenon called “gainfully unemployed class’, stands you out as a philosopher, human manager, seer, a patroit, and sociologist par excellence.

    I am a member of the ‘G U class 4.’ It’s saddening the ruling class has no vision for the frustrated youth. One day, the ’critical mass” will form, we the class 4 will speak, and the rest will be disastrous, revolutionary conflagration. We salute you.

     

    D_Oracle

    “The rise (and rise) of the gainfully unemployed” is a ticking time bomb. Sir, your generation has sown and continues to sow the wind. Surely you all will be alive to reap the massive whirlwind cum gale cum hurricane. You have the ears of these vagabonds-in-power especially those that populate the South West… the discontent in the land is getting to an alarming level and it’s almost a cinch that the unmanageable commotion will begin from the South West.

     

    Tata tata

    Yo know for a fact that you are a Yariba…Obasanjo onyejekwe is also one.

     

    Bola Awoniran

    Sir, it is very unusual and very uncharacteristic of polymath intellectual avatars to combine humility with intellectual prowess, and your easily combining the two had in my humble opinion elevated you to the realm of greatness in our national pantheon, as flawed as it may be to apostates of our national creed.

    But sir your contention that “Gone are the days of infallible leaders of men who treat fellow citizens as ignorant and feckless children. Gone are the days of writers as oracular supermen dispensing nuggets of wisdom to lesser beings from their Olympian fountain “is not in conformity with the duplicitous arrogant reportage of the Western press, listen to CNN, and you discern right away that the duplicitous verbiage they are spewing and spinning is pure and unadulterated mendacity.

    Listen Sir to Bill Oreilly, listen to Rush Limbaugh, listen to Christian Amanpour, listen to Fareed Zakaria, read Rupert Murdoch newspapers, read about all their characterisation of Africa and what is coming out of Africa.

    Until recently when they are in competition with China for African resources they start reporting about Africa rapid growing GDP, and conveniently failing to report that this growth was fueled by mineral exploitation, and that poverty index and corruption index in most of these African countries are rising exponentially.

    Sir, have you heard them saying anything negative about Equatorial Guinea? And they are hand in glove with the tin pot dictator bedeviling that part of the mother continent.

    What about the Tony Blair and Collin Powell spin that led to destruction of Iraq? It was actively promoted as gospel truth by the Western press and their neo-con intellectual rabbis.

    Now the rabid atavistic and obscurantist House of Saud who name a country after their own family name, and the despotic, imbecilic and equally obscurantist rulers of Bahrain and Qatar are now being promoted as champions of democracy in Syria.

    They want to give Syria what they don’t have; they want to teach Syria what they don’t know. What a theatre of the absurd! Terrorists are being financed and armed to destroy Syria, blatantly contradicting the West’s avowed declaration of war on terrorism. It is in this light we must be wary of their ambivalence in declaring Boko Harama terrorist organisation.

    Sir, the information they daily disseminate to the world is absolute arrogant falsehood and aberrant propanganda. Sir, on your supplication that “ God forbids a revolution in Nigeria in which gainfully unemployed  suburban scum return to the metropolis, that will be holocaust itself. “On whose behalf are you making this supplication? Obviously not on your behalf, for Chief Okon  is already overhauling intermittently the existing societal order and also intermittently fomenting sporadic revolution in your household ,yet you adapt and evolve, unlike our diabolic pedestrian thinking pathetic caricature of homo politicus. Sir, bo ba le ya koya, elulu ti o fajo ori ara e ni o fajo le.

    Sir, if they don’t return to the metropolis where are they to return to? Sir, as you earlier proclaimed they are youth, and flower of this fatherland and now they are suburban scum, by your dictum. who procreate these suburban scums?Your generation Sir, now you are all afraid of Frantz Fanon prognostication about the future that awaits you guys from the Frankenstein monster your generation has created. Sir, I wonder who is afraid of the barbarians at the gate?

    Obviously not you, but your friends. Sir, please admonish journalists and opinion molders in our fatherland to shine their search light on the beneficiary of our fatherland ethos of crony capitalism and pseudo capitalist comprador bourgeoisie, expose them  for the fraud that  are. The resurgence of countries like China, India, Japan, Brazil, Argentina, Russia is the result of efforts of their patriotic capitalist bourgeoisie.

    The fulfilment of American manifest destiny was the manifestation and culmination of the efforts and struggle of this class.

     

    RealityCheck

    Government saw men only in mass; but our men, being irregulars, were not formations, but individuals…Our kingdom lay in each man’s mind. T.E Lawrence. I once asked a truck-driver why they conduct themselves so dangerously not mindful of other road users.

    His reply: Which other road-users? We see only flies and ants driving. About the over-crowded train, let me break it down. Our almighty government doesn’t see individuals, it see “ants “and “flies.”

    Sususu1

    Answer correctly and win!!!!

    What is the name of the political party that Dr Olu Agunloye will decamp to in Ondo after the gubernatorial elections? Star prize is an oil subsidy contract and a chance to become part of the “Bugatti Boys.”

  • Poll 2015 campaigns began yesterday

    Poll 2015 campaigns began yesterday

    Those who say it is too early to talk of and plan towards 2015 obviously do not understand what politics is all about, or of the crushing burden of clearing the filth and stagnation years of misrule have brought upon the country. Nothing, not even universally accepted convention, excuses leaving things undone till the last moment. If Nigeria is to be liberated from the clutches of visionless rulers, the plans and permutations must begin early, whether President Goodluck Jonathan fears distractions or not. The next polls are a little over 30 months away, but the opposition is still struggling to design a vehicle for that great task of liberation ahead, while the ruling party itself, shorn of vision and the doggedness and commitment needed for societal re-engineering and transformation, sits complicit in ruminative indifference to the country’s destiny.

    I have not encountered anyone not beholden to the ruling party who thinks the PDP has a concise vision for the country. If the party had a vision for the country in the excitable days of Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and in the considerably sedate days of the late Umar Yar’Adua, it would have been fairly obvious, even if implemented shoddily. We would have blamed Jonathan for poor implementation of the vision, not condemn him for lack of one. But there really was none, and there still isn’t any. As I have indicated here so many times before, and even shortly before the last elections, we must, without necessarily being members of opposition parties, begin to look beyond the ruling party. The PDP has held the reins of power for more than 13 years since the beginning of the Fourth Republic, and in all that period, the party was never able to articulate a vision for the country beyond the routine and cavalier adumbration of five-point, six-point, seven-point or x-point programme.

    I think it is time once again to reiterate the point that it is not projects, roads, education and health, etc. that drive a country’s greatness. The first grand task is to find either a party or a leader with an inspiring vision capable of freeing the country from the mediocre orbit in which it is locked. It is ideas that beget projects that beget greatness. Ask American how they got to the moon. There is no other order of precedence. We must find a leader who has been to the mountaintop and has conceived in his mind the heights he wishes to take the country. He must be clear in his mind what the dimensions of the Promised Land would be, and must also be able to articulate how to get there. He must understand the kind of democracy required to midwife a great country and be a convinced democrat himself, not a democrat as an afterthought. He must understand how comparably high the shoulders of his countrymen must be in relation to the other peoples of the world.

    What gives concreteness to vision, however, is ambition. The leader (I use leader interchangeably with party) must himself be highly ambitious to imbue his country with great ambition. If he does not think Nigerian democracy should be better than Britain’s, for instance, or our roads better than those of Canada, we will never put the structures in place to achieve those goals. And even if the constitution provides viable structures to underpin democracy and guarantee certain inalienable rights, as indeed the 1999 constitution has imperfectly done, the unambitious leader would undermine or exploit the document, as in fact Obasanjo, Yar’Adua and Jonathan have done. The ambition described here is, of course, not personal ambition, for both Obasanjo and Jonathan, in particular, have displayed personal and humungous ambitions that war against their modest talents.

    But while it is fairly easy for a leader to generate ambition, it is not quite as easy to generate vision, for vision, much more than ambition, comes from much studying, exposure to other civilisations, private character development, and an indefinable intuition and canniness that propel him into doing the right thing and making the right judgements. As the sectarian troubles in North Africa, Middle East and northern Nigeria are showing, the quality of leadership is declining precipitously virtually everywhere to the point where the so-called leaders in many places have become captives of the prejudice, hate and populism of the rabble. It was not until I read Chief Obafemi Awolowo copiously that I fully appreciated the depth of his knowledge and ambition, the breadth of his vision, his courage both in the face of adversity and opposition, and his solid and cosmopolitan endowments in democracy, administration and planning. It was not until I read books on Sir Ahmadu Bello, the eponymous Sardauna of Sokoto, and perused his files in the days of the Northern Region, that I was struck also by the grand scale of the society he envisioned, his Spartan discipline, his administrative acumen, and the remarkable balance he maintained between his private piety and the liberalism the regional politics of the day required.

    It was also not until I read books by and on Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe that I began to understand how impossible it is for a leader to generate vision without reading about others, and without having one’s own heroes. Zik dreamt big, perhaps far bigger than his region of birth could accommodate, and probably much bigger than his country could fathom. This perhaps accounted in part for why he was in some ways the least successful of the three great leaders in terms of regional idolisation, and maybe, too, why he seemed to have been overshadowed by the more charismatic and enigmatic Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu in the East. It is indisputable that all three or four gentlemen displayed leadership and visionary qualities incomparable to the mediocrity Nigeria has been inundated with since the collapse of the First Republic. All of them were at least deeper, braver, and more imaginative than today’s leaders, and would probably have attempted to respond boldly and innovatively to the sectarian menace and small-mindedness undermining the stability and future of Nigeria. Even if they failed, it would not be because of indolence, cowardice or lack of determination.

    I also recall how imperative the visions and dreams of some of the world’s great leaders were to their societies. Recall Napoleon Bonaparte’s Grand Army (imagine the inspired name), his Continental System, and his military achievements. These followed his dream of recreating a new (Roman) Empire, equal or superior to that of Charlemagne or even the Caesars. There could also never have been the Soviet Union had Lenin not first envisioned it. And there could not have been a modern and liberal Turkey rising from the ashes of the Ottoman Empire had Mustafa Kemal Ataturk not recognised that that was the only way to secure the rump of the empire and drag it into the modern era.

    Nigeria is enfeebled and humiliated by lack of dreamers and visionaries. Much more despairingly, for the past 50 or so years, primordial and even primitive considerations have been at the bottom of leadership selection in Nigeria. The PDP under Obasanjo was supposed to lay a solid foundation for Fourth Republic democracy, but due to the limitations of his vision, his temperamental unsuitability, and the constriction of his unpresidential heart, he was incapable of laying a foundation for a modern society he could not conceive. He worsened the problem by foisting the wrong kind of leadership on equally prejudiced, fearful and passive electorate.

    You do not have to belong to the opposition to know it was a tragedy enduring eight years of Obasanjo, three or so chequered years of Yar’Adua, and now halting, half-hearted opening years of Jonathan. It would be a disaster, however, to wait till 2014 to begin planning for the country’s liberation, or to succumb spinelessly once again to zoning, tribal or sectarian considerations in selecting a liberator capable of dreaming big for Nigeria. By all means, let 2015 begin now. The task ahead is too serious to be delayed for one or two more years.

     

    Goodluck Jonathan
  • Defending bigotry and cant at both inec and the federal character commission

    Defending bigotry and cant at both inec and the federal character commission

    INEC and Federal Character Commission have to do more to convince Nigerians that they have no ulterior motives

     Nothing can be more indicative of the synergy between the Independent National Electoral Commission and the Federal Character Commission in their determined bid to protect inequity at INEC than the fact that while Prof Jega, the INEC Chairman had caused Kayode Idowu, his Chief Press Secretary, to do a lengthy defence of INEC’s indefensible management composition, Prof Oba has, himself, resorted to granting newspaper interviews to achieve the same result. But only the unwary can be deceived by either of these two professors who head very vital, indeed strategic, national institutions.

    In my article: ‘What game is the North up to at INEC?, 18 August, 2010, and sundry other publications, attention was drawn to the overwhelming preponderance of officials of Northern extraction in the management of INEC. My aforementioned article went the extra mile of accusing the Federal Character Commission of being an accessory to the fact of this out rightly illegal composition going by the constitutionally prescribed functions of the FCC.

    In his laboured defence, Prof Shuaibi Oba Abdulraheem, the Executive Chairman of the commission said as follows: ‘the Federal Character Commission is essentially focused on the public service recruitment, at the entry point only. That is when we ensure equity of opportunity of all persons to be able to enter into an establishment by drawing the benchmark for merit’. In a quick volte face, as if he could not see the contradiction, he went on: ‘the other point which we get interested in is at the management level, which is where the INEC thing you are talking about comes in. We encourage all establishments that when it comes to management positions, there must be a practice of equity of distribution of offices among the various interest groups in Nigeria. The issue of INEC is about the management structure which is arising from the internal development of the individuals within that structure up to a particular level. Yes there are some issues there, but it is not intentional in the sense that at the management level we have given instructions, guide lines. Our circulars are there, that for all establishments, all management positions must be advertised and made public, even while we are practicing equitable distribution, but some institutions have been sufficiently clever enough and have been protected by whatever forces, I don’t know how they are able to manipulate the internal structures and appoint persons into, for instance, management positions…’

    Exactly the point that critics now being demonised are making.

    But beyond that it can safely be said that Prof Oba was being economical with the truth when he claimed that FCC is concerned only with the entry point, that is, unless he has since changed the practice at the Federal Character Commission since he became the emperor.

    One of the earliest reactions to my article of the 18 August, 2012, was a telephone call from my former boss at the University of Ife, (Dr J.G.O.Adegbite who, for many years represented Ekiti State on the Federal Character Commission .As he vividly recalls, the commission was nothing but an ombudsman which guided not only entry point appointments but also ensured an effective federal character presence in the workforce, especially, at the management level. Otherwise, why would Chief Executive Officers, only, of federal agencies and ministries be invited to present and defend their extant staff positions? Indeed, Dr Adegbite remembers, in particular, an occasion when, Mallam el Rufai, as the Chief Executive Officer of the Nigerian Privatisation Agency, was about being refused entry into the chambers believing he was not the Chief Executive Officer, because of his generous stature.

    Professor Oba should tell Nigerians if he has since changed this procedure.

    Dr Adegbite also went further to inform me that non-compliant agencies, where management placements are noticed to have been unduly skewed in favour of a particular zone were always given a 6-month grace period to make amends. I will personally not be surprised if this has changed since our professor took charge of affairs at the commission.

    And what was INEC’s effete defence?

    Let us listen to Mr Idowu.

    After berating the Media for being a washed with what he called weird tales of goings-on within the commission, he generously informed us as follows, like we were some kindergarten: It is also alleged that there is regional disproportion in the chairmanship of INEC committees by the National Commissioners. That, simply, betrays grievous ignorance of legal provisions setting up the Commission and governing its operations. Section 14 (1) (a) of Part 1 (F) of the Third Schedule of the 1999 Federal Constitution (as amended) provides that The Commission shall comprise the following members: (a) a Chairman, who shall be the Chief Electoral Commissioner; and (b) twelve other members to be known as National Electoral Commissioners. In practice, the 12 National Commissioners are appointed by Mr. President on geo-political basis: two from each of the six geo-political zones making up the country. Also, Section 7 of the Electoral Act 2010 (as gazetted) provides that “the Commission may appoint one or more committees to carry out any of its functions under this Act.”

    He then went further to educate us on the criteria for appointment into the chair of these committees which he listed as: ‘personal expertise, previous experience and ultimate responsibility.’ What he failed to tell us is that only Northerners have these in overflowing abundance since we would have required that eternal truth as proof positive of how unbiased the composition of INEC management is.

    For ease of reference, and to help Mr Idowu, I recall writing as follows in my article under reference: ‘INEC’s top management is made up as follows: 1. Prof Jega (Chairman)- Kebbi 2. U.F Usman (Director of Logistics) –Kebbi 3.A. Muktar (Director of Human Resources) –Sokoto 4. A.A Uregi (Director of Finance) –Niger 5. M. Kuta (Internal Auditor) –Niger 6. E.T Akem (Director ICT) –Benue 7. I. Biu (Director of Voter Education) – North East 8.I.K Bawa (Dep. Director, Legal) –Plateau 9.Okey Ndeche (Director, Operations) –Anambra 10. Nyise Torgba (Director M& E/Performance) –Benue 11. A.A Adamu Head, Commission, Secretariat) –Kogi 12. M.Ekwunja (Director, Civil Societies) 13. E. Umenger (Director, Public Affairs) –Benue 14. Regina Omo-Agege (Director, Political Monitoring) –Delta. 15. B.E Edoghotu (Estate & Works).

    INEC’s national commissioners who head the vital committees overseeing the most important departments are as stated hereunder though he tried to delude us into thinking that no committee is more strategic than the other:

    1. Col. Hamanga ( Chairperson, Logistics Committee) –Adamawa

    2. Dr Nuru Yakubu ( Chairperson, Operations Committee) –Yobe

    3. Ambassador Wali (Chair person, Procurement Committee) –Sokoto

    4. Prof Jega (Chairperson, F&GP) –Kebbi

    5. Prof Jega ( Chairperson, ICT) –Kebbi

    6. Hajia Amina Zakari (Chairperson, Political Monitoring) –Jigawa

    7. Membership of a newly constituted INEC 9-Man Strategic Planning Committee reads as follows: Nuru A. Yakubu, Istianus Dalwang, Mustafa Kuta, M.S Mohammed. Torgba Nyitse, Emanuel Akeem all from the North with only Mike Igini and Okechukwu Ndeche from the South.’

    What needs be added is the undue emphasis on the restructuring going on in INEC. What Nigerians have seen, and which I suspect is the leitmotif for the exercise, is Professor Jega’s undue eagerness to emerge much more powerful by being crowned the commission’s accounting officer as if not being that had, in any considerable way, stymied his effective performance.

    In all, our friends at both INEC and the Federal Character Commission will have to do much more than what they have offered till date to convince Nigerians that there are no ulterior motives at play in INEC as things stand today, albeit, without a whimper from the almighty national ombudsman..

  • The case for public schools

    The case for public schools

    Early this year, I was invited by a Non Governmental Organisation to address some students of a public secondary school in Ikorodu, Lagos during a career programme.

    As I stood before the packed hall of students with some of them not having a seat, it occurred to me that some of them may be wondering if they could ever become as ‘successful’ as I appeared to be based on the introduction by an official of the NGO. I therefore started by telling the students how I used to be like them. I recalled how I grew up in Ajegunle in Lagos and attended Ajeromi Ifelodun Public School. I asked if they know a town called Iperu in Remo local government area of Ogun State where I had my secondary education- Christ Apostolic Grammar School- only two of them raised their hands.

    If I could accomplish whatever I have in journalism despite attending the obscure primary and secondary schools, I assured the students that they can do better as their future does not depend on the schools they attended, but their will power and how serious they take their education.

    I told them how lucky they are schooling in Lagos State as many of their colleagues in schools in many remote parts of the country do not have half of the facilities and teachers they have.

    I was reminded of the career talk last week while listening to a three- part phone-in programme on the quality and cost of education in private and public schools on Inspiration FM, my favourite radio station.

    Like most people of my generation, I attended public schools from primary to the university level. There were a few private primary and secondary schools then, majority of which were owned by missionaries but at a time the military government took them over.

    Because the government then at all levels largely lived up to their responsibility of providing qualitative education, the quality of instruction was good and the cost was affordable by the majority. Some governments even offered free education and bursaries.

    So much has, however, changed in recent years with the quality of education in public schools being so poor that attending private schools from primary to University levels is becoming the order of the day. If most Nigerians have their way, they would prefer to send their children to private schools in the country and abroad like many are already doing.

    Due to poor budgetary allocations for education, the standard of public schools has fallen in addition to lack of basic facilities for learning. Notwithstanding, some public schools have managed to retain an above average performance and their students sometimes do better than graduates of private schools.

    Expectedly, the fees charged by private schools are very high and not affordable by many who particularly at the university level are unable to get admission even when they perform well due to limited spaces.

    There have been concerns about the high fees charged by private institutions, which have not provided them an alternative for those who at the university level cannot get admission even when they do well in the matriculation examination.

    At the rate we are going, good education is gradually becoming the privilege of the minority who can afford them and not the right of everyone as it should be.

    Government at all levels more than ever before have to allocate adequate resources for public schools to retain the high quality they were associated with. If most of the present leaders benefitted from government funded education, they owe it a duty to provide same for all now instead of leaving parents at the mercies of some school proprietors who have turned education to big business even when what they are offering is not necessary excellent.

  • Elephant and Castle

    Elephant and Castle

    (The political economy of royal succession)

     

    Just in case you are thinking of the huge and sprawling shopping complex to the South east of metropolitan London, this is not about shopping. Or rather let us just say that this is about shopping for a president in a royal jungle. It is about the political economy of succession in an animal farm. All animals are equal, but some animals are truly more equal than others.

    Sorry folks, we have to return to the feral and furry realm of animals once more. A few weeks back, we had thought that we were done with animal tales. But there are compelling reasons to return to the magic world of crawlies and good old Comrade Napoleon. This is what happens when the tools of conventional Political Science fail dismally to explain or grasp the dynamics of an unfurling political drama.

    Conventional Political Science rests on a set of stable variables for its analytical validity and integrity. To a large extent, you can predict the outcome of the inevitable collision of human and social forces. After all, when you have eliminated all that is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, is the truth, to appropriate the great Sherlock Holmes. But in the post-colonial jungle, nothing is set and everything is variable. It is the ultimate nightmare of the political scientist.

    You would have thought that only a year after the last presidential election and given the dire and fraught situation of the country, a nasty succession battle would be the last thing on the mind of our political class. You would have thought that amidst country-wide social unrest and given the fact that the north of the nation has virtually imploded politically and economically from the Boko Haram scourge, presidential election would be the last thing on the mind of politicians.

    You would have thought that the conventional wisdom is to fix what is broken first before deciding who should handle it. But you are profoundly mistaken. This is Nigeria, Blackman’s own country. And who would have thought that at this particular moment the Jonathan presidency would come to resemble the Yar’Adua presidency in its inert and futile probing like a stalled caterpillar and its mix of political and physiological ailments? It is all beyond our human ken. It points at some malignant tricks of some powerful occult forces.

    If anybody had thought that the next presidential election or the impending succession battle would be fought over the Boko Haram plague or how to secure the political stability of the nation by redesigning its grand architecture, they had better perish the thought. A plantain plantation or Banana Republic does not require architectonic wonder. Just allow the oil to flow and all will be well.

    It may be an economy based on extractive predation, but it is an economy all the same. After all there is demand and there is supply, which is the first law of economics. Secure the oil rig first and the electoral rigging can come later. This is the political economy of royal succession in an animal farm.

    Last week, there were some significant moves on the chessboard which foreshadow a great battle of will and wits in the coming months. It points towards another epic succession battle. It is a play of giants and both the grass and the grassroots are already trembling. Against the selectorate, the electorate have no chance. The kingmakers only vote after the king has been chosen for them. This past week, the elephant rumbled and the castle quaked as if it has suffered a tectonic concussion. Let us return to the elephant and the castle.

    With its mammoth brains, the elephant is gifted with phenomenal memory. It neither forgives nor forgets Its powers of photographic recall are a tad short of the miraculous. It remembers human faces and scant topographic features. It stalks those who have attempted to harm it with chilling resolve. It often lies in wait for those who would ambush it. When roused to fury and indignation, the elephant is a truly formidable picture of elemental rage and umbrage, tearing at and pulling out everything in sight and out of sight. Its capacity for absorbing punishment is legendary and even in death—as the Yoruba will attest—the skull of an elephant is no luggage for children.

    In anger and angst, not even the castle is safe and secure from the elephant, more so when the elephant itself has sojourned twice in the castle. A bid to secure permanent residency met with massive popular discontent in which the earth quaked with towering indignation and disgust. The elephant retreated in shame and misery. But it has not forgotten old business or forgiven old businessmen. In military parlance, it is known as discreet evacuation of troops while awaiting reinforcement.

    Last week, Nigeria’s surviving pachyderm from the Jurassic Age, the irrepressible and inevitable General Olusegun Obasanjo, finally roused himself to political battle but from the economic trenches. With well-controlled indignation and in an act of political marksmanship quite stunning for a man of his advance age, Obasanjo took the economic policy of his political protégé to the cleaners. The proposed introduction of the 5,000 naira mega-bill, he averred, was not only going to further compound the economic miseries of Nigerians, it was bound to fuel massive inflation.

    All hell was let loose at the castle. This was the political equivalent of Pearl Harbour when the Japanese suddenly overwhelmed the imperial might of America. You would have thought that as a distinguished member of the Council of States and Jonathan’s political benefactor and godfather, Obasanjo had a safe and secure communication channel, a hotline as they say, to communicate his misgivings to the presidency. But this is what late M.K.O Abiola famously described as “high-wire politics”.

    A succession war is in full swing. The elephant has bared its battle-tested trunk. Knowing fully well that transformation is the kernel of Jonathan’s message and self-declared mission, and knowing fully well that a sound economic policy is the heart of transformation, the great elephant has wrapped its trunk round the presidency’s soft and septic underbelly.

    This is a textbook military operation, a bold Panzer strike at the jugular before the mopping up operation. Once Jonathan is rendered combat-ineffective, it will be a question of time before his limping presidency is taken out of contention. Obasanjo is a past master of the politics of delegitimation. His artillery bombardment of Babangida’s “deficits of honour, credibility and integrity” prepared the ground for the Minna General’s crucial lapse of concentration and hurried exit from power.

    The same gambit led to the eventual unravelling of Alhaji Shehu Shagari, General Mohamadu Buhari and lately the Yar’Adua presidency. In the particular case of Alhaji Shagari, Obasanjo gave a damning and devastating critique towards the end. When the Daily Times deliberately published a garbled and mischievous version, the irate general sent a blistering rejoinder. Abacha who could read the game very well swiftly impounded him, but this did not prevent the goggled one from meeting a similar fate.

    For months, there have been rumours of a final and terminal parting of way between godfather and godson. It was deliberately leaked to the press that Obasanjo was eyeing a Sule Lamido/ Rotimi Amaechi ticket. This was swiftly and hurriedly denied. The stinging economic rebuke is the clearest indication so far that that the Jonathan administration is an object of stringent scrutiny by Nigeria’s power mafia and the report card may not be too flattering.

    Predictably, the presidency has been placed at the equivalent of a war footing. Presidential canine sentries simply tore into Obasanjo. There were even echoes of Michael Okhai Akhigbe’s infamous put-down of the old warhorse as a frustrated farmer.

    Leading the pack of hounds is Doyin Okupe who ironically was Obasanjo’s former spokesperson. With patronizing glee, Okupe dismissed his former boss as a private citizen who is entitled to his own views. One can almost hear the bellicose medico smacking his lips in relish. It all recalls a passage from Job: “My desire is that mine enemy hath writ a book”.

    But the icing on the cake of insolence goes to Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the feisty Central Bank Governor. Virtually dismissing Obasanjo as an economic illiterate, Sanusi, with caustic severity, added that the old war veteran may be a successful farmer but he is a bad economist. The main plank of Sanusi’s diatribe was that it was Obasanjo himself who had introduced mega-bill currencies into the Nigerian economy.

    Yet in the very next breath, and in patent self-contradiction, Sanusi added that Obasanjo’s introduction of mega-bills did not lead to inflation due to “prudent fiscal and monetary policy”. Does that not mean that in spite of himself, Obasanjo is not a bad economist after all? In any case, the Central Bank guru has not told us how the current massive run on the naira through various sinister scams and the Sanusi-endorsed unjust taxation of the poor called subsidy removal will not eventuate in printing more and higher megawatts naira thus fuelling more tacit devaluation and inflation.

    As it is often the case with Lamido Sanusi, the ease, fluency and facility of delivery seem to have got in the way of logic and deep reflection. In Nigerian officialdom it is not a crime to speak before thinking. Yet it is quite unlikely that these vitriolic denunciations could have passed without some tacit endorsement from the presidential bunker.

    The elephant has the castle within its rifle sight. But the castle is unmoved and unmoving. It all points at a nasty roforofo fight or what the Yoruba call yanponyanrin. The old general may be trying to return to his old political base. But for once in his career, he might have made a fatal political miscalculation with Jonathan. This is because other unstable variables might have crept into the equation. The chap from Otueke is unlikely to go down lightly and meekly.

     

  • FBN Capital appoints Feyisitan as COO

    FBN Capital appoints Feyisitan as COO

    FBN Capital Limited, the Investment Banking and Asset Management business of the FirstBank Group, has announced the appointment of Funke Feyisitan as Director and Chief Operating Officer.

    Ms. Feyisitan joins FBN Capital from JP Morgan in London, where she spent 15 years in product control, financial control and business operations management, and functioned across the securities and investment banking business. She was an Executive Director running the business operations platforms for Global Equity Capital Markets, and the Debt Capital Markets and Acquisitions & Leveraged Finance businesses in EMEA. She started her career as an auditor at BDO Binder Hamlyn UK, and then worked for Banker’s Trust (now Deutsche Bank) and SG Warburg (now part of UBS), before joining JP Morgan.

    Ms. Feyisitan is a Fellow of the Institute of Chartered Accountants of England and Wales, and an alumnus of Queen Mary University and Brunel University, both in London.

  • Resolve causes of violence, Don tasks FG

    Resolve causes of violence, Don tasks FG

    Professor of Criminology, Etannibi Alemika, has urged the Federal Government to find effective and long-lasting solutions to factors causing ethno-religious violence in parts of the country.

    He spoke at the on- going 8th all Nigerian Editors Conference in Uyo, the Akwa Ibom State capital.

    In a paper titled Cost of Insurgency in Nigeria, Alemika pointed out that necessary preventive measures should be taken to develop and sustain the capacity of security agencies and citizens to deal with all phases of terrorism.

    The University of Jos don explained that the media play a strategic role in tackling insurgency and terrorism, adding that media practitioners must display discretion in making sure reports on terrorism and insurgency do not weaken state capacity and counter-insurgency measures.

    He also canvassed for necessary information flow between media practitioners and security agencies.

    He identified the risk factors in the emergence and scale of insurgency and terrorism as economic, political, ineffective state capacity, religious and social division factors.

    Alemika explained that insurgency imposes different costs on individuals, groups, governments and the society.