Why this country is under the perpetual curse of being governed by the ‘worst eleven’ in years despite the substantial number of eggheads that we are blessed with remains one of the human mysteries. I want to agree, though, with the school of thought that a people get the kind of leadership they deserve. The country would remain in this state until something gives, whether willingly or otherwise because, as many of us have always warned, our present system is not sustainable. It is bound to crumble on someone’s head someday. Louis XV1 under whose reign the ancien regime collapsed in France was not the worst of French monarchs. It just happened that a series of events culminated in bringing down the regime and the old order in his time in 1789.

Let me start by warning that Nigerians should learn to sift the wheat from the chaff. We should be able to separate the message from the messenger. Otherwise, we won’t get the import of this piece.

For a political leadership that is not destined for perdition like the dog that wants to get lost and therefore would not heed the hunter’s whistle, the October 2020 #EndSARS riots were enough to make genuine and lasting reforms come from above in Nigeria. From what we see daily, it does not seem our political leaders have learnt any lesson from the protests. If they had, they would not be content with the largely cosmetic changes they were forced to bring about as an aftermath of the protests.

I am giving this background in view of the warning by former President Olusegun Obasanjo that the about 15 million kids who are out of school today would constitute the new Boko Haram in the next 15 years if the ancien regime, particularly in the northern part of Nigeria does not dismantle itself. Obasanjo did not mention any region; but we know where most of such children hail from.

The former president bared his mind on February 21 in Abuja, at the 2022 Murtala Muhammed Foundation Annual Lecture, entitled: “Beyond Boko Haram: Addressing insurgency, banditry and kidnapping across Nigeria.” Give it to him, he is too experienced to be talking on this kind of topic as an ignoramus. According to him, he had been to Maiduguri, the Borno State capital, in 2011, to understudy the activities of Boko Haram insurgents and found out that they are angry because they have been denied education and consequently are jobless and poor. He even traced the history of the weapons that are in wrong hands in the country, some of which have found their way into the hands of the bandits. The former president said that “The population of Nigeria today standing in over 215 million. And 15 million children which should be in school are not in school. It does not matter how we deal with Boko Haram, bandits, kidnapping and abduction today, either by stick or carrot, those 15 million children that should be in school that are not in school are the potential Boko Haram of 15 years from now.” He therefore advised the government to get these children educated and create jobs for them rather than waste resources on the provision of unsustained palliatives.

This, for me, is the message in his speech at that occasion. Obasanjo spoke not only as a military general who knows that defeating an enemy militarily is pyrrhic victory if the sociological and other tendencies that gave birth to that enemy are not adequately addressed; but also as an elder who is street-wise. His advice perhaps stemmed from the latter, specifically from the Yoruba saying that ‘omo ta o ko lo ma gbe’le ta ko ta’. Literally translated, it means a child that is not trained or educated (built) will end up selling the house that one built. Pure and simple.

It is because the northern establishment failed to train these children years back that they have constituted a nuisance to the north and other parts of the country today. Many of the northern elites have abandoned their ancestral homes for fear of being kidnapped or killed by these angry children. So, in a sense, what Chief Obasanjo is  saying is that the same way their parents cannotgo to their respective villages and towns today will their (the elites’ children) not be able to visit those places 15 years from now unless the elite change their ways and realise that children, whether from the rich or poor homes are all children deserving of some care, love, attention, affection, rights and privileges. Education is not an exclusive preserve of the children of the rich. If Quaranic education is enough, why do the cream of the northern establishment send their own children to the best of schools in the world? What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

You may want to ask what Obasanjo did to stem the tide of out-of -school children, particularly in the north when he was in power. But, that, to me, is not relevant at this point. The fact is, Obasanjo is hardly affected by Boko Haram. But if he is suggesting a way out, it is in the interest of those of us who are likely to be victims to interrogate his prognosis. Moreover, the former president understands the north more than even some of the northerners. He knows how endemic some of their religious and cultural practices are enough, to know how far (possibly in vain) anyone attempting to put an end to the almajeri system would try to end or even reform the system. If you doubt this, did the Goodluck Jonathan administration not spend a whopping N15billion on the education of almajeris, what happened to that project after? Yet, these are some of the right things to do to reduce the number of out-of-school children.

I am always angry when discussing this topic because it is one of the inequities in the Nigerian system that even the political elite do not factor in whenever they are talking about federalism. A second reason I am angry is because money that would have been spent wisely on other developmental aspects  across the country is being wasted to prosecute an avoidable war and fix infrastructure over and over again because bandits would not let them be. Nigeria’s constitution allows freedom of movement. I have no issue with that. But I have issue with a situation when a child that one has shown love to and trained with a lot of personal resources gets killed by another child who does not value life and for no justifiable reason. And, in all honesty, it is not the fault of the poor child: the system that produced him never showed him love and so he does not know the colour of love. Readers conversant with this column will always remember the reference I usually make whenever I am writing about this topic. It is about what one of my seniors in the university wrote in the acknowledgement column of his undergraduate project which I stumbled on when doing research for my first degree project. ‘Perrow’, as we fondly called him then wrote acknowledging the role of various people in making him whatever he was then and to his parents “who gladly embraced poverty” to see him through university education.

But poverty is not pepper soup; so, it is oxymoron to say some people gladly embraced it. Even when the country was relatively prosperous and better run, some indigent Yoruba parents still did not mind selling their clothes to pay their children’s school fees. That tells you the extent some people can go just toeducate their children. That is the spirit in the western region. Unless we want to deceive ourselves as most of our politicians like to do just for political gains, we may all be Nigerians but we are not the same. Our erstwhile National Anthem recognised this difference: ‘though tribes and tongues may differ…’ It is not just tribes and tongues that differ, even our cultures and religious perceptions too.

While the average northern elite may hide under religion or culture to limit the children of the poor to the worst form of Quaranic education, that is one without provision for their upkeep or that of their trainers, their southern counterparts cannot do that. That is why more people in the south are educated irrespective of their religion. That is why Christians marry Muslims and live in peace with themselves here in the south. Today, many of us get nervous seeing these children being brought in droves down south not because we naturally hate them but because we know the implications, which, unfortunately, is no fault of theirs, either. Societies will always live with crime and criminals. But it is a different ballgame when the crime borders on terrorism and advanced banditry caused by the denial of basic rights like education and other cares and privileges.

It is not late in the day for the northern elite to reverse this trend which they brought upon themselves. I get angry and have this sense of, ‘oh, it does not seem to me that these people have got the message from Boko Haram that things must change’, when some of their leaders continue basking in their huge population. They must realise that huge population is no longer trendy if there is no value added. That value added is education. The mistake that the northern establishment has been making and keeps making, which is costing not just the region but the entire country dearly is to think that some people would perpetually accept to play second fiddle in any system. Like one of my friends used to say, anyone who assumes that his child loves to drink gari with sugar and groundnuts is making a big mistake. The day you feed that child with bread, fried eggs and corned beef, marks the turning point. It is then you will know he/she has really never loved gari and sugar, etc. It only appeared the child loves it because that is what you have been feeding him/her with; that is all he or she knows. ‘Baba ta ni ise wu’? (Who likes penury?)

Now that the system has shortchanged the poor too much for them to notice and be up perpetually in arms against that system, that system must know it is time for reform.

But, even as the north must reform for peace to reign in the country, I am afraid the south needs some rejigging too. I fear for the south as well. And my fear is exacerbated by the perceivable insensitivity and arrogance on the part of some of the southern leaders. If they do not change for better, the entire country might become one huge ungovernable entity. And it is worse when educated people decide to unleash their knowledge dysfunctionally, taking advantage of modern technology that they are very much conversant with. Yes, infrastructural facilities are being provided or rejuvenated in some southern states, there is little by way of job creation to absolve the millions that the educational system is churning out annually.

In essence, what Chief Obasanjo is saying, and which I support wholeheartedly, is that beyond taking out the Boko Haram terrorists by military force, the northern elite has to ensure that potential ones that would trouble us in the future are not allowed to travel the same trajectory that today’s bandits travelled. That is to say, the elite must begin to pull down the foundation that produced that archaic and unsustainable system that condemned the children of the poor to waiting to pick the crumbs falling from the tables of the rich. These 15 million unfortunate kids must be educated. There must be job opportunities for them. Otherwise, the Boko Haram we are seeing today, as Chief Obasanjo rightly observed, would be a child’s play to the one that is coming.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

But for the proximity and urgency of the fuel subsidy issue which dominated the media space in Nigeria last week, the new fad in Africa, particularly West Africa, the incessant coups detat would have been my focus last week, with the latest one in Burkina Faso (then) as peg. However, as a saying goes in my place, when one suffered burns alongside one’s child, one first attends to oneself before attending to the child. This makes eminent sense because if one does otherwise, one would not have the necessary presence of mind to deal decisively with the burns of the child. It is for this reason that I could not have left the fuel subsidy matter to talk about coups on the continent last week.

However, even if I had chosen to write on the incidence of military takeovers in the subregion last week, my most recent example would have been the one in Burkina Faso which occurred on January 23. Before then, soldiers had struck in Mali (August 18, 2020), and Guinea (September 5, 2021). As at last week Sunday when my column on fuel subsidy was published, the world was not aware of what some military elements  in Guinea-Bissau had up their sleeves. It was not until about 48 hours later on Tuesday that we were told some soldiers in that fragile country had attempted to topple the government of President Umaro Sissoco Embalo. Mercifully, government forces were able to repel the attacks on the government palace which lasted about five hours. An unspecified number of people were killed and many others injured.

It is instructive that the dissidents made the move during a cabinet meeting to prepare for a forthcoming ECOWAS summit on the military takeover in Burkina Faso. Emmanuel Kwesi Aning of the Kofi Annan International Peacekeeping Centre told Al Jazeera, Guinea-Bissau has been a “fragile state” for decades. “In the last 10 years … the benefits of democracy have been trickled down, corruption is still endemic, unemployment is problematic, and quality of education dubious.” The country’s ballooning population over the years has also left many youths unemployed and uneducated, Aning added. “All of this has been “building up frustration … Particularly where we have leadership that doesn’t speak the language and behave in a way that reflects the aspirations and hopes [of the youth],” he said. The government countered that it was because of its relentless war against drug barons that the coup attempt was made.

However, Eric Humphrey-Smith, an analyst at risk consultancy Verisk Maplecroft, correctly analysed the unsavoury developments when he told Reuters news agency that “It looks increasingly hard to argue against the idea of coup contagion,”

“When added to successful coups in Mali, Burkina Faso, Guinea and Chad in the past year, there is no doubt that West African leaders are nervously looking over their shoulders.”

But this is nothing new. Coup was like ‘ankoo’ (competition) in Africa, particularly the West African subregion in the ’70s where if one country’s soldiers staged a coup today, it was expected that their counterparts in another country would follow suit in a matter of time.

But, what these incessant incursion of the military into governance tells us is that the African Peer Review Mechanism (APRM) established in 2003 by the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD) Heads of State and Government Implementation Committee (HSGIC), is not working.

According to the African Union, “APRM is a voluntary arrangement amongst African states to systematically assess and review governance at Head of State peer level in order to promote political stability, accelerated sub-regional and continental economic integration, economic growth and sustainable development. By acceding to the APRM, member-states agree to independently review their compliance with African and international governance commitments.”

Broadly speaking, therefore, the essence of the peer review is good governance. That good governance is a scarce commodity on the continent tells us that the problem of many of the African countries is not the lack of guidelines or parameters to do good, but the lack of political will to see such through. “Charity”, they say, “begins at home”. Even in the internal affairs of most of these countries, Nigeria inclusive, it is not about the lack of laws to deal with many infractions, for example, but in the political will to punish violators of such laws. With specific reference to Nigeria, the government pretends not to know that some extant laws are in place to address specific issues and would rather enact new laws, thus duplicating laws and wasting scarce resources in the process. In the end, none of the laws would be applied and the problem persists.

An effective peer review, for instance, would have interrogated successive Nigerian governments on why they prefer to import fuel despite being a major crude producer. The same way they could have interrogated the leaders of most of the other African countries where soldiers had torpedoed civilian governments on their style of governance because the bad governance on the part of many of them was well known before the soldiers struck. The global village that the world has become has torn  the veil that used to localise such bad governance. In the specific case of Guinea-Bissau, the regional and continental bodies that are now crying foul said and did nothing when Embalo declared himself president in February 2020, even as the petition of his main challenger was still pending at the Supreme Court, after a second-round runoff election that followed four years of political infighting under the country’s semi-presidential system.

But, rather than be proactive to nib bad governance in the bud before it metastasizes , they look the other way while their peers are messing up the lives of their peoples, only to wake up when their friends are kicked out by soldiers. In other words, they respond reactively. No doubt most of these African leaders see themselves largely as friends and cult members who are at liberty to play yo-yo with their respective countries’ destinies. Since they are largely birds of the same feathers, they have no moral grounds on which to admonish one another.

Peer review was supposed to correct the hitherto noninterference in member-states’ internal affairs by African leaders. Former Head of State, General Yakubu Gowon (retd) had no one to lift a finger for him when he was overthrown on July 29, 1975, because of the policy of noninterference in member-states’ internal affairs that was in operation then.

But what is the way out? This is simply in making the extant peer review mechanism more effective such that peers can look peers in the face and say, ‘peer, you are not doing well; please do something so that something will not do you’. This way, they would save themselves the tag of meddlesome interlopers that they have acquired over time because of their ‘siddon look’ approach to bad governance only to start sending special delegations to countries where people are jubilating on the streets when they hear martial music.

As former American President John F. Kennedy, said in March, 1962, “Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable”. No system tolerates bad governance forever or in perpetuity. Every system has its own way of terminating the reign of a bad ruler or king, even in ancient times. With hindsight, we have seen generally in Africa that military rule has not necessarily helped or promoted good governance. Nigeria is a case study. They were usually welcomed with jubilation but a few years down the line, they unveil their true colours. Because of their regimented lifestyle, they see the application of force as antidote to all situations. Thus, they promulgate decrees upon decrees which in the end would change nothing.

Cleisthenes, “the father of democracy” may not have totally got it right, but the world is yet to find a better alternative. Democracy, as we know it today comes complete with the package to remove leaders who have outlived their usefulness. It could not have envisaged a situation where a leader can be greater than his country such that he cannot be removed through the same process he claimed to have brought him to power. But that is what you find all over Africa. Many of them are so bad and cannot win in any free and fair election; yet, they rig elections and foist themselves on the people. They want to be in power till death do them part. The result is in a CNN report: “Worryingly, research shows that many Africans are increasingly ceasing to believe elections can deliver the leaders they want”. It added that “Surveys conducted across 19 African countries in 2019/20 showed just four in 10 respondents (42%) now believe elections work well to ensure “MPs reflect voters’ views” and to “enable voters remove non-performing leaders.” What many Africa’s unwanted leaders resort to is the use of state power (force) to perpetuate themselves in power. What then, is the way forward? This should be the immediate concern of African leaders. The solution does not lie in empty threats and dispatching of high-powered delegations to countries whose peoples are dancing on the streets to welcome the soldiers. As a matter of fact, some reports say, in Guinea, some people even kissed the soldiers in celebration of the coup. So, what justification does any outsider has to demand that the sacked democratically leaders be restored? Even the world’s policeman, America, would not make that a state policy again. It had tried it several times and burnt its fingers.

Yes, African leaders today may not be as openly vicious as the Idi Amins, yet, they still live what the Yoruba people refer to as ‘aye fa mi lete kin tu’to’ (pull my lips, let me spit). When Donald Trump tried to fiddle with the electoral process in the U.S., he failed woefully. In Africa, he would have continued to manipulate the system even when it is clear he is no longer wanted.

HURRAY! Nigerians should expect a fall in the price of rice. That was the assurance by President Muhammadu Buhari, at the launching of 13 pyramids of rice at the Abuja International Trade Fair Complex, Abuja, on Tuesday. An obviously elated and optimistic President Buhari said at the occasion that the measure was part of efforts to reduce the price of the staple. “The significance of today’s occasion can be better understood by looking at the various economic strides the administration has achieved through agriculture,” he said. He lauded the Anchor Borrowers Programme (ABP), which is behind the government’s agricultural revolution. The Nigeria Rice Paddy Pyramids is an initiative of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Rice Farmers Association.

To be sure, the Buhari administration has invested a lot in agriculture, especially through the ABP. This much the CBN governor noted at the launch of the rice pyramids. “The past few years have been quite challenging towards some of the farmers, as they have battled with insurgency, banditry, lockdown and other related setbacks”, Emefiele said. He added that “Indeed, we lost some of our farmers to insurgency attacks nationwide while some could not access their farms for several months yet, they kept faith, they did not give up, they persevered, and they did not abandon our fight for food self-sufficiency.”

The CBN governor was right. Insecurity played a major role in the food crisis that the country is facing today. But this is only a leg of the story. The other leg that the CBN governor failed to mention, and for obvious reasons, is that President Buhari’s failure to tackle the challenge when it was still tractable is largely responsible for the precarious security situation in the country. The man simply looked the other way when the entire country was complaining about the menace of killer Fulani herdsmen who believe they own all parts of Nigeria and could therefore do and undo. They became a nuisance to farmers in several parts of the country and even when some people retaliated the attacks by the Fulani herdsmen, security agents arrested several of them whereas the herdsmen enjoyed official protection.

This lackadaisical attitude of the government to the security challenge emboldened not only the herdsmen but other criminals, who seized the opportunity to wreak havoc, leaving behind tears and sorrow. By the time the government seemed ready to confront the situation, it was almost late; as it had become something akin to a malignant tumour.

A good example of the mishandling of insecurity, particularly as it affects agriculture, is the case of 44 rice farmers that were murdered by terrorists in Borno State in 2020. Rather than protect the farmers, or at least speak words of consolation to their relatives, or go after those who killed them, the government blamed them for going to farm without informing soldiers in the area! How does that help farming or agriculture? If farmers in every troubled part of the country have to first take permission from security agents before going to farm, is that not an indictment of the government and its security agencies?

The truth of the matter is that we do not have to look too far to see that whatever this government gained in agriculture has been lost at the same time on the altar of its nepotistic handling of the security challenges, especially at the onset of the administration. Statistics on what we are still spending to bring in food items confirm this much. A CBN report on sectoral utilisation of forex for the third quarter of last year indicated that the country spent a whopping $1.68bn on food importation between January and September. Similarly, it should worry us that we spent about N1trillion on fish imports from nine major countries in the last two years. And this, too, is official, coming from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).

The same applies to milk imports said to have risen by 28 per cent within nine months. What all these tell us is that the various interventions have not had any profound effect on food security. And for reason/s already stated. Nigeria was only busy pouring hard-earned public funds into a bottomless pit, pretending to be fighting the criminals.

Ordinarily, the president’s assurance should calm frayed nerves about the skyrocketing price of rice, a staple food in the country because, when a leader in his kind of capacity speaks, his words should be like those of an oracle: unimpeachable.

But then, it is doubtful if many Nigerians took the president for his words. Not a few would have dismissed whatever he said as one of those political rhetorics for which our politicians are notorious. And they cannot be faulted: the present government has since joined the bandwagon; it has proved time and again, that it is also mastering that notoriety of not matching words with action.

But beyond this is the fact that under President Buhari’s watch, prices of every imaginable item have been skyrocketing. From gas to power, rice, tomatoes, cement, iron rods, to what have you. Very soon, Nigerians will have to start paying for petrol literally with their blood.

Indeed, many of us who are Christians have only taken his promise of cheap rice by faith rather than by his record because we don’t want our situation to be like that of the man who did not believe Prophet Elisha when he said “about this time tomorrow, a seah of the finest flour will sell for a shekel and two seahs of barley for a shekel at the gate of Samaria.” True, given the physically visible in Samaria at the time, this seemed more like an improbable fiction. The officer who did not believe the prophet saw the good times but did not eat of it, in line with the prophet’s curse on him. You can see why we need a leap of faith to accept the president’s promise as the gospel truth: one, he is not a prophet and, two, his record does not engender such optimism. Yet, we must say ‘Amen’ to his wish or prayer that the price of rice will soon fall.

Perhaps the fact that President Buhari’s words have hardly been his bond explains the perception in some quarters that the whole idea of the rice pyramids was nothing but a ruse. That it was, at best, some political gimmick aimed at shoring up the government’s dwindling image. At the vanguard of this blow below the belt is the opposition People’s Democratic Party (PDP). The PDP, which appears to me to be waking up from its slumber to give the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) a good run for its money really took the pyramids to the cleaners. The party, which rechristened the project as “pyramids of lies” said the government was only staging another media stunt to deceive Nigerians ahead of the 2003 general elections. PDP’s National Publicity Secretary, Debo Ologunagba, said “There is nothing to celebrate in the APC pyramid of lies in Abuja. It is rather shameful that APC leaders are again ridiculing President Muhammadu Buhari by making him unveil pyramids of allegedly imported foreign rice which are re-bagged as locally produced, just to create an impression of a boost in local production under his watch.”

Although the opposition party made some bogus claims, like saying their party turned the country into one huge rice growing centre, leading to the price of 50kg of the commodity selling for about N8,000, I do not know whether this was the reality or whether the country was flooded with imported rice then, leading to the crash in price. But then, what is undeniable, as the opposition party noted, is that rice was very cheap then, compared to the gold that it has become in the Buhari years. Again, the opposition party claimed that what the Buhari government advertised were fake pyramids of rice with sandbags and rebagged rice stacked on pyramid-shaped wooden structures. As if the party knew that people would ask how it got the impression that the rice pyramids were fake, PDP quickly reminded that there is nothing novel in the arrangement because an APC governor allegedly did the same thing a few years back, with his own brand of rice pyramids.

Be that as it may, I have no proof that what the president commissioned on Tuesday was fake or, at best, imported rice. The only scientific proof of that would be what happens to the price of rice after these products have arrived the market. So far, however, there is no proof that the one million rice paddy has had any effect on the price of the commodity. Perhaps it is too early to feel the impact. So, I will still give it the benefit of the doubt that the PDP is only still bellyaching, hence, its writing off the government’s rice pyramids as bogus lie. A party that had boasted to rule the country for 60 years in the first instance and was booted out after about 16 years because it was too inept and corrupt certainly has every reason to bellyache. And if the party could not take a leap of faith like some of us, it is because only a thief can trace the footsteps of another thief on the rock. May be the former ruling party organised similar shenanigans in its days in office and in power.

All said, the jury is out on whether what President Buhari commissioned on Tuesday were indeed rice pyramids or mere sand. Whatever it was, it is only a matter of time for the truth to be revealed. If it was the former, Nigerians will enjoy the dividend and it would be a plus for the Buhari government. In the same vein, if it was the latter, it is the government that would bite the dust after the people would have exhausted the real rice, which would further dent the government’s image, at quarter to general elections. My father used to tell us that if the person being lied to does not know, the liar at least knows that he is lying. Moreover, anyone who sold sand as a good should not be surprised if paid with stones.

President Buhari should pardon those of us with sympathy for the PDP and other doubting Thomases about what he commissioned. In the first place, the PDP was in power before and knows how they did some of those things in their time. They are bound to be believed by some people too because not much has changed between them and the ruling party, in spite of the ‘change’ mantra of the latter. Today someone is in PDP, tomorrow he changes over to APC and vice versa. The difference is no longer clear. You cannot put any mischief beyond our politicians. I have always said that when many of them say ‘good morning’ Nigerians should pull up their blinds to be sure it is not goodnight.

All said, Nigerians should be able to tell whether the rice pyramids are fake or genuine when they buy the next bag or bowl of rice in the market. After all, people selling all manner of concoctions in ‘Molue’ buses usually tell us that we can only buy na true after several times of buying na lie. In Nigeria, we have been buying na lie from government since; may be this time around we’ll buy na true. The price will tell.

What does Governor  Nasir el-Rufai of Kaduna State hope to achieve with his four-day working week which began in the state on December 1, last year? This was the question many people were asking when the policy was announced. Muyiwa Adekeye, special adviser to the governor on media and communication who announced this last year said the  policy was designed to boost productivity, improve work-life balance and enable workers to have more time for their families. “The measure also reflects lessons learnt from managing the COVID-19 pandemic which required significant relaxations of old working traditions and the ascendancy of virtual and remote working arrangements”, Adekeye said in a statement. He added however that public servants in schools and healthcare facilities were not affected by the policy. According to the special adviser, “senior officials are working on detailed guidelines to ensure that emergency services and the education and health systems in the state continue to deliver services 24 hours a day, seven days a week during the transition and beyond.”

Obviously, this transition has ended, with the announcement by the state government last week Sunday that schools would now migrate to the four-day working week schedule. This time, it was the commissioner for education, Halima Lawal, who made the government’s position public. According to her, “All public schools are to migrate to the four-day working week while the 2021/2022 academic calendar would be adjusted to ensure coverage of the curriculum for the academic session.” This has however angered parents in the state and some of them have voiced out their opposition to the idea.

Ordinarily, I would have commented on the policy when it took off last year but for the fact that schools were then exempted. The truth of the matter is that many civil servants in the country have long been idle. As a matter of fact, we have the huge numbers of civil servants in many places because the respective governments that employed them are not responsible for sourcing the money to pay them. In other words, it is one of the many contradictions of our federalism. The moment the country embraces federalism in the true sense of the word, no one would teach most governments – federal, state or local – to prune the numbers of civil servants on their payroll.

Even right now, it is an open secret that many civil servants across board don’t see their work as full time jobs. Many of them are simply idle; they only report for work after which they leave the office to do their own businesses. Indeed, most government establishments are mere gossip centres, and this is indication that the jobs the workers are doing are not engaging enough. As a matter of fact, some people call them “evil servants” because of some of the characteristics they manifest, including but not limited to padding their workforce with ghost workers who get paid monthly, get promoted, get transferred, etc.

Please do not get me wrong. I am not saying civil servants are not desirable or that they are all bad. The fact is; some of the attitudes they manifest merely reflect what obtain in the larger society. I know many senior citizens would always recall with nostalgia the role of civil servants in the country in decades past. I remember some of them in the defunct Western Region were ever proud of the role of civil servants in the region then, such that the region’s civil service was competing with the private sector for the best brains available then. The truth is that today, the civil service in many parts of the country has become over-bloated for efficiency.

All of these explain why I was not keen on wasting my time writing on the issue when the policy was announced last year. How, for instance, could anyone say civil servants need more time to rest for improved productivity? What are many of them doing presently to warrant more rest? Again, how can a state government say workers should work for four days in a week so that they can have more time for agriculture? So, agricultural productivity has become something to decree into existence? What infrastructure has the Kaduna State government put on ground to actualise its dream of increased agricultural productivity? More questions than answers indeed. That the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and other workers’ unions in the state or nationally did not protest this path to indolence on the part of their members in Kaduna State merely makes them complicit in the entire arrangement. It shows they are merely interested in collecting rent for their generally idle members.

Indeed, a policy like this confirms the lack of rigour or robust debate in government and on the part of people on whose shoulders the responsibility of taking this country to greater heights lies. That is part of the reasons why we are the way we are, all motion, no movement. Even countries that have solved most of their problems are not asking their workers to work for four days in a week. Kaduna State is still grappling with the most basic duty of government – provision of security. Yet, its government says they need rest. The state, and indeed Nigeria need more than 24 hours a day, seven days a week, 30 or 31 days in a month and 12 months in a year to solve some of these basic problems of security, shelter and food.

Bad and ridiculous as the policy is even as it affects civil servants alone, to now add schools to the long list of idle workers in Kaduna State makes it too dangerous for silence or comfort. Education is the bedrock of development. It helps make people better citizens. With education, “we are able to shape a better society to live in by knowing and respecting rights, laws and regulations.”

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It is astonishing that the same el-Rufai who announced free feeding for students in public schools in the state in 2016, to encourage pupils to attend school as well as improve the nutritional value of the food for them cannot see the danger that this new policy poses to education and social values in the state. Let’s even assume that the teachers need rest and so should work for four days in the week, what would the students be doing on Fridays? This question is pertinent because, far back as 2016 when the state government commenced the free feeding programme, it also pledged to tackle drug addiction among students of primary and secondary schools in the state. Is this new policy not a recipe for idleness which the devil needs to provide jobs to keep the students busy in reverse?

I think it’s high time we began to show interest in what is happening in each other’s states or affairs because the world itself has become a global village. When in 1975 the General Yakubu Gowon regime was overthrown, Gowon knew it was over and did not expect any external country to fight for him. Indeed, the charter of the then Organisation of African Unity (OAU) did not provide for interference in member-states’ internal affairs and the organisation said this much then. Today, however, things are different. The Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) is fighting the junta in Mali and has imposed wide-ranging and unprecedented sanctions on it, ostensibly in the interest of the Malian people. Although, for me, it would seem more of self-preservation or enlightened self-interest. Where was ECOWAS when the former Malian leader was misbehaving? This is not about ECOWAS or Mali, though.

But, just as what happens in a country is of interest to neighbouring or other countries,  the same way other parts of Nigeria should be interested in what is happening among themselves. The seed of el-Rufai’s four-day a week policy on education will germinate long after he would have exited the political stage. The same way the country is now reaping the whirlwind of the seed of the almajiri system that the northern elite planted over the decades. Now, it is not only the north that cannot sleep, even though it is most affected, it is the country’s collective resources that are now being used to fight the banditry and terrorism which are products of that odious system that deprived the vast majority of the northern youths of education.

But this is not about Kaduna State alone. It should go for all states of the country. It is just that when a policy touches on education, we should be worried, if for nothing but for what we are currently going through as a nation because of policies like the one el-Rufai has just introduced in Kaduna State. We need to be worried because when the seed germinates in the future and the heat becomes unbearable in the region, they would start transporting the youths in droves down south, all in the name of free movement that is entrenched in the constitution. There is no society that is crime-free, but when people in leadership positions begin to take decisions that the negative consequences would reverberate across the country, we should not pretend not to see or hear.

It is however gratifying that some parents in the state have seen through the disadvantages of the policy for learning. One of them who bared his mind to a newspaper, Aliyu Suleiman, and has children in a public school said “As parents, we are not happy with this policy because it will affect our children’s performance in school. Remember what happened in 2020 when public schools were shut down due to pandemic and now the children are struggling to recover, the government came up with this four-day working week.” Another parent, Suwidi Zakari, said a day difference would surely affect the life of a child in public school. “One day can affect a child attending a public school. We hope the government will have a rethink except if they don’t care about our children,” he said.

Even teachers that one would expect to naturally leap for joy as a result of the policy are not upbeat. These are the people who interface directly with the students and should therefore know where the shoe pinches. It is even doubtful if teachers in the state were consulted before the government rolled out the policy. If they were not, it would only confirm the characteristic manner of government officials sitting comfortably in their air-conditioned offices and taking critical decisions without the input of critical stakeholders.

One can only appeal to Governor el-Rufai to rethink this policy that cannot better the lot of students in the state. Kaduna is not noted for any exceptional performance in public examinations. Only four per cent of its students passed West African Senior School Certificate Examinations (WASSCE) in 2010 and 10 per cent in 2011, rising to a phenomenal 44 per cent in 2012, there is still much room for improvement. This four-day working week can only reverse the gains recorded in the past.

This policy can only make Kaduna State rest in pieces. Therefore, it must be reversed before it becomes the fad, especially in the northern part of the country which plays host to most of the out-of-school children in the country.