The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Ololade

  • Before we say a prayer to rage

    Before we say a prayer to rage

    We must be wary of furnishing the narrative of a Nigerian apocalypse. And while we condemn the duplicity of doomsday troubadours glorying in Nigeria’s economy death watch, we mustn’t glamourise the misery of hitting rock bottom.

    Partisan psychology asserts the fickle benevolence of human emotion. Thus, in our blemished system, the truth logically has no place; the truth is habitually relative. Little wonder Nigeria careens to the shove of dubious truths.

    Doomsday aficionados eagerly project worst-case scenarios of Nigeria’s economic collapse and eventual descent into anarchy. They manically reel out morbid statistics, detailing the gravity of economic distress and suffering of the masses.

    Ultimately, they have no solutions. Their major preoccupation is to spread their gospel of horror and devastation. Their criticism is never constructive but borne of intent to gloat and accuse those who voted for the incumbent administration as the cause of the pervasive economic hardship. Convenient, isn’t it?

    Of course, the time for cuddling President Bola Tinubu is decisively over. Gloves off, we must engage his policies and the much-hyped gospel of ‘Renewed Hope.’ President Tinubu must be aware of the myriad of ways that Nigeria proves fatal to its citizenry.

    To reverse such fatality, Nigeria requires non-predatory leadership. It was in reaction to predatory leadership that Nigerians resorted to virulent criticism and emotional cultism.

    Post-2023 polls, political discourse has become glyptic; it unfurls with an incised edge. The incised edge manifests the steely autograph of the Nigerian core. Intellectuals, artists, revolutionaries, pacifists, economists, and activists, sprout and flower astride the incised edge, like the mystical roses of the mire.

    By their devices, our chaste, walled garden is made unchaste for brutes milking political power, like the plundered bower of the country brothel.

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    Amid the crisis, civil society groups romanticise marching in protest against the government’s perceived failures. Yet in the historical arithmetic of the apocalypse, neither organised protests nor anarchy could halt economic decline. Rather, a complete breakdown of law and order will quicken Nigeria’s collapse and impose decades of destitution on the masses. History offers valuable lessons and deterrence in this respect.

    No doubt, skyrocketing inflation and a sustained decline in Nigerians’ spending power becloud any foreseeable economic growth, but we all had a role to play in perpetrating our current situation, we all must join hands to salvage our country.

    Two days, ago, the Federal Government disclosed attempts by certain dark forces, including losers in the 2023 elections, to create anarchy and destabilise the country. Claims like these, if backed by factual evidence, must birth lawful inquisition and prosecution of culprits. In the process, the issuance of punishment to culprits in high places mustn’t be deterred or corrupted by mercenaries of cronyism and the ever-elusive cabal.

    Speaking on behalf of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu at the Public Wealth Management Conference organised by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Finance Incorporated (MoFI) in Abuja, Vice President Kashim Shettima said, “We know the consequences of unveiling the masquerade. Forces are hell-bent on plunging this country into a state of anarchy, those that could not get into power through the ballot box. Instead of waiting for 2027, they are so desperate; that this country can fall apart as far as they are concerned. But we are going to visit them.”

    Shettima also revealed that “Just a few nights ago, 45 trucks of maize were caught being transported into a neighbouring country. There are 32 illegal routes in that axis. At the moment when they were intercepted, the price of maize fell by N10,000, from N60,000 to N50,000. So, there are forces that are hell-bent on undermining our nation but this is the time for us to come together.”

    While many would scoff at VP Shettima’s claims, it is necessary to address the evils posed by saboteurs hidden in plain sight. To this end, a joint effort was reportedly launched by the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Nigerian Financial Intelligent Unit (NFIU) to combat economic saboteurs manipulating dollar/naira exchange rate.

    Although VP Shettima stressed the importance of unity during these challenging times, he must understand that the citizenry won’t buy into the vision of the current administration unless it asserts its integrity as pro-citizenry in credible terms.

    Nigerians, on their part, must commit to more realistic expectations; to achieve appreciable recovery in the coming years, we must channel enduring resilience and patience. It’s about time we supported the government’s fight against insecurity. It’s about time we grew and patronised our local industry.

    Nobody is coming to save Nigeria. Not the World Bank or International Monetary Fund (IMF). The Europeans, Americans, and Asians have their problems to deal with; both Britain and Japan are in a recession while America fights a futile battle to stave off the slump.

    This is the time for Nigeria and Nigerians to cut down on frivolous spending and expectations. Foreign interest in Nigeria, like all parts of Africa, is innately fishy – a matter of dubious humanitarianism, a devastating plague spruced up as aid.

    Only Nigerians may prevent the country’s drift further into the gorge. But even doom has nuances, and in Nigeria, it has a myriad layer of meaning. The periphery of one thing is also the core of something else. Nigeria must recalibrate its centres of vitality and resilience alongside its visions of hope.

    The media has a great role to play. This is not the time to indulge in poverty porn or accentuate a resort to hopelessness. Any klutz with a camera and midget recorder could interview angry market women, hungry housewives and unemployed youths – beyond sensationalising their miseries, shall we also reflect on what could be done to resolve them?

    Now, more than ever, Nigeria is in urgent need of a fearless, critical but patriotic press. This is not to impose a culture of passivity and complacency on journalists but our criticisms must be constructive.

    In certain ways, Nigeria seems headed in the right direction for the first time in decades. But while President Tinubu talks a great deal about fostering gradual, far-reaching and sustainable progress, he must communicate in relatable terms his Nigerian solutions to Nigerian problems and cushion their effects on an impatient populace.

    The country’s inner rhythms of development have been shattered over decades of misgovernance by greedy leadership that persistently toadied to predatory foreign allies and economic institutions.

    President Tinubu must free Nigeria from predatory outside interference. This requires shuffling predatory allies to choose the ones with the least carnivorous designs on Nigeria’s fortunes. It is never possible to cut off ties with the predatory superpowers less they quicken their plots with internal foes to sabotage the Nigerian State.

    President Tinubu’s leadership must replenish the social contract between his government and the governed. The vision and possibilities of his gospel of “Renewed Hope” must be actualised to serve millions of Nigerians who voted for and against his emergence into public office.

    Beyond taking hard policy decisions, his administration must be seen to cut down on profligate spending and the cronyism that, over the years, became the bane of public governance in Nigeria.

    Only then can he get Nigerians to stop believing that their survival and sanity depend on how they succeed in thwarting or outmanoeuvring the state.

  • Not to speak ill of the dead

    Not to speak ill of the dead

    Once upon a time, a billionaire patriarch got starved to death. Starvation plagued him through dusk and dawn, writing his epitaph with his gasps and sighs for food bought with his money yet denied to his belly.

     His wife, who became a billionaire running his business empire, dreaded him soiling the precious bedsheets that she bought with his money. Thus, she denied him food. She padlocked the fridge, pantry and kitchen cabinet. Then she instructed the maid and his caregiver never to buy him food from their own purse.

    The only food he was allowed to eat was the cereal she rationed to him very early before she left for work every morning. A rare boardroom titan she was, who had time to inspect the clothesline to see if the helps washed and changed her husband’s bedsheets – to establish if they fed him in her absence. His anal incontinence made him soil the sheets every time he ate and for this, she starved and flogged him in creative ways that left no welt on his tender skin.

    One Tuesday morning, around 10 a.m. to be precise, the billionaire’s sister came visiting and found her brother crying for food like a baby. Weeping profusely, she rushed to the kitchen and found the fridge and food shelves padlocked. Angrily, she broke the locks and made her brother food.

    She vowed to beat up her brother’s wife but her elders promptly reminded her of the severe traditional penalties she would incur – which included buying a ram to appease the gods and a heartfelt apology to her sister-in-law. She also dreaded being hunted by the culprit’s friends in high places. Thus, the matter got swept under the carpet by a family divided within itself.

    No thanks to the lure and devices of filthy lucre that got them split in disparate camps; one camp groveling before their patriarch’s affluent, power-drunk wife, while the other camp banded into a defiant but disunited collective ruing the precarious circumstance of their hitherto powerful patriarch.

    This is hardly about their shenanigans but about the sad fate of their billionaire patriarch who personified opulence in his youth but was eventually battered to death by hunger pangs and associated ailments. This is about other billionaires, still alive, ignorant of what fate awaits them in their twilight.

    Predictably, the death of Access Holdings Chief Executive Officer (CEO), Herbert Wigwe, with his wife and son, in a chopper crash, en route to the 2024 Super Bowl in Las Vegas, United States, has birthed a flurry of posthumous disclosures on his doings while alive.

    While some are fawning and patronising, some are damning and malevolent. In the end, both pro-Wigwe and anti-Wigwe homilies ignite introspection about mortality and the transience of life within and outside billionaire circuits.

    No matter how rich and powerful you become, your whole life and worth eventually reduces to a final moment and fate as a venerated billionaire, or a bedridden, starved, flogged, forsaken, vilified and embittered old man.

    This is sadly the lot of several men in their twilight. It doesn’t matter if they were good to their dependents: wives and children, friends and employees may eventually desert you once they exhaust their love for you or if you outlive your usefulness.

    No motivational theory or exaggerated psychobabble could dull this fact. A wealthy patriarch knows when relatives hang around and feign love for him in order to inherit his wealth.

    While money offers no protection against the ravage of unforgiving karma, the beaming brightness of good that each man had done may, serve as his buffer or protective shield against the whims of a vindictive wife, ungrateful children, churlish relatives and pitiless karma. Even where you enjoy the spirited love and devotion of loved ones, your citizenship of humanity may excite gory recompense.

    For instance, a public administrator or bank chief who is good to his family but monstrous to employees, the masses and others whose destinies entwine with his whim may suffer a gruesome end.

    No matter how rich or affluent a man is, he can never determine his final fate. No magnitude of wealth could enable a man reclaim his youth and undo his past mistakes.

    In “The Two April Mornings” and its companion poem, “The Fountain,” a 72-year-old schoolmaster recalls his youth as an energetic man, Wordsworth recalls. Virility is canonised only when lost.

    It is documented as distant narrative removes, nostalgia within memory: the first poem ends with Wordsworth recalling the schoolmaster’s memories. Masculinity is contemplated through the bleared lens of age, notes Paglia.

    In “The Last of the Flock,” we meet a full-grown, healthy man. But he is weeping in the road. Once rich, he has sold his fifty sheep to buy food for his children. Wordsworth turns the flock’s diminishing into a litany of dwindling manhood: fifty, ten, five, three, two, one, none.

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    The poet’s arithmetic charts the shrinking of patriarchal domain and masculinity’s supple patch. As his property shrivels to the borders of his body, the protagonist, like fabled Odysseus or Lear, diminishes to nobody.

    Are we prepared for that dreaded epoch when we may become nobodies? Are we prepared for that period when our shiny glories in time of youth may command only a perfunctory nod or the crisp tribute of a grudging hand clap?

    How does a man welcome that frightening reality, when the unforgiving measure of his deeds as a public officer or private citizen, determines the drift of his twilight?

    The Wordsworthian male decline, like Sango’s domestication by Oya and Kleist’s male mastectomy in Penthesilea, is a surgical reduction of self that counsels reflection among Nigeria’s privileged folk.

    William Wordsworth empathised with the virile male of “The Last of the Flock” over his suffering and fast diminishing masculinity. Yet for Wordsworth, a man may become greater as he becomes less.

    As a man, do you attain greatness as you become less? Have you made any sacrifice worth canonisation by the cult of posterity and human nature? Would your name enliven high society and suburban poetry long after you return to dust?

    What quality of manhood do you pose to your dependants, neighbourhood and the Nigerian state? What calibre of men steer the ship of the Nigerian state? What is our collective value beyond the elevated treatises, political, economic, and sociological theories hazarded to define us?

    Who are we, stripped of the veneers of material wealth, randomly professed spirituality, feminism, chauvinism, masculinity, masochism, intellectualism, and every other ism and schism that serve and afflict us?

    Alive, we seek our aspirations as rites of pagan worship in our bejeweled social and political space. In death, they resound like comical jaunts borne of a pedestrian taste of the splattering kind.

    Any blockhead or egghead may enjoy wealth and power through crookedness or honest endeavour, until karma strikes.

    Man’s karma travels with him, like his shadow. The universe’s agent of cause and effect, deterrence and retributive justice, can neither be owned nor placed on a leash.

    It becomes our temenos or ritual precinct of reward and comeuppance. In this divine, marked-off terrain, the moral code of the universe operates at its darkest and most mechanical – there are no emotive shingles of pardon or persuasion, just causes and effects, actions and consequences.

  • January wild, child apocalypse (2)

    January wild, child apocalypse (2)

    Samuel Akpobome, 18, wanted to be rich. So, he strangled his mother to death and removed her briefs. Then he mounted her corpse and raped it.

    The victim, Christiana Ighoyivwi, didn’t see it coming. Perhaps because no mother ever worries about being murdered and raped by her own son.

    Akpobome pounced on his mother, around 5 a.m. while she slept at her residence on Market Road, Ologbo, Ikpoba-Okha local council, Delta State.

    The youngest child of the deceased claimed to have acted on the instructions of One Love, a native doctor in Oghara, who urged him to use his mother for money ritual.

    “I was advised by One Love, a native doctor in Oghara, to kill her. After killing her, I slept with her. The native doctor told me to do so and keep her corpse for two days,” said Akpobome.

    According to him, One Love promised to give him N50,000 if he could cut her ears and fingers, and bring them to him.

    But just before he cut his mother’s corpse, he got caught. Akpobome’s grandmother saw him with his mother’s lifeless body and sounded an alarm, which led to his arrest.

    Following his arrest, the 18-year-old led the police to One Love’s apartment but the native doctor had absconded.

    Six years years since the gory incident, Nigeria still grapples with the chimera of fetishized ritual wealth as teenagers, as young as 15 years, prowl the country’s neighbourhoods for anyone they could kill for money ritual.

    Spiritual and magical powers, despite their denial in public circuits, have become a ubiquitous part of Nigerian life, particularly among the youth.

    In the wake of teenage boys’ dalliances with the killer culture of human sacrifices via “Yahoo Plus,” there have been increasing calls for government and security agencies to focus on the spiritual aspects and consequences of digital crimes.

    The use of spiritual powers to defraud victims in cyberspace is an offshoot of the Advance Fee Fraud (AFF) which criminals themselves refer to as a ‘game.’ Hence the modern derivation of the “Game Boy” sobriquet among internet fraudsters.

    Most “Game Boys’ engage in online versions of advance fee fraud (AFF) locally known as ‘Yahoo Yahoo.’ In several ways, their actions resonate cultural precedents peculiar to their immediate environment and social milieu.

    Their actions are hardly alien to Nigeria’s historical and cultural experience. In the 1940s, some colonial headteachers observed that a group of schoolboys aka Wayo Boys (money doublers) were into diabolic manipulation, skullduggery, and scams. They collaborated with “native doctors” to defraud victims across international boundaries using scam letters and magical amulets.

    Cut to August 4, 2004, some 50 officers of the Nigerian police, including elements of the defunct Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), raided a complex consisting of a number of shrines in Umuhu Okija village, in the Ihiala Local Government Area of Anambra State. In the wooded groves where the principal shrines were located, the police found human skulls and the remains of dozens of corpses, some of them dismembered, some in coffins, others lying by the bush path.

    The police subsequently arrested a number of people suspected to be minders of the Okija shrine. Eventually, 31 suspects arrested in connection with the discovery of 83 corpses – including 63 headless bodies – and 20 skulls were paraded before the press in Abuja.

    The case attracted massive interest as it was confirmed by a member of the national House of Representatives from Nigeria’s southeast, that leading politicians had visited the shrine and sworn oaths there.

    One of the most notorious such cases – which had a slight connection to the Okija shrine occurred on September 19, 1996, when an 11-year-old groundnut hawker, Anthony Ikechukwu Okoronkwo, was invited into a hotel in Owerri, Imo State, by 32-year-old Innocent Ekeanyanwu, a gardener. Ekeanyawu reportedly treated the boy to a spiked bottle of Coca-Cola. In a matter of minutes, the boy dozed off, and he severed the boy’s head, disemboweled his torso, removed his liver, genitals, and other parts that he needed. After butchering the boy, he sorted out the organs, packed the head in a polythene bag, and buried his remains. Ekeanyanwu was apprehended while taking the boy’s remains to the house of the man who needed his fresh head.

    The crime was later reported by a commercial motorcyclist who realised that his passenger (Ekeanyanwu) was carrying a fresh human head, still dripping with blood. The bike man alerted the police, who intercepted Ekeanyanwu still with the head.

    At the culprit’s apprehension and parade on live TV, the people of Owerri went on a rampage, destroying property of individuals perceived to be ritualists and advance-fee fraudsters. Chief Vincent Duru, proprietor of the popular Otokoto Hotel, in Amakohia, a suburb of Owerri, who was named as the mastermind of the ritual killing of Master Okonkwo had his hotel torched alongside 25 other buildings, including a church, by an irate mob. Duru, one of the men convicted in the celebrated case was reportedly hung on Sunday, November 13, 2016, about 20 years after the Otokoto saga and 13 years after his 2003 conviction.

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    On March 24, 2014, Nigeria stirred, once again, to eerie confusion as a kidnappers’ den was discovered in Soka community, Ibadan, Oyo State. The police found human skulls, dried human parts alongside malnourished victims who were being reserved for ritual purposes at the grove. Some victims’ personal effects including shoes, bags, and identity cards were also seen at the site.

    Since the 2014 shocking discovery at Soka, there have been multiple revelations of suspected ritual killings, especially by teenagers as young as 15 years of age as reflected by the Bayelsa trio and Ogun State quartet of teen ritualists.

    But why would 15-year-old boys engage in diabolical money-making rituals? What would they do with stupendous wealth if they had it? Usually, they would acquire expensive cars, pay for expensive sex with often older females, and lodge in the presidential suites of five-star hotels until they exhaust their ill-acquired fortune. Some build their family home set their mothers up in a business. When they go broke, they simply recommit to the hustle, with the unwavering support of their mothers, in particular.

    The former Chairman of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Ibrahim Magu, lamented in 2019 that mothers of cyber fraudsters, popularly known as Yahoo boys, were organising themselves into an association to protect the interests of their wards.

    Several mothers, in truth, claim to give their sons moral and “spiritual” aid with intent to protect them from getting caught by the EFCC and the police. Where the father disapproves, he gets sidelined.

    In this prevalent clime, more teenage boys are learning to perpetuate that sly, sharp instinct for self-preservation that passes as “street smarts” in social parlance. They have no patience for the vagaries of honest industry.

    This is their Nigerian dream: a lush, breathtaking future that de-emphasises honest toil and accords their vanities a caressing glance. They wish to drive the best cars, live in palatial mansions, and keep fat bank accounts.

    If prosperity gospel, reality television, and motivational literature won’t make them instant celebrities, then crime and “money ritual” will.

    Their actions aren’t accidental; from plotting to execution, a hideous smattering of bestiality manifests as their victims’ misfortune and society’s just deserts. Yet the boys are neither freaks nor social accidents, they are simply karma coming home to roost.

  • January wild, child apocalypse

    January wild, child apocalypse

    Again, January presages our ghastly nature. Its auguries fulfil the grisly typecast that has become our fate in recent years.

    Amid the ruckus of cutthroat politicking, terrorism and economic depression, January 2024, like its seasonal peers, yanks the rug out from under our pretentious ideals.

    Being the first month of the year, a lot of folks consider it a perfect time to start all over again, swapping energies and discarding old gloom. Some pledge fresh beginnings and new attitudes.

    The most jarring message of January 2024, however, rattles in Daniel Bamidele’s hymn of progeny as the new fiend. The 20-year-old “internet fraudster” reportedly stabbed his parents over his mother’s refusal to reveal her real name, a prerequisite for activating a black ritual soap that was supposed to bring him riches.

    Enraged by his mother’s actions, Bamidele assaulted both his parents with a machete at their Apabielesin home in Ibadan, Oyo State. His mother, Titilayo, escaped and raised an alarm, attracting passersby who subdued Bamidele and disarmed him.

    According to Daniel, his parents were aware of his involvement in cybercrime, from which he claimed to have built a three-bedroom bungalow.

    He accused his mother and elder brother of cheating him out of N2.5 million, frustration over his mother providing a false name, which rendered the ritual soap, which he said was given to him by a white garment church priest, ineffective. The soap, he added, was intended to bring good fortune but required his mother’s real name for activation.

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    “I purposely lured my mother from a church programme she was attending, and as soon as we arrived home, I attacked her with a knife and was already inflicting cuts on her body when my father tried to save her from me. I attacked my father too because if I had not stabbed both of them, they would have succeeded in killing me,” he told The Nation.

    The 20-year-old’s recklessness resounds the suburban legend of Nigeria’s teen ritualists. A surfeit of similar incidents imbued previous Januaries with unavoidable greyness and colour.

    January 2022 and January 2023, for instance, dawned with crimes committed by Nigerian teenagers and young adults looking to become filthy rich, in the blink of an eye.

    The viral video, in January 2022, of three teenagers looking to learn internet fraud aka ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ in Edo State, prefigured the horrors that haunted the Nigerian landscape throughout the year.

    In the two-minute video, the boys, between ages 14 and 15, appeared stranded as they told an interrogator in pidgin: “We wan come hustle.” Their preferred hustle, they revealed, is the “Yahoo hustle.”

    In January 2023, Police Superintendent, Asinim Butswat, spokesperson of the Bayelsa State Command confirmed the arrest of three teenagers for attempted ritual killing. Butswat identified the suspects as Emomotimi,15 years, Perebi, 15 years, and Eke, 15 years. All boys and natives of Sagbama in Bayelsa.

    The trio allegedly accosted one Comfort, 13, “hypnotised” and led her to Emomotimi’s apartment, where they reportedly cut her finger and sprinkled her blood on a mirror for ritual purposes. The ritual was supposed to make them rich. But for vigilant village youths, Comfort would have been history, perhaps.

    A more jarring note knelled on January 29, 2023, in the misadventure of the quartet: Wariz Oladehinde, 17, Majekodunmi Soliu, 18, Abdul Gafar Lukman 19, and Mustakeem Balogun 20, who were arrested by men of the Ogun State Police Command for allegedly killing a girlfriend of an accomplice for money-making ritual.

    On interrogation, they confessed that what they were burning in the clay pot was the severed head of the girlfriend of their accomplice. They gang-raped her before beheading and cooking her.

    The frantic lunge for sudden wealth by teenagers and young adults establishes the fatal forming of Nigerian maleness, family and society.

    Toxic families produce toxic wards. Toxic children become toxic citizens. Toxic citizenry becomes poisonous to nationhood in the long run. The interplay of excessive materialism, misandrist-feminism, and the absence of exemplary father figures has foisted upon us a generation of reprobate males.

    Economic forces aggravate their sense of disenchantment while corrupted gender roles and the denouement of masculinity afflict them with greater confusion.

    Masculinity flows from nature as an aspect of the birth mother, no doubt, but it is sculpted by society and a father figure into humane and effective manhood. The boy-child learns by instruction, counselling, and imitation.

    In an ideal setting, the father moulds his character by careful nurturing, awarding punishment for vice and reward for virtue. Where the father is absent or feckless, the child suffers exposure to degenerate blooming, like Afeez Olalere, who was encouraged to use his younger brother for money ritual by his mother – to embolden Afeez, she fed poison to her younger son and watched him die.

    Boys are in trouble. They have become Nigeria’s trouble. But the academia shies from the issue gagged by dubious gender politics and the notion that males enjoy greater advantage and access to school enrolment, financial stability, business and political opportunities. Consequently, several boys are denied constructive counselling at home and necessary push through educational tiers.

    More boys drop out of school to become internet scammers (Yahoo Boys) disguised as bitcoin traders, I.T. and forex gurus. Many of them are casualties of dysfunctional families and the changing dynamics of the new global economy.

    The economy has become less friendly to males. This is a global problem, however. Jacqueline King, of the American Council on Education in her group’s study of lower-income adults in college, discovered that men had a harder time committing to school. They reported feeling isolated and were much worse at seeking out fellow students, study groups, or counsellors to help them adjust.

    Mothers going back to school, however, describe themselves as good role models for their children. Fathers worry that they are abrogating their responsibilities as breadwinners, explained Hanna Rosin.

    Against the backdrop of these realities, the “protector” and “provider” theories of manhood and fatherhood are continually dismissed as credulous and crude, in a modern world where conservative ideals of masculinity are maligned and fiercely rebuffed.

    On the flip side, females enjoy patronage in crusader education and art. This slanted social complex has been adduced to a venomous leftist orientation.

    Responding to my query on the issue, a staff of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) told me recently, that his organisation ignores Nigerian boys and adult males in its intervention programmes because the government has failed to make provisions for them at the policy level.

    “The Nigerian government and local NGOs do not consider boys and men worthy recipients of any form of intervention,” he lamented.

    It is pleasing to see girls and young women succeed. But it is wrong to neglect boys. This is a sure recipe for disaster, the kind that is happening in real time.

    There is a reason the ritual money credo is embraced by increasing number of boys. The exasperating nature of their lusts, dysfunctional families, poverty, misgovernance and societal corruption amplify their rationale for embracing a creed of cruelty and carnage.

    The situation is aggravated by the frantic fostering and cues from media and literature. Popular culture’s celebration of grotesque and increasingly infantilised versions of masculinity aggravates the malady – from Nollywood’s neurotic man-boys to the bestial and slacker dudes of feminist-misandrist literature.

    But this is a discussion we aren’t ready for.

  • Betta Edu: Beyond artifice

    Betta Edu: Beyond artifice

    It is impossible to observe the shenanigans of the Betta Edu herd and not laugh. Yet you may be driven to relive their theatrics with a stunned combination of amazement and disgust.

    Call it a daemonic aria, a flight of effete imagination. If contemporary politics thrives as musical artifice, the recent falsetto of Betta Edu’s herd could be her cipher, the fault in her organ valve rendering her artful melody a frantic fustian dross.

    The recent videos of a ragtag group of women singing Edu’s praises and calling for her reinstatement and the frantic tweets by some “social influencers” equally supporting the suspended Minister of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation and calling for her recall, affirm that Nigerians nurse a hankering for extremes.

    The brazen resort to tribal sentimentality and gender asserting sophistry by Edu’s apologists seem simultaneously connected to a moral apocalypse and a proclivity to live above the law.

    Their wacky verses mock the solemn solitaries Edu initially uttered in rebuttal of allegations of wrongdoing in the scandalous fraud bedeviling the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation.

    That ‘Edunian’ pathos lends itself so easily to parody suggests there is some real excess in it. In all, common sense and morality suffer the mean grope of indecency. The palsied pat of her supporters, their shrill chants and plea to President Bola Tinubu to “Give Betta a second chance” become grotesque restraints, confining and corrupting emotion instead of ennobling and deepening it.

    So far, no one has jeopardised Edu’s interests more than the ragtag squad seeking to assert her innocence through sponsored protests and cheap emotional blackmail. Just recently, a Facebook page titled, Dr Betta Edu’s Supporters Group – with 1,800 members – took up the campaign to save the embattled former minister from blame and prosecution.

    Yet, the weight of the allegations against Edu rests on the sturdy beams of the following facts: that she was fingered in an alleged diversion of more than N585 million naira ($640,000; £500,000) of public money into a personal bank account; that she was suspended by President Tinubu soon after local media buzzed about a leaked document that allegedly showed the minister instructing a senior treasury official to transfer the money to the personal account of Bridget Oniyelu, the accountant for the government’s Grants for Vulnerable Groups initiative instead of a government account.

    At 37, Edu was the youngest minister in President Tinubu’s cabinet. Her appointment as the Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation Minister seemed revolutionary, depicting Tinubu’s administration as a force with a strapping innate promise. But no sooner did Edu get fingered in the alleged diversion of public fund into a personal bank account than she was suspended by Tinubu.

    The President subsequently ordered an investigation of Edu’s ministry and called for a reform of government institutions that run the National Social Investments Programmes Agency (NSIPA) stressing the need to “win back lost public confidence.”

    Edu, who lost her job barely six months after she assumed office, has denied any wrongdoing even as she submits to grilling by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC). Also being grilled at the EFCC headquarters is a former Minister of Humanitarian Affairs, Disaster Management and Social Development, Sadiya Umar-Farouq, over alleged fraud in handling N37.1 billion social intervention funds during her tenure under then President Muhammadu Buhari. Halima Shehu, the suspended chief executive officer of the NSIPA, is also under investigation by the EFCC.

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    Yet Edu is the only one with a curious band of die-hard supporters who have resorted to more desperate measures across physical and social spaces to demand her reinstatement.

    Edu has, however, disowned groups purportedly fighting for her reinstatement claiming that she did not sponsor any public activity. She said, in a recent press release, that she did not authorise groups organising public prayers and protests to seek her reinstatement to President Tinubu’s cabinet, stressing that she is cooperating fully with her investigators.

    The shenanigans of the Edu-herd commands an exercise of the eye, not of the mind. At best, they should be accorded the passing tribute of a sigh. While they defend and stroke their infinite delusions, such characters secretly suppress, perhaps, their mind’s wars with treacherous nature.

    Nigeria’s culture of corruption remains a vast behavioural gash across successive administrations.Even as hope sprouts on the margins through the daring of the incumbent government, Nigeria has begun to look like an immense illustration of chaos theory and corruption.

    In the face of comatose industry and a distressed economy, public officers have been found to repeatedly loot public money that would otherwise provide infrastructure and fund social intervention programmes.

    How President Tinubu handles the Edu case, among others, would determine the consequent trajectory of his anti-corruption campaign and public opinion about his administration.

    The burden of proof of his fabled sagacity rests on his response to social crisis or opportunity in real time.

    It took a great deal of spirit for him to assert the legend of his sagacity, en route to the presidential polls. As President, it is easy for him to trash his repute and all of his associated mystique. He probably wouldn’t.

    From the get-go, President Tinubu dared to assert his mettle, making an earnest wish to serve the people from the trenches of governance. Just two weeks into the job, he made rousing pirouettes signing the student loan bill into law and promising to review the N30,000 minimum wage to reflect current global realities thus tugging on the people’s heartstrings.

    From dousing the threat of industrial action by a partisan and corrupted labour union, suspending the heads of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), Godwin Emefiele and Abdulrasheed Bawa respectively to investigate weighty allegations of abuse of office, to his appointment of key State House officers, President Tinubu expressed his eagerness to hit the ground running with the right calibre of staff.

    While his opening acts seem emphatic of his will, the citizenry impatiently seek the manifestation of the promised dividends of his policies in their lives. They earnestly await the implementation of the new minimum wage, student loan bill and promised reduction in fuel price at the operationalisation of the refineries.

    More importantly, they await his urgent intervention and enthronement of justice in scandalous cases of corruption and abuse of public office, involving crucial government organs like the Federal Ministry of Humanitarian Affairs and Poverty Alleviation.

    From his swearing-in, Tinubu cut the image of a leader eager to to rid Nigeria of the affliction of the parasitic cabal that hitherto misappropriated the fortunes of the oil and finance sectors and Nigeria’s commonwealth.

    Yet passion is never enough to survive the storms outside and within the corridors of power. Tinubu must assert his integrity of intent, unwavering in the face of random subterfuge and organised animosity. If he intends to be taken seriously, he must shun subtle and barefaced artifice.

    As he supervises the Betta Edu inquisition, among others, Nigerians are counting on him to prevent the miscarriage of justice, hoping he understands that no matter how adroitly a leader cartwheels on moral fibre, if he feigns integrity as a rite of perfidy, he would fall splat in the court of posterity.

    President Tinubu must shun such recreant retreat. If not, he would be forging a bad karma, for himself and the country.

  • Mefy’s gloom

    Mefy’s gloom

    Inside his jail cell, Godwin Emefiele has a habit of staring into the emptiness, to relieve his life in time of repute. January 2023 is barely a year ago since he presided as the Governor, Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) and scarred the fate of 200 million citizenry including his arch-enemy, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, as Nigeria prepared for the 2023 presidential elections.

    This writer recalls Emefiele’s premature victory walk; how he sauntered in catty glory along the corridor of the Presidential Villa, in Aso Rock, Abuja, just after he met with former President Muhammadu Buhari and contrived his right to persist with the shady currency redesign and naira swap enforced by his administration as CBN governor.

    The resultant naira scarcity – engineered to incite the electorate against Tinubu and cost the APC a large percentage of anticipated votes at the February 25 polls – was manifesting swimmingly, Emefiele bragged and gloated to State House Correspondents.

    Mefy didn’t care about the impact of his personalised vendetta against Tinubu on the citizenry: a lecturer died on a lengthy bank queue while trying to withdraw a paltry N5,000 to feed his family; fathers stripped naked and cried in the banking hall, mothers tore off their clothes from their bodies and rolled on the bare floor under the cold gaze of soulless bank workers, all protesting their inability to access their savings and feed their families,

    Through the orchestrated starvation and deaths of ordinary citizens, the Labour Party (LP) candidate, Peter Obi, People’s Democratic Party (PDP) candidate, Atiku Abubakar, and President of the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), Joe Ajaero, hailed Emefiele aka Mefy, for the hardship he had imposed.

    They told Nigerians, tongue in cheek, to bear the suffering: the sudden bankruptcies, starvation, riots, robberies, and deaths, were necessary sacrifices that must be made to prevent vote-buying and successfully alienate the electorate from Tinubu and the APC, they said.

    More fascinating was the passionate support of the Obidient mob, who hailed and snuggled in the bloom of Mefy’s Dystopia. One fanatic told me, “With what Emefiele has done, Tinubu’s ambition is dead on arrival. Emefiele has finished him. This currency redesign is a masterstroke,” he said.

    Indeed, the die seemed cast against Tinubu, until his unanticipated yet emphatic victory at the polls. Fast forward through Tinubu’s inauguration and painstaking probe of Emefiele’s tenure as CBN governor and Nigeria confronts the swollen belly of Mefy’s wiles.

    On June 9, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu suspended Emefiele from office immediately amid an investigation of his tenure and controversial reforms in the economy’s financial sector. Yemi Cardoso was appointed as the new substantive head of the apex bank thus signalling an end to Emefiele’s nine-year tenure or thereabouts.

    Emefiele’s suspension and subsequent trial have been linked to significant scandals during his tenure.

    Jim Obazee, the special investigator appointed to probe the CBN reportedly discovered 593 bank accounts in the United States, United Kingdom and China in which the CBN, under Emefiele, kept Nigerian funds without authorisation by the Board and Investment Committee of the bank.

    The investigator also discovered how billions of naira were allegedly stolen by Emefiele and other officials from the CBN’s accounts including a “fraudulent cash withdrawal of $6.23 million” – about N2.9 billion at the then official exchange rate of N461 to a dollar.

    Local media reports cite Obazee’s recommendation that the ex-CBN chief and at least 13 others, including his deputy governors, should be prosecuted for alleged gross financial offences.

    In the UK alone, the Special Investigator said his probe led him to £543.4 million stashed by Emefiele in fixed deposit accounts. He also said Emefiele manipulated the Naira exchange rate and perpetrated fraud in the e-Naira project of the CBN.

    In his report submitted to President Bola Tinubu on December 9, Obazee reportedly identified several “chargeable offences” for which the former CBN governor may be asked to defend himself before a court.

    Tinubu had on July 28 appointed Obazee as a Special Investigator to probe the CBN and related entities, charging him to work with relevant security and anti-corruption agencies for the assignment, in consonance with the provisions of Section 15(5) of the Nigerian constitution and furtherance of Nigeria’s anti-corruption campaign.

    Obazee, who was the CEO of the Financial Reporting Council of Nigeria (FRCN) between 2011 and 2017, has also been charged with strengthening and blocking leakages in the CBN and key Government Business Entities (GBEs).

    Read Also: Students Loan Scheme will take off this January – FG

    The revelation of financial misappropriation by the CBN during Emefiele’s tenure underscores the potential for theft, money laundering and other illicit activities within Nigeria’s financial system, casting a shadow on the CBN’s integrity.

    At the moment, the nights are the hardest for Emefiele, when he lies in his cot, ruing the whine of silence in his ears. Back when he was CBN governor, his phone buzzed constantly for his attention. These days, its blank screen makes his face look like a ghost in the dark, his eyes sunk into a perpetual side glance at the suddenly idle device.

    His mind and the rest of his senses stuck in a perpetual vertical pose, like an antennae scanning for calls and messages that would never come. The infamous Mefy Cabal or Coterie has disappeared into thin air, along with its celebrated infamy.

    He shouldn’t even have a phone. An accused public officer standing trial should enjoy no such privileges. Yesterday, Mefy cherry-picked calls and messages to answer to. Today, he scouts for both calls and messages. From anyone, everyone and nobody in particular.

    Those who fellated his ego have pleasured him to his doom. Their frantic cheers and fondling of his wiles have wilted in the heat of his prosecution. Nigeria needed Emefiele to uphold professionalism and a moral culture impervious to degeneration and the machinations of politicians, rogue economists and industrial bogeymen, but he failed.

    Had he succeeded at his brief, the ricochet of his exploits would have served a greater purpose improving the economy and burnishing him for a more significant leadership role in the future.

    As CBN chief, Emefiele failed to evolve an enduring moral code unyielding to any baggage from his past and amenable to higher responsibilities in future.

    Agreed, moral codes could be somewhat obstructive, relative and counter-productive, particularly when pitched against a vicious circle of leeches and reprobates in government circuits. Ultimately, moral codes are of inestimable benefits to civilisation.

    Without them, we are vulnerable to gluttony, amorality and wanton tyranny of the self-seeking and covetous. It was a lack of moral code and personal ethics that ruined the names and reputation of immediate past genii in Nigeria’s power circuits.

    Emefiele now understands perhaps that public service must be humanely carried out as an honour, not cashed in upon or taken advantage of with a haughty smirk and condescending smile.

    Let’s hope Mefy now understands that, in the end, he would be judged by how adroitly he scorned or toned to a minimum, the arrogance implicit in leadership and the corruption characteristic of power.

    It took the ex-CBN boss an unceremonious exit from office and subsequent detention to understand that whoever dances too close to the balefire of the vanities would get burnt.

    Emefiele danced too close and he got burnt, leaving the vivid air soured with his charred aspects.

  • A copse of poisonous petals

    A copse of poisonous petals

    Our collective persona as a nation is reflected in the governor who once stole $4.2 million from his state’s coffers and stashed it to fund his vanities abroad, not minding what good such loot could do in resolving the educational, healthcare, and infrastructure woes of his state.

    It is reflected in the shenanigans of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor who is seeking a plea bargain to escape punishment over a 20-count charge over alleged conspiracy to perpetrate procurement fraud running into billions of naira, among others.

    It is reflected in the former female Minister of Petroleum, who raped Nigeria silly until we suffered the industrial strokes of scarcity and recession. Yet she frantically fights to walk free and her cronies are eager to let her off with a pat on the back. Thus the protracted drama of her prosecution at home and abroad.

    Lest we forget the governors looting billions of naira via “security votes and hyperbolic capital projects, outrageous life pensions, among other frills,  even as poverty, policy failure, and insecurity devastate the citizenry and crucial social institutions on their watch.

    Our collective personae flourish in the antics of youths feverishly flying ethnic flags in support of their ‘brother’ and ‘sister’ lawmaker, governor, minister, and ex-CBN governor irrespective of the atrocities committed by them and the criminal charges levelled against them.

    Public officers in the executive, legislature, and judiciary embody our frantic culture of dubious citizenship. They legitimise our culture of being, which enables and justifies a public officer’s immediate descent into a basement of opportunism right after emerging as an elected representative.

    The latter locks himself or herself in that amoral cellar, against the ethical rungs and wise counsel of sterling statesmanship. As the citizenry sinks in wretchedness, he embarks on a quest of inordinate acquisition and counts his spoils in material possessions.

    He is, however, a mere fragment of our bigger cultural dilemma. Think of him as the pointed end of the spear of our culture of greed, feverish pillaging, and criminality, in whom the triggers of consequence-free theft, sponsored violence, ethnoreligious carnage, gender, and sexualised menace are fused.

    In concert with fellow wild personae prowling Nigeria’s corridors of power, he reinvents, with creative malice, the penetrative outcrops of our national maelstrom. Optimists would call them salvageable ogres from our dark, primal aspects but their cruelty attains deeper resonance in their manifestation as poster icons of our corrupted personae.

    They are our decadence. Our disease. Like the millions of citizenry they supposedly represent, they are products of our moral void, the sickly stems bearing our poisonous petals. Little wonder we suffer a carnage of incarnations.

    Yet even as we have rightly identified their emergence as an affliction of the eye and disease of the mind, our chances at healing are hindered by chinks in our surgical armour: the fissures of ethnoreligious bias, illiteracy, willful degeneracy, greed, poverty, savage ego, and sheer malevolence.

    These constitute severe impediments to our healing. Thus, as usual, we corrupt the debate on our complicity. We should be discussing and taking decisive steps to rid governance of their savage afflictions but they continually hoodwink Nigerians into a thick emotional fog over several issues of governance and nationhood.

    At the slightest prompt, the citizenry engage each other in intense bickering, often in defence of their ethnic brothers and sisters, irrespective of the latter’s misdemeanour. The people fall for their gimmick, threatening war and secession from the Nigerian enterprise in solidarity with their dubious representatives.

    It’s a familiar scene, a Nigerian reality that often resounds like the fable of the doomed Odysseus and the labouring ships.

    In the backdrop of these shameful proceedings, the argument persists in academia, social and political circuits, that the future is blurry and bleak due to youth absence in politics. But the youth had been in politics as armed thugs, assassins, arsonists, and internet trolls for several years.

    Lest we forget our more ‘youthful men and women in their 60s, 70s, and 80s control the country’s ruling party, the All Progressives Congress (APC), and major opposition platform, the People’s Democratic Party (PDP).

    Their clannish pride bequeath the country’s leadership to their wards to sustain their legacies even as they draft boondocks young as cannon fodder and enforcers of their never-ending cycle of sleaze and mayhem.

    But the youth are hardly the prey they are thought to be. They are often willing participants in a dehumanising ritual of violence and bloodshed.

    Read Also: Kaduna Council to bury 49 unclaimed corpses next week

    This minute, the image persists of the nation’s youth as dispensable tools of specific and random politicians. Unlike the artist’s immobile masterpiece, sculpted in bronze and stone, such youths evolve like plasticine, easily malleable and amenable to devious plots.

    Some have attributed their afflictions to structural banes and the perverse culture of citizenship by which they are weaned and ushered into adulthood.

    In the wake of plausible and often far-fetched analyses, too many ‘patriots’ conveniently absolve themselves of blame. Some propound the tragic theory of Nigerians as being innately incapable of self-determination and self-governance.

    These arguments have over time attained a language of their own and thus evolved as a dialect of dissent and exaggerated self-abnegation. The nation’s elite frequently marshals clashing precepts as solutions and in condemnation of the status quo according to their biases.

    A more damning view identifies the youths’ persistent claims of victimhood as a consequence of their sense of entitlement. Between hyperbole and informed sophistry, Nigeria suffers the affliction of intellectual miscreants and promising youth-turned-fetal-adults.

    The coordinated tragedies afflicting our consciousness daily, append the only real structure to our lives as impoverished Nigerians. From burdensome realities of fast-slipping youth, and recurrent rites of bigotry to the ethical quandary of coping with strict moral codes of adulthood and ideal society, our lives obscure in purpose and meaning.

    Thus the scorning of ethics by the youths for fast, illicit riches even as ripples of their actions keep hundreds of millions more in binds of despair.

    Consequently, the revolutionary dissent that sprouts from oppression is pitiless and unbending. It radically splits our world into ‘insensitive ruling class’ and ‘clueless lower class,’ ‘elite’ and ‘downtrodden,’ ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots.’ It fosters even more fragmented discord that continually pits Nigerian Christians against Muslims, Hausa against Igbo, Igbo against Yoruba, and Itsekiri against Urhobo.

    While this piece too may resound as hackneyed howl and lamentation, it needs to be said that our ultimate solution lies in our will to effect true change.

    Can any of the existing political parties foster a progressive nation? Pundits aver that they are programmed to a recurring cycle of self-destruct and rebirth while showing occasional flashes of brilliance and daring against familiar odds. But it’s all smoke and mirrors.

    Greening the Nigerian pasture is not achievable in a sprint or marathon. Think of it as a cross-country run. It is not a race winnable in four years. But who cares?

    As we advance, President Bola Tinubu’s administration must rid Nigeria of a culture of public governance dependent on administrative corruption and lifeboat solutions. To truly empower the citizenry, his administration must actualise a stable electricity supply and a better road and marine infrastructure; he must also revive the agricultural economy, and get the refineries working.

    Systems thrive by their human elements thus Nigerians humanise our systems and dehumanise them. The President must also be wary of the human factors that hinder the successful implementation of most policies and Social Intervention Programmes (SIPs).

  • 2023: A bloody curtain fall

    2023: A bloody curtain fall

    Again, another year recoils cloaked in blood and the sadism of murderous characters. Eight days to the new year, Plateau mounted its funeral pyres.

    This minute presents the umpteenth scare in the state’s grisly drama, perhaps. The most recent being the Christmas Eve killings of at least 100 people in Plateau villages.

    On Sunday, gunmen stormed Ndun, Ngyong, Murfet, Makundary, Tamiso, Chiang, Tahore, Gawarba, Dares, Meyenga, Darwat, and Butura Kampani villages in the Barkin Ladi, Mangu and Bokkos Local Government Areas (LGA) of the state, burning houses and shooting residents.

    Eyewitnesses alleged that about 140 people were killed in the attacks. The state government said over 115 people were killed, while the police put the death toll at 96.

    The assailants targeted 17 communities in “senseless and unprovoked” attacks on Saturday and Sunday, burning down most houses in the area, Plateau Governor Caleb Mutfwang said in a TV broadcast.

    “As I am talking to you, in Mangu local governorate alone, we buried 15 people. As of this morning, in Bokkos, we are counting not less than 100 corpses. I am yet to take stock of [the deaths in] Barkin Ladi,” Mutfwang said. “It has been a very terrifying Christmas for us here in Plateau,” he said.

    There are fears of a higher death toll as some people are unaccounted for.

    Some locals said it took more than 12 hours before security agencies responded to their calls for help, thus echoing past concerns about slow interventions in Nigeria’s security crises.

    Earlier in the month, a report by the Policy and Legal Advocacy Centre (PLAC) stated that at least 750 persons have been killed by bandits, terrorists and other non-state actors. In comparison, no less than 45 persons were abducted from various educational institutions in the country in 2023.

    With the recent Christmas Eve killings in Plateau State, the figures have indeed increased. The year, which opened with reports of attacks on unarmed civilians by insurgents and other non-state actors on one hand and the security forces on another, is also ending the same way.

    Thus, 2023 recoils cloaked in blood and the sadism of murderous characters. The terrorists maimed rural Nigeria, murdering fathers, mothers, sons, and daughters, leaving Plateau and the entire country cringing in anticipation of the next horrible attack.

    At the start of the year, the dominance of despair seemed so complete and insurmountable. Still, the political class, split along party lines and lusty for electoral votes, issued habitual promises to secure lives and property. They also vowed to improve living conditions in the country. 

    The citizenry, still smarting from the carnage of the previous year, believed them even as shady separatists emerged from the woodwork, 

    chanting bloody banality to the politicians’ insensate bromides. The latter killed unarmed civilians and law enforcers, triggering fears over the possibility of holding the elections. 

    Now that the elections have been lost and won, will the political class fulfil the pledges they made while canvassing for votes? As 2023 records more funeral pyres, can Nigerians count on their elected leaders outside the pressure of an impending election or their frantic need to grandstand before the camera?

    Politicians know the electorate through sadistic plowing; nailing them down with spikes of cash and bigotries, they catch their shrieks in a metaphoric calabash. The vessel is chillingly archetypal. 

    The gourd vine connotes pathologic self-preservation. The ruling class’s metaphoric calabash sheaths its exaggerated pride and self-idolatry—a poisoned chalice.

    Like the Biblical bawds of Babylon, they hold their gourds scummy with lust and amorality. The insolence persists across social platforms and spills through our worship houses, schools, and social circuits into our rural divides; shady politicians pant to serpents interred in our possessed spirits. We have seen such individuals and their bungling parties sadistically maul tenet to wile and policies to streaming blood. 

    The 2023 elections provided an opportunity to divest the country of their cancerous forms, lest we end up as tissues and blood in their gourds. Nonetheless, the ruling class reflects our degeneracy to us. They actuate rather than constrain our perversions.

    Boorstin would call this the mirror effect. The political class’ administrative hearse becomes the railcar of our death-tending impulses: terrorism, kidnap for ransom, and armed robbery flourish. Fraud and embezzlement of public funds persist in public and private corporations.

    The maladies persist through dispensations. From now, over the next three years, voters will get to know if, by their votes, they have once again fallen victim to errant lusts. 

    At the moment, the political arena equally unfurls like a red-light district, an expansive brothel, where electorate bodies are the stringed instruments hysterically plucked by politician-patrons. 

    In this decadent theatre, politicians emerge as master harpists, making dark melodies to the electorate’s torment. In anguish, the latter gains identity as faceless natives: bleeding sap condemned to infernal dystopia. Think of the Plateau massacre and the like.

    Beyond the false narrative of one candidate’s sainthood and the opposition’s villainy, the consistency and emotionality of the story is paramount. Thus, the occasionally wild and absurd drama. 

    Did the Plateau electorate choose the most suitable candidates for their public offices? Have they entrusted their lives to the right hands? Or were their votes hijacked or stolen by the most devious candidates? Did the illiterate voter escape the snare of political con men at the 2023 polls? 

    Take the Plateau government and police authorities, for instance; since they assumed office, what have they done differently from their predecessors in curbing the seasonal massacre in the state?

    It’s about time the federal government overhauled the regional security architecture, with particular attention to intelligence and anti-terror operations in established hot spots. This would forestall a recurrence of the Plateau massacre, among others.

    The frightful spurts of violence in Plateau and other parts of the country intone a brazen incantation of bestiality over humankind. It exposes the scourge of our inner ugliness and establishes citizenship as a barbaric ritual drama, where the performers periodically swap masks among the government and the governed.

    Read Also: Alleged vote-buying: Adebutu reports to police in Ogun

    From Boko Haram’s terrorism, armed banditry, and kidnap for ransom to the killer herdsmen-farmer crisis, criminals and mass murderers actualise their fantasies of ill-bliss across the country.

    Every fresh killing occurs jarringly in the wild drama. The corpses manifest as a sick rose wrapped in menacing public thorns. Amid the mayhem, the governors look up to the federal government to rescue their states from the jaws of insecurity, thus drawing speculations about what they do with the monthly outrageous security votes they draw from the national purse.

    The occasional knee-jerk reactions to insecurity are ineffective. The incumbent government must not lose its grip on the nation’s security apparatus. It is, however, pointless rehashing calls for an overhaul of the security system. Nigeria needs a more drastic intervention.

    The President Bola Tinubu-led administration must avoid the occasional flashes of feeble resolve deployed by his predecessor and empower the nation’s armed forces lest they make a frantic recourse to the glorified hide-and-seek escapades with terrorists.

    Whatever good the incumbent administration seeks to achieve mustn’t be smothered by the miseries and death cries of victims of insecurity, unemployment, and the collapse of security infrastructure. 

    On President Tinubu’s watch, Nigeria mustn’t diminish into a Darwinian spectacle of turbulent energies: terrorism, warmongering, buck-passing, corruption, and inefficiency – the same failings for which previous administrations were tirelessly chastised. 

  • Remember when we grew food in our gardens

    Remember when we grew food in our gardens

    There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm, notes Aldo Leopold in A Sand County Almanac; one is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other, is that heat comes from the furnace.

    For the benefit of the superficial Millennial or Gen Z-er, the Curmudgeon paints a more fascinating picture of the source of all wealth. And in the true spirit of his portraiture, I’d say: Imagine yourself a ghommid, standing smack in the centre of Nigeria’s groundnut pyramids, animal ranches, and cocoa plantations, several decades ago.

    You take your ghommid’s shears and cut down surrounding flora to make a clearing for a farm. As the crops flower and animals fatten, you harvest the best grains and herd all the supple livestock into a giant pile, wave a magic wand, and it’s all turned into industry, buildings, and people spattered across gated high society and sprawling boondocks. You name this ‘progress’ and feign mutation from ghommid to giant.

    Such is the relationship between cities and the countryside, the modern and out-of-date, the dwindling past, and the silicon age. We must understand, however, that mortal Nigeria as the metaphorical giant is nothing but a dispensable minion in the economics of life.

    A Nigerian prototype of America’s Silicon Valley is the Millennial and Gen Zer’s most astute retort to the declining world foisted upon all by the older generation. But this has done too little to improve our fortunes. Ultimately, the burgeoning I.T. sector fosters ephemeral growth, rather than give relief, it delivers a Siamese bundle of utopia and dystopia in one birth.

    Young Nigeria, like the rest of the world, is besotted by this twin grotesqueness for its dazzle and espoused freedoms. More fascinating are the manifestations of the now ubiquitous start-up and fintech. A peculiar thing is happening: where the government fails to show up, foreign financiers or angel funders, if you like, are extending their interventions with curious funding.

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    Of course, nobody sees anything wrong with this. How could anyone deem such interventions scary in a world where oligarchs maul promising youths into armed bandits, career assassins, political hooligans, murderers, arsonists, and so on, while they embezzle public funds to entertain their wives and educate their children abroad?

    Thus the argument is that angel funding is great for the economy. These seed monies – irrespective of their slush equivalents used for funding regime change and dubious political springs worldwide –  are filling a crucial void in empowering youths who would otherwise be unemployed and left out of the loop of social interventions.

    Not all ‘seed money’ is a slush fund; a few agricultural startups have sprouted from the seeds of angel funders with stakes in diverse sectors of the agricultural economy. Some of their interventions subsist in the production of palm kernel oil (PKO) which is still currently inadequate for the companies that use it as raw material.

    Then some support farmers’ scale-up from peasant farming to commercial farming by providing extension services, quality seeds, access to finance, access to mechanization, and general advisory services on new and innovative methods in farming.

    These appreciable interventions deserve sustainable partnership between the government and the so-called angel funders of Nigeria’s Silicon Valley. But technology, like the crude oil boom, is Janus-faced, often manifesting as development’s womb and tomb.

    Little wonder Silicon Valley subsists as the playground of nerds and mindless herds on a leash. It is also the modern arena of the surveillance state, our private perversions and mob wars: government and the governed, husbands and wives, parents and children, lovers and their sexual nemesis, politicians and electorate, clash like gladiators – their mismatched whims the tools of shredding and seizure.

    The history of technology has often been characterized by a debate between enamoured romantics and dismissive sceptics. Neither divide, however, projects a convincing response to the opportunities and challenges that new technologies present; both in turn often exaggerate or downplay the impact of technology, and this leads to entrenched positions and polarization.

    Such entrenched positions can be harmful even if politically correct and more media-friendly than the highly differentiated analysis fostered by reality and careful, longitudinal research.

    Advocates of technology integration in agriculture must understand the discourses that drive it and, in some cases, harm its acceptance, and find a balance between the technological innovations that can be sustained by sound policies and those driven more by Machiavellian interests.

    Technology is useless if it isn’t humane and doesn’t improve life. Given the soil’s contribution to all life and wealth, technology must be deployed to enhance its healing and restorative properties by which disease passes into health, age into youth, and death into life.

    The wellspring of wealth is agricultural surplus, the ability to feed more than one with the labour of one. Agricultural surplus built the groundnut pyramids of the north and the cocoa plantations of the southwest.

    Agriculture became the mainstay of Nigeria’s economy and the foundation upon which the pioneer nationalists launched their agitation for independence.

    Nigeria was a leading agricultural economy in the 1950s, being the largest producer of palm oil, groundnut, cotton, and cocoa globally. The sector employed over 70 per cent of the labour force and accounted for as much as 62.3 per cent of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings.

    World Bank data reveal that agriculture contributed over 60 per cent to the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Even so, the sector grapples with a poor land tenure system, deficient irrigation farming, climate change, and land degradation. Others are low technology, high production cost and poor distribution of inputs, limited financing, high post-harvest losses, and poor access to markets.

    These challenges have stifled agricultural productivity, affecting the sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP. It has also led to increased food imports amid skyrocketing population and declining levels of food sufficiency.

    For instance, between 2016 and 2019, Nigeria’s cumulative agricultural imports stood at N3.35 trillion, four times higher than the agricultural export of N803 billion within the same period.

    Of its 92.4 million hectares, Nigeria boasts 82.0 million hectares of arable land; so far, just 34 million hectares of it have been cultivated. With population explosion and the government’s renewed drive to boost food security, agriculture has become increasingly crucial to our survival as a nation.

    But caught between the womb walls of the crude oil creeks and big tech, Nigeria lives imprisoned in starvation’s bower. The country asphyxiates amid deathly oil spills, stolen crude oil, misgovernance, and the tinseled serpents of Silicon Valley.

    We live in dire need of irrigated farmlands but our people shed more blood to irrigate the seasons; think farmers-herders clashes over grazing pasture and arable land.

    Yet Nigeria is lost to her Silicon Valley treats. What do we eat when the dazzle dims to a dwindle, as the oil boom did, and all innovations do, eventually? Like Cadmus sowing dragon’s teeth, shall we plant yesterday’s corpses and harvest them as fresh food for our bellies?

    The first supermarket, Kingsway Stores, appeared in the Nigerian landscape in 1948. Since then Nigeria has showcased dazzling groceries across a burgeoning wholesale-retail complex.

    Against the backdrop of it all, the old farm fades into patterns and cycles of strife. Remember when we grew food in our gardens, forests, and farm settlements? Remember when fresh harvest nestled in our pantries, the basement, and our backyards? 

    Today, it’s beyond the reach of everyone.

  • Wellspring of all surplus

    Wellspring of all surplus

    It’s about time the Nigerian city achieved a rural sweep. We should profit from what we grow. Right now, our cities deify baubles and digital enlightenment, which are superfluous to the country.

    This is why social life and commerce get grounded in the heat of a crisis. At the outbreak of the coronavirus, for instance, economic activities in most cities got grounded. It was as if the metropolis and the wheels of industry didn’t matter.

    Before the advent of big tech; before our cash crops and wildflowers got decimated by murderous herdsmen and their ruck; before pastoral farms frothed with pesticides and fishes floated belly-up in Ewekoro and the oil creeks in Niger Delta, we grew what we ate.

    Cities don’t produce food. They depend on the countryside to provide it. Save their food distribution systems, cities can quarantine, shut in, and shut down, so long as the countryside doesn’t.

    A deeper look at our fate through the pandemic revealed how worthless the Nigerian city is, with its parade of glitz and chug-chug of industry. But for the country’s agricultural economy, Nigeria would starve.

    President Bola Ahmed Tinubu has his work cut out for him. His agricultural policy must manifest beyond passionate pronouncements and gazetted intent.

    The wellspring of wealth is agricultural surplus, the ability to feed more than one with the labour of one. Agricultural surplus built the groundnut pyramids of the north and the cocoa plantations of the southwest.

    Nigeria was a leading agricultural economy in the 1950s, being the largest producer of palm oil, groundnut, cotton, and cocoa globally. The sector employed over 70 per cent of the labour force and accounted for as much as 62.3 per cent of the nation’s foreign exchange earnings.

    Over the last four decades, however, the yield of most key crops has declined, in particular, cassava, cocoa beans and wheat – a reflection of low utilisation of improved seedlings, agrochemicals and poor adoption of technology, according to a recent Price Water House report.

    The yield of rice on the other hand has increased steadily, resulting from government’s increased support for rice production, by providing subsidised agrochemicals and credit facilities through various intervention funds.

    In contrast to yield, land usage in Nigeria has increased across key crops, like cassava, cocoa beans, rice paddy and wheat. This has been primarily driven by an increase in the population engaged in farming, although production remains at a subsistence level.

    For most key crops, Nigeria’s share of global production has remained low. However, the rate of consumption has outstripped production. The deficit has been met largely by importation, making the country a net importer. On average, between 2011 and 2015, N1.4 trillion has been spent on food imports with wheat, milk, rice, sugar and malt extract, constituting the bulk of Nigeria’s food import bill.

    Consequently, Nigeria is vulnerable to changes in global agro-commodity prices, with a significant impact on inflation and foreign reserves. Between 2011 and 2015, agro-processed exports declined by 41 percent to N143 billion. These exports, which accounted for an estimated 20 per cent of Nigeria’s non-oil exports in 2015, were mainly leather and processed skin, alcoholic and non-alcoholic beverages, tobacco and cocoa derivatives.

    According to the FAO, Nigeria is estimated to have lost US$ 10 billion in annual exports of agriculture and agro-processed commodities including groundnut, palm oil, cocoa and cotton as a result of the decline in production of these commodities.

    In addition, the Nigerian Export Promotion Council (NEPC) attributed the decline in food exports to non-compliance with regulatory and documentation requirements for food imports to the European Union and the United Kingdom.

    Also, the World Bank estimates that Nigeria and other developing countries could have lost as much as US$ 6.9 billion in 2015, as a result of food export rejection.

    These challenges have stifled agricultural productivity, affecting the sector’s contribution to the country’s GDP. It has also led to increased food imports amid skyrocketing population and declining levels of food sufficiency.

    For instance, between 2016 and 2019, Nigeria’s cumulative agricultural imports stood at N3.35 trillion, four times higher than the agricultural export of N803 billion within the same period.

    Of its 92.4 million hectares, Nigeria boasts 82.0 million hectares of arable land; so far, just 34 million hectares of it have been cultivated. With population explosion and government’s renewed drive to boost food security, agriculture has become increasingly crucial to our survival as a nation.

    Understandably, former President Muhammadu Buhari sought to revivify the country’s agricultural economy at his assumption of office in 2015, and then, in 2019. Despite his rural preachment, the country’s fixation with oil rendered her a whited sepulchre, sullied by wastefulness and vice, the soot that will not out.

    Read Also: Nigeria records N1.888tr trade surplus in Q2, says NBS

    Nigeria needs agriculture. Agriculture employs about 70 percent of the country’s population thus it can be used to drive sustainable growth prospects through a value chain that turns raw commodities into processed goods for domestic consumption or export.

    President Tinubu must fund the diversification of agriculture to make it more appealing to a vast youth population that is spiritless about farming but might be attracted to processing, marketing, and other business opportunities along the value chain.

    The food emergency in northeast and northwest Nigeria brought on by the Boko Haram insurgency, banditry, infrastructure deficits, and the government’s response to them emphasises the need to expand the agricultural sector to guarantee food security and nutrition.

    Until then, the Nigerian city will subsist as a plague; it is diseased because its sensuality is both morbid and commercial. Its hidden graces unclad, like the proverbial harlot, self-exiled from the village but always returning under cover of night to stalk and prey on the countryside.

    The Nigerian city does too little for the countryside. Knowing this, President Tinubu announced his decision to resurrect the country by endowing its agricultural economy with remarkable fillips. To achieve this, he must ensure that both his team and tools, unlike Thel’s worms, aren’t pathogens miming his curative mantra.

    Tinubu must understand that his government cannot achieve agricultural boon simply by pronouncing passion to resources. He must thoroughly examine if resources are pronounced to his passion.

    While the rationale for prioritising agriculture is sound, many reforms will have to be enacted if the sector is to flourish. These reforms must also include measures to save rural Nigeria with the sheen continually sponged off its greenery by the city.

    It was hay that allowed populations to grow and civilizations to flourish among the forests of Northern Europe. Hay moved the greatness of Rome to Paris and London, and later to Berlin and Moscow and New York, writes Dyson.

    Hay was responsible for Nigeria’s first brush with economic glory. Between 1962 and 1968, Nigeria’s major foreign exchange earner was the agricultural sector where palm oil and groundnut made up around 47 per cent of the country’s exports. However, Nigeria’s position as an agricultural powerhouse declined through its oil boom.

    Caught between the womb walls of the crude oil creeks and digital tech, Nigeria lives imprisoned in starvation’s bower. Yet the government recites fantastic stories of agricultural rebirth thus rejecting the strife of contraries by which Nigeria convulses.

    At the outbreak of COVID-19, our storied artifice collapsed in hysterical retreat as the country leapt from its tinseled perch and dashed, shrieking back to its native valleys.

    What was hitherto regarded as an underprivileged fetish and peasant preserve became our major source of sustenance and rebirth. Nigeria weeps but does not recognise her tears.