Category: Olatunji Ololade

Few months ago, a colleague of mine told me in a voice laden with a sneer and veiled contempt that, “Nobody reads you guys anymore. Nobody cares what you write as a columnist. You are just wasting your time,” he said. According to him, the best form of social commentary is that which seeks to elevate and shamelessly venerate even the worst of Nigeria’s perverted ruling class. “You have to be smart,” he advised.

Few months later, another colleague told me in the same tenor that it’s about time I started sucking up to the politicians and industry leaders. “You need them more than you would ever know. You need connections with them and the money they can give you. You can’t keep writing English, you have to be smart,” he said.

Between the two, an indisputable truth resonates jarringly; it echoes the depth of our descent as men and citizens. Both colleagues of mine, while issuing a subtle mockery of my professional and personal ethics, endeavoured to tell me the truth as they have learnt to see it.

I agree with them that being close to politicians and sucking up to the latter manifests in almost instant and outrageous wealth for many journalists. Forget journalists, it is a veritable shortcut to instantaneous and sudden wealth for Nigerians of all gender, professional, religious and ethnic divides even as you read. Little wonder it has become trendy for many a Nigerian to virulently lambast the incumbent leadership or opposition until opportunity beckons for them to be co-opted into the special circuit of treasury looters, associate looters or aspiring looters. And this is the point at which they begin to exhibit ‘table manners.’

According to a famous and now domesticated human rights and political activist, “Table manners demand that when you eat, you don’t talk.” Thus in showing table manners, many Nigerians careen in the perilous swirl of the country’s tragedies, with their mouths stuffed, until the end.

The end is what should scare us. But nobody cares. Hardly anyone gives a hoot about that imminent epoch when greed, self-pity and deceit will no longer serve us. I speak of that looming epoch when we shall grope through the lattices of personal tragedy into the ruins of national disaster; when anarchy and genocide shall find their perch past corruption and greed, in our hearts – even as we burn and blaze in the name of mammon, tribe and tin-gods.

The language of our madness will not be understood by all even as our madness is patronized and enabled by all. In our madness, our perverted neighbours of the ‘first world’ shall nourish and thrive. Nigeria shall become that perfect prey for the ‘first world’ and all manners of world to rip off.

It’s not such a long haul to that epoch right now; the tragedies that would ruin us are right at our doorsteps. They are rooted in our hearts and clannish havens of chaos and plunder. They manifest as renewed agitation for Biafra, a bumbling senate, Boko Haram terrorism, falling oil prices, ongoing looting of our treasury by the incumbent state governors and recent devaluation of the naira.

In the wake of these tragic manifestations, not a few people rue President Muhammadu Buhari’s apparent psychological and moral resolve to steer Nigeria off the course of the troubled deep and incessant storms.

But even as we balk and fret over the likelihood of the country’s descent into socioeconomic and political recession, friends like mine and of the ruling class fixate on the next corrupt politician whose deep pocket they could scavenge from. This coven of parasites could be likened to the mythical harpies and servants of the furies. They abide in and currently run amok our socioeconomic and political space doling unequal plaudits to a savage ruling class, for a fee.

The men and women that profited from President Goodluck Jonathan’s political bazaar remain scheming, conniving and soulless supporters of his administration; together, they epitomise what the harpies connote. Like the latter, they afflict us like fortune hunters and airborne brigands, befouling our corridors of power and society with their droppings. They represent the aspect of bestiality that ravages and kills in order to sate its lusts.

These mentally and morally impoverished worshippers of filth would tirelessly argue that the former administration is the best that Nigeria ever had. They argue that President Jonathan was the best thing to happen to Nigeria politicizing his “humility” and “love of God” to the fascination and appreciation of Mr. President’s groupies nationwide.

There is the oft-repeated logic and inclination to blame this persistent and saddening malaise on greed, ‘enlightened self interest’ or capitalism; however, the impulse for giving a monster a mild name, the lust for acquisition, pursuit of gain and money are merely symptoms, like capitalism, of the society’s steady descent the slope of the decadent and grotesque.

Max Weber, the late German economist and social historian would say it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all cultures of the earth but I would say that the Nigerian malaise is brought about by the absence of an enduring moral code.

This deficit manifests in deficiencies of personal and societal ethics – the consequence of which is the preponderance and regeneration of tyrants, greedy-guts, fraudsters, narcissists, murderers and bloodhounds of all kinds and of all nature, across the country’s landscape.

The trials of Nigerians’ moral degeneration – as exemplified by the citizenry’s inordinate lust for money and the country’s recurrent tragedies– reveal an overarching tendency to savour short-term greed and relief over long-term prosperity.

Despite a protracted and tumultuous history of impoverishment and bad leadership, Nigerians continue to look for quick fix solutions by casting their votes for the clueless and corrupt at election time, for a fee, thus mortgaging the country’s present and future for short-term benefits.

Through decades of self-inflicted scourges and disasters, Nigerians continue to bemoan their tragic fate; while many argue that the country ruins because the youth are too weak and too selfish to spill as much blood as is required to rid the nation of every human and institutional affliction, many more contend that the country’s woes will disappear immediately poverty is eradicated by the ruling class.

We should be inching towards freedom but we aren’t. We should have attained freedom, but we haven’t; makes it a wonder what manner of patriots we have become. Destiny is what you experience by the fabrication of your own hand. It’s about time we desisted from excusing our evilness and stupidity in the name of fate.

It is our so-called intellectuals, labour leaders, radicals and human rights activists that amaze me; add to the mix every mercantile journalist, ‘media practitioner of note and substance’ and you have a perfect blend of Nigeria’s worst enemies. It will no longer do to excuse our idiocy and greed as pertinent elements of political and socio-economic expediencies; everybody knows that every one of us is playing his own card.

We are enjoying a great deal by selling out. It is what the domesticated activist called exhibition of “good table manners.” Funny how every journalist, labour leader, banker, doctor, cleric and activist to mention a few, have developed excellent “table manners.”

Ogun State looms like a gothic platitude of pain and death from its transit townships but the “Gateway State” is Governor Ibikunle Amosun’s bower of bliss. There, in his stately Eden, he lives immune and insensate to the ravages of ill-will and pent-up fury tearing the natives apart from inside out. Governor Amosun must be having a blast inside the Government House at Oke Mosan. He does not have to rise and retire to his bed everyday wondering if he would die along the deadly stretch of Lagos-Abeokuta highway, particularly at the spots where innocent children, mothers, fathers – dependants and breadwinners – die like stray fowls, accidentally or by installments, in his administrative landmine.

Governor Amosun’s loved ones are extremely lucky; unlike the mother who left home with her three children only for them to be brought back as mangled corpses from an accident, caused by bad road, to the deceased’s husband. Amosun is certainly favoured by the ‘gods,’ unlike the bereaved families who sent their wards to school only to receive news that they had been crushed to death by a steel container in a gory accident along the Sagamu-Benin expressway. Is Governor Amosun neglecting that death trap because it is a ‘federal road?’ If that is the case, is Governor Amosun solely remunerated from revenue he makes from Ogun State or from the ‘federal purse?’

Governor Amosun is one lucky dude as he does not have to live up to the promise he made to the poor, hopeless pupils of the Community Primary School, off Agoro road, Owode-Titun, Ota, Ogun State. One year and six months after they lost their classrooms to a violent rain squall, most of the 740 pupils have been learning with tears, under a crooked shed held together by wooden poles and corrugated iron sheets. The school’s Parents Teachers Association (PTA) constructed the shed last year when it was clear that the state government will not come to the children’s rescue. Although Governor Amosun promised to rebuild the school when his campaign train visited the area to seek re-election, he has since forgotten his promise and the area.

Thus through scorching sun blaze and violent rain squalls, the pupils huddle together helplessly, in futile lunges for comfort and cover from the ravages of nature, tearing at their fragile frames. For the only public primary school in the community, the descent into decay started in May last year, when a rainstorm blew off the roof of the block of six classrooms and the staff room. The storm also tore off the entire side of the building. Yet Governor Amosun conveniently forgets the sad fate of the poor pupils of Community Primary School in Owode-Titun, Ota.

Some cratered meters from the school, the stars are still a backdrop for the inhuman condition at Owode junction, just before you get to Ifo. Is Governor Amosun waiting for that expedient moment of disaster or road mishap of immense magnitude to occur before he swoops in with a bereaved mien and overzealous aides, to misappropriate anguish where he feels none?

The natives of Ijoko, Agoro, Ijako, Iyana-Ilogbo, Ilepa, Ijoko, Alade, Oju Ore, Ilo-Awela, Elekunmefa, Imise, Onihale, Singer, Lusada, Ewekoro, Atan-Ota and Igbesa to mention a few, are still dying slowly and accidentally, from the perils of plying their muddy and badly cratered roads and there is still ugliness in Lafenwa, Aiyetoro, Olugbode and various communities along Itele road.

From a distance, the piercing and indiscriminate glare of sunlight and moonshine desecrate these townships like tombs slipshodly carved along the graying highway that leads to Abeokuta, Ogun State’s capital city. Closer, the people and houses in the communities take shape like a stream of accidental shadows, their hard noises striking one’s face and making the senses numb with jarring clarity. It is their noiseless undertones that however, evoke intense feelings of awe and curiosity. Sad desperate glances of the natives inspire a thirst for buried narratives that they miserably learn to endure as unreal jests made by death.

Guess his Excellency in Ogun State, has learnt to glance without flinching at the straggle of human suffering emblematic of the pale ghost of his “Gateway State.” Wonder if he is unaware of the deaths and squalor across the townships; wonder if he knows that there are schools with better structures, histories, progressive and ideological foundations that deserve as much attention and support as he is currently giving his model schools’ phantasm; wonder if he simply chooses to ignore the descent of the tourist tracts where decay and death spit venom at the hapless citizenry, like Siamese cobras every day.

Governor Amosun is probably unmoved to affect heart-felt responses to the malaise. Perhaps he is making spirited gestures even as you read to extend citizenry-centred governance cum democratic dividends to the disillusioned natives of the state. Perhaps he just doesn’t know how to go about it.

Ignorance is not an excuse for denying the citizenry good governance and their fundamental human rights. It is no longer tenable to hoodwink the citizenry by chants of ‘Change’ and platitudinous avowal to abolish squalor and foster general prosperity; time has revealed what section of the citizenry such ideological ‘life boat’ solutions are meant to deceive. It shall no longer be “politically expedient” to neglect a class of the governed just because, by will or circumstance, they inhabit parts of state the ruling class would rather not lose sleep over; except at the time of election or re-election.

Governor Amosun is spending his second term in office which makes it even more dangerous for the APC to maintain dominance in Ogun State if he fails. When the party eventually presents its candidates for public offices in 2019, what glowing achievements will it point to as Amosun’s legacy and reasons why it should be given the people’s mandate again? The oft over-hyped and derided bridges and roads in Abeokuta? Or the equally contentious model school projects? These familiar arguments have gotten too old now and they are infinitely strange to the poor citizenry braving the perils of the state’s townships every day.

Life in Ogun State’s townships is in grave decline. Together, these neglected tracts constitute an ambiguous ‘sick rose’ accentuating Ogun State’s descent into a food for worms even as you read. Though a sick rose, Ogun State is manouvered to mimic a growth cycle in the hands of Amosun and amid the rabid PR blitz launched and managed by Camp Amosun.

That is why the state government will do nothing even if foreign investors  cum fortune hunters like cement giant, LafargeWAPCO Plc, subjects its host communities to terminal death, by its dangerous production activities, in desperate pursuit of profit. (It is instructive to note that LafargeWAPCO perpetrates in Ogun State, atrocities it wouldn’t dare commit in France and other European nations but that is a discussion for another day.)

Ogun State’s manifestation as a sick rose satirizes Governor Amosun’s preferred portraits of it as a bower of bliss. It reveals an inner hostility; the governor’s flirtatious art of concealment necessitates that truth’s approach must take the form of a rape. If not, the people of Ogun State will continue to die by the onslaught of the conqueror maggots of hypocrisy, neglect, arrant betrayal and underdevelopment afflicting the state.

Does Governor Amosun, like too many of his peers, consider truth as he hates to see it, as a perverse fetish? Does he believe that any critique or contradiction of his gospel of ‘Change’ is a swerve from goodwill and fruitfulness? If so, his much celebrated ‘Change’ project is diametrically opposed to the APC’s gospel of ‘Change.’

• To be continued…

Years pass like a dream of mist and our informed analyses, like a drunkard’s fart. It’s the stink that’s nauseating. It pervades every nook and cranny. It lingers. It assaults our airspaces like bad breath. Few things…very few things are more pathetic than a critical mob; gangs of columnists, journalists, hatchet writers and career critics may stir up strife but their efforts eventually pass as the hum of mosquitoes seeking to make a noise like thunder. Like the rest of the Nigerian mob, the social media critic, newspaper columnist and journalist symbolize a tiresome mercenariness of complacency, avarice and inertia. However, unlike the rest of the Nigerian mob, this critical mob epitomizes the tragic manifestations of the pious frauds of citizenship, like microbes hastening the decomposition of corpses.

Nigerians love being conned and the Nigerian ruling class knows that; so does the Nigerian critic. The latter knows that, if you can deceive the citizenry in grand and entertaining styles, you will get away with it more often than you could count thus the continual deception, impoverishment and murder of the Nigerian masses.

Like the masses or totality of the Nigerian mob, the critic suffers exposure to pain and humiliation for too long in the hands of the ruling class thus ending up in a pitiful state evocative of a condition of enthrallment in which the hypnotized individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer. Careful observation would however, suggest that foremost crusaders of the critical mob variously suffer paralysis of the intellect as does every hypnotized subject; consequently, the latter becomes enslaved to an object, a need, money, a perversion or an idea by which the hypnotizer (oftentimes the ruling class) directs and belittles him at will.

It’s a shame that I belong to the journalistic segment of this pathetic societal divide; as a journalist and newspaper columnist cum social critic, I am not in any way distinguishable from the rot emblematic of my colleagues in the Fourth Estate of the realm. However, much I as could try to absolve myself of blame, the society is wired to see all journalists as a bunch of shameless liars, pawns to tyrants and junkyard dogs.

We essentially epitomize a style of living which cultivates sincerity and is at the same time a fraud. We arrogate to ourselves rights to nobility and free speech by twisting truth into relative truths and true lies, in an existence that we have learnt to rationalize as gracious and irrevocably necessary. This has to be odious; it is.

Despite the cowardice and duplicity of Nigeria’s critical mob, it is amusing to see other constituents of this mob divide tirelessly chastise and identify the Nigerian journalist as a bane to progress and monumental disgrace to the society. To this, many a journalist and newspaper columnist have responded that the society essentially wishes that the journalist do not effectively fulfill his responsibilities to it. Likewise, I have corroborated such argument claiming that big business and politicians’ ownership of mainstream media gives them intimidating capacities to influence and set the agenda for the media and society in general.

This is an intimidating reality no doubt; it is obscenely silly and self-serving of the Nigerian society to continually muscle in the media’s job and prevent it from discharging its duties effectively and yet turn around to identify the Nigerian press as fraudulent and disgraceful.

However, this does not in any way ennoble the shamefulness and irresponsibility of the Nigerian press. Journalists, unlike the social media critic, delusional citizen or online journalist, press secretary or special media adviser to the ruling class, are expected to fulfill more sensitive and crucial roles to the society.

The Nigerian journalist should be the hero that perpetually cramps himself into demanding roles of watchdog. It is shameful however, that the contemporary journalist takes unpardonably dense and gruesome human elements for gods and worships them as such; by enslaving himself to such characters, the journalist is duly taken for some idle, nondescript human integer, extant in the world to entertain tyranny and have a few naira and demeaning errands thrown at him that he might get to enjoy a taste of the good life or a semblance of it.

Be it as Special Media Adviser to the President, Chief Press Secretary to the Governor, Personal Assistant to the MD, Corporate Affairs Manager or any other title created for an enslaved press intellectual within public or private sector, the journalist shirks his role as societal watchdog; he becomes lapdog, dung-dog or junkyard dog of the ruling class. In the strict slave system in which he works, there can scarcely be such a thing as crime; whatever his principal does is fair and justifiable – his ultimate aim is to keep his employer happy and thus guarantee the security of his meal ticket. It is no surprise therefore that the journalist and newspaper columnist who ought to serve as a check on the bestiality and excesses of the ruling class eventually become the defender and justifier of such vile.

Those who are not yet lured into the loop of schemes and largesse of the ruling class painstakingly become gadflies to the ruling class. They taunt and condemn every measure, utterance and action of the country’s leadership in desperate bid to bully whatever government excites their greed and duplicity till they include them as recipients of crumbs of the proverbial “national cake.”

As crucial appendage of Nigeria’s critical mob, the press has mutated into a contemptible factor, trollopy in conduct and pitifully cast in the stormy waters of Nigeria’s sociopolitics. Far flung in the murky waters, many have drowned, a paltry few struggle to swim against the tides while many more hang suspended, to be forced up or down by the chance currents of a sleazy, vicious world. How can such human elements fulfill the roles of watchdog and moral compass of the society?

For too long, the Nigerian journalist has tirelessly fulfilled the role of criminal constituent amid the nation’s critical mob divide. So doing, he becomes blamable for every ill and any ill symptomatic of the country’s steady descent the slope of amorality and currency-activated self-destruct.

What is however, true of the journalist is peculiarly true of other human elements of the Nigerian society; contemporary happenstances attest to the fact that the current generation of Nigerians, the youth in particular, is afflicted by an intense tumult of self-interest, gluttony and intricate trashing of spirit that destroys whatever nerve could be mustered in pursuit of truth, personal and societal progress.

Poverty and job insecurity are ascribed as our reasons for betrayal; true, the society betrays the journalist by the hour but it’s about time we stopped repaying perfidy with perfidy. It’s about time we evolved dependable and practicable means of creating and instituting a leadership, society and media practice we could trust.

We could begin by ditching our familiar whining and blame-mongering to evolve a culture of truthfulness and conscientious citizenship. It is no longer permissible to contend that the journalist is only a reflection of the society he serves. By advancing such argument, we box ourselves into straits of sophistry and frantic rationalizations. This is unacceptable of purported men of letters and conscience of the society. Truth is what we should speak. Truth is what we should be guided by.

Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu is a supporting actor in President Muhammadu Buhar’s ‘change’ fiction or drama of ‘change’ if you like. At a glance, he seems an ideal ambassador of ‘change’ but has he the political and ideological bent to actualise Mr. President’s anti-corruption crusade in the oil sector? Has he the nerve to turn his office into something more than a labyrinth and political jailhouse? If he fails, his name and reputation will suffer for it.

There is no gainsaying the Nigerian corridor of power is booby trapped to thwart genius. A rabble of genii has fallen in recent past to her decadent pleasures and cruelties. By their deeds, they become a profanation of sterling stewardship in public office. After Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Reuben Abati to mention a few, one gets the feeling that entrusting a genius with a Nigerian public office is an exercise in futility. It’s akin to trying to tie the Mediterranean with palm fronds for storage against drought.

Time was, when the argument was entirely against the ‘system’ thus making a case for the genius. But a new school of thought emerges and it advances the perspective that the genius should no longer be let off the hook by the simple technicality of his perceived powerlessness against a corrupt system and hostile work environment. That is simply one way to look at it and it is a grossly skewed portrait of the status quo presented in defense of the genius.

Managing a public office is no walk in the park, particularly in Nigeria, yet the Nigerian genius with an Ivy League education and impressive track record, eagerly accept to serve the country, promising hope and positive change. It is always fascinating to see such individuals however, morph into grotesque apparitions of the patriots they were meant to become. Annoyingly, they do so with unpardonable cheek and a swivel-it-finger-in-your-face stance.

Kachikwu should be different. He should be that interpreter of ‘change’ who keeps his wits about him. He shouldn’t fall to the lure of the decadent and all powerful ‘system.’ Can he? His predecessors suffered irreparable loss of self; Kachikwu shouldn’t. Salaciousness, lewdness, avarice and extreme covetousness are familiar hyper-states that destroyed preceding genii by stifling their minds and enslaving them to the attraction of vulgar luxury and other unimaginable obscenities. Lots of promising folk have extinguished in name and status on this charred, crimson path. It takes a man of integrity and strong personality of unusual kind to scorn and tower above such decadence.

In the unfolding drama of ‘change,’ greed is the depravity that Kachikwu should shun. The ‘young oil Turks’ and the aging cabal dominating the oil sector over which he currently presides have overtime, evolved an enduring culture of acquisitiveness, self-centeredness and mediocrity as the benchmark of stewardship and moral fibre in the nation’s oil sector. With the connivance of the immediate past administration, they created and sustained a daemonic lyre of gluttony and lust as the language of transaction and service in the oil industry.

Consequently, the need for competence and accountability was serially altered into an imperial hankering for unearned dividends and mechanised pilfering. Public service in the oil sector thus split into two, taking on the forms of a vulgar gladiatorship by perverse civil servants and leisure-class banditry by aberrant oil magnates.

At the twilight of the last administration, Nigeria came face to face with the snazzy promiscuity and dishonesty of the characters that ran the oil industry aground. President Buhari swore to retrieve the country’s looted funds from these bandit breed. To this end, the nation is treated to a tragicomedy-styled hunt and prosecution of the culprits at home and abroad. While it is too early to give the president kudos for operationalising his anti-corruption crusade beyond platitudinous jingle, one cannot but appreciate the haunted glares of the culprits as they scurry for safe havens abroad, their trails littered with their plundered and pasty spoils.

Kachikwu had better take in the imagery of nemesis and remorse. Let it guide him as he serves as the Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) or as he prepares to assume his touted new portfolio as a minister for the oil sector.

Lest we forget Kachikwu’s assurance to Nigerians that although the challenge of cleaning NNPC will be a bumpy ride, it will be exciting and it will eventually yield positive results. Positive results for whom? It’s about time the NNPC boss understood that Nigerians are more aware and interested in their affairs. Nigerians are paying his salary and they deserve more than his subtle retractions and fragile excuses.

Agreed, fuel is being sold at N87/per litre at the moment but for how long? Nigerians expect him to evolve a regime that would make fuel more affordable to the citizenry and eliminate insititutionalised corruption in the NNPC. Nigerians expect him to furnish the country periodically, with details of the workings and actual proceeds of the oil industry. It is not only the president that he is accountable to in such respect. There are a lot of other products refined from the nation’s crude oil, in the spirit of accountability and his touted love of transparency, let Kachikwu furnish Nigerians with a transparent account of the workings of the oil corporation. Nothing should be done in secret anymore. It’s about time Nigeria stopped watching helplessly as her public officers, NNPC top executives inclusive, meet with oil magnates in hotel lounges and suites abroad. Any such meeting done in secret with a select few often reek of suspicious or malicious intent against the progress of the nation’s oil sector and the country in general.

It could be rewarding fellating Kachikwu’s ego but that would be disastrous to his persona and career as a public servant. Nigeria needs Kachikwu to evolve and uphold professionalism and moral culture impervious to degeneration and machinations of the oil industry’s bogeymen.

If Kachikwu succeeds at his current brief, the ricochet of his exploits would serve a greater purpose than justifying President Buhari’s second term agenda, if actually the president nurtures any such ambition. Besides ameliorating the pains of the citizenry, his sterling success and patriotism at his job, will stand him in good stead for more significant leadership role in future. Kachikwu needs to evolve an enduring moral code unyielding to any baggage from his past – if any such baggage actually exists – 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 but ultimately, moral codes are of inestimable benefits to civilisation. Without them, we are vulnerable to the degenerate barbarism of 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.

Picture a future with an unsullied Kachikwu, Okonjo-Iweala, Babatunde Fashola, Reuben Abati and their likes in sensitive public offices and as drivers of the Nigerian State. Imagine a future whereby such men and women are peacefully ushered off the corridors of power after meritorious service in the interest of the collective – that would be a future to die for no doubt.

At the risk of sounding Polly-Annaish, Kachikwu should understand that public service and valour need to be progressively planned, not cashed in upon or taken advantage of; and that there are all sorts of questions and consequences to ponder before he adopts the next economically or politically expedient measure. At  the end, Kachikwu will be judged by how adroitly he scorns or tones to a minimum, the arrogance implicit in leadership and corruption characteristic of power.

In few months, Emmanuel Ibe Kachikwu will be seen as a national boon or disaster. He will be hailed as a round peg in a round hole or tirelessly maligned as the fig that lets down the leaf, the affliction that has to be concealed or expunged. Until then, Kachikwu will stew in metamorphosis. The Group Managing Director (GMD) of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) dissolves into multiple identities characterised by the oil industry’s familiar bogeys, even as you read.

His transformation is akin to Daniel Orowole Fagunwa’s mythical forest ghommid’s. Other beings pass through him  as if he were a wraith. He is like Fagunwa’s ghommid, who transforms into a tree, an antelope, a raging inferno, a bird, water and a menacing snake. While Fagunwa’s mythical creature assumes more or less the characteristics typical of its new category of being, Kachikwu struggles to preserve his individuality, mostly the capacity to think and act humanely, against the power and intimidation of Nigeria’s oil cabal.

Yes, Kachikwu, despite his brilliance and touted vigour, is hardly a match for Nigeria’s predatory band of oil Turks and cliques in the energy sector. But his office demands that he assumes a front thus his frantic posturing and pretension to purpose and valour. It would be delightful however, to see Kachikwu succeed where his predecessors failed woefully but he needs generous doses of forthrightness to do that. The NNPC’s GMD needs to be a man or the best form of the man that his employer, President Muhammadu Buhari wants him to become. Can he?

Despite his initial braggadocio or what is known in street parlance as Initial Gra Gra (IGG), Kachikwu seems woefully handicapped to effect the needed turnaround in the nation’s oil sector. Perhaps he isn’t, he simply glamourises the knack for making uninformed commentaries and pledges before assessing his capacity to deliver on his words.

Take for instance, his circus acts in the nation’s oil sector; a recent report by The Cable, an online medium credited Kachikwu with the information that the nation’s refineries are currently working at 30 percent capacity as against the minimum 60 percent required to generate profit.

He was quoted thus: “Personally, I will have chosen to sell the refineries, but President Buhari has instructed that they should be fixed. After they are fixed, if they still operate below 60 per cent, then we will know what to do…The 90-day ultimatum for the refineries to be fixed will end in December and Port Harcourt Refinery looks like the only one that will meet the deadline, but we will wait and see what happens at the end of the 90 days.”

If you take the pains to skim over the folds of officialese and doleful cliffhanger nuggets contained in his disclosure, you just might find that Kachikwu is tacitly preparing our minds for one of his several failures or his only failure perhaps. Earlier, he said that in view of the nation’s low refining capacity, there was need to establish more refineries in the country. “I am pushing to build new refineries next to our existing plants in order to boost the nation’s refining capacity for the common good,” Kachikwu stated, explaining that the new refineries will be developed by private investors and that NNPC’s role will be just to provide them with space close to the existing refineries to enable them share key facilities such as pipelines and storage facilities.

If you consider this in light of his alleged preference for selling off the refineries, you could be forgiven for getting lost in the NNPC head honcho’s maze of double speak and embarrassing retractions.

Following his recent cancellation of the oil swap deals instituted by the immediate past administration of President Goodluck Jonathan and his Petroleum Minister, Diezani Alison-Madueke, the NNPC boss did a cartwheel to tactfully rescind his decision. Apologists of Kachikwu claimed he was only doing the president’s bidding but critics of the NNPC boss earnestly aver that President Buhari couldn’t have taken the decision without the knowledge and approval of the NNPC boss. Whatever the case, Kachikwu is either a force that the presidency reckons with or an pitiable mascot, negligible human sound bite employed to unquestioningly rubber-stamp Buhari’s caprices. Is he?

It would be recalled that major oil tycoons became jittery and desperate to save their businesses in the wake of the NNPC’s cancellation of Offshore Processing Agreements (OPAs) and Crude Oil Swap (COS) deals entered with them. This was because their businesses plummeted in the absence of the several shady deals entrenched by the immediate past corrupt regime. Likewise, the federal government placed a ban on 113 oil vessels for perceived infractions. The presidency has since lifted the ban on the 113 tankers and the NNPC has tacitly reinstituted the controversial OPAs and COS, it would seem.

It would be recalled that the Ahmed Joda-led Presidential Transition Committee had recommended to the Buhari administration to carry out a comprehensive audit of all OPAs and COS deals entered by the NNPC. The committee said the audit would help government identify and claim any reimbursements for excess crude oil lifted under the controversial OPA and swap arrangements to establish the quantity of products delivered based on a fair and transparent audit process. The GMD of the NNPC subsequently hinted that all Production Sharing Contracts, (PSCs), Joint Venture Contract Agreements (JVCAs) and all other contracts between the NNPC and its various partners would be reviewed to reflect actualities in the global oil and gas industry. He stated that as part of the measures to optimise the marketing of Nigeria’s crude oil and secure new market potential, the number of off-takers for the proposed 2015/2016 term contracts, which would emerge after a planned rigorous competitive bid had been pruned from 43 to 16. The corporation however, extended invitation to few oil companies affected by the cancellation of the deal.

Despite Kachikwu’s celebrated show of running the process in the spirit of transparency, fears abound that the NNPC boss is impotent against the intimidating clout and pressure from certain quarters that he favours the same corrupt oil firms responsible for the misfortunes bedeviling the nation’s oil sector.

Given his sterling achievements in academia and the private business sector, Kachikwu seemed every inch capable for the onerous task of sanitising the grossly corrupt and ailing oil sector, at his appointment as NNPC boss. A doctor of Law, Kachikwu graduated with distinction from the University of Nigeria (UNN) Nsukka and he was the best graduating student from the Law School, winning seven of the available nine prizes in 1999. He holds the LLM Harvard Distinction and was best graduate in 1980 with specialisation in Energy, Petroleum Law and Investment. Kachikwu has more than 30 years experience in policy- making positions in the petroleum industry serving in various capacities thus he seems well equipped for the job but for a snag, he is a Nigerian genius. Nigerian genii seldom fluorish in public office. Ultimately, they serve as puppets or clueless characters rubber-stamping and enabling the greed of their principals or associates in corridors of power.

Kachikwu, like such genii, has betrayed little character or justifiable individuality so far in his position as NNPC boss. Is the high office gradually nullifying his fabled genius as it did the smarts of former finance minister, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala? It is often said that a public officer assumes and reflects the character of his superior principal or employer; if that be the case, the presidency becomes the teat from which Kachikwu sucks his new identity. The impact so far, has been enlightening.

• To be continued…

• (Ignorant youth, motivational speakers, youth leaders…con-artists)

Like captives, our youth are shackled by webs of ‘brilliant’ arguments. They are smitten by random sound bites and quotations by professional ‘life coaches’ and ‘motivational speakers.’ It doesn’t matter that anecdotes they retail are not much expression than sound.

It doesn’t matter that characters by whom they are spellbound, are ultimately foetal-adults with no honest livelihood and relatable experience to their name. Young, fresh graduates and undergraduates; rich, spoilt brats without the least anecdotal work and life experiences mount the podium at random, hawking clichés and mesmerizing sound bites to teach clueless, idle youth to tread paths even they would rather not tread. Sublime, isn’t it?

It is our tragedy today that Nigeria parades ‘promising’ youth with the heart of a lion and wit of a hyena. It’s our tragedy that our youth talk the talk of champions and walk the walk of cowards.

A simple lust remains our woe. Now more than ever, we are desperate to harvest sugarcane where we planted thistle. That is why we become easy prey for rampaging motivators to rip off.

Their talk is of ‘seed.’ Bet their unfortunate, middling, ignorant audiences do not know that every session they attend, they plant no seed; rather they present as fertile earth for their crafty motivators and ‘youth leaders’ to sow in and reap from.

Let us not dwell on their usual fallacies; there are no universal solutions and approaches to life that are practicable by all and applicable to all. Peculiar problems beget peculiar solutions. Individual remedies lie in the hands of individual man. They are usually relative and self-taught, as different circumstances dictate.

Which is why, I maintain that our ‘motivational speakers’ and ‘youth leaders’ are fraudsters – particularly the child-adults role-playing wise adults. What is it that gets to you? Their clean-cut suits or passionately belted pick-me-ups, and psycho-babble they steal from more reputable frauds or reliable role-models every day?

Today, the Nigerian educational system fails: the western model and our indigenous, religious, cultural models inclusive. The evidence abounds in the quality of our middling youth. Were we as promising as we are deemed to be, we would understand that the so-called regenerative words of Zig Ziglar, Jim Rohn, Brian Tracy, Stephen Covey would sound just as lame springing from the lips of the lazy, scheming brats parading themselves as Nigeria’s array of “upward, mobile, promising youth leaders and motivational speakers.”

Were you as intelligent as you claim to be, you would understand that even Ziglar goofed when he said that “Success is dependent on the glands – sweat glands,” for success hardly depends primarily, on hard work. There are other essentials including attitude, perseverance, doing what you love and loving what you do. After all, a person may be a passionate artist, and be successful – just because he loves what he does, nothing feels like “work,” let alone, hard work.

You see, motivational phrases that are based on one person’s experience don’t really work for the vast majority of people – successful or not. At least, you could quote the likes of Ziglar, Covey et al. You could hardly glean appreciable anecdotes from Nigeria’s band of ‘motivational speakers.’

It’s about time you saw them for the fraud they have become – for what promising youth  in their prime would abandon medicine, law, journalism, education, engineering for ‘motivational speaking’ even before they earned their first keep?

It’s the lazy, fraudulent type that does that. It’s the scheming, greedy kind that does that. True motivation, wherever it is truly given, requires neither a fee nor payment of any kind from the recipient. It need not be seen as a money-making venture.

The giver, is at best, honest and iconic; an indisputable champion and veteran in whatever discipline he is practiced. He inspires the youth and elderly alike without being aware or having to force it. And many of such role-models would neither hawk nor vend any magic formula to attaining success or self-actualisation.

The best they could do is to share the adventures of their souls in the stormy and pliant realities called, ‘life.’ And the best you could do is to excite by their fortitude and faith in the universe’s steadiness in process of retribution and rewards, as determined by individual human’s endeavors and contributions to the global enterprise.

There are no top 10 secrets to getting rich. Once you’ve solved your current problems, you’ll be rewarded with a whole new set of harder problems. There is no free lunch. No psychic to tell you the winning lottery numbers.

That book you read? Well, that’s just some narcissist’s story that had to be embellished a bit so that you might be excited to buy it. There are no easy answers.

This is the cold hard truth that you’d pay to avoid. Covey and Tracy et al may not be frauds but Nigeria’s increasing band of psycho-babblers constitute the worst form of fraud. The reason why these foetal-adults and lazybones thrive is because there is a strong demand from an audience desperate for the illusion they sell. You.

The truth is otherwise too painful, and no one wants to pay good money for it – they are already living it. That is why they fake escape from it. Do you too? Remember, there is no luxuriant path to success. The lanes are strewn with hindrances and so on.

You are a fraud if you are more interested in getting ahead than doing what is right – like following the slow, steady path of honest industry to progress or something like it. Bet this is where you get to say: “Keep spewing rant and whatnots, those young girls and boys are smiling to the bank every second.”

Well, what can I say; the universe always corrects every imbalance and deceitfulness to its equilibrium. That is why those thriving, scheming ‘youth leaders’ and ‘life-coaches’ you see in Nigeria today, could fall into irrelevance, bankruptcy and disrepute tomorrow by a subtle twist of fate.

It’s about time you lived life by your own terms. It’s about time you repossessed that quiet confidence and steadfast belief in your innate ability to confront and solve challenges as they arise. You need no master plan or magic formula–just a general direction in which to proceed, content that confronting some bit of vicissitude in the road less traveled might better allow your inimitable aptitude to flourish.

You need not the heart of a lion and the wit of a hyena to navigate the shoals of objective reality and perceptual delusions. You could try the slow, steady path.  Or you could seek direction by serving as sound-boxes for the emptiness and fraud your favourite ‘motivational speakers’ perpetuate. If you choose the latter path, knowing that having attempted every perfect formula you pay them to oblige you, you will find suddenly, that obvious yet ignored pointer to the path you ought to have traveled.

Then you will realize how dismal your life has become. You will find you have squandered your youth on impotent saws and debilitating sound bites. You will find you have avoided harsh, unalterable reality for the love of pick-me-ups and sugar-coated shortcuts, only to encounter it in its most vindictive temper in your twilight.

The presidential media adviser had flawed gender because he had no real self or moral substance, in the last dispensation. Ultimately, he played errand boy and court sycophant to Mr. President. He could be likened to the celebrity hairdresser, boudoir confidant or presidential lounge lizard perpetually nodding in affirmative to the caprices of his principal, the president. He was constantly engaged at the feet and filth attic of the president. Flattery and malice leapt from his forked tongue as he attacked the president’s perceived detractors.

Last dispensation, the Special Adviser to the President on Media Affairs was pliable and servile, a deformation of Castiglione’s courtier. He projected with slavish plasticity, the president’s whim and wile. His identity was self-evacuated as he persistently opened himself like a glove to the presidential palm. Like Castiglione’s male harlots, his shameless self abasement was unmanly and amoral; he elevated bum over forelock in a flagrant rite of political sodomy. This should not be Femi Adesina.

The former editor and director of The Sun newspapers until his appointment, flaunted no trait of the fawning page nor was he ever the smooth flatterer and intellectual thug, twisting and turning with changing circumstance. Femi Adesina was never insanely reactive. He was never a parody of masculinity whose words and deeds boomed as cloying mime of a politician’s desire. My former editor was never a perversion of male bonding neither was he a spectacle of submission and ideological sodomy. He was Femi Adesina, widely respectable, poster icon of quintessential journalism.

Then he became Special Adviser on Media Affairs to President Muhammadu Buhari and every virtue he was known by, is constantly put to the test, by the second. The jury may be out on his capacity to stem the tide of journalism’s most abhorrent malady, the intoxication of power and money, but I am keeping faith in Mr. Adesina’s incontestable virtues.

His new office shouldn’t corrupt him or cause him to mutate into a clueless sounding board for Mr. President or a massager of his ego. That is why his recent article: “A new sheriff is in town,” gives serious cause for concern. While most journalists would sheepishly egg him on and cantankerously aver that he was simply doing his job, Mr. Adesina should be wary of such freeloaders who would always urge him to toady up to Mr. President, “As long as it is lucrative.” They only care what free money they may make from him as kickbacks for “making his work easier for him.”

Mr. Adesina’s piece was verbose with flattery ; his use of exclamation marks and aggressive bid to portray President Buhari as a hero was uncalled for. Nigeria sailed past that bight few months ago. We are done propping Buhari up as our hero, it’s time for him to truly match his heroic promises with actions that will resonate positively in the life of the average Nigerian.

Heroes grow into outsized monsters, in a republic of villains and court sycophants. This minute, President Buhari is our hero, tomorrow, he may become the brute in our recurring nightmares, if we do not take care. Perhaps the statesman from Daura possesses the essential ethics and character to resist the lure of ‘enlightened self interests,’ ‘economic and political expediencies’ characteristic of the Nigerian ruling class. Perhaps not, but in the next few months, Nigeria would know if she was fortunate to return Muhammadu Buhari as President-elect at the last presidential elections.

There is no gainsaying Nigeria is afflicted by political profiteers comprising the ruling class and various segments of the poor, struggling masses. In the ensuing degeneracy of politics and cultural ethos, the hero we know today may morph into a dreadful monster. Given that power is the brandy of the turncoat, there is need to scrutinize President Buhari uncompromisingly.

Mr. Adesina needs to know that President Buhari’s touted anti-corruption fight is simply noise-making at the moment. When the ‘corrupt’ get prosecuted and sent to jail for their misdemeanor, Nigerians will believe him. And despite his touted reduction of his salary and that of his deputy, President Buhari is not working pro bono. He is being paid for the work he does. And it’s an open secret that his cozy allowances among other frills of being President and living in Aso Rock are the stuff the finest fantasies are made of hence no matter how vociferously he announces the cut in his salaries, his apologists and most virulent critics will continue to see him as the luckiest, richest and most powerful Nigerian alive.

Buhari has been cuddled enough, by the media and his most ardent supporters. Nigeria needs him to work now. And no matter the floweriness and duplicity of spin accorded his first 100 days in office, very little has changed since Buhari became President. Of course, Nigerians discuss with mixed feelings his performance so far; his critics persistently call him “Baba go slow,” a pun on his perceived snail pace even as his diehard apologists cite steadier electricity supply, more decisive military onslaughts against Boko Haram terrorist sect, sack of corrupt public officers and renewed anti-corruption fight as worthy achievements of his administration.

Truth is, Buhari is yet to do anything extraordinary; if electricity supply has become steadier, it was never meant to be unsteady in the first place. Part of his duty as President is to facilitate and guarantee stable electricity supply. If fuel is being sold at N87 per litre, Nigeria pays Buhari to ensure that the pump price of fuel is affordable to most Nigerians.

It need be acknowledged however, that his globally acclaimed honesty and integrity as a man, ex-soldier and politician exerts reasonable influence and pressure on erstwhile corrupt individuals and institutions to do a cartwheel in pursuit of the good of all. That is appreciable and commendable of the retired general. But there is a limit to what his integrity and personal ethics prior to his emergence in office can do for him.

Integrity is not enough to resolve the nation’s economic woes. It is not enough to transform Nigerians into law-abiding citizens overnight. At the moment, Buhari is still the president of the rich. And that is because he is yet to evolve policies that will liberate the economy and citizenry from the stranglehold of certain influential and powerful characters. And maybe he is busy with the blueprints of  the ‘change’ he promised; the ‘change’ we can believe in. Who knows?

The banking sector, oil sector, political sector, cement and grain industries are still under the vicious yoke of characters whose selfish interests continually clash with the best interests of the impoverished masses and struggling middle class who braved bullets and cudgels of the same elements, to vote for Buhari.

I am sure President Buhari is aware that hardly any bank director, oil and cement entrepreneur, politician, royalty, militant and junkyard-dog-journalist is in love with him. Many worked and prayed assiduously for his failure at the polls and no sooner did he win than they began to pray and work against the success of his administration. At his emergence, they understood like Adeshina intoned, that ‘a new sheriff is in town’ and their shady deal regime under former President Goodluck Jonathan was over.

If it was and still is Buhari’s wish to transform Nigeria into an Eden of sort, it would be heavenly of him to succeed. But let him know that, in heaven, saints don’t become ‘God’ and an angel is nobody in particular. It is the job Femi Adesina to play the devil’s advocate and make him understand this fact.