The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  •  Of molue, market chat

     Of molue, market chat

    Lawal Ogienagbon

     

    THERE is something missing in the title of this piece which was deliberately left out. It is as good a place for a chat as molue, that once upon a time ubiquitous commercial bus in Lagos, and a market. It is the bar, a place of fun, wine and women patronised by the lowly, the high and mighty, as well as the innocent and the street wise. For the hottest stories in town, just take a ride in a molue or visit a market and a bar.

    The bar was left out because the molue and the market are situationally relevant to this article. The molue and the market are connected to what happened to the two prominent Nigerians who ran into trouble with the security agencies following their public declaration of what they heard inside a molue and a market, respectively. The late Dr Tai Solarin, an educationist, and Dr Obadiah Mailafia, a central banker and politician, may have acted at different times,  but what they did resonated nationwide, despite the events being 31 years apart.

    The first event happened in 1989 during the regime of  the maradonic military dictator Ibrahim Babangida. The junta was known for its excesses in everything it did. It claimed that it toppled the Buhari military regime in 1985 for the administration’s excesses. Just imagine! Riding on the wave of the warm reception for him, Babangida promised ‘not to scorch the people  with snake, like my predecessor’,  but to treat them with love. It was a ruse.

    Within a short time, he had burnt his bridges and the people started complaining, especially when he forced the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) down their throats. To the Babangida regime, SAP had no alternative. The late Chief Gani Fawehinmi (SAN) was arrested and thrown into detention for organising a seminar on the ‘Alternative to SAP’. While the people were sapped by SAP, those in power fed fat on the commonwealth. They stashed money and property abroad. To them, it was a sin to be in government and not own foreign assets. They did it brazenly because, according to Babangida, they were not only in government,  but also in power. Since the people knew where the power was, they blew muted trumpet on many of the things they knew for the fear of their lives.

    Only the brave can dare the lion in its den.  Solarin showed he was one in 1989 when he came out to accuse Babangida of stashing money abroad.  Before he went public with that information, the country had been agog with it. In bars, motor parks, molue and related commercial buses, as well as other places where people gathered, the discussions always centred on the stupendous wealth their leaders kept abroad. They were enraged by the information, but none knew its source. They believed the information, however,  and carried it from bar to bar, molue to molue, market to market until it got to every part of the country. There was nowhere that people did not learn about what later came to be known as the “Ebony Story”. Ebony, a popular American magazine, was wound up a few months ago.

    How did it get that name? After Solarin came out with the information, he was invited by the State Security Service (SSS). The asthmatic Solarin went to the Ikoyi, Lagos office of the agency, where he was interrogated. Having found that Solarin could not substantiate his allegation, the SSS decided to make a show of the whole thing on national television. In the agency’s thinking, that was the way to humilate the renowned educationist before his admirers for making a big deal out of  what it considered gutter talk. The plan backfired,  not because it was not well executed, but because the people no longer trusted  the government.

    How will they trust a government that did not keep its promise to accept the outcome of the debate on whether or not Nigeria should accept the International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan? The people said no to the loan, but the government went through the backdoor by adopting SAP to apply the IMF loan “conditionalities” in the country.  Rather than see Solarin as an offender, the people treated him as an hero. As he was grilled on the Nigerian Television Authority (NTA) Network News that night by a shadowy figure whose voice was only heard, barking questions at him, viewers felt that the educationist was being unjustly treated. Why bring him on national television in such a disrespectful manner and be shouting questions at him, they wondered.

    “Dr Solarin, can you tell the world where you got your information from?” Before he could even answer,  the interrogator had fired the next question, “here is a copy of the May 1989 edition of Ebony, can you show me where the story is in it”. Solarin coolly and calmly told his tormentor that he got the information “in a molue and that it was published in Ebony”.

    Like Solarin 31 years ago, Mailafia was invited by the Directorate of State Service (DSS),  as SSS is now known,  over his claim that a northern governor is the commander of Boko Haram.  Mailafia spoke during an interview with a radio station. His statement went viral. As he said after he was first quizzed by the DSS, he never envisaged that his statement would go viral. Mailafia, who returned to DSS for another round of interrogation on Monday, is an influential figure who contested the last presidential election on the platform of African Democratic Congress (ADC). Like Solarin before him, he enjoys the confidence of some people in power.  He could have met these people to verify his claim before going public with it. But would these people have spoken with him on the veracity or otherwise of the information?

    That is the kernel of the matter. Nobody in power would have told him anything about it. They would have gone round in circles and asked him to ignore the information because it is fake news or hate speech. The Federal Ministry of Information has since wielded the big stick, slamming a N5 million fine on the radio station for ‘hate speech’. Hate speech as defined by who? The ministry, which has no such judicial power? We await the court’s decision on the issue as a lawyer has sued the ministry and the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC).

    If a governor is really the commander of Boko Haram, would it be easy for security operatives to get him? I find it difficult to believe though that a governor commands the insurgents.  What time will the governor have for the group? He cannot hold the jobs of governor and Boko Haram commander at the same time? With the kind of people that members of the group are, it may be difficult for a governor to be their leader.  They will be the very ones to give him out by their disdain for his office and the way they carry themselves around town. Who is that governor that can cope with the demands of these insurgents?  Governors and Boko Haram are two parallel lines that cannot meet.

    With the throng of security men around him, is it possible for a governor to hold office in the day and be Boko Haram commander at night?  To be able to do that, his security men must also be Boko Haram members. Mailafia heard something and said something. According to him, he got the information from a trader in the market. Should he have passed the information to the security agencies? How would they have handled the information if he had given it to them? Arrest the poor trader and put Mailafia in trouble with his people who knew why they confided in him? Either way, it is a no-win situation for the polymath, who cannot afford to be seen to betray his people.

     

     

  • The Biden-Harris ticket in US election

    The Biden-Harris ticket in US election

    Jide Osuntokun

     

    Finally this year’s party conventions have kicked off with the on-going virtual Democratic Party Convention to formally nominate Vice President Joe Biden and Senator Kamala Harris as the candidates of the Democratic Party for president and vice president in the presidential election coming up on Tuesday, November 3. I had written in my previous column that the safest way to beat Donald J. Trump and Michael S. Pence is for the Democratic Party to field a Lilly-white ticket of Joe Biden and a white female senator or governor from somewhere in the mid-western, western or southern states of the Union because President Trump will unashamedly play up the racial card. Biden in his wisdom has chosen Kamala Harris, a senator from California as his running mate. This seems to have resonated well with important members of the party and within two days of the announcement, $48 million in campaign money have come in. This is a carefully calculated political move. Kamala Harris is the daughter of the late Professor Donald Harris from Jamaica who came to the prestigious University of California at Berkeley in the late 1950s as a graduate student in economics and who later rose to the rank of professor of Development Economics in Stanford in the 1970s. As a student he had met and married Shyamala Gopalan, an Indian lady from Chennai in Tamil Nadu in Southern India who had graduated from the University of New Delhi and had come to Berkeley for her doctorate degree in Biological Science and later specialized in breast biology and cancer. She was from a solid middle class family which accounted for her liberal and some will say radical views about politics and race relations. They married in 1963 and had two daughters, Kamala and her younger sister Maya. The marriage lasted only 12 years before the parents separated. Senator Kamala Harris is married to Douglas Emhoff a white legal practitioner. I have taken the pain of dwelling on the background of Senator Harris to indicate how much she represents the complex racial mix in modern America which Trump and his White nationalists are doing their best to reverse. The beautiful lady is as proud of her Jamaican roots as well as her Indian roots. As a young lady she used to go to Chennai in India to spend her long holidays with her grandparents who were politically engaged in the politics of India and the role of India particularly in the world and in the Non-Aligned movement. Senator Harris has confessed that her political awareness began at the feet of her Indian grandfather. She also has the confidence of a typical Jamaican who is well endowed with courage and self-assertion and sure footedness and the desire to excel. There is something interesting about people of Jamaican heritage in American life and politics going back to Marcus Garvey and in recent times to General Colin Powell who rose to the rank of Chief of Staff of the American military forces and later Secretary of State under George W. Bush after serving as National Security Adviser under George H. Bush. He was touted as a future president if only he would run for the office.

    On her own, Senator Kamala Harris was a distinguished no-nonsense Attorney-General of the state of California and took on all kinds of criminals without distinction of race colour or gender. As a senator, she has been an unforgiving interlocutor of every candidate of Trump for confirmation to the executive and the judiciary. She is a lawyer to the core and she marshals her points as a careful prosecutor whenever she is involved in a debate. Vice President Pence will find her a very formidable opponent in the vice presidential debate .She is a very attractive lady who brings some charm and even joy to the ticket headed by the dull and rather tentative Joe Biden who is apparently weighed down  by his 77 years on earth. If elected president, he will be the oldest man elected as American president. He is about two decades older than his running mate Kamala Harris.  Furthermore, Kamala Harris brings to the ticket youth and charm which is lacking in the doddering Joe Biden who is claimed to have confided in his supporters that he would only stay for one term of four years in office by which time he would be 81 years old. Kamala Harris may be perceived as not black enough by some black Americans the same way Obama was perceived as not to have evolved from the centuries of slavery and its aftermath to which most black Americans were faced with. Even Eric Trump, the president’s son was heard saying Kamala Harris is not black. Whatever votes she may lose from hard core black nationalists would be gained from the growing Asian-American community who will see her as one of themselves. This bridge between blacks and Asians which Kamala Harris’s represents may in fact have tilted the nomination in her favour.

    On the ideological front, Senator Harris is not a wild-eyed radical and she has many things in common with the middle of the road Joe Biden politically speaking. Having served as President Barack Obama’s vice president for eight long years, Joe Biden belongs to the mainstream of the Democratic Party. He favours widening the range of the Social Welfare State as it concerns Medicare for the old and medical insurance for as many as possible. Even the so-called OBAMACARE did not cover the entire population of the United States. This separates him from his rival senators, Bernie Sanders of Vermont and Elizabeth Warren from Massachusetts who represent the progressive wing of the party who are inclined to socialism in the case of Sanders who prefer universal health insurance like in most of Europe and Canada and free university education as In the case of most countries on the continent of Europe particularly Germany. It appears the progressive wing of the party unlike in 2016 when Hilary Clinton was the candidate, will be mobilized to support their party’s ticket this time around. Bernie Sanders has already said he would do all that lies in his power to see that Donald Trump is defeated in November. As incredible as it may sound, the gregarious former Republican Governor of Ohio. John Kasich has broken party ranks to support the Joe Biden-Kamala Harris ticket. Some other Republicans have followed suit and it is expected that some of those who served in Trump’s cabinet like his former Secretary of Defence and Secretary of State may follow the example of John Kasich to say that Trump is not fit for the post of President of the United States. The latest national poll places Joe Biden at 52% to Donald Trump at 41%. Of course, anything can happen between now and November and as they say in politics a day is a very long time. If Joe Biden does not fall on his face, he should win this election. He is not the most attractive candidate. Even Democratic supporters are lukewarm towards him and many Americans are saying they would support him because he is not Trump! That is not a ringing endorsement, but it will be sufficient on Election Day. There is of course the problem of over excitement of the black population as was the case with them during the Hilary Clinton nomination in 2016 when the convention was virtually taken over by black Democratic officials while their White colleagues looked on with disinterest. Before Joe Biden nominated Kamala Harris, a group of black Democrats issued an unwise statement saying Joe Biden must nominate a black running mate. This looked like an ultimatum. I personally think this was unwise and unhelpful to the candidature of Joe Biden who Republicans may portray as a weak man being driven by a black agenda. Now that he has made his choice, the black folks should let him appeal to a wide spectrum of the American people of whites, blacks, Asians, Native Americans and the women of America. If well mobilized the Democrats constitute the majority in the United States.

    What is in Joe Biden’s victory for the wider world? The world needs some respite from the Trump years of rancour, tumult, uncertainty, economic instability, threats of war and disorganization of global mechanisms of maintaining peace and reversing environmental degradation.

  • Porn nation (2)

    Porn nation (2)

    Olatunji Ololade

    Porn has evolved from the airbrushed glossy spreads and smut-prints of “Better Lover,” “Dauda the sexy guy” to amateur flicks hawked on seedy websites. It is now trendy and easily accessible. Porn is political, as the pageantry of curvaceous ladies or BBWs if you like, contracted to enliven the campaign of a legislative hopeful with raunchy “twerks” and hip-rolls at the 2019 general elections.

    Porn has evolved from presenting humans as sexual commodities to corporate, political pop culture. In Nigeria, it fuses with the commercial mainstream to win the culture war. Hence exhibitionism, promiscuity, and outright porn are mainstream chic, no thanks to ‘emancipated’ thinking and muck-fests, like the big pervert reality show.

    The show glorifies as its core message, an innate claim that we’d all like to be porn stars at one point in our life or another. Predictably this narrative runs the gamut of modern Nigerian life; fashion takes lessons from porn. Movie and music video directors, artistes, and the chain of backroom production staff vie to fulfill a morbid stereotype that ‘enlivens’ music and movies with porn scenes.

    Characterisation re-imagines men as disposable tools while portraying girls and women as sex machines, porn-rats, or video vixens if you like.

    The language and moral bankruptcy of porn mould and redefine popular culture; ditto the sex games at popular night clubs, and the after-parties of major entertainment awards where revellers get plastered, and randomly have sex as a frantic mime of western notions of celebrity and hipness.

    Producers of the big pervert reality show have told Nigeria that her women are sexual commodities and porn assets. Every year, they teach Nigeria to redefine and accept her daughters as whores: docile whores, opinionated whores, while reinforcing narratives of the Nigerian male as brute chauvinists, and numbskulls with ripped torsos. But all is fair game as long as parties profit from the whorish enterprise.

    So, the show’s producers, while ‘enabling’ Nigeria’s youth to seize supposedly grand opportunities to acclaim, state emphatically, that, the Nigerian daughter is a whore, and the Nigerian son is a whore-monger. And whores deserve to be dominated and abused hence the pornographic shower hours, sex in the house’s public toilet, frantic fondling, and intercourse. Once the live-in whore-mongers have had their way with the whores, or vice versa, they are discarded or ‘evicted’ – except the one that emerges winner.

    The show manifests a more dangerous pandemic; it glorifies the illimitability of lust. Its a disease that thrives on the ability to wield money and fame to induce others to fulfill random, subhuman sensuality.

    Very soon, the show’s producers will include same-sex intercourse in its offerings. It will broadcast in the near future, an edition featuring more children of influential public officers engaged in same-sex unions. It’s a sure-fire path to desensitising Nigeria to homosexuality and further brainwash an amoral youth population to embrace filth as civilisation. After all, they got away with featuring foremost statesman, Obafemi Awolowo’s descendant in their muck-fest.

    The show’s audiences should also look out for that edition featuring their favourite celebrity artistes, authors, on-air personalities, journalists, public officers, and corporate titans – they will legitimise the show’s decadent jousts with morality and make pornography even more mainstream.

    The best way to destroy the system is to debauch its major currency: fear. Fear is responsible for society’s amoral swerve to the decadent. Fear has become a legal tender shadowing more informal fears. Politicians prey on fear. They know the citizenry lives under a slew of fears. The fear of poverty; fear of the police; fear of COVID-19; fear of soldiers, shylock landlords, and ill-health. As COVID-19 wreaks greater havoc, more businesses and homes slip into financial crisis and the Naira unravels becoming worthless on the watch of a leadership desperate to borrow and squander its way out of a pandemic and deepening recession.

    Dystopia dawns, and the citizenry, continually robbed of hope and socialised to scavenge the dump of the national sweepstakes, frantically seek escape. So doing, they embrace and celebrate filth like the big pervert reality show. They confuse pornography with diligence and celebrate it as a higher industry.

    The illusion deepens when they enjoy the rare fortune of being selected as participants, after committing to several days of prayer and dry-fast, as revealed by a three-time applicant to the  reality show.

    The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered Nigeria wants to confront it thus the citizenry’s recourse to manufactured illusions and pseudo-realities of TV shows, celebrity trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilisation.

    The severe economic crisis triggered by the COVID-19 pandemic has no doubt, reordered society, inducing calls for social discipline and a new moral code. Any new revolutionary movement may topple the political system only by entrenching a new moral code.

    In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained for the duration of their lives in an underground cave, knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are thrown. They believe these flickering silhouettes are reality.

    If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought into the sunlight, he will suffer temporary blindness but eventually, his eyes will adjust to the light. The illusion of the tiny shadows on the cave wall is decisively obliterated.

    But he is despised when he returns to the cave as he is unable to see in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they are blinded as well.

    Plato feared the power of entertainment, the power of the senses to overthrow the mind thus his admonition that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who tried to free them and leads them upward if they could somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would do so.”

    The more we sever ourselves from reality and embrace illusions, the more we are destined to implode. The earth is strewn with the ruins of powerful civilizations that decayed—Egypt, Persia, the Mayan empires, Rome, among others. Not all died for the same reasons but they all suffered affliction by a bankrupt, corrupt elite.

    The latter squandered resources and pillaged the state, and became unable to muster internal allegiance and cohesiveness. These empires collapsed structurally in the wake of their moral demise. The leaders, in the final period of decay, increasingly had to deploy state law enforcers like armed mercenaries until they lost control of the latter. The citizenry descended into orgies of violence and self-indulgence. They surrendered their civic and emotional lives to the spectacle and violence of the political and social arena.

    This depicts the state of modern Nigeria, where the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical, as Boorstin writes, have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the spontaneous until reality itself has been converted into stagecraft.

     

  • Foreign loans and sovereign immunity

    Foreign loans and sovereign immunity

    Jide Osuntokun

    There has been a lot of brouhaha over some recent loans from China for projects in Nigeria and the inclusion of a clause in the loan agreement saying in case of default on payment, Nigeria will not be able to assert sovereign protection against whatever assets China may decide to seize in lieu of payment. The confusion over the issue arose from the rather flippant way Rotimi Amaechi, the minister in charge of transportation tried to explain the issue. If he was at sea about the implication of the controversial clause, he should have told the House Committee that he would bring to the committee somebody either from the Ministry of Finance or Debt Management Office or the office of the attorney general to throw more light on the issue before it became a free for all comments thus portraying the government as being totally unsure of its foreign obligations.

    Those worried about Chinese intentions in Africa point glibly to China taking over Zambian Department of Customs and the Zambian Police Force because of that country’s defaults over some debt owed to China. There is also some allusion to China taking over port operations in Sri Lanka after huge investment in expanding port facilities in that country. If true, this is a cause for concern.  However, Nigeria is neither Zambia nor Sri-Lanka without trying to be-little those countries. Nigeria does not have a history of defaulting rather we have always paid our so-called debts in spite of controversies surrounding some of the debts incurred by the civilian government of Shehu Shagari between 1979 and 1983. But I suspect some of the press and politicians may be falling for western campaign and propaganda against Chinese so-called infiltration into Africa as if Africa belonged to the West.

    Of course we have to be concerned about China’s ambition in Africa. I have written criticizing the humiliation of African leaders going cap in hand to China and other capitals of major powers and lining up as school children and being called one by one to shake hands with the imperial poobah from whom they have gone to borrow money. There is nothing wrong with borrowing money for development as against borrowing money for consumption and payment of salaries. If money is borrowed to construct revenue generating facilities whose income would be sufficient for amortization of the debt, this should be welcomed. The problem with most underdeveloped countries is management and maintenance of facilities after completion of projects. The railways being constructed with these loans and the roads and bridges being built are needed but are there post completion maintenance clauses in the agreement and possibly joint management clauses so that as usual, our people do not eat the seed and the fruit if I may use an agricultural terminology?

    I do not blame Nigerians for being concerned about goings on in this government where there is almost total blackout of what the government is doing. The exposure of rampant corruption in some of government parastatals and the ongoing investigation of the EFCC, a corruption bursting organization being accused of looting recovered loot! It cannot get worse than that! I know we hear from the minister of information sometimes about what is going in government but even that is mostly reactive and defensive rather than expository and explaining government policy but when last did we hear anything from the president or the vice president about the economic plan for the country?

    On these Chinese loans, the situation is fairly straight forward. The total loans borrowed from China is  USD 3.121 billion out  of total external loans of USD 27.67 billion  representing  11.28 percent of external loans . This shows China is not the main source of Nigeria’s external finance. The Chinese loan of USD 3.121 billion represents  3.94 percent of the public debt (local and foreign) of USD79.303 billion. So why the unusual noise? Why are we not calling for an investigation of the entire loan stock of Nigeria and what the loans were used for? This will be a legitimate enquiry. The Chinese loans are at concessional interest of 2.5 percent per year. The tenor is 20 years with a seven-year moratorium period. It will be interesting to find out what interest is attached to the non-Chinese loans. I personally would prefer we build our country without external loans. A small country like North Korea is now a nuclear power without borrowing a dime from any country. We can do this if we husband our resources instead of the usual looting. A country that has earned $5 trillion dollars over the years from hydrocarbons and other exports without much to show for it cannot turn back and blame the cynicism of its people over external borrowing. Our country citizens are concerned knowing what such extravaganza did to Egypt over its huge debt on the construction of the Suez Canal. When it defaulted in payment and nationalized it in 1956, an Anglo- French Force invaded the country to demand its pound of flesh.

    When it comes to the issue of the economy, it seems government’s preoccupation is preparing the annual budgets and taking care of recurrent expenditure with little or nothing said about capital expenditure. What capital expenditures can one really talk about when government is borrowing money externally and domestically to balance the budget?

    I honestly do not believe in the capacity of those running the Ministry of Finance to handle the economic future of the biggest economy in Africa. Economic philosophy is not the same as routine management of income and expenditure.  It is also not the same as fixing the exchange rate of the Naira and rationing of foreign exchange – important as this may be for a developing economy.

    It is also not the same as episodic intervention in roads, bridges and railways construction unless situated within a national plan and planned period. There ought to be a philosophy behind the whole thing such as we find in the management of the economies of the rapidly developing economies of South Asia and South East Asia. A background in economics and particularly econometrics not accountancy and business management is what is needed to project for the future of a country like Nigeria away from over dependence on income from hydrocarbons of crude oil and gas. There ought to be a measurable standard or yardstick by which we can say whether we are on any trajectory and in what direction and to tell us where we are on our journey of economic development. One needs to know what plans we have to make us self-sufficient in consumer  and capital goods and how we can get maximum returns from our agricultural products if we add values to them and what we need to do in concrete terms to diversify our economy from our present primitive dependence on raw materials of mineral and agricultural products.

    A few years ago such economic philosophy was well articulated by the Yakubu Gowon and the Obasanjo governments when we had vehicle assembly plants in Kaduna, Kano, Enugu, Ibadan and Lagos. When I was ambassador in Germany in the 1990s, I used to have meetings with the Daimler Benz and Volkswagen people over their operations in Enugu and Lagos respectively. Both companies and Peugeot in Kaduna were concerned about the Babangida government lifting its commitment to their protection perhaps under the pressure from the Bretton Woods institutions and their commitment to open market and free trade without thinking of protecting infant  businesses. There used to be companies producing batteries, windshields and of course tyres from our raw rubber. Fiat and Leyland and Toyota were also assembling vehicles and sourcing some of their parts from local manufacturers. We were also self-sufficient in fertilizers. We also had the giant Ajaokuia Steel mill and other steel companies in Oshogbo, Jos and Onitsha in what were supposed to be the nucleus of our integrated steel industrial take off.  But we lost all this. Are we still interested in foreign investment and the protection of foreign investment?

    Are we going to have direct government investment through corporations which we tried in the past which got us nowhere before we decided to privatize government corporations? What exactly is our economic philosophy? Or we are going to continue to muddle through? These are the real issues. But I want to say finally that we need to manage our resources better than we have been doing over the years and if we must borrow from outside it must be under the most favorable  and stringent terms which must be scrutinized by parliament openly with nothing  done in secret.

  • Desecration

    Desecration

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    The parliament is a sacred place. It holds a pride of place in every  country and its members are held in high esteem because they are the eyes, ears and voice of the people. As the people’s representatives, they speak for their constituents and push for projects in those constituencies. Lawmakers wield enormous powers which if well used will benefit their constituents and the country.

    The legislature acts as a check on the executive and for this, those in that branch of government do all they can to cultivate lawmakers. In every part of the world, the executive and legislature work together for the common good, but once in a while, they clash. Such clashes arise when the legislature feels that the executive is assuming too much powers.

    In such a situation, the legislature will assert its authority to curtail the perceived excesses of the executive. The beauty of democracy is shown on those rare occasions to the delight of the people who follow every development with keen interest. But at times, lawmakers misuse their wide powers.  The most annoying thing is some of them use those powers to feather their own nest. By virtue of their position, lawmakers are by no means poor, but some of them are ever ready to dance to the tune of the executive for filthy lucre.

    The legislature has sold itself to the executive, which determines who holds key principal offices in any incoming assembly. Whether at the federal or state level, it is the same. The executive is in control of what goes on in the national and state assemblies. This was never the intention of the framers of the Constitution. The executive and legislature were created to be separate and distinct from each other to ensure check and balance. But the executive, as represented by the president and governors in this piece,  has used the enormous  resources at its disposal to subsume the legislature into it. This is why many refer to the legislature as mere rubberstamp which endorses whatever the executive does whether right or wrong.

    In Edo State, the legislature is being drawn into the forthcoming governorship election there when it has nothing to do with the contest. Its only tie with the election is for individual members to exercise their franchise at the poll. But Governor Godwin Obaseki is afraid that the House of Assembly which he caused to be inaugurated at an ungodly hour on June 18, last year, by only five of its 24 members may be used against him. That’s the trouble with tyrants. They are afraid even of their own shadows when nothing is chasing them. Until now,  Obaseki had everything going for him after he was helped to power by his predecessor,  Adams Oshiomhole, the immediate past chairman of the All Progressives Congress (APC).

    Whether or not he believes it, Obaseki is the architect of his own problems. Hardly had he got into office that he started distancing himself from those who made him. Politics is not all about brilliance or ability to get things done. These count, no doubt,  but they must be married with the people factor. The people are the cornerstone of politics. They have the power to make and unmake a leader and they are always ready to follow the person, who will guide them right. This was why they followed Oshiomhole in 2016 despite their misgivings about Obaseki. They just knew that Obaseki will not be loyal to the group’s cause.

    By the time he spent a year in office in 2017, Obaseki had started showing his true colours. He  built his own core group of loyalists. In politics,  once you enjoy that kind of executive power,  it is easy to attract people, both good and bad. It takes an astute politician to know those to court and those to keep at arm’s length. The truth dawned on him when it was time for the House of Assembly election last year. His own people did not get APC’s ticket to contest the election. Yet, he is the governor.  This should have told him that he is not popular. After the election, he did what many of his fellow governors do. He tried to install those he could buy as  principal officers. The project failed before it took off.

    This was why the house was inaugurated at night. Even at that, he got only five members-elect for the exercise. These people quickly appointed a speaker and deputy speaker among them and adjourned. Four others later joined them to take the number to nine. The number has since reportedly shrunk again to five.  Obaseki has a big fight in his hands – a fight there was no need for if he had played his game well. He refused to embrace  reconciliation with Oshiomhole and the members-elect, when the opportunity presented itself,  because of his belief that they must kowtow to him. He insisted that as governor, he would not bow for anybody. He forgot that the office of governor is temporary.

    At best,  he can only hold office for eight years. If in his first four years, this is the best he can offer, what will happen if he spends another four years in office? He will probably run many out of the state. In his bid to hold to office, he did the unthinkable on August 6 when the 17 lawmakers-elect shut out of the house in the last one year finally resolved to dare him, using the strength of their number. He panicked by causing the removal of the roof of the Chief Anthony Enahoro Complex housing the assembly. These people should have woken up from their slumber long before now. However, it is better late than never.

    Tyrants are afraid when they are confronted and Obaseki has shown this in his reaction to the members-elect’s move. By causing the removal of the roof of parliament building and dumping granite and gravel at its gate to prevent access to the place, Obaseki committed a cardinal sin. The governor cannot hide under the immunity he enjoys to stop those elected as lawmakers to access the House of Assembly. The house is the office of lawmakers and they sit there to make laws for the good governance of the state. Can a governor stop them from accessing the place under the claim of renovation?

    What is he renovating? The roof that was removed in full public glare? Was their any complaint that the place is not conducive for sitting? If there was such a complaint,  is it not the job of the House of Assembly  Commission to see to the renovation? Can such a renovation be done without appropriation by the House of Assembly? With the removal of the roof of the house for fear of his being impeached, Obaseki has desecrated the sanctity of that hallowed place. By that action, he has lost every moral right to being a democrat. No democrat will do such a thing for whatever reason. Judgement waits for him at the September 19 election. If he has done well, victory is his, but if otherwise, defeat beckons.

  • Of reign of gangsters and fraudsters

    Of reign of gangsters and fraudsters

    Jide Oluwajuyitan

    I was at a shopping mall with my daughter on July 29 when a young lady approached us. She said she was doing a marketing survey for Lever Brothers. As evidence she gave two Lever Brothers products to my daughter. She said she needed our names and telephone numbers for the survey. While my daughter was asking why she needed our names and telephone numbers, I persuaded my daughter by confirming Lever Brothers often engage in periodic market surveys for their products.

    But I was wrong. Within five minutes there was a call purportedly from a member of our University of Ife alumni associations. That was the beginning of my ordeal. Within 10 minutes, more than 10 people called to inform me that my number had been hacked. The following day, I headed for an MTN office nearest to me to show them the MTN number the fraudster used. To my greatest surprise, the young man simply said there was nothing MTN could and advised me to go and appeal to the fraudster.

    The security of life and property of citizens, protection of their rights and reconciliation of differences that naturally exist between groups are the primary responsibilities of a state. This task of the state is made relatively easy because of its monopoly of coercive use of force. And democracy which we ascribed to makes only two demands on government – respect for the will of the people and an abiding faith in the rule of law. Unfortunately, governance is one thing that has been in short supply since the beginning of the fourth republic. One manifestation of absence of governance is the take-over of the nation by brigands and fraudsters.

    Unfortunately. like national interest, it is he elected sovereign that determines who the enemies and friends of state are.  Thus, President Buhari as military Head of State back in 1984, identified journalist who report truth that embarrassed government officials as enemies of state and went ahead to jail Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irabor of The Guardian. As elected president, his close associates seem to have identified herdsmen killer squads as friends of the nation while victims trying to protect their land and farm crops are identified as bad hosts and enemies of the state.

    His successor, the Babangida’s regime equally identified journalists as enemy of state and Dele Giwa Giwa paid the supreme sacrifice when he was killed by a parcel bomb in his dining room. Abacha identified NADECO, which was rechristened ‘Agbako’ by his deputy, General Oladipo Diya as enemies of the state.  The regime chased leading members of the group into exile while many of those who waited at home to confront his evil regime were assassinated.

    Obasanjo identified the Yoruba who insisted on restructuring of the country as enemies of state. He marginalized the Southwest while ordering the members of Odua militant group to be shot at sight. For him, Asari Dokubo, head of the militant group who confessed receiving mouth- watering contracts from Obasanjo is a friend of the state.

    For President Yar’Adua, James Ibori who was later jailed for his sins against his people was a friend of the state while Nuhu Ribadu who probed Ibori who was rescued by an Asaba High Court and put Tafa Balogun, the former IG in chains, forced him to regurgitate the billions of police equipment and welfare funds he stole, was enemy of state who must be haunted out of the country.

    Like Boko Haram, a creation of some PDP warring northern governors according to General Owoye Azazi, the then President Jonathan’s National Security Adviser, the Niger Delta militants responsible for the loss of about 400,000 barrels of crude oil to oil bunkering daily was a creation of Niger Delta governors. But President Jonathan who according to the Financial Times of London empowered leading members of the groups with multi-billion-dollar contracts to secure of our waterways and protect oil pipelines while the navy remained under-funded saw Niger Delta militants as friend of the state.

    Absence of governance finds expression in corruption, greed and debilitating poverty amidst bandits’ illegitimately acquired opulence. Absence of governance is also a recipe for a failed state whose signs we are told include endemic corruption by the governing political class, absence of transparency and accountability by the political class and loss of confidence of the ruled in the existing institutions. There are other socio-economic consequences. In the name of privatisation and commercialisation, brigands and fraudsters sold all the commercial concerns established by the founding fathers to themselves and their cronies. The economy came under severe strains. Part of SAP legacy is that an exchange rate which was almost at par with American dollar in 1985 is today N460 to $1.

    Babangida and Abacha groomed new breed of politicians that bred nothing but corruption. El Rufai disclosed how, through the instrumentality of Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), members of the gang shared among its members, most blue-chip Nigerian companies. It is also on record that PPPRA set up government in 2003 was used by members of the political elite and their children to siphon about N1.7 trillion under the fuel subsidy regime.

    When President Buhari first came as military Head of State in 1984, his presence as the leader of responsive government was felt by his absence. The fear of Buhari was the beginning of wisdom. Today by paying little or no attention to lawless brigands and fraudsters, he has allowed the state to undermine her role as a neutral arbiter that guarantees ordered society through laws and rules.

    Apart from the economy, other manifestation of absence of governance and reign of gangsters is the ongoing mindless killings by herdsmen across the Middle Belt region of the country. Not too long ago, Theophilus Danjuma, former Chief of Army staff and defence minister called on Nigerians to get ready to defend themselves. With army formations and police contingents Kaduna governor El-Rufai called for, we are assaulted everyday with newspaper howling headlines of many that have been killed by invaders who simply disappear into the thin air without trace.

    Community policing has been adjudged as the best solution to insecurity in communities. And the logic is unassailable.  While federal police posted to remote communities in the country have little or no commitment to the people beyond doing their official duties, police from within the community have a stake in their communities. The Nigerian Police do not swear an oath to die for Nigeria. They therefore don’t have apologies for not going beyond their lines of duty. The Nigerian police we see at every remote area openly collecting bribes from motorists do so because they are protected by their anonymity.

  • Adesina’s date with history

    Adesina’s date with history

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    Left to the United States (US), Akinwumi Adesina would not be returning in a few days as president of the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) which he has piloted in the past five years. As AfDB chief since 2015, Adesina,  who was Minister of Agriculture under President Goodluck Jonathan,  has run the multilateral agency in a classical manner. Some world leaders, seasoned industrialists and bankers have all attested to this fact and hailed his country of origin for nominating him to head the bank.

    His brilliance stands him out anywhere, but what he has going for him is his humaneness and soft spot for the underprivileged. In his days as minister, farmers in the rural areas benefited from what was tagged the wallet revolution under which their accounts were credited in a fertiliser scheme. The scheme was devised to ensure that fertiliser got to the farmers. Under it, middlemen, who abound in the fraud which fertiliser distribution has come to be known for in the country, were cut off the chain.

    Till today,  the peasant farmers remember him with nostalgia. So, when he was going to AfDB, their prayers were with him. Adesina was not going into an unfamiliar terrain since he has always been in one multilateral agency or the other all his life. But he never bargained for what came his way early in the year as his first five-year tenure was about to end. Some anonymous petitioners, who styled themselves as whistle-blowers, submitted a complaint against him. But, when they were put to the strictest test of proving their allegations against him, they failed.

    In law, he who alleges must prove. It is not the duty of the respondent to prove his own guilt as he is deemed innocent until otherwise shown. Even at that, Adesina did something uncommon. He submitted a 200-page document detailing his innocence. In his defence, he responded to each and every allegation of the shadowy group. If a man could come out so boldly to meet his challengers, then such a person must be full of courage. Adesina displayed rare courage in the face of threat to his job. He showed that he was more interested in clearing his name than his job.

    Remember the saying, a good name is better than gold? Adesina fought his accusers with his all because he did not want the good name bequeathed to him by his father to be soiled by  people who lacked the courage of their conviction. If his accusers were sure of themselves,  they would have come out in the open to meet him face to face and prove their allegations. They chickened out when it mattered most to appear before the AfDB Ethics Committee to sort things out. Without hesitation,  the committee threw out the allegations and acquitted Adesina. It was then the almighty US, the self styled global cop, waded into the fray. Why will the US poke its nose into a matter that has been settled,  according to the bank’s rules? many wondered.

    Only the US can answer that poser. It demanded the reopening of the case and it was obliged because after all, it is the US and only a big person, according to a local proverb, does something big. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchi demanded an independent probe after rejecting the ethics panel’s report which cleared Adesina. The independent  panel comprised people of integrity. Led by former Ireland president Mary Robinson, the panel acquitted Adesina, holding that it “concurs with the ethics committee in its findings in respect of all the allegations against the president and finds that they were properly considered and dismissed by the committee”.

    “We have considered the president’s submissions on their face and find them consistent with his innocence and to be persuasive. At the same time, it appears to us to be an undue burden to expect a holder of high office in an international organisation,  to prove a negative, in the absence of sufficient grounds. An attorney writing on behalf of the president also argues quite correctly…that a distinction should be drawn between alleged institutional failure at the bank and the conduct of the president”, declared the panel, which had Chief Justice Hassan Jallow of The Gambia and Leonard McCarthy, former head of special operations of South Africa,  as members.

    The US wanted what the panel ruled against – that Adesina should indict himself when there is no evidence to that effect. Having been cleared now,  even by the panel in which it has so much faith, will the US allow Adesina to return to office and continue his good job at AfDB? The US may be the second highest shareholder in the bank after Nigeria,  which holds the highest shares, that does not give it the power to unduly interfere in the running of the organisation. The problems in AfDB predate the coming of Adesina as its president.  Therefore, as the Robinson panel said,   people and countries like the US should learn to draw a line between what are institutional issues and the style of the person that heads the organisation.

    The panel made itself clear: Adesina has no case to answer, laying the matter to rest forever and ever.  The report has cleared the way for Adesina to return  to office three weeks from today,  some three months after he should have done so. What will be will be. Nobody,  no matter how powerful,  can stop what is ordained. Adesina’s return as AfDB president was only delayed,  it was not denied. This is his finest hour and by his conduct,  he has burnished Nigeria’s image. To the cynical world, looking for something to tar Nigeria and its foremost ambassador at AfDB, you have a long wait ahead of you.

    EFT to the United States (US), Akinwumi Adesina would not be returning in a few days as president of the Africa Development Bank (AfDB) which he has piloted in the past five years. As AfDB chief since 2015, Adesina,  who was Minister of Agriculture under President Goodluck Jonathan,  has run the multilateral agency in a classical manner. Some world leaders, seasoned industrialists and bankers have all attested to this fact and hailed his country of origin for nominating him to head the bank.

    His brilliance stands him out anywhere, but what he has going for him is his humaneness and soft spot for the underprivileged. In his days as minister, farmers in the rural areas benefited from what was tagged the wallet revolution under which their accounts were credited in a fertiliser scheme. The scheme was devised to ensure that fertiliser got to the farmers. Under it, middlemen, who abound in the fraud which fertiliser distribution has come to be known for in the country, were cut off the chain.

    Till today,  the peasant farmers remember him with nostalgia. So, when he was going to AfDB, their prayers were with him. Adesina was not going into an unfamiliar terrain since he has always been in one multilateral agency or the other all his life. But he never bargained for what came his way early in the year as his first five-year tenure was about to end. Some anonymous petitioners, who styled themselves as whistle-blowers, submitted a complaint against him. But, when they were put to the strictest test of proving their allegations against him, they failed.

    In law, he who alleges must prove. It is not the duty of the respondent to prove his own guilt as he is deemed innocent until otherwise shown. Even at that, Adesina did something uncommon. He submitted a 200-page document detailing his innocence. In his defence, he responded to each and every allegation of the shadowy group. If a man could come out so boldly to meet his challengers, then such a person must be full of courage. Adesina displayed rare courage in the face of threat to his job. He showed that he was more interested in clearing his name than his job.

    Remember the saying, a good name is better than gold? Adesina fought his accusers with his all because he did not want the good name bequeathed to him by his father to be soiled by  people who lacked the courage of their conviction. If his accusers were sure of themselves,  they would have come out in the open to meet him face to face and prove their allegations. They chickened out when it mattered most to appear before the AfDB Ethics Committee to sort things out. Without hesitation,  the committee threw out the allegations and acquitted Adesina. It was then the almighty US, the self styled global cop, waded into the fray. Why will the US poke its nose into a matter that has been settled,  according to the bank’s rules? many wondered.

    Only the US can answer that poser. It demanded the reopening of the case and it was obliged because after all, it is the US and only a big person, according to a local proverb, does something big. US Treasury Secretary Steven Mnuchi demanded an independent probe after rejecting the ethics panel’s report which cleared Adesina. The independent  panel comprised people of integrity. Led by former Ireland president Mary Robinson, the panel acquitted Adesina, holding that it “concurs with the ethics committee in its findings in respect of all the allegations against the president and finds that they were properly considered and dismissed by the committee”.

    “We have considered the president’s submissions on their face and find them consistent with his innocence and to be persuasive. At the same time, it appears to us to be an undue burden to expect a holder of high office in an international organisation,  to prove a negative, in the absence of sufficient grounds. An attorney writing on behalf of the president also argues quite correctly…that a distinction should be drawn between alleged institutional failure at the bank and the conduct of the president”, declared the panel, which had Chief Justice Hassan Jallow of The Gambia and Leonard McCarthy, former head of special operations of South Africa,  as members.

    The US wanted what the panel ruled against – that Adesina should indict himself when there is no evidence to that effect. Having been cleared now,  even by the panel in which it has so much faith, will the US allow Adesina to return to office and continue his good job at AfDB? The US may be the second highest shareholder in the bank after Nigeria,  which holds the highest shares, that does not give it the power to unduly interfere in the running of the organisation. The problems in AfDB predate the coming of Adesina as its president.  Therefore, as the Robinson panel said,   people and countries like the US should learn to draw a line between what are institutional issues and the style of the person that heads the organisation.

    The panel made itself clear: Adesina has no case to answer, laying the matter to rest forever and ever.  The report has cleared the way for Adesina to return  to office three weeks from today,  some three months after he should have done so. What will be will be. Nobody,  no matter how powerful,  can stop what is ordained. Adesina’s return as AfDB president was only delayed,  it was not denied. This is his finest hour and by his conduct,  he has burnished Nigeria’s image. To the cynical world, looking for something to tar Nigeria and its foremost ambassador at AfDB, you have a long wait ahead of you.

  • Zulum: Whodunnit?

    Zulum: Whodunnit?

    By Lawal Ogienagbon

    It takes a daredevil to attack a governor’s convoy. Or put in another way: it takes a mad man or a suicide case to launch such an attack. Anybody contemplating to attack a governor must be fed up with life. Governors move with an army, so to say. Their entourage comprises all manner of security aides, who are the best in their trade. It came as a surprise when the news broke on July 29 of the attack on Borno State Governor Babagana Zulum on the Baga-Maiduguri Road. Maiduguri is the epicentre of Boko Haram insurgency and the governor has never hidden his desire  to end their evil reign.

    With the military claiming to have flushed the insurgents out of Baga, Zulum felt confident to embark on his trip. But along the way, he was attacked. He felt bad and rightly so too, since he had been assured that the coast was clear before he moved out. He has since accused the military of masterminding the attack. On its part, the military is pointing fingers at Boko Haram. Where was  the military  when the insurgents struck?

    If you saw the video of how Zulum’s security aides shepherded him into a police armoured tank, you will know what he went through that fateful day. But whodunnit? as the Americans will say.

  • Porn nation (1)

    Porn nation (1)

    By Olatunji Ololade

    In The Emperor’s Tomb, Joseph Roth chronicles the decay of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, writing that at the very end of the empire, even the street-lights longed for dawn so that they could be extinguished.

    The undercurrent of modern Nigeria, where people are reduced to objects, where values erode and nationhood dreams collapse, incites a similar yearning for annihilation and what Hedges calls a moral decline into hedonism and giddy, communal madness.

    Understandably Nigerians seek escape from their daily miseries. They crave distraction from the narratives of pain and desolation. But rather than seize their destinies and change their stars through the ballot box at election time, they have embraced spectacle and pseudo-events.

    They covet amusement like the ongoing big pervert reality show – I will not state the actual name of the muck-fest lest it resounds as yet another free advertorial for its dastardly plots.

    For effect, the show constructs symbolic psychology that’s very much pedestrian yet perplexing to its host society. One of its basic patterns is to incite warring contraries among the citizenry thus stratifying them into an extreme left, a complacent middle, and immoderate right.

    An overarching theme of the show, however, is its incitement of bitter confrontations and perverse bonding between male and female participants, ethicists, and corruptible divides among citizenry segments.

    In the show, immoderate lust and sex are weaponised as themes of competitive power relations, towards which Nigeria takes a moralist stance yet responds impotently by patronising its torrid dross.

    The country’s broadcast regulator, forever sterile in thought, and dubious in candour, issues cowardly ripostes to critics of the show’s insolent attacks on Nigeria’s cultural structures. To those who scoff, “What cultural structures?”, I say, “Don’t be silly.”

    While it’s a given that the National Assembly is habitually toothless against the big pervert reality show, it was hitherto unthinkable that a government presided over by supposed moral exemplars, Muhammadu Buhari and Yemi Osinbajo, would leave Nigeria beholden to merchants of filth. But then they are only Nigeria’s President and Vice President, and they are powerless against rights arguments and the show’s decadent hordes.

    To those claiming that it’s all in the interest of fostering a conducive business environment, China has outlawed the show alongside every TV programming that ridicules Chinese traditions and “defiles the classics” including those that promote “overnight fame, wealth parade or hedonism, selfishness, and intrigue.” Despite its media censorship, China appreciates in repute as a global super power and economic giant.

    Yet morality and rights hypocrites would flay China for its media censorship and conveniently ignore Nigeria’s newfound love for Chinese loans, media, and economic imperialism.

    The incumbent government is curiously beholden to the show’s producers thus its cowardly preachment that the muck-fest is restricted to a satellite TV channel, and that there is no compulsion to view it. This is a silly argument; for instance, the last time I viewed the show was at its maiden edition in 2005, while I reported for Tell Magazine. In subsequent years, I suffered exposure to its gist via unsolicited media reports.

    The show desensitizes its teeming viewers to wanton amorality and psychological rape, even as it suits the government’s vampiric plots. Teenagers, young adults, and older persons are psychologically exploited and manipulated on one front by the show’s producers for profit; on another front, the show serves as a powerful distraction, diverting the citizenry’s attention from more crucial public concerns of comatose industry, treasury looting, non-existent infrastructure, terrorism, substandard schools, and health facilities.

    A lesser fraction of the country’s productive labour force and the youthful electorate is currently concerned about the corruption allegation against the Interim Management Committee of the Niger Delta Development Commission (NDDC), and how the commission allegedly looted N81.5 billion within six months.

    Many more would rather obsess over the shenanigans of the big pervert reality show’s lab rats than protest bad roads, the mismanagement of COVID-19 palliatives, and engage in more constructive quests at nation-building.

    They are smitten with a show that glorifies as its core message, an innate claim that we’d all like to be porn stars at one point in our life or another.

    In Nigeria, porn has won the culture war by fusing with the commercial mainstream. Nudity, promiscuity, and random sex are mainstream chic, no thanks to the big pervert reality show.

    Nigerian fashion takes its cues from porn. Music videos mime porn scenes and present women as porn-rats, or video vixens if you like. Broadcast advertisements, traditional and new media exploit porn for shock value. Little wonder the big pervert reality show posits an entertainment culture that dignifies decadence and amoral seduction.

    The show targets the youth, and successfully sever their audience’s mental connection with moral roots. The so-called leaders of tomorrow are thus lured backward, away from menarche into the womb of regression.

    As I observed in a previous piece, the inmates are enclosed in a zone of morbid ecstasy. They are untouchable, carriers of charisma kept under quarantine, till they emerge as bearers of dirt.

    All of the show’s participants, irrespective of gender, are non-persons, subject to mass cheering and shunning. The eventual winner, like other participants in the show, emerges blinded by celebrity and severely crippled to function as a normal constituent of a humane society.

    As participants in the show, their imagination is loosened, but their bodies are bound in ritual restriction. They are daemonic tools, sacrificial totems maddened by intoxicants: alcohol and human milk, fluid of slovenly genitals.

    The heated debate over their sexual indulgences is familiarly rife with sentiments as societal segments engage in a clash of obscenities in defense or condemnation of goings-on, on the show.

    The participants’ sexual indiscretions are untidy and shattering, according to media reports.

    Viewers’ morality has been seduced and conquered as the producers render sensuality aglow in gothic gloom. The big pervert reality show thus legitimises carnal depravity and brokers pornography via its bedchamber of rank and malodorous sex.

    Any critic of the show is, however, deemed ‘hypocrite,’ a disgruntled visionary who feels too deeply and sees too much and is tortured by his own vision.

    Shall we seek import, still, in a social media post by a certain Shakeerah S. It goes thus: In 2018, the total number of votes on the show was 170 million. In sharp contrast, the total number of votes cast at the 2019 general election was 27 million.

    Then she writes: “A practical reality of who we are as a people and where our priority lies as citizens. The funny side in all of these; we still go to bed, have a good sleep, and wake up with the hope to meet Nigeria we didn’t create.”

    This brings us to the Nigeria of our dreams vs the Nigeria of our reality. Do we deserve Nigeria as it is? Yes, we do.

    Nonetheless, the country’s youth clamour for change. They want a revolution and a radical improvement on the status quo. But how can they exact change while they are perceptually enslaved?

     

  • Carnage on Lagos-Ibadan expressway as symptoms

    Carnage on Lagos-Ibadan expressway as symptoms

    Jide Oluwajuyitan

     

     

    I dread travelling on Lagos-Ibadan Expressway because of tales of agony by those who regularly traverse the road. But two Fridays ago, I had to leave Lagos at 8am for a meeting scheduled for 10am in Ijebu Ode. I spent about four hours between Berger and the Redeemed Camp arriving at my destination at 12noon. In the early eighties, Lagos to Ibadan was just one hour and about two hours from Lagos to Ilesha.

    The road, plied by about 25,000 vehicles daily is said to account for 75% of movement of goods across the nation. Yet the road accounts for the worst accidents in Nigeria. Multiple accidents involving petrol tankers are common occurrence. In one particular night on May 31, 2018, over 24 vehicles were burnt with several lives lost.

    Government had in 2009 signed a concession agreement with Bi-Courtney under Design Build, Operate and Transfer arrangement. It was to be at no cost to government but to be managed by Bi-Courtney for 25 years to recoup its money. A presidential committee set up in 2013 to review the agreement recommended it be upheld since “it offers a quick and reasonable solution to the problem”.

    But President Jonathan’s Works Minister Mike Onolememen, claiming that because no real progress was recorded in four years, government was prompted to terminate the agreement “to put an end the carnage on the road”.

    Contract for the reconstruction was awarded to Julius Berger Nigeria Ltd and Reynolds Construction Company Limited at a sum of N167billion. Flagging-off the reconstruction in 2013, Jonathan said “we have adequate funds arrangement” while then PDP acting secretary insisted it was “another manifestation of President Jonathan’s transformation agenda” to ‘‘put the lie’ to the insinuation of marginalization against Southwest by the Jonathan administration’. This column immediately dismissed the exercise as Jonathan’s Shagamu road show’.

    It was not difficult to see the opportunism on the eve of an election by an Azikiwe Jonathan who could not deliver on his promise on the Second Niger bridge in four years playing politics with important Lagos-Ibadan expressway,  described by his Works Minister, Onolememen’s as “a major artery that connects Lagos, major Nigerian seaports, to other states of the federation and forms not only a part of the Trans-Saharan Highway that links Lagos on the Atlantic Ocean to Algiers on the Mediterranean Sea but also part of the Trans-African Highway”.

    In any case, the Yoruba who had experienced eight years of marginalization from Obasanjo, their son expected no special favours from Jonathan but good governance having experienced such in the past under late Obafemi Awolowo.

    Besides, it amounts to shedding crocodile tears for the Yoruba who have alternative routes to their country when in fact those hit most are other Nigerians that have no alternative of ferrying their goods from the country’s major port and the nation’s economic nerve-centre.

    But the tragedy of Lagos-Ibadan expressway and indeed many other abandoned roads in Nigeria did not start in 2013. Obasanjo, Jonathan’s godfather once embarked on similar road show when he flagged off with fanfare, the Ibadan-Ilorin expressway in 2001. As at 2014, a minister of works was still talking of efforts ‘to complete the Oyo-Ogbomosho portion of the road.’ That story has not changed.

    There was also Works Minister Adeseye Ogunlewe who first flagged off the rehabilitation and reconstruction of this same Lagos-Ibadan expressway in 2003 shortly before an election Obasanjo desperately needed to win. The over N300billion budgetary allocation for roads construction, under the late Tony Anenih brought little relief to Nigerian road users.  The picture of Diezani Alison-Maduekwe as works minister, weeping like a baby over the suffering of motorists on the collapsed Sagamu-Ore Benin expressway even as journalists tried to console her is fresh in our memory.

    For President Buhari and his APC resisting change and digging deeper into the hole, let us also call their attention to the report of the Presidential Projects Assessment Committee (PPAC) set up in March 2011, to look into cases of abandoned federal government projects. It claimed there were 11,886 abandoned projects that will cost an estimated N7.78 trillion to complete.

    The Institute of Project Management of Nigeria (IPMN) and the then president’s Special Assistant on Performance Monitoring and Evaluation, Professor Sylvester Monye gave   the breakdown and the spread of some of the projects as follows:  the 400 metres-long Utor Bridge along Asaba-Ebu-Uromi road awarded in 2006 but abandoned in 2009, Ikorodu-Sagamu road and Lagos-Otta road project awarded in 2001 but abandoned by both Impresit Bakolori PLC and Julius Berger because of ‘inadequate funding,’; the 36 kilometres Bodo-Bonny road in Rivers awarded in 2002; the abandoned 285 NNDC projects and 1,994 rural electrification projects among many others spread around the various geo-political zones of the country. The story has not changed. Ikorodu-Sagamu and Lagos-Otta roads which I am familiar with are still death traps.

    But as Governor Nasir El Rufai, observed back then, “rather than these figures compelling the government to find solutions, it would rather engage in weekly charade of awarding new contracts or re-awarding old ones at higher prices during its weekly Federal Executive Council (FEC) meetings”.

    This structure will not work even with an angel. “Show me 100 kilometres road your government completed in four years”, Fashola back in 2014 taunted Jonathan. Fashola after five years in the saddle recently admitted that Lagos–Ibadan expressway will be completed in 2022. In fact, as at May this year, only 61% (24 kilometres) of the 43 kilometres Ojota-Sagamu inter-change have been completed according to Kayode Popoola, Federal Controller of Works.

    The system is the problem. A system that expects President Buhari and his minister of health who cannot manage the state house hospital under their nose to manage all the teaching hospitals and federal health centres in 774 LGAs of the country is doomed to fail

    While President Buhari who claims not to  understand what restructuring or federalism is all about, America whose constitution we copied has moved on from cooperative to competitive federalism patterned along the lines of market economy whereby residents of states whose governors are  indolent move to states whose governors are more creative and more resourceful.

    In the US, the government has a body of experts that handles federal roads, awards contracts and pay as per work done and as scrutinized by journalists. Here one minister in spite of 36 ministries of works, controls all the federal roads in all the nooks and corners of Nigeria.

    A federal road runs from Akoko through Ado Ekiti, Ogotun Ekiti to Ipetu Ijesha; the only portion of the road that has endured, outliving even the state roads constructed with free federal allocation is the six kilometres portion that meanders through dangerous crevices, cracks, gorges and  valleys linking my town with Ipetu-Ijesha constructed with taxpayers money by Awolowo in 1959.

    The reconstruction of Lagos-Ibadan expressway constructed within three years (August 1974-July 1977) which now has defied heroic efforts of four presidents spanning 20 years is a symptom of our crisis of nation building. The solution is a workable federal arrangement that guarantees the rights, freedom and liberty of groups and individuals ‘defined in form of language, culture and religion or socio-economic status’.