The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • The fall of Onnoghen

    Since the news of the non-declaration of some of his assets broke, it has been one allegation after the other against the suspended Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) Walter Onnoghen. The contention is that his action amounted to a violation of the Code of Conduct for public officers. Justice Onnoghen’s ready made answer was that he forgot to do so. Many never expected the custodian of our law, the nation’s  number one  judicial officer, for that matter,  to say such a thing. But he did.

    From then, things moved at a dizzying speed, with the Federal Government seeing in it a way to make a scapegoat of Onnoghen under its anti-graft crusade. From the outset, Onnoghen was a marked man. The government knew he has such a baggage, but still appointed him as CJN in March 2017. The appointment was a subtle way of telling him that “look, you must behave yourself as long as you remain in office, or we will expose you”.

    His resignation last week may have brought closure to this sordid episode, but it calls to question the integrity of our judiciary. Onnoghen, who is standing trial before the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), was ready to fight to the end until he read the handwriting on the wall and threw in the towel last Friday. The National Judicial Council (NJC), which he headed until his travail began, might have done him in with its report following its investigation of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) petition against him. The council recommended that he should be retired with full benefits.  His exit should be an opportunity to beam the searchlight on the judiciary and do all that can be done to cleanse this critical institution.

    I have a lot of respect for judges because they are society’s conscience. They are men and women who have sworn to uphold the scale of justice to ensure that no man is cheated nor deprived of his right. Painfully, the society’s conscience has, in the course of time, lost its moral and legal bearing, to judge others. Justice, the saying goes, must not only be done, but must also be seen to be done. How then can a corrupt judge live up to this age-long maxim when justice is for sale?

    In an October 6, 2016 piece titled : Justice for sale (see bromide), which was prompted by the NJC’s sanction of some corrupt judges then, this writer warned against creating room for  judicial officers to turn the bench into their public limited company (PLC). We did not know then that even the council, which should be an holy sanctuary, could be as rotten as some of those it probes. Onnoghen’s case has shown that we must rejig the membership of the almighty NJC. If as NJC chair, he could forget to declare some of his assets, how are we sure that such misdemeanour does not run down the line?

    Read Also: The Onnoghen dilemma

    Honestly, if we desire a council, which will be the pride of our nation, and not one that will shield its members who soil their reputation and bring opprobrium to it, we must overhaul it. A stain on NJC is a dent on the nation’s image, so we cannot treat lightly any allegation of corruption against its members. Are there still other Onnoghen in the council? There may be because since as the head, he had such a baggage, it is likely that he would tolerate others who tread the same path with him.

    The nation does not deserve a tainted judiciary. This is why the government must weed out judges who perceive the bench as the place to amass wealth at the expense of their judicial duty and the time to do that is now, no matter how some people feel. We cannot build a just society with a cash and carry judiciary.

     

    Will Buhari act?

    IN 2015, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) settled for Senator Ahmad Lawan as Senate president, but the action did not go down with outgoing Senate President Bukola Saraki, who joined forces with Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) senators,  to snatch the plum job. Four years after, APC seems not to have learnt anything from that bitter enterprise. It has tipped Lawan again for the coveted seat in the incoming Ninth Senate, which will be inaugurated in June. Senators Ali Ndume and Danjuma Goje are not comfortable with his choice. Ndume, especially, is fighting tooth and nail for the job. He is accusing the party of not carrying him and other aspirants along before settling for Lawan.

    Ndume may have a point. But where there is discipline, members are expected to fall in line with whatever decision their party takes. After all, as they say, the party is supreme. Having been anointed by the party, Ndume and others must rally round Lawan to get the job so that they do not play into the hands of PDP as they did four years ago. PDP is waiting in the wings to reap from APC’s internal strife as it did in 2015 and ran away with the deputy Senate president. APC should be firm on this matter. It should stand by its decision and ensure that it is complied with by its senators, no matter how powerful and connected some of them may think they are. President Muhammadu Buhari should not keep quiet too. If he is backing Lawan, he should say so unequivocally and let the other aspirants know. This is not a time for ‘’you can go and vote for whoever you like’’. It is a time for him to take charge and let the APC senators know where he stands. To start with, what about inviting Lawan, Ndume and Goje over to the Villa to knock some senses into their heads? Doing that will douse the tension over this matter. APC, beware, so that 2015 does not repeat itself.

    The party must show that it has balls by sticking to its choice and doing all it can to make him Senate president. It must not allow the PDP to seize the initiative again as it did four years ago. If PDP could be in power for 16 years and ran the show the way it liked in the National Assembly, I do not see why APC cannot do the same now that it is ruling the roost. What is power if you do not know how to use it?

  • The tragedy of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway

    For four days within a week the Lagos-Ibadan expressway was for want of better description under a virtual lockdown or a siege thus paralyzing movement and causing unimaginable hardship and pain to the traveling public. People spent over ten hours on the road till midnight of April 2 and early morning of April 3.  A reoccurrence was witnessed the night of April 6 till the morning of April 7.Repeating the same thing and expecting different results is the hallmark of madness. If innocent people were not the victims of government’s indifference, it would probably just pass as the proverbial example of Nigerians being inured to suffering, humiliation and poor governance but in this case many ordinary Nigerians just wanting to be allowed to live were involved. A 70-year old year professor friend of mine on her way to the United Kingdom was caught in this horror and she spent 10 hours in the heat of the traffic snarl not knowing if she would come out of it alive. After 10 hours anybody, not to talk about a 70-year old lady, would be pressed to go to the toilet. This is just the case that I know but there must have been thousands of unreported cases. Of course the poor lady missed her flight and had to stay in Lagos for extra two days to find a seat on another scheduled flight after paying huge financial penalties for missing her flight. It is only in Nigeria where citizens are subjected to this kind of double jeopardy without anybody or institutions being held accountable.

    There are two construction companies working on this 127.6 kilometre road which has been on the drawing board since 1993. From the Lagos end we have Julius Berger a Nigerian – German company and a subsidiary of Bilfinger und Berger based in Wiesbaden. This is a company with tremendous reputation of efficiency and reliability. This company was largely responsible for building Abuja as well as the modernization of Lagos involving the construction of all the flyovers among many major engineering landmarks in Nigeria. From the Ibadan end is a Nigerian-Israeli company, Reynolds Construction Company Limited (RCC) which has also been handling many construction businesses in Nigeria. The two companies were brought in after the failure of the Wale Babalakin-sponsored company Bi-Courtney limited which was given the go ahead to build the road as a private enterprise by the Obasanjo regime.  Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the minister of finance under Obasanjo had promised that since we exited from the debt overhang of the Paris and London clubs of external creditors after paying in the year 2000, a whopping $12 billion, the money being previously used to service the debts will be devoted to infrastructural renewal. Nothing like that happened; rather we saw the Lagos-Ibadan expressway privatized into the hands of Bi- Courtney. The award was further confirmed by the Goodluck Jonathan regime.

    The question many of us asked then was why the major road artery in Nigeria connecting the main ports with the hinterland became the object of the experiment of the western capitalist inspired privatization mania of the PDP governments from 1999 to 2015. Even in the latter years of the Babangida government particularly under Major General Abdulkarim Adisa as minister of works, plans were afoot to reconstruct the road but all came to naught because of the political and economic instability which marked the last seven years of the military regime from 1992 to 1999.

    Until President Muhammadu Buhari came in 2015, the expressway seemed jinxed with the spirit of abandonment.  It was with great expectations that most people welcomed the appointment of Babatunde Raji Fashola as minister in charge of works, housing and power. His reputation as a modernizing governor predated him to the ministry. He did not initially disappoint his admirers. He took on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway with his usual aplomb. But his enthusiasm and drive were halted when Bukola Saraki as president of the senate stood in his way.

    To curry favour of some powerful interests, Bukola Saraki began to suggest that the Southwest was not the only zone in the country and that whatever resources that were available for the Lagos-Ibadan expressway would have to be spread to all the six zones of the country. Thus the budgets for this road for the four years of the Buhari government were slashed and shared to other zones sometimes for frivolous projects such as boreholes and senators’ corrupt constituency projects .What Saraki forgot to remember was that the Lagos-Ibadan road extended to his fiefdom in his much-abused and humiliated Ilorin.  The reality of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway is that it connects the North to the coast and also the ports of Lagos with the oil producing zones of the South-south and the Southeast. Not only that, the zone where the road traverses contributes 70% of the  customs and excise revenues of the country as well as 60% of the Value Added Tax (VAT). Building the road therefore was of great and significant economic importance to the entire country. This simple logic could not be assimilated by those in the senate whose understanding of government did not go beyond buccaneering self-aggrandizement. Now chicken has come home to roost and innocent people are dying and suffering at the hands of the construction companies particularly Julius Berger.

    For some strange reasons, Julius Berger is performing below expectations in its Lagos half of the road. The story in the past was usually about being owed money for job done. Yet, we were told that money had been secured for this project. Is someone deceiving the public and is Julius Berger still being owed money for previous work on this road? I travel on this road weekly and I compare the work being done by Julius Berger with that of RCC and Julius Berger is surprisingly lagging behind. The equipment and men deployed shows the unserious approach of Julius Berger. There are fewer men and equipment deployed by Julius Berger on the vital Lagos section thus slowing the pace of work and prolonging the suffering of the unfortunate Nigerian people.  Our people in the best of times are also unruly and impatient thus compounding and contributing to the chaos on the road. When sections are blocked there is no intelligent provision for alternative routes. This does not happen on the RCC section. The inference one can draw is that Julius Berger is not interested in the job at hand and is waiting for the riot act to be read to it before being fired. It could also be due to a sense of ennui and tiredness of the corrupt Nigerian bureaucracy and government.

    Whatever the case may be, President Muhammadu Buhari had better send Fashola or his minister of state to visit the expressway and other vital projects of his ministry. As I have said in this column several times, Buhari does not have the luxury of time to waste talking when what is needed is action. He is not going to run again but he is running against his place in the history of this country. He must remove all impediments and obstacles for his earning an enviable place in the history of this much abused and misgoverned country. All governments at the state and federal levels must realise that they are not just in government and authority they are there to ameliorate the suffering of our helpless and hapless people who have no recourse to anybody but God even though divine justice grinds very slowly. Our people don’t demand much than to be left alone to eke out their miserable existence. In this regard, free and passable highways are not asking for the moon but they are the rights of the citizens of this country. In short government is not just about those in government and state houses but about ordinary people too.

  • PDP and energy sector reforms

    In August 2013, 15 companies made up of 10 Distribution Companies (DISCOs) and five Generation Companies (GENCOs)  paid $2.238billion to  take over 60% of unbundled PHCN after federal government’s injection of between $8.2b-$15b of taxpayers money. President Jonathan on the occasion assured Nigerians that his administration will ensure that “Nigerians enjoy a minimum of 18 hours of electricity supply a day”, while Prof. Chinedu Nebo, the minister of power, described the development as “a great milestone in the power sector reform roadmap that should give hope to all Nigerians, and inspire confidence in government’s power reform programme and President Goodluck Jonathan’s Transformation Agenda”.

    But as against 10,000-15,000MW promised in the roadmap which Jonathan had earlier launched with fanfare in Lagos on August 26, 2010, Buhari inherited less than 4000MW when he was sworn in as president  in May 2015.

    The privatisation of the power sector was meant to ensure adequate, regular and stable supply of electricity to the consumer at a reasonable cost. It however failed because of our environment. First, privatisation itself according to the World Bank, its architect, was designed for high and middle-income countries ‘with a competitive market, a market-friendly environment with a good capacity to regulate’. Besides it has been established we are a ‘fantastically corrupt’ nation. The new investors were for instance, mainly PDP stalwarts doubling as Disco owners. Jerry Gana headed the delegation of Disco owners to government where the former minister of petroleum promised a facility of N213billion. As it later turned out, the biggest donors, (N2b – N5b) to President Jonathan’s failed re-election bid in 2015 were Disco owners.

    Even with the best efforts of the current government, the nation today faces serious energy crisis with factories either closing down or relocating out of the country. The result is the massive unemployment of our youths and impoverishment of craftsmen and other Nigerians who depend on cheap Chines generators to run their businesses and power their houses. To change the narrative, many concerned Nigerians have called on stakeholders in the energy sector and government to address issues of appropriate tariff, inefficiency of the Discos and the need for the Discos to give up part of its equity for new investors to come in with fresh capital to make the industry more efficient.

    In this regard, the Director General, Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE), Alex Okoh, was recently quoted as saying “If the Discos currently in place, because of the way their balance sheet is compromised, are not able to raise sufficient investment capital, to recoup the distribution network and improve the provision of meters, then we have to look at the possibility of admitting other investors who may have the capacity, financially and in terms of the technical expertise, to improve the distribution infrastructure. We cannot continue to have a situation where the general populace is at the wrong end of the stick all the time. What the public wants is power supply delivered at a reasonable cost”.

    Bola Tinubu, APC national leader and former governor of Lagos State added his own voice during   the 11th Bola Tinubu Colloquium that took place in Abuja recently. According to him, “The PDP administration shared our generation, distribution and transmission to their friends and cronies without very deep and thoughtful research and evaluation. It has now become pork chops”; he therefore  suggested  that “for a more constructive reform to improve generation, transmission and distribution, this privatisation must be reviewed by putting experts together at all costs”, without prejudice to the legal implications of the privatization of the sector.

    Unfortunately, while others are trying to find a way forward, those who as a result of massive fraud wrecked the energy sector privatisation initiative are refusing to be part of the solution. Speaking for PDP, Kola Ologbondiyan has said his party is opposed to the review of the current position because President Jonathan, according to him, ensured due diligence in the privatization sector’ while in office. “In as much as the nation deserves improvement in our power sector, whatever we must do must be guided by the law if we do not want to cause confusion and crisis”, he says.

    Ologbondiyan is speaking of laws as if it is not on record that PDP bungled the whole privatization effort between 1999-2014 by breaching the laws. It was on account of this the 7th Senate report of November 30,  2011 directed the National Council on Privatization to “rescind the sale of Abuja International Hotels Limited (Nicon Luxury Hotel) as well as Sheraton Hotel and Towers;  that the sales of assets of Daily Times Nigeria PLC  by Folio Communications Limited and its directors  be investigated by anti-graft agencies and the sold assets recovered; that the Share Purchase Agreement of Volkswagen Nigeria Limited now (VON)  be rescinded and the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) to investigate the economic crimes being perpetrated against the nation at VON Automobile Nigeria Limited premises in Lagos by Barbedos Ventures Limited; that NICON Insurance PLC  should immediately refund with interest ,the sum of N900 million to the federal government being money paid by BPE in February 2007 as contribution for recapitalization with accrued interest; that Nigeria Re-insurance Plc should immediately refund the sum of one billion naira paid by BPE in February 2007 as contribution of the federal government for recapitalization with accrued interest and that  the former Directors-General, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, Dr. Julius Bala and Mrs. Irene Nkechi Chigbue be reprimanded by the National Council on Privatization; and the then Director-General, BPE, Ms. Bolanle Onagoruwa be relieved of her appointment for “gross incompetence in the management of the Bureau of Public Enterprises and for illegal and fraudulent sale of the 5 % FGN residual shares in Eleme Petrochemicals Company Limited (EPCL)”.

    When PDP was not breaking laws as they did above to impoverish Nigerians, they were passing self-serving laws such as the PPPRA bill or the monetization bill to short-change Nigerians. Under the former, PDP leaders and their children defrauded the nation to the tune of about N1.7 trillion under the fuel subsidy scandal. With the latter, Dimeji Bankole, former speaker of the House of representative was accused of immorally purchasing  his official house  while David Mark, former senate president is currently in court in a suit Okoi Obono-Obla, the chairman, Special Presidential Investigation Panel for Recovery of Public Property (SPIPRPP), described as a “a disguise to scuttle criminal investigation”, trying to prevent EFCC from questioning him on the “2011 purchase of the official residence of the senate president,  built on 1.6 hectares of land, a national monument that was not meant to be acquired by an individual and was never reflected in the federal government’s gazette as required”.

    Ologbondiyan and PDP understand that that while many Nigerians have short memories, a great many others cannot articulate our problems. It is obvious many of the 11 million Nigerians who voted for PDP in the March presidential election were unable to link the massive unemployment and impoverishment of our people to the bungled privatisation programmes that ceded ownership of our budding industries to those who were only interested in asset-stripping which eventually reduced the nation to a net importer of the labour of other societies while our qualified university graduates roam the streets. Ologbondiyan and his PDP exploited the lacuna in our laws to short-change Nigerians and are now trying to use same to hold on to their disproportionate share of the nation’s resources they immorally confiscated.

  • Kindling wet wood

    The Nigerian youth forges his bad karma. The want of bread disturbs his peace, but in pursuit of bread, he guns for gold and perverse glamour. Modesty succumbs to vile, honesty deserts his heart and the beaming brightness of good forsakes our bothersome neighbourhoods.

    The demolition of Nigeria is ongoing. And it is being perfected by the most useful agents of hope or destruction; the youth. But as Nigeria ruins, we ruin too. The much romanticized promise of our generation manifests as a pathetic lie we inherited from our forbears. Today, we tell it to each other in the thick of despair for false hope and cheap comfort.

    The history of our generation will be one continuous disaster from one time-line to the next, if we do not change. But change is what dream of it. It is what we make it out to be. Change is what we make of will. Have we such will that ignites dying embers to scorching hearths of hope and unquenchable ardour?

    It is the malady of this age that the youth are too busy preaching that they have no time left to learn or grow. It is a sad manifestation of stunted growth that most evolve into foetal adults and spend the rest of their lives seeking the comfort of what Ayn Rand aptly sums up as “life boats.”

    It is even more disheartening to see many more adopt as a favourite past time, the anticipation of doom for our fatherland; they chant with emphatically, that, “This country is doomed,” and “Nigeria is finished.”

    The Igbo youth laments his persistent marginalisation from the scheme of things. He believes Nigeria is skewed to work against him and fellow Igbo because his peers from other ethnic groups are wary of his touted acumen, industry, courage and political savvy.

    The Hausa youth believes he has inalienable right to reign supreme and lord it over his peers, irrespective of merit considerations. And the Yoruba youth, goaded by sentiments of his perceived higher wisdom, towering depth in diplomacy, culture and politics, believes, that he is entitled to the best the country has to offer, on a platter of gold.

    Every youth desperately perpetuates his sense of victimhood and entitlement. The idea is to keep whining until he gets lucky and appropriate an immense portion of the proverbial national cake – with minimal exertion and at no cost.

    We are increasingly handicapped by greed and lack of creed. By creed, I mean a coherent and specific set of goals, a consistent series of norms according to which society is to be remade.

    Since we have learnt to blame the ruling class for everything, what is it that we want from them? We don’t need their permission to make something of the world where they have failed but we still live our lives seeking their permission to evolve positively in our own interest.

    It takes courage to evolve a humane ideology and establish it. We haven’t the courage and the will, and this interferes with our ability to accomplish progressive change. More worrisome are our violent attempt to be radical; eventually they resonate too feebly, like a kind of rudderless activism.

    This was reflective in the attitude of certain youth segments during the last general elections. Mistaking hooliganism for “higher political awareness” or “being woke,” they harassed their peers and the elderly, for not rooting for their candidate.

    Their devilry knew no bounds on and off the social media in particular, there, they frantically sought for votes for self-styled messiahs, whose only unique selling points (USPs) were their exaggerated sense of self-worth. Extravagant sections of the press called them titans. But they were no titans. They were simply merchants of rot, who emerged to clothe dross as gold and filth in newer, fanciful packs.

    Leading a motley pack of rabid followers, they condemned the incumbent ruling class to frantic applause. But soon after they spoke in brilliant, rousing cadences, their platitudes started to trail off in confusion.

    Today, their language echoes like the battle-cries of four-year-olds playing war Generals against an army of hostile corn stalks. Having provoked the citizenry’s dormant passion with deceptive dialectics, as the election wore on, their passion was shown for what it was, the spunk of beetles kindling wet wood.

    Most youth candidates failed to shine at the last general elections because their gospel of hope was untranslatable by realistic yardsticks. They spoke the same gibberish as the oligarchs they sought to unseat. Ultimately, they brought nothing new to the table, save a slew of platitudes and tiresome rhetoric.

    For instance, some other dizzy candidate promised to turn marijuana into a national revenue earner and establish a N100, 000 national minimum wage package for the country in a manner reminiscent of the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP)’s lifeboat solutions. Another promised to rescue the Chibok girls, eradicate terrorism and entrench gender equality without a practical blueprint for achieving such.

    Eventually, their desperate rants and promises established them as dangerous daydreamers, who could, and would, rip apart a nation already fragmented and ruined by bigotries, maladministration and plunder.

    Such is the quality of the Nigerian youth – the ‘politically woke” and most vocal segment to be precise. They identify all that is wrong with Nigeria but they are never specific about what must be done to correct them.

    It is relatively easy to join a picket line and tirelessly castigate our elders and ruling class for everything that is wrong with our lives but these actions, while they demonstrate frustration, in some instances even heroism, deal generally with symptoms of· our problems and not the solutions.

    All the picket lines in the world will not resolve maladies of fraudulent and impatient youth, greed, racism, disillusionment with learning and substandard education.

    Yeah, bad news is in the air. We worry and gripe about it. Bloggers and columnists rant about it. We have even learnt to joke about it. But it’s time we do something about it.

    It takes so much effort to be cynical and vengeful, let us channel such efforts into more profitable enterprise, like visionary politics, honest labour and reorientation.

    It’s about time we projected more progressive views of our world. Let us begin to seek the upright amongst us. They aren’t so hard to find. They are the paltry few we love to haze and deride for being too “conservative,” “stupid” and “pretentious.”

    They believe in justice, equality and the rule of law. They are pious without being self-righteous. They are responsible, tolerant, and in many ways, more evolved.

    We need such breed of youth to drive a practicable and all-inclusive plan; a proposal of shared targets and intentions with broad based support and the moral and political will to implement its mechanisms and ends with profound understanding of law, governance methods, economics and social organisation of humane statehood.

    Without these, we will continue to flounder in the sea of well-meaning but ineffective good intentions.

    These are dark days for the Nigerian youth. We are going through a particularly unpleasant form of hell but it’s a hell that we have made for ourselves by our ghastly greed, laziness and inarticulateness. But we’ve still got youth on our side.

     

  • “Boycotting all boycottables”

    There was a certain Captain Charles Cunningham Boycott (1832-1897) an English land agent in Ireland then ruled by the English who treated the Irish people in general cruelly. But the situation in county Mayo was generally unbearable because of the bad manners of Captain Boycott who worked as an enforcer for Lord Erne, a major landowner who lived off the exorbitant rents charged the tenants. Boycott regularly expelled poor farmers from their land which led to many dying of hunger. The Irish land league organized against the landlord’s cruelty and ostracized Captain Boycott and his family with the whole community withdrawing all services to him. Their action gave the English language the verb to boycott meaning avoid or do away with something.

    In the 1950s during the British colonial rule over Nigeria, a certain Mbonu Ojike, the deputy of Ibikunle Olorunimbe, the mayor of Lagos and one of the Nigerian nationalists, led a campaign that Nigerians should boycott all things British. Mbonu Ojike threw away his western suits and began to wear agbada. He dropped the prefix “Mr” and replaced it with “Mazi”. Other nationalists like Raji Abdallah, Ibrahim Zukogi, Ibrahim Imam and Aminu Kano began to prefix their names with “Malam” and Ogedengbe Macaulay, the son of Herbert Macaulay and Kolawole Balogun, a firebrand member of the Zikist movement, also prefixed their names with “Ogbeni” in solidarity with Mbonu Ojike’s campaign and call to “boycott all boycottables”. Nnamdi Azikiwe, their leader, a six footer who looked very regal and handsome in his suits reluctantly followed his radical lieutenants. Obafemi Awolowo and his Action Group were more practical and natural in their Yoruba outfits without calling attention to it. Being conservative in their politics of the time and using the traditional rulers as pillars of their political movement, they preferred becoming honorific chiefs and being referred to as “Oloye” than the plebeian “ogbeni”.The two groups were however united in rejecting the western standards of civilized dressing. This cultural rejection of the appearances of western imperialism was a necessary precursor to political liberation.

    In recent times, I watched a presentation by Audu Ogbeh, the minister of agriculture in which he brilliantly appealed to Nigerians to only eat what they produce and boycott all food imports through which our national wealth is transferred abroad to other farmers. He said importers of rice for example, would do anything to sabotage the country’s plan to grow enough rice for home consumption. He said those importers are not only desperate but dangerous in strangulating the local economy. He argued that importers contribute nothing to the economy but use the country’s foreign reserves to bring all sorts of junks including toothpicks and all sorts of furniture we can make from our hardwood timber. Just at the time Audu Ogbeh was making his submission, the CBN Governor, Godwin Emefiele said all textile imports would be banned from Nigeria in order to stimulate the moribund textile industry. Any student of economic history knows that textile industry is the beginning of industrial revolution in a country because in most cases, at least in the tropics, it is easily adaptable to backward integration. The cotton needed as raw materials can be grown locally, ginned locally and fed to the textile mills. From the mills, the textile materials can be sold to tailors who will then produce apparels of different types for wear and cloth for home and office furnishing and the fashion trade.Apart from producing for home consumption, they can also produce cotton wears for export.

    When I was in primary school in Ekiti in the 1950s, our school uniforms were woven by women each of who had local looms somewhere in their homes. I watched these women bring cotton from their husbands’farms, carefully ginned them and removed the seed from the cotton lint. They then turned the cotton lint into thread through the use of manual threaders before rolling them into yarns which were then fed into the looms. All this was done by the women manually as secondary occupation in their spare times since farming was their primary occupation as helpmates to their husbands. They of course were also good cooks. After the weaving of these white clothes, they will then be sent to dyers who produced usually black or blue stripes which tailors then sewed interspersing black and white to make knickers and jumpers for primary schoolchildren.  The entire processes from weaving to dying were products of native ingenuity and local vegetable sourcing. This was the textile industry which the white man found here when they came but destroyed when they introduced their khakis as school uniforms. Happily the textile industry still survives as “aso oke” in parts of Oyo. Kwara, Ondo, Kano,Katsina,Zaria, Sokoto, Akwete and Ijebuland. But it seems to have disappeared in most places in Nigeria. Interestingly they can be found in western museums showing African textiles going back to the 15th century.

    I remember wearing my agbada made from hand woven “aso etu” when I presented my letters of credence as Nigeria’s ambassador to the German President Baron Von Weisacker in 1991. My southern African colleagues could not believe we had our own textile industry going back to the 15th century. I had to proudly give a lecture on how everything I wore that day was home-grown unlike my other southern colleagues dressed in Saville Row suits.

    What Godwin Emefiele and Audu Ogbeh are saying is that we must go back to our past to find our trajectory to a viable and productive and prosperous future! Imagine what we can do with a thriving textile industry. We can wipe out unemployment almost immediately. More than three million tailors would be needed to sew what our teeming population will be wearing. We even look more dignified in our environment and climate-friendly Babanriga, Agbada, Dansiki, Jallabia, and kaftans. I remember having to beg my tailors in Maiduguri between 1982 and 1984 to sew my Babanriga on time. The cost of sewing was not cheap either but the skill and dexterity of the master tailors was what we paid for. I would like to see a cultural renaissance in which we all wear what is most appropriate with our hot climate.

    What will be saved in foreign exchange can then be used for industrialization in other areas of heavy industries and in chemical and petroleum industries in which we are well blessed because of our comparative advantage. In this way we will raise the value of our much abused Naira and thus make Nigeria great again.

    The government must be determined and strong to achieve this. It is Jean Jacques Rousseau in his theory of the “General will”who said it is possible to force a people to be free which sounds contradictory but in real fact sometimes this may be necessary because people don’t usually know what is good for them. A strong government can put in place an agricultural programme to encourage the young people roaming the streets selling junks to go back to the farms by mechanizing farm production and supporting young farmers with monthly stipends until they can fend for themselves. This was how the kibbutz in Israel led to the greening of a desert now producing different types of fruits for the world market. This will require a policy of social and political mobilization involving the universities, community and traditional leaders as well as political leaders. It will only work if leaders are ready to make sacrifices.There is money to be made in agriculture but first it must be divorced from the hoe and cutlass hewers of wood and drawers of water type. If we make our agriculture attractive, money will go into the rural areas. Life there will become liveable with very little attraction and incentive to embark on rural urban migration. If the cities are not overwhelmed by unplanned growth, the rate of crimes and criminality would go down and money being spent on policing and pacification would be spent for social welfare. It is a “win-win” situation and I therefore call on the government to build its programme of taking us to the next level around the well-articulated ideas contained in Audu Ogbeh’s agricultural revolution and Emefiele’s foreign exchange management to force us to produce cotton for our daily wears or go naked .These are solid prescriptions for economic revival. I join the chorus of “boycotting all boycottables “

  • The race for the 9th assembly

    In advanced democracies governed by rational-legal authorities, leadership of national assembly is often a routine affair within a ruling party with a majority in parliament. Model builders from John Calvin (1509-1564) to Baron de Montesquieu (1748) and others that came up with the idea of separation of powers in their wisdomrealized that was the only way to guarantee stability of government and prevent it from being held hostage by a hostile opposition without prejudice to the supervisory functions of the parliament. It is therefore unimaginable in the US whose constitution we copied, that the GOP will embark on a surreptitious move to take over the congress with a democrat majority. Such was equally inconceivable during the first and second republics and in the first 16 years of the fourth republic. Of course there were conflicts within the national assembly with Obasanjo changing senate presidents at will, but it was all intra-party affairs.

    But all that changed with the takeover of our National Assembly in 2015 by ruffians, in the guise of protecting the independence of the legislature. And predictably, what the model builders and framers of our constitution sought to avoid was what happened with the ruling government with a majority held hostage by PDP and APC ruffians who stalled government projects through budget passage delays, budget padding and cornering a big chunk of the annual budget for themselves. At the end, the 8th assembly which will probably enter the Guinness Book of Records as the highest paid parliament in the world served no one but their members.

    Because we allowed evil to thrive in 2015,the desperate struggle for the leadership of the 9th assembly has againstarted in earnest with top aspirants for the position of presiding officers within the ruling party reported to have converted some suites in the Transcorp Hilton Hotels to a mini secretariat. Newly elected and returning federal legislators have also been sighted sneaking in and out of the emergency secretariat’. Going by our experiences in recent years with outcome of presidential primaries determined by the contestant’s weight in dollars and voters openly hawking their votes, it is most unlikely those going in and out of the emergency secretariat will leave empty handed. The stakes have become higher with PDP’s reported “launching of an audacious move to win to its side 13 All Progressives Congress (APC) senators-elect as part of a grand design to hijack the leadership of the 9th Senate”.

    “The fact that it has been a convention for the majority party to produce presiding officers does not make it legal or the norm” –PDP, a beneficiary of the same convention for an unbroken 16 years, now insists. The party now says “it is not mandatory for the principal officers of the senate and the House to come from the party with a simple majority in the two chambers”.Just like the ‘like-mind’ senators claimed in 2015, they say they are worried about a possible emergence of “a possible rubber stamp legislature” if the ruling party is allowed to foist leaders on the two chambers. They did not only fail to identify any democracy where their model works, they were silent on the fact that theirunique model in 2015 ended up creating a parallel government with the National Assembly preparing their own budgets,paying themselves outrageous salaries and allowances and frittering away billions of naira on over 500 abandoned constituency projects that were doomed to fail since feasibility studies were never carried out.

    But why would a party that was given free hand to run the country for 16 years and made a mess of it be reluctant to perform the role of an opposition which is to keep the ruling party on its toes? It is precisely because PDP is not a party.Itis according to John Campbell, a former US Ambassador to Nigeria, “a club of elites who come together for sharing of oil rents and political spoils”. As military-baked ‘new breed’ politicians,they merely  set out to complete Babangida’s uncompleted mission – the destruction of the economy through ill-conceived  Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) that turned our nation to net importer of other nations’ labour, with its own ill-implemented privatization programme that shared out Nigeria’s budding industries after injection of public funds, to its members. PDP and its leaders set out to serve none but themselves and their members.

    Let us start with Obasanjo, the father of PDP. In an attempt to consolidate his hold on power after winning in 1999 election without a political base, he did everything to undermine the country’s democratization process by presiding over massively rigged elections in 2003, 2007, impositionof ailing Yar’Adua following his third term fiasco, and in 2011, Goodluck Jonathan.His continuation with Babangida’s adopted Bretton Woods’ international monetary arrangement that set up a system of fixed exchange rates with the US dollar as the international reserve currency,which Lamido Sanusi, (Emir of Kano) in a widely circulated socialmedia video said he regretted embracing as CBN governor, only brought ruin to our nation and impoverishment of our people. The only beneficiaries are private jet-owningPDPimporters of wine,champagne, rice,textile, fake drugs and tooth pick among others.

    Like Obasanjo, Atiku Abubakar’s struggle is for Atiku.His decision to collude with South-south’s self-serving governors led by James Ibori, in an attempt to deny Obasanjo, his boss a second term in2003 could not have possibly been on behalf of poor Nigerian victims of the duo’s war over the privatisation and sharing of our common resources. And Atiku’s 12 years of motion without movement between PDP, ACN, PDP, APC and back to PDP,in search of platform many believe,had little to do with serving the people but more to do with fulfilling his ambition.

    We similarly have evidence to supportBukola Saraki’s claim that he was driven by noble objectives to inelegantly seize the leadership of the senate in 2015. Andrefusing to relinquish the senate presidency after decamping back toa party, with minority, in the words of Oshiomhole,APC chairman, only”portrayed Saraki for who he was – a person, whose personal interest always comes first before any other interest, including national interest.”And as if to confirm PDP is not averse to unscrupulous means to political ends, Senator Olujimi, Fayose’s former deputy reminded Nigerians that it was the PDP that gave Saraki 42 of the 53 votes with which he emerged senate president in 2015.

    The story is the same with PDP elected assembly members who in 2002, publicly made it clear they were in a hurry to recoup their expenses having sold houses to fund the 1999 elections.They went on to pass the PPPRA bill which was to become the instrument with which they and their siblings defrauded the country to the tune of about N1.7trillion.

    Democracy is never sustained by immoral behaviours of politicians like Ayo Fayose who ruled his state with six lawmakers after chasing 22 lawmakers out of town with thugs or a Saraki who took over the red chambers with 42 opposition senators after outwitting 52 of his party senators. There is noknown democracy where a party with 37 elected lawmakers would be scheming to take over a parliament with a majority of 63 senators.

    And no constitution, including the American constitution that we copied which according to John Adams, the second American president (1797-1801), was ‘made only for a moral and religious people”, can survive greed, recklessness, licentiousnessas we today witness among PDP and APC politicians. Those promoting immoralityand lack of character as ‘real-politik’ must realize that nothing threatens democracy and freedom as immorality.

  • Letter to IGP

    POLICING is a tough job. It is not made easy by the fact that people like to cover up things. In doing so, they tell lies. Our elders are wont to say that he who lies will steal.  If lying is the root of stealing what that means is that we are all criminals because there is hardly anyone who has not told one lie or the other before. To get a liar may be difficult because it is not written on the face. But the police try all the same to decipher the truth in a case.

    In some cases, they hit the bull’s eye, in others, they are wide of the mark. But the margin of error is expected to be minus zero. This is to say that they are not expected to make any mistake at all because it could be costly when that happens. As Inspector-General of Police (IGP), Abubakar Mohammed Adamu bears the whole weight of the organisation on his shoulders. The first question you should ask yourself, sir, is how you can discharge your responsibility and leave a worthy legacy behind.

    The killing of innocent people through the stray bullets of your men has become worrisome. The police, more than any other arm bearing organisation, are expected to be more careful with their guns. Unfortunately, the reverse is  the case. Policemen seem to take delight in shooting people at the least provocation.

    Last Sunday, it happened again in Lagos when Citizen Kolade Johnson, who left his home to watch a football match at a nearby viewing centre, was hit by stray bullet. His family says he was shot dead. Some operatives of the Special Anti-Cultism Squad (SACS) were said to have stormed Olu Aboderin Street, Onipetesi near Ikeja to arrest a suspected cultist. On their way out, they saw a man in dreadlocks with a woman and stopped.

    They reportedly accosted the man and ordered him to join enter their vehicle. Being a known face in the neighbourhood, people immediately gathered to stop the police from taking him away. It will be easy to accuse those people of obstructing the police from doing their job. Is that really the case? Since they are not zombies, it will not be right for the citizens to keep quiet when they see the police trampling on others’ right.

    The danger in keeping silent in such a situation is that nobody will be safe in the face of police tyranny. You must stop police impunity in your own time. I am not against the police arresting offenders, but it must be done in accordance with the law. What happened in Onipetesi on Sunday was barbaric. It was the height of abuse of power. Is it an offence to wear dreadlocks? Which law says that those who wear dreadlocks are cultists? Can a cultist be identified by the make of his hair? We should not forget that there are people born with dreadlocks. They are referred to as Dada in some culture. There are also prophets who wear dreadlocks. Will these people be tagged cultists and arrested by your men on the road?

    By their training, the police should not be hasty in judging people, but the SACS operatives did not follow this age-long practice on Sunday. Seeing the bind they put themselves, they resorted to shooting their way out and in the process, the late Johnson, who was watching the scene from afar, was hit. The culprits – Inspector Olalekan Ogunyemi and Sergeant Godwin Orji – have faced internal disciplinary action, we are told. They are likely to be prosecuted too.

    But, that will not be the first time that policemen who killed people will be made to face orderly room trial or be charged to court.  Some were tried and sentenced to death in the past. Yet, these measures have not served as deterrence. As IGP, the solution to this problem lies in your hands. What is it that makes our policemen bay for blood when soldiers who are trained to kill do not misuse their weapons? If you can identify that, you will be on your way to solving the problem.

    May God grant the Johnson family the fortitude to bear this irreparable loss.

    The cursed road

    THOSE living around the Lagos – Ibadan Expressway corridor dread one thing most – the gridlock which grounds traffic on both sides of the road every now and then. It happened again on Tuesday when a fuel tanker spilled its content at Ibafo around 9.30 am. From then till early yesterday (5.28 am) when I started writing this, the gridlock still stretched all the way from Ibafo to the Long Bridge and beyond for outbound Lagos motorists. It was the same on the other side of the road as inbound Lagos motorists were caught in the traffic jam from the Sagamu Interchange to Ibafo. A motorist, who called Lagos Traffic Radio around 5.10 am, said it took him three hours to drive from the interchange to Lotto, which is around the Redemption Camp, a journey which ordinarily should not take 10 minutes. Many, who slept in their offices, like me, were calling the station that early to find out if they could dash home, change and return to work. I immediately perished that thought  when the duty announcer advised against such move – at least as at that hour.

    The traffic situation became compounded about three years ago when Julius Berger started the rehabilitation of the road. All pleas to Julius Berger to provide an alternative route have, so far, fallen on deaf ears. Motorists have been suffering as it continues to waste time in diligently executing the job. The cheek of it is that, the authorities do not see anything wrong in what Julius Berger is doing. Can the firm act like this in its home country? It cannot. For how long will motorists suffer for the tardiness of Julius Berger? Reynolds Construction Company (RCC), which is handling the Sagamu – Ibadan end of the road, has been up and doing, giving motorists no stress at all in its area of operation. Why can’t Julius Berger just do the same?

  • Just before Buhari’s ‘tough decisions’

    PRESIDENT Muhammadu Buhari could be blunt at times. He also has a wry wit. In fact, some of those who know him very well would swear that his sense of humour is remarkable. He deploys it in unusual ways.

    Consider that German trip on which he was asked about his wife’s comments on his administration. He did not simply tell his audience that his wife is no politician; he said “she belongs to the other room”. I am sure His Excellency must have let loose a loud guffaw anytime he got comments of women rights activists who suddenly woke up to launch a campaign that he wasn’t right to say that a (his) woman’s place is in the kitchen or in “the other room”. And comedians seized upon the phrase to fuel their trade, ascribing all manner of innuendoes to “the other room”.

    The President could also decline to join issues with his critics, taking it all on the chin. Even then, his silence is as loud as thunder. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s epistolary (mis) adventures failed to attract a wink from Buhari, who perhaps in the best traditions of military orientation, would not join issues with a senior officer. Now, who needs to be told how silence has been golden, trumping the din of the marketplace?  But Obasanjo, being Obasanjo, would not hold his fire. He keeps screaming that Atiku Abubakar is better than Buhari. Is anybody listening?

    Buhari has been asking some hard questions. Sound replies have been hard in coming. He once asked governors: “How do you sleep soundly when workers are not paid?” Of course, there was no reply. A cheeky fellow who claims to be close to some governors sneered at the question. He wondered how the President could understand it all as he does not know how Champagne tastes. “Who won’t sleep soundly after a glass of chilled champagne?” he said derisively.

    The President remarked that $16billion was spent on power. He asked: “Where is the power?”  Obasanjo, wily and crafty, actually admitted that $6.5b was spent. He advised those searching for answers to visit the ports where the equipment for power projects he initiated were rotting away.

    Buhari has also said Nigerians would like to have answers to the “irresponsible expenditures of 1999 to 2004 when oil earnings peaked at about N140  a barrel”.

    Now a foreshadow of his last four-year tenure which begins on May 29. I will take tough decisions, he warned when members of the Federal Executive Council visited to congratulate him on his victory at the February 23 election. Ever since he announced   this, questions have been flying all over the place. What are  the “tough” decisions our President is likely to take? There have been speculations, postulations and permutations on the “tough” decisions.

    Will Buhari grab the evil hands behind the herdsmen-farmers killings that have debased our claim to decency? Will he expose their sponsors, seize them and bring them to justice for their horrendous crimes? The military have been battling Boko Haram, the fiendish group that has killed many innocent Nigerians. At a point, we all felt helpless. Now the herdsmen-farmers wars are as worse as Boko Haram’s madness. How sweet it would be if Buhari decides to go all the way against the killers and their sponsors, who the security agents should know.

    Will private individuals who own oil blocks be made to shed some of their holdings for states to get a piece of the action? There is the thinking that many rich individuals have lost focus on how to spend the cash they harvest from their oil blocks; they funnel some to oiling the destructive machines we have all over the place. Will Buhari tackle them?

    The Malabu oil block (OPL245) scandal remains unresolved, a bad sore that won’t just heal. About $523m of the $1.092b paid for the block was shared out as bribes to some former ministers and by politicians. A former president was named in the dirty deal. Will Buhari hauled them all before the courts?

    The Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) may wish to lengthen the list of banned items to save the naira from pressure and boost our foreign reserves? Local manufacturers will be happy, if we actually stop importing biscuits, cotton wool, eyelashes, eye shadows, eye shades, Brazilian hair, lip stick, lip balm and such frivolous items in the name of beauty care. Will the President approve that more items should join the list?

    Will the government carry out its threat to go after the billionaires who don’t pay taxes and won’t even come forward to negotiate how to pay? This also shall pass seems to be their thinking.

    Will petrol price go up for the embarrassing high subsidy to end? Will Buhari, being a friend of the poor, embrace the age-long official line that stopping subsidary will free some huge cash for infrastructural development?

    A special court for corruption cases has been advocated? Now injunctions are jamming injunctions as lawyers and judges argue over jurisdiction. Corruption cases take years to complete as defence lawyers take advantage of the loopholes in the system. With a special court, so goes the popular thinking, those who deserve to go to jail will go fast and return home early after learning a lesson or two in how to handle public trust. Those who don’t will know their fate as fast as possible. Will Buhari pursue this idea?

    Will the President listen to the mercantile advocates of restructuring if they agree that they know what they are talking about? Beyond being a vote harvesting and money minting gimmick in the hands of its insincere advocates, how good  is this phenomenon?

    A friend of mine could hardly name six ministers and their portfolios the other day. Many are believed to be bench warmers in the cabinet, enjoying all the appurtenances of office without the commensurate hard work that these times demand. Will Buhari throw away the dead woods or kowtow to political considerations in his choice of a cabinet? How long will it take to raise a cabinet?

    Many have pointed at the detention of former National Security Adviser (NSA) Sambo Dasuki as a stain on the human rights banner of this administration. Dasuki is being held for alleged diversion of about $2.1b cash meant for arms to fight Boko Haram. His case is in court. He has been given bail, but the authorities won’t let him go home. Will Buhari say why Dasuki must remain incarcerated or let him go?

    The Shi’ites keep protesting the detention of their leader El- Zaky Zaky and his wife. Like Dasuki, he is also being held under a thick security veneer that the public finds hard to understand. Will Buhari let El-Zaky Zaky go?

    A word of advice: If Buhari wants to have an opportunity to take some tough decisions that will form the legacy of his administration, which will be tabled when the verdict of history comes, he must pay attention to the shenanigans of some opposition figures in the battle for the leadership of the National  Assembly.

     

    The UAE robbery suspects

    FIVE Nigerians are being held in the United Arab Emirates (UAE) for alleged robbery. They were said to have smashed their way into a bureau de change, grabbing its cash and injuring the staff. The camera on the premises gave them out.

    When the President’s Special Assistant on Foreign Affairs and the Diaspora, Mrs Abike Dabiri-Erewa, broke the news and named the suspects as some of those disgracing Nigeria overseas, there was anger – apparently because the youngsters (gangsters?) belong to the same ethnic group. Why won’t others be named? Are they the only people disgracing Nigeria overseas? Is it fair? Outrage.

    Abike Dabiri- Erewa

    It is all disgusting. We should be ashamed of what these youths have done instead of playing the ethnic card, as we often do. Some of the critics of the name-and-shame went ahead to release on the social media their own lists of Nigerians who are facing one allegation or the other overseas. Okay. But what is bad is bad.

    We all have a duty to educate our youths that crime doesn’t pay. It used to be drugs, 419 and prostitution. Now, it is armed robbery. The path of hard work, integrity and honesty can sometimes be strewn with thorns, but in the end it leads to success and peace of mind, which no hot cash can buy.

    In scolding our wayward compatriots, ethnicity shouldn’t feature.  Crime wears no ethnic badge; it is a universal phenomenon that should be condemned by all – always.

  • The dog, the dog-walker, and the waist-bead

    The freedom of the bead is oft impeded by the voluptuous hip. Thus is the paradox of the threaded bead, ageless bejeweller of the luscious waist.

    Beads on their own may seem attractive, astonishing perhaps, but when they are threaded together on a string, they lose the freedom to skitter around as they please.

    Think of the youth as the bead, the voluptuous hip as the government, a political party, big business or non-profit. The bead undoubtedly kowtows to the tyranny of luscious hips.

    A cursory look around will reveal the pervasive rot and shamelessness of Nigeria’s youth, save a few visionary cohort.

    When you see the feverish scramble by most youths and youth groups for patronage by political parties, local and international political interest groups, and non-profits to mention a few, the stench of fraudulence hits you; its rank smell, redolent of the stink faeces make in a clogged latrine.

    The youth should, ideally, evolve and grow into the much hackneyed but romanticised roles of the ‘leaders of tomorrow,’ but for inexcusable greed, that has turned too many questionable, self-acclaimed radicals into racketeers and seekers of unearned benefits.

    Like the crooked activist, who eventually ditches activism to display ‘table manners,’ they circumvent ethical boundaries and embrace the “Naija way” of “running things.”

    Money talks, corruption works; most youths frantically learn and intone the language of the game. They have learnt to agitate shrilly and in all ugliness, until they are courted, funded and co-opted by the predatory ruling class, whose stranglehold presumably incites their discontent, usually at 11th hour to the general elections.

    Then they emerge from the woodwork to support or contest ‘practical’ and ‘impractical’ causes.

    It is alright to support a cause or supposedly noble ideology but at what cost? Many youths, driven by funded activism, continually scorn ethics, societal mores to support or attack a policy, personality or cause.

    Like Arundhati Roy would say, “I’m not against people being funded—because we’re-running out of options, but we have to understand, ‘Are you walking the dog or is the dog walking you? Who’s the dog and who are you?”

    The Nigerian youth is unquestionably the dog, and he is definitely being walked.

    From Boko Haram’s bloody terrorism, seasonal electoral violence to persistent herdsmen attacks across the country, the youth, mostly underclass, perpetrate a cycle of violence, mugging and hacking each other to death, in a senseless carnage. And everything thing is paid for.

    The latter constitute the muscle and mob continually unleashed, as appendage to compromised law enforcers, by the country’s oligarchs, whose quest is to retain political power and privileges at all cost.

    The ruling class funds the repression, murder and incarceration of inflexible dissenters; even as they patronise and hurl money at those whose tenor of dissent is amenable to their wiles and leash of cash.

    Money shaves the edge off the most virulent activist till he ends up as what the Yoruba would call, ekun inu iwe (paper tiger) or that the Indians would call, paaltu sher, which means tamed tigers.

    Supposedly wiser youth coalesce into a pretend resistance, revolutionary impostors, like the electoral paper weight, Presidential Aspirants Coming Together (PACT); ultimately, they ignite with sparks that sodden coal make amid a storm.

    There is no gainsaying Nigeria’s demographic bulge seems in favour of youths, the country is relatively young. Going by the estimates for both males and females, the median age of the country is estimated between 17.9 to 18.4 years of age, even as the vast majority of youths are unskilled, underemployed, and unemployed.

    A major implication of this situation, is that, the youth are unsuited to serve as the vanguard of truly progressive politics and practical governance that the country deserves.

    Where they are co-opted into mainstream politics, they are consigned to the fringes and enslaved to a leash of tokenism powered by the so-called “me-first politics” or “stomach infrastructure.”

    Kwame Nkrumah, Aminu Kano, Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Nelson Mandela, Ahmadu Bello, Mahatma Ghandi and Anthony Enahoro among others, emerged as leaders of their countries in their 20s and 30s, due to their immense sacrifices and unflinching devotion to the collective good.

    In sharp contrast, the modern Nigerian youth, or politically ‘woke’ youth, if you like, personifies a dud joke. At the last general elections, while millions of illiterate voters played pawn to the problematic oligarchs, supposedly ‘woke’ youths united on the PACT platform to produce a consensus presidential candidate.

    It was a given, however, that PACT would fall apart. Its initial language was untranslatable by realistic yardsticks; cohorts spoke the same gibberish as the oligarchs. Ultimately, they brought nothing new to the table, save a slew of platitudes and tiresome rhetoric, vigorously broadcast on social media.

    Still, the joke persists in contemporary circuits, that, the battle to free Nigeria from the vicious grip of the oligarchs, would be fought and won in social space, and by the cudgels and blades of ‘woke’ youth.

    This notion sprouts from ideological fields at home and abroad, where pasture, copse and tributary of thought, flourish from sickly seeds of violence and death.

    While Africa and Nigeria’s founding fathers, shed sweat, towering intellect and rigorous man hours to actualise their nationalistic dreams, the contemporary ‘woke’ youth experiments with brawn, rogue reverse intellectualism and lip service.

    Yet being ‘woke’ is next to being a deity in contemporary youth circuits. It confers on the ‘woke’ a colossal ego, an exaggerated sense of awareness and idolatry of fawning peer. Hence the revolutionary chants wielded to inflame the polity via Facebook, Twitter, and shades of mainstream and manipulable media, at election time.

    Beneath the radical chants, however, subsists an immoderate hankering for money, fast cars and other material things. This translates to a morbid race against time, to acquire wealth by ‘woke’ young assassins and political thugs, internet scammers (Yahoo Boys), and prostitutes, to mention a few.

    As you read, youths with key-pad confidence are pounding away on their mobile phones, iPads and computers; they are done mouthing off and tormenting virtual space with insolent gibberish, about not being too young too run.

    This minute, they are obsessing about the next ‘insane’ reality show, to borrow their lingo. The filthier the show, the merrier.

    The elections are over hence they are done standing on barrel-heads to spout and be seen. They are done crucifying Muhammadu Buhari. They will obsess about trendy filth in real time.

    Apparently, we suffer a throwback to the era that launched a trend in which Nigerians became preoccupied with themselves more than the survival of the nation.

    What Joshua Lubin identifies as the “Me” decade has indeed, recoiled inward rather than concern itself with crucial national issues, like national progress and ethical rebirth.

    The Nigerian youth betrays self. Poverty, selfish politicians and unemployment are cited as reasons for the betrayal. True, the society betrays the youth 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 and culture of citizenship that we could trust.

    Only then can we attain progressive rebirth. How?

     

  • The future of the two dominant parties

    With the exception of Adamawa and Rivers States, the 2019 elections are  practically over. What is left in the electoral war are the legal moping up operations. The judiciary has to be very careful about a rash of decisions that seem tilted in favour of the opposition. For keen observers, it seems that quite a few unreasonable judgements are coming out of the courts giving the impression that the courts are fighting back the Buhari government that is perhaps perceived as being anti-judiciary. I believe it is a dangerous combat for an unelected body to  appear to take on an elected government. Even in a settled democracy like the United States of America where an autocrat is in the White House, the American judiciary moves gingerly not to go  head-butting the presidency of Donald Trump. Recent judgements on Osun, Zamfara, Bauchi and

    Adamawa seem rather one sided.

    Having said this, the outcome of the elections and the distribution of political control at the gubernatorial levels gives the impression of a balanced equation of power. The APC, unless the courts decide otherwise, is in control of the following 20 states of  Borno, Yobe,  Gombe, Plateau, Jigawa, Kano, Katsina, Kebbi, Zamfara, Kaduna, Nassarawa,  Niger, Kwara, Kogi, Edo, Ondo, Ogun, Ekiti,  Ogun and Lagos. Osun’s  Electoral tribunal’s decision to switch the state from APC to PDP is being appealed. On the other hand, unless the courts decide otherwise, the PDP is in control of the following 13 states and the Federal Capital Territory namely, Oyo, Sokoto, Bauchi, Taraba, Benue, Enugu, Ebonyi, Imo, Delta, Akwa Ibom, Abia, Cross Rivers, Bayelsa and possibly Adamawa, and Rivers while APGA is in control of Anambra. The balance of political power is not lopsided at all and courts decision may still flip one or two states in either direction. My advice to the courts is to beware or legalistic activism which in the long run always runs the danger of  political illegitimacy and political confrontation as had happened in the much copied USA.

    From current disposition of the two political parties, the future of two strong political parties appears settled. The PDP as some of its members have argued, appear to have better national spread than the APC. The APC appears to be entrenched in the distressed Northeast excluding the important states of  Adamawa and Bauchi where the APC lost by a slim margin because of the unpopularity of Governor Abubakar to a legally-besieged Bala Muhammad, former minister of Federal capital Territory who has several cases of fraud and corruption arising from his allegedly selling plots of land and collecting bribes from allottees of land and alienating hectares of land to himself, his companies and family members. It will be a pity if by being elected governor, he gets to keep his loot of part of the national patrimony. Unfortunately, it is being reported that the current administration of the FCT is involved in the same land alienation and appropriation to current members of the executive and legislature.

    PDP will probably take Adamawa which is the home of Abubakar Atiku and unless for serious reasons of envy, it should support their own son. But from the gravevine we understand Atiku is not too popular in his state because of his wealth in the midst of general poverty and complaints by the people that they don’t benefit from his stupendous wealth and have no money to send their children to his expensive “American” university in Yola. The APC is not too popular in Taraba because it is perceived as a Fulani and Islamic party. It is a victim of the multitudinal ethnic complexity of both Taraba and neighbouring Adamawa states.

    The APC is supreme in the Northwest in spite of Sokoto where it lost the gubernatorial seat by a few tens of votes which may call for recount. The APC is also quite strong in the North-central winning in Niger, Kwara, Nassarawa, Plateau and  Kogi. It lost in  Benue because of the issue of Fulani herders killing local farmers and alienating their land without serious repercussions from the federal government.  The APC remains formidable in the Southwest but here the lack of performance of the Muhammadu Buhari government in its first term drew negative vibes to the government in voters perceptions. The campaign of associating the party with a plan of Islamization pushed the large population of Christians there to the PDP which aggressively marketed the campaign of clandestine plans of Islamization. This was so strong that even apparently nominal Christians fell for the ploy. The apparent nepotism and Islamic and regional bias in Buhari’s appointment did not go down well in Yorubaland in spite of its  almost equal division of the place between the two monotheistic religions. The issue of restructuring/ devolution was also a selling point for the PDP.

    The APC is, with the exception of Edo, virtually non existent in the South-south and the Southeast. This makes the PDP to boast of being more national than the APC.

    What is the prognosis for the future for these two parties?

    The performance of the Buhari government during its second term will determine the future of the APC. Since the president will not be running again, he must help the party to survive after him. The only way for this is performance. The party must also be known as the party of the  common man as well as the struggling lower middle class (petite bourgeoisie); it must also be identified with the party of modernization and innovation in the areas of infrastructure, electricity generation and distribution and  affordable quality education.  All the electricity generation plans under construction must be finished within the next four years.

    Above all, it must do something quickly to guarantee security  and if it is needed for this purpose, it should restructure or devolve power and resources to the states and the periphery.  It must also prevail on its governors to key into its platform of development and  must prevail on the National Assembly to support  the implementation of the party’s manifesto so that plans and budgets are not held prisoner by padding and frivolous demands for constituency projects that are always marred by corruption. President Buhari cannot hands off the government and the party as he appeared to have done in the past. He must carry his party members along with him. Decisions must be taken as quickly as they are needed. A bad decision is better than no decision. If he fails this time around, the party will collapse in both the north where his domineering and charismatic presence will no longer be available when he leaves office. The PDP in Oyo will spread to Osun  if the governors there do well especially in resuscitation of tertiary institutions and payment of salaries to their bloated bureaucracy. If poor governance continues in Ondo  under Governor Rotimi Akeredolu, the PDP will take the state. Before you know it, Ogun, Ekiti and Lagos may remain the redoubts of the APC in the Southwest.

    Without Buhari, the APC may peter out in the northeast and northwest whose natural political tendency and inclination is towards conservatism. Kano may remain with the APC because of its old time radical tradition. With the South-south and Southeast remaining in the PDP and with a disintegrating APC without Buhari, the PDP will be the party to beat  in the future. All this will depend on whether Buhari rises to his historical calling and help the party that brought him to power survive his leaving it. He holds the party this debt of gratitude. This is not the time to be saying he will be neutral in the legislature’s choice of its leaders or to be saying he belongs to nobody. One is not saying he should discriminate against any section of the country. What one is saying is that he must help his party to consolidate its hold in the states it controls.

    His government could have helped Aregbesola more in Osun  by reconstruction of federal roads like Osogbo-Ilesha and Osogbo-Offa-Ilorin roads which could have boosted the popularity of his party in the state. This is the kind of what should be done in the second term with the help of a politically sensitive National Assembly. One hopes such political sensitivity will play out in Ado Ekiti – Akure-Ilesha-Akure dualisation long promised during the Obasanjo years. This eye on the future of the party must be kept open so that it does not appear people have just been used  to fulfill personal political ambitions. If the second Buhari administration is able to do well, people will not leave the party in droves over  the abandonment  for example of  Oyo-Ogbomosho road that seems to take eternity to complete while thousands of souls are perishing on the road.

    All these suggestions would require huge amount of money. This money must be found by cutting off fat from government administration, radically whittling down the salaries and allowances of the members of the National Assembly and the executive branch of government. We must diversify the economy or we die economically. It is as serious as that. Buhari must also pay attention  to all the states of the federation to ensure that the states are also working towards the same end of development and job creation and security improvement. This is the only way to prevent a rebellion of the masses in 2023 and a possible rejection of not only the APC and PDP  but the entire political system that seems to have held everybody down since the end of our first attempt at democratic governance in 1966.