The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Once bitten…

    ‘Buhari cannot be aloof over this matter as he was in 2015, if he truly desires a Senate that will help him in implementing his party’s programmes’

    IT IS 2015 all over again. As it was then, so it seems now. Four years ago, shortly after the 2015 polls, some All Progressives Congress (APC) elected lawmakers clashed over the National Assembly leadership. It was a fight over the Senate presidency and Speakership of the House of Representatives. There was political horse trading, as the front runners sought their colleagues’ support for the exalted jobs.

    With its 60 senators-elect to the Peoples Democratic Party’s (PDP’s) 49,  APC had a slim majority in the Upper Chamber before its proclamation on June 9, 2015. The presiding officers’ job was conventionally its, but the party did not  handle the issue well and it was shortchanged in the process. Its senators perceived that the party wanted to shut out some people from the race. Prominent ranking senators like Bukola Saraki and Ahmad Lawan indicated interest in being Senate president. The odds favoured Lawan who is from the Northeast to which the top job was zoned.

    The party publicly named him its candidate, but Saraki would have none of that. His insistence on having the job polarised the party and its senators. Some APC senators supported him in defiance of their party. By then its number of senators had shrunk to 59 following the death of Senator Ahmed Zanna some weeks to the Senate’s inauguration. With the 49 PDP senators backing Saraki, who was a member of the party before his defection to APC, the coast was clear for him to become Senate president, if he could get just only nine senators from APC – should the whole house sit during its proclamation. At the end of the day, he emerged unopposed because those who could challenge him for the job were elsewhere when the Senate was being inaugurated.

    The Senate never got over the crisis which trailed that inauguration where the minority party, for the first time in the life of the Upper Chamber since 1999, produced the deputy president – Senator Ike Ekweremadu. History, if care is not taken, may repeat itself when the incoming Ninth Senate  elects its principal officers. Lawan, who has been a lawmaker since 1999 starting with the House of Representatives (HoR),  is again in the race for Senate president. In fact, he is the one to beat. The party has chosen him as its candidate for the top job in which Senators Ali Ndume, Abdullahi Adamu and Danjuma Goje, among others, at least from the APC,  are also interested.

    Ndume, who Lawan replaced as Leader of the outgoing Eighth  Senate, has been a lawmaker since 2003 when he was elected a member of the HoR. He has condemned the way the party picked Lawan without allowing input from others interested in the Senate presidency. According to him, ‘’the party’s decision to settle for an individual instead of zoning the position to a particular geopolitical region and also consulting the senators from that zone to decide who among them they prefer as Senate president is a surprise.

    “We were surprised on Monday when the national chairman of our party told us a decision has been taken to adopt Ahmad Lawan as candidate from the Northeast for the position of Senate president. The reason why I am shocked and I am sure that is the feeling of my colleagues, is that the constitutional provision for the emergence of the leadership of the Senate is clearly spelt out”.

    He was talking about Section 50 (1)  (a) of the Constitution which stipulates that senators shall elect their president and deputy president ‘‘from among themselves’’. By citing the Constitution, Ndume is telling his party that it has no business telling the senators who should be their president. This was the same argument that Saraki put forth in 2015 when he kicked against the party’s choice of Lawan. With APC’s 65 senators-elect to PDP’s 42, all he needs do if he wishes to play the spoiler as Saraki did in 2015 is to get all the PDP senators behind him. Once he does that and he is able to get 15 senators from APC, he may clinch the job – if the whole house sits on inauguration day.

    Will 2015 repeat itself in the election of the incoming Ninth Senate leadership? It all depends on how the party handles the matter. If it handles it with tact, all may go well, but if it does not, the will of the senators, that is the election of  a president and deputy president of their choice without the majority party’s input may prevail. President Muhammadu Buhari cannot be aloof over this matter as he was in 2015, if he truly desires a Senate that will help him in implementing his party’s programmes. Today, he has nothing good to say about the outgoing Eighth Senate, which he claimed did not work in sync with his administration, because he was not instrumental to the emergence of its leaders. If the President wanted a cooperative, and not a malleable Senate, he should have shown interest in who became its leader back then. Since he did not, he probably got the Senate leadership he deserved.

    It is early days yet for the incoming Senate. So, it is left for the President and his party to show substantial interest in who emerges Senate president, if they want an Upper Chamber that will be on the same page with them in the running of government. If not, 2015 may be a child’s play compared to what may happen when the senators converge in June to elect their president.

  • A peep into our leaders’ future

    NOW that the elections are over -somehow – it is fit and proper to ponder the future of some of the major actors. Court summons are flying all over the place as some launch desperate battles to reclaim what they call their stolen mandates. Others have surrendered to fate, that unseen hand in human affairs, to face life without the rough and tumble of politics. Just for a while, I bet.

    What will they do? Will they stay here or hop onto a plane and wave a long bye to this land of exciting contradictions? Will they join the struggle to rebuild and rework Nigeria? Will they defect to the winning party as politicians often do without scruples? Or will they just sidon look (apologies to the late Chief Bola Ige).

    Consider Senate President Dr Bukola Saraki. Since  populism flew high on the wings of the “O to gee” phenomenon to trump what the people described as a long-time hegemony, he has been a subject of relentless vitriol from all-comers. He took it all on the chin. Now there are postulations, permutations and speculations on his future.

    Some have suggested that Dr Saraki should stay put in Kwara and rebuild his political empire. Others said he should simply return to his first love – medicine. They went further to suggest his early clients, who are also VIPs in their own right – Senator Dino Melaye (of whom many have wondered, ‘what ails him; is he well?’) and former Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose (is he still in sifia pains?) who may soon ask the court trying him for alleged fraud for leave to attend to his health.

    Saraki, I learnt, won’t give up on politics. With hindsight, you count him out at your own peril.

    Many pundits have sworn that this is Atiku Abubakar’s last political battle, which he has vowed to fight with his all. They said on account of age, he may not be strong enough for the rigours of running in 2023, even if he has the financial wherewithal for the unpredictable venture.

    I suspect that when the court battle is over, the Waziri Adamawa, who is contesting President Muhammadu Buhari’s victory, will find the time to write his memoirs and debunk all those pesky speculations about his wealth, his women and his friends. Such rumours include what his opponents have gleefully described as the “Dubai Agenda” with which they claimed he wanted to clinch the presidency. Is it a myth or reality? What does it mean? Could it have handed Atiku power if it had not been checked as his opponents aver? Did Atiku actually have access to INEC’s server?

    Former Senate President David Alechenu Bonaventure Mark is not returning to the Red Chamber. What is crystal clear is that the retired soldier is not tired. He will surely be involved in the local politics, sponsoring his cronies for offices. More importantly, perhaps, Mark will now have time for golf, the elitist game for which he has a remarkable passion and in which he is said to have invested a fortune home and abroad. Now he can tend his courses better and savour the sheer lush greenery of the fairway and improve on his handicap.

    Besides, he can now splash more cash on the game, with the fairway so far away from the prying eyes of those curtain-twitching busybodies posing as whistle-blowers.

    General Jeremiah Timbut Useni, former military governor, former minister, former Quarter-Master General of the Army, distinguished senator and governorship candidate of the PDP in Plateau State, has vowed to reclaim his mandate. He says he was rigged out. Solomon Lalong, the incumbent governor, has since been handed the trophy.

    What will Useni do now? Get set to have another shot at the office? Retire from politics and go into humanitarian ventures, if indeed service is the engine that drives his ambition? I really don’t know. All I am sure of is that the senator will neither be bored nor be idle. No.

    There has been this clamour for his memoirs in which he is expected to shed light on what actually happened on June 8, 1998 when former Head of State Gen. Sani Abacha – of dreadful memory – died. Useni is said to be the only one who holds the key to unravelling how the man who ruled Nigeria with an iron fist passed on peacefully in his bedroom in what is believed to be either an orgy of concupiscence or a miracle.

    Now the amiable senator will have time to debunk all the rumours. Was there a bevy of Indian girls at the Villa when Abacha died? Where was his Chief Security Officer (CSO), Col. Hamza Al-Mustapha (retd.), the one singing like a canary and blabbing all over the place, when his boss succumbed to death? Was it a murder or a natural incident? Will Useni agree to write?

    Former Kano State Governor Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso believes his candidate was robbed of victory in the governorship election. Like many others, he is screaming and swearing and crying and sobbing and whining and singing and wailing that Umar Ganduje’s victory will be reversed. Interesting.

    Those who think the leader of the Kwakwasiyya Movement will be idle got it all wrong, I dare say. His Excellency will be available for politicians seeking Hausa votes in any part of the country. Articulate, calm and charming. Kwankwaso can always deploy his skills to woo his kinsmen living outside the North to vote whoever has sought his service. That, no doubt, is a hell of a job that will keep anybody busy. But, will His Excellency receive a just and commensurate reward for such physical and mental exertions?

    Oyo State Governor Abiola Isiaka Ajimobi is at peace with himself after losing the battle for Senate. He carries on with the business of state with the nobility and dignity of a self-respected leader, unlike some of his colleagues who are fighting for their integrity after being accused of betraying the party that gave them power. One was even hit with a criminal allegation of putting a gun to an electoral officer’s head to force his declaration as winner of a senatorial election – he denies it ever happened.

    Since Ajimobi mounted the saddle about eight years ago, Ibadan has ceased to be the haven for thugs and motor park warlords whose cutlass brandishing henchmen ruled and ruined the exciting city. Ibadan is now peaceful, no more home to gangsters, mobsters and tricksters. His Excellency will have his hands full, seeking peace where there is trouble – there are many such places in our beleaguered country. The Oyo formula will surely be handy.

    It is stale news that Senator Godswill Akpabio lost his seat in an uncommon election that was prosecuted in an uncommon manner by an uncommon electorate and some uncommon supervisors, who are defending it all in an uncommon way. Many have been wondering what the charismatic politician will do now.

    Akpabio, it has been suggested, should set up a first-class law chamber – many don’t remember he is a lawyer who strayed (or strolled) into politics. The uncommon senator, I am damn sure, has his eyes on a bigger stage, considering his closeness to the men of might and means in Abuja whose social functions he now finds time to attend. In other words, Akpabio is likely to get a national platform from where he will relaunch his uncommon political career and reclaim his lost crown. Will he not be betrayed again?

    The Uba brothers – Chris and Andy – lost the battle for Senate to another Uba, Ifeanyi, the controversial businessman. Chris Uba, you may wish to recall, had spoken of his plan to propose a law to protect godfathers. All that has become a mere dream, some conjectural fantasy of a wannabe senator. But the chief need not worry;  godfathers, fortunately, will remain with us for as long as we have willing godsons and goddaughters. He should return to that role in which he is so experienced.

     

    The Rivers conundrum

    RIVERS State residents are faced with a difficult question. Who won the March 9 governorship election? The Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is laying claim to the prize. So is the African Action Congress (AAC), a relatively unknown party eager to become a giant killer. There are speculations that it is backed by the All Progressives Congress (APC), which fielded no candidate in the election.

    Results were being collated. Suddenly it all stopped, stuck in the murky mud of violence. INEC is set to resume the collation, but there are many results that are being pushed as the authentic representation of the wishes of the people.

    inec Elections
    INEC Chairman Mahmood Yakubu

    Amid the chaos, the AAC candidate’s running mate, Akpo Yeeh, jumped ship (o yeah, he did), defecting to the PDP. Suddenly. He got a warm reception at the Government House where Governor Nyesom Wike, PDP National Chair Uche Secondus and others were waiting excitedly to receive him. Before AAC could deal with the reality of a running mate dumping its camp to join its opponent’s (at whatever price), its vice chairman also threw in the towel to join – no prize for guessing which party – the PDP. Suddenly.

    There have been protests and protests. Who has the people’s mandate? Will INEC be seen as an unbiased umpire when it all ends somehow? Why has it all been so bloody? With soldiers in hospital, is it valid to say the army was the aggressor or aided the violence that attended the election?

    Until our politicians decide to bury their greed and allow the people to decide who gets their mandate, there will always be violence as personal interests and people’s interests clash. INEC will continue to get the bashing – wrongly.

    Since democracy remains the best way of choosing leaders, it must be saved in Rivers. But will our desperate politicians agree?

  • Eighth assembly’s baleful legacies

    As the eighth assembly winds down and feverish fever for agenda-setting for the ninth senate becomes infectious, I think it is important to examine where we are coming from. Although history has the final verdict, the eighth assembly is considered by many Nigerians as a disaster. And to them, there can be no greater heart-rending dirge than the fact that only about a third of the ‘like minds’ senators who yesterday behaved as if there would be no tomorrow would be returning  to the red chambers.

    The eighth assembly is a symptom of all that is wrong with Nigeria. To the greed-driven PDP and APC lawmakers, it is a house for deal-makers. To ex-President Obasanjo, it is a house of ‘unarmed robbers”. To Prof. Itse Sagay (SAN), “for its refusal to pass the 2018 budget almost halfway into the year, the 8th senate is probably the worst we have ever had since the return to civilian rule”.

    To our own Biodun Jeyifo, the 8th assembly is a ‘predatory legislature’ for paying its members the highest salaries in the history of modern parliaments’. To the influential ‘The Economist’, it is responsible for ‘the most unjust and lopsided pay structure in the world’.

    It’s inauguration on July 9, 2015 was preceded by a monumental scandal unknown to democracy elsewhere in the democratic world. Bukola Saraki, after cutting a deal which ceded the deputy senate presidency to the opposition, capitalized on the absence of 51 of his elected APC colleagues to be adopted senate president by 49 PDP senators and eight APC senators. Itse Sagay described Saraki’s coup as ‘a victory for impunity, a victory for fraud and a victory for political desperation and indiscipline’, while Auwalu Yadudu, former Dean of Faculty of Law, Bayero University Kano dismissed it as ‘lies in the face of democratic ideals’ since Saraki’s emergence stemmed from ‘a flawed election by a fraction of yet-to-be-constituted senate.

    For consolidation of power, the lawmakers must remain lawbreakers having started by substituting the existing Senate Rule 3 (3) (k) of the 2011-(All senators-elect shall participate in the nomination and voting for president and deputy president of the senate) which makes it mandatory for all members to participate in the process with a strange Senate  Rule 3 (3) (i) in the 2015 Orders-(All senators-elect are entitled to participate in the voting for senate president and deputy senate president) used for the election. Police interim report confirmed fraud and dragged the Saraki and Ekweremadu to court.

    Then following Dino Melaye’s specious argument that since the same rule was used in screening the ministers including the Attorney General of the Federation, AGF, service chiefs and in passing the budget, “If the rule is fake, then the budget we have received is also fake and illegal”. The government developed cold feet. The law-breakers thereafter went ahead to pass another senate resolution saying the senate rules were not forged and directed their members in court to withdraw their case or risk sanctions.

    With that victory, the senators started to behave like ruffians.  On January 11, 2017,  the Nigerian Customs “intercepted and impounded a Range Rover SUV which carried documents that claimed its chassis number was “SALGV3TF3EA190243”, valued  at  N298 million, with an alleged fake documents presented by the driver showing payment of N8m as against expected customs duty of N74 million. It belonged to the senate president. Resorting to self-help, Hameed Ali, the Comptroller General of Customs, was ordered to appear in the upper house. Dino Melaye insisted he must appear wearing customs-general uniform despite Femi Falana’s argument that “neither the constitution not the rules of procedure of the senate has conferred on it the power to compel the CGC to wear customs uniform when he is not a serving customs officer”. The nation was told a few days later that the senate internal probe exonerated the senate president but found an un-named importer guilty.

    More rough tactics were soon brought to bear on the running of the senate. Kangiwa Umar, a highly principled former administrator of Kaduna State spoke of an influential senator, who used his company to import 1,200 metric tons of rice in 30 40-foot containers, fraudulently declared as yeast to evade payment of appropriate duties. And when Ali, the Customs Comptroller-General refused to release the seized items based on the dubious alibi provided by “the leader of the Senate Committee on Customs, Excise & Tariff” to the effect that “his findings shows it was the clearing agent not the importer that called the goods ‘yeast’ instead of ‘rice’, he was harassed, intimidated and accused of corruption.

    Umar was not done. He went on to also allege that the same senator involved in the rice importation scandal also owns a company that secured a contract to dredge the Calabar Channel which the Bureau of Public Procurement has condemned as violating all due processes. Despite that there was no evidence the contract was ever executed, the senator “demanded and got a whopping $12.5million upfront payment from the NPA and even asked for a purported balance of $22million”.

    The eighth assembly, like others since 1999 when Dr. Bukola Saraki, fresh from a medical school, was appointed budget adviser by President Obasanjo is notorious for budget padding. The senate response to the critics of this illegal diversion of resources from critical projects such as Lagos- Ibadan expressway or the Second Niger Bridge to ill-implemented constituency projects has always been a threat to discipline a minister or impeach a vice president.

    The public didn’t need to wait for long to discover the constituency projects scheme was nothing but a rip-off. First, Abdul Mumin Jibrin, reacting to his removal as chairman of the appropriation committee of the house following a claim he ‘unilaterally padded the 2016 budget to the tune of N4.1 billion to his Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency in Kano State, attributed his travails to his inability “to admit into the budget, almost N30 billion personal requests from Mr. Speaker and the three other principal officers”.

    Not long after, a Civic Technology Organisation-BudgIT claimed that about N350billion appropriated by the National Assembly in respect of about 2,516 projects spread across the country in the last five years never took off even after full payment had been made. On July 17, 2016, The Nation in a report titled “Constituency Projects – a ritual of monumental waste” summarized the result of a survey of 436 projects including water bore-holes, rural electricity and roads projects and primary health centres designed to alleviate the suffering of the poor but abandoned across 16 states of the federation.

    The 8th assembly is also a house of greed. Following a newspaper report that governors-turned senators were collecting two salaries, the senate claimed its internal probe confirmed their esteemed members only collected their pensions. This was at a time about 26 of the 36 states could not pay minimum wage of N18, 000 with some in arrears of 8-12 months and at a time pensioners who had served the country with distinction were dying on the queue waiting for their unpaid pensions.

    The 8th assembly finally lost all by derailing the constitutional amendment project because Saraki and Dogara wanted to be members of the Council of State, enjoy immunity along with speakers of state legislatures who must also enjoy financial autonomy. They rejected devolution of power, preferring the current situation where we have about 88 items in the exclusive list and 33 in the concurrent list without a residual list, an arrangement that has rendered the states impotent while a dysfunctional centre makes a mess of functions such as roads, agriculture, health, education, and security that are best handled by states.

  • The ‘Coding’ fallacy

    Over the past few years, the idea that computer programming or “Coding” is the key to Africa’s unemployment and development problems has bloomed across the continent.

    In Nigeria, the bug catches on in real time. The desire to make coding a “new basic” skill for all Nigerians has driven the formation of coding schools, non-profit concerns and policy cultures.

    It’s amusing to see governors presiding over states with inadequately funded schools, barely stocked and mostly empty libraries, underpaid teachers, make a public show of giving indigent pupils scholarships to participate in coding workshops.

    Coding is just another gimmick from the digital cult of distraction. As Rojek points out, it masks the real stagnation of life, hiding its decomposition behind thick layers of sheen and contrived glitter.

    The coding movement, like previous forms of distraction, seduces us to engage in imitative but ill-suited enlightenment. It asks and deflects in one breath, what Hedges would call, the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice, growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic collapse, and political corruption.

    We live in a world were education is continually mauled and reconstructed to be market-friendly. Thus the recent fascination with coding, the notion that Africa and Nigeria’s children and youth will profit by the over-hyped precepts and algorithms of programming – it’s all part of a corporately-managed Nirvana, tentacles of the same calamari.

    Critics of the coding train allege that its primary goal is to increase the number of programmers on the market and thus trigger a regime of dismal wages, even as tech companies smile to the banks.

    Many parents, too, are encouraging their children to learn to code. The recent boom in kids coding classes draws attention to public perceptions that coding is a crucial part of children education.

    The attainment of coding skills by children, the girl-child and housewives, in particular, has been fetishized as the panacea to societal problems even though the promoters of such cause are aware that the provision of well stocked libraries, stable electricity supply, standard school science laboratories, well-paid teachers, food security, and humane public health policies, among others would the cited beneficiaries greater good.

    Coding, as promoted by STEM-based learning programmes, is sold as the major guarantee of employability now and in the future in an industry that seems to be growing and evolving more rapidly than we can keep up. But is this the reality? As Myranda Leigh Harris would ask, how many more coders could we possibly need?

    The fact remains that barely half of high school and university students who major in science, technology, engineering or math-related subjects secure employment in their field after graduation.

    That certainly casts doubt on the idea that there is a “skills gap” between workers’ abilities and employers’ needs, notes Kate Miltner Ph.D candidate in Communication, University of Southern California, Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism.

    Speaking on America’s coding culture, she says: “Concerns about these disparities has helped justify investment in tech education over the past 20 years. As millions of dollars flow to technology companies in the name of education, they often bypass other major needs of U.S. schools.

    “Technology in the classroom can’t solve the problems that budget cuts, large class sizes and low teacher salaries create. Worse still, new research is finding that contemporary tech-driven educational reforms may end up intensifying the problems they were trying to fix. Who will benefit most from this new computer science push? History tells us that it may not be students.”

    Indeed, the jury is out over the real beneficiaries of the coding train. A cursory look around would reveal that most of the non-profits advancing the coding train are affiliated to big business and trust funds’ handout list. There has to be something wrong in that, right?

    Yet the frantic quest to acquire programming skills may be unnecessary. Using traditional terminology, data scientist, Kady M, analyses why programming newbies comprising students and 30-something-year olds, learning to code, would be switching jobs before they turn 40 or 50 perhaps.

    The obsession with coding, it would seem, is ill-informed and misdirected. Kady traces society’s never-ending digital shuttles on the coding train. The basic development of programming language, she notes, occurred in the 1950s-60s, when mainframe computing, starting with many different vendors entered the marketplace. The period ends with the IBM 370 being the de facto computing standard, and COBOL being the de facto programming language.

    In the 1970s, minicomputers entered the venue, triggering a resurgence in the use of FORTRAN alongside COBOL. Personal computing emerged in the 1980s and computer programming shifted to the IBM PC/Microsoft combination. Program development was primarily done in BASIC.

    Client/Server computing emerged in the 1990s. Object oriented computing begin to appear, with C++ being the most prevalent. Programming tools such as IBM’s VisualAge also appear, and 4th generation computing languages are developed.

    In the 2000’s, internet technologies took hold. HTML became the internet’s common language. Java also became the core computer language of the internet.

    As you read, the core internet technologies are supplemented by cloud computing and microservices, which are single-purpose programs running in the cloud to do very specific things for programmers.

    Through these periods, there had been a large but temporary increase in the number of programmers needed, but the number employed per unit of output rapidly decreases near the end of the period.

    “Bottom line: In the beginning of the period you needed a lot of programmers to develop a given output; at the end of the period, you needed a lot less (like, maybe one) to do a job that previously took maybe a hundred to do,” says Kady.

    Today, companies are pushing economies of scale by moving computing functions off their own premises and into the Cloud. This is requiring a load of new programmers aka “Coders,” fluent in microservice technologies over the next decade or so, as existing programs are re-tooled and modernised.

    But coders, data scientists warn, should learn from history as software companies are already working overtime to put them on the unemployment line. They want to decrease how labour intensive the re-platforming to microservices is; experts argue that if you are writing scripts to drive and link these services today, you won’t be doing that in a couple of years. Somebody with much less skill than you, but who understands the higher level programming tool, will be doing your job.

    Also, there is a new player that makes the above even more drastic in terms of shortening coding careers: Artificial Intelligence (AI).

    The coding skills that children acquire today will be outdated by the time they are ready to enter the workforce, educators argue, and stress that, the more meaningful purpose of a good STEM education, is to help students develop skills in critical thinking, exploration, and problem solving-?skills that are emphasised in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics classrooms and approaches.

    These are the skills that will guide youth toward becoming more employable in the future in any profession, any position, any field. And while we can use coding as a platform for STEM-based learning, coding is not?—?and should not be?—?the only hands-on activity to develop and harness these skills.

  • The polls in words

    BY NOW, the nation should have forgotten about the governorship elections that were held in 29 states on March 9. Unfortunately, this is not so because of the tardiness of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC). Up till now, the commission has not been able to sort things out in seven states. It declared the elections inconclusive in Adamawa, Bauchi, Benue, Kano, Plateau and Sokoto and suspended the process in Rivers.

    But all of a sudden, INEC reversed itself, in Bauchi,  saying it would continue with the process as the “duplicate and original registration area results are available”. That was on Friday. On Tuesday, it made a dramatic U’ turn again, as it returned to its earlier position of conducting  supplementary elections in the state. Did I hear you say, why is INEC dillydallying? We will come to that shortly.

    The other side of the elections, which will be remembered for the upset in some states where the mighty fell to those hitherto seen as small fries, are also quite interesting. But the polls will be remembered more for the new lexicon they threw up. These words have developed a life of their own even after the elections. It all started in Kwara long before the polls when some people in the state came together under the O To Ge banner to wrest power from the Saraki dynasty. Senate President Bukola Saraki, the head of the dynasty, did not know what hit him at the polls. He lost his bid to return to the Senate and was also unable to facilitate the election of those who relied on him to win.

    The O To Ge Movement has  been likened to the Arab Spring which spread through the Middle East in late 2010. Many regimes were toppled by the Arab Springers, just as O To Ge swept away Saraki and his men in Kwara. O To Ge was the beginning of things to come. Some mischief makers wanted to try it in Lagos. They tried all tricks in the book to rally the people round a cause which was bound to fail ab initio. The reason being that the champions wanted to fight a personal war.  Their aim was to get at former Lagos State governor Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Never one to run away from battle, Tinubu gave it back to them during the March 9 election. “This is not Kwara”, he reminded them. “There is no O To Ge here, it is O To Pe in Lagos”.

    In Ogun, the outgoing Governor Ibikunle Amosun, contrary to his wish, will not be leaving in a blaze of glory. He is leaving with his tails between his legs following the defeat of his anointed candidate Abdulkabir Akinlade by Governor-elect Dapo Abiodun. The people waved him bye after the election with the slogan: O Tan E. His followers will miss his sky-bound cap after his exit in May. His comrade-in-arm, the outgoing Imo Governor Rochas Okorocha suffered the same fate. Okorocha wanted to perpetuate himself in office through his son-in-law Uche Nwosu. His Ibeberism philosophy crashed even before it could be adopted. Former House of Representatives Deputy Speaker Emeka Ihedioha got the better of him and his candidate at the poll. Today, he is waging a bitter war against Ihedioha for cautioning him against going on a spending spree before his exit. With Ibeberism, he might have erected statues in honour of some undeserving people, but the philosophy sure has its limit when it comes to election.

    In Oyo, Governor-elect Seyi Makinde is being heralded into office with the slogan: Won Tun De, to remind him of the years that his party spent in office in the state with little or nothing to show for it. Will he make a difference?   INEC took the term ‘’inconclusive polls’’ to a ridiculous height this time around. It has reversed itself twice on Bauchi in five days, throwing its actions  open to suspicion. Is the commission sure of what it is doing? Why did it declare the election inconclusive when it has not concluded its findings on the exercise? Inconclusive! Ongoing!! Inconclusive!!! What will INEC do next in Bauchi? Reverse itself again before the Saturday supplementary polls? You cannot put that beyond this commission which seems confused about its task. INEC should just round off the elections and let us put the exercise behind us. How long does it take to conduct elections paapa?

    From 4 + 4 to Next Level in Abuja to 4 + 4…Loading in Edo, we were not short of slogans. The slogans did not just start today. In the Second Republic, we had 122/3; Accord Concordiale; Politics without bitterness; Political juggernaut; When the come comes to become and shortly after the beginning of this dispensation in 1999, the late Chuba Okadigbo came up with the “banana peel’’ under the Senate president’s seat following his ouster. Slogans are the munition with which political battles are waged.

  • Mindsets, stereotypes and delusions of grandeur

    The 2019 presidential election was considered by many local and international observers as a referendum on integrity. Located at both ends of the spectrum are President Buhari, promoted by his admirers as a man of character leading an anti- corruption crusade against parasites that feed on the blood of the poor, and, Atiku Abubakar, a former vice president and a multi billionaire business man committed to the protection and defence of the interest of his friends in politics and in business.

    The mind-set of Atiku promoters during and after the Port Harcourt PDP presidential primaries described by some newspapers as dollar bazaar through which privileged delegates allegedly smiled home with as much as $10,000, was that the poor, uneducated, jobless and unemployable northern youths concerned more with their daily survival will be easy prey to money bags and promoters of stomach infrastructure. And for the middle-belt region voters, the mindless killings of innocent farmers and their family members by herdsmen while the president’s security men accused of nurturing a Fulani agenda talked from both sides of the mouth, the choice between candidate Atiku and President Buhari, a former herds boy accused by political opponents of having sympathy for herders that turned the middle belt region and elsewhere in the country into a killing field, was very clear.

    But mind-sets sometimes can be nothing but pictures in our heads. The 2019 elections as shown by INEC declared results, is a study in failure of mind-sets, stereotypes and indiscretion of self-delusion. Many of the uneducated jobless poor in search of a messiah, a potential threat to the democratization process, voted their conscience and made informed choices. Thus the haven of millions of unschooled jobless                                                                                                                     angry youths and other centres of poverty in the north voted as follows: Kano: Buhari secured 1,464,768 to Atiku’s 391,593 votes; Kebbi,581,552, to 154,282), Yobe,(497,914 to 50,763),Borno, (836,496 to 71,788), Jigawa, (794,738 to 289,898), Katsina, (1,232,133 to 308,056) and Zamfara, (438,682 to 125,423)

    Similarly in the middle belt regions where it appears voters were driven more by  preference for integrity above other considerations including herdsmen’s mindless killing and fear of islamisation, Buhari and Atiku ran neck to neck in Adamawa  with Buhari securing  378,078 to Atiku’s 410,226;Taraba: 324,906  to 374,743; Benue 347,668 to 356,817 and Plateau 468,555 to 548,665. Buhari also secured a landslide victory in historical anti-Fulani Bauchi with 798,424 to 209,313 and besieged Kaduna with 993,445 to 649,612. That the poor chose integrity over other considerations during the presidential election is evidenced by the current ‘inconclusive’ gubernatorial elections in some six states including Sokoto (490,333 to 361 604) that had earlier given Buhari massive support.

    In contrast to the poor, uneducated and deprived youths who take refuge in some declared centres of poverty in Nigeria, the southern youths are better educated, informed and articulate social media activists.  But unlike  the poverty centres in the north where jobless, hungry and angry youths have nothing but disdain for those accused of corruption (barawo), the privileged, educated and better informed  affluent southern youths, the promise  of democracy, taking a cue from ex-President Jonathan, never see stealing government funds meant for developmental projects as corruption. It is a common feature in the south to see politicians indicted for corruption by house probes or the courts and some others who have been moving in and out of EFCC detention camps over fuel subsidy scam in the last four years elected into the National Assembly as senators, members of the House of Representatives or even governors.

    Except among the underprivileged poor northern youths where Abubakar, on account of his past records as public servant was considered unfit to rule, integrity and honour play little or no role among many Nigerian voters during election. Just as ex-President Obasanjo back in 1979 said the best candidate in an election didn’t necessarily have to win, he in the run up to the 2019 election also asked Nigerians to overlook his well-documented alleged Atiku’s sins against the country. It is instructive that the bulk of Jonathan 12million votes in the 2019 election came from the south-east, south- south and the north-central.

    In the southwest, Atiku discovered just as Jonathan did in 2015, that traditional and political leaders are only leaders to the extent that they represent the aspirations of the people and that the Yoruba as Awo once warned would not vote for you because you are Yoruba, if you have no programme that will impact positively on his life.  And since the people freely make their choices, even within the traditional Obaship system, it is not likely the Ifa will reject the choice of the people for someone who has a character deficit. It was not an accident that self-deluding leaders who staked everything to promote Atiku Abubakar were humiliated in their polling booths.

    Atiku’s victory in Oyo where he polled 385,229 to Buhari’s 366,690 cannot be separated from the mishandling of herdsmen ‘killings, kidnappings and attack on farmlands in Yoruba land” which  Emeritus Professor of History and Second Republic Senator, BanjiAkintoye alleged “are being sponsored by the Fulani oligarchy with the sole aim to capture Nigeria”, and his passionate appeal  to” Southwest governors and those of Kwara, Kogi and Edo states to set party interest aside and join hands together and decide on how to protect Yoruba land for history and posterity in the face of the herdsmen aggression against the peace, security, and prosperity of our people”.

    Other victims of grandeur of illusion in the southwest include outgoing governor, AbiolaAjimobi of Oyo State who had his ambition of transiting from governor’s lodge to the senate chambers checkmated by victims of his caustic tongue and IbikunleAmosun, who having surrounded himself with thugs and sycophants thought he was no more answerable to those who recruited him from APP, packaged him and campaigned for his election.

    Ajimobi is perhaps the first Oyo governor to win a second term – an appreciation of his unprecedented achievements in areas of infrastructural development, reduction level of violence and bringing sanity to chaotic flash points in Ibadan during his first term. By his second term, he had grown wings daring the Olubadan and constituting himself into a ‘constituted authority’ totally out of touch with students who looked up to him for support after spending several months at home due to teachers strike over unpaid salaries.

    As for Amosun, he momentarily forgot himself and dared the people. Surrounded by thugs and promoted by sycophants, he had thought he was invincible. The people of Ogun State humoured him on until he was humiliated by the defeat of his candidate during the February 23 governorship election.

    The paradox of the 2019 election is that while the so called uneducated, poor northern youths, the ‘almajiris’ in search of messiah, often portrayed as threat to the democratization process came out as the greatest assets to democracy, their educated, better informed and more affluent southern counterparts and social media warriors, have turned out to be the greatest threat to the democratization process in Nigeria.

  • Lagos, Port Harcourt, Kaduna and Enugu: Tale of four cities

    There has been so much controversy on who owns Lagos in recent times between the indigenes and the non -indigenes, between “omoEko” (indigenes) and “araEko” (residents) that a little knowledge of the history of Lagos May remove the blinkers from our eyes. The indigenes of Lagos have a saying “Awori lo l’Eko” meaning, Lagos belongs to the Awori. The Awori were the original settlers of Lagos and their settlements still exist in various Awori settlements from Iddo, Iganmu, Apapa, Isheri and so on up to Otta. These Awori settlements were founded around the 12th century during the evolution of similar political entities in Yorubaland.It was not until the 15th century that Oba Ewuare the Great sent an expedition to the island now known as Lagos for the purpose of making it a slave port for evacuating war captives to Europe through the Portuguese, the first Europeans to make contact with the Benin Empire. The Bini settlement or camp (Eko) was separate from the Awori villages and settlements and there was no attempt by the Bini camp to lord it over the Aworis. Waves of people from neighboringIjebu, Remo and Egba territories came to Lagos virtually overwhelming the Awori and the Bini camp. But since they were all of the same culture, there was no acrimonious contention about indigenous rights and the rights of newcomers. The Bini group hunkered around their settlement at IghaIdugaran (pepper farm). The prestige of the Benin Empire made the settlement to be respected and the place grew into a kingdom replicating in a small way, the royalty of Benin and its palace chiefs on the island the Portuguese named Lagos but which the Yoruba’s appropriating the Bini word for camp called Eko. The independence of the Awori settlements on the mainland continued to be respected even until today and throughout the colonial period. The sister empire of Oyo also put down a toehold at Ajase, west of Lagos, which the Portuguese called Porto Novo for the same purpose of the slave trade. Benin influence on the island of Lagos is a historical fact, but this does not mean Lagos is not part of Yorubaland. The Benin influence extended to the dynasties of such places in eastern Yorubaland like Ado, Ikere, ItaOgbolu, IgbaraOke and Akure. This does not make the people from these towns Bini. The fact for example, that the ruling monarch in England is German does not make England part of Germany. Also the Bini inspired monarchy in places like Onitsha and the western periphery of Igboland does not remove the fact that Onitsha and kingdoms west of Onitsha are part of Igboland neither does the replacement of the ogisos in Bini by an Oduduwa dynasty make Bini part of Yorubaland. What is important to note is the dynamic relationship of people in the Bight of Guinea in the past and that the whole area shares a common cultural similarity.

    When the British took over Lagos and its mainland in 1861 after naval bombardment of the town, it signed a treaty of cession with the oba who surrendered his suzerainty to the British crown. From that time onwards, the people of the crown colony became British subjects while the rest of what later became Nigeria was “terra incognita “at least for a while until the heydays of European imperialism of the 1880s to 1900s.

    At amalgamation of all British territories in Nigeria with the colony of Lagos in 1914 with Egbaland remaining still independent until its independence was abrogated at the outbreak of the First World War, Lagos became the capital of Nigeria.

    The then Governor General hated Lagos with its “insalubrious climate and seditious press “and its “trousered niggers, dressed in Bond-street attire who send their laundry for dry cleaning in England” and decided to build a new capital in the centre of the country. He found this centre on River Kaduna which gave the new capital its name. Lugard embarked on feverish development of Kaduna using the same tax on “trade gin” banned from the north as well as revenue from custom levies and proceeds from palm kernel and palm oil and cocoa trade. The development of Kaduna continued during the Great War at a less frenetic speed as before. The whole idea of moving the capital to Kaduna was ended by Sir Hugh Clifford, a different kind of governor from Lugard. Sir Clifford, the successor of Sir Fredrick Lugard said he was not prepared to administer Nigeria from “specially fabricated isolated centre in the middle of the country”. Development of Kaduna was however never quite abandoned and its effect is the well planned Kaduna city compared with the chaos of Lagos. Hugh Clifford tried to improve Lagos by developing the so-called” Ikoyi plains” in the 1920s.

    Contemporaneous with the Kaduna project were two other new towns built by Nigeria. Port Harcourt was conceived by Sir Fredrick Lugard as an alternative if not an outright replacement for Lagos. Lugard felt Lagos port was too shallow and its development constituted a drain on Nigeria’s exchequer. The principal officers in the colonial office in London were not persuaded about Lugard’s project and to outwit them, Lugard named the port after the secretary of state for the colonies Sir Lewis Harcourt. Sir Lewis fell for it and action for the new port began in 1913. The city around the port was well planned by British architects which accounts for the town’s sobriquet as “garden city “. Any visitor to Port Harcourt before the deluge of people from the hinterland would have described it as “little Lagos”.

    With the outbreak of the First World War, it became difficult to get British ships to bring coal from New Castle to Nigeria. Coal was absolutely necessary to run the railways which crisscrossed the country from Lagos to Kano and from Port Harcourt to Jos. Coal was also needed to fire the generators to light up the European government reserved Areas ( GRA) . It was in this circumstance that the colliery in Enugu was developed. The native Wawa people were too primitive to work in the mines so people were recruited from all over the country to work in the Enugu coal mines. Enugu owes its well-planned layout to its colonial origin. Another town that developed around the tin and columbite mines in the plateau was Jos. In fact, the European impact was such that a certain part of Jos was known as “Anglo Jos” perhaps until recently.

    There is no doubt that our British colonial heritage brought together heterogeneous population many of who had very little in common. This has led to bloody frictions in Jos between the indigenes and the Hausa who claimed that they built Jos. Old Jos was an amalgam of Hausa, Birom, Naraguta, Yoruba, and Urhobo; the Igbos were late arrivals after the tin mines had become unprofitable. It seems a modus vivendi now exists between the natives and the Hausa in Jos.Enugu has not experienced too much conflict between the indigenes and other Igbo settlers with the exception of resentment of the natives against those who exploited their backwardness to alienate their land to themselves during colonial and post-colonial rule when Enugu was the capital of the entire Eastern Region.

    Port Harcourt’s indigenes in Diobu and the Nkwerre people resented the dominance of the up country Igbo during the colonial and post-colonial period. In fact up till the 1940s, Port Harcourt was reasonably cosmopolitan. The Nigeria civil war and the creation of a Rivers State allowed the local people to ventilate their feeling against their Igbo neighbours by seizing their landed property and converting it to their own use under the rubric of “abandoned property”. When the war ended, the Rivers people even though a large percent of them speak the same language with the Igbo in the hinterland, refused to give up the properties of the Igbo.

    Now to Lagos the big elephant in the Nigerian room. Lagos is like New York big apple which everybody wants to have a bite of. Lagos since 1861 up to the amalgamation of all British territories to form Nigeria became a frontier of opportunity for Yorubaland and other immigrants from all across West Africa as well as the returnees from Brazil and Sierra Leone. After the amalgamation, Lagos was opened to all comers from the whole country. The colonial and post-colonial governments have spent considerable amount of money to make the place livable.  Facilities such as newport, new airport and housing estate to decongest the unwieldy urban sprawl of Lagos sprang up. Those who were displaced by the civil war and other ethnic conflicts up country always found home in Lagos. Incredibly people tend to find a way of living together in spite of differences in socialization from urban to village type of life.

    Now this seems to be coming under severe strain by those who want to use the force of population to seize control from the owners of the place using spurious arguments about how one can move from one state to another in America to contest election. Africa is an old continent and not like America that is a recently settled country. Until recently, you couldn’t become a German except by blood! It is foolish to deny the power of ethnicity in African politics as much as we deprecate it. It will be unreasonable for me to enjoy the right to contest in Lagos and in Ekiti at the same time or as Igbo propagandist TV has been threatening that an Anambra man will be the next governor of Lagos. Ideally that should be wished for through evolution but not by threat of unproved superiority of one ethnic population and tax contribution over those of the quiet majority who have been very generous to non-indigenes whose properties were preserved for them during the civil war with accumulated rents collected unlike what happened in neighboring states.  We need to build on trust that existed in the past and respect each other. There is no need for ethnic bellicosity and jingoism because at the end of the day, it is the poor people who are merely eking out an existence who will suffer. We need to preserve the past civility and not rock the boat because of electoral politics. Nobody disputes the ownership of Kaduna Enugu and Port Harcourt; why is Lagos different?

  • A long running show

    I HAD thought the elections and the accompanying melodrama would be all over by now. The vote bazaars, the fumbling and rumbling key actors, the hassling and haggling. How wrong I was; damn wrong. The show, which began on February 23 after a shift from February 16, goes on.

    Supplementary elections are coming in Bauchi, Kano, Sokoto, Plateau, Adamawa and Benue states. Legal battles are raging as politicians get more enraged over their fate. Rivers State politicians have turned their (beloved?) state into a ping pong, smashing it up and down and defending it at the same time. The young people who run the show have gone gaga. Elders are crying for help. Who will save Rivers?

    Where the elections have been concluded, the drama remains inconclusive. Gbenga Daniel (I bet you know him  very well), the former Ogun State Governor who was the face of the Atiku Campaign before the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) convention where his principal got the party’s prized ticket, suddenly announced the other day that he was waving a final bye to politics. Incredible. The news was shocking – to fans and foes alike.

    Why? Why now? Age? Health? Cash? Is he broke or broken by the peculiar vicissitudes of our peculiar politics? Heartbroken by Atiku’s costly loss? Or is it all a stunt – the type our politicians pull off with shameless dexterity? What ails Daniel?

    As many were struggling to unravel these puzzles, Daniel’s fans rushed down in droves to his palatial home. Their mission: to beg their hero not to quit politics. It was a moving scene. Women were crying. Men held their heads in their hands. Unable to hold their emotions, some went down on all fours, held Daniel by the leg and cried, begging him not to leave them in the wilderness. They grovelled and snivelled all day. “Please, don’t go; take us to APC,” they cried.

    Daniel, obviously a compassionate man, rescinded his decision. “My people have spoken. What else can I say?” he told reporters. End of the show? No. Not at all. Those curtain-twitching busybodies, whose number among us is unfortunately growing by the day, went after him. They claimed – as usual, without any proof whatsoever – that Daniel was broke, as if being broke is a criminal matter. Besides, they said he was eager to shake off the damning effects of a probe of his administration by Governor Ibikunle Amosun. He had thought an Atiku victory would be a sure ticket to those good old days of naira –sorry, a slip there – dollar rain. They called him names, saying he should have waited for Atiku’s legal battle to end before throwing in the towel.

    But the question remains inconclusive: is Daniel heading for the APC?

    Also inconclusive is His Excellency Rochas ‘Owelle’ Okorocha’s bid for a senatorial seat. INEC carried out its threat not to give him a certificate of return because, the electoral umpire claimed, his victory was obtained through the bullet and not the ballot. The electoral officer reported that he announced Okorocha winner under duress as a gun was put to his head. Wonderful..

    The Imo State governor is defending his mandate. He appeared on television the other day to say that he was unjustly shut out of that rowdy certificate presentation in Abuja. But he gave INEC the benefit of the doubt. “Maybe INEC wants to organise a special session for me,” he said, smiling. Yes; it is possible.

    As His Excellency was fighting for his certificate in Abuja, another war had broken out back home in Owerri. He was accused of withdrawing N7b cash in three days. Besides, he was pointedly told to get set for a probe. Poor fellow. It does not just rain it pours, as they say. Trust Okorocha, a man of outstanding courage and an exciting sense of humour. He dared the incoming Emeka Ihedioha administration to probe everything, including his meals.

    Those fellows whose business is minding other people’s business even as theirs remain unattended; those who know nothing about the workings of a government, began to gossip. Why such huge withdrawals? What for? Does he want to erect more statues or repair and erect again those that have been pulled down?

    Apparently not done, they hit the social media with a picture of His Excellency in a complete khaki uniform of one of the state’s paramilitary outfits. He is at attention – never mind the protruding tummy – with his two arms tightly placed beside his big frame, fists clenched and eyes looking straight.A brown beret sits gently on his gubernatorial head. The caption: “My governor on the way to INEC to collect his certificate.”

    His Excellency need not fret. He should remain hopeful and prayerful. These matters could take some time to resolve.

    Kano State Governor Umar Ganduje is confident of winning Saturday’s makeup election. Apparently unwilling to stand his confidence, his opponents have hit the social media to deride him. An old picture of His Excellency carrying a head pan at a construction site has been dug out and presented as fresh. “See how Ganduje is appeasing one of the communities where the supplementary elections will be held,” the purveyors of the fake news announced. There is yet another —of Ganduje and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu — an old picture taken when the governor visited the APC leader in Lagos last year. They said Tinubu was in Kano to influence the makeup poll. Lies. Bloody lies.

    Besides, what is wrong in a governor carrying a head pan; isn’t there dignity in labour anymore?

    At a thanksgiving service in his Iperu hometown, Ogun State Governor-elect Dapo Abiodun said he would not have won if men were God. He told of how he had run several times but failed and never gave up. That was the lesson. But some of those busybodies, aforementioned, took the matter beyond the church. They started their inquiries. Who was the “Incoming” referring to? Did anybody try to play God? Why did he not go all the way, like some other politicians, to name the small men playing God? Was he afraid?

    Suddenly, videos and photographs of a furious Governor Ibikunle Amosun, seized by a strange anger, leading the destruction of Abiodun’s campaign materials, appeared on the social media. His Excellency, who many would swear to be a man of manners, is seen supervising the mannerless assault on Abiodun’s posters. The APC candidate’s supporters were beaten black and blue and chased away from the stadium in Abeokuta when President Buhari visited.

    Are they insinuating that Abiodun was referring to Amosun?

    Oyo State Governor-elect Seyi Makinde has been on the road, visiting dignitaries and thanking everyone for his victory. He was with former President Olusegun Obasanjo in Abeokuta the other day. Asked by reporters why he was visiting, Makinde told the inquisitive fellows that he came to seek wisdom on how to run his administration. A cheeky fellow among the reporters was later heard telling his colleagues that he was sure that a one-day tutorial in “egocentrism” and “do-or-die” will not be enough for the “Incoming”.

    Atiku also came visiting. Obasanjo, you will recall, was one of his main backers who swore that Buhari must go. Now, Buhari’s supporters are claiming that Obasanjo has been demystified. Are they right?

    The Ninth Senate is yet to open, but one of its potential stars has been all over the place. Dino Melaye, who will again be representing the twice lucky people of Kogi West, a master stuntman and loudmouth, has been unusually quiet – no new tricks, no vulgarity and no abusive videos. It is common knowledge that there is no love lost between Governor Yahaya Bello and the distinguished senator. Now, there is this picture of the governor posing as a boxer – black round neck shirt with a red stripe and a pair of red shorts. His fists are clenched like a pro boxer’s, the left hand up and the right down, bent to deliver an upper cut. Beside the picture is Melaye’s. He is in a blue jeans jacket, his right hand across his chest, fist clenched.

    Are those posting these pictures suggesting that Dino should be careful because His Excellency is not just keeping fit but actually getting into a fighting shape? Is it true that he used to be an amateur boxer? I really don’t know. But, I have it on good authority that Bello used to run a motor park and a fleet of commercial vehicles somewhere in Lagos before fate vaulted him to his exalted seat. I don’t even know if he was a member of the NURTW (Up National!).

    As I was saying, this has been one of our longest running shows. It will begin to wind down as from Saturday, but nobody can predict when its melo drama will end.

     

    Delta girl Success’ video

    The government of Delta State has been battling to fend off attacks since the video of a little girl, Success Adebor, went viral on the Internet. The seven-year-old was sent out of school for unpaid fees. She said she would have preferred being flogged instead of being sent out of school. The government insists that fees are not to be charged in public schools.

    Success

    The headmaster of Okotie-Eboh  Primary School I, Sapele, has been suspended to allow a thorough probe of the matter. We await the government’s findings.

    Success’ case isn’t new. There are many kids who are on the street because of the greed of some teachers, who charge illegal fees. When their poor parents can’t pay, the kids stop schooling. Such teachers should be fished out and sacked.

    Many critics have been asking the state government to account for its huge revenue; it should.

  • What do politicians think at death’s door?

    Politicians take but statesmen give. The latter relinquishes perks and privileges to earn honour. Politicians, however, fight and grab their way to identity and power, amassing fortune to leave to their heirs, and their names. Whatever becomes of both.

    The heir inherits by default hence he has no value to transact for worth, except the name, exploits and privileges of his father, which are sooner squandered and declined.

    Reality, however, reveals many a heir of a famous father as an alcoholic, drug addict, sexuality freak and dilettante, among others.

    It is not by accident but just deserts, that, several heirs to Nigeria’s greatest political dynasties incandesce, albeit briefly in their fathers’ infamy or repute before they burn out.

    Saul Bellow may liken gifting such political heirs inheritances, to picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk or rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation, as referenced by his novel, Humboldt’s Gift.

    Many who grasped these super-charged wires and serpents have been found to incandesce in acclaim for a little while and then they wink out.

    But Nigeria’s ruling class forever takes care of its own, thus the preponderance of political heirs foisted across the country’s civil service and corridors of power.

    Politicians believe its the surest way to preserve their infamy, or legacies if you insist, from transience and decline.

    What do politicians think at death’s door? How much money they could hoard into their caskets perhaps. What would you think at death’s door? You, the unbidden offering on the politician’s altar of greed?

    Greed, weaving its tissues of lust, wraps us in her shroud at birth. We grow out of the mould, startled by a pat, into a larger frame of the world’s excesses. Until we become society; and society flips us by the senses, moulding us from infancy into feral, garish cruciform.

    The newborn grows into crucifixion in the house of the impoverished. He evolves through systolic throbbing of the heart at birth, oscillating between poverty and pain, power and weaknesses, ethics and amorality – vortices of a life foredoomed to a historical gyre of gloom and death.

    The lucky child, however, extinguishes at birth in the home of the poor. Thus he is spared death in macabre warrens, like Ogun State’s dirt roads and dysfunctional hospitals. He is spared gruesome expiration as bone sliver, blood spatter and brain fragments, in Borno’s theatre of war and death.

    If he doesn’t extinguish to lack of oxygen in the hospital labour ward or alagbo omo (traditional midwife)’s matted lab, he risks growing up to become a street-urchin, cult killer, armed robber, menial worker, prostitute, assassin – forever amenable to plots of a devious ruling class.

    At the backdrop of his grisly narrative, his privileged peer grows into lush, ornate extravagance; the latter, born into the aristocratic divide is, however, feted on affluence and ravaged by wealth.

    He grows reprobate and unfeeling, weaned to extrude his savage lusts to the detriment of impoverished peer amid starving electorate – his family’s hound-meat, if you like.

    At election time, he glistens the news pages in family portraits and carefully orchestrated political media campaigns. He is the darling child whose testimonial for ‘daddy,’ ‘secret philanthropy’ and ‘very Nigerian’ fashion sense, arouses the wonder and goodwill of ‘poor, silly, sentimental electorate’ as his father would say.

    As you read, he uploads in careless abandon, pictures of his wild cavorting aboard his parents’ private jet, oft acquired with pilfered State funds. He throws the wildest fête champêtres at home, where boondocks daughters become fair game to him and friends.

    The privileged heir, like the fabled palace troll, mutates into tyrant royalty. Having assimilated the ethical decay of his forebears, he blossoms in cruelty and procedural violence. He illustrates his class’ ferocious passions in the ways and pattern of licentious Rome.

    Each sadistic exertion by him establishes portents of his unprivileged peer’s future torment by the venal, occult ruling class.

    Nigeria thrives by this macabre rite. Thus while youthful electorate clamoured for the ‘#nottooyoungtorun’ bill, the oligarchs, comprising politically party stalwarts, lent voice to the clamour, although at varying decibels and with vicious intent.

    The oligarchs plan to retain their hold on power courtesy their rich, spoilt wards, thus they snigger at youthful electorate ranting about “taking over” or screaming: “take it back!”

    The herd may vie for power but only patrician creatures and spawns, comprising drug addicts, sex perverts, trainee looters and Ivy League crooks, to mention a few, may enjoy such privilege.

    The votes our parents’ cast put us in such bind. The votes we cast puts our children in worse bind. This beggars the question: ‘For whom did we cast our votes at the 2019 elections? Whose constitution rejected our tragic ironies?

    This 2019, did you vote for the APC or PDP candidate promising a prosperous future, by the lure of money, and bigoted, poisonous politics? Which candidate projected a promising story of the future, a grand vision of possibilities that Nigerians could believe?

    We face a far more difficult problem at our moment in history: the affliction of youth weaned on ferocious, ill, savage materialism. The youth, comprising foetal adults from two societal extremes: the haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigeria project.

    How do we counsel them to be prudent, honest and just in their dealings? What do you promise youth that had been told that they can have anything they want without shedding sweat for it? How do you give them a new vision to deal with bitter reality?

    How do we breed youth on the belief that success should never be about accumulating obscene wealth to show off but the right to live life more fully and engage more expansively, the elemental possibilities of human existence?

    There is no gainsaying politicians worship money and feed the youths’ obscene lust for affluence thus emphasising the need for a value reorientation spanning schools, religious structures and the family as a social unit.

    Nigeria may draw inspiration from the legend of the conqueror King Alexander. After conquering many kingdoms, he allegedly fell ill on his way home.

    On his death bed, he realised how his legendary conquests and wealth were of no consequence. He longed for the little moment that amounted to life’s essence: to see his mother’s face and bid her bye. But sinking health would not permit him.

    In his last three wishes to his generals, he said his first desire was that his physicians alone must carry his coffin, that, people may realise, that no doctor on earth can really cure anyone of any disease.

    Second, he requested that the path leading to the graveyard be strewn with gold, silver and precious stones, which he collected in his treasury, that people may know that “not even a fraction of gold” would be buried with him.

    “My third and last wish,” he said, “is that both my hands be kept dangling out of my coffin. I wish people to know that I came empty handed into this world and empty handed I go out of this world.”

    King Alexander died afterwards. As the legend persists.

    Many supposedly “great” Nigerian politician have died in common hours. Many more would die less honourably than a commoner.

    They would never amount to a hair-strand on the world’s Alexanders, despite their conceit.

  • Gubernatorial elections: Impact of local issues

    All politics is local is a general belief among political savants. This will however not be true in nationwide presidential elections  and even in prime ministerial regimes where there is a growing tendency for local issues to take back seats in national elections. However,  the character of individual candidates and local issues may sometimes decide who wins or who loses in a particular constituency in spite of national voting trend. The last states elections have revealed quite a lot of interesting tendencies.The results in places like Kano, Oyo, Bauchi, Adamawa, Plateau, Benue and Sokoto have  revealed that local issues and the likability of the governors can be decisive.

    In Oyo for instance, some of the policies of the incumbent governor, Isiaka Ajimobi, have not gone down well with the people. Even though the Ladoke Akintola University is jointly owned by Oyo and Osun states , its closure for almost 18 months is blamed on the Oyo governor. The Ogbomosho people felt slighted and humiliated that the university named after their illustrious son was abandoned while a so-called brand new technical university  out of the reach of the average citizen was built in Ibadan. Furthermore, the Ladoke Akintola University is regarded as an economic catalyst for the sprawling Ogbomosho town which has few empowerment opportunities for its close to one million citizens. Even the various campuses of the Ibadan Polytechnic were also not funded and the result was industrial action which paralyzed the institution and threw into the streets, thousands of young people to add to those from Ladoke Akintola University whose institution had also been closed down by industrial actions of various university unions. When the students tried to meet the governor during a rowdy session, the whole situation ended in shouting exchange between the governor and the students. The young people who were affected provided the shock troops for the PDP and for all those who wanted to humiliate the rather abrasive governor. I hope the incoming governor will face frontally the issue of tertiary institutions in the state. My advice to him is to cut the Gordian knots of the ownership of Ladoke Akintola University by taking it over so that Osun State can face the problem of Osun State multi-campus university which is grossly underfunded  too. The new governor would also have to give  financial subventions  to the  Ibadan Polytechnic and its various campuses. Students fees would have to be at the level that is commensurate to what is expected at higher institutions in other parts of the country but it must not be excessively high to the point where the parents of the students will be unable to pay.

    I recently visited the Ibadan Polytechnic to ask why my ward’s results have not been sent to me and what I found in the physical dilapidation and unkempt environment was simply devastating and brought tears to my eyes. Students finish their programmes and results are withheld because one union or the other is on strike! The electoral humiliation of Ajimobi and his party has shown why it is important at least in the Southwest, for the government to carry along with it the educated elite, the educated young men and the intelligentsia generally.

    Ajimobi did very well in the infrastructural transformation of Ibadan and keeping peace generally for eight years.  Although he didn’t quite finish the job since many of the road reconstruction remain incomplete. He is the first governor in Oyo to administer the state for eight unbroken years. This in itself is a record. In the process, he stepped on several toes. But some of his problems were self-inflicted. It is not clear what informed him in creating parallel Obas to the Olubadan when there was absolutely no reason for it. The chieftaincy institution in Ibadan has endured for over a century and it is the least contentious in terms of succession to the throne in Yorubaland because succession to the throne was through promotion in the two lines of Olubadan and Balogun. Who becomes the Olubadan was therefore predictable and without rancour.

    Whatever Ajimobi’s faults, notably his acerbic tongue are, he  demonstrated nobility  of the spirit by congratulating Seyi Makinde the incoming governor who has demonstrated tenacity  of purpose by contesting for the post  of governor four times before winning just like President Buhari. He will need our prayers to succeed in a state where unlike Lagos State, people are averse to paying taxes on their properties. I don’t see any other way to raise revenue outside the Lagos style land use levy. If this is to be done, it must be state-wide and not excessive to the point of leading to resistance and even rebellion.

    What has happened in Oyo State is also playing itself out in the fierce competitions in Sokoto, Kano  and Bauchi which are normally “Buhari country”. But since these are elections run on local issues, the governors of Bauchi, Sokoto and Kano can possibly lose to their opponents. Kano is a tempestuous state of acute political awareness. The accusations of bribery and corruption levied against the incumbent governor have not gone away. When you add to this the factor of Kwankwaso, the governor is facing serious challenge. In Bauchi, the governor is simply unpopular. Even with the support of Muazu, the former PDP governor of the state and former national chairman of the party, Governor Abubakar is not having it easy against his opponent. But Bala Muhammad his opponent who is facing several indictments for corruption and money laundering while he was minister of Abuja Federal Capital Territory should not even have been allowed to run. It will be a pity if his cases are kept in abeyance if he upsets the incumbent governor of Bauchi.

    In Sokoto, Tambuwal the incumbent governor was earlier on playing a dangerous game when his party, the PDP, started spreading rumors of the APC going to remove the Sultan of Sokoto. The APC has said this is a tale from the pit of hell.  The contest there remains  on a cliff hanger and  it could go either way.

    The gubernatorial elections in Adamawa, Benue and Plateau states have not been concluded. Benue will definitely see the incumbent governor riding  on the wave of the symbolic victim of the terrorism of herders killing people in his state. Even though the problem is more complex than what the governor is presenting. But the consequence of the herder/ farmer conflict has seen to the end of Senator Akume’s political career. Plateau remains a toss up but Lalong will probably triumph over the geriatric General Jeremiah Useni. It seems that Jibrilla Bindow, the incumbent APC governor in Adamawa will probably lose not because he has not performed but because Abubakar Atiku is throwing in serious financial muscle into the contest.

    For those armchair commentators in the press, Plateau, Adamawa, Bauchi and Taraba are the home of perpetual conflicts  of the bedlam of ethnic groups of over 200 of the so-called ethnic groups in Nigeria. This mosaic of ethnic architecture is overlain by religion of Islam, Christianity and African traditional beliefs. All these local issues, differences and grievances come into play in gubernatorial contests where the huge and dominant charisma of Muhammadu Buhari does not constitute an intimidating presence. It is a case of chicken coming home to roost. A governor cannot hide under the canopy of the national party.

    In a way this is not necessarily bad. The states governments, going forward, must be much more scrutinized so that people can hold them accountable instead of everybody looking to and blaming the federal government for whatever goes wrong at the state level. Of course, like everyone, I believe the federal government must shed some of its fatty financial weight in favour of the thin and emaciated states. But some of the states should be held responsible for mismanagement, corruption and absolute incompetence. It is good that the votes of the people are beginning to count and anybody saying the opposite is just playing politics. The defeat of “big men” and untouchables during this election is a manifestation that votes count and INEC should be commended in spite of the unbelievable returns in some states even where voter turn-out is apparently low. The two parties in such states have mastered the techniques of voter inflation to the extent that they probably cancel  out each other’s inflated votes. All states of the federation must begin to seriously increase their internally generated revenue (IGR) because they cannot for ever look to oil and gas revenues as their only sources of income. They must embark on commercial agriculture wherever they have comparative advantage. They must also look into mining of hard minerals in their states as well as manufacturing, particularly in adding value to whatever agricultural  produce  and mineral deposits in their states. Reliance on revenues from oil and gas has simply become unreliable, untenable and unsustainable. These are certainly interesting times as the Chinese would say.