The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Canon Sowunmi: A great Nigerian passes on

    Canon Sowunmi: A great Nigerian passes on

    Professor Margaret Adebisi Sowunmi, professor of palynology and environmental archaeology in the Department of Archaeology, University of Ibadan passed on in May and was laid to rest on June 24. This has been a personal loss to me and a collective loss to the University of Ibadan, the Anglican Christian community and to the city of Ibadan and Nigeria as a whole.  This elegant and generally quiet lady who spoke slowly and effectively had unmistakably noticeable presence wherever she was.

    She was born in Kano in 1939 where her father, the late Anglican Bishop of Ibadan was a young cleric during the colonial days before coming back South and rising to head the Anglican Diocese in Ibadan where Adebisi grew up attending primary and secondary schools, including the iconic Saint Anne’s  and Ibadan Grammar schools before entering the University of Ibadan where she read Botany and earned a  B.Sc. and a Ph.D. in  palynology and environmental archaeology generally applying the study of botany to archaeology. She blazed the trail in this particular area of application of the science of botany to the study of environmental changes from the past to the present which is quite important here in Africa where radio carbon dating is important in dating the African past where written documentation is not available or very scarce.

    Those of us not involved in the arcane study of archaeology are most interested in the role of Professor Sowunmi in the church particularly in the Chapel of Resurrection, the main Christian church in the Ibadan university community.

    The church will miss her very much. Even those of us who are not regular members of the church were attracted to her regular homilies during the Passion Week ending the Christian Lenten season climaxing in Easter marking the death and resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ.

    For the past 20 years, I drove from Lagos to Ibadan to attend the one-week Passion Week simply to listen and see Professor Sowunmi’s elucidation of the word of God as contained in the Christian Bible. I exchanged texts and calls with her, raising one issue or two on issues of the Christian faith and its application to our country’s problems. She sometimes asked me what we Christians were doing about our faith especially when Christians were in government or excluded from government. She once invited me to give a talk to the Christian community at the university chapel on the role of Christians in the global governments and what we can learn from it.

    I decided to focus my discussion on the Christian community in Germany since the end of the Second World War because I had just come back from Germany where I had been an ambassador from 1991 to1995 mentioning the significance of Christianity in the formation of the dominant political party in Germany, the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) of current German chancellor, Friedrich Merz and the first post-war chancellor Konrad Adenauer.

    I mentioned  that this party inherited the legacy of the largely Catholic Centre Party of the past as a foundation for the current CDU  which has built their support on the large Catholic community  in West Germany and now the Protestant Christian community in Eastern Germany both of which commands about 45% of the  nation’s population.  

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    I always mentioned the fact that although the sectarian nature of politics is hardly mentioned publicly but it is nevertheless important, I also said the fact of sectarian belonging in Germany is significant in that tithes were deducted by the state and forwarded to the sectarian bodies chosen by the citizens. I also told my audience then that major universities and their teaching hospitals were funded majorly by the churches obviously attracting state and federal grants as determined by government. I also alluded to the role of the Evangelical church in the USA, Republican Party and the Anglican Communion in the Conservative Party in the UK and the Catholic churches in Latin America especially, and splinter marginalised groups known as revolutionary Christianity of armed militants and I mentioned the role of the Muslim umma in the politics of Turkey, the Sudan and Northern Nigeria and the Catholic community in Eastern Nigeria. 

    After listening, she asked me why we Christians were so silent that we hardly had a say in government. She asked the audience what we could do about this. I know for sure she organised silently for the Christian candidate for governor in Oyo State irrespective of party affiliation in the last two elections. 

    Whatever radical opinions she held she kept to herself without being loud about it but occasionally expressing some of these views as a preacher on the pulpit. I don’t know how effective her effort was but it shows her commitment to social change. She also, I believe, took serious interest in national politics and held office of patron of a patriotic pressure movement basically in an advisory capacity. All I can say is that she was not happy with the way things have been with the political development in our country since independence.

    I dare say not many of us in the academic community and the general intelligentsia have been happy with the way the country is run without thought of the future. If Professor Sowunmi were a man, she would have been in the forefront of confrontational politics in the country. She held very dim view of academics in government. She made me feel this when I had a role in government no matter how tangentially a role I felt I had.

    I had a lot of respect for her restrained approach to religion and politics generally and was much impressed by her erudition in religious scholarship despite the fact that she did not quite train as a cleric unless one says she learnt all that needed to be learned under her revered father, the Very Reverend Jadesimi, one time Anglican Bishop of Ibadan. She also, like some us, had her religious baptism in Saint Anne’s and Ibadan Grammar School. I know this because those of us who went to schools like Christ’ School Ado – Ekiti, Lagos Anglican Grammar School, (CMS Grammar School), Igbobi College, Lagos, Dennis Memorial Grammar School Onitsha, Baptist Boys High School, Abeokuta, Saint Gregory College, Lagos, Old Holy Ghost College Owerri to mention the few that I know, had distinctive Christian approach to governance.  Of course, these schools have been polluted by government take over at certain times or the other so the moral standards have not been maintained.

    I regard the death of Professor Adebisi Sowunmi, beloved wife of the late Professor Segun Sowunmi, a distinguished mathematician as a great loss to the Christian community, the academic world and to her friends and relations and to her family to who she is simply irreplaceable.

    Rest in peace, Sisi Bisi, as I called you.  We all will miss you but I am sure heaven will rejoice at your coming. You have run a good race and won the crown of glory.

    Praise the Lord.

  • PDP to INEC: Tell us our secretary!

    PDP to INEC: Tell us our secretary!

    It was the most embarrassing and shameful question that any group can ask a non-member of the group. On Tuesday, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) was at the Abuja headquarters of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), to wait for it, ask the agency who the party’s secretary is. It was, as someone noted yesterday, one question too many.

    How can PDP expect INEC to determine who the party’s secretary is for it? What is INEC’s business with who the person is? It should be PDP telling INEC who its secretary is and not the other way round. But what will Nigerians not see from PDP? Its visit to INEC was prompted by the agency’s query over its correspondence on its forthcoming National Executive Committee (NEC) meeting. The party wrote to INEC, informing the agency of its NEC meeting fixed for June 30. The letter was solely signed by its national chairman, Ambassador Umar Damagum. Whereas, it should have been jointly signed with the secretary.

    So, you can now understand why it asked INEC: “who is our secretary?”. The bemused INEC Chairman, Prof Mahmood Yakubu, there and then proceeded to lecture the party and its chieftains and asked them to return home to put their house in order. PDP cannot be easily forgotten in the political annals of Nigeria. It has played a leading role in the present democratic journey which began in 1999. It remains to be seen whether its NEC meeting will hold, as scheduled, because of the communication problem.

    PDP was the first party to rule Nigeria. Between 1999 and 2015 that it held sway, PDP was larger than life itself. It swept every other party out of the way, and at the height of its reign, it boasted in 2008 that it would be in power for 60 years. Since pride goes before a fall, that boast by its then national chairman, Vincent Ogbulafor, was the beginning of its end. It fell yakata at the polls seven years later! A coalition of parties that became known as All Progressives Congress (APC) wrested power from it 10 years ago.

    The coalition comprised a rump of PDP known then as nPDP, a breakaway faction of All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA), the dissolved Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and the defunct Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). These legacy parties, especially CPC and ACN gave up their identities to form APC, but PDP and APGA remained in one form or the other. Indeed, some PDP and APGA members who played leading roles in the formation of APC have since returned to their original parties.

    Just as they did to PDP, some of those who championed APC’s formation like Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai, are now planning to give APC the same treatment. El-Rufai has left the party. Amaechi has not formally done so, but he is as good as gone. Both men are in the vanguard of what they call a ‘national coalition’ to unseat APC in 2027. Coalition appears the easy way to go, but those that they look down upon as ‘small parties,’ like the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the All Democratic Congress (ADC), may play the spoiler.

    Reason: these ‘small parties’ that they are planning to hijack and name as their new platform, is not playing ball. The alternative is to form a new party and that is not an easy route to take, going by the guidelines of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) for the registration of parties.

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    Invariably, some PDP stalwarts who are the  brains behind the coalition, incurred the ire of the governors and National Assembly members elected on the party’s platform, among others. Do not mind that these latter-day ‘die-hard’ PDP members were also in the not too distant past involved in this kind of game of building a coalition right under the nose of their own party that was then in power, just as Amaechi and a few other APC members, who have not left the party are doing now.

    Even, one of PDP’s leading lights, Atiku Abubakar, who has changed parties as often as a woman changes wrappers, in his hunger for presidential power can be assessed on the same parameters. Political watchers, are however, wondering why he should be talking of a coalition instead of working for the cohesion of his party. PDP is sharply divided. It has lost many of its members, including governors and National and state assemblies’ members to APC in the last few months. There is also trouble in its National Working Committee (NWC) over who the party’s secretary is.

    Senator Samuel Anyanwu held the position until he went to contest the last governorship election in his home state of Imo. The post was not filled in his absence. After the election, Anyanwu cashed in on the lacuna to take back his job. The NWC rebuffed his move, insisting that Sunday Ude-Okoye had been appointed as secretary. The NWC did that without recourse to the NEC, which has the sole authority to so act. The legality of the matter became an issue. At the end of the day, the Supreme Court, in a back to sender manner, ordered the litigants to go and resolve what it called the ‘party’s internal affair’.

    Since then, the party has been running from pillar to post and experimenting with different secretaries in its dealings with others, using the one that suits its purpose at any point in time. For its landmark 100th NEC meeting billed for June 30, it tried to be clever by half, but INEC saw through its trick. INEC faulted the party’s correspondence on grounds that it was not co-signed by the secretary and urged the party to go and do the right thing.

    The party insisted that it did nothing wrong since the NEC meeting is non-elective, meaning it is not for the election of its executive, which INEC must monitor upon being notified in a letter jointly written and signed by its chairman and secretary. But it was tongue-tied when it was told that on the 99 previous occasions that it wrote to INEC on its NEC meeting, the letters had always borne the signatures of its chairman and secretary. According to INEC, “we are happy that this is the 100th meeting. Meaning that 99 times in the past you wrote to us. On those 99 occasions, the letters were signed by the chairman and secretary”.

    In recent times, INEC recalled that it has been receiving letters from the party signed by different secretaries. “At a time, we received a letter signed by Anyanwu. We got another one signed by Ude-Okoye; then another came from Anyanwu and we got another from Setonji Koshoedo”. Who is really PDP National Secretary? It looks like a simple question, but it is not that easy for PDP to answer. It went to INEC to seek clarification and came out “more confused”, according to this paper’s lead headline yesterday. How can a party not know its own national secretary.

    PDP went to INEC pretending not to know who is its secretary, and asked the agency to bail it out. Oh, blimey! What a party? How come PDP led this country for 16 years with this kind of infantilism? For God’s sake, how can a party, not any party for that matter, but PDP and its chieftains go to INEC and be asking, probably with hands behind their backs, like schoolboys: “sir, please, who is our secretary?” PDP has become a joke of a party, and nothing portrays this more than its childlike act at INEC office. Is this the party that wants to return to power in 2027?

    Nigeria and its people deserve more than that. The country cannot afford to be led again by a party that does not know its right from its left. If PDP does not know who its secretary is, how then can it figure out what the country’s challenges are if given the chance to lead again? Nigeria cannot afford to return to Egypt. PDP should return to the drawing board and put its house in order, as Yakubu advised.

    •postscript: Anyanwu has been reinstated as secretary

  • Remember when we grew food in our gardens

    Remember when we grew food in our gardens

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

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

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

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

    A Nigerian prototype of America’s Silicon Valley is the Millennials and Gen Zers’ most astute retort to the declining world foisted upon all by the older generation. But this has done too little to improve our fortunes. Ultimately, the burgeoning IT sector fosters ephemeral growth; rather than giving relief, it delivers a Siamese bundle of utopia and dystopia in one birth.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  • Villains of democracy

    Villains of democracy

    Sycophancy, which sadly, has become part of our political DNA, as many will argue, is anyone’s game in a democracy. It is not many seasons ago that Tinubu’s fought a nasty battle for the Nigerian presidency. The battle was against children of anger, social media terrorists, failed politicians and journalists whose major tool of engagement was sycophancy. Today in power, if anything has changed, it is that for his party, the APC and other opposition parties, sycophancy remains a compelling weapon for subliminal battle for the minds of Nigerians.

    In recent times, the APC has assaulted the sensibilities of Nigerians by turning the president’s midterm review of his presidency, a period for sober reflection in view of punishing effects of the president’s unavoidable economic policies, to a jamboree. Favour seeking party members, defectors without ideological orientations who the president said must be welcomed to avoid ‘political malpractices’, ministers trying to cover up their inadequacies and even  hardworking and goal-setting ministers have found flattering the president to high heavens, an irresistible distraction.

    Nyesom Wike, who the president publicly described as an asset, you will think, does not need to flatter the president to high heavens. But not even the president’s expression of the nation’s deep appreciation while “thanking him for bringing Abuja to a level that compares favourably with great cities of the world”, could in a season of sycophancy, restrain him from re-naming his newly refurbished Abuja Conference Centre after the president.

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    I am sure the president cannot but feel scandalized by having to be hit on the face every day  by Bola Ahmed Tinubu International Conference Centre , And unfortunately, it is not of any relief that both his Yoruba culture or his Islamic faith frown at deification of living beings.

    The amateurish intervention of Senator Abdul-Aziz Yari, former governor of Zamfara State must have no doubt further irritated a president who hails from an area where people read meanings to ordinary greetings. Doing great damage to the president’s recent visit to grieving Benue where over 200 people had been mindlessly killed, Yari had clumsily said: “His decision to suspend everything he was doing is worthy of note”; adding as if he had ever been president that “If we understood the responsibilities associated with the office of the president, we would see the empathy in his decision to personally visit Benue. He could have delegated a high-powered team to visit and stand in for him but he decided to show leadership and identify with the people”.

    Yari should focus on his many EFCC and ICPC cases instead of adopting diversionary tactics including organizing prayers for the president. The truth however, is that sycophancy has always been the scourge of successive Nigerian’s administrations. As Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the former governor of the Central Bank (CBN), put it during the 2013 public presentation of  Mallam Nasir el-Rufai’s controversial book, The Accidental Public Servant, “corruption is not the bane of Nigeria … but sycophancy.”

    Again, we can take a journey through memory.

    Ahmadu Bello, despite espousing high morality and intellectual virtues through his political career started to unconsciously arrogate to himself the status of a super-human being, fuelled by the usual loyalty of serfs to feudal lords. He started to regard his contemporaries – Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Prime Minster Tafawa Balewa as subordinates.

    With a gift of a horse to Zik and a copy of the Holy Quran to Balewa after independence, he gleefully declared that he had divided Nigeria between his two loyal lieutenants.  After Zik fell out with him following the 1964 constitutional crisis, Zik was effortlessly replaced with Chief S.L Akintola who received a gift of the sword. Awo, who he had sworn would pay for forcing him to campaign for votes among his subjects during the 1959 election, had been jailed for 10 years.

    He probably now saw himself as the new Uthman dan Fodio. In fact the story was told of how he was one evening walking with one of his trusted civil servants with some grazing cows retreating following their approach, he could not resist telling his subordinate that “even cows recognize my presence”.

    He had ignored Brigadier Ademulegun’s warning of the impending coup just as he did of Chief SL Akintola’s who chattered an aircraft on the January 14, 1966 to Kaduna warning the revered premier that “they might be coming to kill all of us tonight”.

    Prime Minister Tafawa Balewa seemed to have added to Ahmadu Bello’s air of invincibility when with dead bodies littering major streets of Western Region, he ignored University of Ibadan students plea that a state of emergency be declared. He chose to wait for the arrival of Ahmadu Bello from the hajj with the crisis eventually consuming both of them along with the best of our trained soldiers.

    Ironsi was also a victim of sycophants. Following the January 1966 coups, Ironsi was told by self-serving Igbo politicians that he alone could save Nigeria. He in turn told the rump of assembled ministers that “since he could not persuade Dr Nwafor Orizu, the acting president to make an appointment, he must assume supreme control of administration. He was later stampeded to turn Nigeria, a federal state, into a unitary state and centralization of regional bureaucracies.

    Realising the move as an attack on Ahmadu Bello controversial northernisation policies that saw to the exit of thousands of Igbo and British expatriates from northern bureaucracy by northerners, an ABU students’ led riot eventually ended Ironsi’s regime and life.

    The irony was that, sycophants who drove him to his untimely death following January 1966 Igbo pyric victory were behind Ojukwu’s Aburi demand for return of regionalism.  Gowon, speaking with Charles Aniagolu of Arise Television last week insisted the cause of the civil war was Ojukwu’s insistence not just on regionalism but regionalism of the military to be controlled by regional governors.

    General Gowon with his post-civil war mantra of “No victor no vanquished” and solemn undertaking to cede power to civilian administration was on track until sycophants within his cabinet led by the Pa Edwin Clark manipulated him to breach the promised hand-over date to civilian rule. That was all Murtala Muhammed needed to oust him out of power.

    Ibrahim Babangida took Nigeria through eight years of ‘transition without end” with the help of sycophants made up of politicians, Aso rock professors, journalists including Chidi Amuta who after writing IBB’s biography, Prince of the Niger declared that his “earlier plan to hand over power was a betrayal of the masses”. Others include traditional rulers from whom he acquired more traditional titles than any living or dead Nigerian leader.

    His greatest hour was the Fellowship of Nigerian Economic Society (NES), the most authoritative body of scholars on Nigerian economy. The award they said was for being “visionary in the management of the national economy”, just after Financial Times had accused him of frittering away $5b Gulf war oil windfall and IMF, World Bank and Paris Club had accused IBB of “fiscal indiscipline”.

    Sani Abacha was humoured to death by his decreed five parties dismissed as “five fingers of a leprous hand “by late Bola Ige; Daniel Kanu and his “Two-million youths earnestly ask for Abacha”, the loyalty medal- wearing generals including Jeremiah Useni, the Bamaiyi brothers, Aziza, Akhigbe, Abubakar etc. who for three years could not prevail on Abacha to call the meeting of Provisional Ruling Council.

    His other zealot worshippers who presented falsehood as unquestioning truth, include Ebenezer Babatope who told us “ Abacha regime was the best to happen to Nigeria”, Wole Oyelese, Dr Walter Ofonagoro and Emeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Abacha’s envoy to Europe to de-market President-elect MKO Abiola.

    Obasanjo was equally tamed by sycophants who made sure none of his legacy projects except the telephone revolution succeeded.  He swallowed the lie that Nigeria will cease to exist with his exit from power. Obasanjo, who assumed power in 1999 with goodwill of Nigerians, frittered away everything with his own hands following his third-term fiasco.

    President Buhari had within his government, sycophants who pretended to share his pan-Nigeria agenda while working for other tendencies including the promotion of Fulani agenda. There was Nasir El Rufai who would always kneel down to greet him while he allegedly encouraged a regime of ethnic cleansing in southern Zaria, Ababakar Malami who, while pretending to promote freedom, justice and equity for all Nigerians, was encouraging illegal occupation of government reserved forest in the West by armed Fulani criminals. Malami and his group succeeded in reducing Buhari, a leader with a pan-Nigeria outlook into a Fulani irredentist.

    But it is not all doom. Those close to President Tinubu insist that unlike our past leaders, he is clear-headed and cannot be distracted by sycophants falsely swearing by his name. And it is of little relief to flatterers that because of his tact and good breeding, he will not publicly or even privately shut flatterers down.

  • Journey of growth

    Journey of growth

    On the eve of its inception on May 29, 2023, this paper set agenda for the Tinubu administration. In a special package published on May 28 of that year, the paper looked at critical areas of national life and made some far reaching suggestions. The state of the  economy, as it then was, was our major concern and we reeled out what can be done to revive it. It is now on the rebound.

    Today, I return to the section on ‘National reorientation and rediscovery of values’, another topic dear to our hearts, as a way of assessing what has been done in that area, especially as the President spoke about unveiling the National Charter of Values (NCV) in his New Year’s speech. It is good that the National Orientation Agency (NOA) has come up with such a charter. However, having the charter is one thing, making it work is another.

    The charter will chart a new course in the value reorientation journey. To begin with, the external perception of Nigeria is worrisome. It is as a result of how we are perceived as ‘no do-gooders’, an image wrongly used to characterise us. Our identity is one of repute – a people of strength and character – with citizens in top places in many parts of the world.

    Ahead of NCV’s launch, NOA’s Director-General Lanre Issa-Onilu and his team have perfected work on its key ingredients which have been approved by the Federal Executive Council (FEC).These ingredients known as the Seven Institutions (The 7 Is) of Nurturing will form the plank of the charter. NOA styles it 7 for 7, that is the seven things expected of the citizens and the seven  to be done in reciprocity by the government. To Issa-Onilu, our identity is our pride, and it must be used to our global advantage.

    The charter will restore Nigerians’ faith in Nigeria and make the world to stand up and recognise us for who we really are. The charter preaches positivity and optimism. It aims to change the negative narratives which in most cases Nigerians give about themselves even to outsiders. The job has begun in earnest. We see NOA campaigns these days in the media on citizenship education and advocacy. It is a job that should not be left to the agency alone. It requires our collective efforts to succeed.

    Issa-Onilu speaks with conviction about value rediscovery. With attitudinal change, a lot can be achieved. But the cynicism of many is not helping matters. Issa-Onilu disagrees with the cynics. “Our glass is half full, not half empty”, he says. In other words, people should stop seeing things from the negative perspective. He likens the charter to the ‘holy book’ which we must meditate on day and night in the process of social interactions.

    Believe him or not, he argues that “we have found our destination; we have also found a path to that destination and we have embarked on the journey”. No matter how long a journey is, it starts with the first step. The fashioning of The 7 Is is a turning point. These are Citizenship Studies; Nationalisation of Cartoons; Creation of Citizens’ Brigade; Inculcation of Value Orientation into National Youth Service Corps (NYSC)/Industrial Training Fund (ITF), Two-week value orientation for elected and appointed officers (taking along with the police, military and paramilitary forces), Strengthening belief in our national symbols – flag, coat of arms, anthem, currency, Constitution,  National Identity Card), and Global Reputational Management.

    Putting Nigeria first, and not running it down, at home or abroad, is the first port of call. What will it profit a Nigerian to own the whole world, but lose his identity? Our identity is our Nigerian-ness, if I can use that word. Being our unique identity, it tells who we are and stands us out in the crowd. So, we must guide this unique identity jealously anywhere we are. Lest we forget, Nigeria is not the worst country on earth. Unfortunately, through acts of omissions and commissions, we make it look as if it is.

    The idea behind the 7 Is is that they would help reshape our values and rebrand Nigeria. Citizenship Studies is expected to replace civic education in schools. It will be taught from primary to tertiary education levels. Pupils and students will learn in graduated form what it means to be a citizen of Nigeria, which qualifies them to call themselves Nigerians. Nationalisation of Cartoons will ensure that children grow up knowledgeable about their nation’s history and do not imbibe western culture through the foreign cartoons that they watch on television and social media these days. The localisation of these cartoons’ contents will help them to know more about their ancestry and allow them to choose their true heroes.

    There was a time that the Boy Scouts, Girl Guides and Boys’ Brigade were a spectacle to behold as they marched through the streets in their uniforms. As school boys in the late 1960s and 1970s, many of us joined the Boy Scouts. At various times, we went camping to learn about self defence, safety and security. These organisations are virtually non-existent today, except for the Boys’ Brigade which can still be found in some churches today. NOA is proposing that the Citizens’ Brigade (CB) be created to play a pivotal role in value reorientation. Under CB, which will be introduced in primary and secondary schools, 1000 Brigades will be recruited per state and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) in the first year, translating to 37,000 Brigades.

    For now, NYSC emphasises rigorous military like training, while ITF concentrates on vocational skill acquisition. Value orientation will be inculcated in their curricular to help shape their intakes mindset about Nigeria. With ITF said to have 12.7 million registered artisans, and the million that complete national service each year, NOA will be building a huge value orientation army. Also, the two-week value orientation for elected and appointed officers is imperative so that they can take the driver’s seat in their respective capacities in pushing the message. As disciplined forces, value orientation should not be strange to the police, military and paramilitary organisations.

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    Respect for our national symbols should be a given. People should get up without being prompted when the national anthem is being played; you do not tear the flag or fly it at half mast or use it as wrapping paper. You don it at a moment of glory when you represent Nigeria at a regional or global event. You show respect to the naira, our legal tender; the Constitution, Coat of Arms and the National Identity Card, the symbols of nationalism. A patriot waves his nation’s flag when he excels in what he does, not tear it in annoyance for whatever reasons.

    Global Reputational Management is about cleaning up after Nigerians. What can we do as a people to correct the perception about us? Nigerians are not scammers and confidence tricksters. This is not our identity. Our identity is that of an industrious and intelligent people. There are many Nigerians making waves in the Diaspora in various fields of endeavours. So, why does the world judge us from the prism of some bad sheep? While NOA is determined to crack the nut, the public must join the campaign to make it work.

    In passing the government’s messages to the people, NOA has cleared some grey areas about certain programmes, especially the Nigerian Education Trust Fund (NELFUND) from which thousands of students have benefited in a short  time. After initial teething issues, the Presidential Compressed Natural Gas Initiative(P-CNGI) is going on, though not at the speed many expected. There are credit schemes for consumers, small and medium enterprises and big businesses, thereby putting the economy on a rebound. These point to the fact that with the right values, greater things can be achieved. So, NOA should not rest on what it has achieved in the last 20 months.

    It must continue to drive the values process through concerted efforts, but not by pushing out slogans alone. Slogans are good, but they will only have impact when matched with the human element in the drive and desire for the change that will expand the frontiers of renewed hope. Or, if you like, “hope renewed”, as Issa-Onilu tags it now.

  • Middle East: Israeli tail wagging American dog

    Middle East: Israeli tail wagging American dog

    The recent denial by the Secretary of State of the United States, Marco Rubio, that the United States did not know beforehand, Israel’s attack on Iran was an obvious lie which President Donald Trump cleared not completely the following day when he said he was briefed by Mr Bilyaminin Netanyahu the Israeli prime minister a day before but he did not say if he gave the go ahead.

    Of course, the Europeans are not having a part in the Israeli war on Iran, the third Israeli war on its enemies in one year, if one adds this current war on Iran to the Israeli war on Gaza and on Hezbollah in Lebanon.

    Europe is more concerned with Russia’s war on Ukraine which poses existential threat to Europe.

    It seems however that since Trump was elected president of the USA, the role of Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in global security has almost become irrelevant in world affairs. Trump has almost individually appropriated foreign policy operations whether in Europe but most particularly in the Middle East. All the remonstrations of the Europeans and Canada with Israel over its murderous campaign against a defenceless people in Gaza and Lebanon made largely of women, children and old men have been ignored.

    America has been dragged in, to support Israel in Lebanon and in the constant bombing of Syria until there was a regime change in Syria and Hezbollah has been rendered useless as part of Iranian front against Israel and now Israel has decided to remove the troublesome presence of Iran in the Axis of evil as Israel is concerned.

    Earlier on when Israel and Iran exchanged blows during the dying months of the Biden administration, the United States in October 2024, Europe, even Jordan and Egypt tried to intercept Iranian missiles and drones from hitting Israel but in the current situation, the European countries principally Britain, France , Germany and Canada and their allies in the Middle East kept their distance and called for  de-escalation of the conflict because they felt Israeli attack on Iran was unjustified especially when America was involved in negotiations with Iran over the issue of the Iranian  rapid uranium enrichment a precondition for making nuclear weapons.

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    Israel was more concerned with the issue because it poses existential threat to her. This reluctance on the part of Europe to jump on the bandwagon of military campaign against Iran restrained the combustible Donald Trump who first said America was not connected with the Israeli attack. This was also reinforced by Marco Rubio’s disclaimer that Israeli attack was a unilateral decision with no American input.

    We now know the American president was involved from the beginning. But Trump wants to intervene on the side of Israel apparently reluctantly because the MAGA movement supporting him is against American military entanglement in the Middle East. Trump also sees himself as a “PEACE PRESIDENT” who would rather face the task of developing America and making Americans rich through his policy of high tariffs against the rest of the world whether, as his critics say, makes economic sense or not .

    This is where we are. Trump departed before the end of the G-7 conference in Canada to go back to Washington where he has been making threats against Iran and asking people to vacate immediately, Tehran, the 10 million-peopled capital of Iran apparently as preparatory to America unleashing B52 bombers to drop huge bombs that can penetrate down the depth of where the uranium enrichment laboratories are buried.  Trump while arriving in Washington threw caution to the winds and said “we control the air space of Iran and we know where the Ayatollah is hiding and we have not decided to take him out yet”,

    This means that America and Israel may decide not only to get rid of the nuclear infrastructure but also effect a regime change. It seems they may go for both. It will not be easy if America intervenes by putting troops on the ground because one cannot win a war without ground troops to secure the victory of air campaign. Iran is not going to be an easy country to conquer.  However the American administration has begun deploying its military assets into the Persian Gulf and had flown military planes to the centre of the conflict in the last few days.

    Whatever the case may be, the IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency), the UN agency based in Vienna has however warned that busting nuclear facilities buried deep down the earth and releasing radioactive materials come with tremendous risk. This is a warning to gung-ho Republicans who want to bomb Iran to ashes to be careful of wilfully or unwillingly poisoning the environment in the Middle East and elsewhere because the global environment is one.

    One thing that bothers me is the way Israel has been empowered by the current and even the Biden United States’ administration to shape the Middle East the way it wants irrespective of what the other countries want. Because of this, Israel arrogates to itself the moral right to decide about who is right or wrong in the politics of the Middle East. Gone are the days when the whole world stood with Israel on issues of morality on  politics of the Middle East and when Israel was famous for taming the desert and turning  the Israeli desert to green agricultural pastures and producing first class medical drugs and equipment. These days Israel is known for its military conquest and its policy of might being right. Israel, because of the history of the holocaust, has the right to defend itself but when does this right become the right to brutally conquer and kill Palestinians who like the Israelis are merely struggling to be free?

    The slaughterhouse which Gaza and the West Bank of the River Jordan have turned into need to be closed down for ever. Someone needs to speak up about the need to stop the slaughter of Palestinians by the Israeli army and the two suffering peoples – the Israelis and Palestinians need to live in peace either together or separately.

    If Donald Trump brings the weight of the United States behind Israel, the question then is what becomes of the recent apparent success of Trump’s policies in the Arab world? No matter the historical differences that exist between Arabs and Iranians (Persians), the tie of Islam despite the differences between the dominant Sunni and Shia Islam respectively in most of the Arab world and Iran, the ties of geography, history and Islam are stronger than the temporary binding of contemporary times.

  • For minds unfettered

    For minds unfettered

    It is sheer folly to watch a house burn while bickering over who should hold the bucket of water for quenching the fire. Such is the madness that has gripped Nigeria for decades; generations chanting placebo therapies prescribed by scheming colonists for the country’s behavioural cancer. The land is rich, but the minds are colonised.  The soil is fertile but poisoned by imported seeds of thought.

    Nigeria’s corruption, for instance, is not just a matter of flawed governance, but a crisis of ethics exacerbated by an inordinate lust for expedience. The 2023 National Bureau Statistics (NBS) corruption data reveal a worrisome trend: over 87 million bribes paid, amounting to over $1.26 billion, mostly money stolen by fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grannies, clergy, principals, and officials. How did we get here?

    We got here because Nigeria’s postcolonial elite, groomed in the mould of their colonisers, learned to loot with logic and a grin. They speak of “efficiency” and “modernisation” while defunding schools and pawning national resources to foreign interests. They are dangerous for their dexterity at dismemberment. It is not the devil that plagues Nigeria; it is a culture of systemic dysfunction rooted in the disintegration of social conscience.

    Nations do not emerge fully formed from constitutions or borderlines. They are shaped by the character of their citizenry. And the latter, in turn, are shaped by their most intimate institution: the family. The family is the receptacle in which the values of a nation are first kindled or corrupted. It is where character and social conscience are either nurtured or strangled in the cradle. The integrity of our public life, therefore, depends on the morality of our private lives.

    Family is key. From this sacred unit, a people’s sense of self, place, and purpose begins. If the family is compromised, then society itself becomes a ghost town of ethics: full of laws but lacking justice and compassion; rich in rhetoric, but bankrupt of vision. Societal growth, therefore, cannot be engineered solely by policies or economic indices. It must be cultivated through the slow, careful evolution of the human spirit. Through education, yes, but not the kind that alienates the learner from their origins.

    Francis Nyamnjoh, in his excavation of Africa’s epistemological crisis, recalls Okot p’Bitek’s Song of Lawino with painful clarity. Ocol, the educated African elite, emerges as a walking corpse; a clearing agent for foreign ideologies and an enemy to his kin. His education does not liberate; it enslaves. It turns him against his wife, his people, and ultimately, himself.

    This is the face of the Nigerian elite: fluent in multiple languages and philosophies but unable to communicate with their grandparents; draped in academic garlands but disconnected from indigenous wisdom; eloquent before foreign audiences but dismissive of local realities. They are, as p’Bitek lamented, hens that eat their own eggs.

    The fetishisation of colonial values of beauty and notions of African reality has entrenched a psychological war on the African self. It is no surprise, then, that many Nigerians continue to bleach their skin, speak with borrowed accents, and look to the West for validation. Modernity, as defined by the West, becomes the Nigerian holy grail. Young Nigerians are taught to despise our histories, distrust our systems of knowledge, and to measure success by how far they can flee from our roots. In so doing, they become, like Ocol, a walking corpse, alive to foreign endorsement, but dead to native truth.

    This crisis manifests across every sphere: from university syllabuses that erase indigenous knowledge systems to national policies crafted in donor-pleasing jargon. Even religious institutions, once cultural sanctuaries, have turned into imported franchises of guilt and prosperity.

    Apollos Nwauwa rightly posits that Western education produced a contradictory elite in West Africa; one that served as both an agent of colonisation and nationalism. But nationalism, in our case, did not mature into sovereignty of thought. Instead, it hardened into mimicry. We changed flags, not philosophies. We rewrote our constitutions but kept the same epistemic shackles. What we call modernisation has often been little more than domesticated colonisation—metacolonialism, as Hussein Bulhan rightly names it.

    This metacolonialism is no longer imposed with rifles and chains, but through curriculum, cinema, policy consultancy, and international development models. It creates a class of elites who worship at the altar of foreign approval; those who speak of development only in the metrics handed down by British colonialists. They are the Ocols of our generation, trained to quote statistics, but unable to feel the pulse of their people.

    Thus, while the skyscrapers rise and the GDP is celebrated, the Nigerian mind continues to rot. We build flyovers over potholes of the mind. We chase digital revolutions while ignoring the intellectual genocide that is the continued erasure of indigenous knowledge.

    It’s about time we reclaimed Nigerianness. We must start prioritising what we think of ourselves over what the West thinks of us. This recovery requires a radical revaluation of knowledge, a turning away from borrowed epistemologies toward what Nyamnjoh calls a reality larger than logic. We must reprioritise native philosophies over Western syllogisms.

    We must dismantle the myth that science, stripped of ethics, context, and community, is the only path to progress; we must pay attention to knowledge systems that value Nigerian reality over Western logic. This means listening to market women who manage micro-economies more efficiently than government programs. It means engaging hunters, herbalists, griots, and artisans—custodians of ecological wisdom, history, and sustainable living. It means revisiting the shrines of thought that colonialism labelled “backwards” and asking: what did we lose when we stopped kneeling there?

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    We must re-educate our educators, decolonise our curricula, and refuse the seduction of validation by foreign wile. A child who learns to love their name will not be ashamed of their accent. A nation that learns to love its essence will not need to bleach its soul.

    We must stop treating ordinary Nigerians as disposable extras in the theatre of governance. The people who truly challenge the status quo: those who resist the prescriptive gaze of foreign-funded NGOs and speak truth in idioms absent in Western textbooks, must be centred in the national discourse. It is from these everyday realists that a true renaissance will manifest.

    The media must also unshackle itself from the imperial narrative machine. Too long has it amplified the metacoloniser’s myth of a Messianic Europe, while muting narratives of African resistance, resilience, and rebirth. The press must recover its role as griot and conscience, not just a content factory.

    There is a future worth dreaming of: one where our development models are rooted in communal values; where schools teach both code and calculus alongside cosmology and craft; where governance is not about appeasing international donors, but serving the child hawking bananas on a dusty road in Madagali, Agbado-Ijaiye and Sankwala. Such a future demand that we stop waiting to be invited to someone else’s table and start building our own.

    It’s about time we dislodged the clearing officers and coronated Ocols using Nigerian institutions as pit latrines of foreign ideologies. Shall we instead cultivate a new generation of thinkers? Those who can walk between worlds without losing their way, who can marry tradition with transformation, while acknowledging that progress is not a synonym for alienation.

    Civilisations are rarely built with concrete and currency alone, but with narratives, rituals, and native wisdom. Nigeria’s rebirth will come from memory, not mimicry.

  • Villains of democracy

    Villains of democracy

    President Tinubu last Thursday bestowed national honours on heroes and heroines of June 12, 1993 struggle. Leading the pack was MKO Abiola, the winner of what has come to be regarded as the freest and the most credible election in the nation’s history and who had to pay the supreme sacrifice for winning a pan-Nigerian mandate. Others honoured by the president include activists, journalists, scholars and Ken Saro-Wiwa and the Ogoni nine who were executed by Abacha’s junta in 1995 following their protest against Shell’s activities in the region.

    But as a nation that often shields its youths from knowing the painful past and treacherous role of its political elite, I think beyond honouring our martyrs of democracy for their heroic struggle, this is also an opportunity to identify some of the villains responsible for undermining our democratization process.

    Ibrahim Babangida on whose desk the buck stops as self-appointed president who took Nigerians through eight years of ‘transition without end’ only to annul the result of the fairest and most credible election in the nation’s history, won by his friend, MKO Abiola has been fingered as the one responsible for Nigeria’s nightmare despite his attempt to blame others including, his generals, northern establishment and the judiciary.

    Yet with characteristic conceit of Shaka the Zulu, his hero, Babangida started his game of deceit by first setting up a political bureau, decreeing two political parties, NRC and SDP for a nation that had since 1923 managed political parties, and setting up Centre for Democratic Studies (CDS) where his State House professors swore they could teach democracy and democratic ethos. And against wise counsel, he went ahead to fritter away N3billion on building political party headquarters, later taken over by reptiles as well as allocating another N531b for the take off their two decreed parties.

    To protect his decreed political parties reserved only for military groomed new-breed politicians, he had on October 7, 1989 ordered the dissolution of  the then existing  13 political associations,  disqualified 12 aspirants on the eve of gubernatorial election for their role in October 19,1991 primaries and banned 12 national assembly members as well as  all the powerful 23 presidential candidates.

    If however you ask me for the villain of June 12, 1993 debacle, despite Babangida’s “eight years of transition without end”, ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo is the one who in my view fits the bill. Without Obasanjo playing god in 1979, we would not have had Buhari in 1984, Babangida in 1985 and of course, Abacha in 1993.

     Obasanjo, it was who in 1979 declared the best candidate in that year’s election didn’t need to win. He was to later confess he aided Shehu Shagari, who was only interested in going to the senate to win the 1979 election.

    Olu Falae, who joined the Babangida regime a few weeks after adopting the Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) while appearing on Channels TV programme last week, reminded us that it was Shehu Shagari who, through indiscriminate and uncontrolled issuance of import licences, ruined Nigerian economy in four years of importation of foreign manufactured goods including NPN chairman Akinloye’s branded wine.

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     We owed international creditors and without paying our debt, Olu falae insisted that there was no way to trade with the international community. This according to him was what drove Babangida to embrace SAP, which reduced our country to an importer of the labour of other societies while with the collapse of our budding industries, with our unemployed youths moving to foreign lands in search of greener pasture.

    And if there those who want to hold brief for Obasanjo for undermining our democratization process in 1979 and in the process used his hands to destroy the legacy he left behind in 1979, all that is needed is to interrogate his treacherous role in the annulment of MKO Abiola’s June 12, 1993 victory and imposition of Interim National Government, declared illegal few months later by the court.

    Obasanjo, who was widely acclaimed as a pillar of democracy in Africa for voluntarily handing over power to a civilian government in 1979 in addition to his virulent criticism of Nigeria military whose leadership he claimed was “deficit in so many fundamental attributes”, Nigerians and the international community had expected Obasanjo to call Babangida, his protégé to order.

    But Obasanjo, who often suffers from messianic complex, was to tell Nigerians that MKO Abiola who had just secured a pan Nigerian mandate was not the messiah Nigerians were waiting for. And to supplant Abiola’s victory, a spineless Ernest Shonekan, Abiola’s fellow Egba man was installed head of illegal interim national government.

    And if there are those still in doubt as to who constituted the greatest threat to Nigeria’s democratization process in the fourth republic, events that followed the sudden death of General Abacha, the maximum ruler finally laid that to rest.

    Obasanjo was the military and northern establishment PDP candidate for the 1999 presidential election to assuage the raw feelings of aggrieved Yoruba that had, along with other Nigeria’s pro-democracy groups, fought five years strategic battle with the military. Many including Olu Falae, his opponent, believed the election was rigged in his favour. By 2003, Obasanjo and PDP had rigged the six southwest governors except Lagos out of office. In the 2007 election denounced even by Umaru Yar’Adua, the winner, Obasanjo and PDP with the help of Tony Anenih, “Mr. Fix it”, took control of 28 of the nation’s 36 states.

    Obasanjo for eight years danced on the grave of MKO Abiola without acknowledging his supreme sacrifice.  Instead, in an effort to consign June 12 to history, Obasanjo went on to cynically adopt May 29, the day the military was humiliated out of power as democracy day.

     Ironically, it took Buhari, a man with a large heart, whose removal from office in 1985 through Babangida’s palace coup was widely believed to have been sponsored by Abiola, to right an historic wrong. Buhari conferred on Abiola the nation’s highest national honour and declared June 12 1993 as Nigeria Democracy Day.

    Now that we have established that Obasanjo emboldened Babangida and Abacha to hold Nigeria hostage while a fertile ground for hungry politicians to exploit the ethnic and religion vaults in our nation for personal gains between 1985 and 1999 brewed, we can again interrogate those often regarded as villains of democracy stating with Arthur Nzeribe, the arrow head of those opposed to inauguration of Abiola as president.

    This was a man who once admitted beating up his Irish principal in secondary school, an international business man described by BBC as the “largest arms dealer in Africa, who wanted extension of IBB tenure by three years “to eradicate poverty, corruption and rights the wrong of political inequality”. Despite placing a full page advertorial in newspapers claiming the Igbo opposed Abiola’s presidency, there was no evidence Nzeribe spoke for the Igbo nation. Nzeribe was no doubt working for his stomach.

    Uche Chukwumerije,  the secretary of Information whose brief period witnessed the proscription of no less than five different newspapers and newsmagazines, who “ succeeded in reducing Abiola’s pan Nigeria mandate to a Yoruba mandate, government critics to Lagos sectional press, many believed was out to demonstrate he was a propaganda genius.  Chidi Amuta, who authored Babangida’s biography, Prince of the Niger, Eric Agume Opia, Walter Ofonagoro,  Bassey Ikpeme, Dr Atkin, Abimbola Davis, Ebenezer Babatope, Minister of Transport and Aviation who later became chieftain of PDP, Lateef Jakande, General Haliru Akilu – Director General of National Intelligence Agency, Chief Clement Apamgbo – Attorney General, Babagana Kingibe who abandoned his mandate to become Abacha’s internal affairs minister, Justice Bassey Ikpeme who gave a midnight judgment to scuttle the election, Justice Dahiru Saleh, who passed the judgment stopping further announcement of result, were driven more by self-preservation than by desire to derail the democratization process.

    I am not sure others labelled as villains of democracy including the likes of Arisekola Alao, the Aare Musulumi of Yoruba, a military contractor and Lamidi Adedibu, the strong man of Ibadan politics, notorious for his variant of politics of stomach infrastructure, Jerry Gana, a man who doesn’t believe in anything and has freely deployed his awesome talent into the services of every government in power since 1979, Akanni Aluko of The Third Eye, really cared about democracy.

    I similarly don’t think that other zealot Babangida worshippers like Duro Onabule who staked his honour to defend his boss even after his principal’s admission that “the government interfered to save the judiciary from ridicule or Augustus Aikhomu’s assertion that they “are trying to save the neck of Abiola” was driven by a desire to truncate the democratization process. 

    The tragedy today is that the very villains of democracy are the same people putting themselves forward as solution to our crisis of democracy.

  • El-Rufai: My error

    El-Rufai: My error

    In this space last week, I reported that Justice Hauwa’u Buhari of the Federal High Court ordered former Kaduna State Governor Nasir El-Rufai to pay nine Adara community elders led by Awemi Maisamari N900 million for violation of their rights. I have since learnt that the court never made such an order. The error was inadvertent.

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  • June 12 and a ‘N45b debt’

    June 12 and a ‘N45b debt’

    Today is June 12, and the country remembers as it has done in the past 32 years the presidential election that took place that day in 1993. Why did the military annul the election won by the late Bashorun M.K.O Abiola? We may never know because a key figure in the saga, Gen Ibrahim Babangida, is not ready to open up on the issue. He had an opportunity to do so in his book: A journey in service. He did not; instead, he blamed those under him then, especially Gen Sani Abacha, for the annulment.

    But former Jigawa State Governor Sule Lamido, who was secretary of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on which platform Abiola contested the election said it was annulled because of the N45 billion owed the business magnate by the military government for a contract in the 1970s when former head of state, the late Gen Murtala Muhammed, was federal commissioner for communication. The military, he said, at the release of his own memoir: Being true to myself last month, felt that Abiola would use his office to recover his money if allowed to become president. Why deprive a candidate of his mandate because of the money he legitimately earned? Contract execution and election are not related. If a man has discharged his contractual obligation, he is entitled to be paid.

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    Abiola was doubly wronged. He was denied his money and his election was annulled for fear that he would use his position to right the first wrong done him. For how long will we continue to bury our heads in the sand like ostrich over this matter? Is Abiola owed that much? Did he work for the money? If the answers are yes, why did  the military not pay him? If there were isssues, the best the military could have done was to go to court and not to arbitrarily withhold his money, and subsequently also deny him his mandate. I agree with Lamido that it was the height of injustice. There is no nexus between the contract and the June 12 election.

    Paying his family the money now, with interest, may not really address the criminal act of annulling the June 12 poll, but it will serve as some form of compensation for them. It may not be too bad if President Bola Tinubu weighs in on the matter in his address to the joint session of the National Assembly today. The claim has dragged on for too long.