The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

Shadow chasing

It Is Laughable. The suggestion, that is, for a team to shadow the activities of the government. And as the Yoruba wise-saying goes, you laugh over something that is beyond weeping for. Coming from Patrick Utomi, that of the Patito’s Gang fame that used to pontificate on air, who you think should know better, the suggestion, to say the least, is ludicrous.

A shadow cabinet, government or team or by whatever name or guise he styles it, is the least of the nation’s problems now, with its avalanche of opposition parties. For another, a ‘shadow team’ is alien to a presidential system of government like ours. We run a presidential, and not a semi-presidential, or parliamentary system of government, with all executive powers residing in the President. The system recognises the opposition, but not as a shadow government in the sense that Utomi is proposing.

Utomi wants his shadow team to be the face of the new opposition in the light of the failure of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Labour Party (LP) to which he once belonged, and others to effectively play that role. The opposition including the Social Democratic Party (SDP) on which platform some people are planning to coalesce to wrest power in 2027 is crumbling like a pack of cards. Having seen the handwriting on the wall, the smooth talking Pat is creeping out of the sinking boat and beating a new path to political relevance.

He says he is not looking for an appointment, but is embarking on this journey in the national interest. As usual, he regales his audience with how he joined government at an early age to serve in the administration of former President Shehu Shagari in the second republic as a result of his brilliance. The same brilliance that earned him the jobs of chief executive of the moribund Volkswagen of Nigeria and the chair of the liquidated BankPhB which former MD is now marking time in jail for theft and fraud.

No doubt, Utomi is brilliant. No one becomes a professor, the highest academic honour which can only be earned, without being smart and intellectually sound. This is why many, including some professors like him, are wondering why on earth he is pushing for a shadow team. This is no television debate where he and his gang just threw fanciful arguments on democracy, economy and governance about.

There is a limit to which theories can be pushed and propounded. We cannot keep on theorising when there is an urgent work to be done. Is his proposed shadow team the answer to whatever he thinks are the ills of the country? Utomi like every Nigerian has the right to hold views and express them the way he likes, but he cannot do so in breach of the Constitution. The 1999 Constitution talks about a presidential lsystem, with the executive, legislature and judiciary as equal partners.

The executive functions are subject to the scrutiny of the legislature with the judiciary as the arbiter of disputes within the system. This principle of check-and-balance is what makes the system tick. In this system, there is no room for shadow government. It can only be in the imagination of manipulators who think they can use their academic and media reach to upturn what is already constitutionally provided for.

Nigerians know better. They know when certain people want to manipulate the system for selfish reasons, citing public goodwill. What public goodwill is that when Utomi is coming from a place of bias and partisanship. He stepped down for LP’s Peter Obi for the party’s presidential ticket in the 2023 elections.

How then can such a tainted figure call for a shadow team and expect to be taking seriously? Beyond his call being unconstitutional, what is the shadow team going to do that he, Obi, Atiku Abubakar, and their co-travellers are not already doing? Have they not been talking and criticising the government? Why then does Utomi require a shadow team to do that? What is the difference between what he is doing now and what the shadow team will do?

Hear him on this amorphous shadow team: “It will be a group of people that will meet at intervals…say like two weeks. Each shadow team with a watch on an aspect of government will go in there and ferret out information, make it public and seek a second opinion. The Constitution guarantees this. It does not say there will be a shadow government or not. Shadow government is just a nomenclature.”

“Ferret out” information. What if the ‘shadow teamers’ are caught in the process?’ Does Utomi remember the Watergate scandal under former America’s President Richard Nixon? We are not saying that citizens should not hold the government accountable, what we are saying is that they should do so within the ambit of the law, as guaranteed under Section 22 of the Constitution, which says:

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The press, radio, television and other agencies of the mass media shall at all times be free to uphold… the responsibility and accountability of the government to the people.

Utomi’s proposal is offensive to the Constitution. He wants to, through his proposed shadow team, usurp the oversight functions of the legislature which is empowered to scrutinise the executive. It cannot arrogate that power to any shadow team because in his word: “shadow government is just a nomenclature”. It is not a mere nomenclature. It is the recognised title of the opposition in a parliamentary system like what Britain operates.

To call shadow government just a nomenclature is Utomi’s way of hiding the illegal act he is trying to perpetrate with a name that is politically and democratically recognised under the parliamentary system. It will not work. Right-thinking Nigerians can see through his gimmick. It is not too late for him to retrace his steps from this shadow chasing shadow cabinet. Or is he thinking of a shadow government under the conspiracy theory of individuals lording it over elected leaders? The professor of political economist should know the consequences of that.

May 15, 2025
Indo-Pakistan war over Kashmir and Jammu

Shortly after the division of the British empire (RAJ) over India, the territories were divided into two, the bigger and most populous part retained the name India while the remaining largely Muslim parts were constituted into west Pakistan, modern PAKISTAN, and East Pakistan today’s BANGLADESH, and the two sides were separated by more than a thousand miles of Indian territory.

To show the artificiality of the new Pakistan, the name was an acronym of the provinces constituting it, namely Balochistan, Khyber, Pakhtunkhwa (formerly NWFP) Punjab and Sindh. These provinces, along with Islamabad capital territory and the federally administered Tribal Areas, constituted the federation of Pakistan.

To show the instability of the Muslim state each of which differed from each other ethnically but united by religion broke into BANGLADESH and PAKISTAN in 1971 after a brutally fought war which ended in 1971 in which India supported the secessionist East Pakistan.

This was virtually an impossible country to run with the west Pakistani army ruling East Pakistan like a conquered territory. Mahatma Gandhi, the founder of modern India, had foreseen this and had tried to persuade his Muslim colleague and founder of Pakistan, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, Governor General of Pakistan (1947-1948), but the Muslim – Hindu distrust was so fundamental that emotion prevailed over centuries of mutual hatred.

Despite the problems of the two embryonic nations, they were again faced with what to do with the knotty problem of Kashmir and Jammu that were left unsolved by the departing British. This territory was ruled over by a Hindu Maharaja over a vast Muslim population. The principle of the religion of the ruler should be the religion of the population became impossible to apply.

When the majority Muslim population tried to seize power in 1947, the Hindu Maharaja appealed to India for help and Pakistan went into the war to help the Muslims, thus a territorial war became a religious war on top of the approximately 2 million deaths and about 20 million displaced people.

The enormous human loss attendant on the partition had remained a bitter memory for the two countries and had damaged their relations leading to war over Kashmir in 1965, 1971, and 19991 and a seven-day shooting and bombing campaign in 2025, following the murder of 25 Indian tourists in Kashmir by presumably Kashmiris nationalists resisting suspicious Indian Settlers.

A nationalist resurgent India under Prime Minister Narendra Modi has, in recent years, changed the constitution of India, administered Kashmir and Jammu to union states removing the temporality of the province thus denying the promised UN referendum promised the territory to determine its eventual status in 1948 to the chagrin of Kashmiris who either want to join Pakistan or become independent.

India legitimately feels armed Muslim terrorists, both in India itself where there are more than 100 million Muslims who feel disgruntled or discriminated against by Hindu overlords using their majority dominant demographic position against them, and Muslims in disputed Kashmir, are being encouraged into armed terrorism.

Optimists have felt that with the increasing wealth of India there will be less tension between the two religious communities but it does not seem to be getting better as long as there are politicians available and ready to fan the embers of religious fanaticism.

To add to the complexity of the situation, India became a nuclear weapons state in May 1998; within two weeks later, Pakistan, after a series of nuclear tests, declared itself a nuclear weapons state. This means any war between the two antagonistic states may deteriorate to nuclear conflict in which the side effects of their nuclear exchange will spread beyond the two countries.

To add salt to injury, the Indian – Chinese border cuts across Kashmir and Jammu, which means final settlement of the Kashmir/ Jammu problem cannot ignore the interests of China which has recently become a strategic ally of Pakistan.

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It is interesting that the United States allegedly has a military base in Pakistan, not too far away from the nuclear weapons sites of Pakistan, apparently keeping watch over the nuclear activities of the Pakistanis.

Pakistan politics is hugely dominated by the military, and when it is not directly in power controls the levers of power, installing and removing prime ministers as it wishes. A critic of this situation said Pakistan is the most dangerous country where the possibility of “a mad mullah armed with nuclear weapons may seize power and threaten the whole world “is a pressing concern.

An Islamic fundamentalist regime may decide to spread the joy of nuclear Armageddon to the tinderbox of the Middle East in a war to end all wars! As a student in London in the1960s and 1970s, I witnessed the mutual hatred of Indian and Pakistani students, even in a foreign country, and on visiting India in the 1990s, the mutual hatred was still palpable. Yet the two people must live side by side with each other, and even though separated by religion and culture but united by history and geography and race.

It’s easy for an outsider to suggest that India accepts a UN conducted referendum, but the possibility of India being surrounded by potential enemies in Kashmir and Jammu, Pakistan, China, and Bangladesh is too ghastly to consider. Perhaps a condominium of India and Pakistan over Kashmir and Jammu could be tried for half a century before the eventual status of the country is determined.

An economic community of India, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Sikkim, Nepal and possibly Myanmar could be encouraged in which case the power of Kashmir will be a case of subsidiarity. A case of no war, no peace, is just not reasonable and acceptable. There are just too many problems that the UN is simply too overwhelmed to handle.

May 15, 2025
Dangerous lust

Life becomes breathtaking for once, and only once, everyday, for Aliyu Salisu. Just before dusk, while he is perched on the rail tracks of Galadima, in the bowels of Maiduguri, Borno State. Out there, in the sweltering heat, he tastes the unprecedented cool of ‘Ice.’ He sees for the umpteenth time, the city’s limitless possibilities and his place amid the urban sprawl.

In that space and at that hour, he sees what his relatives are unable to envision about him: Aliyu, the successful timber merchant; Aliyu, the billionaire transporter, Aliyu, the responsible son.

In a rare encounter with him, the 28-year-old widower recounted with zest, why 4pm is his best hour of the day. In that hour, he whisked out his discoloured glass pipe and fired up his daily dose of methamphetamine (meth) aka Ice, a ‘dangerous’ synthetic drug. Aliyu sucked on his pipe with conquering immersion, all the thwarted longings of his life urgent on his puckered brow and dependent breath. His face was hard and calloused with craving, and his eyes, reddish, like burnt earth.

As the “Ice” thawed, he lighted an ample wrap of marijuana thus “stepping down” or chasing off the chills that succeeded his high at every deep drag. His mouth, incongruous at exhalation, became slightly distended like that of a whistling boy.

The marijuana smoke was ingenuously haunting; it spread over him like a brassy blanket, and made the rest of him a soiled, grey background. Irredeemably high and past caring, miseries that lied within their grave of submissive sternness in his heart, spilled their troubled ghosts nonchalantly out of his mouth – all in a smoky spiral.

His wife dumped him and “followed (married) a Boko Haram insurgent” and his paternal uncle believes he would “never amount to anything,” he drawled. Soon as his euphoria began to ebb, Salisu sprang abruptly from his seat muttering: “Why dem close this place sef?” his eyes scanning dejectedly what was left of Galadima’s redlight district.

His smoking routine usually ended with a romp in a prostitute’s bed, in Galadima’s days of decadent glory. All that is history now as the Borno government demolished several brothels and pubs around Maiduguri, acting on intelligence that they posed security threats. More than 67 structures were destroyed for violating extant state laws that banned their operations since 2018.

More curious kinks abound on the streets, in the pubs and numerous drug dens scattered across the country. For instance, while Salisu and his friend seek their highs in marijuana and synthetic meth, Suleiman Tanko finds his thrill in madaran sukudai, a potion chemically prepared with formalin (formaldehyde gin).

Perhaps because it tastes like wild love, making him dance to a beat no one could hear. From dawn through dusk, Tanko boogies in ecstasy to the psychoactive potion. Although it is used to preserve corpses by mortuary attendants, it incites Tanko’s apathy to “big and small trouble;” like his joblessness and tragic loss of his drunkard son, Yusufu, in a gang fight.

Yusufu, 13, took to the bottle very early; like his father, he fell in love with madaran sukudai, continually downing it to get high. In the end, he got stabbed to death, while high, in a turf war along the Galadima rail track, where local gangs converged to smoke and drink. But Tanko, has no regrets. “Wata ya seyray kankantchi’ii garra,” he said, meaning: “Does the moon trouble itself about the punishment of an ant? I won’t worry and die before my time,” he said, in the tenor of a man whose native “land” had gnawed his joy to feed grotesque lusts.

At the backdrop of Salisu and Tanko’s wild indulgences, several youths across the country abuse hard drugs, despite the government’s outlawing of the sale and consumption of psychoactive substances.

Strolling along Oju Irin – along Fagba-New Oko Oba axis – the modern-day Mecca for Lagos addicts, a suspicious mix of darting eyes and dank smell gives you the impression that the sea of shops and stalls offer something slightly more sinister than your standard cannabis, SK and heroin replicas.

Between 2018 and 2019, nearly 15% of Nigeria’s adult population (around 14.3 million people) reported a “considerable level” of use of psychotropic drug substances, a rate much higher than the 2016 global average of 5.6% among adults according to a survey anchored by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) and the Centre for Research and Information on Substance Abuse (CRISA) with technical support from the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) and funding from the European Union.

Baring any urgent intervention, the typical life span of a teenage addict is just two or three years from time of the addiction, argued Sarat Ilyasu, an addiction psychiatrist. For instance, Theophilus Adeoye, 17, died of excessive consumption of vodka and tramadol one year into his addiction.

The Medical Director (MD) of the Federal Neuropsychiatric Hospital (FNPH), Yaba, Dr. Oluwayemi Ogun equally sounded the alarm over the increasing prevalence of drug abused induced mental disorders among children, adolescent and adult Nigerians saying over 150 new cases are admitted at the hospital and its Child and Adolescent Centre, Oshodi Annexe every week.

Reacting to Lagos teens’ addiction to Gutter Juice (Omi gota) and other psychotropic substances, she told me, in an exclusive interview, that: “Only disturbed people drink Gutter Juice. Each of the substances mixed in the juice is highly dangerous. Codeine, cocaine, Indian Hemp, Tramadol and Rohypnol are seriously dangerous to health the way they are abused.”

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According to her, there is need for a lot of counselling and education of the youths, particularly at the home front. “They must understand that taking psychotropic substances would have adverse effects on them and possibly wreck their lives. Troubled teenagers especially must understand that the good times are made, not sniffed, drunk or smoked,” she said.

Priscilla Benjamin-Olaoye, another mental health expert, argued that although the first assumption many parents make is that drug addiction is a spiritual problem, substance abuse is actually a chronic relapsing disorder, leading to mental and behavioural challenges.

A spiritual problem, she stressed, is one in which the individual has no control over, but “in this case, substance abuse is one which the individual behaves themselves into. You cannot pray yourself out of what you behaved yourself into,” she argued, urging parents to implement a healthy balance of both.

Benjamin-Olaoye could save her homily for desperate parents like Moyin. Moyin persistently dismissed expert advice that her 16-year-old son, Toye, needed psychiatric help, stressing that her son’s problem is spiritual – even as findings revealed that he was hooked on a strong brew of Gutter Juice containing strong doses of cocaine, boiled cannabis, codeine, tramadol, and rohypnol.

Occasionally he smoked thinner and crack. After a chain-smoking and binge-drinking episode, Toye went off the deep end.

Predictably, his mother sought spiritual help. But when exorcism failed with Toye, his mother shipped him off to a traditional asylum in Agbara, Ogun State. When I visited the home, I found the 16-year-old tied to a steel bar fastened to the concrete floor. He looked gaunt with flecks of eko tutu and agunmu (cornmeal and herb) spattered over his parched lips.

His eyes bulged out of their sockets and his skin bore red welts from sustained beating. He looked spent and lost in an alternate universe but his caregiver paused from using the whip on him to assure that his case had remarkably improved.

May 15, 2025
Utomi’s search for vision of good society

Patrick Okedinachi Utomi, born in Kaduna but of Delta state extraction, is passionate about Nigeria. Perhaps the only other Nigerian whose passion for Nigeria rivals that of Utomi was another Kaduna-born Delta Nigerian nationalist, Chukwuma Nzeogwu, whose effort to rid Nigeria of “ten percenters and others that make us ashamed of being called Nigerians” was betrayed by some of his military colleagues including Ifeajuna, Ironsi and Ojukwu who sabotaged Nzeogwu’s revolution in Lagos, Enugu and Kano.

Prof. Pat Utomi, like Nzeogwu, has a vision of good society which became more elusive the closer they came towards it despite deploying all his talents and energy towards securing a better Nigeria for Nigerians since he started his crusade in the early eighties.

He first bewitched the Shehu Shagari administration with his in-depth newspaper analysis of the state of the economy, an endeavour that earned him a place in Shagari’s cabinet. Even after the collapse of the administration, he was given a chance to put into practice all his theoretical postulations at V/ Wagon Nigeria Limited which, under his control, suffered the same fate as other assembly plants of the period.

Utomi, a resourceful professor of political economy, is perhaps the face of Nigeria’s public intellectual home and abroad. He belongs to many professional bodies, including the Nigerian Institute of Public Relations, (NIPR), Institute of Directors (IOD), Nigeria Economic Summit Group and Nigeria Economic Society. He has served in various private-sector associations, including the Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI), the National Council of the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria, and the Nigeria Employers Consultative Association (NECA).

He has carried the crusade for a better Nigeria through intellectual debate beyond the shores of Nigeria, especially at the Centre for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, and Chatham House in the UK.

He has to his credit several books and journal articles on economic underdevelopment, including, ‘Nigeria as an Economic Power House,’ ‘Crafting the New Nigeria – Confronting the Challenges,’ Nigeria ‘Changes as Prospects,’ ‘Values and Economic Stagnation in Africa: A Paradox of Poverty in Nigeria,’ ‘Managing Uncertainty: Competition and Strategy in Emerging Economies,’ ‘Critical Perspectives in Political Economy and Management’ etc.

The labour of Utomi has not gone unacknowledged. For his pains, it has been honours without end. Numerous awards. He has been nominated and voted for by the public as one of Nigeria’s top ten Living Legends in the Vanguard/Silverbird Television Awards, Great Nigeria Lives of the 20th Century and Who is who in Africa.

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Unfortunately, Utomi’s theories have not reflected positively on the state of our economy.

The record of his intervention in politics has, however, not been any less dismal. But this has not diminished his enthusiasm for a vision of a better society. Thus, he last week once again came up with his “Big Tent Coalition Shadow Government,” over which he declared himself ‘Leader of Opposition.’ The initiative, which is to serve as critique of the President Bola Tinubu’s administration, was, according to him, dictated by his desire to save Nigeria’s democracy following his inability to stop the gale of defections from Labour and PDP, where membership of his new coalition was selected.

The task before the group would be to regularly scrutinise government actions, identify policy failures, and propose alternative solutions in key areas- economy, education, healthcare, infrastructure, law and order, and constitutional reforms of the present government.

These are no doubt noble objectives except that the Information Minister, Mohammed Idris, has said, the idea of a so-called ‘shadow government’ is an aberration as “Nigeria is not a parliamentary system where such a system is practiced.” Many seem to agree with the minister that “Our bicameral legislature amply features members of the opposition, and it should be the right place to contest meaningful ideas for nation-building.”

Besides government opposition, Utomi’s current search for a vision of good society seems threatened by the choice of his crusading team drawn from opposition PDP democrats without democratic ethos and the ‘obidients,’ an unthinking mob Obi, as the falconer, cannot control.

For instance, Dele Farotimi, who will lead the Ombudsman and Good Governance portfolio, is a man many of his critics believe talks more than he thinks in order to prove his valour. Not too long ago, he was ready to publicly disrobe Chief Afe Babalola, an elder statesman, over unproven allegations, just as he, on account of some bad eggs, didn’t mind pulling down his own noble profession without which we all return to a state of nature where life is ’nasty, brutish, and short.’ And this was a self-confessed ‘obidient’ who, in search of ‘Obi’s imaginary ‘stolen mandate,’ recklessly declared without proof before his American audience, “in a few days’ time a convicted drug baron will be sworn in as the president of my country.”

Before Prof. Utomi’s latest gamble, most of his past efforts at building a coalition in pursuit of a new vision of good society failed. He contested the 2007 presidential election on the platform of the obscure African Democratic Party and failed. Following his initial setback, he formed another party, the Social Democratic Mega Party, on which platform he tried to contest the 2011 presidential elections before withdrawing at the last minute.

But in 2012, he joined the opposition Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN) “because the progressive opposition in Nigeria has been unable to bring itself under one umbrella while the enemies of the progressive struggle are disciplined enough to coalesce under the conservative/retrogressive Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).”

Utomi is a rolling stone. His attempt at contesting a senatorial seat in Delta under PDP failed. I have heard him declare publicly that the APC manifesto was drafted on the dining table in his house. Indeed, Utomi was declared as the governorship candidate of the All Progressives Congress for the 2019 general election in Delta State by a faction of the party until it was overturned by the national working committee of the party.

In January 2018, Utomi floated the Nigeria Intervention Movement (NIM), with former Cross River State governor, Donald Duke, former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Charles Soludo, Senior Advocate of Nigeria, Olisa Agbakoba, Tafawa Balewa, former Education minister, Oby Ezekwesili, former Information minister, Frank Nweke Jnr, Col. Abubakar Umar (retd), Ayo Obe, Rabiu Ishyaku Rabiu, former presidential adviser, Akin Osuntokun as members.

The group described itself as a pro-democracy movement and pressure group of like-minded Nigerians, “Concerned that left to their schemes and antics, a class of entrenched leaders will lead Nigeria into a state of indescribable human misery, characterised by death, hunger, disease, illiteracy and manipulation.” They decided to create a third political force, a platform to mobilise all citizens of goodwill and conscience towards engendering a new political system and culture in Nigeria. The intervention movement brought no relief to Nigerians.

Restless Utomi in 2020 and Naaba formed a group to lead mass action against corruption and insecurity in Nigeria. They wanted Nigerians to rise up and put an end to the situation where the president was being caged and his office being run by some unelected proxies and power

traders operating without any form of mandate from the Nigerian people. Chasing out that clique of ruinous political cartels ravaging our commonwealth enabled by their self- serving capture of our Government and State. The result was not different.

Then ahead of the 2023 general elections, Utomi was among prominent Nigerians that established a third force, Rescue Nigeria Project (RNP), ostensibly to give Nigerians an alternative platform, other than the All Progressives Congress (APC) and the Peoples Democratic

Party (PDP). Other founding members of RNP included former governor of Kwara State, Ahmed Abdulfatai, Prof. Tunde Adeniran, former Governor of Cross River State, Donald Duke, Senator Lee Maeba, Usman Bugaje, Prof. Attahiru Jega, Amb. Nkoyo Toyo, Yomi Awoniyi, Dr. Rose Idi Danladi, Dr. Sadiq Gombe, among others. They set out to fight “the high level of nepotism and lack of inclusiveness” which had given rise to agitations by different ethnic groups.

“We want to salvage this country and see how we can fix the mess. We want to set a template and key criteria leaders must have before they can attain any political position.” Abdulfatai had hardly finished delivering this keynote address when Utomi was discovered to be gunning for the presidential ticket of the Labour Party, which he later ceded to Peter Obi.

While the closer we came towards Utomi’s vision of a good society, the more elusive it became, it has not been all doom for Nigeria’s foremost professor of political economy and management at a personal level. He is the chairman of close to two dozen Nigerian companies and a shareholder in many others.

May 13, 2025
The San Siro battle

San Siro is the name of the home pitch shared by Inter Milan and AC Milan, two leading football clubs in Italy. On Tuesday night, the stadium was virtually on fire, a week after the first leg of the Champions League semifinals showdown between Inter and Barca at the Olympic Stadium in Spain, which ended, 3-3. The Spain encounter was a foretaste of what to come in Italy. The match lived up to its billing. From the start to the end, there was no dull moment.

By the 90th minute, the normal regulation time, Barca were leading 3-2. At that stage, the game was as good as won. So, Barca and their supporters as well as others thought. But the Inter boys did not give up and in the third minute of added time, they got the equaliser. The game resumed in extra time and Inter got the winning goal in the first half of extra time to end the breath taking game, 4-3 after about 126 minutes, including added time of extra time, of pulsating soccer.

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It was football at its best, the kind of which I do not think has been seen in the history of the Champions League. Inter are now in the finals. Either side could have won as both teams were hungry for victory. When teams play like this, the beautiful game is the better for it. Is that not why people are crazy about soccer?

May 8, 2025
Nigeria First, a safety valve

THINK NIGERIA, BUY NIGERIA has for long been a slogan that the people are used to. It is employed by ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs), as well as private enterprises to woo customers to patronise locally manufactured goods. The slogan might have caught on, but the message did not.

Sloganeering is one thing, but making the message sink in, is another. It is the duty of the messenger to ensure that his message is understood and that the receiver buys into it. If the receiver does not key in, it means either one of two things. The message is not clear or the product being marketed is not good enough. Or it could be the medium or media used for the message was or were not wide enough.

Message, messaging and the messenger must go hand in hand for any product or policy to sell or work. The Federal Government seems to have realised this under its Nigeria First Policy (NFP), hereinafter referred to as Nigeria First, the Policy or NF, which was unveiled after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting on Monday. The Policy talks about putting indigenous businesses first in everything.

Be it in contract bidding or provision of goods and services, Nigerian businesses will come first. They will be the contractors of first resort, according to the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Alhaji Mohammed Idris. One may be tempted to say there is nothing new about the policy on putting Nigeria first in every area of human endeavour. Even without a formal policy like NF, the government, industrialists and patriotic Nigerians have always spoken about the country, its people and businesses been the cornerstone of whatever we do.

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The government should be commended for formalising the process. It should, however, not end there. The Policy must be strictly implemented for it to work. There should be no room for any corporate entity or individual, no matter how powerful, to cut corners or attempt to find loopholes in the Policy so as to serve their selfish interests. Most times, the government comes up with good policies but the system prevents them from working. The government is the government and no one no matter how affluent and influential can be more powerful than it.

The government must go beyond having good policies to wield the big stick whenever a big man or a big firm takes it up by bypassing those policies meant for the good of the country. We should learn from other countries that are doing well across the world. They respect the rich and big companies, but they know what to do whenever such people and institutions cross the line. Policies can only be as good as their implementation. The failure of implementation is the beginning of the failure of any policy no matter how good it is.

The government cannot afford to allow NF to fail. All eyes are on it, with the unveiling of the policy. Its planned tinkering with the procurement process is good. For too long, the nation has lost trillions of naira through procurement fraud. The sanitisation of the unit is long overdue. It should not start and end with the staff of the unit, which may affect only those in the junior cadre. It needs overhauling so that the unit which is supposed to verify all transactions does not become the tool for fraud and corruption, which many believe it is today.

If the unit becomes ‘born again’ (read as clean), Nigeria First is on its way to achieve its aim of, among others, “putting Nigeria – not foreign companies, not imports – at the heart of national development”. Our economy can only come out of the woods in such a situation. With time too, the government should back the Policy up with law. An Executive Order does not carry the same force as the law. It has its limitations.

May 8, 2025
#NogreeforNipco

The messages have been coming in, in torrents. Almost all the writers have something to say about gas filling stations. They said all the outlets are crooks. According to them, the outlets are not different from their workers whose stock-in-trade is to rip off motorists and other customers. I have also experienced some of the things they wrote about. But my last experience which has provoked two pieces in this space beats them all.

To me, it is daylight robbery by a well-heeled oil firm which also runs a retail outlet. Nipco is deliberately refusing to refund my N20000 for a failed transaction last January 15 at its Arepo outlet off the Lagos-Ibadan Express road. The money is not the issue but the outlet’s advertent refusal to make amends. Those who wrote in, in solidarity with this column said they had similar experiences with some outlets (names withheld) as well as Nipco.

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They said the outlets do not give a hoot about customers’ complaints. For all they care, customers can go to hell. ‘I see wen for dem hand. I go buy petrol for one filling station around Ogba with my ATM. Dem debit me but the receipt say: ‘DECLINED’. Dem no sell fuel for me. My bank say the money don leave dem hand. I go back to the filling station, dem no answer me. Na the thing wey we dey see for dem hand be that. Oga, no gree for dem o”.

None has a good story to tell about the outlets. This is worrisome. Should they be allowed to continue to treat customers shabbily, especially in cases of ‘dispense error’ – where a customer is debited for a failed transaction, but the outlet is credited. In my case, if Nipco wants to claim, contrary to available evidence, that it did not get the money, then it should throw its books open for scrutiny. From there, we will take the matter further.

May 8, 2025
Character is like smoke, no matter how one hides it, it will escape

I was reading an opinion column in a Western European newspaper last weekend in which the writer was saying the eventual fall of President Donald Trump and the political tendency and ideology which he represents were almost ordained because, according to the writer, any success built on hate cannot endure.

It now appears that the apparent electoral success of Trump over Kamala Harris was a mere pyrrhic victory which, though is having fundamental consequences on the USA and the whole world at large, may not amount to a sea change in American politics and global politics after all.

As an observer of global politics, it is clear to me that there are necessary changes which have to be made in American politics and global reactions to these changes but not the way Trump has gone about it. It is clear to me that America cannot continue to be the dumping grounds for Asian industrial goods from Japan, China, India, Vietnam and other putative capitalist countries whose economies are based on exports while America consumes all and their own industries go into decline without consequences on the global exchange capitalist mechanism.

This system, whereby consumption is in one country and production is in other countries, particularly in one dominant manufacturing country, is not likely to remain forever and it contradicts the capitalist system of exchange of goods.

This suited the commercial class in America, and also in Europe, which moved production to China and fed fat on design and manipulation of the market to favour themselves while the working class were made to pay exorbitantly for cheaply made Chinese goods deceptively styled “designer goods “and the rich class became richer and richer on their manipulation of the shares and stock markets.

Trump exploited the inherent racism of the white people against blacks and Asians to tell the Americans in coded language that the Chinese were responsible for their economic problems. His campaign of making America great again essentially meant “let’s make America white again,” where everyone knew their places, with the whites right at the top of the racial heap.

In this scheme, the likes of Obama and Harris have no place, and the vast majority of the white American electorate bought this. Somehow some Latinos bought into it feeling smug that they were not after all blacks! Even some black men felt they would not be bossed around by a black madam! The state capture of the electorate was complete.

Former President Joe Biden waited too long before he decided he would not seek the presidency. The sham and charade of the Democratic nomination of Kamala Harris came too late and she was merely presented a poisoned chalice at the end and there was no magic wand that she could cast to win against Trump. In the end, the contest was no contest at all.

However, the dirty character of Donald Trump is becoming clear not only to the whole world but to the American community which has shamefully supported him because what is clear to anybody who has ever visited America is that Americans are closet racists. Somebody once commented that racism is in open display every Sunday when the so- called “God’s own country“ is assembled in separate churches- black, white and the whites are separated into Catholic, Episcopalian, Methodist, Baptist, Greek, Croatian, Ukrainian and others with red lines which one should not cross.

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A young friend of mine who was brought up in a Baptist environment of primary school, secondary school and whose Baptist father sent him to a university in Oklahoma apparently owned by the Baptist mission was shocked when he went to attend church on his first visit to the United States. On entering the big church, he noticed that there were no other blacks in the church. He was accosted by the church warden who asked him “can I help you?” When he replied that he was new in town and a Baptist wanting to worship God . He was told he was in the wrong place.

What is happening in America today and what Trump’s world view represents is what his German forebears called – weltanschauungen. The whole world must understand and sympathise with the ordinary Americans whose leaders are fanning the embers of racism because of politics. Some of them like J.D. Vance, the Vice President, who one will think would understand the incipient racism of their society, having been married to an Indian, is trying to widen the net of racial superiority to include the people of the subcontinent of India in their dragnet of racial superiority in a struggle with the rest of the world.

The rest of the world must learn fast and try to blunt the spear of racism directed against them. The world does not need any racial divide. Adolf Hitler tried it and failed. Any pitiable imitator will surely fail. The problem unfortunately is that racism is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons yet we must try and extirpate and crush this dragon.

This is the challenge facing the whole world but it is our bounden duty to expose the smoke of racism wherever it lurks in our society and in the world. Let’s begin.

May 8, 2025
Ghosts of Hurti

Even vultures do not feast on their young. Yet in Hurti, Nigeria nourished on the blood of her children. The narrative is bloodcurdling: severed throats of innocent children, salty tears of sorrowing mothers, and decapitated fathers who bled out.

The victims’ fates invoke the mindless grief of a nation too brutalised to feel empathy. Yet Hurti’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back. The horror that befell the hamlet on April 2nd is no accident of history. It is a grim parable; a ghastly rite of our clustered miscreation. That ill-fated Wednesday, Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven, had their throats slit by an ethnic militia. Subsequently, their bodies were flung into their burning home.

That any human hand could press a blade against a child’s neck and pull—without scruples or remorse—is the ultimate indictment of a nation adrift. Yet this savagery is rarely singular. It mirrors a familiar rite of vengeance that has been around for a long time. At the same time, plagued warring communities pitted in a never-ending tussle dubbed the indigene-settler crisis, ethno-religious conflict, across Plateau, Benue and other States.

From Riyom to Barkin Ladi, Bokkos to Mangu, the narrative is the same: a festering grievance, a retaliatory attack, and a government that responds with lofty speeches and body bags. This is not justice. This is the ritualisation of horror.

Hurti did not burn in isolation. It burned as part of Nigeria’s slow, daily immolation. What remains after the carnage isn’t simply the ash of houses or the charred corpses of the slain occupants. What remains is eight-year-old Josiah’s scream: “Leave him alone! Leave him alone!” as he watched his father get butchered to death. What remains is nine-year-old Fatima Yusuf’s barefoot sprint from death, and her fragile, prayerful chants above the crack of gunfire.

Hurti’s tragedy is not new, but its pain is freshly grotesque. Around 3:35 pm, the soft murmur of rural life ruptured to the hum of motorcycles, three slayers in each seat, their guns and machetes slung across their backs like casual accessories. Within moments, the air turned metallic with the stench of blood. Julia, 48, watched from the bush as her sons got slaughtered, paralysed by the knowledge that a step toward them was a step toward certain death. Her children died without her arms around them. Their last thoughts, zoned into the absence of a mother torn between love and survival. That is the real death. Yet Julia suffers another kind of death; the one that stalks a mother, long after she witnessed her sons’ murder and burial in a mass grave.

The Mangut boys, like several of their peers, were soullessly erased from the nation’s moral register. Their killers are products of our moral void. The disfigurement of the soul that afflicts them drives hundreds of youths in several Plateau communities to bear machetes into neighbouring settlements, retaliating for past wrongs with future atrocities. The cycle is cruel and complete: blood for blood, sin for sin, horror for horror. And while the dead pile up, those still breathing shuffle forward, desensitised and forever maimed.

No tribe or tongue owns this cruelty. What we are dealing with surpasses ethnic violence; it is moral atrophy cloaked as gall. Amid this cultural flop of empathy, Nigeria suffers a descent to pitilessness; a deadening of our national conscience. From the rostrums of leadership to the ramshackle dwellings of the poor, compassion is vanishing. In its place is a perverse exaltation of vengeance and rage.

This malady is canonised in real time; it is what makes a government send relief materials instead of trauma therapists. It is what drives citizens to turn every tragedy into a statistic and every loss into a familiar tragedy. Pitilessness thus defines the Nigerian system. It flows through the corridors of power into the minds of everyday Nigerians who scroll past photographs of massacred children and civil deaths as if they were yesterday’s football scores. What kind of society is this, that a child’s charred remains invoke no rallying cry?

The cost of unhealed wounds is profound. Josiah’s eyes, now vacant, tell a story we refuse to hear. Laughter has deserted his innocent heart, and he wakes up screaming from persistent nightmares. His father is dead, but Josiah dies a little every night. If we do nothing, he will grow up among us as a wounded shell. Like Josiah, hundreds of children across Bokkos LGA and beyond have witnessed similar horrors, and in their experiences, you begin to see a generational crisis of unfathomable scope.

As trauma specialist Dr. Osaro warns, Josiah may grow up physically but remain stuck emotionally at the moment of his father’s slaying. And such children, unhealed, become adults unable to give or receive love. Some will harden into new agents of violence. Others will collapse inward, swallowed by fear or shame or addiction. Either way, society pays.

The costs are steep: broken homes, mental illness, suicidal ideation, and violent crime. But worst of all is the silent inheritance: the rage, suspicion and grief that the living pass on to the unborn.

It’s about time we halted the transmission of this transgenerational hatred. We must draw a line. There must be justice, not just for Hurti, but for every village whose earth has been darkened by blood. The perpetrators of the April 2 massacre must be hunted, tried, and punished. No more euphemisms. No more “unknown gunmen.”

There must be healing, the type that surpasses food rations, sanitary pads, and temporary tents. I speak of structured trauma therapy and community-based interventions funded by the government. Art therapy, storytelling sessions, and safe houses for child survivors must become part of our emergency response. Healing cannot be outsourced to God. It must be planned, funded, and executed by men.

There must be dialogue. It’s about time the government, traditional rulers, faith leaders, and local communities sat at a common table, not to relitigate old grievances, but to chart a pathway to sustainable peace. We must neuter the culture of reprisal and the myth of ethnic supremacy. We must cultivate mutual respect as a survival strategy far from the culture of utopia.

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We must also address land use conflicts with transparent legal reforms. Set up conflict-resolution commissions that include all stakeholders: settlers, herders, indigenes, and imbue them with real authority. We must remove the bureaucratic bottlenecks that delay intervention and create safe zones where displaced people can live and rebuild without fear.

And lastly, we must re-teach ourselves to feel. Our social and religious institutions must preach compassion louder than conquest. Our schools must teach empathy, not just arithmetic. Our homes must nurture kindness, not vengeance. Only then can we ensure that Saltifat and Justice did not die in vain.

What Hurti demands of us is not pity but a covenant. We owe it to Saltifat, four, and Justice, seven. We owe it to Enoch Jabarang, nine, and Bright Ephraim, one. We owe it to nine-year-olds: Fatima and Josiah, who still wake up screaming from a horrid relive of their fathers’ murder. Shall we unlearn the barbarism of our past, and rework compassion, from a convenient slogan into a national policy and culture of co-existence?

If we do not, then Hurti is prophecy; its flames will leap into other hamlets and other homes. And the fires may stay burning in our hearts.

May 8, 2025
In defence of Okowa

I sympathise with former governor Ifeanyi Okowa of Delta State who has suddenly become the poster child for PDP’s self-inflicted afflictions. He is today going through great stress and strain for hearkening to the call of his people for a change of direction after 26 years of faithful marriage to PDP.

The April 23 divorce train was led by Governor Sheriff Oborevwori, his predecessor and PDP’s 2023 vice presidential candidate Ifeanyi Okowa, his deputy, the elected national and state house of assembly members as well as elected local council officials.

The justification for the mass defection was well articulated by various stakeholders. First was the Delta State Commissioner for Works (Rural Roads) and Public Information, Mr Charles Aniagwu, who explained that the decision to jilt the PDP was born out of “the need to align with a political platform that would better serve the development goals of the state and the interests of Deltans.”

There was also the pioneer PDP Chairman in the state, Senator James Manager, who reminded critics that “when a ship is sinking, you don’t stay onboard out of sentiment,” adding, “we had extensive consultations, and today marks the climax of those discussions, what we have now is a collective and unanimous decision to chart a new course.”

And for OKowa , the one receiving various diatribes from PDP members who rather than put out the raging inferno in their own house engaged in a two-year game of intrigue over sharing of political offices, the defection to the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) was “a bold and strategic move to change their path for the common good of the people; it was not about the governor, but the fact that there is the need for us to connect to Abuja… that resource of which Delta State is a large contributor, there was a need to connect to it.”

And perhaps no one explained the defection better than Governor Sheriff Oborevwori himself. “Ten years was too long a time to be in opposition,” he bellowed to an excited crowd of defectors. He was right. Peoples of Niger Delta have always been mainstreamers since the run up to independence in 1960. We will come to that shortly.

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Okowa shouted himself hoarse explaining it was not about him but about his people. But there has been no respite from his disconsolate PDP former family members who shouted in anger: “You too Brutus”? They have accused him of betraying the body that has given him everything to become relevant in Nigerian politics. As a former secretary to government, a senator of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, and a two-term governor of oil rich Delta, where leaders spend money like water, and finally as vice presidential candidate of PDP that had after its truncated 16 years in power hoped to reign for another 60 years, what else does Okowa want, they asked with uninhibited contempt.

At war with Okowa is a formidable group of his former PDP members who are unfortunately tarred with the same brush. Former Senate President Saraki who in the guise of “some people” first accused his former APC party of disingenuously designing “A one-party state which will not augur well for a multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multicultural, multi-religious… society like ours,” went on to tell Okowa that “it is unbecoming and shocking for the running mate to the standard bearer of a leading party to abandon ship to join the ruling party.”

Senator Abba Moro, the minority leader of the senate, has said picking Okowa who could not deliver his state in the 2023 election, despite having lobbied for the slot, was “a political miscalculation.”

But Okowa, drawing his conclusion from Atiku’s statement, insisted the VP slot was foisted on him, without first seeking his consent, by PDP oligarchy at the centre. But as it turned out, Atiku who said Okowa’s choice was based on PDP’s recommendation was also being economical with the truth. Evidence now in the public domain showed that, of the 17 PDP stalwarts that participated in the VP selection process, 14 voted for Wike. Atiku’s calculation for picking Okowa was probably informed by the expectation that the governor of an oil-rich Delta, who earned in one month what some states earn in a year, would be able to bankroll his (Atiku) campaign expenses the same way Ibori was said to have done for Yar’adua in 2007.

And this unfortunately was the reason Okowa’s travails started long before the current toxic divorce of Delta PDP from its suitor of 26 years. Indeed, long before the 2023 election, Pa Clark, the leader of Pan Niger Delta Forum, (PANDEF) and Southern and Middle-Belt Leaders Forum (SMBLF), had in a letter dated February 2, 2023, accused Okowa of betrayal for reneging on southern governors’ resolutions that no politician from the South should accept to be running mate to a northerner.

Pa Clark alleged Okowa was using Delta State money to fund Atiku’s campaign. But since it was Pa Clark who also told us that Ibori funded Yar’adua’s election, why was it difficult for Pa Clark to understand that poor OKowa was merely following a tradition? And if, indeed, Okowa actually used part of the 13 percent derivation to build a university in his village the same way Ibori deployed the same facility to build a university in Oghara village, I don’t think Okowa owed Pa Clark any apology.

And finally, Pa Clark, in June 2023, alleged that Okowa as governor of Delta misappropriated the state’s derivation fund amounting to N1.760trillion.

But If I have to make a choice between Okowa and Pa Clark, I will settle for the former. First, until EFCC proves its case against Okowa, he remains innocent. Secondly, Pa Clark is not an impartial arbiter among his errant children some of whom in the guise of struggle for distributive justice engage in criminal activities against the state.

In any case, Pa Clark, while alive, knew the word corruption did not exist in the Niger Delta lexicon. It is not on record that he contradicted Augustus Aikhomu, Babangida’s deputy, when he declared that “diversion of resources meant for development was not corruption but “misapplication of funds.” We similarly don’t have any evidence that Pa Clark, as self-appointed “father of the President,” ever faulted President Jonathan’s assertion that “stealing government funds was not corruption.”

For Deltans, allegations against or even indictments of leaders who swear by their names for financial malfeasance only endear them to their leaders. If there were people complaining, they were not short-changed Deltans but must be meddlesome interlopers.

Obasanjo and Murtala Mohammed seized some ill-acquired properties of Diete Spiff, who became governor of Rivers at 25. He is today a leading traditional ruler in Bayelsa. Obasanjo chased Diepreye Alamieyeseigha around the world, haunted Odili until he was saved by the judiciary, and after failing to secure the conviction of Ibori by Nigerian courts, took the battle to London where he ensured his conviction for 10 years by the British judiciary.

Unfortunately, his impoverished Deltans were not amused. All those desperate efforts did not stop those whose battle Obasanjo was waging from worshipping Ibori, their hero.

In fact, Ibori was welcomed back to Nigeria after serving his jail term by a tumultuous crowd of his enthusiastic people. There were close to a dozen Bishops in the jam-packed Otefe-Ogara village church during the thanksgiving service for his safe return from prison.

And now let us return to Delta pre-independence resolve to remain ‘mainstreamers.’ Rather than persecution, Okowa deserves only accolades for resurrecting the dreams and aspirations of his people The truth is that Delta has since 1963 never been in opposition.

Having experienced persecution and marginalisation from their more aggressive and more diplomatic Igbo and Yoruba neighbours, they opted to become ‘mainstreamers,’ aligning themselves with the dominant ruling NPC party from the north.

While the Binis and Itshekiris, because of their cultural affinity with the Yoruba, found more accommodation with Awo’s AG, with the NCNC victory after the 1952 regional election and its takeover of Midwest after its creation, the Urhobos, the Ijaws, Isokos etc. found themselves “between the devil and the deep blue sea.” With the advice of minority rights agitators like Pa Clark, they chose to cast their lot with the ruling majority.

Critics must, therefore, understand that Delta’s marriage to PDP between 1999 and 2023 was not out of altruism. It was because PDP provided a fertile ground for their cultural demand and even their licentiousness. What Oborevwori and Okowa are today saying is that Deltans are not obliged to make further sacrifices.

May 6, 2025