The Nation Newspaper

Category: Thursday

  • Tinubu: The Lagos factor in Nigerian politics

    Tinubu: The Lagos factor in Nigerian politics

    Any study of Nigerian politics without special attention paid to the political economy of Lagos within the Nigerian political complex will be missing the key role of Lagos metropolis in the history and politics of Nigeria. Lagos was the entry point of Britain into Nigeria. When a naval squadron bombarded the city in 1851 ostensibly to stop the slave trade, the people of Lagos realised that the wider world was interested in what went on in Lagos. This naval promenade was repeated in 1861 and Lagos was permanently annexed to the British Empire and run sometimes from the Spanish Island of Fernando Po and later from the Gold Coast where the British had had an older settlement.

    By the middle of the 1860s Lagos then had its own administration but still subordinated to the Gold Coast administration. Up till 1875 the British were not really sure of what to make of its West African colonies. The West African Coast was regarded as the white man’s grave because of the malaria fever which killed off the white man within weeks of mosquitoes bite. Even when quinine was used in the 1820s as prophylactic against malaria, its effectiveness was still debated but widely used by settlers on the West African coast especially from the settlements of liberated slaves in Saint Louis, Dakar Freetown and Monrovia. Eventually, white men began to tolerate the inhospitable climate and unhealthy environment of the coast for white people.

    This did not stop black people at least in the immediate hinterland of Lagos from moving in droves to Lagos. Lagos had existed as a small fishing village established by the Awori people circa 1200. Over the years, they had witnessed Egba, Ijebu, Egun people coming to join them. The dramatic movement of some Edo warriors in the mid-15th century to the place did not quite change the demography of Lagos but its government which from then on was patterned after the monarchical institution of Benin which it too had inherited from Ile Ife. This was the settlement the British took over in 1861.

    The population of Lagos increased exponentially from the 1820s onwards from the considerable influx of liberated slaves from Brazil and Sierra Leone. These were Yoruba ex-slaves who knew the area of their birth. This population increased from 1876 onwards because of the century of warfare in Yorubaland which began with the Owu war in 1796 and was terminated by the British conquest of Ilorin in 1896.  The period of war in Yorubaland facilitated the exodus of people into Lagos. It is a surprising coincidence that just as warfare in Yorubaland intensified in 1876, the British a year before had stated through its secretary of state for the colonies, Joseph Chamberlain, the Tory businessman from Birmingham, that Britain was then determined to acquire tropical colonies as undeveloped estate of the realm. This meant a forward policy in West Africa and in the Yorubaland hinterland of Lagos.  By the time the British were effectively in the control of Nigeria, Lagos population had grown from the original Awori settlement to what can be called a cosmopolitan city without losing its Yoruba essence with cultural contributions from the various people who had made the city their home particularly the Anglophone Creole and their counterparts, the Brazilians with their strong attachment to Catholicism while the  indigenous Muslim elements were concentrated in the centre of the city with accretions from  sizeable Nupe elements. Lagos has always been a province of opportunity and freedom for not only Nigerians but also West Africans.

    Lagos was also the city which saw the emergence of virile newspapers with healthy dose of anti-colonial sentiments. With the press grew the sentiment of freedom and demand that Africa should be ruled by Africans and not by imperialists whose civilization was found to be exotic and different from acceptable African culture. The so-called educated elite in Lagos did not abhor everything British; what they were opposed to was the discriminatory practice which elevated the pigmentation of the skin over the character of the person.

    It is remarkable to note how advanced the political sociology of the Lagos elite was when compared with modern views of a racially neutral world. When the early Lagos nationalists like Drs J.K Randle and Obasa and Herbert Macaulay organised the very first political movements in Nigeria, they concentrated on the amelioration of social and political situation of the people of Lagos with the intention that a secure Lagos will be an attractive beacon to the rest of Nigeria. They have largely been proved right because over the years, Lagos has nurtured the political destinies of people like Herbert Macaulay, Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, and now Asiwaju Ahmed Tinubu. Other politicians have bestrode the Lagos firmament but on lesser scale than those of these three. It is remarkable that the three of them can trace their ancestry to places outside Lagos. Lagos has been a welcoming city and anybody who is prepared to work hard and struggle can make it in business and politics in Lagos.

    It is true that Lagos belongs to Lagosians. Lagos has never been a no man’s land. It was never a terra incognita. It was always an abode of people. People have always migrated to Lagos and have been absorbed by the people and their culture. People who come to Lagos and want to be Lagosians must embrace the people and their culture. This was what Yoruba-speaking Herbert Macaulay from Sierra Leone and Nnamdi Azikiwe from Onitsha and what several Lagosians from diverse ancestry have done. Those who say Tinubu is not a Lagosian and say Lateef Jakande is not a Lagosian do not know the history of modern Lagos. There are also those who say Atiku Abubakar is a Cameroonian and that the Baba Ahmeds are from Mauritania. Such people forget that we all ancestrally came from somewhere from where we are today.  Besides, migration is a common factor in African history and that is why many of our northern Nigerians became Nigerians. My ancestors came from Ajase Ipo  in present day Kwara and I am very proud of it .This does not mean I am not an Ekiti, a place where my great grandfather Dada “Agbo dumogun bere uja, taku taku a bija pe “ fought for and was ready to die for.

    These preambular statements are designed to establish the point I want to make that is, we are from where  we have fought and were ready to die for. I don’t know anybody who is more Lagosian than Asiwaju Bola Tinubu. Tinubu withstood the federal political hurricane unleashed on Lagos during the Olusegun Obasanjo presidency and used the period of adversity to look inwards and develop Lagos into the fifth largest economy in Africa.  He was prepared to die in the process for his belief .He definitely has paid his dues.

    Now to the kernel of my piece. People have said Asiwaju Tinubu is not physically fit and the man said appropriately that the presidency is not a boxing arena. Buhari despite his health challenge held fort there for eight years. Although Asiwaju does not intend to follow the Buhari trajectory because he has better business and economic ideas far superior to that of Buhari, he has also proved beyond debate that he is an organiser of men and material to achieve designed targets. He has proved this in Lagos and his successors have followed the same trajectory.  While governor of Lagos, he built a formidable civil service and teaching service open to all residents of Lagos marrying in good proportion the interests of “ Omo Eko” and  “Ara Eko”. Tinubu would never ignore the interests of Lagos indigenes and subordinate them to those of residents who have claims in other states apart from Lagos but at the same time, he believes in careers open to talents and would use the talents of outsiders to develop his favourite Lagos. Tinubu’s reach globally is very long and wide.  I remember when he developed his policy of land use, he tapped the knowledge of Canadians and I can testify to this verity because I was then the chairman of Nigerian-Canada chamber of Commerce.

    As long as we continue to embrace the capitalist model of development, Tinubu has the golden touch to deliver. Even if he is not as robust as when he was much younger, he is not lame. For those who know a little bit of history, the most successful president of America in modern times was Fredrick Delano Roosevelt who engineered from his wheelchair the most radical social revolution in American history. Compared with his other competing politicians for the presidency, Tinubu in my estimation is clearly the victor ludorum (VICTRIX LUDORUM) if this were a fair competition to determine the best of the lot.

  • Enemies of the State

    Enemies of the State

    The protracted fuel and naira scarcity furnish a panoptic of Nigeria’s political succession wars. It’s a blood feud taken to the extreme. Some would call it a perfidious game of thrones, a despairing caucus’ last hurrah against the hurricane that would consume them.

    In a recent interview, Kaduna State Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, said some non-state actors would prefer an interim government as an outcome of the ongoing political transition. El Rufai characterised the culprits as elements whose conduct is consistent with plans to subvert a civilian-to-civilian transition after the next presidential election.

    “What is happening is that there are people around the president that had their presidential candidates. They had two candidates that they preferred to succeed Buhari – Godwin Emefiele from the South and Ahmad Lawan from the north – and they got neither.”

    To their chagrin, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu (BAT), two-time Lagos governor, emerged as victor at the All Progressives Congress (APC)’ presidential primaries.

    Consequently, “It turned out that some of the wildest stories of conspiracy to derail the transition at best for APC to lose, preferably for the whole system to result in no election leading to an interim arrangement began to rear their heads,” said El Rufai.

    And what better way to incite chaos than to contrive fuel shortage and naira scarcity? The major victims, comprising the working class, rural dwellers, unemployed and large swathes of the impoverished, are subjected to sustained hardship allegedly because some political actors dread the possibility of Tinubu’s victory at this month’s presidential polls.

    They fear that he would entrench true federalism. They fear that he would immortalise his name in gold via humane and astute governance. They fear he would raise a new breed of young, patriotic, visionary leaders. They fear that he would change the class and culture of political patronage. They fear he would attain peerless repute by achieving what none of them could achieve all through their dalliance with power.

    At the underbelly of their plot is avarice. Greed, wielded by these enemies of Nigeria, manifests in their sacrilegious scarring of the country’s fertile womb to protect their ill-acquired wealth.

    There is no gainsaying Nigeria’s rape cycle is rooted in its cutthroat politics, surpassed only by the citizenry’s penchant for malice and sculpting of spite into an oratory, in praise of their oppressors.

    The possibility of watching the ongoing crisis snowball into unimaginable proportions is scary. Thus the governments of Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara states resort to judicial intervention via the Supreme Court before the citizenry turns against each other and everyone.

    The governors’ intervention, however, translates to a sterile reprieve as the Federal Government and CBN flagrantly flout the Supreme Court’s February 8 order of interim injunction, restraining both the commercial banks from suspending or ending on February 10, the usage and circulation of now older versions of the N200, N500, and N1000 denominations as legal tender, pending the hearing and determination of the plaintiffs/applicants’ motion on notice for interlocutory injunction.

    The Supreme Court, on Wednesday, February 15, reasserted the ruling following a complaint by the lawyer to Kaduna, Kogi, and Zamfara states, Abdulhakeem Mustapha (SAN), that the Fed Govt and its agencies have failed to comply with the order and have allegedly directed the rejection of the old notes.

    Consequently, the local economy and citizenry suffer unimaginable hardships. Amidst expectations that President Muhammadu Buhari would resolve the matter in seven days as he promised in the wake of the crisis, CBN governor, Emefiele, has admitted that the apex bank does not have the capacity to print adequate new naira notes.

    Even so, he insisted that there was no need to shift the deadline despite a Supreme Court last week ordering the Federal Government and CBN not to enforce the deadline.

    Pundits are having a hard time intellectualising why Emefiele and the Federal Government felt the need to rush the implementation of the new naira policy and invalidate the now older notes.

    His insistence that there was no need to shift the deadline despite the Supreme Court’s order to the contrary, resonates ominously; it’s somewhat imperious, a caper of fiendish conceit and bursting insolence against the rule of law.

    Predictably, several politicians, the media, and civil societies sympathetic to the plot attempt to intellectualise the grisly motif. Yet there is no excuse for hardships imposed on Nigerians via a policy borne of gall and executed in malice. There is equally no justification for the surges of aggression birthed by the new naira policy.

    The ongoing exploitation of Nigeria’s underprivileged divide unfurls like a Darwinian spectacle favouring fangs and claw over fur, a pratfall of predatory structures and agents of the State. The CBN and commercial banks, purportedly working to assert the whims of puppeteers tugging at the strings of all actors in the crisis, have mopped up trillions of cash only to dole paltry sums back into the system, thus creating an avoidable naira scarcity and impoverishing defenseless masses.

    Commercial banks have virtually shut down operations, refusing the old naira while denying impoverished citizenry access to the new notes; and while the citizenry laments their fate with the banks, the neighbourhood POS operators subject them to a greater ordeal by charging exorbitant fees on every withdrawal they make.

    The informal economies of the suburbs and metro business hubs consequently suffer massive contractions, due to the CBN’s stifling of the cash flow required to drive and sustain them.

    For the umpteenth time, Nigerians witness a grotesque politicisation and perversion of the CBN and commercial banking operations. Against the backdrop of these realities, the citizenry (curiously in southern Nigeria alone) engages in heated protests, leading to avoidable deaths and imperilment of the country’s fragile peace.

    Lest we forget the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC)’s recent lament that if nothing is done to address the cash crunch caused by the CBN policy, INEC would find it difficult to deploy staff and materials for a successful election.

    There seems to be a deliberate attempt to incite the citizenry to mayhem and prevent a peaceful transition from this civilian government to another. It’s about time Nigerians neutered the blooming anarchy; all stakeholders – every Nigerian inclusive – must cooperate to prevent a situation where the country implodes; where state power, lusted after by brigands, is defiled and entangled in a heap of corpses.

    In the intense struggle for presidential power, national ethics gets assailed by pagan instinct. Yet Nigerians must begin to ask some crucial questions: Why are supposedly rival candidates in sudden cahoots to endorse the CBN’s ill-timed policy? Why is the CBN governor on a feverish quest to implement the policy amid dire circumstances? And why is Tinubu the only candidate speaking for the people?

     The enforced naira and fuel scarcity highlight the manifestation of oligarchic power in its crudest form, the subjugation of popular will by aggression. The resultant violence becomes both medium and motif by which frantic oligarchs, or the cabal if you like, sustain their choke-hold on political power and perpetuate the enslavement of the Nigerian populace.

     In one of the viral videos showing violent protests in Edo, a spectator laments that there was no need for the mob to destroy a bank building. “Our people don’t know. Dem wan take style cancel the elections,” he noted. More reason for Nigerians to persevere regardless of the miseries contrived against them.

    It’s just a few days to the general elections. Nigeria must survive the plots of infernal groups and actors.

  • Unmasking the cabals

    Unmasking the cabals

    There is a Yoruba aphorism that says ‘no true born sets out to deliberately destroy his father’s house’. Most often, we are defined by our actions. Jesus Christ, our Lord and the greatest teacher the world has ever known while explaining the process of identifying false prophets also applied a similar metaphor: “By their deeds you will know them”: (Matthew 7:16)

    Some two weeks back, Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna spoke of a cabal in the presidency working against the interest of APC and its presidential candidate.  And when Babajide Otitoju of TVC wondered whether it was not time to unmask members of the cabal, he literarily asked him to read his lips by saying ‘we will do that by defeating them in February election just as we did during last year APC primary when an attempt to foist a candidate on APC was thwarted’ by a coalition of progressive northern governors. 

    And if that lead is not enough to expose those behind the war of attrition in APC, interrogating those behind APC war that has now been extended to all Nigerians with or without bank account, will confirm that with Godwin Emefiele’s currency swap fiasco, Lai Mohammed’s double talk and Abubakar Malami’s political subterfuge, APC and the rest of us need no enemy. For selfish political consideration, they seem determined to stand against all efforts by men of goodwill to save APC from itself and the rest of us from collateral damage.

     The 36 state governors, under the aegis Nigeria Governors’ Forum (NGF), having observed that “The speed of implementation of the policy is a recipe for anarchy in the country”, and therefore in its February 6, 2023 letter, “urged President Buhari to extend the deadline for the implementation of the old naira notes swap”.

    There was a World Bank warning that the “inability of Nigerians to access the new naira notes may influence uncertainty ahead of the February 25 and March 10 elections in the country.” There was also the Supreme Court seven-man panel led by Justice John Okoro, who in a unanimous ruling, granted an interim injunction “restraining the federal government, CBN and their agents and commercial banks from implementing the February 10 deadline.” 

    The National Council of State, professional bankers and economists have spoken in the same vein especially with Emefiele’s reported admission that our local mint lacks the capacity to print more new notes beyond N400b already injected into the system after mopping up about N2 trillion.

    The three APC stalwarts are however unimpressed. And rather than listen to voices of respected opinion leaders including the Sultan of Sokoto who has called on President Buhari to “douse tension because  ‘people are hungry and angry because of lack of money’, and Governor Okezie Ikpeazu of Abia who has warned that  ‘the crisis may lead to anarchy if not addressed quickly”, Godwin Emefiele,  Lai Mohammed and Abubakar Malami seem to have more faith in their APC political foes.

    And those encouraging them to keep digging deeper into the hole include their sympathetic media, PDP stalwarts including Abubakar Atiku, and Governor Obaseki who says “Edo State government has no problem with the policy”. Others include ‘the Civil Society Central Coordinating Council (CSCCC) led Obed Okwukwe,  the 14 of the 18 registered political parties and Justice Eleojo Enenche (FCT), High Court who ruling on a motion by four Action Alliance (AA), Action Peoples Party (APP), Allied Peoples Movement (APM) and National Rescue Movement (NRM) restrained President Muhammadu Buhari from further extending the deadline.

    By ignoring the Supreme Court judgment which many have described as an opportunity for APC to avert an impending anarchy as frustrated depositors openly attack banks and bankers while allying themselves with an order that restrained Buhari from ending the nightmare of Nigerians, Mohammed, Malami and Emefiele who have now painted a picture of Buhari as a leader with no empathy for his people, seem to be on a mission.

    Nigerians still remember that following the sack of Sanusi Lamido Sanusi over his alleged sympathy for APC, the major consideration for Emefiele’s appointment as CBN governor by President Jonathan was his presumed PDP sympathy. And President Buhari has retained him. And in office, it has all been more of politics than economics. His response to the deteriorating state of the economy was to register as a card-carrying member of APC in his Delta State ward. His sponsors rumoured to include a serving minister and a media mogul understands very clearly that by offering its platform to a sitting CBN governor to contest for presidency, APC as a party was doomed.

    But forced out of the race by combined forces of public opinion of those who worry about the health of our nation including APC northern progressive governors, Emefiele came up with his currency-swap brainwave ostensibly to fight corruption and insurgency, which of course he knew would be music to President Buhari’s ears. Emefiele after falsely attributing the currency swap fiasco to currency hoarding by commercial banks was to admit misleading the president and the nation.

    For Lai Mohammed, the strategy was to assault our sensibilities. After showing no enthusiasm in the Supreme Court judgment, that allows his principal to do the right thing, he has now come alive with a high court ruling that tied the hands of his principal. He now blames the opposition for APC self-inflicted crisis saying “their actions are a clear evidence that the opposition has turned this whole issue into a political game, preferring to make Nigerians suffer more on the altar of an unconscionable political gamesmanship.” He now describes them as “unscrupulous opposition parties who have decided to legally hamstring (his principal) from providing any relief for Nigerians suffering from the cash crunch”.

    Can someone tell Lai Mohammed to give us a break? Since President Buhari will not talk, ministers including those driven by selfish ambition give the impression they are reflecting his mind-set.

    Malami is tarred with the same brush. As Attorney General and Minister of Justice, he has always misled the president. Whether it is the issue in of pre-independence grazing routes, Amotekun, comparing immigrant armed herdsmen illegally occupying southern reserved forests with Igbo traders in northern cities, selective ‘sting operations’ including midnight invasion of houses of Supreme Court justices, etc., he continues to falsely swear in Buhari’s name.

    And now long after his senior professional colleagues have stated the true position of the law in relation to the Supreme Court ruling, Malami, as in character, is looking for technical reasons to undermine the judgment. “What we have at hand is a situation where the central bank was not joined as a party”. “So, we have given considerations to diverse issues, inclusive of the issue of jurisdiction … within the context of compliance, we shall challenge the ruling… it is all about the rule of law,” Malami rambles on.

    If these men are not serving other tendencies in Buhari’s government, the true test of their love for the president and the country will be finding a way to lift the ongoing siege on Nigerians who are starving because Emefiele confiscated their monies.

    In the ongoing war of attrition among APC stalwarts who are prepared to pull down the country along with themselves, we have all become victims. But we know those ministers who by their actions have shown they are not part of us.

    For close to two weeks, I have succeeded only once in transferring N20,000 from my bank while I am indebted to different people including my mechanic who spent N65,000 of his money to repair my car.

  • Supreme Court and the Emefiele affront

    Supreme Court and the Emefiele affront

    We even had to dispatch all our old currency on Friday to the Central Bank. We obey our regulators, not the Supreme Court – Bank worker

    HE WHO feels it knows it. The people, especially, the commoners, are feeling the heat of the naira redesign policy. They took their money – what we now call the old N200, N500 and N1000 notes – to the bank as directed, but could not get the new ones of the same denomination in return.

    Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Governor Godwin Emefiele, who is pushing the policy as if his life depends on it, had promised heaven and earth that they would get the new notes once they brought in the old ones. It was all talks. Many are regretting the day they did that. They no longer have access to their money, whether old or new. It is now easier to look for a needle in the haystack than to get back their money.

    The people believe that they have been taken for a ride. If not, they ask: why can we not access our money? The question is directed to the Federal Government and Emefiele, but no response is forthcoming. How did the country get to this pass? It all began with the CBN’s recall of over N2 trillion and the pumping in of N700 billion into circulation under the new policy regime. To Emefiele, the action was to mop-up the excess fund in people’s homes. Money, he said, should be in the bank and not at home!

    According to him, as at October, N3.23 trillion was in circulation, out of which N500 billion was in the bank. It was to correct what he called this economic imbalance that Emefiele pumped in N700 billion after mopping-up over N2 trillion. Economists are still wondering what informed his decision.

    They argued that he should have considered that the country has a gross domestic product (GDP) of over N271 trillion before determining the amount of cash to have in circulation. With a government that allows him to run riot all over the place, Emefiele does whatever he likes, in consultation with only President Muhammadu Buhari. Between them, they have made an economic mess of an otherwise good policy, which process of implementation should have been graduated.

    The country is where it is today because Buhari and Emefiele listen only to themselves. The governors, the Council of State (CoS) and the Supreme Court have all spoken and said almost the same thing – suspend for now, the February 10 deadline for phasing out the old notes. The President and Emefiele would have none of that. They won’t listen to experts; they won’t listen to politicians and they won’t listen to statesmen.

    And now, they won’t listen to the court and not any court for that matter, but the Supreme Court. The President and Emefiele are carrying on as if there is no Supreme Court order restraining them in respect of the policy. CBN is trying to hide under the premise that it was not joined in the suit brought by Kaduna, Kogi and Zamfara states against the government to flout the order.

    In the suit, the states are contending that the policy has brought untold hardship on their people and asked for an interim order barring the government from going ahead with the now expired February 10 deadline for stopping the use of the old notes. The February 8 order was clear and succinct:

    “…an order of interim injunction restraining the Federal Government of Nigeria, either by itself or acting through the CBN and/or the commercial banks… or through any person or persons (natural and artificial) howsoever, from suspending or determining or ending the timeframe within which the old notes will no longer be legal tender”.

    Rather than comply immediately with the order, Emefiele started looking for a lacuna in it. He found none because the order was well couched that there is no hiding place for him. Yet, he refused to comply with it.

     On Tuesday in Abuja at a meeting with the Diplomatic Corps, Emefiele flagrantly disobeyed the apex court when he said there was no going back on the February 10 deadline. If that is not contempt of court, I wonder what it is. Emefiele spoke in clear contempt of the Supreme Court order restraining ‘…CBN or any person…’ from giving effect to the February 10 deadline. His words: “there is no need to consider any shift trom the deadline of February 10th”.

    His statement was a slap on the Supreme Court face. All he was saying is that the apex court could go to hell with its order for all he cared. It is unwise of him to have spoken like that before an enlightened gathering of envoys. Emefiele was undiplomatic at a diplomatic forum where decorum, good upbringing etiquette, respect for rule of law and order are expected to hold sway.

    What impression of him did the diplomats go away with? One can only imagine. I am sure that there is no way the governor of the central bank of any of those envoys’ countries would have spoken that way in the face of a subsisting court order. Can we blame Emefiele when the government itself is dilly dallying over the order? Emefiele was only taking a cue from the government.

    What is the meaning of the government’s statement that it would make its position known after yesterday’s proceedings at the Supreme Court? If it says either it or CBN has not done anything preemptive to vitiate the Supreme Court order, what should the public then make of Emefiele’s statement? So, it is now the government’s prerogative to decide when and which court order to obey! Can you hear the government? Can the government too hear itself?

    There can be nothing more preemptive an action than what Emefiele did. What he told the nation in effect was: no matter what the Supreme Court says, the naira policy has come to say. This is why the Supreme Court should come down hard on Emefiele and other public officers like him who think that they are above the law. Unfortunately, this column cannot await the outcome of yesterday’s proceedings because of its deadline (ha, this word again!) for submission.

    I know that the court will be firm and fair. It will certainly not allow anybody, no matter his status, to treat it contemptuously and get away with it. If the Supreme Court does not act now, it risks losing face before the public. Just imagine, a bank worker telling a reporter: “we obey CBN, not Supreme Court”.

  • Cashless economy by fire by force

    Cashless economy by fire by force

    As I write this piece, I have N500 on me which is what I have had for a week because at my age I could not participate in the struggle at the ATMs from which Nigerians are getting money sometimes after queuing up for a whole day. Last week, the banks in my area shut their doors against the public for fear of their staff being beaten by irate Nigerians who have been made insane by the government policy of Naira colouring and withdrawal of old notes without adequate supply of the new notes. I was able to enter two banks in my area the week before and I was convinced that the new Naira notes were just not available by the looks on the faces of the bankers and by their aggressive demeanour in some cases. Only the women bankers from my experience showed some feelings of kindness to the public especially to the elderly people who they treated with courtesy. Even GTB which has a tradition of according courtesy to older people could not maintain their traditions because you can’t give what you don’t have.

    This strange phenomenon of having money in the bank but not in your pocket has for me come with some silver lining. First of all, it has forced me to realize that I don’t have to carry about some money with me whether I need them or not. I have become frugal and unusually miserly because I can’t give out money that I don’t have. I am told that even beggars are no longer expecting money from passers-by and because of this they are no longer pestering us with their demands for alms. I have also experienced generosity from a few persons who out of pity have stretched their helping hands to me and I will not forget when things come back to normal.

    Let me give two examples of two people who have been helpful during this time of cash scarcity. A former student of mine called me to find out how I was doing and I honestly told her my experience of going cashless by force and by fire and how I had been going round the banks in my area without collecting the new Naira. She was not happy that somebody like myself should be expected to go and struggle in some cases for N10,000 or N5000 twith young people of my grandchildren’s age. She, without letting me know, told her young husband to find me money by all means. The young fellow got N15,000 old Naira and gave this to the wife who simply sent her older sister to give me the money. I was actually expecting new money but in the situation I found myself, money whether old or new, was money. I got the money with much gratitude and the money went very far in buying stuff for the house.

    Of course, I have credit cards and cheque books but nowadays some shops and filling stations don’t accept cards and the claim of no internet is a common refrain. Secondly nobody takes cheques these days and I don’t know why though banks continue to sell cheque books to us older fellows. It is also not everyone who can transfer money. Some banks advise elderly people not to do so for fear of our accounts being hacked! This is where elderly people have found themselves in the policy of cashless economy by force. Apart from my old student’s generosity, I have found help and solace in my church where one or two people have found out what I was going through and like old time Christianity of communal living and help, have come forward to help me source for money to keep my car and generator running.

    Who says teacher’s reward is in heaven I am a testimony that if you are a good teacher your reward is here and now. The kingdom of God that we pray to come every day has really come in Christian fellowship to one another as I have found during these weeks of cash scarcity.

    The question to ask is what is the aim of this government imposing needless suffering and pain on the governed? It is strange that a government would deliberately do this. It reminds me of what Jean Jacques Rousseau said in one of his philosophical rantings that our rulers can force us to be free even if they kill us! It seems our government without adequate consultation with us the citizens has decided to impose a cashless economy on us for the overall good of the economy and presumably ourselves. We are told this is the way to go and this is the way of the modern world.

    In fact China from where the whole world learnt about paper money is ways ahead of every country in adopting a cashless economy. There are some provinces of China where people have not seen for months and years paper money. People have even moved away from cards and transfers to using their phones and wrist watches to transact business. I have personally seen my children doing this abroad with admiration. But do we have the structures, internet, and computer infrastructure to do this? Anybody who has travelled abroad recently will discover that banks will soon be ancient history because they will no longer be needed. I pray we move smoothly to this Eldorado. But we must make haste slowly.

    Nobody can fault all the reasons given by the CBN for the cashless economy.  They said it will reduce fakery of the Naira. It will make it easier to monitor the economy. It will reduce the temptations of criminals to request for millions of Naira from their victims and it may also bring the inflation down and stabilise the exchange rate of the Naira. All these aims and goals are desirable but we must plan for it and not jump into a moving stream. At the rate at which we are going we will destroy the rural economy if not the urban economy as well because the percentage of those of us nationally with accounts in the banks is not more than 40 percent. This means in effect that our economy is a cash economy and it will remain so for some time to come.  

    This is not the first time we have changed our currency notes. We did this in 1968 or thereabouts during the civil war. We also did this in 1973 when we moved from pounds to Naira and decimalised our currency. We also did this in 1984 when this same Muhammadu Buhari was head of state. We did not go through this hell then because the changes were better planned and secondly the economy in Nigeria since then has more than quadrupled. We cannot use the strategy of 50 or 40 years ago and apply it today and expect it to work smoothly.

    What our government has done is to withdraw close to N3 trillion of the old currency notes while printing N300 billion new notes much of which had been given to the commercial banks while withholding some of the new notes with the expectation that without enough notes, people will be forced to use bank transfers, debit and credit cards and presumably cheques without regards to how prepared Nigerians are for this sea change. Now it seems the people have rejected this imposed and forced change. The government may not have expected this and it does not seem there is a plan B. The advice by the National Council of State that met in emergency meeting last week in Abuja recommending that both old notes and new notes should run concurrently is based on if the old notes have not been destroyed. I hope not. Because if they have been destroyed then what do we do? We have heard from the grapevine that the Mint does not have the paper and perhaps the ink to print additional new notes. Efforts to secure this from la Rue Company in Germany or Switzerland has met a brick wall because there appears to be a backlog of countries importing the same security paper for their own currencies. This means if we need to print new currencies we have to wait for a while.

    The way out to me seems to permit the liberal use of good old cheques as before as well as continued reliance on the use of debit and credit cards and bank transfers while waiting for new currencies to be printed. But in all this, the government must take the lead and talk to the people without hectoring them and put their cards on the table. Planning to prevent politicians from using the Naira during electioneering campaigns and elections proper is a waste of time. Is it possible anywhere in the world to hold elections without oiling the system with money whether cash or otherwise? Imposing a draconian policy on the whole nation because we want to prevent politicians from using money during elections is not the best way to uphold the sacredness of our elections. Are the judiciary, the police and the electoral commission so abjectly weak that only a cashless policy can do the job for them? Saying this policy is designed to curb the power of money in our nations politics is the greatest height of ridicule and foolishness.

  • 2023: Buhari’s nemesis or swan song

    2023: Buhari’s nemesis or swan song

    President Muhammadu Buhari must see the upcoming elections as his political nemesis or swan song. Would his final act inspire poets to verse? Or would it resonate like a curse of receding valour and ethically deficient persona?

    If this month’s presidential elections get truncated for any reason, it would manifest as a permanent smudge on his legacy – or what’s left of it.

    Thanks to the Supreme Court, the dark elements prowling the corridors of power and our banking halls may have failed to scuttle the ongoing transition. The court, on Wednesday, ordered the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) not to end the use of old naira notes on February 10. But Nigeria isn’t out of the woods yet. There is much to fear in the recoil of ogres stalking the nation’s march to political transition.

    Yet we have more to dread in the spirited angst of the random man on the street. The last few days have unfurled in fury and unimaginable chaos as many were rendered penniless due to the CBN’s February 10 deadline on the naira swap, and the antics of Nigerian banks hoarding the new notes thus denying the populace access to much-needed cash.

    Nigeria stews in the rage of the frustrated father who finds it difficult to provide for his family, the furious wife who has lost patience for her husband’s tiresome excuses, and the fractious wards too blinded by starvation to accept their parents’ lame excuses.

    Lest we forget the angry hordes of the boondocks and the denizens of Nigeria’s shadow economy: the truck pushers, sand divers, street hawkers, roadside traders, and motor park urchins – to mention a few –  whose daily livelihood depends on the informal transactions hindered by the CBN’s malicious deadline.

    While honest citizens are denied access to their own money by their bankers, currency converters and Point of Sale (P.O.S) merchants enjoy untrammeled access to the new notes.

    Consequently, they impose excessive charges on withdrawals; for instance, a cash withdrawal of N20,000 attracted a fee of between N4,000 – N5,000. Miffed, Nigerians lay siege to banks to access much-needed but unavailable cash. Frustrated customers vandalise bank properties and amid the scrimmage, anti-graft agencies and the State Security Services (SSS) have arrested a number of citizens caught hawking the new naira notes.

    The situation got worrisome as news filtered out about folk paying N1 million to withdraw N700,000 just to spray at a party. Operatives of the Lagos Zonal Command of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), equally commenced the investigation of an actress and cosmetologist for allegedly tampering with the redesigned Naira notes, an offense contrary to Section 21 (5) of the CBN Act, 2007.

    The culprit was earlier arrested by operatives of the Independent Corrupt Practices and other related offenses Commission (ICPC) on Wednesday, February 1, 2023, along Awolowo Road, Ikoyi, Lagos, for offering new Naira notes for sale on social media. How she got access to such a large amount of money amid the criminal hoarding – by banks – and scarcity of the new notes is confounding.

    But the EFCC recently claimed that the 31-year-old was arrested after a video of her spraying and stepping on the newly redesigned Naira notes at a party surfaced online.

    Through it all, the sad reality of beastly Nigeria manifests; we aren’t our brother’s keeper and Nigeria teems with predators: individuals and groups forever prowling to cannibalise the weak and disadvantaged.

    Most Nigerians see their compatriots as prey. And the seeds of such monstrosity are sown in them from childhood. If I should hesitate to say these things, it will not be because they are untrue but because I cannot speak of them without betraying my imperfection.

    This currency swap crisis further highlights the deviltry in the average Nigerian. We are very, very bad people. A cursory look at our families excites uncontainable marvel. Mothers are mightily pleased to see a child hurt an “annoying” neighbor’s dog or cat; and such wise fathers we have now, consider it a true mark of martial spirit to see their ward domineer his or her weaker peer.

    And there are those whose parents groom to perpetuate the worst forms of bigotries for the sake of religion and economic survival. Several parents consider it smart of their kids to cheat and oppress their peers. It gladdens their hearts to see such kids evolve into ‘lovable’ brutes at a tender age claiming it’s a worthy deportment for the very tough world out there.

    Thus from adolescence through adulthood, they greet every dishonesty their children perpetrate with cheer, as long as it translates to social elevation and stupendous wealth.

    These are the true seeds and roots of cruelty, tyranny, and treason; most parents nurture them in their wards and the latter imbibe such and grow to perpetuate grosser forms of malevolence through their lineage.

    It starts from the very little things; like nurturing a child to be brutish through childhood and grooming him or her to be fraudulent through adolescence. Hence the multitude of “peaceful, hardworking and God-fearing” families engaged in frantic pursuits to enroll their wards in “special coaching schools” where they purchase for them, seats at “special centres” as they write the Senior School Certificate Examination (S.S.C.E) and the university entrance exams.

     Such characters, who were raised to circumvent the straight, moral path to attainment, eventually mature as damaged adults. All through their lives, they navigate the depths and shoals of challenges with the courage of a weevil and the wit of a hyena.

     Eventually, the seeds of indolence and monstrosity sown in them grow to prodigious bulk, and we have such brutes thwarting our lives and determining our future.

     At this juncture, I guess many would dispute and claim that such a shameful lot constitutes just a minor fraction of Nigeria’s 200 million-strong families or thereabouts. I disagree.

     But if they insist, I could make good to say that: Such wonderful families we have now bless us with the current political class. Such wonderful families we have now that bless us with thieving bank chiefs and corrupt law enforcers.

     Such wonderful families, we have that bless us with slothful civil servants, light-fingered bank clerks, desperate, treacherous journalists, and lawyers. Such wonderful families, we have that bless us with prostitutes, armed robbers, Yahoo boys, and deceitful, currency-activated clerics to mention a few.

     One degeneracy gravitates into the other and we have for ourselves, a nation of finely bred bandits raiding to the death supposedly weaker peers.

     We are very, very bad people. Driven by greed, selfishness, indolence, and appalling inclination to play “god,” we embark on a never-ending quest to prey on each other and ruin Nigeria – smartly and quite righteously.

    The argument that it’s the lack of good leadership that forces us to be corrupt does not hold much substance anymore, let us all be accountable for our actions.

    As you read, parents are purchasing seats and liberties to cheat for their wards at school examinations; our bankers are pilfering our accounts by 50 kobo, N1, N100 to millions of naira by the second; impatient motorists are flouting traffic lights and veering off their legitimate lanes to face oncoming vehicles; public administrators are stealing pension funds meant for elderly retirees; journalists are receiving money to doctor stories according to the whims of desperate politicians and criminal masterminds; perfidious lawyers are twisting the law to serve the whims of the worst criminals ever and you are reading this thinking I am just another ‘grifter’ calling the con-artist, ‘fraud.’

  • Between El Rufai and Lai Muhammed

    Between El Rufai and Lai Muhammed

    Governor Nasir El-Rufai of Kaduna can be ruthlessly aggressive in pursuit of his beliefs. Whether it is the matter of perceived superiority of his largely illiterate but politically conscious northern voting population, freely deployed as weapon of political warfare during elections, crusade for summary execution of immigrant killer herdsmen or commitment to power shift to the south, you always know where he stands. But unlike him, Lai Mohammed, his fellow Buhari confidant, seems to suffer from selective perception. He chooses only what he wants to see. His claim that those, who on account of his inconsistencies changed his name to “lying Mohammed’ often misinterpret whatever he says, has not stopped 24 members of his Kwara State House of Assembly from declaring: “For Lai Mohammed, every day is another opportunity to tell another lie”.

    Last week, El Rufai who holds no hostages, fingered some elements in Aso Villa who are “trying to exploit the president’s commitment to “free and fair election” to scuttle the presidential ambition of their APC candidate in the February election to avenge the defeat of their candidate during last year APC primaries, as those responsible for the ongoing fuel crisis and naira scarcity few days to a critical federal election.

    El Rufai was ruthless despite knowing the buck stops at the desk  of President  Buhari, who as petroleum minister reneged on his promise to end fuel subsidy regime which in 2021 gulped N2 trillion from a government with a capital budget of only N200b and on whose name Godwin Emefiele, the governor of Central Bank continues to falsely swear even as hungry, angry and aggrieved Nigerians who have no access to their monies, fuel and food are taking out their frustration on bank workers and bank facilities across Nigeria.

    On the other hand, Lai Mohammed, the Minister of Information and Culture whose ministry’s mandate is to provide Nigerian citizens with “credible and timely information on government activities, programmes and initiatives” while he as minister  ”facilitates free flow of adequate, timely and reliable information and feedback between government and the public for socio-economic empowerment and enhanced democratic citizenship”, heard nothing, saw nothing and smelt no danger as one unelected Emefiele continues to dehumanize Nigerians while  NNPC and oil marketers that have been sucking the blood of Nigerians since 1999 continue to hold Nigerian hostage.

     “If there’s anybody working against a candidate, we don’t know officially,” was Lai Mohammed’s response to El Rufai’s warnings about the dangers ahead. Since people only repeat the obvious when they are not sure, Lai Mohammed told us what we have always known – that “President Muhammadu Buhari is not favouring any presidential candidate and is instead committed to a free and fair election” which by the way is not antithetical to supporting his party. He has demonstrated this through his unimpressive, half-hearted and uninspiring appearances with his party’s flag bearer on the campaign train. But such appearances are not a measure of Buhari’s support for his party’s candidate. It was just the style of a leader deficit in politician’s versatility, brinkmanship and skilful exploitation of man’s infirmities.

    Those who claim Emefiele is on a vengeance mission may not be totally wrong. This is a banker who but for ethnic consideration and his sympathy for PDP would never have been considered as CBN governor. When Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, his predecessor accused Jonathan government of profligacy and called for a forensic probe of NNPC missing N20 billion, he was labelled an APC sympathizer and removed from office unconstitutionally. While President Jonathan hired Dr Mike Ozekhometo justify his illegal action before the court, Sanusi was replaced with Emefiele.

    Towards the tail end of Jonathan administration, government according to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the finance minister was taking loans to pay salaries. But Emefiele continued to be promoted by his sympathetic media even as the economy dipped to its worst state ever. Emefiele, who is more of a politician than a banker, became a card-carrying member of APC in 2021 after registering in his LGA ward in Delta State.  Then a cabal, unarguably serving other tendencies in President Buhari’s government decided to sponsor him for presidency.

    Picture of about 500 ‘Emefiele for President’ branded vehicles soon appeared on social media. Three aircraft were said to be on stand-by. The Punch edition of May 2022 also reported that three interest groups – the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria, Friends of Emefiele and Emefiele’s Support Group had paid N100m for the application form. 

    Following widespread criticism by Nigerians who believe it was “immoral and a joke taken too far to ridicule our country” (Babatunde Ogala) by a sitting CBN governor, Emefiele hired Mike Ozekhome and filed a lawsuit at an Abuja Federal High Court which spoke of his “desires to contest elections” and about his “aspiration to seek election to the office of president” before going on to declare in a tweet: “This is a serious decision that requires God’s Divine intervention: in the next few days, The Almighty will so direct”.

    His sympathetic media egged him just as they again did when he embarked on the current currency exchange debacle. Zainab Ahmed, our Minister of Finance who claimed to have been kept in the dark, was harassed, ridiculed by Emefiele’s combative journalists who went on to remind her their client only reports to the president, in case she has not read the CBN Act. Even now as we face the consequences of Emefiele’s dictatorship, with staff of banks scaling wall to escape attack by frustrated customers, governors who are trying to end the nightmare of their people are called names by Emefiele’s media promoters who think journalism is best practiced when public officials are intimidated.

    Lai Mohammed continues to pretend he cannot see the danger ahead even with Obasanjo setting the ground for violent protests by youths whose hope he has raised in the event that Peter Obi, his choice for the youths loses the election. There is also the call by Chief Afe Babalola, his lawyer and closest ally ‘for a six months Interim government’ which he calls “a child of necessity” to allow for a new constitution to replace the military-imposed 1999 constitution, a constitution, Obasanjo did not see the need to change during his eight years reign. Of course, there is also the cabal consisting of some members who directly and indirectly played leading role in the 1993 debacle that threw Nigeria into darkness for six years.

    That Lai Mohammed pretends not to see the unfolding danger which has already forced Hakeem Baba Ahmed, director of publicity and advocacy for Northern Elders Forum to call on Nigerians to “reject any plan to produce a successor to President Buhari through unconstitutional means” in form of ‘unconstitutional contraption’ as they did in 1993, is probably because he is playing with the hare and hunting with the hound.

    Of all Nigerian ministers of information since 1958, including controversial Walter Ofonagoro during Abacha’s execution of Ken Saro Wiwa, Niger Delta environmental activist, Lai Mohammed seems to have brought little relief to his principal.

  • February 10: If tomorrow comes

    February 10: If tomorrow comes

    WHICHEVER way the President rules on the matter, as the seven days he requested for ends tomorrow, there is no doubt about the systemic disruptions so far caused by the naira redesign policy. The policy got the President’s blessings from the outset, but his economic team was kept in the dark about the plan purportedly initiated by the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to control inflation by mopping up the excess cash in people’s homes.

    It was an enthusiastic CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, that unveiled the plan last October. It was a multi-pronged programme, which began with the cash withdrawal limit for individuals and organisations. For individuals, the cap was N100,000 per week, and organisations, N500,000. The public kicked and at the end of the day, commonsense prevailed. The limit was raised to N500,000 and N5 million weekly.

    It took the intervention of the National Assembly to get Emefiele to make that U-turn. The CBN’s long term plan is to bequeath to the nation a cashless economy. This started years ago, with the introduction of the debit card under the Automated Teller Machine (ATM) regime. The ATM has been a huge success, despite hiccups here and there.

    The nation entered the naira redesign phase of the plan with a bang. With the specimens of the redesigned N200, N500 and N1000 notes unveiled by President Muhammadu Buhari last November, the stage was set for their formal introduction as legal tender. Emefiele quickly rolled out the arrangements for phasing out the old notes as he implored depositors to pay them into their accounts in exchange for the new ones by January 31.

    The time frame, many argued then, was too short. Emefiele, who announced the redesign plan last October 26, presented the cash specimens to the President on November 23 and set January 31 as deadline for phasing out the old notes, turned a deaf ear to their cries. Whereas, he did not put his house in order, as events showed before fixing the January 31 deadline. By the time the expiration of the deadline was drawing near, it was obvious that those in the rural areas and the unbanked in many cities would lose their hard-earned money, through no fault of theirs, for failing to pay it into the bank. How could they when they had no access to banks?

    But Emefiele would have none of that. As far as he was concerned, people had enough time to return the old notes and get the new ones but chose not to act fast until it was too late. He insisted that there was no going back on the deadline, but two days to its expiration, he suddenly showed up in Daura, the President’s hometown in Katsina State, to get an approval for extension. Even, with the extension of the deadline to February 10, not much progress has been made. The deadline expires tomorrow, with a seven-day grace for people to still take their old notes, which would have become illegal tender (that is can no longer be spent) anyway, to the bank for exchange.

    People have returned tonnes of cash to the bank, but they were not given new notes in return. The redesigned notes are simply not there. “We do not have the notes”, the banks are saying by their action. Where then are the new notes? How come currency hawkers have them in abundance, while many other Nigerians find it difficult to get? Are banks hoarding the notes – and for what reasons? Is CBN sincere in its implementation of the policy? Did it print enough of the notes? In its own eyes, CBN believes that it has done well. The jury is still out on that.

    The nation is on edge today because of CBN’s acts of omission and commission. How can it recall N2.1 trillion and pump in only N300 billion? To the discerning, that was a deliberate ploy to create scarcity of the new notes and foist on the nation a crisis of monumental proportion on the eve of a major election – the February 25 presidential poll. In a situation like this, the governors could not have sat on their hands, watching, while Emefiele took the country for a ride. Their intervention made the President promise to see what could be done in seven days, which coincide with tomorrow’s  expiration of the February 10 deadline.

    The President asked for time to enable him engage in wide consultations before making his decision. Political observers, however,  believe that he does not need such a long time to resolve the matter. To them, he only needs to decree it and the deadline will be extended again. Who did he consult before approving the extension of the January 31 deadline to February 10? They asked.

    His request for time is good, but the President should bear in mind that the people did not vote for Emefiele nor many of those he is meeting with. They only voted for him and the governors who have read the situation correctly and given him sound advice to allow the old and new notes to be used together as legal tender. To take the advice of others may count for something, but at the end of the day, the final decision is that of the head. Is the President happy with what is happening across the country? The chaotic fuel, banking halls’ and ATMs’ queues. The protests across the country in which some lives have been lost.

    What else does he need to take a life-saving decision for many Nigerians? The President should be mindful of the judgement of history, with the kind of advice he gets from these consultations. He should bear in mind that the buck stops at his table. This was why Emefiele ran to him on January 29 to get an extension from January 31 to February 10. If he could do that then, he can still do it now.

    As President, he can never be short of advice, whether sought or not. What matters is what he does with the advice. The advice he needs now is one that will get protesters off the streets and clear the long queues at filling stations, banking halls and ATM portals. This is the advice that can defuse the tensions across the country. It is only those who do not wish him and his administration well that will tell him to stick to the February 10 deadline for phasing out the old notes.

    With the raging protests across the country over the biting cash crunch, anarchy looms ahead, with just 16 days away from the presidential election. No matter how much they try, the President should not allow small-minded people to bring Nigeria down on his head. If tomorrow comes, he will certainly do right by the citizenry and end this nightmarish naira scarcity never before witnessed in Nigeria. Even during the civil war (1967-1970), money was not this scarce. Why now – in peace time? Only the President can save the country from this self-inflicted crisis.

  • American Archives fights back: Whither Nigerian Archives

    American Archives fights back: Whither Nigerian Archives

    The news ÿþhas been on for a while that former president, Donald J. Trump who always felt he is above the law went away with several classified documents ordinarily belonging to the American people. All attempts to persuade him to return these documents failed until the Department of Justice (DOJ) felt compelled to get a warrant served on him to release these documents. When he resisted, the FBI was asked to raid his private mansion in Mar-a-Lago in Miami in Florida.

    Some of these documents have been retrieved from him while he is challenging the government’s action in the court. These documents were generated when he was the president of the United States and they were of security importance which requires  that they be locked up in the National Archives for periods ranging in many countries from as long as 30 to 100 years. In some cases, they may not be made available to the public for ever.

    Not everything connected with JF Kennedy’s assassination has been made public. President Trump during his campaign for the American presidency promised he would make this public but he fulfilled his pledge in the breach. In Great Britain, it used to be 100 years after the event but the period has been reduced to 30 years. The French are more conservative and I am not sure you can access public records that are as recent as 50 years and in the in case of the archives at the Quay D’Orsay (Foreign Office), the  documents are locked  up for many years.

    The reason why nations guard their secrets is that many crimes have been committed in the so-called national interest in the past which the present is not proud of. Experiments such as using human beings to test the effect of syphilis on black people in the USA or some terrible diseases or the effects of radiation on humans and such things in the past which if revealed may cause serious national problems. It is better to let the past belong to the past without opening wounds. If what the white race did to non-whites were exposed, world peace could be jeopardised. Just as nations have secrets, companies and merchant houses keep things locked up in their archives never to see the light of the day.

    Now back to the American situation. Just at the time when President Trump was being excoriated it transpired that President Joe Biden had skeletons in his cupboard. He too has secret documents from his time as Senate member of Foreign Relations Committee and documents from his time as vice president. These documents were found in his private office in Washington DC and his home in Delaware. Documents continue to be found in some of his other homes as I write. The difference in his case was he volunteered the information without waiting for an FBI raid. The sticking point was that he found this out in November before the 2022 Congressional elections and waited until now to make the revelation. The Republican Party rightly felt the president was not truthful and that he should be probed. Earlier on, the US Attorney-General had appointed a Special Counsel to probe the former President Trump and in order to appear even-handed, a Special Counsel to probe President Joe Biden was also appointed.

    The new Republican dominated House of Representatives has indicated its readiness to not only probe Biden but some radical right wing members to impeach the sitting president as was done to Trump when he was president. Hardly had the ink dried when it transpired that former Vice President Michael Richard Pence also have secret documents in his home and office in Indianapolis. This has taken the steam out of the Republican Party’s action to put the president in the dock!

    The question has now arisen about the nature of classification of official documents in the USA. Some of these documents are mere briefs prepared for the president and vice president in the ordinary nature of their jobs or background briefs for them when traveling or when having cabinet of national security meetings. Some of the documents may be of serious security in nature. But it seems too many documents are classified which need not be.

    Secondly, some government officials including presidents and vice presidents think documents with them while in office belong to them rather than to the government. But the law mandates every administration to hand over to the national archives all documents in their possession when they leave office. These do not belong to presidents, vice presidents personally and they are not the types of documents that are ordinarily deposited in every presidential libraries of former presidents located in their home states.

    We have not heard the final story on the American situation and we will not have the final story until the Special Counsels’ report. One interesting thing is that former president, Barack Obama, has come out unscathed in all these stories. It is to his credit that no dirt has been found on him throughout his public life despite all efforts by his enemies to pin something on him.

    What is the situation in Nigeria? There is a national archives in Nigeria located on the grounds of the University of Ibadan with branches in Enugu and Kaduna. The one in Ibadan was inspired by the late Kenneth Onwuka Dike, the first Nigerian vice chancellor of University of Ibadan and the doyen of Nigerian historians. There is a law ordering all governments, especially the federal government, to deposit all documents of a certain age in the national archives but in a country poorly administered and governed, this is the least concern of those in government.

    I wrote two books of first republic politicians namely chiefs S.L Akintola, last premier of Western Nigeria and Samuel Okotie-Eboh, federal minister of finance both of whom were killed during the coup d’état of January 15, 1966. I went to the premier’s office in Ibadan in 1972, six years after the man was in office hoping to access his official documents. I was told by the officials that his papers had been burnt because there was shortage of space and yet the National Archives was located a few miles from the secretariat. The officials told me that the papers of Colonel Adekunle Fajuyi, his successor had equally been burnt. I was reduced to tears and I had to write my book from remembered history and oral interviews backed by newspapers in the university library. 

    Several years later in 2016, I wanted to write the biography of Chief Okotie-Eboh, I went to the Federal Ministry of Finance and it was the same story of absence of documents. I searched everywhere for any information on the man who ran the economy for 10 years, who founded the CBN, the Stock Exchange, the mint and other financial institutions and  there were no documents on him. Then I went to the internet and found out his 10 budget speeches are available in Stanford University in California.

    The Nigerian Institute of International Affairs did not have any copy of his annual budget speeches. Eventually, only Chief Phillip Asiodu had copies in the entire country. He graciously lent them to me for the assignment. I have been in government before but in a tangential role as adviser to the Minister of Foreign Affairs and I am not sure the ministry had a policy on archives. It is not too late for somebody in our executive arm of government to send a bill to parliament stating the process of archival retrieval both at the state and federal levels including all the embassies of Nigeria where vital documents are found.

    I remember serving in the glorified but ineffective Presidential Advisory Council on International Affairs and our properly articulating every advice and proposals we submitted to the president. I sincerely hope all those memoranda will be kept if not for present usage at least for historians in the future. One of the problems those early academic historians who wanted to reconstruct our past had was the absence of documentary sources. This should not be the problem for those coming after us. This is why I welcome autobiographies and biographies of our leaders because they will constitute veritable sources among other sources of our history in the future.

    We should not be talking about oral tradition for a largely literate society in future. We can learn from what is happening in America and keep our records. It is important to know how decisions are made and who contributed to making these decisions so that we can learn from our failures and successes. If there is any country in the world which needs to keep records it is Nigeria.

  • Something’s got to give

    Something’s got to give

    En route to the general elections, the charge persists that the race is dominated by controversial characters. Several pundits dismiss the political class as corrupt and attack the system that sustains them. But how did such a system manifest? From where do politicians emerge?

    They aren’t from outer space. They didn’t fall from the clouds. Neither did they manifest through the membrane of an alternate reality. Rather they are sired by Nigerian families. They are produced from society’s cultured and corrupted loins. They are groomed by our schools, prisons, worship houses, and traditional institutions.

    They are our fathers, mothers, uncles, aunts, grannies, sons, daughters, concubines, and benefactors. They are a perfect reflection of the Nigerian family – a spitting manifestation of our clandestine quirks and professed values.

    Among the contenders for the various public offices, some incumbents have boasted that they would turn scorched earth to gold even though all they did in their first term was pound the precious metal to dross. Some promised to turn the underdog into an overlord, but all they did was make street sweepers of the strapping, and sewage cleaners of the literate in the cold, harsh bowels of the diaspora.

    More youth get by in the shadowy political economy as goons, assassins, mercenary protesters, and internet hooligans. Those who fall outside the bracket of patronage end up as armed robbers, kidnappers, drug mules, and human traffickers.

    Yet en route to the 2023 elections, some presidential aspirants have presented their manhood in flight. Flaunting a juvenile skittishness, they leapfrog from mood to mood, from cloying fib to the ugliest lie, seeking to enchant gullible galleries.

    Others have flaunted the privilege of incumbency, frantically playing to more sterile herds. However, the leader Nigeria needs must be visionary, pragmatic, brilliant, and unflinchingly humane.

    He must flaunt a brilliant track record, glowing and fruitful, like a blooming orchard. He is a true patriot, the type that wears altruism on his heart’s sleeves. Demagogues promise glory without sweat, success without sudor, and get significant segments of the citizenry, mostly youth, hung up on the fantasy of a world without hardship. That is not the kind of leader that we need.

    If there is a cautionary tale in Nigerian politics, it is the tension between the politician and the voter. Both schemers, their hostility echoes the proverbial race between the fox and tortoise. The fox, for all its brawn and trickery, meets his match in the tortoise, whose cunning eventually wins the race. Thus goes the ethically-correct narrative.

    The fable, however, dissembles in the Nigerian wild. Ultimately, it manifests in reverse: picture the politician as the fox, the electorate as the tortoise, and the political arena as the wild. The fox beats the tortoise silly thus winning the race time and over again.

    At the forthcoming general elections, the foxes will carry the day. It’s a given. The race had always been rigged in the interest of the foxes. Thus Nigeria reels at the borderline between a republic and captured empire. The electorate’s bent, however, will determine if the country would re-emerge as a republic of free, fortunate people.

    We need a victor capable of seizing upon his victory to humanely reconstruct the power equation, redistribute social privileges, and reinvigorate civil societies, and dormant economies. 

    The public healthcare system, for instance, must be overhauled with better social safety nets and driven to earn foreign exchange. And this can never be achieved by gifting a frantic bigot or lying demagogue the presidential seat.

    Something’s got to give. Renaissance hierarchies are dramatized in the noisy climax of gladiator politics. The average voter must re-emerge decisively as the political personae of a renaissance Nigeria, at this year’s general elections.

    He must re-emerge as the cultured hero and worker of marvels: the farmer, painter, plumber, sculptor, street trader, student, unemployed graduate, and manual labourer must reprise their roles as fearless change-makers, irreconcilable to visions of them as pawns and inferior social elements.

    In the ongoing duel with hardships triggered by misgovernance and accentuated by the coronavirus pandemic, the ultimate purpose of families, states, and nations, is to breathe. It’s a sublime irony: man labours to breathe in an atmosphere corrupted by his labour for material wealth.

    To survive at a time like this, the Nigerian voter must quit participating in heavily choreographed elections, in which the demands of corporations, individuals, and banks are paramount.

    He must vie to tilt power in Nigeria’s interest. It’s time to take back what’s ours. Yet slogans and scathing bromides are hardly the way to go in reclaiming Nigeria’s soul from the fangs and talons of a raptorial political class.

    A new class of political leadership must emerge to assert the mental and moral freedom of the citizenry by communicating in a language comprehensible to the common man.

    As we approach the general elections, we intensify our bid to sensitize our graduates and undergrads, street urchins, traders, commercial transporters, armed forces, and the unemployed, to scorn vote seekers who only visit the electorate to share roasted yam and ponmo (cowhide) at the dawn of general elections.

    Teach them to scorn leaders that commit crumbs of their constituency allowances to empower the citizenry with wheelbarrows, machetes, sachet water, and pepper grinding machines, among others.

    It’s about time we ended the charade and elect leadership uninclined towards misgovernance and pilferage of federal, state, and local government treasuries.

    Nigeria must elect men and women incapable of stealing money meant to build schools, and hospitals, and rehabilitate crucial infrastructure into their private accounts at home and abroad.

    Our resistance to predatory leadership would, however, be impossible if large segments of the electorate continue to scoff at progressive consciousness at ballot time.

    Against the backdrop of this, we face a far more difficult problem: Nigeria’s affliction by an electorate nurtured on bigotries and savage materialism. Voters emerging from two societal extremes: the haves and have-nots, coalesce in ghastly pursuits inimical to the Nigeria project.

    How do we counsel the masses to be prudent, honest, and just in their dealings? How do we teach them that toxic politics requires extreme sacrifice and that the bigot, in fulfilling his role as a virulent, gelded being, must silence his mind?

    How do we reconcile politicians to the belief that politics should never be about accumulating obscene, illegitimate wealth to show off, but about the passion to live life more fully and engage more expansively, in the progressive possibilities of human existence?

    As we approach the polls, the appalling recklessness by which some candidates propose, justify, and project “government with a human face” must be scrutinised and measured through the looking glass of their antecedents in public office.

    Who knows? We may discover, in the nick of time, that the hallmark of our preferred candidate’s humanitarian disposition is the advocacy of some limitless, grand-scale public goal or initiative without regard to context, cost, or the means of achieving it.

    For such a goal or initiative to be desirable to all, it has to be made public and glamorised because the costs are not to be earned but to be expropriated, and a dense patch of venomous fog has to enshroud such vital issues as the means of achieving it.

    This is because the means could be human lives. Human lives like yours and mine: battered, bruised, browbeaten, easy to fleece.