Category: Olakunle Abimbola

Just as well the military option isn’t gathering much traction.  But that doesn’t mean the jokers of Niamey, the coup plotters that on July 26 blasted their country right back into the past, are sitting pretty.

It’s as the Yoruba say: the callow child throatily traduced the Iroko and brags that he lives — did he ever think his doom, the Iroko crush, would be instant?

For the Niger putschists, it’s a prolonged psychological siege until they wilt.  Proof? The growl from Mali and Burkina Faso, co-military-in-government lepers, barking that a war on Niger would be deemed a war on both.

But a growling dog manifests rabid fear and manic panic, hardly cold courage!  That Guinea Conakry, another military-blighted state, is less excitable is wisdom.  

Guinea knows as international attention beams on Niger, it would be a long night for the notorious West African quad, now under jackboot rule.

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The Niger coup was in-your-face bluff and cynical bluster: you fail in your primary duty and claim you are toppling your commander-in-chief for a security meltdown?

The soldiers claimed they took power because President Mohamed Bazoum’s war against Jihadi insurgency was flagging! Pray, what was the president supposed to do: snatch the guns from his incompetent army (if that allegation was even true) and go storm the battlefield himself?  

Blare the Niger Army’s cowardly tale by the moonlight, sizzled with alleged sleaze — irresistible condiment for such power grabs — and set minds are already spewing set-theories, like some set cant: good governance is the only antidote to putsches.

No heresy!  But what’s the antidote to an irredeemably corrupt ruling junta, as Nigeria saw in own best-forgotten era of military rule?  Coup and counter-coups that wouldn’t stop until the Army is disgraced and the country brought to its knees?

That’s the point.  With democracy, you at least have term limits and periodic polls. Those are structural checks which even the best of junta rules don’t have.

Yes, Africa teems with tragic self-perpetuators — as Russia is under Vladimir Putin and the United States would have been under the yet unfolding tragedy of Donald Trump.

Another African catastrophe is brewing in the Central African Republic (CAR) where a sitting, term-bound President Faustin-Archande Touadera just conducted a sham referendum to amend the CAR constitution and gift himself more years in power.  

Uganda and Rwanda — the one still bears the gargoyle of Idi Amin; the other, the trauma of the 1994 genocide — have already fallen under that spell.  Rwanda is all Kegame glitter now but that mirage may yet buckle, cropping stark catastrophe.

The ultimate antidote is thriving democracy, with routine elections that reward performance but punish governmental failures.

Yes, on that, there are challenges; but even over those, Nigeria offers stunning triumphs.  

It already triumphed over attempted illegal term extension by former President Olusegun Obasanjo (incidentally, a former soldier as Rwanda’s Paul Kegame and Uganda’s Yuweri Museveni); and over rotten elections his two terms epitomized.

Now here, illegal term extension is all but banished. Junta rule too, a distant echo.  

Challenges remain though: PDP’s Atiku Abubakar and LP’s Peter Obi, with sore losers, spiritual and temporal — ala Trump — strain to stain the 2023 polls, clearly the best since 1999.  

Still, the judiciary, doing justice to all, should be fit asylum for lunatic voices.

Nigeria and ECOWAS should press ahead to smoke out any form of military rule in West Africa.  That’s the lone and sane path to the region’s shared prosperity.

Niger coup and the bluff after

• By Azubike Nass

Nigeria President Bola Tinubu and the West African regional group — ECOWAS – which President Tinubu chairs, have condemned the coup in Niger.  So has the African Union (AU), with support from some Western powers.  They all tell the coupists to scram.

But restoring President Mohammed Bazoum would include negotiation and failing, perhaps military force.   The coup plotters, of course, balk at outside interference. 

Other African nations currently ruled by military coup leaders are Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea, all in West Africa.  All the coups happened within the last three years. But the three wobble, with internal and external pressure to restore democracy in Niger.

A goodly number of analysts caution against military force, citing possible backlash with catastrophic consequences. 

But many of such arguments lean on one-sided emotions that do not adequately balance strength and weaknesses. Rather, they tend towards scare-mongering.

But the spate of recent military coups, particularly in West Africa, requires a collective and firm action to check the trend. Otherwise, we could be heading back to the uncomfortable past, instead of moving in the direction of the future.

There is the common cry of exploitation of Africa by foreign nations: former colonial masters or not. But it is a global trend, applicable to all, of nations seeking for their interests: USA, Europe, Russia, China, etc. None is free from such accusation. 

For Africa, the greater problem is the high level of corruption among leaders, entrusted to handle their nations’ resources.

So, we will be dishonest to attribute the whole problem to foreign nations exploiting our natural resources while our people remain poor. It’s a common pattern of excuse with corrupt African nations, to whip up cheap emotion and divert attention.

Every reckonable nation could have cause to use military force when deemed necessary. It could be USA, UK, France, Russia, China, etc. Russia invaded and seized Crimea from Ukraine in 2014, and invaded Ukraine mainland in 2023 (fighting still going on). China has a very aggressive foreign policy ready to use military force in the island nations of South China Sea, including Hong Kong and Taiwan, and so on. 

When the Nigerian-led ECOMOG troops were sent on peacekeeping mission to Liberia and Sierra Leone in 1990 — it lasted for about 10 years: actually it was a peace-enforcement mission because there was no peace to keep — many Nigerian public affairs analysts warned against it and predicted doom. 

But today, Nigerian influence in West Africa, Africa and beyond, is built on sacrifices it made on those critical military intervention missions.  Former President Muhammadu Buhari, of recent, mobilized Nigerian troops to restore democratic governance in The Gambia. The predicted doom, by those who opposed it, never happened.

This writer, a retired military officer who had taken part in peace-enforcement missions in other lands, is in full support of actions to reverse the present situation in Niger. 

Negotiation should be from the position of strength: with the readiness to use military force. President Bola Tinubu should not be weighed down by scare-mongering of possible worse-case scenario. It’s normal. 

It doesn’t stop nations from taking actions when deemed necessary. No venture, no success.

• Azubike Nass, a retired colonel of the Nigerian Army, writes from Enugu, Enugu State.

Beware! A Blues orchestra blares out there since 2015: lest its virus turns you into a bitter, ever-grumbling wretch!

The Tinubu tenure is hardly 100 days, from a four-year term.  Yet, what this lobby see, gazing through their tear-soaked crystal ball, is nothing but sure catastrophe.

Indeed, from 2015, it’s been near-permanent sessions of gloom: uppity priests and pesky imams, loud churches with strange preachments, ethnic champions gaming the naive as rights activists — all abandoning their calling to play self-destruct politics.

All that is not about to stop.  Yet, subversive sobs solve nothing!  

Which is why the administration, aside from gauging sensible citizen feedbacks, should buckle down, undistracted, to its policies and programmes. 

From 2015 to 2023, it was wailing unlimited.  But with strategic deafness, former President Muhammadu Buhari kept out that din.

He made his mistakes — as the Tinubu order will make its: every regime does.  But those that claimed that government did “nothing” now wished they were blind, so as not to see clear landmarks that it left!

The sheer futility of subversive tears, though all is still work-in-progress! 

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That droning will probably get worse in the first four Tinubu years, as policy options bite hard.  As the pocket hurts, simple souls surrender to sweet sadness.  But it’s a journey to nowhere but wilful self-deceit. 

Now, a juxtaposition of the opening gambits of Buhari and Tinubu. 

President Buhari shunned fancy theories for stark pragmatism: grow what you eat and eat what you grow!  It was a fierce re-focus on agriculture.  

Its rail modernization was loud symbol for its twin-policy pillar: infrastructure.  Without fixing those two pillars, the economy would continue in a perpetual crawl.

The missing link in infrastructure was electricity — but even that was not for lack of trying.  There were no low-hanging fruits just because power transmission had terrible deficits in crucial investment — and for much too long — to yield any sudden sparkle.

Even at that, that government worked the Siemens Germany-Nigeria government-to-government transmission upgrade, still ongoing; and bound to yield appropriate results.  President Tinubu has no reason not to build, on that foundation, his own power security policies and programmes.

To support its stress on crops and grains, Buhari emplaced the Anchor Borrowers’ Scheme, driven by Godwin Emefiele’s Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN).  

For infrastructure, it installed a slew of funding options, chief among which was the Presidential Infrastructure Development Fund.  PIDF was to accelerate strategic infrastructure projects, under which came the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and the 2nd Niger Bridge — the umpteenth mirage across the Niger that Buhari finally gifted life!

Aside, there were Sukuk bond funding for specific sections of federal highways and tax-concession-for-projects, under which private sector players like Dangote, BUA and even NNPC Ltd agreed to rebuild public roads, in the best tradition of public-private sector partnership (PPP).

Still, was what the nay orchestra’s response to these Buhari-era initiatives?  Stone Age Buhari-nomics! — its economic theory class howled.  

Every pyramid of rice paddies was a “scam”.  Every new mill to process new rice — a symbol of new sundry grains — was “fake news” and “government propaganda”.  

Even the negative impact of insecurity on crop cultivation — real enough — was over-blown as if it was in every material particular!

Yet, without this aggressive path back to the farm, you just wonder what Nigeria’s hunger level would have been, after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.

On infrastructure, the “debt burden” was the ultimate blot.  Such triumph was the debt crow that it “cancelled out” long-term assets — rail and roads — those debts procured; and how they would strengthen the real sector.

Politically driven eternal moaning often cripples the brain! 

That brings the discourse to President Bola Tinubu’s opening gambit.

In 2013, 10 years before winning power, President Tinubu, with American Brian Browne, co-authored Financialism: Water from an Empty Well — a rather iconoclastic work on how good, old capitalism (booming production of goods and services) was tapering into “financialism” (booming money stock for money’s sake), leaving in its trail global poverty.

That appears reassuring, for it presupposes that the president’s policy entry tactics of tweaking the public purse — junking oil subsidy and floating the Naira — are no ends in themselves but a means to an end.

Removing subsidy could ballon state earnings but hardly boost citizens’ pockets.  Floating the Naira — effective devaluation — could harvest quite a confetti of the local currency.  But it hardly makes the real sector hum to deliver short-term prosperity.

So, opening gambits are neither good nor bad in themselves.  Good or bad greets the success or failure of the overall strategy.

The Obasanjo-PDP era prided itself in its “reforms”.  Yet, it birthed no lasting economic legacy, with the near-zero infrastructure the PDP left behind in 2015. 

Indeed, the former president handed out good cash for “debt forgiveness” — capital that could have developed infrastructure, got the economy humming, and eventually defrayed those debts; even as the economy grew stronger.

President Goodluck Jonathan, the last of his successors, preened over a bland “rebasing” — an accounting artificiality that proclaimed Nigeria Africa’s biggest economy, yet with no especially vibrant real sector: either in higher manufacturing or any agricultural boom.  Both could have created mass jobs and reduced poverty.

Classic “financialism” — aided by equal-opportunity sleaze — that vanished at the first sign of economic storm?

So, the winning strategy, if the Tinubu-era reforms must salvage the economy, is to sink most of the subsidy savings (outside the palliative budget) and the Naira-float cash in further infrastructure upgrade and agricultural processing, without letting off on crop production, aside from playing in the digital economy and allied services.

That way, the overall strategy won’t be that different from the Buhari era, though the market-friendly opening tactics are.  

That indeed would be a fit continuum from 2015 — now that the new order is dreaming improved electricity, commodity boards for food security and a credit-powered consumer market that could attract big manufacturing plants to Nigeria, and create millions of jobs.

Still, the sad ensemble don’t bother about these fine details.  All they do is milk the present pains for own rogue politics.  

So, the administration has its job cut out: adroitly manage political merchants of grief for now, but leave landmarks that deliver a productive economy that banishes poverty. 

It’s not entirely new.  But the lack of empathy, across the Nigerian class divide, gets more choking, as the neo-liberals seize Nigeria’s policy framework by the jugular.

When Chief Obafemi Awolowo started Nigeria’s greatest social revolution — Western Region’s free and compulsory primary education (1955) — the opposing National Council of Nigeria and Cameroon (NCNC), led by Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Awo’s great rival, scoffed it was a social “crime” to deny farmers their family farm work force.

 But Awo’s stubborn resolve turned that “crime” into a potent social capital. That head start still redounds to today’s South West, compared with the rest of Nigeria. 

 When much later, in 1979, the inimitable Baba Kekere, Alhaji Lateef Jakande, proud apostle of Awo’s progressive politics, unleashed his own doughty social capital, as Action Governor of Lagos, the naysayers went ga-ga with venom.

 His make-shift, start-up public schools (which in Lagos banished forever the shift system) were “poultry sheds”.  His social housing interventions were “civilian barracks” hardly fit for humans.

 But today, we know who was right and who was wrong.  But that hasn’t quite robbed the naysayers their empty crow, each time any government tries to serenade Nigeria’s poorest in its policy sun. 

 Such Babel and racket are greeting the Tinubu Presidency’s proposed N8, 000 conditional cash transfer (CCT) to Nigeria’s poorest of the poor numbering, according to the Nigeria Social — read poverty — Register (NSR), some 12 million households.

 Now, the rich — or just rich wannabes in the vanishing middle class — are all howl-and-growl, swearing that to the poor — who they know not, or even bother to know — N8, 000 is an absolute waste!  What heady arrogance!

 Well, to President Bola Tinubu, it’s all a hideous market din.  The thing though is that the president, and (wo)men in his policy suites, can ill afford this ill distraction.  

 In an ever divisive Nigeria, where base ethnicity and cynical religiosity grab the centre stage at crucial elections, a strong pan-Nigeria social capital, powered by the poor and most vulnerable, united by pan-Nigerian poverty, could just always tilt the scale.

 That was what the NSR started.  Common sense dictates that register be deepened, even as the administration, by its policy choices, viciously tears at the roots of poverty.

 The NSR perhaps explains why the ever-demonized President Muhammadu Buhari won two terms, in spite of vicious attacks on his person, and the hideous slur of his Fulani nativity.  

 For the first time ever, PMB’s Federal Government had a support register for the poor — by the way, a classic South West progressives scheme stretched nationwide.

 That might also explain why Tinubu himself won the 2023 polls, despite blatant anti-Tinubu lies, Atiku Abubakar playing the “northerner” card; and Peter Obi playing the ‘Christian’ divisive joker, aside from weaponizing to the full, his Ndigbo clannish bent.

 Meanwhile, the poor-are-too-rich-for-N8,000 band just got a new eureka: the claim, by the National Economic Council (NEC), that the “Buhari” NSR teems with sleaze. 

 That was the ultimate bogey: you hear sleaze and your brain is supposed to freeze!

 But if you can’t even think through a bogey, what value can you add?  That’s today’s uppity media for you.  That’s why rumour thrives.  No surprise: the media echoed the NEC claim with near-manic triumph!

 To be sure, NEC, Nigeria’s apex constitutional economic body, chaired by the Vice President, must have its facts.  Still, that’s at best a claim — a claim yet to be confirmed or disproved by an informed, independent body.

 That’s where failures in media reporting and analyses hit you smack in the face.  CCT, from its nursery in Osun, under Governor Rauf Aregbesola from 2010, is 13 years in Nigeria.  PMB escalated it, as part of his government’s social safety nets, from 2016.

 Yet, there appears no serious media focus on CCT, so much so that no independent voice can confirm or debunk NEC’s claim on the NSR.    Again, hardly surprising: everyone was too busy writing empty treatises on Argbesola’s “mullah” beard; or chasing Buhari’s ubiquitous “Fulani herdsmen” that committed all crimes, while their criminal cousins from other tribes were in blissful retirement!

 Still, to all the anti-cash transfer huff, This Day’s Kayode Komolafe wrote “For Cash Transfer”, a powerful and incisive riposte, citing the Bolsa Famila (Family Grant) of Brazil, under Inacio Lula da Silva’s first presidency (2003-2011). 

 KK even referenced “What Buhari can borrow from Lula”, published on May 9, 2016 — seven years ago — clearly a lone voice crying in the wilderness of distracted peers!

 Even then, the Osun example (2010-2018) demonstrated how safety nets could shore up a state’s economy and how abandoning such — total or partial — could crop voter whiplash (witness: the Osun APC governorship defeat of 2022), if you have a developmental mindset.

 As earlier stated on this page, the World Bank’s Nigeria Youth Employment and Social Support Operation (YESSO) got its initial inspiration from the Osun Youth Employment Scheme (OYES), which WB wanted to adopt as primer for its global war on poverty.

 So, YESSO started building the NSR, with Osun OYES managers helping to build the NSR in Osun, with a uniform template, as other YESSO managers nationwide.  

 That would explain the WB’s readiness to extend, to Nigeria, the US$ 800 million post-subsidy palliative facility, based on the same YESSO-developed NSR.  It was a part-developer of it all and it had done its due diligence.

 So, how come the same NSR has become “Buhari’s” article of “corruption”?  

 Besides, what’s the guarantee that the states would attain higher rigour for new registers, with the present social pressures?  Does it not make more sense to sanitize the NSR, instead of embarking on new social registers?

 The good thing though is that NEC, even with its dissonance with the NSR, isn’t trashing CCT, as many neo-liberal hawks are screeching — a right step.

 CCT, with parallel measures, proved a huge recharge to a drained Osun economy, starting 2010: poverty rate fell from 37.5% in 2010 to 10.9% in 2018; state GDP: N191 billion (2010) to N398 billion (2018); unemployment rate: 17.2% (2010) to 5.3% (2018) — according to cluster stats from the National Bureau of Statistics, the World Bank and other international development agencies.

 CCT paid N10, 000 to each of four sets of 20, 000 OYES volunteers: totaling 80, 000, all through eight years (2010-2018), but with the last set serving beyond 2018.

 But the classic CCT was the Agba Osun register.  By it, some 114, 000 dirt-poor, scientifically picked Osun seniors were paid N10, 000 monthly, aside from the state picking up bills for their old age Infirmities.  

 It was ultra-smart investment in social capital: the riled youths just starting their lives; the frail elders at the departure lounge.  It’s a structured pact with the poor and the society’s most vulnerable.

 A structured pact with the vulnerable is logical balm to neo-liberal angst: though the books sizzles with excess cash; the poor seethe with excess crush!

 A vibrant NSR is an imperative now.  But as more and more are eased out of poverty, the register itself will gradually ease out.

Since their crushing defeat at the 2023 general elections, two of the three discrete arms of PDP have embraced election denialism — as if their lives depend on it.

Maybe their lives do.  When you believe a blatant, self-told lie, your very reality is nothing but a rich illusion that soon blossoms into some glorious, preening delusion!

Such is the pathetic lie that has become the mainstream PDP under Atiku Abubakar, former Vice President of the Federal Republic; and even worse: its LP variant, under the ever-posturing Peter Obi, and his legion of youths merry to be scammed; with his boisterous, clannish supporters in tow!

It’s quite a bubble — the Obi camp — where one incandescent lie uproots the other, to fend off — horror of horrors! — Dis-Obi-diency: a disavowal of the Obi-dient orthodoxy, as fatal as heresy was to the heretic, against medieval Catholicism.

Only the PDP third arm — Rab’iu Kwankwaso’s New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), garrisoned in Kano — has blasted itself off that bubble of post-polls lies which, oft repeated, wear the garment of truth — at least among folks ready to be fobbed.

But even that, with the demolish-first-think-later temper of Governor Abba Yusuf and his gang, you could feel a regime fated to fatal distractions, though self-imposed.

But back to PDP and LP.  Both weaponized the pleading of their cases at the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), as if it were some open sesame to corral  the presidential diadem both so much covet, though both work at cross-purposes.

But as the PEPC winds down, and its initial blackmail value wears off, and stark reality sets in, new blackmail tools, to further fob their starry-eyed captives, appear imperative.

The Obi camp never tires of bombarding the social media, and sympathetic radios and TVs, with alleged unimpeachable “facts” they had tendered at the PEPC, suggesting their candidate, Peter Gregory Obi the Immaculate, was only awaiting coronation!

Still, shouldn’t such proclamation come from PEPC, after x-raying every claim and counter-claim?  Why this pre-verdict glad tiding from the Obi vanguard?

Peter Obi and co rise or fall by the explosive power of their hideous propaganda!

The same pre-poll tactics declared Obi soar-away social media president, though he boasted no soar-away winning structure, beyond hallucinating “Yes, Daddies”.

The same post-poll tactics pushed fair defeat into an amusing pantomime of mandate reclamation, when it made more sense to study a clear over-performance, skewed by reckless religious politics; and a rabid projection of ethnic desperation.

The same tactics, you can be sure, will spin the PEPC verdict as some victimhood lore, even long after the Supreme Court would have had its final say on the matter.

On the bubble and its echo chambers, Peter Obi and camp are probably beyond redemption.  Still, you hardly tell the blind is market is over.  The vanished din drums it loud enough!

Nevertheless, Obi-dients — rabid in fervour, plebeian by temper — will do well to brace selves: their shaman just swore to Daily Post of July 9 he’d be president in 2027 —fancy springs eternal!  

But might that be early warning yet PEPC might turn out a contrived bumpy ride to nowhere?  We wait!

In comparison, the Atiku PDP arm ran a far more serious campaign (beyond Dino, its in-house comedian; and Atiku, fatally branding himself the northern candidate).  It also exhibited far more sobriety and industry at PEPC.

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But that doesn’t make its election denialism any less galling, though far more subtle.

Take the take of Osita Chidoka, Aviation minister under President Goodluck Jonathan, on the unfortunate case of Nmesoma Ejikeme, the 19-year-old that faked her Joint Admissions and Matriculation Board (JAMB) score to proclaim herself the 2023 University Matriculation Examinations (UME) genius.

On Nmesoma, Oby Ezekwesili, Obasanjo-era minister of Education, was a painful study of a split personality: her heart rooted for her ethnic lass, her head played the national activist of conscience.  Yet, pious dissembling never loomed larger!

Chidoka scoffed at any such conflict.  Citing “red flags”, he pronounced the girl’s result genuine forgery.  That was quite refreshing: for many of his folks were enrobing plain dishonesty with ethnic rage — which Chidoka rightly decried.

But it was clear Chidoka threw poor Mmesoma under the bus to fully pounce on the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) — public enemy No. 1 to Atiku and Obi, for conducting an election which both lost.

Chidoka’s self-serving cant, posturing as fiery angel for public good, was clear: “Like JAMB, INEC must be accountable to the people of Nigeria,” he boomed.  ”They should step forward and restore the integrity and sanctity of elections in Nigeria and remove the cloud of illegitimacy surrounding the election of President Tinubu, if their system worked as they are claiming.”

Again, gangling hypocrisy never loomed larger!  

For starters, it’s rich for the former FRSC Corps Marshal to spew evocative words as restoration,  electoral integrity and sanctity; and alleged illegitimacy over Tinubu’s election, as if he was not a partisan just echoing the stark sentiments of losers — sentiments clearly not shared by Tinubu’s winning camp.

But that’s the thing: in Chidoka’s bluster, you clearly see the potency of the Atiku propaganda — subtle deceit, perhaps more noxious than Obi’s hare-brained rackets.

But even more sinister: Chidoka’s flat dismissal of a court’s verdict, yet to be delivered. 

“The courts,” he huffed, “cannot remove the national disappointment, odium, and massive distrust of INEC’s election infrastructure, no matter the decision.”

Odium and distrust — from who?  Besides, if the courts cannot fairly adjudicate a case, then who can — Chidoka and rabid co-partisans, coveting stuff they never had?

Again, is the Chidoka show an early spin of the likely debacle to come from PEPC — after all the huff and puff of reclaiming a “stolen mandate”?  

Perhaps like Obi, Atiku too is “coming” in 2027!  So some racy spin to further sate and fob dis-Atiku-lated Atikulates?  Toh!

Clearly, the toxin from the June 12, 1993 election annulment saga appears not fully diffused.  Then, it was a hubris-filled political military purporting to cancel a free election.  They eventually cancelled themselves.

Now, it’s a band of sore losers, badly splintered going into the polls, jerking awake to, sour grapes, bad-mouth the glorious result of their ringing folly!  The joke is on no one else but them.

Besides, these PDP variants traduce Prof. Mahmood Yakubu, INEC chair, as if he were some Maurice Iwu, Obasanjo’s special purpose vehicle to ram down his “do-or-die” electoral heist of 2007 — clearly the worst since 1999, if not ever!

Well, common sense isn’t common.  Besides, sustaining a lie, brazenly self-told, could damage the mind, perhaps beyond repairs.  

There is a clear limit to blatant election denial.

How is Osun faring?  Compare and contrast June 2011 and June 2023.

In June 2023, the Ademola Adeleke government clocked six months.  In June 2011, the Rauf Aregbesola government — the one he dubbed “government unusual” — had reached that same threshold, after assuming office on 27 November 2010.

In those first 100 days, Aregbesola had delivered OYES — Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme — his government’s volunteer scheme to put graduate and non-graduate youths to work; and give Osun’s sleepy economy a wake-up jab.

OYES rolled out 20, 000 youth volunteer jobs in 98 days.  But OYES was only the flagship for other development policies and programmes:   

— O’Meal: free school daily feeding for the first four years in public schools. 

— O’School: the most comprehensive modernization of public education infrastructure  

(school buildings, atmospherics and teachers’ re-tool) in Osun history. 

— O’Ambulance: a free and ready public ambulance service, for emergency auto crashes; and to offer support medical care for Osun’s poor, frail and helpless elders.

— Agba Osun: an old age health and welfare scheme for the poorest of Osun elders, scientifically picked, with a monthly stipend of N10, 000. 

Then, an integrated road-bridge-canal system, urban and rural, that boosted the economy and salvaged the environment.

From OYES came the World Bank’s YESSO: Youth Empowerment and Social Support Operation.  

YESSO would birth the Nigerian Social Register (from which the Muhammadu Buhari government paid N5, 000 to Nigeria’s poorest nationwide, under its conditional cash transfer (CCT) programme.  The World Bank also used that register to extend US$ 800 million to fund Nigeria’s post-subsidy palliative payments to the poorest of the poor.

OYES would also preface the N-Power national graduate volunteer job scheme, with its initial 500, 000 beneficiaries bigger than the federal civil service (then put at 88, 000).

Much of these are captured in Ogbeni: The Osun Renaissance Years, a book on that era (by yours truly) that should be out before this year runs out.

That was Osun 12 years ago.  But now — June 2023?  

Unlike the developmental clatter all through Aregbesola’s first six months, drawing study visits from all over Nigeria, what defines the evolving Adeleke era?

The governor and a former senator, trying each other out for space, at the Osogbo eid prayers, during the 2023 Ileya (Eid-el-Kabir) Muslim festival!  What a sink!

Former Senator Ajibola Basiru, PhD, was Aregbesola’s attorney-general and Justice commissioner.  His ministry gave teeth to that era’s development-friendly policies.

Governor Ademola Adeleke was an opportunist senator, on account of the sudden death of his better-known brother, a former senator too and Osun’s first elected governor (January 1992-November 1993): Isiaka Adeleke, aka Serubawon.

Adeleke’s willy-nilly insistence to replace his dead elder brother, within Aregbesola’s APC on which ticket Serubawon was elected senator (though a latter-day defector from PDP), created the first succession chink of the Aregbesola era.

Adeleke would go ahead, on PDP ticket, to win the Osun West senatorial seat; and come back in 2018 to contest the governorship against APC’s Gboyega Oyetola, amidst a clangorous Osun West clamour: Oyetola was from Osun Central.

Though Oyetola would win with a wafer-thin margin after a run-off, that election badly splintered the Osun APC.   

Many of its leading lights from Osun West (most notably, the Shehu: Alhaji Moshood Adeoti, from the Iwo progressives bastion) rebelled to push for personal glory.  

Osun APC hardly ever recovered.  The Osun progressives debacle was born!

On his own, Governor Adeleke (with all due respect to his high office) was never a perceived serious figure, beyond inherited family privileges.  

“Ade Dancer”, his dismissive and irreverent moniker, all but says it all.  So, hardly anyone expects the world from his government — in any case, not when compared with the policy Olympus of the Ogbeni years; or even the more placid Oyetola era.

But dancer or no dancer, Adeleke would hand Governor Oyetola a hat trick of electoral thrashing, starting with Oyetola’s gubernatorial ouster, though that was a close race.   

But as sitting governor, PDP’s Adeleke would inflict a severe double-whammy: first, in the 2023 presidential election: APC’s Bola Tinubu lost to PDP’s Atiku Abubakar — the first APC candidate’s loss in Osun, since the 2010 progressives’ take-over.

Then, in the state legislature election: Adeleke wiped out the APC Osun legislature presence: from 24 seats to a solitary one, in a 26-seat assembly!  In this terrible hat trick, each follow-up drubbing was more hideous than the previous one.

Enter, the Osun progressives meltdown, perhaps even more severe than the 2003 Alliance for Democracy (AD) fiasco — which the defunct Action Congress (AC) stepped in to correct and erase from 2007, though a blind PDP vote-steal wouldn’t allow a reclaim of power till November 2010!

Why the debacle, though?

Oyetola, all through his four years, benchmarked himself against a government in which he was Chief of Staff; and not against the Osun PDP conservatives that the APC ousted, after three-and-a-half years of crunchy legal challenge — aside the blood and gore that drenched the 2007 heist, which President Olusegun Obasanjo then dubbed “do-or-die.”

In the ensuing war of attrition, the Oyetola government lost the potent social capital — from the poor-friendly developmental policies — that fetched the Osun progressives 12 uninterrupted years in power.

Ogbeni himself blundered into an unfortunate verbal attack on his long-term mentor, President Bola Tinubu — a tragic brawl that pitched hitherto beloved ideological son against a no less doting ideological father.

That attack has risked, for Ogbeni, isolation from his progressives family.  The Yoruba progressives aren’t the most forgiving, once they are charged!

Yet, for Osun, that’s a clear path to perdition: those who screech for blood lack street value.   Those whose blood they crave are undisputed champions of the street!  

It’s a peculiar mess that could well doom the Osun progressives to perennial future electoral slaughter — except, of course, more clinical minds break this cycle of happy-go-merry mutual destruction, on a lightning-fast emotive lane.

While the gladiators will sort selves out, it’s paradise lost for the Osun masses.

In November 2018, Osun placed second (behind Yobe) in SOML — Save One Million Lives Programme for Result (SOML-P-for-R), a World Bank-Federal Government national public health contest, on child health and maternity care. The state won US$ 20 million as prize, to further invest in its public hospitals.

In March 2020, Akintade Abdullahi, a product of the Aregbesola-era mega model public schools, was Nigeria’s best schoolboy scientist, earning a university scholarship up to PhD, as his win.

Will Osun ever repeat such feats — as Nigeria’s best schoolboy scientist — with the humdrum of governor and senator brawling over sitting spaces at eid?

Osun ronu — think! 

The job of the National Security Adviser (NSA) is essentially to coordinate the various intelligence agencies, both internal and external, and brief and advise the President as necessary. It is the President that determines who to appoint to the office.

Sample: Shortly after George Bush Jnr was inaugurated as US President in February 2001, he appointed Condoleezza Rice (a woman) as his NSA. George Bush was a soldier; he retired as an officer of the National Guards (which is an arm of U.S. military), before he joined politics as a Republican. 

Condoleezza Rice was not a military person but had rich credentials on security studies and work experience. She was also a Republican politician who had worked with George Bush in the Republican caucus before Bush emerged as President.

In Nigeria, the precursor organization to NSA office, was the National Security Organization (NSO), which was formed in 1976, headed by a serving Police officer. 

It had its various departments which, in later years, were broken up into separate organizations:  State Security Service/Department of State Services, SSS/DSS (essentially for homeland security intelligence); Defence Intelligence Agency, DIA (essentially for military intelligence); National Intelligence Agency, NIA (the external arm). 

Then, the Office of National Security Adviser (ONSA), headed by the National Security Adviser (NSA) to coordinate the rest of the intelligence and security services; and brief the President as necessary. The President also has backdoor channels to get intelligence briefs from each of the services.

The newly-appointed NSA, Mallam Nuhu Ribadu, is a retired senior Police officer who had handled some critical national assignment as the first Chairman of a key anti-graft agency, EFCC (with international reaches). 

Since he left office, he had been a close political ally of Bola Tinubu long before Tinubu became President. In fact, Tinubu has been his political mentor, and they had worked together in the election that produced Tinubu as the new President. 

Tinubu does not need any brief from anybody before appointing him to the position of NSA. That’s very easy to understand.

• Col. Azubike Nass, ECOMOG hero and retired officer from the Nigerian Army, writes from Enugu, Enugu State.

• By Azubike Nass

The exit of an old administration and entry of another often heralds a cacophony of allegations — some earnest and others wild — about the state of the nation and the imperative to take radical steps.  The change of guard, from May 29, has not been different.

Asari Dokubo, famed Niger Delta agitator, just alleged that oil theft could not be stopped without bringing to heel the alleged military top guns behind it.  Also, President Bola Tinubu’s naming of Nuhu Ribadu, a retired Assistant Inspector General of Police (AIG) as National Security Adviser (NSA), has sparked some controversy, suggesting the military might be cold toward that appointment, since latterly, the NSA had been the bastion of retired Army officers.

Col. Azubike Nass, a retired Army officer himself, weighs in on both issues, giving a rare insight which can only enrich the discourse.  Enjoy!

Asari Dokubo recently made a public statement that the Nigerian military was heavily involved in about 99% of oil bunkering.  He stirred the honets’ nest and has come under attacks and official rebuttal by military authorities.  

Dokubo raised a stinging issue, but I also think he exaggerated it for effect. This essayist is neither a supporter nor antagonist of Dokubo. My position is to confront the bitter facts if it could be of benefit to the wider society.

Military involvement in Nigeria oil business, whether legal or illegal, had been there since the military governments of the 1970s, up to the last military regime which exited on 29 May 1999.  But even with the coming of democracy, military involvement in oil business has not stopped because it is already well entrenched.

In the past, it was common for some members of the Supreme Military Council (the highest ruling body) to secure oil block allocations for themselves and/or their business cronies/fronts — just as they also did with the regulated foreign exchange. 

You could just get an official allocation paper and the oil companies or foreign exchange traders/users would hustle to buy it from you at a huge amount of money. Your business front would broker the deal. These are facts on record.

Since the 1980s, there had been several periodic reports by credible international groups about military involvement in Nigerian illegal oil business. I recall that of 2013/2014 period when the Coordinating Minister of the Economy, Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala (now the Director-General of World Trade Organization – WTO), openly lamented about the huge volume of oil theft in Nigeria. 

Some foreign groups, including IMF and an oil business tracking outfit, had released reports about the involvement of the military in oil theft in Nigeria. The military authorities promptly denied the accusations. Minister Okonjo-Iweala was completely helpless to the situation and she expressed it.

Most military personnel who serve/served in the oil-producing Niger Delta make/made a lot of money within a short period. Some senior commanders, mostly of the Navy and Army, make hundreds of millions or billions of Naira within about two years stay in the region. The few that are not interested in hustling for the business are seen as indolent and stupid. 

At present, for example, the biggest fraud/money-laundering trial of a military officer by EFCC, is that of Maj-Gen Emmanuel Atewe for billions of Naira within his two years stay as commander of a military task force in the region. That’s just one case. This writer is a retired military officer speaking from knowledge and experience.

President Bola Tinubu was a senior executive of the biggest multi-national oil company in Nigeria (also the biggest in the world) in the 1980s military regime era. He has a good knowledge of oil business in Nigeria and beyond. 

Asari Dokubo is an indigene of oil-producing Niger Delta. He knows what is involved in the business. He was also a pro-democracy protester after the military regime of Gen Babangida annulled the June 12, 1993 presidential election. 

That was when he knew Bola Tinubu, who was one of the key leaders of NADECO. Dokubo also campaigned vigorously for candidate Tinubu during the last presidential election which Tinubu won.

It is the position of this writer that there is no way any Nigerian leader can drastically reduce or stop oil-bunkering/oil-theft in the Niger Delta region, without finding a way to break the hold of some military guys who had been entrenched in it. 

It’s quite a tricky issue, but once you achieve that, it is very easy to control that of other security and law-enforcement agencies who are equally well involved in it.  

It will take a leader with lots of gut and ingenious approach (thinking out of the box) to achieve that. 

President Bola Tinubu, by his track record, is the right person to do that. Nigerian economy and the Nigerian masses would be the beneficiaries. I rest my case.

God Bless Nigeria.

Hardly a secret: the failed conspiracy to scupper the last general election and foist an interim national government (IMG), that Prof. Wole Soyinka just spoke of.

What might not be so clear — at least to the undiscerning, among whom many count — is a new but vile generation of “owners of Nigeria”, sprouting under our very noses.  

The good news, though: the old “owners” appear losing grip, while their new wannabe cousins are making a hash of their gambit — from the result of their many wild machinations during the last cycle of elections.

Nigeria’s democracy is the better — and stronger — for it. 

While the old “owners” of Nigeria — discredited military-era rulers and allies — use thunder-and-bluster, their new kith-and-kin apply under-your-skin stealth: cynically mouthing the law; or shuffling some clever religious cards. 

That makes them all the more noxious, for they hide behind some phoney moral force. 

Kongi warned of populist symbolism as crass opportunism, which could set voters on a joy ride to nowhere, and ultimately end in tears.

“Revolution is not about lining up behind nearest available symbol,” he stressed on June 16 in Lagos, while unveiling the latest work in his Interventionist series, The Putin Files: Excursion Around The Ideology Of Pain.  “When a symbol does emerge, however, we are obliged to examine every aspect of what is fortuitously an offer, and continue to guard our freedoms every inch of the way.”

On Nigeria and how to run it, a Babel of voices blared before the polls, professing newfound patriotism, pointing to their preferred candidates as sacred actualizers.

To that, WS just added a famous ambivalence, but in support of no one in particular. 

“Project Nigeria, I must confess, has become near terminally soul-searing.  Do I still believe in it?” he teased. “I’m no longer certain, but first we must rid ourselves of the tyranny of the ignorant and the opportunism of time-servers.”

Tyranny of the ignorant and the opportunism of time-servers!  That hoopla has defined the 2023 electioneering, the election proper and even this post-poll era; with plots and counter-plots to tip the scale by hook or by crook.

Indeed, it has been a season of ceaseless drama: the election itself; the disputation, fair or foul; and contrived ”uncertainty” — the vile plot that plagued President Bola Tinubu’s inauguration till the virtual last second, though former President Muhammadu Buhari had worked out a most seamless hand-over that Nigeria ever saw.

Folks can figure out which candidate best approximated the babble of the ignorant and the rank opportunism by time-servers.

Still, a perceptive profiling of three candidates, to see how each fits in, will do.

Read Also: LP cries out over plot by PDP to install interim govt in Abia 

Where does former Vice President Atiku Abubakar belong?  For starters, he was the PDP candidate.  To be sure, the PDP of 1999 (that swept Atiku and former President Olusegun Obasanjo into power) is different from the PDP of 2023, that now languishes in the wilderness.

Still, to the extent that PDP was the the “Army Arrangement” (to borrow the title of one of Fela’s iconic releases) that gifted mainly conservative forces power in 1999 — many of them anti-democratic elements — it’s reasonable to project Atiku would be comfy with this old power bloc.

But as the PDP appears progressively weaker since losing power in 2015, so would the old “owners” of Nigeria: frailer they get, as Nigeria’s democracy gains extra years.  About time too!   

President Bola Tinubu (then the All Progressives Congress candidate) is the direct opposite of Atiku —  if not the outright nemesis of the power ancien regime that Atiku so exemplifies. 

Tinubu’s trajectory, from 1999, says it all.  From the sole surviving Alliance for Democracy (AD) governor in 2003, he galvanized a South West progressives power reclaim, starting from 2007, first under Action Congress (AC); then from 2011, under the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). 

By 2014, Tinubu’s ACN had inspired a new opposition alliance: APC.  APC, in 2015, would flash PDP the red card, though with the help of some PDP elements, who joined the other APC legacy partners: Buhari’s Congress for Progressive Change (CPC) and Rochas Okorocha’s All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) rump and Vice President Kashim Shettima’s All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP).

So, might the old conservative bloc be hostile to Tinubu as they are warm to Atiku? Not that clear-cut: Tinubu is a practical (not dogmatic) progressive that boasts friends in the conservative camp, just as Atiku too could posture as some liberal conservative.

It’s that seeming mishmash that the new “owners” hoped to crush, with Obasanjo, living to the full his post-power role as gadfly, anointing Peter Obi as new messiah.

But both Obasanjo and Obi were old PDP hierarchs, very much part of the old rot they now railed against.  Still, their holy rage was sweet music to the band of frustrated youths, blissfully ignorant of their country’s history, and the pair’s roles in the debacle.

But even if you could see through Obasanjo and Obi, it was harder seeing through the motives of lawyers and priests, flying new kites, carefully veiling their partisan blights.

One top lawyer created a controversy out of a hitherto settled matter in law: the place of Abuja, the federal capital, in determining a presidential candidate’s win or loss.

A bevy of priests, orthodox and Pentecostal, turned their pulpits into subversive platforms, pumping captive congregation full of partisan bile; turning the church into a partisan camp, restive and radicalized, on account of the so-called “Muslim-Muslim” ticket. 

As the result hit the polity, and the “wrong” candidate had won, some Catholic priests staked their integrity on bad-mouthing the polls; and after, pushing strange legal theories of holding up inauguration, until legal challenges were completed, all in clear breach of the Constitution. 

But if all else failed, the clamour for “interim national government” wouldn’t — they must have thought — not with after suffusing the polity with Armageddon tales.

All hail — or nail — the new owners of Nigeria!

As it happened, that plot  also crumbled, with a new government in place and doing the work of state.  Still, the strategy of sacred deceit has hardly changed.

As white lies choked the media space during electioneering, so have some litigants been dishing out flowery stories, flattering badly faltering court procedures, just to game gullible partisans.

But good news: so far, democracy is holding its own against the new wannabe, as it has wrestled, to a halt, the old “owners” of Nigeria.  That is heart-warming. 

When the elephant falls, the Yoruba say, every sort of knife — long or short, sharp or blunt — slashes and cuts.  That essentially is the Emiefele story.

On June 10, the Department of State Services (DSS), Nigeria’s secret police, arrested Godwin Emiefele, the governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), suspended on June 9.  After, he was flown from Lagos to Abuja, said the DSS, for “investigative reasons”.

Since that arrest, the roast-and-skin-them-alive lobby, at their growling worst at the end of one administration and the beginning of another, have been baying for blood — not exactly of Emiefele’s alone; but others’ too, against who they bear a grudge. 

To Obiora Ifoh, factional national publicity secretary of Labour Party (LP), his party’s preferred villain-in-chief is Chairman Mahmood Yakubu, with his Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC).

INEC’s crime?  LP’s Peter Obi lost the presidential election under INEC’s watch!  Not a few in this camp, in wilful hyperbole, even claim INEC just conducted Nigeria’s “worst election”  — yeah right: with Maurice Iwu-delivered, Olusegun Obasanjo-decreed “do-or-die” heist of 2007!  

Indeed, combative ignorance is the limit!

Read Also: New naira notes: I would have issued warrant for Emiefele’s arrest, says Gbajbiamila

This Day also quoted Ohanaeze Ndigbo, speaking through one Chima Uzor, who signed as Ohanaeze’s director of national interest matters, as claiming Emefiele’s suspension from office was — using Uzor’s exact words — “a witch-hunt and a sign of ethnic cleansing” to cancel the Igbo from public office! 

What crap — and just as well Emmanuel Iwuanyanwu, the Ohanaeze president-general, has dissociated the body from it!  Otherwise, the Igbo would have learnt nothing from the last election: that excessive clannishness and blatant ethnicization bring nothing but grief.

But back to saner climes.  For Monday Ubani and the Nigeria Bar Association Section on Public Interest and Development Law (NBA-SPIDEL) which he chairs, even a more compelling arrest, than Emiefile’s, is Hadi Sirika’s, the former Aviation minister, for his alleged “scam of ‘Air Nigeria’”, as reported by The Nation of June 11.

Fair enough.  Let Emefiele, Sirika and any other person from the ancien regime bear own cross for whatever allegations levelled against them.  

But let no one presume it’s some willy-nillly roasting of some heretic to roaring applause, at some pious stake in some medieval court!  This is a 21st century democracy, run on the rule of law and powered by strict due process.

Neither Emefiele nor Sirika would have strong cases built against them by circulated court rumours, codified by the media’s zest for scandals and sleaze.  

So, the Federal Government will do well to graft hard facts from alluring fiction; and ignore those baying for blood on the fallacy of false equivalence.  Let everyone answer to his or her alleged crime.  But let no single innocent soul be harassed or traduced.

Besides, Nigeria derives no benefit from a sick culture of tarring, wholesale, every old order as a den of robbers that must be demonized. That’s an ill wind. It blows no good.