The Nation Newspaper

Category: Olatunji Dare

  • Once upon a life-changing picture

    Once upon a life-changing picture

    By now, almost everyone in the attentive audience in Nigeria and even abroad knows Olajumoke’s story.

    If anyone quips “Olajumoke who?” at the mention of that name, simply add “the bread seller.”  That should settle it.  For she is the only person bearing that name and most recently in that line of business who has been the focus of media attention lately and, meaning no disrespect to other bearers of that evocative name, the only Olajumoke that seems to matter at this time.

    Balancing a pyramid of loaves of Agege bread on her head as she made her rounds in one of the seedier neighbourhoods of Lagos, the winsome mother of two strayed into a photo shoot, of which the hip-hop artist Tinie Tempah was the subject.  But when the shoot was published in the social media, it was the woman carrying a pyramid of neatly stacked loaves of bread on her head that caught public attention.

    Everyone wanted to know her identity.  The photographer, TY Bello, eventually located her, gave her a makeover, and published her pictures in This Day Style magazine.

    Olajumoke’s life has not been and will never be the same again. The pictures catapulted her from obscurity – from near invisibility, despite that pyramid of loaves of bread – to celebrity.    It is the stuff of fairy tales.

    Banks that would have turned down her application for a loan on the threshold have now signed her up as brand ambassador.  Were she minded to seek a loan from them now, they would gladly oblige.  What collateral can be greater or more valuable than the star herself?

    Her clients also include manufacturers of consumer goods, fashion houses and modelling agencies, and she is billed to figure as a face of Lagos as the state celebrates its 50th anniversary next year.

    From the world of rowdy bus-stops and crowded buses and perhaps the occasional taxi cab, from the world of roadside meals washed down with “pure water” sachets, from nondescript clothing and flip –flops, she has been thrust into the world of limousines and airports and air travel and four-course meals in the swankiest restaurants and hotels and designer apparel and high-heeled shoes.

    A property developer has offered her a luxury apartment that only the most upwardly mobile can aspire to live in or own in one of the most opulent neighbourhoods in town, and has thrown into the bargain a fund for the education of Olajumoke’s children up to university.

    Without stating whether it has been so commissioned, an Instagram site has announced that it is accepting bookings from those who may need Olajumoke’s services.  Business has been brisk, I gather.

    The evangelical churches that promise deliverance and prosperity now daily invoke her as a “point of contact” in their supplication for transformative miracles in the lives of their teeming congregations.

    She has been a subject of countless profiles in the national and international media and even her name has undergone some transformation of the eponymous kind:  ThisDay’s Olusegun Adeniyi has coined the term Olajumokeism to denote the phenomenon that Olajumoke’s life emblematises.

    The perceptive and engaging Punch columnist Abimbola Adelakun has in a sober piece pointed out that Olajumoke’s dizzying rise to stardom illustrates for the most part the failure of a system that afforded her no formal education and reduced her – and millions like her – to the drudgery and danger of street hawking.

    But Adelakun’s is almost a lonely voice.  Virtually everyone else is celebrating and wishing fervently that an Olajumoke would surface in their lives, now, in these disarticulated times.

    I envy Olajumoke and her family their good fortune.  But if it is not properly managed, they are going to pay a high price for it.  Even the most sophisticated among us will find it difficult to handle a change of fortune so spectacular. For poor Olajumoke, it is a case of too much too soon.

    Her anonymity  – the anonymity that allowed her to be herself, to mind her business, to be not too concerned about what people are saying or thinking about her, to live her life quietly and unobtrusively and by her own rules and judgment,  will be the first casualty of her new, treacherous world.

    Lost also is the environment she has always known, now replaced by a world of minders and agents, and teeming with supplicants and opportunists and persons of dubious character and even more dubious motives.  This setting opens the door to vicious exploitation – the type that has, even in better-regulated societies, brought down many a celebrity precipitously down from affluence to indigence.

    Think also of what Olajumoke’s sudden fame will do to her husband Sunday, who makes a modest income from fitting aluminum door and window frames, and is probably only slightly more knowledgeable about the ways of the world, but is now thrust into Olajumoke’s new circle — the men and women, especially the men, who will spare no effort to make her believe that she deserves better.

    If his wife’s name survives her quantum leap to fame, his family name probably won’t. I can almost see them taking her aside and telling her solemnly that Orisaguna simply won’t cut it and that if she wants to really get on, the name would have to be replaced by something more cadenced.

    I am reminded of a certain actress originally named Norma Jeane, whose story has some parallels with Olajumoke’s.  Her minders, sensing that she could not enter Hollywood with a name like that, changed it to Marilyn Monroe.

    She became an instant hit.

    Examples abound of persons who came into sudden fame and affluence but wished in retrospect  that fortune had left them severely alone.

    There is, to take a local instance, the butcher Olagunju from Ede, Osun State, known mostly  by his first name like Olajumoke, who won £75, 000 on the Littlewoods pools in the 1950s.  Back then, that sum put Olagunju in the league of some of the wealthiest persons in the British Empire.

    Even with the strongest will in the world, you cannot have that kind of money and remain a butcher.  Advice flowed from every corner urging upon him a lifestyle that matched his new wealth.  More wives, to be sure.  Landed property.   Some business ventures.

    They sold him land that belonged to the Nigerian Railway Corporation.  His pools betting company was paying out much more than it was taking in, and was soon grounded.  They made him a “father” of the Action Group, and he had to pay the dues that came with the honour. One organisation after another sought his financial support.

    The money soon ran out.  Thereafter, Olagunju would introduce himself wistfully as the “olowo Ede ojoun,” literally, the wealthy Ede man of yore.

    To return to Olajumoke:  Asked what she would like to do with her new life, she said she would like to go to school and train to become a lawyer.  That is a good sign that stardom and occasion have not gone into her head.

    The assets that have brought her fame will fade over time; other stars will take her place.  Her dream is of a future that is secure.

    Those who truly wish her well should help her keep that dream splendidly in view.

  • Annals of justice: The Affluenza Defence

    Annals of justice: The Affluenza Defence

    Given the plethora of ongoing prosecutions brought by the EFCC in the Obtainment Scandal that has been tied indissolubly to the beleaguered former National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki (hence Dasukigate), other corruption cases in the works and still others that are sure to follow, and given the creativity and ingenuity of our lawyers, I predict with a great deal of confidence that some exciting new terms will soon enter the lexicon of litigation in Nigeria.

    The Affluenza Defence is coming.  You haven’t heard of the Affluenza Defence?

    Let me explain, then, starting with the term “affluenza.”  It signifies not just affluence, but suggests powerfully that the condition is a psychological malaise with some negative ramifications.

    At least one American court has recognised it as an extenuating factor even for conduct of the most egregious kind.

    On June 5, 2013, Ethan Couch, 16, was driving under the influence of alcohol — his blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit for adult drivers — when he rammed his pick-up van into some pedestrians, killing four of them.  Two passengers riding at the back of the truck suffered serious injuries, one of them to the extent that he can only communicate by blinking his eyes.

    At the trial, in Forth Worth, Texas, a psychologist testifying for the defence blamed it all on affluenza.  The juvenile on trial, he said, had been so coddled by his wealthy parents that he could not distinguish between proper and improper conduct.

    Invoking her discretionary powers, a juvenile court judge more or less accepted the affluenza defence.  She ordered that Couch be placed on probation in a long-term treatment facility.  But Couch found his way out of there, skipped a parole appearance and, with his mother, fled to Mexico. They have since been brought back to face fresh charges.

    The Affluenza Defence is just what you would expect in a litigious society, of which the United States is the quintessence.  No charge is so frivolous you will not find someone pressing it and no plea so outrageous that you will not find someone canvassing it.

    Here I am reminded of the man who stole a car from a parking lot in New York, and while driving it away crashed it, losing both legs.

    He filed a law suit demanding compensation from the owner of the vehicle, claiming that the accident had resulted from the owner’s failure to maintain the vehicle in a good running condition.

    The suit was dismissed.

    But the fact that a lawyer saw some merit in it and took it up goes to show how far some people will go in trying to make the law work for them even in the most unpromising of circumstances. And how far some lawyers will go to accommodate them.

    I will not be surprised if the case even went to appeal.

    Another case involved a motorist who left the steering wheel and went to the kitchenette at the rear of his Winnebago to make some coffee.  The vehicle veered off the highway and crashed, leaving him with serious injuries.

    He filed for damages from the vehicle’s manufacturer, saying that nowhere in the operational manual or the terms of purchase was it stated expressly that you could not take a few minutes off while driving to make yourself some coffee or fix yourself any drink you fancy.

    The case was also thrown out.

    It is all of a piece with what they call chutzpah (kootspah), Yiddish for overweening impudence, the classic example being the man who killed his parents and at his sentencing begged for leniency because he is an orphan.

    As the saying goes, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

    So, don’t be surprised if someone freighted with far more lawless conduct than Couch and a rap sheet stretching from the Gateway City to Abuja and back blames it all on the suffocating affluence of his upbringing.

    I certainly will not be surprised if a judge were to accept it.  After all, there is example for it.

    Stare decisis. 

    And the affluenza-stricken fellow’s travelling choir will dutifully intone, “As Your Lordship pleases.”

    From affluenza, it is but a short, logical step to its opposite, what I call indigentza, the state of being indigent.  I make bold to say that, like affluenza, it is also a psychological malaise with its own pathology, guaranteed to enter the legal vocabulary very soon, considering that the vast majority of Nigerians are raised in indigence , if not stark penury.

    Now, indigence and penury are at least as likely as affluence to corrode character and judgment and to breed delinquency.  So, why should they not be regarded as extenuating factors in criminal trials, and indeed in all matters before the courts?

    So a political official before whom even court judges and traditional rulers cower because of his violent impulses, who brooks no dissent and carries on as an erratic emperor answerable not even to himself, and has withal a rap sheet stretching from the Fountain of Knowledge to Abuja and back – something tells me that if this political official is ever called to account, he will enter a plea based on the Indigentza Defence.

    He will argue, assuming he submits to the authority of any court, that he was brought up in poverty so stark and pervasive that he never had a chance to develop a sense of right and wrong, and of decency and indecency.  This condition, he will insist, lies at the root of his countless schizoid acts and omissions; in short, that he is more victim than villain.

     

    A change of designation

     

    Wearing another hat, I am also Editorial Adviser of this newspaper.  This designation dates from its founding some 10 years ago.

    But I find that, 21 years after I resigned from my former perch in Rutam House, I am still widely referred to in the media as “the former chairman of the Editorial Board of The Guardian.”

    It is almost as if those vesting me with that title do not know or do not recognise my current status as Editorial Adviser of The Nation.

    If they do not cease and desist forthwith from this practice, I will buy space in major print and online newspapers serving formal notice of a change in designation and send them the bill.

    Here, for their benefit, is a draft of the announcement:

    “I, Olatunji Dare, widely referred to as the former chairman of the Editorial Board of The Guardian, wish henceforth to be known, referred to and addressed as Editorial Adviser of The Nation.  All former documents remain valid.”

  • Again, Budget 2016

    Again, Budget 2016

    It is probably just as well that the National Assembly has suspended discussion and deliberation on President Muhammadu Buhari’s budget proposals for fiscal 2016.  There is simply no way to move forward on a document so gravely flawed and so lacking in the basic integrity with which Buhari is widely credited.

    The more one learns about the budget proposals, the more one is distressed that it was ever presented as a Budget of Change.  For it is nothing of the sort.  It is in many ways a budget of Continuity – continuity of the feeding frenzy, the financial recklessness and the sheer rapacity of the Jonathan years.  And it tests sorely the public’s faith in the capacity of the Buhari Administration to set Nigeria on a new path.

    A budget of change would have questioned rigorously the fundamental assumptions on which previous budgets were grounded. A budget prepared at a time revenues from oil exports had fallen by more than 60 per cent would have rejected out of hand the business-as –usual approach in favour of something lean, even mean, if only to signal indeed that hard times are here and will be with us for quite a while.

    It would have scrutinised every proposed expenditure unsentimentally, cutting out whatever is not absolutely necessary and demanding, if an expenditure is warranted, that it be met at a cost that takes into account the nation’s diminished financial circumstances.  It would have resonated with a call for sacrifice and prudence.

    Thus, it would have questioned whether the President and Vice President and their families should for all practical purposes be wards of the Nigerian state, with their every need and desire and fancy met from the public purse, in a country where the anaemic minimum wage of N18, 000 goes unpaid for months.

    But what do we find?

    To take one scandalous example:   The budget makes outrageous provisions for the kitchen equipment and cookware and ancillary stuff  on which the previous year’s budget – and the one before it – had received outlays that bordered on the obscene.

    What happened to all the kitchen equipment and cookware and related stuff provided for in the State House budget every year Dr Jonathan was in office?  Were any purchases made?  What happened to last year’s purchase, and the previous year’s?  Was the material ever inventoried?

    They probably did so much cooking and preparing cassava bread in the place that at year’s end, the equipment purchased only the previous year for tens of millions of Naira – junk stuff most likely, like the military hardware acquired during the same period, were no longer serviceable.

    But with a new resident in the Villa, one not given to the bacchanalia and the gastronomic proclivities of the previous resident and his train, there is no excuse for such profligacy.

    This is indeed the time to consider privatising the entire catering operation at the Villa, in keeping with the public-private partnership strategy that has become obligatory for solving national problems. That way, the government pays a charge on the catering, without having to buy a new set of kitchen equipment every year.

    Take, as a second example the more than N4.9 million earmarked for books for the office of the Vice President for fiscal 2016.  It is considerably less than the previous year’s outlay of N7.5 million, though the incumbent is a legal scholar and practitioner of the first rank, unlike his predecessor, an architect who never pretended to be a bibliophile.

    Though relatively small, the expenditure on books for the former vice president’s office for fiscal 2015 year cries out for justification, as does the proposed expenditure in the 2016 Budget for the current vice president.

    Were books actually bought in 2015?  Who determined what books should be bought?  What subjects do they cover? Where are the books now?   Are they in safe custody, properly catalogued and available to staffers of the Vice President’s office and officials in other bureaus of the Presidency?  Or did the former vice president take them away as personal effects, to be read in the leisure he never enjoyed in office?

    Who determined that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s suite should boast a library crammed with books worth nearly N5 million?  What subjects will the volumes cover?  Even if he is inclined to read them all, he will never have the time.  They may even constitute a distraction.  So, whom are the budget planners trying to impress?

    But the puzzle does not end there.   A cable linking one part of the Presidential Villa to other drivers’ rest room is to be installed for  some N322 million, and another linking a Guest House to the generator room is to be installed for N213 million.

    How did these come to be budget priorities in these hard times?  If they had hitherto run the place without these cables, why install them now when the cost could serve more urgent needs?

    Then there is the allocation of N618.6 million for electrical lighting and fittings at the Villa, and another N37.7 million for electrical distribution boards and other cables.  What happened to the electrical lighting and fittings and distribution boards and cables that previously served the Villa?  All of them went bust in one fell swoop?  Or were there none to begin with, in which case it is necessary to ask:  What then makes them so urgent now?

    In testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Professor Isaac Adewole stopped just short of calling the budget document for his ministry a forgery.  He disavowed it, saying that it had been doctored in such a way as to upend the ministry’s priorities.

    The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, discovered a “strange” provision of N230 million and N168 million for the purchase of computers for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and the Film and Video Censors Board.

    The budget proposals for the Investments and Securities Tribunal, it has turned out, were copied word for word from the previous year’s submission.

    These are just some of the willful errors, duplications, inflated prices, misplaced priorities and shoddiness with which the 2016 budget documents are strewn.  The Federal Government blames it on a “budget mafia,” entrenched civil servants who have made a career of gaming the system for corrupt self-enrichment.

    This will not do.  Members of the so-called mafia report to superior officials who in turn report to the President, who is on record as saying that he took so long to name a cabinet because he wanted to be sure that he had the right officials in the right places.

    With regard to the 2016 budget, this seems not to have been the case.  By their negligence, indifference and complicity, Buhari’s senior officials have caused him and the nation great embarrassment.  They have also undermined public faith in his commitment to change, and in his administration’s capacity to break away from the failed habits of the past.

    They should not go unpunished.

    What this budget fiasco has revealed is in a fundamental sense a failure of auditing.  Public institutions operate for years on end without being audited.  Errors, witting and unwitting, go undetected and become self-perpetuating.

    No effort to combat official malfeasance, however spirited, can succeed without a strong and responsive audit mechanism.

     

     

  • ‘I, formerly known as . . .’

    ‘I, formerly known as . . .’

    No, I am not about to change my name.

    I have merely been paying closer attention than usual to the classified advertisement pages of the newspapers lately, following the example of the House of Representatives.

    They are chockfull of notices announcing name changes that usually begin, “I formerly known  as…” or “I formerly known and addressed as…” The closing phrase emphasises that all previous documents remain valid.

    Advertisement revenue has been at an all-time low, forcing newspapers to cut pagination drastically. But revenue from the classified pages, especially those featuring name changes, has never been greater.   By one estimate, the pages have grown at least five-fold.  At N4,500 per crack, and with some 100 inserts crammed into one of the several pages featuring that kind of material, we are talking serious money here.  In these hard times, it is almost as if the newspapers have struck gold.

    And the process of effecting this transformative change is as easy as it is cheap. Just go to the nearest newspaper house with your marriage certificate or sworn affidavit and a draft of the statement you want published, plonk down N4,500 – one of the best bargains you will find anywhere in this era of the shrinking Naira  — and it is done.  Even if you factor in the fee for the commissioner of oath operating under licence or by the roadside, it is still a great bargain.

    Many of the changes being advertised are innocuous, resulting mostly from marriage or re-marriage or divorce, or conversion to a new faith.

    Or from revulsion at having to bear a particular name, especially if that name is identified with a public figure who has fallen into disrepute.  An example that comes to mind here is Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the last premier of Western Nigeria.

    Following his assassination in the bloody January 15, 1966 coup, the classified advertisement pages of the Daily Sketch overflowed day after day with notices from his Yoruba kinsfolk sharing his last name disavowing it, despite its intimations of nobility.  Not for them the risk of being associated in any way with the man they perceived as a major architect of the mayhem that had paralysed Western Nigeria for two years and in a way prepared the ground for the coup that would claim his life.

    Today, if Akintola is not regarded as a martyr, he is certainly no longer an object of loathing abhorrence.  He is acclaimed by many as a statesman and one of the founding fathers of Nigeria, patron-saint of the mainstreamers, and a communicator of the first rank.  A public university, located appropriately in his hometown, Ogbomoso, in Oyo State, bears his name. The name has been decoupled from his persona, its lustre restored.

    I should mention in passing that, down the ages, many who had found their names unprepossessing and could not bear to go through life so encumbered had changed them drastically.  Who can blame the Soviet tyrant formerly known as Djugashvili for changing his name to Stalin?

    Some of the name changes being announced in the newspapers are minor, the type I made more than 50 years ago by simply dropping the name I had been baptised with as an infant, long before it could appear on any official document that really mattered.  You wonder whether it is worth bringing such changes to public notice.  The persons doing so must have their reasons, I suppose.

    But not a few of the advertised changes are intriguing.   The new name is a re-arrangement of the old name, a permutation and combination of sorts.  It is as if the advertiser had just realised or learned in mid life or even well past that milestone that the previous combination was an error requiring urgent correction.

    The person formerly known and addressed as XYZ wishes henceforth and with immediate effect to be known and addressed as YZX, XZY,ZYX, or YXZ, without prejudice to all former documents

    Examples, names slightly altered:

    Omoloba Olanifemi Sadiku wishes to confirm to the general public that he is also Lanrewaju Olanifemi.

    No doubt as an act of courtesy, and for the avoidance of doubt, as the uniquely Nigerian expression goes, Osunyemi Babatile Daniel wants the general public to know and remember at all times that he and Oladele Immanuel Babatile Daniel are one and the same person.

    The gentleman formerly and variously known as James Okwat and Okwat Wiseman Okon now wishes to be known and addressed as Okwat Wiseman Okon James.  Kindly take note of this change, Zenith Bank and First Bank in particular, and the public in general.

    The lady who used to be known as Ethamor Mercy henceforth wishes to be known and addressed as Inneh Mercy Joseph Oluaye.

    Moses Olusegun Asola now wishes to be called Durofola Olusegun Moses.

    And please take note that Okafo Peter Amadi, Okoroafo Paul Ameobi and Okafo Pete-Bok refer to one and the same person who, desirous of saving the public and the institutions with which he has been affiliated the trouble of sorting things out, but without doing violence to previous documents on which those names appear, now wishes to be known simply as Okafo Pete Amadi.

    Note, too, that Kassy Lundi Palinus, also Kassie Monday Paulinus, being one and the same person, now wishes to be known and addressed as Kassy Lundi Stallone.

    Decidedly curiouser are the changes that amount to a wholesale repudiation of the name the bearers had answered for decades and used in all manner of transactions, and the adoption of new names that bear little or no connection to the previous names, previous documents remaining valid.

    Here are some random examples, names slightly changed: and previous documents remaining valid.

    The lady formerly Katharine Ifeyinwa Okunwa now wishes to be known and addressed as Oluwaseun Mustapha.

    Legum Friday, apparently fed up with having his first name misspelled as “Legume,” now wishes to be known as Precious Agba Abaah.

    The fellow formerly addressed as Omotegbe Osahunwa, and who has suffered the additional misfortune of having his birthday wrongly entered in official documents as May 4, 1981, now wishes to be known as Anaigolu Dodi Edmond, and to have October 4, 1982 recognised as his authentic birthday. Notwithstanding the errors aforementioned, all previous documents remain valid.

    And the good lady formerly known as Ehimare Sandy Lawrenta will henceforth be known as Obihuku Ibheke Lawrenca.

    It is this latter category of name changes that has moved the House of Representatives to call on the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Nigeria Police to check the antecedents of new applicants for the Bank Verification Number, persuaded that the frequent change of names in national dailies could be a way to circumvent the process and perpetrate fraudulent acts.

    Nor did the House stop here.  It mandated its Standing Committees on Information, Police, Judiciary and Banking and Currency to investigate the matter.

    Easy, Honourable Ones, easy.

    Nigerians can no longer change their names and identities as frequently as they please  — they cannot exercise their freedom of speech —without the legislature of all institutions, inciting the banking regulatory authorities and the police and the EFCC against them?

    What is this country coming to?

  • What are they doing now?

    What are they doing now?

    What are some of yesterday’s people doing now?

    Now that they have time on their hands and considering their diminished circumstances, a good many of them must be reflecting on the awful instability of human greatness.

    Previously, if they had time to reflect at all, it was about how to pull in the next N100 million from the public purse and stay in place to pull in another N100 million or multiples thereof at the earliest opportunity.

    And as we have been learning to our grief with each passing day, there was never a shortage of opportunity or pretext.

    They probably still have lots of resources – enough, at any rate, to engineer a curious reversal in the epochal case that started out as The Federal Republic of Nigeria v Obtainers Unlimited & Others but is now shaping up as Obtainers Unlimited & Others v The Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    Identified perpetrators, who have in diverse ways fessed up to “obtaining “ have nevertheless put on the garb of victimhood and are with help from their confederates and sympathisers, challenging those seeking to bring them to justice to defend and justify the quest.

    It is a familiar conjuncture, and the reason why corruption has blossomed.  Remember Nuhu Ribadu, and how they ran him out of office and out of town? Can any lessons be learned where  no lessons were taught?

    The quest for restitution should be pursued with vigour, but also with diligence.  It cannot be abandoned.  It cannot be deferred.   There may not be another day.

    To return to the beginning, what follows is the first instalment of an occasional series that will speak to the prefatory question, namely:  What are some of yesterday’s people doing now?

    The two most powerful women of the era happily behind us now are confronting realities they never could have imagined.  So ubiquitous was Mrs Patience Jonathan, so forcefully did she intrude into so many areas of state action, so irresistible a force had she become that it was being suggested quite seriously in some quarters that the safest thing was to entrench her in the Constitution her husband was set to give Nigeria.

    That way, so went the reasoning, she could at least be managed.

    And the signals, I gather, were that Dr Jonathan, having tried without success to rein her in with the intervention of elders flown from the creeks of the Delta to Abuja for the purpose, would not be averse to a constitutional fix. Unfortunately, it never came to be.

    That may be just as well.  Not much has been heard lately from that quarter.  Perhaps she has finally dedicated herself to peaceful pursuits, now that she can no longer engage in nor advocate lawless action without having to face the consequences.

    Diezani Alison-Madueke presided daintily over the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the heart of the petroleum industry that was losing 25 per cent of its daily output to what a British report called  “political officials,” while also bleeding  the country dry through payment of bogus import subsidies to the administration’s retinue of freeloaders.

    Yet she remained untouchable.  If Dr Jonathan were still in the saddle, there is little doubt that, despite her illness, she would have continued to preside over what is without question the most corrupt public sector organisation in Nigeria, and one of the most corrupt anywhere.

    She must be regretting that she did not quit when she was diagnosed with cancer.  That would have earned her a great deal of empathy.  Now, she has to cope with its ravages while attending to the genteel but insistent demands of the police and courts in the UK for information about her time in office.

    The man at the centre of all this, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, has been having a time of his life, especially abroad, garnering  prizes and commendations, overseeing national elections, being toasted and feted as the statesman he aspires to be and the great democrat he never was.

    His stock seemed set to rise and rise and rise until The Economist, that master of the pernicious putdown, dismissed him in its current issue as “an ineffectual buffoon.”

    Ouch.

    That magazine is no longer on my reading list.   I have not held a copy in my hand nor paid more than cursory attention to its online manifestations since August 2002 when, as the Bush Administration was exploring with almost maniacal frenzy just about anything that could furnish a pretext for the invasion of Iraq, it had this banner on its cover:   WE VOTE FOR WAR.

    It would be hard to come up with a more disreputable headline or a more pernicious piece of advocacy than the one laid out under it.  Here you have some privileged white boys sipping tea in their cosy offices in London and with smug complacency, if not sang froid, “voting” for a war to be fought by other people’s children and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers –  a war that will claim tens of thousands of lives, and upended the lives of the millions who survived it

    All for a lie – a transparent lie.

    Given the mindset of the war-mongering US Republican Party and the hawks George W.Bush surrounded himself with, the only question left was when the invasion would start, not if.  The Economist had made their case for war.

    When it dismissed Dr Jonathan as an ineffectual buffoon, it was doing what it does best – the savage putdown.  Jonathan may be ineffectual, but buffoon he ain’t.

    Just wait until he locates that dodgy dissertation, dusts it up and cranks out seminal paper after seminal paper, the type that is sure to guarantee him a Lifetime Achievement Award of the World Congress of Ichthyologists. And if he can make the time to settle down to apply that supple mind and well-honed sense of discrimination to work out the definitive distinction between corruption and stealing, even The Economist will have to admit that it was wrong about him.

    The last time we heard from Labaran Maku, Dr Jonathan’s Minister of Information, he had just been clobbered at the Nassarawa gubernatorial election, which he contested on the platform of the Labour Party, the PDP having disowned him.  He had made his mark in the cabinet by staging jamborees he called Good Governance Tours, during which he ostensibly gauged how each state government was delivering.  Only the PDP states measured up; in Lagos, take away the federal projects and Governor Babatunde Fashola was just an empty barrel, Maku said.

    I cannot yet confirm it, but I hear Maku is planning to get into tourism big-time, drawing on the skills that had served him so well in the Jonathan cabinet.

    When Femi Fani-Kayode, who now wishes to be known and addressed as Olukayode (former documents presumably remaining valid) was warning so stridently the other day that hell would break lose if anything happened to the beleaguered former National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki, someone quipped to my hearing:  E dey talk like person wey don obtain well well.

    Easy, I upbraided the fellow.  The jury is no out yet.

    Meanwhile, I hear he has de-mothballed his wig and gown and re-organised his well-stocked  law library.  Next time Dasuki and some of the more notable suspects appear in court, do not be surprised if you find Fani-Kayode in their corner, decked up in lawyer’s garb and lugging an arsenal of private facts on which he will draw copiously

     

    Did Donald Trump really say that?

    My column for last week (Donald Trump’s delusional world) was based entirely on disparaging remarks the frontrunner for the Republican ticket in November’s U.S. Presidential election was widely reported to have made about Nigeria and Nigerians.

    It sounded very much like what Trump has been saying and could have said.  In journalism, there is a rule of thumb that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.  I had followed that rule and pronounced Trump guilty as charged, without verification.

    I report with regret that I can find no authoritative source for the statement at issue.   It was a brilliant spoof, and I can almost hear its author laughing heartily.

  • Donald Trump’s delusional world

    Donald Trump’s delusional world

    Not a few expatriate Nigerians in the United States have been fretting since Republican Presidential hopeful Donald Trump threatened to send them packing if he wins November’s presidential election.

    “To make America great again, we need to get rid of the Muslims, Mexicans and the Africans, especially the Nigerians,” Trump said. “They take all our jobs, jobs meant for honest hard working Americans, and when we don’t give them the jobs, the Muslims blow us up.”

    This was a new one.  Nigerians as a group had previously figured on his catalogue of bugbears only as crime-prone elements.  And this latest was just a preamble.

    “We need to get the Africans out. Not the blacks, the Africans. Especially the Nigerians,” he elaborated.  They’re everywhere. I went for a rally in Alaska and met just one African in the entire state. Where was he from? Nigeria! He’s in Alaska taking our jobs. They’re in Houston taking our jobs. Why can’t they stay in their own country? Why? I’ll tell you why.

    “Because they are corrupt,” he said to vehement cheering by a predominantly white audience   of some 10, 000 at a rally in Wichita, Kansas.  “Their governments are so corrupt, they rob the people blind and bring it all here to spend. And their people run away and come down here and  take our jobs.  We can’t have that! If I become president, we’ll send them all home. We’ll build a wall at the Atlantic Shore. Then maybe we’ll re-colonise them because obviously they did not learn a damn thing from the British!”

    There you have it, Himself the Donald, the tabloid media personality and cartoon character on the top of his flippant, foul-mouthed, demagogic form.  Do not expect him to do anything differently yet, because what he has been doing so far has served him well.  It has kept him at or near the top of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, supposedly the bellwether of political preference in an election year, and as prohibitive front runner in national polls for the Republican ticket.

    What the statesman and British Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour (1848 – 1930) said of a speech by one of his contemporaries can be said with justice about Trump’s broadside: “There were some things that were true, and some things that were trite; but what was true was trite, and what was not trite was not true.”

    It is true, but trite, that a good many Nigerians are involved in syndicated extortion, credit card fraud and other scams of like nature that a name has even been created for the phenomenon: “The Nigerian Connection.

    Through their own gullibility and credulity and a predilection for reaping where they did not sow, hundreds of Americans have fallen victim to these scams.  In whatever case, it is not proven that Nigerians are more given to criminal activity than other national or sub-national groups in the United States.

    It is true, but trite, that Nigerians are to be found even in Alaska.  They are everywhere trying to earn a decent living like other residents.  Were business or pleasure to take Trump to Greenland and beyond, indeed to the farthest regions of the world inhabited by humans, he will find Nigerians there. That is not a flaw in their character but a tribute to their enterprise, their sense of adventure, their irrepressible spirit.

    It is again true, but trite, that there is much corruption in public life in Nigeria, and that many public officials who have corruptly enriched themselves warehouse their loot in the United States, in the expectation that it will buy them life most abundant.

    Since taking office in May 2015, the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has been  unmasking the corruption that virtually bankrupted Nigeria under Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s  watch, identifying perpetrators in high places, and preparing the ground to bring them to justice. Dasukigate is only the best-known manifestation of this exercise.

    So, it is no news that corruption is a big issue in Nigeria. Nor is it a revelation that major American oil companies – think Halliburton – have over the decades aided and abetted it big-time.

    A good many Nigerians might not be averse to being re-colonised, this time by the United States as Trump said he might do if elected, the British having made a hash of it.  One recalls how, at a very low point — as if there was ever a high point! — in the Second Republic, a tearful Imo State Governor Sam Mbakwe, whom no one ever accused of flippancy, wished the British could be brought back to continue where they had left off.

    Decades earlier, the question was being asked in homes and on the streets:  When will this independence end?  Even now, today, it is not inconceivable that there is still some yearning among some of our compatriots, however muted, for the return of Britannica.

    So it is true, but tiresomely trite, that corruption in Nigeria has assumed industrial proportions. And Trump was all triteness when he hurled his broadsides at Nigeria and Nigerians.  And where he was not trite, he was a peddler of falsehood.

    It is not true and not trite that Nigerians have been taking jobs meant for “honest, hardworking Americans.”  To put it baldly, it is a shameless lie.

     

    What jobs?

    Certainly not the job of healing the sick and tending their wounds and caring for the old and infirm that tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and medical workers who claim Nigerian nationality carry out everyday.

    In the tri-State area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut that Trump is familiar with, the health care delivery system will virtually collapse if the Nigerians he has been denigrating were to pull out.

    The educational establishments from primary school all the way to research universities will   be the poorer without the Nigerians who serve as teachers, administrators, senior faculty and scientists engaged in cutting-edge research.

    There are more Nigerian doctors, more Nigerian engineers and more Nigerian professors  in the United States than in Nigeria.  Virtually all of them earned their places in the system by competition and superior performance, not by “taking away jobs meant for honest, hard-working Americans.”  And they have kept their places in the system the same way – by superior performance.

    Not that it would make any difference to Trump if he knew it, but according to recent research, Nigerians constitute the largest group in the United States with graduate – or post graduate, as we say in Nigeria –degrees.

    These are not your thieves stealing jobs from hard-working Americans.  These are people          who have, through diligent study and application, earned their places under the American sun, a good many of them as American as Trump and Mark Rubio, and more American than the Canadian-born Ted Cruz.

    To those Nigerians out there freaking out about what Trump might do to them in the very unlikely event that he is elected U. S. president, I say: rest easy.  I commend to you President Harry Truman’s commiseration with five-star general and World War II Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, who was about to succeed him in The White House.

    “Poor Ike,” Truman lamented.  “He will give orders, and nothing will happen.”

    If Trump issues arbitrary orders, or pursues any of his other crack-brained ideas, he will find himself blockaded by the system of checks and balances, if not by entrenched interests.  Little will change.  About the only way he or any president for that matter can get anything done on the domestic front – even lofty things — is to tinker around the edges.

    Ask Barack Hussein Obama.

  • Budget 2016: So far, so dodgy

    Budget 2016: So far, so dodgy

    When word came from somewhere in the Senate the other day that the entire 2016 Budget – all N6.08 trillion of it – had gone missing, disappeared, vanished, millions of Nigerians looking up to it for a reprieve from their miseries must have felt as if they had been pole-axed.

    If there is one thing on which all Nigerians are agreed, it is that nothing is impossible in Nigeria.  Still, it was almost inconceivable that such a colossal amount would have vanished in a mere three weeks.  Not even Sani Abacha and the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan Administration in their cumulative profligacy and kleptomania could have made such a colossal sum perform a disappearing act so unceremoniously.

    Much to everybody’s relief, it turned out that only the budget documents were missing – the tome President Muhammadu Buhari had presented to the National Assembly in a sturdy receptacle that looked like the national flag in three dimensions just before the lawmakers left for their umpteenth recess in six months.

    They returned, only to find that the hard copy and the soft copies supposed to have been made for members of the Senate were nowhere to be found.  Dutiful and public-spirited as ever, they raised the alarm:  The budget documents had gone missing.

    Not so, said the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the other chamber of the National Assembly. The documents were intact and available, and members of that chamber were not complaining.

    Still, the word out there was that the budget documents were indeed missing, and public concern shifted to what must have happened to them.

    According to one early theory, Buhari had pulled a 4-1-9 on the National Assembly.  The box he had presented to the Assembly with such critical solemnity on December 22, 2015, so goes the theory, contained no documents at all, only stale air.

    But how then did the House of Representatives come by what they are purporting to be Budget 2016 documents.   Were they forgeries, like Standing Orders 2015 “as amended”?

    Another theory posited that Olisa Metuh must have in a fit of petulant rage eaten up the documents.  But why did he consume only the copies meant for the Senate and spare those meant for the House of Representatives?  Plus, no one can eat up hundreds of pages and not succumb to terminal dyspepsia in the process.

    According to yet another theory, following the mugging the Budget proposals suffered in the news media, Buhari had surreptitiously spirited away the documents, reworked them and returned them to the National Assembly in like manner.

    Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters, Ita Enang, seems to have rendered this theory plausible when he declined to address forthrightly the charge that the documents had been doctored, saying instead that the kerfuffle was “sensitive” and that both sides were working toward a resolution.

    Nor did federal officials refute this theory when they described the controversy over the Budget offhand as a “distraction “and “a storm in a tea-cup.”

    What is “sensitive” about a public document, the contents of which have been analysed in the news media and discussed and debated on dozens of various platforms?  Why were Enang and other federal officials less than forthcoming on the matter?

    In whatever case, why would Buhari withdraw the Budget documents surreptitiously when he can with a formal letter to the National Assembly change, modify or disavow altogether any request he may have placed before it?  After all, the Budget is a work in progress.

    Meanwhile, the Senate decided to take all the guessing and grandstanding out of the matter and directed its Committee on Ethics and Privileges to ascertain what really was the matter with Budget 2016.

    The Committee has since “revealed” that the Budget papers were not really missing, only that there were “two versions” before the Senate.  One version has been christened the Enang Budget, and the other one credited to Buhari.

    But not before the story of the dodgy budget had made the headlines and front pages of the news media across the world and gone viral on social media.  And not before Nigerians had lampooned it as only Nigerians can.

    One comment doing the rounds on YouTube, with a picture of a man clutching a pile of akara wrapped in paper went thus:

    “If you buy suya, akara or guguru, please crosscheck the (wrapping) papers to avoid eating our 2016 Budget.”

    You hear, all ye patrons of roadside food vendors.

    Another had a picture of stern looking armed security officials rummaging in cluttered office:  Cutline:  ”DSS raids Metuh’s office in search of missing budget.”

    Another comment, entirely pictorial, shows two men peering intently into a sewer, hoping  they might find the missing budget in the murky stench.

    Yet another comment showed a long line of men trying to push a passenger down on its side. Caption:  ”Don’t joke about this missing Budget O.  They have checked the National Assembly.  Now we are in Agege searching under buses.”

    Another comment shows Buhari and Vice- President Osinbajo in a lounge chair as they laughed  mirthfully, with Osinbajo proclaiming triumphantly, “We don play them.”  To which a certain BGIS (who is he?) responded, “Dem go find budget taya.  Oya, go edit am.”

    Then, there is this evocative one showing Buhari in a white robe, hands clasped in supplication; the bubble from his mouth has him saying, in lamentation: “These people have come again o.  They stole my certificate.  Now they have stolen my Budget.”

    One picture shows three rams, two of them chewing on opposite ends of a large piece of paper.  ”Buhari,” one of the goats said in a manner both mocking and taunting, “If you want your Budget, you can come have it.”

    Amidst all the theories, the declarations and the declamations and the proclamations, the best available information – I am here taking the Senate Committee on Ethics (ha!) and Rules (ha! ha) on trust, which is a risky thing to do – the best available information is that there are at least two versions of the Budget document.

    Maybe we will know in the days ahead how one version differs from the other, the discrepancies and interpolations that have been discovered between the two.

    The National Budget is fundamentally a political instrument.  It often conceals at least as much as it reveals, and implementation always falls short of intent; in sum, there is always an element of dodginess to it.

    Budget 2016 is no different.  The Executive Branch and the legislative Branch are locked in dodgy games of their own, even before debate has commenced in earnest.  When it eventually gets under way, the debate must not turn out to be one long exercise in dodginess.

    By the way, have you heard that the Constitution has also gone missing?

     

    • This piece was written before it was reported that President Buhari has formally revised his Budget proposals.
  • First Draft: A Manual for these times

    First Draft: A Manual for these times

    Two weeks into the year, chances are that 13 per cent of those who made solemn resolutions of the ameliorative kind will have defaulted or given up altogether.

    If you belong in this group, do not despair. Your ranks will swell and swell, and by year’s end, encompass the vast majority–90 per cent, according those who keep such records—of all those who made New Year resolutions.

    And then, it will be time for another round of resolutions.

    Making a vow at a stroke past midnight on December 31 gives it an extra snap.  The person behind the vow is saying that he or she is set to forsake the old habits of the year that has passed irretrievably and to embrace new, better, healthier, and altogether more agreeable habits.

    But you need not wait until a minute past midnight on December 31 before entering into new vows.  You can make your resolution on a whim, on the spur of the moment any day of the week or month of the year, and it would not be a whit less significant than a New Year resolution.

    It may help, but you need not wait for one year to flow seamlessly into another before you resolve to give up smoking, a lifestyle change that is far less difficult than is generally supposed.

    Ask Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to the world as Mark Twain.

    “Giving up smoking is easy,” the great writer declared.   “I have done it a thousand times.”  Maybe you have, too, with respect to drinking.  I certainly have found losing weight and giving up procrastination exceedingly easy, because I have done both at least a thousand times.

    With regard to giving up procrastination, I have been greatly assisted by the musings of the English writer Jerome K Jerome, who said he loved work so much that he always made sure he saved some for the next day.  Plus, you can always bask in the conceit, as many of us in the league of procrastinators do, that some of our best work comes from having our backs to the wall.

    Dasukigate has gone down as a benchmark in the annals of sleaze even before its dimensions  are revealed in full.  Not surprisingly, some well-connected sources tell me, it has spawned a raft of resolutions among the attentive audience, especially among members of the political and mercantile classes implicated in its breath-taking depredations.

    What follows is a summary of binding resolutions passed unanimously at emergency caucuses of the attentive audiences, aforementioned.  I see it as the first draft of a Manual for these times.

    At one caucus, all present and voting solemnly resolved, individually and collectively, never to treat voluntarily or involuntarily with the Office of the National Security Adviser, but to report to the appropriate authorities any invitation from that Office or any of its agents to discuss any issue whatsoever, and to seek a perpetual injunction barring that Office or any of its functionaries from inviting any member of the caucus, their relation or servant for any purpose whatsoever.

    At another caucus, all present and participating resolved firmly and irrevocably to run away as fast as their legs can carry them from any place, forum or institution where “obtaining” is going on or rumoured to be going on, and to proceed therefrom to report the matter to the nearest magistrate.  For the avoidance of doubt, the caucus pledged to subject to the same treatment any place or forum or institution that has the potential to cater to obtainers, however slight.

    At yet another caucus, it was unanimously resolved that if the usual people were to bring in a sack of money, it would be dead on arrival unless it came with forensic evidence of its source.  And that is just for a start.   Other questions will follow.  What is it meant for? How much is in there, and in what currencies?  Why was it brought there, and not sent to another forum?

    The caucus will insist on detailed and precise instructions on disbursement, who gets how much, and for what purpose.  If the caucus is satisfied that the money is from a legitimate source and is designed to be spent for a legitimate purpose, it will ask the courier to take the sack away and bring it back at an appointed date.

    On that day, with all those named on the distribution list present, the money will be shared out. Each taker will issue a receipt.  The caucus will keep the originals and send copies through the courier to the source.

    Another caucus laid down strict guidelines for any public official desirous of staging a reception in honour of its members.  The host will be required to swear to an affidavit stating how much will be spent on the event, and where the money is coming from, plus a detailed account of the foods to be provided and the cost per serving, the year the wines on offer were bottled, the cost of each sip, and the average number of sips per bottle.

    These measures, the caucus says, are designed to pre-empt a situation in which, long after the event, the guest is informed that the four-course meal at the banquet added up to $100 per serving, and that each sip of the vintage wine was worth $100, and that the hosts expected the beneficiary and his crowd to do the needful.

    Yet another caucus resolved that if any government agency wants to profit from the expertise of its members, it must furnish a letter of interest spelling out the exact nature of the expertise, what it is required for, and how it will be applied.  And it will accept no payment outside the agreed terms, which will have been duly certified as reasonable by the appropriate agency.

    The caucus says its members will not allow themselves to be flattered into believing that their “advice,” however recondite its basis and however efficacious, is in monetary terms worth more than the combined annual pay of 200 university professors.

    Another caucus has solemnly resolved that if any of its members found some footloose money in his or her account, whether it is N400 million or even N4, the person should raise the alarm, demand to know how it landed there, when, through whom, and in respect of what transaction.

    The culture of “donations” came up at a meeting of another caucus.  The members resolved never to solicit or accept any donation from any ministry, department or agency for any cause whatsoever, persuaded that the fear of donations from officialdom is the beginning of political wisdom.   Any donation made in a public cause despite this declaration will be publicly acknowledged and maintained in proper custody, the caucus emphasised.

    It remains to conclude this interim report with related developments in the spiritual sphere.  Members attending this particular caucus noted that while some among them possess the gift of prophecy and can work miracles with prayer, they will no longer demand or accept a “spiritual allowance” or prayer money for their intercession.  Otherwise, they say, the whole thing will become indistinguishable from charlatanism.

    That resolve is laudable indeed, considering that charlatanism sells big-time in Nigeria.

  • Thoughts on Budget 2016

    Thoughts on Budget 2016

    It is that time of year again, the release of the Federal Budget proposals, when we all become economists, at least for the three or four weeks that the plan dominates public discourse.

    And why not?

    After all we buy and sell and make and consume, and we are all subject to the vagaries of the Market which, to misquote Emerson, is in the saddle and rides all mankind.  And there are those who would argue that, in a literal rather than technical sense, homo economicus is no less  a plausible creature than homo sapiens.

    If the statesman who led France through World War 1, Georges Clemenceau, had not said memorably that war is far too important to be left to the generals, another wise man would surely have laid it down with greater truth that economics is far too important to be left to the economists.

    But don’t say that to the hearing of professional economists who have turned what used to be the engaging discipline of political economy into one of the most arcane specialisms, often involving facility with figures on a level with particle physicists; it is all equations and equations and graphs upon graphs and probabilities upon probabilities, not forgetting ceteris paribus.

    Maybe that is why real economists do not take it kindly when dilettantes, to say nothing of lay people and even market women, presume to comment on the economy, a point made most eloquently by Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, the embattled Minister of Finance of the Babangida regime when the nation was debating the wisdom or unwisdom of taking a huge loan from the IMF that came booby-trapped with a Structural Adjustment Programme.

    If Kalu had his way, something tells me that he would have made possession of a doctorate in economics from the world’s most prestigious academies the minimum qualification for participating in that debate.

    He was never so incensed, I gather, as when one Bamako Jaji, obviously no economist, clinically took the whole SAP edifice apart in an op-ed piece for The Guardian titled “Against Kalunomics.”  The Minister inquired frantically about the true name and identity of Bamako Jaji, aforementioned, with a view to challenging him to a public debate, and engaging him in single combat if that did not settle the matter.

    “Bamako Jaji,” it is now safe to reveal, is none other than our own Biodun Jeyifo, who turns 70 this week.  Congratulations, BJ, and welcome to the Club.

    As I was saying before I landed myself in a labyrinth of digressions, this is the time when we all pivot on the much awaited federal budget proposals to sound off as economists and experts in matters fiscal.  Although it is no more than a statement of intent that is more often honoured in the breach than in the observance, we invest it with the power of the accomplished fact.  We take the deed for the intent.  Thus, in Babangida’s time, it was not unusual to celebrate the release of the budget estimates with a sumptuous state banquet.

    The hysterical Olisa Metuh, publicity secretary of the discredited PDP who is reportedly due   to keep a date soon with the EFCC in the investigation of charges related to obtainment, has predictably dismissed the 2016 Budget proposals as a fraud and a scheme to enslave Nigerians of the present and future generations.

    I will steer the middle ground between the reflex exultation of the Babangida years and the schizoid denunciation that is Metuh’s trademark.

    Given the steady attenuation of the Naira, it is a wonder that estimated expenditure came out in billions rather googols (a googol is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros).  And if you factor in the declining fortunes of the Naira and the rate of inflation, officially put at a very conservative 9.3 per cent, the increase in this year’s expenditure over the previous year’s at a time of shrinking revenues is understandable.

    Nearly one-third of the estimated expenditure is going to be borrowed.  At first blush, this seems unwise, even profligate.  Why not simply live within your means?

    It depends on what the borrowed funds are used for.  If you borrow to eat, to finance consumption, you are sowing the seeds of future economic and social turmoil.  But if you borrow to finance projects that will create jobs and stimulate demand, if your borrowing is an investment in the future, you are sowing the seeds of prosperity. Borrowing outside this framework should be discouraged.

    President Buhari was therefore right to have taken a dim view of the Senate’s outrageous proposal to buy luxury American-specification SUVs – no Dubai-assembled vehicles, please, for each of its 109 members for oversight committee duties, and to replace the 10-vehicle convoy of its president with exotica of the same vintage, at cost of N4.7 billion.

    It is unfeeling, and downright provocative at a time when the authorities in a great many of their constituencies are saying that they can no longer afford to pay the anaemic minimum monthly wage N18,000, which they have never paid regularly anyway.

    What happened to the last set of vehicles purchased for oversight work? Where is their conscience, their empathy?  Is being a ward of the state their idea of public service?

    By the same reasoning, the President should disavow the plan to buy a fleet of luxury cars for his senior officials who are guaranteed loans to buy their own vehicles, plus generous allowances for maintaining them.

    And he should also raise serious questions on the plan to spend N5 billion for official residences for the vice president, the Senate president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives.  What happened to the official residences built for the last holders of those offices? Will the  government embark on this kind of construction each time new people take over these offices?

    It has to be said that the President’s Economic Team – who are the members, by the way? – did him and the APC a bad turn in the way it approached a Budget designed to launch their agenda of Change. The team seems to have used previous budget proposals as their template, adding millions of Naira here and shaving off millions there, instead of determining whether an expenditure is warranted in the first place.

    Only that approach can explain why new expenditures are now being proposed on kitchenware and cookware as were presumably expended in the budget for the previous year and the year before that on those very items, and on computers, exotic birds for the Aso Villa lawns, and so on and so forth.

    What kind of kitchenware and cookware and computer hardware is it that has to b e replaced every year?

    There is perhaps no greater task before the Buhari Administration than tamping down youth unemployment.  As is the case with almost every aspect of Nigerian life, including the national population, reliable figures are hard to come by. When government officials who have a vested interest in keeping appearances rosy claim that as many as 25 per cent of young Nigerians are unemployed or underemployed, the chances are that the actual figure is around 40 per cent.

    Neither figure is good for the nation’s health.  The plan to employ 500,000 teachers during the fiscal year is to be commended, but only as a start.  In recent years, not much attention has been given to adult and non-formal education on the one hand, and on the other hand to continuing education, the type that helps the newly literate stay literate.  Vocational training has also been neglected.

    Programmes designed for these ends can open up at least another 500,000 teaching jobs all over the country and sustain a book publishing industry that will open up still more jobs.

    A highly literate population with matching skills is a prime national asset, and few will contest the wisdom and indeed the imperative of investing in it.

  • A lawyer’s call, and a scare

    A lawyer’s call, and a scare

    Of the columns that have appeared in this space every Tuesday this year, one in particular clings in my memory, but not on account of its impact, the controversy that trailed it, and the abuse and curses rained on me by readers who felt disappointed or displeased.

    I remember it clearly because, of all the things I have written recently in this line of business, it came closest to giving me a scare,

    A call had come from the office in Lagos asking whether my phone number should be released to Alhaji Femi Okunnu (SAN), who had asked to talk with me.

    Now, it isn’t everyday a Senior Advocate of Nigeria wants to talk with you.  I have more than a nodding acquaintance with a few of them, from long before they found fame and fortune.  Okunnu was not one of them.

    I had known him from a distance since 1964 when he was a dashing young lawyer who cruised about Lagos in a Volkswagen Beetle.  His trademark goatee meshed with a luxuriant crop of hair parted on the left and his horn-rimmed glasses to project an engaged person marked for the leadership ranks of the Nigerian Left.

    The last time I met him was in 1994.  He had come to Rutam House to thank The Guardian for breaking the Osborne Foreshore scandal.  In the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida, prime real estate reclaimed from sea at public expense was secretly parcelled out among the regime’s cronies and clients.

    You knew that this was no ordinary development because, well before the plots were laid out, paved roads and arteries and drainage had been constructed on the site.  Underground electricity cables had been laid and street lamps set in place, aglow with fluorescent lighting day and night.  And this was at a time when even some of the finest residential neighbourhoods had to put up with epileptic power supply.

    Naming names, The Guardian had demanded that the allotments be revoked.  The Lagos State government and some powerful influences in Lagos pivoted on the paper’s reporting to challenge the acquisition of the site and the allotments at law.  Okunnu, I believe, was their lead attorney.

    They won in the court of first instance.  Several days later, Okunnu was in Rutam House, at the head of a delegation, to thank The Guardian.  But this was a time of utter lawlessness in Nigeria, when the regime routinely ousted the jurisdiction of the courts and even rendered the African Charter of Human and People’s Rights nugatory.

    The authorities simply consecrated the theft under another subterfuge.

    That was 1994.  But here we are, some 21 years later, and at my base in central Illinois, I get a message that Okunnu would like to talk with me.

    Before responding I did some quick thinking.  I pulled up my recent submissions and went through them.  Nothing I had written could have moved anyone to retain a senior attorney to  seek compensation for injuries.   My breathing regained its rhythm.

    But it was a Tuesday.  Could it be that my column for that day was the problem?

    Titled “An unwelcome visitor,” it was about Tony Blair,  also known as “Phony Tony,” the former British prime minister who confected a dossier that helped build a case for the American-led invasion and destruction of Iraqi in which Blair had, in the face of strong opposition from his fellow Labour parliamentarians and public opinion, led Britain to prosecute enthusiastically as the major ally of the United States..

    I had written that, in a just world, Blair would be standing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not gallivanting all over the globe as a money-grubbing lobbyist, and certainly not featuring as keynote speaker in the workshop that the APC had organised on the eve of taking office to identify its priorities and firm up its agenda.

    Strong words, I grant.  Had Tony Blair by any chance briefed Okunnu to institute a defamation lawsuit against me on account of those words?  If that was the case, I had every reason to breathe easier still.

    If it came to that, I would plead justification – that the publication was essentially truthful

    If that seemed risky, I would urge my attorneys to press the court to adopt the ruling in the case of New York Times v Sullivan, which makes it all but impossible for any public official or public figure to recover for injury to reputation unless such persons can prove that the publication was made with “actual malice,” meaning that its author or publisher not only knew that the material was false, but had gone on to publish it with reckless disregard to its falsity.

    Very few plaintiffs ever win under this standard, not even if the publication contained some material errors.

    Satisfied that I was in no danger of being shafted by a multi-million Naira  lawsuit by the hubristic Tony Blair, I called Okunnu.

    “Tunji,” he said with avuncular familiarity.  “How are you?”

    “I am fine, sir,” I responded.

    “I have seen your article in The Nation,” he said.

    For the next 30 seconds or so – it had seemed like an eternity – he said nothing.

    I began to get that sinking feeling.  Could it be that he was telegraphing that this was not going to be a friendly encounter?

    “I have seen your article,” he resumed.  “But I have not read it.”

    There was cause for relief there.  If he had not read the article, he could not have concluded that only a multi-million Naira defamation lawsuit could even begin to repair the damage it might have inflicted on his client

    Okunnu told me how he had called Lai Mohammed, the publicity secretary (as he then was) of the APC and asked what in the world could have led them to bring in Tony Blair, of all persons, to feature as a keynote speaker at the party’s transition workshop.  Lai Mohammed had then told him that I had made essentially the same point in my column.  He had then decided to save it for later reading, but not before talking with me.

    He went on to give me a run-down of all the acts and omissions that transformed Blair from one of the most admired figures in British and international politics to one of the most despised.   He brought  up the latest developments at the Chilcot Commission looking into Britain’s role in the Iraq war

    My column had captured much of what he said, and I told him that if he had not read it, he needed not do so since it contained nothing he did not know. He was enormously well informed.

    The discussion ended on a far more amiable note than I had expected.  I promised to call on him during my next visit to Lagos.

    Tony Blair, I should add, did not show up the following day at the event he was supposed to headline.  He had slunk away in the night, and his place was taken by Peter Mandelson, who had held senior cabinet positions under Blair.  A devoted follower of this column told me months later that, after reading the Blair piece, he had wagered that Blair would not show up.  He won the wager.

    As I reviewed the day’s encounter my mind went back to the Femi Okunnu of the 1960s and his friend and Hull University contemporary Tayo Akpata and their left-wing activism, and to their sudden lurch to the Right during the military regime of General Yakubu Gowon.

    How did the Left lose the twain, and their collaborators in The Committee of Ten?