If the state governors due to vacate power and office next year, Yahaya Bello of Kogi is sure to claim to be the most accomplished.

The record is clear.

He made the environment so forbidding to the coronavirus Covid-19 that the infernal pathogen was reduced to circulating over, above, under, and around Kogi as if kept in orbit by some geomagnetic force but could never come close even tangentially.

The marauders whose cattle devastated farmlands while they laid entire villages to do waste, killing and maiming and kidnapping the residents, are nothing if not discerning.  Yahaya Bello’s Kogi was off-limits.  They knew, even without being told, that to cross the line he had drawn around the territory. was to court annihilation.

He had intimidated public servants into accepting, with gratitude, that payment of one-third of a smaller fraction of their salaries into the bank accounts every month or whenever the spirit moved him amounted to full discharge of the state’s obligations.

He had conquered teachers, nurses, doctors, lawyers, trade unionists, political opponents, and all such types, reducing them to self-pitying onlookers, fawning proxies, and groveling accomplices.

Under him, the state legislature became a reptile assembly and a rubber stamp.

The tat-tat-tat rhythm of gunfire that perfused his pronouncements large and small left little room for doubt about the fate that awaited anyone who would dare to question or countermand his authority.

But the time to vacate his all-conquering perch was fast approaching.  Time to render an account of his stewardship.  Sooner rather than later, all the jiggery-pokery would be exposed.  What everyone had long suspected would come to light:   The treasury was empty.

And there was pretty little to show for all the reports about foreign investors and industrialists whose technological and entrepreneurial wizardry had transformed Kogi’s land mass into the richest and most productive terrain in the world, square kilometre for square kilometre.

All adversaries had been vanquished, and all opposition crushed. But it must never be said that Yahaya Bello bequeathed an empty treasury to his successor and his people.   So, even as the River Niger swelled and raged and threatened to overwhelm, action was indicated elsewhere, urgently.

Hadn’t the flooding Niger wrought greater havoc last year and the year before?  And hadn’t everyone adjusted and moved on?  They would do so again.  The floods will always be with us anyway; far better to face a greater menace.

To be sure, the treasury was never full.  At its least flaccid, it held just about enough juice to sustain the appearance of liquidity.   Bello had frittered away its anaemic contents in a campaign   to actualize a hare-brained Presidential ambition, which he promoted as “God’s plan for Nigeria.”

As the evangelicals would say, God was not mocked.  The campaign never got off the ground. But reflating the treasury could no longer be delayed.

Kogi’s authorities had jousted with Africa’s wealthiest businessman, Aliko Dangote, over sundry matters relating to the cement industry, the crown jewel of the mogul’s far-flung business empire located in Obajana, near Lokoja, the state capital.

Now it was time to bring Dangote to heel and the mogul and his business interests to the casualty list of the little napoleon who, it would appear, lives each day haunted and taunted and perhaps even inspired by the ghost of Frederick Lugard, the former imperial resident of those precincts. Time, also, to reflate the treasury.

An extortion scheme, of which our syndicated kidnappers are sure to take note, was underway.

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Dispatch a batallion of thugs to shut down and seize the plant, under a dubious claim of ownership, injuring workers and damaging equipment and machinery in the process – thugs from perhaps the same outfit that had vandalized the Federal Medical Centre, Lokoja, and destroyed medical records of Covid patients whose existence Yahaya Bello had vigorously disputed.

That incident was never investigated.  No arrests were ever made, and no persons were ever charged.  So, who is going to work up a fuss over the storming, by Kogi stalwarts, of a plant “owned’ by Kogi State?

Get the state legislature – the reptile assembly aforementioned — to issue a proclamation divesting Dangote of any claim to the plant and ancillary assets and vesting same in the Kogi State Government.

Just like that.  Without fear and without research. They had received their orders from Himself the Executive Governor Yahaya Bello.  What authority could be greater or more reassuring?

Bello’s Man Friday, Kingsley Fanwo, who doubles as Kogi’s commissioner for information, has framed the issue as a struggle by the people of Kogi to recover their stolen endowment, to deploy it for the benefit of the people.

Hear him:

“This struggle is not about governor Yahaya Bello or his administration. It is about the people of Kogi State. In the last 72 hours, well-meaning Nigerians, leaders and government officials have waded in and have pleaded with the governor to consider reopening the plant while discussions are ongoing.

“The expectations of the over 4 million Kogites are clear and high and we want to assure them that the governor and the government of Kogi State will not compromise the interest of the people of the state to reclaim their rights in the cement company.

“We shall be non-violent in our approach as we are sure of green pathways to success for the people in this battle for the economic future of our dear state.

“However, we maintain that the collective assets of the people of Kogi state must be protected and reclaimed in this instance. And that is the process the government has started. We will fight this battle to the end until we get justice from the courts. No committee can resolve this dispute.”

If Fanwo and his principal believed in the rule of law and had any faith in the competence of the courts to resolve the dispute, why the violent rush to self-help?  Why the brigandage? Why proceed, based on the report of a commission of inquiry empanelled by one of the parties to the dispute, without the benefit of a dispassionate review by a third party?

As it is, the state government made the charges, investigated them, pronounced judgment, and rushed to enforcement, without the benefit of judicial review.  The whole thing was incestuous through and through.  What would they have lost by following due process?

I gather Kogi State has an attorney-general, who is listed as a member of its Executive Council. What part did he play in this dispute?  Why is it that it is the commissioner for information, not the attorney-general, that is speaking on behalf of the government on a dispute that has arcane matters of law at its core?

It was like that during Covid, when official pronouncements on the plague came from the information commissioner or the secretary to the state government, never from the health commissioner or the director of medical services.  It was as if the state had no medical professionals qualified to help steer the state through the pandemic.

The State Assembly is a house of law.  What law empowers it to shut even a roadside kiosk without due process, let alone a business that is the largest employer in the state and one of the biggest sources of its internally-generated revenue?

If Kogi has been swindled by Dangote Cement as it claims, the forum for adjudication is the court of law.  Kogi has not demonstrated respect for, and faith in, the due process of law enjoined by our avowed commitment to democracy.

As for Yahaya Bello, it is probably too late for him to learn to conduct himself with civility and decorum.  But he should spare the public his infantile tantrums during what remains of the accidental governorship he owes to the naiveté of the former leadership of the APC National Executive, the scheming of a Federal Attorney-General beholden hegemonic calculations of those who claim to be custodians of the North’s interests, and the cold complicity of the courts.

When the story of Celestine Omehia‘s political career comes to be written, reversals of fortune will have to be its central theme – reversals that range from the stunningly affirming to the utterly crushing.

The stunningly affirming occurred on April 14, 2007, when he was declared winner of the Rivers State gubernatorial election which, according to the best authorities, was marred by massive vote rigging and widespread violence.

The election tribunal reaffirmed, and for 166 days, from May 29 through October 23, 2007, Celestine Omehia was the Executive Governor of Rivers State, lord and master of almost all he surveyed in The Treasure Base of the Nation.

Omehia became governor through a corruption of power not uncommon in this clime.

Rotimi Amaechi had, as they say here, emerged from the gubernatorial primary of the PDP as its candidate.  But the PDP’s grandees chose to substitute the wisdom of the electors with their   prejudice.  They stripped Amaechi of his victory at the primaries, claiming that he had been indicted on corruption charges and thus rendered ineligible for the race.

Then they proceeded to fill the vacancy they had created with Omehia. Thus was Omehia translated from failed gubernatorial aspirant to His Excellency the Executive Governor of Rivers State.

It all lasted166 days that were anything but blissful, despite the lavish perks and perquisites.

Then, in its confounding forensic wisdom, the Supreme Court voided the election on which Omehia’s tenure had subsisted, with all seven justices concurring.  Omehia was not a valid candidate for the election, it held. The valid candidate was Rotimi Amaechi, who had won the PDP gubernatorial primary but was wrongfully excluded from the substantive poll. The court ordered that Amaechi be sworn in immediately

And for the two terms that Amaechi served as Rivers State governor, Omehia languished in the political wilderness.

Fast toward to May 2015 when the able and combustible perpetual-motion machine they call Nyesom Wike succeeded Amaechi. While Amaechi was in power and in office, the PDP grandees who had connived to foist Omehia on the electorate as the party’s gubernatorial candidate could not reverse the Supreme Court’s decision voiding Omehia’s purported election.

Any resolution to that effect would have been dead on arrival.  Amaechi would have vetoed it at the threshold.

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With Wike now in the saddle, they did the next best thing: they moved the State Assembly to pass a resolution mandating the exchequer to resume paying Omehia his statutory entitlements as if he were still the state’s executive governor.

Not one to dither and prevaricate and waffle in the face of a resolution of the state’s lawmakers assembled, Governor Barrister Nyesom Wike duly assented.  The people as legislature had spoken – the same people who had stripped Amaechi of his victory at the primary.

There the matter rested until last week when, in a breath-taking volte-face, the state House of Assembly ordered Omehia to refund the monies he had received while enjoying the perks and perquisites of a serving executive governor after ceasing to occupy that office in fact and in law, the latter prerogative having been bestowed on Amaechi by the highest court in the land.

The refund came to N600 million by way of pay and benefits, plus N97 million by way of pension.  Not a Naira more and not a Naira less.  The state’s accountant-general had figured it out.  No doubt from fellow feeling, they did not add the interest due, as the exchequer would have done if bureaucratic considerations pure and simple were at play.

The State Assembly said the learned attorney-general had advised it that the status it had conferred on Omehia was extra-judicial, and that it had no power to change the judgment of any court of law, let alone that of the Supreme Court.

Wike assented within 24 hours, based, he stated, on his “abiding respect for any resolution” passed by the State Assembly. The House, he explained, had reviewed the matter based on the “better information” at its disposal.

And so, there he was the other day, in front of television cameras, signing the law “de-recognising” or “de-listing” Omehia as a former governor of the state, red pen wedged between his right-hand index finger and middle finger, as an aide dutifully indicated the dotted lines.

The querulous are saying that Wike had confected this vengeful outcome to punish Omehia for allowing himself to be suspected of harbouring sympathies for Wike’s bête noire, PDP presidential candidate Abubakar Atiku who, having regard to Wike’s volcanic temperament, had declined to make him his running mate, despite a showing in the primaries that was second only to Atiku’s.

Pure slander, says Wike.  He had at all times been actuated and will always be actuated by an abiding commitment to rule of law

Perfusing this tale is the reckless disregard for consequences with which Nigerians in public life make shabby compromises.

All the main actors are trained lawyers.  Omehia took a Bachelor of Arts degree in law from Manchester Polytechnic, Manchester, in the UK, in1984.  The following year, he earned an LLM in international law from the University of Hull, also in the UK.  On his return to Nigeria, he engaged extensively in corporate law practice and litigation.

Between 1991 and 1997, he served as an adjunct lecturer in law at the Rivers State University of Science and Technology.

Thus, Omehia was better equipped than most not merely to be wary when they substituted him for Amaechi who had won the PDP gubernatorial primary, but to reject it as an unlawful proceeding.  And when the State Assembly voted to continue paying his salary and allowances even though he had become functus officio, he should have realized that it was conferring a benefit that it had no power to confer any more than he had a right to enjoy.

But Omehia pocketed the gift as his special due.

The Rivers State House of Assembly is a law-making body whose powers are spelled out in the law establishing it.  Many of its members are trained lawyers.  Its remit does not include offering statutory benefits to persons not recognized by the state’s public service. Only the most egregious contempt for the law could have led the House to act in that manner.

And while all this was going on, where was the state’s attorney-general and chief law officer?  Did he warn that the House was embarking on a usurpation and a dangerous precedent?  If they rejected his counsel, did he not feel obliged, as an officer of the law, to resign rather than condone its flagrant breach?

Governor Nyesom Wike, who assented to the usurpation, is a trained lawyer and barrister.  Could he not see then that, in so doing, he was sanctioning illegality and violating his oath of office?

And now, they all seek exculpation, insisting that if they are to be blamed for anything, it is for their fidelity to the rule of law. Wike in particular claims that the volte-face had nothing to do with Omehia’s unwillingness to take Wike’s side in Wike’s feud with Atiku.

They should tell it to the sharks.

This being Nigeria, I fear that this may not go down as the cautionary tale it ought to be.

If Omehia signals to Wike’s camp today that he has become a convert to Wike’s cause, something tells me that Wike’s implacable heart will melt quickly.  He will cause to be de-recognised the law through which Omehia was de-recognised as a serving governor, with all the benefits appertaining, and thus ensure that Omehia is restored to favour and full credit.

And the entire process will be televised, in keeping with Wike’s abiding commitment to the rule of law and transparency.

Nigeria is a planner’s waking nightmare.

Back in 1966, the American economist, Dr. Wolfgang Stolper, on secondment from USAID to help prepare Nigeria’s First National Development Plan (1962-68), accented the difficulty of the task with a book appropriately titled “Planning without Facts.”

Forty-six years later, in September 2013, the World Bank Country Director for Nigeria, Marie-Françoise Marie-Nelly, warned during a workshop in Lagos for statisticians that there could be no meaningful development or evaluation of national strategies without quality statistics to identify socio-economic challenges.

Little changed with regard to the availability of reliable facts in the nearly five decades intervening, and since 2013 when this preface to the present submission was first published.

The nation’s planners have continued to draw up plans on practically every aspect of national life without facts — without even knowing how many people they are planning for, nor how they are constituted.

The point of departure for serious national planning is the population census.  That is the body of data – the sampling frame – from which field investigators draw up a representative sample for the kind of study and analysis that will make it possible for them to apply their findings to the general population with confidence.

But nobody knows the population of Nigeria to the nearest 25 million. Since the 1950s, the population census has been padded, for political reasons. Instead of rectifying the errors of the preceding census, every subsequent census has reinforced and even amplified them. Each census has been in effect an exercise in programmed inflation.

That is why few things work in Nigeria the way they are designed to work. To be sure, corruption and incompetence play a large part in the national dysfunction, but the dearth of reliable facts and figures must also be counted as a major contributory factor.

Take as an example the oil industry, the lifeblood of the economy. Nobody knows how much oil is extracted from our waters or shores. In 1980, Professor Ayodele Awojobi, the University of Lagos polymath, discovered that the barrel used for lifting oil in Nigeria was four gallons larger than the standard barrel. The situation may well have been rectified, but the fact remains that nobody knows how much oil is actually lifted

When they say that as much as one-fourth of Nigeria’s oil output is stolen, that is just guesswork based on guesswork.

Just as nobody knows how much oil is extracted, nobody knows how much oil is consumed. During one of the perennial oil ‘subsidy’ debates, the defunct NNPC and the Department of Petroleum Resources gave wildly different figures for national daily consumption.

Without reliable data, it follows that, if the consumption of petroleum products is indeed being subsidized, it is impossible to calculate the amount of subsidy. Yet a trainload of projects is usually rolled out, to be funded with the money that would be realized from cutting the alleged subsidy.

Hardly a day passes without one official or another declaring with certitude how many billions would accrue to the federal exchequer from ending subsidies on rice or wheat flour or cement or sugar or poultry imports, and how many billion tons of cassava or rice would be harvested in the next season as a result of improved seedlings provided by the government.

Whenever they put out the inflation rate, you have to ask: “In what country do these people live?” For, the figure bears almost no correspondence to the experience of the people. And it is not unusual for two government agencies to supply different figures for the rate of unemployment, each of them guesswork at best.

It all goes back to the absence of reliable census data, and no reliable sampling frame without which it is impossible to draw a probabilistic sample – one in which every member of the population has an equal chance of being represented.

In the absence of such a sample, it is impossible to conduct meaningful public opinion polls in Nigeria.  But that has not stopped the news media from sponsoring or conducting opinion polls and publicizing the results, especially during the election season.

Be sceptical when you encounter reports of opinion polls conducted on Nigerian soil on any aspect of Nigerian life.  Be very sceptical when the report comes dressed in the jargon of psephology.

I am reminded of one notorious instance in which a newspaper lavishly published “exit polls” on an election that was yet to be held. In another instance, the forecast for the presidential election published by the same newspaper, in conjunction with a foreign polling agency that refused to submit its methodology to scrutiny, was matched in every particular by the outcome.

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But given the flawed sampling frame on which the Nigerian poll was based, it was perfectly justifiable to infer, as many commentators did, that the election had been determined, and the task before the pollsters and the newspaper was to fix their findings to that result.

The entry on the Nigerian scene in 2011 of NOIPolls (NOI as in former Finance Minister and current World Trade Organization president Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala) in partnership with Gallup US promised to improve the climate and practice opinion polling in the country.

Dr. Goodluck Jonathan must have been heartened by the NOIPolls findings in its August 2013 poll that six of every 10 Nigerians (the actual figure was 57 percent) approved his job performance, up four points from the previous month, and the highest since January 2013.

Not bad for a month marked by tumult within the ruling PDP, a nationwide strike by university teachers, and killings on an industrial scale by the Boko Haram

Jonathan and his supporters would most certainly have been surprised, however, by the counter-intuitive findings that his approval was strongest not in his South-South redoubt (66 percent), but in the South East (76 percent), followed by the North-Central (70 percent).

In its most recent outing commissioned by banker and democracy campaigner Atedo Peterside’s ANAP Foundation, NOIPolls released its findings on the 2023 presidential election, the first in the field.

If that election were to be held at the time of polling in September 2022, NOIPolls said. Peter Obi of the Labour Party would win with 21 percent of the vote, with Asiwaju Bola Tinubu of the APC and Atiku Abubakar of the PDP would tie for second place with 13 percent apiece, and Dr Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigerian Peoples Party would bring up the rear with four percent.

This report has sent the Obidients jubilating and the other parties crying foul.  It has not said that Peter Obi will become Nigeria’s next president.  It allows that the poll’s findings are not conclusive. The best poll is nothing but a snapshot of a race in progress.  It does not indicate who will finish first.

Plus, it is necessary to point up some factors that would appear to vitiate the NOIPoll’s findings.

The first is that since nobody knows Nigeria’s population to the nearest 25 million, any sample drawn from it cannot be claimed to be scientific or probabilistic.

The second is that the margin of error of five percent is rather self-indulgent. That margin of error could have resulted from pure chance.  Gallup, which NOIPolls names as its partner, would not settle for that.  NOIPolls should strive for greater rigour.   A three percent margin of error is the industry standard.

Third, 47 percent of those polled said they were undecided or would rather not indicate whom they would vote for.  That is just a little under one-half of the population of 1,000  telephone owners aged 18 years and above who said they intended to vote.   A poll with so many undecided voters or voters loath to name their preferred candidates is of limited utility.

And, by the way, what are we to make of the dispositions of those who do not own telephones and who were not included in the sample?  Can it be that their choice will have no bearing on the election outcome?

Its flaws notwithstanding, the NOIPolls have the merit of being grounded on an actual poll, not the “surveys” nor “available data” from unidentified sources, that led a newspaper to declare the other day that  Peter Obi “is not just the issue in the election” but that he also “appears set to disrupt and deadlock” the presidential race.

The newspaper goes on to report figures about how the leading four presidential candidates are “trending” in each of Nigeria’s so-called geopolitical zones. The reader has not the faintest inkling as to how those figures were arrived at.

Apparently, that issue will be addressed by the major global polling outfit the paper says it is planning to launch this month to analyse its exploratory surveys and trends in greater depth and hopefully, with greater transparency.

On reading about the Agricultural Extension graduate of the Ladoke Akintola University of Technology who returned his diploma to the university the other day on the ground that it had proved of little practical worth and demanded a refund of his undergraduate tuition, my memory ticked.

Wasn’t this a case of Nigerian life imitating German art across eight decades?

There welled up in my recollection novelist, essayist poet and playwright Fritz Karinthy’s1938 one-act drama, in which a man, about 40 years old, returns to his old school eighteen years later and demands a refund of the tuition he had paid on the ground that the education he received had not prepared him for life’s challenges.

Osunleke Alaba had gone into farming after graduating from LAUTECH, but those pesky cattle herds and their feckless Fulani minders ate everything. Then he went into entertainment, where only a meagre existence was to be made.  And that is where we find him.

In desperation, he hit upon the idea of returning his diploma.  If he could recover his tuition, he reasoned, he would put it to much more profitable use.

We do not know what Wasserkopf had been doing since leaving school18 years earlier.  His name, literally “water on the brain,” is more than mildly suggestive of mental lassitude and its accompaniment.  Let us just say he is unlikely to be held up as a good advertisement for the school’s brand.

Osunleke’a goal is roughly the same as Wasserkopf”s, namely a refund of their tuition, which they judge to have been a bad investment.  But their approaches differ.

Osunleke is comparatively restrained, sober even.  Wasserkopf, as we shall see, is boisterous, bullying, threatening and utterly disdainful of his former teachers, calling them to their faces the unflattering nicknames which their students of yore could only call them behind their backs, and out of earshot.

Alaba would settle for a quiet recompense.  Wasserkopf insisted on being re-examined in the courses he had taken at the school.  The result would show that he had been taught nothing of value, and would make his case for a refund unassailable.

The Principal was gobsmacked.

He convenes a faculty meeting to discuss Wasserkopf’s proposal.

His colleagues were inclined to reject it forthwith, but the mathematics master demurred.

“Gentlemen, it is my conviction that we will lose nothing by re-examining Wasserkopf,” he said.   “If he fails, he will place us in an awkward position; therefore, he must not fail. He has – shall I say? – pursued advanced studies in the school of life. We will not make our questions too difficult – agreed, gentlemen? We are dealing with a sly, crafty individual, who will try to get the better of us – and his money back – by hook or crook. We must checkmate him.”

How is this to be done? Asks the physics master.

“By sticking together. The object is to prevent him from failing, because if he fails, he succeeds. That we must stop. If he fails, tomorrow there will be two more former pupils, and the next day a dozen. We must back each other up, gentlemen, so that this painful affair does not become a pedagogical scandal. We will ask him questions. Whatever his answers, we agree beforehand that they are correct.

Thus is the stage set for an examination the candidate was determined to fail and the examiners were determined he must not fail.

It was decided that the mathematics master should take charge of the proceedings.

When Wasserkopf calls his interlocutors the most disrespectful names, says the mathematics master, that the candidate shows an understanding 0f the patriarchal manners, which the school had emphasized in its curriculum over the decades, in keeping with the days when the medieval humanists, teachers, and pupils related on a footing of perfect equality.

He says that the candidate, having shown in a most tactful way, that he understands the usages of that era, need not be examined in what appertains to gentlemanliness. Instead, the school waives the examination in that subject, and awards the candidate a grade of Excellent.

The faculty assents.  Wasserkopf’s examination had commenced in earnest.

Offered a seat, Wasserkopf disdainfully rejects it, electing to stand during his oral re-examination.

Evidence, says the mathematics master, of a splendid physical condition.  And he recommends that the principal, who teaches that subject, award the candidate a grade of “Excellent” in Physical Culture

The principal concurs.

“No, no,” Wasserkopf protests, realizing that they had put one over on him   He vows that they would not catch him off-guard again.

Whereupon the principal enters on the candidate’s scoresheet, “Alertness, Very Good.”  To which the History master adds, “Perseverance, Unusual.”

The History exam comes next.

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“How long did the Thirty Years’ War Last?” the History master asks.

Wasserkopf replies he does not know the answer.  By gestures subtle and unsubtle, the faculty telegraph the answer to him. It is not in their interest that he should fail the exam.  But it is in Wasserkopf’s supreme interest to fail, so he feigns incomprehension

Suddenly, conjures up a eureka moment.

“Seven metres,” he says, unblushingly.  “Exactly seven metres.”   That was how long the Thirty Years’ War lasted.”

Wasserkopf gloats.  His strategy is working.  The faculty seems paralyzed. The history master is disconcerted. But they cannot afford to lose the plot.

“Seven metres,” the history master repeats.  Your answer is excellent, he tells a disbelieving Wasserkopf.  It is again the turn of the mathematics teacher to explain the verdict as the history master fumbles around for one.

Wasserkopf’s answer, says the mathematics teacher, accords perfectly with the theory of relativity and the insights of Max Planck.  “Einstein has taught us that time is as real as space and matter. It consists of atoms, and may be synthesized into a unified whole, and may be measured like anything else. Reduce the mass-system to a unit and a year may be represented by a metre or seven years by seven metres.”

And, considering that actual fighting took place only for half of each day and that the combatants had to eat and rest and recuperate, the history master adds helpfully, it could well be that actual fighting occurred only for seven years which, under the theory of relativity the theory, may be represented by seven metres.

Farce piles on farce, with Wasserkopf’s most inane answers to the commonsensical posers eliciting grades of Excellent from the faculty.  The re-examination culminates in two questions posed by the mathematics teacher, an easy one, and a difficult one, as he characterized them.

First the easy question:  “If we represent the speed of light by x, and the distance of the star Sirius from the sun by y, what is the circumference of a one-hundred-and-nine-sided regular polyhedron whose surface coincides with that of the hip-pocket of a state railway employee whose wife has been deceiving him for two years and eleven months with a regimental sergeant-major of hussars?”

“Two thousand, six hundred and twenty-nine litres.”  Exact.  No fractions.  Wasserkopf chuckles, satisfied that he has turned the tables at last on the faculty.

Wrong, says the mathematics teacher.  The correct answer is two thousand, six hundred and twenty-eight litres.  The error is less than one-tenth of a per cent, but it is an error nonetheless.  “The candidate fails.”

He adds that the candidate’s request for a refund is reasonable, and that the only question left is the amount of the refund.

Wssserkopf is exultant.  His plan has worked, and he is counting on coming into a hefty sum of money soon.  The faculty is discombobulated.

“How much do we owe you, Herr Wasserkopf?” the mathematics teacher asks, turning to the candidate.

Wasserkopf recalls every expenditure from his school years and submits the total as what the school owes him. With paper and pencil in hand, the mathematics teacher checks the math.

“It is right to the smallest detail, the mathematics teacher announces, as he congratulates Wasserkopf.  That was my difficult question.”  Grade earned:  Excellent in mathematics.

Overall, says the principal, Wasserkopf has chalked up a distinction in every subject, confirming that he earned the certificate he was awarded on graduation.

Wasserkopf may well have felt like the man who died a fake death and was given a fake burial.

Osunleke Alaba of LAUTECH fared better. The school’s alumni crow-funded a sum to cover the refund of his tuition.

Whenever I felt like raising my wife’s hackles, I usually had recourse to an expedient that never failed.

Apropos of nothing in particular, or as the coda to a television news story on the British monarchy, I would ask, with calculated insouciance, “When is that woman going to abdicate and make way for her eldest son?”

“Oh no, she shouldn’t,” she would fire back.

My task was done, bar the occasional interjections.  It remained to sit back and listen, in feigned bemusement, as she laid out why the British Crown must not go to Prince Charles in the event of the Queen abdicating; rather, it should pass to her grandson William, Prince Charles’s oldest son.

The father was unworthy of the Crown; not after his cruel treatment of Diana, the innocent, guileless woman whom he had trapped in a loveless marriage, only to return to a former lover who had married somebody else in the interval. . .”

“You don’t know the back story,” I would interject diffidently.  “It is somewhat more complicated.”

“I don’t care,” she would say. “He should not be king.”

Sometimes, it was almost as if she had a personal stake in the matter.

“It is not entirely up to the Queen, you know.  There are rules to the succession. . .”

“I don’t care,” she would maintain.  “He should not be king.  And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

We were at that conjuncture again after news broke two weeks ago that Queen Elizabeth’s health had caused her physicians more than a little concern.  Then followed a rapid migration of the royal family to Balmoral Castle, her summer vacation retreat in Scotland.   Scarcely three days later, it was announced that the monarch had died.

Within hours of her passing Prince Charles had translated to King Charles the Third.

I am not claiming this outcome as a victory in my habitual jousts with my wife over Queen Elisabeth’s sit-tightism.  On the contrary, I count myself the loser.  Whenever I feel like raising her hackles, I will now have to find a new foil.  But he or she is unlikely as worthy of attention as the Her Britannic Majesty, aforementioned.

The jousting I have described is not unique to my family, I gather.  It is a familiar pastime in many homes and follows a predictable pattern.   The man of the house seems inclined to cut the future king some slack, whereas the woman of the house seems to be on a mission to avenge Diana if not to project on her own husband, the notorious peccadillos of the former Prince of Wales.

In such homes, the men must be hugely relieved that there is a truce, at least for the time being, in this intricate game, which was always freighted with innuendo.

I should add that my wife has softened her stance on the former Prince of Wales on learning that his consort Camilla and I share the same birthday of July 17.  Take note, Buckingham Palace.

There is one important aspect of my life for which I will always remember the late Queen Elisabeth.   It is to her that I owe my first trip outside my place of birth, Kabba, in Kogi State, and it wasn’t just to the nearest big town — Okene, Ikare, in Western Nigeria, nor for that matter to the more distant Lokoja, the provincial capital, only 54 miles away.

It was to Kaduna, the capital of Northern Nigeria, no less, some 400 miles away.

Stuck in town as usual during the Christmas holidays in 1955, I was recruited as one of six pupils from my primary school to travel to Kaduna to do the flag-waving and cheering at the impending royal visit of the Queen and her husband Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburg.

They trotted us to the Native Administration (N.A) dispensary and inoculated us against any contingencies.  From there they marched us to the Native Authority Treasury close by where were each handed the princely sum of six shillings, our pocket money for the trip.

My excitement was boundless.

Together with pupils from area schools and local dignitaries, we were conveyed in three trucks, one harmattan morn to Lokoja, where I saw, for the first time, the majestic River Niger, an awe-inspiring body of water that seemed to stretch to the horizon.  The trucks were loaded onto the ferry to convey them and their passengers to Shintaku, on the other side of the river across from Lokoja

From Shintaku, we journeyed to Dekina, Ankpa, and Ayangba, arriving at Oturkpo the next day. From there we boarded a designated train on the Eastern Line to Kadina North station. The train ride was another first for me. You did not have to show any ticket to board the rain. So many freeloaders took advantage, but those were innocent days and there were no incidents.

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Disembarking at Kaduna North, the boys were bused to the campus of Government Technical School and lodged in a cavernous hall where “iron” beds had been laid out with just enough room to go from one row to the next in any direction.  This was to be our home for the next two weeks. The girls were bused to the campus of the Queen of Apostles College in the Kakuri section of the city.

They issued each of us a pair of white drill uniforms and miniature British flags and medallions commemorating the royal visit, showed us the dining hall and the clinic, and where to seek help.  The next day they bused us to the parade ground, the staging ground for the royal visit, for rehearsals.

It was an expansive terrain, a mini-city actually, showcasing virtually every aspect of the cultures of the people of Northern Nigeria – their architecture, arts, crafts, institutions, leisure, lifestyles, cuisines, and so on.  The royal visit culminated in a grand durbar, a spectacular display of mastery of massed horsemanship, synchronicity, and control.

The closest we got to the royal visitors was when they rode in an open Land Rover through row after row of flag-waving students, members of the paramilitary services, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and townsfolk drawn from every stratum of society.

One Saturday afternoon, I ventured into town on my own.  Destination:  Kingsway Stores, which looked like a fairyland each time our bus drove past it.   I marvelled at the sheer variety and quality of goods displayed arrestingly and fed my eyes for the better part of a day, treading warily in case they decided I had no business being there and threw me out, or worse, called the police.

As a memento of my visit, I bought a roll of toffee for sixpence.  It was all I could afford.  But I could at least boast that I had shopped at Kingsway.

All too soon, it was time to head back home.  I had packed into three exciting weeks the kind of experience my peers who were always teasing me about my being rooted to the home soil – I had packed into three weeks a richer experience than they could boast of in their cumulative travel to spend school vacation with parents or relations.

I had travelled by land, by water, and by rail.  I had seen her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and her consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, not forgetting the Northern Premier Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sultan of Sokoto, and the cohort of Northern leaders.

Memories of that visit flooded back in 1976 when, on a visit to Scotland, I was given a tour of the Holyrood Palace in Edinburg, which featured prominently in the recent burial ceremonies, for Queen Elizabeth, walked the Royal Mile, and resided for two weeks at the Royal Horse Guards Hotel, within walking distance of Buckingham Palace, courtesy of a bequest from the Daily Times of Babatunde Jose’s era,

Throughout the mourning for Queen Elizabeth, the British tabloids’ which never saw a spectacle they could not parlay into a scandal nor a slip they could not cast as a monumental blunder, sheathed their swords, and will now strive to regain lost ground.

A starting point might well be the Profumo Affair of the early 60s, which rocked the Establishment, involving as it did the Secretary of State for War, call girls, British high society and Soviet diplomats, and was tinged with intimations of espionage.

To this day, the identity of the personage implicated in the scandal and characterized tersely as “a member of the royal family” has been kept a closely-guarded secret.

They knew his identity all right but were bound by the rules of the D-4 Notice by which the media voluntarily eschewed publication of material the government did not want reported.

Those were simpler, more decent days, eons literally before ravenous social media, so-called, polluted cyberspace and poisoned the wellsprings of amity.

Two weeks ago, they buried the corporeal remains of Ladipo Akinlawon Mabogunje (or L. Akin Mabogunje as he always signed off), a scholar of global renown, in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, in the Yoruba country, following a week of mourning and stirring tributes by a grateful community that he served with his great intellect, granite integrity, and unexampled devotion.

By osmosis, as it were, I had acquired some familiarity with his name and accomplishments well before I read his devastating critique of the Report of the Coker Commission of Inquiry, which was set up by the Tafawa Balewa Administration in the wake of the crisis convulsing Western Nigeria and invested with sweeping powers to probe that Region’s finances and other aspects of its governance under the Action Group.

That critique, and others by Sam Aluko, Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, and Victor Oyenuga, fellow senior academics at the University of Ibadan, unmasked the Report of the Coker Commission as the hatchet job that it was.

It would come to light later that if these towering intellectuals were not also card-carrying members of Chief Obafemi Awolowo/s Action Group, they were members of his Brains Trust who helped shape the party’s policies and programmes.

Thereafter my colleague at a secondary school where I was teaching in the late 60s, Oyebanji Ajagbe (of blessed memory), who had been Mabogunje’s student at the University of Ibadan, kept him in my consciousness.  He invoked the great man’s name frequently and talked about him in the most reverential terms.

He cited perhaps as the most challenging – and most intellectually stimulating — task he was assigned in his three years as a Geography major at Ibadan an essay titled “Duality in Geography.”  And who else but Mabogunje could have given his students such a task, emblematic of the critical-intellectual framework in which he carried out his work?

I would finally meet the legend himself some two decades later, in1986, at the Fourth of July reception, on the expansive grounds of the residence of the United States Ambassador to Nigeria.  I was introduced to him by Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, a senior executive at Guardian Newspapers, where I was writing a weekly column that was mostly satirical.

Mabogunje shook my hand warmly and complimented me on the column.  Then added, in that slow and deliberate manner that was his trademark, “But you are getting too political, my friend.”

That remark captured the essential character of Mabogunje’s career after the tumultuous 60s.  He abjured the overtly or even mildly political, and focused his brilliant scholarship on how to make our rural areas and cities more liveable and how to raise the living standards of Nigerians through means grounded on tested social research.

His focus on urbanism and urbanization may not have been entirely fortuitous.  For one thing, he had excelled in Geography in secondary school.  For another, his people the Yoruba, have long been ranked in scholarly literature as one of the world’s most urbanized peoples.

That realisation may well have inclined him to make the phenomenon his object of life-long study.

I would get to know Mabogunje up close later at various fora, most unforgettably at the Obasanjo Farmhouse Dialogues held, as the name indicates at General Olusegun Obasanjo’s farm in Ota, Ogun State.  Each session was an intensive weekend affair, involving policy-makers, practitioners, academics, and media people, and the attentive audience for a specific subject.  The agenda was adopted at an after-dinner session on Friday.

It was then examined in all its ramifications in a Saturday discourse that lasted all day and far into the night. A designated Rapporteur presented his report.  It was discussed by the House, which then debated and formally adopted a Communiqué.  The Proceedings were published and distributed widely.

One compendium of the Dialogues listed Obasanjo, Mabogunje, and me as its editors.  I count it as a great honour to be mentioned in the same phrase as the quintessential scholar, and I will always treasure that volume.

As an honorary consultant to the Farmhouse Dialogue, frequent participant and occasional Rapporteur, I am in a position to assert that despite the welcoming ambience in which they were staged, the Dialogues were no picnics.

Mabogunje was a fixture at the Dialogues, listening intently, taking notes, and intervening judiciously, always making helpful observations, the object being to help clarify issues rather than to overawe the audience with his great learning.

I would get to observe him closely on a much larger canvas, about 1986, at a weeklong national workshop held at Zaranda Hotel in Bauchi, Bauchi State on, the strategy and tactics of the National Directorate of Foods, Roads and Rural Infrastructures (DIFFRI), one of the more productive of the myriads of interventionist agencies created by military president Ibrahim Babangida as part of his programme of transition from military to democratic rule.

Mabogunje’s presence as vice chair of the Directorate, retired Air Vice Marshal Larry Koinyan presiding, gave DIFFRI much of its credibility.  The same can be said for the People’s Bank, another Babangida creation on which he served as a director.  He may well have privately entertained some doubts concerning Babangida’s sincerity on the transition, but he never publicly expressed them.

Obasanjo had told me at the time that he had three friends who always took Babangida’s pronouncements and declarations with a large pinch of salt.  The first was Chief Simeon Adebo, the distinguished international civil servant and Nigeria’s first Permanent Representative to the United Nations and an occasional guest at the Farm House Dialogues.  The third was me.

Weren’t we vindicated for the most part, if not always?

It says something of Mabogunje’s sense of duty that, amidst his doubts, he served diligently and to the best of his great ability on the boards of the many agencies to which he was appointed by the administration. If the agencies failed, they did so despite his best effort

I last met Mabogunje eight some eight years ago, in 2014, at the inaugural Annual Birthday Lecture for his great contemporary, the distinguished historian and university administrator, Professor Jacob Festus Ade. Ajayi, which it was my honour to present.

I recall how Mabogunje walked across from the far end of the University of Ibadan Conference Hall where he was seated with his wife and inseparable companion, retired Justice Titi Mabogunje, congratulated me warmly and asked for a copy of the paper.

Though well into his eighties, he was sprightly as ever, marked out by his mop of grey hair, which sat on his head like a crown on the countless laurels he had won at home and abroad for his scholarship, academic stewardship, and public service, including the Vautrin Lud Prize, widely regarded as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Geography

It remains to add that Mabogunje was unobtrusive through and through, unpretentious, urbane, this gentle giant who, despite a time of unremitting engagement, lived to a ripe old age of 91. He always made you feel that the occasion was important not because he was there, but because you were there.

He will live on as a model and a monument.

It has gone down as one of the testiest encounters in recent memory of an overbearing legislature and an unyielding public servant.

Sometime in March 2017. The Comptroller General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Hameed Ali, a retired army colonel, issued a directive giving motorists who had somehow managed to take possession of their imported cars without paying the obligatory customs duties to do so no later than April 12 or face consequences.

Ever so mindful of its oversight duties, the Senate, pursuant to a “motion of national importance,” issued a counter-directive to the Customs Service:  Perish the thought. Dino Melaiye, the National Assembly’s poster boy for bombast and delinquency, whose fleet of cars include a Lamborghini and a Bentley, to mention only some of his more exclusive sedans, went ballistic.

The Comptroller General’s directive, he said, was “anti-people” and would bring more hardship at a time the public was groaning under a “recessed economy.”

Senate President Bukola Saraki, who was widely reported to be engaged at the time in a cat-and-mouse game with the Customs Service over duties on an imported special edition Range Rover, weighed in.  The Comptroller-General had to be stopped.

From there, it was but a short step to summoning its comptroller general, Hameed Ali. aforementioned to appear before the Senate to explain his contumely.

To cut the story short, after some prefatory skirmishes, Ali complied, decked in his accustomed mufti.  The Senate took this manner of dress as a fresh offence, refused to treat with him, and ordered him to return at a later date in the full regalia of comptroller general.

Ali reported on the appointed date, but still clad in mufti.  This time they sent him back at the threshold, warning that he could not disobey the Senate with impunity and go unpunished.

Whereupon Ali headed to court to seek injunctive relief.

The whole thing, it is necessary to insist, had nothing to do with public policy or holding a public official to the code of conduct.  It is all in keeping with the Senate’s proclivity for indulging its proclivity for self-dealing under cover of “oversight.”

But in Hameed Ali, it met its match.

This past week. Ali was back before a chastened Senate that took no notice of his apparel but paid attention to his insight on the refining, consumption, and importation of products in Nigeria, in the context of a colossal subsidy the government says it can no longer sustain and must cut.

Public debate on the matter has been one of the longest-running in Nigeria’s history.  It first surfaced in 1985, when the International Monetary Fund stipulated a raft of conditionalities for granting an insolvent Federal Government a loan of $2.8 billion, including abolishing subsidies on fuel, electricity, and fertilizers.

A wilful lack of clarity has bedevilled the issue since it came under discussion. The framing asserted the existence of a subsidy, relieving its protagonists of the obligation to prove it.

At some point, they said the difference between what a barrel of oil would have fetched in Europe vis-a-vis the same quantity and quality in Nigeria represented a subsidy.

Was that not what economists call an opportunity cost?

They said the subsidy had to be cut because petroleum products were being wasted or consumed irresponsibly.

But how would cutting the subsidy conduce to more responsible consumption, howsoever defined?

Then, they said the petroleum products were so cheap they were being adulterated, resulting in all manner of domestic and even industrial accidents.

Would making the products more expensive not increase the propensity to adulterate?

Then again, they said cutting the subsidy would free up funds for building new, more efficient refineries that would produce for the export market.

But when windfall revenues piled up on windfall oil revenues, they built no new refineries.  Instead, they patched up the decrepit ones and instituted turn-around- maintenance operations that turned around only the fortunes and pockets of military personnel, political officials, and their proxies.

They said petroleum profits were being hoarded, to create artificial shortages and reap windfall profits.  But does the capacity exist for hoarding on such a scale?  Besides does it make sense for the smuggler to hoard instead of selling off his loot on the hot market and arranging his next shipment?  And the next?

Now, oil smuggling is not like drug smuggling.  You cannot stuff it in your luggage and or conceal it.  It has to be transported on vessels that ply the high seas, or in motorized tankers that travel on paved roads across international frontiers patrolled by multinational security personnel.

Why is it that these vessels are rarely apprehended and even less rarely prosecuted?

Instead, officials exult in song and dance on the few occasions they manage to apprehend some woebegone stragglers ferrying perhaps one hundred four-litre cans of petroleum products in false-bottomed dugout canoes across the waters into a neighbouring country.

As justification for cutting the oil subsidy, they even said a bottle of soda or milk costs much more than a gallon of gasoline.

And so on, and so forth, in what has been over the decades an exercise in circumlocution.

Now we are back at that familiar conjuncture, only that they are not trotting out those threadbare arguments and rationalizations.

The economic outlook is grim, but Nigeria cannot meet its OPEC export quota that would have eased its balance-of-payments woes.  Government officials now admit that forty percent of daily production, conservatively valued at N4 billion, is lost to theft.

Their epiphany, if epiphany it is, has come several decades too late. Back in 2006, a British All-Party Parliamentary Group issued a report on the Nigerian oil industry that exposed the essential falsity of the claim by a long line of Nigerian leaders from 1995 to the present that the government had been paying out colossal sums of money to oil companies to shield Nigerians from the real cost of their prodigal consumption of petroleum products.

In a report prepared for the Blair Commission, the Parliamentary Group reported that some N625 billion was lost every year through “organized pilfering” from the sprawling pipeline network and from bunkering on the high seas. The team said it gathered that “senior military personnel and political officials” were involved in the theft, as well as collaborators in the neighbouring countries.  It said it learned that “no serious attempt” was being made to prevent stolen oil from being transferred from sea to land and traded in international waters.

It should have added that no serious attempt was also being made to prevent refined petroleum headed for foreign markets from being rerouted back from international waters and sold in the Nigerian market as imported products.

Finally, fundamental questions are being asked even within government circles about the industry.  Without forthright answers to such questions, no meaningful debate on the oil subsidy can be held.

They are asking:  How much oil is lifted daily?  How much of it is refined locally?  How much of the refined product is injected daily into the Nigerian market?  What is the average daily consumption of petroleum products in Nigeria?  How much of the precious combustible has to be imported to bridge the shortfall between consumption and production?

Nobody within the industry knows how much oil is lifted daily to the nearest 500,000 barrels, it is necessary to insist.  They have probably stopped operating with a barrel that was four gallons larger than the standard international barrel, but abuses are rampant.

One of the officials questioning the data presented by the NNPC on the floor of the Senate with an incisiveness rarely seen in that cohort is our old friend Hameed Ali, the comptroller general of Customs, whose famous encounter at that same forum in 2017, provided the springboard for this his submission.

The NNPC says with a confidence not warranted by its notoriously sloppy record-keeping that it injects 98 million litres of petrol into the domestic market every day.  Local consumption, it adds, accounts for 60 million litres.

What happens to the surplus of 38 million litres?

More crucially, Ali is asking:  Why inject 98 million litres of fuel into the domestic market when you know that only 60 litres will be consumed?

Presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu says the government knows the men behind the syndicated oil theft and will soon unmask them.  The NNPC says it is prepared to submit to a forensic audit.

Let them bring it on.  This is the best time for decisive action on the pesky oil subsidy.  The Presidency should unmask the denizens of the syndicate, and the NNPC should institute a forensic audit.