The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • The fuel cartel is back!

    The Nigerian nightmare is back – fully. Just when Nigerians had thought that the daemon behind the fuel-marketers-induced crisis has slipped into oblivion, it staged a grand re-entry Sunday night with the same old pledge of making the yuletide season hell for Nigerians.

    Fuel marketers, comprising the Major Oil Marketers Association of Nigeria, Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association and Independent Petroleum Products Importers, IPPI, according to reports haveall resolved to lock up their depots nationwide in the coming week. The issue: subsidy debts owed by the governmenttotalling N800 billion remains unpaid.

    Says Patrick Etim, Legal Adviser to IPPI:”The only way to salvage the situation is for government to pay the oil marketers the outstanding debts through cash option instead of promissory note being proposed”.

    “The oil marketers”, he said, “have requested that forex differential and interest component of government’s indebtedness to marketers be calculated up to December 2018 and be paid within next seven days from the date of the letter sent to the government.”

    Say what you may of the notice which effectively translates to potentiallyshutting down an already traumatized economy, it says a lot about how little have changed that the staying power of the fuel cartel shows no signs of diminishing. Whereas the pathology that their stranglehold on the economycontinues topresent in different shapes and in their mutant complexities, they are almost in equal degrees, as lethal and opportunistic depending on time and space. A sample is the current semantic dilemma over what to call the differential between the import price of petrol and the price at the pump, which yours truly wrote about on this page last week. For an equation so simple as not to require a secondary school credit pass let alone a degree in economics to understand, and one that economists and other die-hard practitioners of global trade and commerce would more appropriately recognize as plain subsidy, the federal government not only insists on living in denial,it opts to couch it elegantly as under-recovery, hopingostensibly against hope that the hefty burden of the differential which, at the last count is said to have consumed a record $1.0billion from the NLNG dividend account, would somehow dissolve!

    Difficult country – you say?

    Now to the figure in contention – N800 billion – we must admit is a lot of money to owe more so in a sector which runs strictly on cash. Considering the sector’s absolute dependence on forex also makes it subject to the vagaries of exchange rate fluctuations, the marketers situation comes to a double whammy.

    When all of these are added to usurious lending regime forced on them by the lenders, it takes little to imagine the burden being shouldered by the marketers in their daily striving to keep the pumps wet.

    Today, whereas the story of the toxic assets on banks’ balance sheets are all too familiar and with it the now recurring but ineffectual tactic of ‘name and shame’ routinely unleashed on the so-called chronic and pathological debtors, the other half of the story,less talked about, is the equally humongous debts being owed by the government to this class of players.

    Talk of the stresses and strains that the financial services sector has suffered in recent time;one wagers that the situation is no less contributory, but is also known to have sent many an otherwise thriving entities out of business!

    Faced with a recalcitrant federal government, the marketers’ tacticof weaponising the only effective instrument they have – choking off fuel supply at yuletide–if not entirely justifiable, might seem understandable. It’s an old trick mastered by martial artists to disable attackers by using a simple but forced push on a pressure point.

    One course assumes that the debts actually exist or were truly deserving of payment. Or that the supposedly feuding parties actually agree on the limits of the liabilities and what constitutes the parameters. And so while we hear of nebulous concepts like “forex differential and interest component” being bandied around, what is hardly admitted is that their ‘co-efficient of elasticities’ are as high as the claimants make them to be!

    It is a tough, opaque business – no doubt.

    Which of course begs the question of whether the federal government would readily yield to the blackmail of accepting the patently one-sided –or if you like – open-ended determination of the liabilities – as it sometimes does, unfortunately;or whether the marketers on their part, stand any real chance of winning the argumentlet alone the war.

    To begin with, few Nigerians actually believe the marketers tale.How can Nigerians forget the fraudulent claims for petrol subsidy made by 21 firms for which they were indicted by the Aigboje Aig-Imoukhuede-led Presidential Committee on the 2011 fuel subsidy scam. By the way, whatever happened to the N382 billion they were asked to refund which they wrongly collected as subsidy in 2011?

    Moreover, if Nigerians find the penchant by the marketers to exploit the vulnerability of the people even when it means plunging the economy into ruin somewhat reprehensible, their experience in the hands of the unscrupulous players under every cycle of supply disruptions and which have come to mean more money than they could ever have made were things to be normal, obviously stands out as a class act in conscienceless profiteering!

    To be sure, yours truly refers not just to the roadside peddlers of fuel for whom the shutdown of the depots promises a boom time, but the back channel marketing by the players guaranteed to deliver far beyond expectations, via the emergency ‘deregulation’ of product prices so created! Either way, they win – massive, while the rest of us, left at their mercies, are left to do what we do best – complain!

    How did we get here? By this I mean the current situation in which a few economic actors will continue to hold the entire country hostage at every drop of a hat?

    It is a question for which the nation has long found the answer but also unwilling to accept: we have left undone what should have been done aeons ago!

    Whereas subsidy, for which the nation is inextricably caught in its web, and which currently consumes nearly 40 percent of our forex earnings is the price to pay for our myopic leadership, every other thing, including the current  pretences about market forces meaning nothing; the believe that costs can somehow become irrelevant so long as there is a piggy bank available to service all manners of purposes under the sun, are merely derivatives.

    Which is what makes latest fuel-marketers-induced crisis at best a reminder of that road not taken.

  • Another yuletide, another looming fuel crisis

    If there is anything one can predict unerringly in Nigeria, it is that yuletide will bring with it crippling fuel shortages and disruption in the movement of persons, goods and services and in social intercourse on a  scale that only a civil war or major natural disaster can fully explain or justify.

    The signs that we are again headed that way are in the air.  In anticipation of their seasonal kill, oil suppliers are already whetting their voracious appetites. How they relish holding Nigeria over a barrel,   pun intended!

    Last week, the Lagos State chapter of the Independent Petroleum Marketers Association of Nigeria (IPMAN) threatened to cripple some 900 filling stations in the Lagos and parts of Ogun from December 11, accusing the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) of undersupplying its members with petroleum products and frustrating them on an earlier agreement to supply to them at N133 per litre.

    Only yesterday, MOWMAN, the umbrella organisation of importers and marketers of oil and petroleum products entered the fray, warning that it would paralyse supplies nationwide unless the Federal Government cleared an outstanding N800 billion debt within seven days.

    No promissory notes, please; only cash, the type you can feel and count and put away in and retrieve on demand from one of the better banks, not those shady banks that cannot account for the humongous deposits in their vaults nor even make a pretence, however shambolic, of justifying them as proceeds of legitimate business.

    It is that time of year again, when the only thing guaranteed is a gnarling of fuel supplies.

    Contemplating this perennial dread, a concerned citizen has suggested in earnest that we suspend yule-tide for a few years to begin with, and abolish it subsequently.  With yuletide out of the way, there would be no need for millions of Nigerians to embark on the obligatory migration to their hometowns only to rush back to base scarcely a week later, and no need for marketers to manipulate fuel supplies to create an artificial scarcity.

    With yuletide out of the way, the fellow said, all those horrific road accidents that proliferate during the so-called ember months and reach their climax around yuletide, earning another discomfiting entry for Nigeria in the international misery index, would be distributed equally throughout the year.

    The fellow was obviously not reckoning with the National Assembly.  What made him think that the members would for any reason in the world forgo yet another recess and the hefty grants and bonuses, statutory and contrived that go with it?

    That, at any rate is the kind of desperate solution to which the perennial fuel crisis has driven even  some usually serious people to embrace.  The redeeming grace is that it has also bred a great deal of creative entertainment.  I missed out on much of fuel crisis art of the last yuletide, but among the few that came to my attention, there is one that is simply unforgettable.

    A riff on the refrain of “The First Noel,” one of the best-known Christmas carols, it goes thus:

    No fuel, No fuel

    No fuel, No fuel

    There is no fuel, Buhari.

    There you have it – a hilarious instance of the capacity of Nigerians to defy adversity, and of Nigeria’s fabled resilience.

    In the more than 30 years that Nigerians have lived with crippling fuel shortages, the authorities have never been short on excuses.  At first, it was turn-around maintenance (TAM) of the local refineries.  While the exercise lasted, petrol had to be imported to bridge the gap.  But more by design than co-incidence, TAM was for the most part carried out at the end of the year, the peak travel season.

    Despite its huge cost, TAM maintained nothing and turned nothing around, except the fortunes of complicit contractors and their local supervisors. If they produced at all, the refineries were producing at far less than full capacity, the gap between supply and demand widened, and more and more fuel had to be imported to fill the gap. Oil supplies grew more and more unstable, and so did pricing.

    Since then, virtually every measure trumpeted as a solution to the problem has been a swindle.

    Like most swindles in Nigeria’s recent history, it began during the era of military president, General Ibrahim Babangida.   The country was set to take a loan from the IMF, and as a sop to that latter-day Cerberus, the currency was to be devalued, import restrictions were to be lifted, and anything remotely suggestive of a subsidy was to be abolished immediately.

    Gasoline came to be identified as the scapegoat for Nigeria’s under-performing economy. It was grossly underpriced, they said, because it was heavily subsidised, with the pernicious result that a gallon of gasoline cost less than a bottle of soda or milk.  One image that clings in my memory of that time is of the engaging news correspondent Chris Anyanwu, now a Senator, peddling that false equivalency night after night on national television in her smooth, silky delivery.

    The subsidy, was the difference between the price of a gallon of gasoline in Lagos and the same gallon of petrol in Fargo, North Dakota, they said.

    Wasn’t that what economists call an opportunity cost? If the cost of getting a gallon of gasoline to the pump exceeded the retail price, you could perhaps talk about a subsidy. What were these relative costs?  And whatever happened to comparative advantage and all that if Nigerians were to pay for gasoline produced on their soil the same price as consumers half a world away were paying for it? Was the whole thing not at bottom a tax?

    Shifting gears, they said gasoline was so cheap that it was being mindlessly wasted.

    How so?

    Were Nigerians washing their hands with petrol after a meal, or to prepare their vegetable stew in place of regular cooking oil, or as a beverage to entertain their guests, since it was so much cheaper than Coca Cola?

    Shifting gears still, they said because gasoline was so cheap in Nigeria, it was being smuggled to neighbouring countries to reap windfall profits.

    Now, you could not do that on any meaningful scale by lugging 50-litre petrol cans through bush paths.  Only motorised tankers driving on paved roads across international frontiers manned by immigration and customs and security officials had that capability.  Those vehicles had to be owned or controlled by political and military officials with guaranteed access to refined petroleum products.

    Why was it, then, that not one operator of those vehicles had been arrested and charged with this illegal traffick, only a few stragglers transporting smuggled gasoline cans in leaky dugout canoes or in rickety trucks across the border?

    Nor were the authorities done yet.

    Gasoline was so cheap, they said, that it was being adulterated.  When substituted for kerosene in hurricane lamps and stoves, the adulterated mixture caused horrific explosions that maimed and sometimes killed entire families.

    Why not make kerosene cheaper than gasoline, then?  In any case, why would anyone adulterate a product that was already obscenely cheap?  Whoever heard of adulterated zinc?

    Then they tried to sugar the pill.

    From the funds to be realised by abolishing the subsidy, the existence of which was never proven, new oil refineries would be built not merely to satisfy growing domestic consumption but also for export, to generate foreign exchange.  Those long, snaking lines at filling stations would be things of the past.

    They conjured up in galactic figures the revenues that would accrue to the exchequer from abolishing    the subsidy.  They set up committees to manage the expected cash inflow and to ensure it was put to the most judicious use.  They came up with palliatives to cushion the average person from comprehensive      price increases that would follow.

    In less than two years, the “mass transit” buses charging subsidised fares vanished from the roads.  A striking project here, a thriving scheme there, but much of the money went the way of other state interventions –SURE-P being the latest example, to satisfy the awoof proclivities of political officials high and low,- and their confederates.

    The one thing that never got built is a new refinery.

    When the refineries produce at all, their output is shipped several hundred miles from the loading platform and returned as imported fuel to reap windfall profits in “subsidy” reimbursement for an untouchable criminal syndicate.

    It must stop, this syndicated fraud that has and brought great pain and misery to the many while enriching the few.

    Your move, President Muhammadu Buhari.

     

    • Revised and updated from January 2.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    “Matters miscellaneous,” as many a fellow commentator has graciously acknowledged, is the platform I patented back in my days at Rutam House for attending to a glut of occurrences in broad strokes and short takes, lest the people who make and the people who consume the news feel neglected.

    Here, in all its eclecticism, is the bulletin du jour.

    “Buhari’s Double”

    In journalistic reckoning, the case of Buhari’s Double has to be the top item.

    Since 2017, so goes the tale reportedly originated by the fugitive leader of the Indigenous Peoples of Biafra (IPOB) Nigeria has been ruled by a Buhari look-alike, Jubril al Sudan, a native of Sudan — or Niger, take your pick. Buhari had died in the UK in 2017, where he was undergoing medical treatment.  Notwithstanding the fact that Queen Elizabeth had sent a message of condolence to the Nigerian government, the entrenched Cabal in Aso Rock had procured a Buhari double in Sudan, and pressed him into service as Nigeria’s president.

    Despite occasional stumbles and apparent loss of memory, the transition had gone so smoothly that the only tell-tale sign of the infernal switch was a scar on Jubril’s left earlobe that was not a part of Buhari’s profile.

    Kanu, or whoever began the tale, and those who have been peddling it, should update their material.

    I can report authoritatively that representatives of the Jubril family, having discovered the gigantic swindle, suddenly showed up in Abuja the other day and demanded to be compensated with a power-sharing arrangement at the federal level in perpetuity, plus 50 percent of Nigeria’s oil revenues for ten years in the first instance.   Failing this, they warned, they would tell their story to the whole world.

    I can also reveal that the Nigerian authorities have entered into frantic negotiations with Jubril’s family to head off what is sure to earn a double entry in the Guinness Book of Records as the world’s Dirtiest and Worst-kept Secret.  The UK authorities are mediating.

    Meanwhile, dependable sources tell me that Abuja is close to unraveling the true identity of the fake Jew parading himself on faked foreign soil as Nnamdi Kanu.

    Vast Estates, Ghost Owners

    Of the developments that have trailed Ayo Fayose’s lachrymose exit from the gubernatorial mansion in Ado Ekiti, none perhaps has been more mysterious than the discovery of a vast portfolio of valuable real estate with no owners.

    The sprawling estate covers some of the choicest areas of Ado Ekiti, stretches to the most opulent turfs of Abuja, and then to the finest residential neighbourhoods.  And that is just its Nigerian aspect. In its larger aspect, it is reported to stretch all the way to the most affluent settings in the Arabian Peninsula.

    The EFCC has impounded them, saying that they all belong to Fayose, and that they are the proceeds of official corruption.  Fayose says he knows nothing about the properties and that the EFCC is wantonly infringing the rule of law and undermining the fundamental rights of the actual owners.

    But the “actual owners” seem to be in no hurry to stake any claim on the properties.  They have sought no court orders restraining the EFCC from alienating their property.

    Surely, it cannot be that they are willing to forfeit their hard-earned holdings to the EFCC without a struggle?

    It is more likely the case that they are not aware of the EFCC’s proceedings.  In which case, this piece should serve as an alert

    Between giver and receiver

    If you were to ask the embattled Comrade, I suspect he would tell you that he has found one year as national chair of the aggregation of strange bedfellows that calls itself the All Progressives Congress (APC) far more stressful, more soul-destroying than eight years as governor of Edo State.

    His negotiating skills, honed in hundreds of acrimonious labor disputes, seemed tailored for the job. He would bring them to bear in reconciling the various factions and groups into which the APC had splintered, and tease out a coherent, unifying message out of the many discordant tunes claiming to speak for it or act in its name.

    Not even a thousand Oshiomholes could have stopped Saraki and his camp followers from defecting.  Nothing short of President Buhari forswearing a second term and anointing Saraki the APC’s presidential ticket for next year’s presidential election would have kept Saraki and his followers in the fold. I doubt whether even that would have sufficed.  He would have laid down further conditions.

    The party primaries that should have united the party as it approached the general elections generated far more recriminations than even this fractious clime is accustomed to.  Calculating party barons or local kingmakers set aside rules and procedures designed to impart at least a veneer of credibility and democratic choice, selected themselves or their proxies as candidates, or tried to rewrite the rules all over again in their favour.

    Oshiomhole and the APC leadership vacillated for a while, then insisted that the party’s candidates were those chosen under the rules and procedures the party had established.

    Then began, first, a whispering campaign, which soon grew into a roar heard across the county and  even abroad, that Oshiomhole had received as much as N500 million from some state governors in consideration for validating the results of the primaries conducted under their self-serving rules rather than under the APC’s rules.

    The Naira has fallen on very hard times, but N500 million is still a lot of cash, even with inflation running in double digits. That offer would be a mark of great desperation indeed, by governors who have fallen several months behind in paying public servants in their domains and have made it clear that they cannot pay the minimum monthly wage of N30, 000 being negotiated.

    But the charge soon took on in many minds the force of gospel truth. It had, they said, rendered Oshimohole morally unfit to remain party chair, and that he should resign immediately.

    Even Senate President Bukola Saraki who should be the last person to talk of morality in public life, given his ghastly record, seems to have suffered no qualms in demanding Oshiomhole’s resignation.  On moral grounds, no less.

    Others are demanding that Oshomhole face criminal prosecution.

    But in all this, those who allegedly offered the bribe have not been identified.  They have not been censured. The prosecutor has not been asked to round them up and bring them to justice.

    It is as if, even if proven, receiving a bribe is the crime to be punished.  Offering a bribe is not.

    Shades of Haliburton, Siemens, ITT, Kellog Brown, BAE System and other bribery scandals involving foreign companies doing shady business in Nigeria and other offshore destinations!

    GEJ is back

    At his book launch last Tuesday, Dr Goodluck Jonathan must have felt transported back to the glamour and glitz of his days in Aso Rock, and his wife Dame Patience must have been delighted to step once again into the limelight in a way she was accustomed to, not shuttling from one tribunal to another answering charges of serious sleaze.

    His detractors had peddled the libel that Jonathan didn’t even bother to read his briefing papers when he was in office. To damn them, he has actually written a book, and the cream of society had all flocked there to witness the launch.

    And it wasn’t only grateful contractors, former staffers, hangers-on and the usual influence peddlers what were on hand.  Even Jonathan’s most trenchant critics were there, including former President Olusegun Obasanjo who had lifted Jonathan from obscurity to celebrity only to regret it in a devastating screed and whom Jonathan had in turn compared to a “motor park tout.’’

    The enduring lesson that has come out of the book so far is that Dr Jonathan is still Dr Jonathan.

    The reviewers are unanimous that he blames everyone but himself for his defeat in the 2015 presidential election.  He blames it on former U.S. President Barak Obama and his secretary of state John Kerry, on UK Prime Minister David Cameron, on former French President François Hollande, and  on former INEC chair Professor Attahiru Jega, based on non sequiturs that it would be courteous to call sophomoric.

    It would be hard to imagine a greater insult to the intelligence of Nigeria’s electorate.

    Jonathan is no longer in denial about the abduction of the Chibok girls, but he remains implacably in denial about the circumstances.  He joins issues with those uncultivated minds who could not make the elementary distinction between ordinary stealing and corruption.

    I was hoping he would put to rest the controversy over his dodgy doctorate. The quality of reasoning in published excerpts from My Transition Hours is sure to revive and even deepen it.

  • Lest we forget

    Gloating partisans sure enjoy poking and peppering Bukola Saraki, Senate President, and Yakubu Dogara, Speaker, House of Representatives, over the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) defeat, at the November 17 by-election, into three federal constituencies.

    The constituencies: Irepodun/Isin/Ekiti/Oke Ero (Kwara), Toro (Bauchi) and Kankia/Kusada/Ingawa (Katsina).

    On the personal lane, you can’t over-stretch these defeats.  Neither the Kwara nor the Bauchi defeat came from Saraki’s or Dogara’s direct constituencies.  Indeed, the Kwara federal constituency is outside Saraki’s Kwara Central senatorial district.

    Yet, as a symbolic pointer, to the possible electoral drubbing to come, particularly for those treacherous 8th National Assembly members, that turned vicious powers and principalities against the people’s core interests, that was immensely satisfying.

    To boot: both Saraki and Dogara symbolize those partisan and people treacheries.  So, it is sweet they bear the brunt of those defeats, even if vicarious.

    Partisan treachery, because both got into the National Assembly via All Progressives Congress (APC) mandates.  Saraki’s brazen perfidy against his party, to willy-nilly land the Senate presidency, is known to all; and still riles the conscientious.

    From there, both Saraki and Dogara have returned to PDP; but lack the basic personal decency, talk less of honour, to surrender the Senate Presidency and the House Speakership — perks they got on APC’s parliamentary majority.  Still, though they grimly sit tight, they stand much more defanged.

    Now, to people treachery.  Even if principle is rare on the opportunistic partisan plain, how do you justify deliberate anti-people manoeuvres, by parliament whose social contract ought to be pro-people?

    For three years, this 8th National Assembly, under the leadership of Saraki and Dogara, chisel away at the national budget.  Like noxious rats, they claw at the document, keeping the plums for selves; throwing the chaff the people’s way.

    Though their sole business ought to be the greatest happiness of the greatest number, to echo Jeremy Bentham, their target would appear inflicting the greatest sorrow on the greatest number, but seasoning that evil with parliamentary cant.

    An economy that dipped into recession and was bereft of savings needed to ramp up its infrastructure, to get moving again.

    That was the spirit of the budgets, these past three years, to achieve swift infrastructural rebirth, particularly in roads and rail — the vital transportation sector, so key to re-galvanizing the economy.

    But their majestic lawmakers clearly had contrary ideas.  If they were not accused of satanic padding of the document for personal lollies — equating deep communal pains — they were manically slicing off huge funds, budgeted for key national road arteries, for the so-called community projects: boreholes, the purchase of Keke Marwa (shuttle tricycles) for constituents and sundry cases of budgetary dissipation.

    Yes, constituency projects are no democratic crime.  But the rogue motive for these particular dissipations would appear clear.

    After subverting the Federal Government’s efforts at a nationwide infrastructure rebirth, budget paring for junk projects becomes sweet poison to turn the local folks against an “incompetent” central Leviathan!

    There are even tales: that the Saraki Senate presidency was an alleged Trojan horse to sabotage President Muhammadu Buhari’s efforts at vaulting the country from the 2015 trough; and that the scorched earth legislative agenda was a double whammy: discredit and de-market the present order by rogue parliamentary activism; then prepare the ground for a triumphant return to PDP.

    A version of that tale even alleged: that Atiku Abubakar, ex-APC but current PDP presidential candidate, allegedly midwifed Saraki’s emergency as willy-nilly Senate president, as a fundamental part of the Saraki-Dogara wreck-and-bale stratagem.

    Still, for all you know, all these might just be vicious political yarns, that come with the explosive territory of political intrigue and soulless gaming for power.

    But whatever the facts or fiction, the 8th National Assembly’s recourse to diverting funds from crucial projects has achieved at least two spectacular goals: the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, hitherto billed for completion by December 2019, won’t reach that threshold until 2021!

    Another casualty is the 2nd Niger Bridge, which completion period is now 48 months.  That has prompted a delegation of South East leaders going to plead with the president to help speed up the completion process to 24 months.

    The 2nd Niger Bridge is an especial anti-climax.  After for eons surviving its ogbanje project status, and finally getting off the ground against all odds, it has to be slowed down by political intrigues, from the same parliament, supposed to be a conclave loyal to the people!

    That is the height of this parliament’s people treachery.  Because of these clearly unpatriotic intrigues, whatever contribution these transport infrastructures can contribute to Nigeria’s real economic growth is delayed by at least two years.  The multiplier effects of that setback are massive.

    So, as the people continue to face avoidable economic strangulations, their representatives, both in the Senate and in the House of Representatives, continue feeding fat — not to champion the people’s welfare but to push arid intrigues, that further ruin the majority and law-abiding.

    Which is why, lest we forget: the coming election season must be payback time.

    At the acme of this National Assembly’s anti-people misconduct, when some deluded parliamentarians got smitten by hubris; scorning sponsoring parties and voters, as no more than despicable serfs, this column, on its logo, started an on-running campaign: “Correct the mistake of 2015.  Vote out the corrupt legislators”.

    Come February 2019, it is time to walk that talk.  It is time to reward those loyal parliamentarians, that put their voters’ interests first.  But it is also time to maul, with a vengeance, parliamentary reactionaries, that rewarded their parties and voters with concentrated contempt.

    That is why it is immensely pleasing that both Saraki and Dogara are feeling the earliest heats, en route to 2019, given the roasting of their party at the November 17 federal by-elections.

    Both might have offered the suspect leadership for a parliament that brutally short-changed Nigerians.  But also, no member of that gang, bivouacked in the people’s legislative chambers, must escape judgment on Election Day.

    Besides, it’s high time Nigerians got over the costly illusion that voting the president is all that matters.  This 8th National Assembly has exploded that myth, with its anti-people conduct.

    Can you just imagine the progress this country would have made now, had the Saraki-Dogara legislature kept faith with the Buhari executive’s infrastructural vision?

    That is why, in 2019, Nigerians must vote both the president and the right set of parliamentarians.

     

    Vacation time

    It’s vacation time, after a full year’s toll.  On virtual election eve, that looks like abandoning duty.  But though the spirit is willing, the body is tired.  Thanks readers, for a most active interaction, and see you, by God’s grace, in mid-January 2019.  Do have a merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

  • A familiar game of denial

    Like everything with Nigeria – it’s been hard deciding on which of the two positions is more credible: the claim by the U.S. Department of Agriculture that Africa’s most populous country will still remain the world’s biggest rice importer after China by 2019, or the bland denial by a government perennially seeking to cart the trophy home before the game is called.

    You know the ‘big story’ as published by the influential Bloomberg: “Nigeria’s rice imports”– the medium writes quoting the U.S. Department of Agriculture in its latest Rice Outlook – “will jump 13 percent next year to 3.4 million metric tons, making Africa’s most populous country the world’s biggest rice importer after China.

    “China and Nigeria are projected to remain the largest rice importing countries in 2019, followed by the EU, Cote d’Ivoire, and Iran…Nigeria and Egypt are projected to account for the bulk of the 2019 import increase.”

    For the Nigerian government, the above is akin to a doomsday prophecy. Not the story of the flood-ravaged fadama plains which saw more than 20,000 hectares of unharvested rice swept away this year in Kebbi alone – according to the same Bloomberg.

    An earlier report that Nigeria’s rice imports actually increased by 400,000 tonnes in the current year had been dismissed by CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele as “false and fake news”. Here is what he said on the issue at the 2018 Nigeria Investment Conference hosted by the Chartered Financial Analysts (CFA) Society of Nigeria in Lagos recently:

    “I was reading a report where the United States said the volume of imports of rice increased by 400,000 tonnes.

    “I am not a politician, but people should be very mindful when they open their mouths to say what is untrue because we would come out as central bank to attack it particularly if you use data incorrectly.

    “I seize the opportunity to say that it is untrue. The data that we have today shows that rice imported legally into the country is less than 25,000 tonnes in 2018 so far.

    “Then how come an agency which has not been to Nigeria or even been to the farms to see what we are doing, just come up and say that Nigeria has imported 400,000 tonnes above what it normally should import?

    “Go to the data of countries that export rice, you would see their data; you would find the quantity of rice imported by Nigeria. This is false and fake news.”

    Note his operative word legally. He should know, after all, he has been careful to ensure that no single dollar in the piggybank goes into the importation of rice. More than that, he currently leads the charge to get the local staple into every Nigerian home.I ndeed, under his watch over N100 billion has been invested in the cultivation of rice, wheat, sorghum etc.

    However, while I understand his anger if not frustration,over the attempt by a group of foreign ‘busy-bodies’ to poke fun at the expense of his laudable efforts; not so the dubious attempt to play the ostrich over a matter that is so easily verifiable. Simply put: between the quest for domestic sufficiency which the federal government stridently projects as alternative reality, and the real world of commodity availability in the market place, there remains lots of grounds to cover.

    If only in deference to Emefiele’s counsel, we start with the cold figures. For this, we turn to those supplied by the Thai Rice Exporters Association figures. From their latest data, we know that Benin, our next door neighbour imported 1.1 million metric tonnes of rice compared with Nigeria’s 1.2 million metric tonnesin 2014.

    That Benin’s import of rice declined to 0.8 million metric tonnes the following year. By the way, Nigeria’s rice import also declined to 0.6 million metric tonnes that year. However, by 2016, Benin’s rice imports dramatically surged to 1.4 million metric tonnes while Nigeria’s figure came further down to 0.1 metric tonnes. By 2017, Benin’s rice imports soared to a record 1.8 million metric tonnes at a time Nigeria recorded zero imports!

    Is it mere coincidence that whereas Nigeria’s official rice import has been on a negative slope, that of Benin Republic has been on a steady growth path?

    Again, let’s look at the figures more closely.  Yes, Nigeria’s rice import has been on a steady decline since 2015. However, Benin Republic has not only kept to a steady, positive import trajectory, the country has in effect, doubled its record of rice imports within the same space of time. And so while it pleases our government to tout the decline of official imports as evidence that things are looking up, or that the country is finally inching closer to domestic sufficiency in rice production, our ECOWAS neighbour has steadily moved in, using our porous borders, to fill the demand-supply gap!

    You call the deleterious trade practices across our border – ‘progress’?

    The implication must be seen as frightening enough; but even more troubling is the culture of denial which the development  has spawned. Yes, the country may have done so much to boost the cultivation of rice and other grains, some of the current claims of achievement are to put it mildly,  wildly exaggerated. Indeed, in a world where trade information is only a click away, only the Nigerian government can afford to live in the delusion that those rice-laden ships, officially headed for Benin are not destined unofficially for the Nigerian  market –which is what makes Emefiele contention laughable.

    By the way, if the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics, NBS, the CBN, or even the agricultural ministries are not too high-minded to consider a survey on the status of imported rice vis-à-vis those produced locally beneath them,  it might well be the beginning of the long voyage of recovery.

    Here is what I would do if I were to be the agriculture minister: rather than worry about statistics which have sound basis in reality, I would worry about what Benin, Cameroun and Niger Republic are doing to our economy.  I will do what countries do when faced with existential threats – read the Riot Act! After all, nothing in the ECOWAS treaty permits a supposedly friendly neighbour to provide transit services for smuggling into another sovereign country.

    For now, it should be hard to decide which, between the Americans and our ECOWAS frenemies, is a friend or foe.

  • Osun revolutionary years

    Christ, the divine, the Jews treated like scum. They didn’t rest until they nailed him to the cross, though he committed no crime.

    But after his resurrection and Ascension came Christianity, which billions today swear by. It is the nature of man to scoff at authentic heroes, secular or spiritual.

    From the divine to the legend. When Chief Obafemi Awolowo exited the Western Nigeria Premiership in 1959, not a few swore his political death had come.

    For one, his Action Group (AG), got drubbed at the December 1959 elections.  For another, Awolowo’s traducers, federal and regional, felt they had him exactly where they wanted him — on the brutal slaughter slab.

    Ferocious pre-death torture was the Coker Commission of Inquiry. The final gory chop? Awo’s conviction for treasonable felony.

    But where politics faltered, legacy triumphed. The man of ideas and unfazed federalist, who ran the most revolutionary government in Nigerian history, eventually trumped his traducers.

    Today, millions swear by Awo’s name. But nobody remembers his traducers and pyrrhic political “conquerors” — except for their perfidy and notoriety.

    As Awolowo before him, is Rauf Aregbesola gifting the polity — at least, the historic-minded segment of it — a sense of deja vu?

    1st Republic’s conventional politics laughed Awo’s policy brilliance to scorn — and for good measure, thrashed his AG at the polls.

    Still, Awo’s death in 1987 marked his apotheosis into some political god, whose thinking, particularly on Nigeria’s troubled federalism, is ever fresh and relevant.

    Aregbesola has run the most revolutionary, development-savvy and most impactful government, since Awo’s 1959 sign-off, in any part of Western Nigeria.

    True, two other governments come in for close mention.

    One, Alhaji Lateef Jakande’s 2nd Republic Lagos governorship (1979-1983).  It was four years of non-stop people-focused action; which has secured Jakande’s place in history, even while he still lives, despite the Abacha era stain.

    Two, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s Lagos governorship (1999-2007).  That government not only re-birth Lagos as self-sustaining and as Nigeria’s economic dynamo, it also discovered Aregbesola himself, as its infrastructure czar; aside from unleashing Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, three-in-one Minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola, and a slew of others, who continue to positively impact the current federal order.

    The big difference, however, is that Lagos had a head start as Nigeria’s former capital and the grand infrastructure it inherited, even if progressively decayed.

    Osun had practically nothing — and Aregebsola started planting his future garden of hope, opportunities, development and prosperity, in virtual virgin land, in a virtual infrastructural desert, physical and social.

    Given Osun’s barrenness by 2010, that garden has sprouted and thrived beyond many dreams, though some Osun elite continue to screech over short-term discomfort; and the state, even after Aregbesola’s eight path-finding years, is still a sprawling work-in-progress.

    So, like Awo, Aregbesola felt his ground-breaking feats should gift his ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) gubernatorial candidate, Gboyega Oyetola, a thumping mandate.

    But what ensued was the most nail-biting cliffhanger in Nigeria’s electoral history — spiced with the tragi-comedy of a dancing blob, with a wide berth from own family estate, nearly capering into the Osun governorship; and undoing eight years of unusual creativity, punishing thinking and gruelling work!

    But whatever happens at the election tribunal, Aregbesola’s place in Osun history is assured; though, not unlike Awo before him, many appear too blinded by current orchestrated negative blitz, to realize just that.

    An Oyetola win will secure continued hard work, on Osun’s steady but challenging march, into a glorious future, anchored on a solid foundation.

    But an Ademola Adeleke win would seal a pact with Stone Age, as in Ayo Fayose’s neighbouring Ekiti; complete with had-we-known gnashing of teeth, four years down the line!

    Either way — and God knows Osun deserves the better deal — Aregbe’s legacy is made.

    Despite a blighted economy, the Aregbe era boasts futuristic infrastructure, of gleaming roads and glittering schools, in eight short years; never before imagined, in Osun’s puddle of routinized rot.

    Should things turn awry, these landmarks would turn damning testimonies, against sordid electoral choices; like dust off the apostles’ sandals, dire evidence against those that scorned the gospel.

    But should things stay as they are, the in-coming Governor Oyetola is well placed to ramp up Osun to the next level; and banish, forever, its past stagnation.

    Still, not even those sparkling infrastructures would fully define Aregbe’s revolutionary “government unusual”. Rather, equal opportunity access would.

    Aregbesola, even with a lean purse, started the schools feeding system, the most radical pro-poor school magnet, of his political generation.

    By it, millions of children, from Osun’s most vulnerable homes, have been drawn to school; and served nutritive menu their parents could never have afforded. These children, as future adults, would proclaim Aregbe’s legacy.

    But what is welfare to these kids, is vibrant lifeline to no less beneficiary adults — crop, poultry and animal farmers, food vendors and sundry value chains.

    If 30 million children now benefit from the Federal Government version of this scheme, know that Aregbesola’s Osun started it all.

    When Aregbe started his equal opportunity religious push, a tragically limited media scoffed it off as “Islamization” — and wrote tonnes and tonnes of goading news and vitriol-spitting editorials.

    Yet, his government headed by a devout Muslim, is the first to stand for the rights of adherents to African traditional faiths, when he declared the yearly Osun Isese Day.

    Yes, his declaration of the Islamic New Year has spawned the Hijab controversy in schools, which not a few would rather condemn, because it bucks the conventional wisdom of “settled” school “uniform”.

    Still, today’s “secular” uniforms had Christian roots. Both the colonial government and missionaries that founded earliest schools were Christians. So is the Monday to Friday governmental work week. Therefore, the Hijab is symbol of long repressed legitimate rights, in a multi-religious polity.

    It takes a deeply focused but discerning government to push such campaigns without slipping on the brick-and-mortar, which everyone can see.

    Aregbesola’s Osun federalist rebranding, complete with its coat of arms, again sent a section of the media ga-ga, bawling “secession!”

    Yet today, Aregbesola exits power as a proud exponent of the Yoruba identity, unfazed proponent of Awo’s developmental politics and unapologetic advocate of South West integration within a federal Nigeria, without any iota Yoruba supremacism.

    Those who claim Ogbeni has “failed” are entitled to their democratic delusion.  But Aregbe legacies have already dug their graves.  History will bury them without trace.

  • Problem in search of definition

    These are interesting times, no doubt. As if Nigerians needed some sabbatical from the daily grind that state failure has  foisted on them hence their never-ending quest for basic existential issues long settled by more serious societies, the main gladiators in the restructuring debate continue to stoke the fire to keep Nigerians busy talking for the rest of the current electoral cycle. Which of course leaves one wondering whether the love for polemics or good old patriotism defined by love for fatherland it is that drives public discourse?

    True, Nigerians have since been talking, torn as one would imagine, into the two opposing camps of the restructuring debate: restructurists and those opposed to it. Never mind that the divisions, hardly ever ideological or even intellectual, remain basically along opportunistic lines – and with it the deliberate blurring of issues to create maximum confusion.

    Enter Atiku Abubakar. I understand why man who craves power perhaps more than life itself would want to be everything to all men; a man whose views keep changing like the British weather– all depending on time, space and audience – wanting to force the debate apparently because that seems to be the only thing left on the plate.

    One thing that cannot be denied him though his clarity on a subject that his opponents have done no more than waffle.

    Of course, the man couldn’t be clearer on the subject: return some items on the concurrent list to the states; yes, a reversal of the “epidemic of federal take-over of state and voluntary organisations, schools and hospitals which began in the 1970s”.

    To Atiku, restructuring means tinkering with the current federal structure “so it comes closer to what our founding leaders established, in response to the very issues and challenges that led them to opt for a less centralised system.

    “It means devolving more powers to the federating units with the accompanying resources. It means greater control by the federating units of the resources in their areas.

    “It would mean, by implication, the reduction of the powers and roles of the federal government so that it would concentrate only on those matters that could best be handled by the centre such as defence, foreign policy, monetary and fiscal policies, immigration, customs and excise, aviation as well as setting and enforcing national standards on such matters as education, health and safety”.

    He thinks these could be achieved within six months just as he believes that a good number of the measures do not actually require constitutional amendment.

    Good sound bites; no? Or simply politics?

    Whether the views could be described as realistic let alone workable given the formidable political strictures is open to question.How these will jell with the demands of his allies in Afenifere and the Ohaneze – two groups obviously more inclined to a more radical, geographical restructuring on the one hand, and a north sworn to anything but restructuring on the other, remains to be seen.

    President Muhammadu Buhari of course thinks the restructuring talk may well be a fancy topic for busybodies. Pressed to offer his thoughts on the raging subject during an interactive session with Nigerians in France, he says: “There are too many people talking lazily about restructuring in Nigeria. Unfortunately, people are not asking them individually what do they mean by restructuring? What form do they want restructuring to take?”

    “Do they want us to have something like the three regions we used to have? And now we have 36 states and the FCT. What form do they want? They are just talking loosely about restructuring…Let them define it and then we see how we can peacefully do it in the interest of Nigerians.

    “They are just saying they want Nigeria restructured and they don’t have the clue of what the form the restructuring should be. So, anybody who talks to you about restructuring in Nigeria, ask him what he means and the form he wants it to take.”

    Really?

    A president whose party manifesto actually promised restructuring? The leader of a party under whose direction a 10-man committee was actually set up to articulate the party’s position on restructuring? And to imagine that the president still does not have a position on the document that was submitted to his party some 10 moons ago!

    Ever heard of being sold a pig for a poke?

    So, what is the matter with Nigeria and where does restructuring fit in? Put another way, what is the relationship between ‘good governance and the restructuring of the kind that some Nigerians have long clamoured?

    For answers, we turn to Professor Ropo Sekoni, The Nation’s distinguished columnist and foremost scholar in what smacks of a masterful repudiation of Atiku’s treatise on restructuring in his piece of Sunday. By the way, the good professor is an unrepentant federalist hence his description of the Nigerian challenge as that of re-federalisation’. To him, it is “a more precise word for solving the problems militating against liberty, progress and development in the country”.

    He says of “good governance” that it is “not specific to federal or unitary governance model. It is expected to exist in all democracies—be they unitary like France, Netherlands, and Singapore, or federal like Canada, Belgium, Switzerland, the United States of America, and United Arab Emirates”.

    Devolution, he also said “is not specific to federalism; unitary governments do devolve or transfer powers to sub-national governments without making such system federal”. And that “promotion of privatisation of the economy” is”not a prerequisite for federalising a country. Privatisation is as visible in federal societies as it is in unitary polities”.

    Re-federalisation he says refers to “the degree of freedom available to sub-national governments to have autonomy to govern itself in response to its values”.

    Do I hear the chant – To thy tents oh Israel? It’s a long way – yet! See why nation-building is such a serious, never-ending business?

    To get back to the word – restructuring; is anyone still mystified? No one should be. According to the dictionary, it means “to organize a company, business, or system in a new way to make it operate more effectively”; to change the jobs and responsibilities within an organization, usually in order to make the organization operate more effectively”.

    Ask corporate chieftains;  not only do they know what the word entails, it is something they do routinely. In the shark infested waters of business, it is the only way to survive competition. It comes basically to fine-tuning business processes to ensure optimum performance; only when applied to politics and governance does it stoke fears and panic!

    So, is re-federalisation a la Sekoni or the all-purpose variant – restructuring, the cure all to Nigeria’s multiple maladies?  Here is my simple answer: constitutions or the form of government to which it gives rise can only be as good as the operators make it to be. Ever witnessed a brand new car with full options being driven by an incompetent and ill-mannered driver on a multi-lane highway? That can only be a recipe for disaster. Whereas restructuring  can only do so much to make things better; to make any real progress, a lot more obviously depends on the character of the leadership.

    Call it the value imperative and you are damn right! As they say, it is worth the weight in gold.

  • Inanity as electioneering strategy

    Crass inanity, as electioneering strategy, dogs the 2019 elections, as they draw close.

    That is why the electorate must be clear-headed; listen to the right stuff, and ask the right questions.

    A prime inanity is the sterile uproar over President Muhammadu Buhari’s school certificate.  Despite the attestation by the West African Examinations Council (WAEC), not a few still jabber and yammer to the contrary.

    This rather passionate nuisance bickers over all sorts — the photograph affixed on the attestation paper; who or who didn’t request for the attestation; WAEC’s alleged “diving” into partisan waters for PMB; the summary dismissal of the attestation itself as a “forgery” — rabid rallies just to hold on to wilful falsehood.  Ignorance was never so combative!

    That is inanity in its crudest form.

    But it also comes “refined” — for lack of better words to define lobbies, passing off personal bitterness as sweet public good. For another election-eve inanity, look no farther than the Afenifere camp.

    The pugnacious Baba Ayo Adebanjo may not symbolize Afenifere at its most sublime and politically correct form.

    But he epitomizes, more than any other, its id — to borrow the language of Sigmund Freud’s psychoanalysis — without the filtering powers of the ego and the super ego: the basest, of Afenifere’s essence, complete with its dark ethnic dross.

    Baba Adebanjo just decided to push his constitutional right to “sell” the Yoruba to  Atiku Abubakar.

    According to his logic, Bola Tinubu made a mistake by, in 2015, “selling” the Yoruba to PMB, with his Afenifere, he forgot to add, kicking, screaming and squealing, in protest-support for Goodluck Jonathan, and his raining dollars!

    Now, Baba Adebanjo is bent on making his own counter-”sale”.  The snag is no one remembers any Yoruba assemblage gifting him that power to play Hobson, for all the Yoruba.

    But no prize for guessing — that self-imposed mandate is “restructuring”, admittedly, a Yoruba political project, that has its root in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s espousal of ethnic federalism, in his 1947 classic, Path to Nigerian Freedom.

    Still, in the Afenifere context, “restructuring”, as this column has always maintained, is nothing but a survivalist racket, tapping into the deepest of Yoruba ethnic recesses, after the Afenifere 2015 debacle.

    Besides, Baba Adebanjo, from his statements, would appear assailed by two major dissonances — PMB, on the ethnic plane; and Tinubu, on the partisan front.

    Chief Adebanjo was quick to dismiss PMB’s integrity as “fake”.  That was vulgar abuse, to be sure.  Still, even a child knows what partisan bile doesn’t confer, it can’t possibly take away.

    PMB has lived his integrity all his life.  That’s why he is facing down the everlasting vermin that dub themselves “owners of Nigeria”; and sending that camp, scuttling in sheer panic.  Still, those blinded by ethnic hate can’t see that!

    The Tinubu conundrum, among the fiercely contending blocs within the Yoruba progressives, is tantamount to Mark Anthony’s painful musing over Augustus Caesar, in Shakespeare’s tragic play, Anthony and Cleopatra.

    While crushing the anti-Julius Caesar conspiracy, Augustus was nothing but a mere lieutenant, while Anthony was already a full general.  Yet, as a co-member of the second triumvirate of Anthony, Augustus and Aemilus Lepidus, Augustus always trumped his old general!

    So, the Afenifere old guard might feel really hard done by Tinubu — and for good reasons.

    The one had peddled Awo and his name, all their long, long political lives; with little or no value-added: just fiery inheritors and fierce wielders of the lucrative Awo franchise.

    The other has used the Awo pedestal to build a surfeit of new generation leaders, true to their Yoruba progressive essence but uninhibited by the ethnic ancestral feud that limits the old guard; and can therefore view Nigeria from a more total picture.

    Besides, one camp shrivels while the other sprouts; and yet another judgment — nay, harvest — time is near!

    You can, therefore, see the shrivelling party hug, in sheer ecstasy, an especially virulent form of Yoruba irredentism, if not outright supremacy, to rally a crowd.  In that fevered nightmare, Tinubu is the perfect scapegoat!  Yet, the electorate isn’t that daft!

    All of these manouevres, nevertheless, belong to Afenifere’s spite-filled but vocal minority, a cabal that has seized that conclave and chisselled it according to its whims and caprices.  That Baba Ayo Fasanmi just called their bluff is ample proof.

    Still, beyond Afenifere is another ensemble of pretentious inanity — the so-called “objective” army of media critics.  This clan rattles with so much violence when they declare things are wrong.  But when things are right, they lose their thunder and become absolutely coy — if not outright miserable!

    No thanks to their patriotic clatter, a country at a dire strait can’t achieve a consensus to get out of its bind.  The social tragedy from this camp is huge: that their so-called analyses are rich only drives them to more rabid mischief.

    But again, it behoves the reading or watching or listening public to be wary — lest they be misled.

    The 2019 elections are as defining as any, in Nigeria’s chequered electoral history.  The choice is simple, really: to discard the gains of 2015 and go back to pre-2015 Egypt, Olusegun Obasanjo’s era of rot; or join PMB to consolidate on building a new Nigerian order, even if it is early days yet; and things are tough.

    But it is this stark choice that those who have nothing to offer try to obliterate and complicate, by throwing in all sorts of inanities — ethnic, religious and sundry noises.  Still, it’s the PMB’s camp bounden duty to keep the electorate focused.  That is crucial to wise electoral choice.

    By this time in 2014, a rattled President Jonathan was posing as “persecuted Christian” president, shopping for orchestrated but rogue blessings; and sending his Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN) collaborators, in cant and in mammon, tingling with faith and ethnic hate!

    Shortly after would follow a massive dollar rain, from which even a pillar of the moral palladium of Afenifere could not but “obtain”!  Of course, Jonathan’s grovelling for pity followed four years of presidential collapse.

    Mercifully now, PMB hasn’t gone on his own sortie of illicit blessings, from mosques nationwide, as “Muslim” president.  He has made his own mistakes, no doubt.  But all he has done is concentrate on his work.

    Well, the only pre-election sortie, right now, is Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s Tradermoni financial inclusion crusade, to the poorest of the poor and the most vulnerable of Nigerian hardworking folks, gritting it out in Nigerian markets, nationwide.

    What is more?  The seed money, for Tradermoni, comes from retrieved Abacha loot!  That makes a definite statement — a radical departure from the old Obasanjo order of feeding a few but powerful parasites, to spending Nigeria’s scarce resources on the majority of Nigerians.

    That critical shift is what the 2019 elections are all about — and why a panicky Obasanjo has abandoned his much vaunted “Third Force”, to gobble his twin vomit of PDP and Atiku Abubakar, incidentally Afenifere’s new beloved twin champions!

    True, it’s only in crises that folks really show who truly they are — and the Afenifere is living proof!

  • ASUU assault

    The Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) is in a dilemma. As potentates of learning, they are supposed to elevate humanity from poverty to prosperity. This it will do, by applying knowledge to the challenges of life, whether the mundane or the esoteric. In a new world, driven by knowledge, members of ASUU should be revered egg-heads, who churn out innovations, ideas and dreams to aid the nation’s march to greatness.

    But alas, ASUU has become an object of ridicule. The latest of its strikes instead of evoking sympathy and sense of urgency has become a subject of derision, even amongst the educated. The challenge facing the union is compounded by the absence of a knowledge-driven economy and an egalitarian social environment, revolving on the cusp of learning. Where it elsewhere, where education is very productive in innovations and social capital, perhaps ASUU can throw its weight around and hope to gain attention.

    But of what valuable stock is a professorial chair in a country, where the most valuable office in the land is constitutionally open for grabs by any person who merely passed through a secondary education? If you want to be a president, governor or senator, all you needed to have is a secondary school certificate. You don’t even need to have passed in flying colour. Just that you attempted the examination.

    ASUU also fails to realize that you don’t need to be innovative to gain the other requirement of attaining a high office in the country they operate in. That other requirement is having train-load of money, whether by hook or crook. As a matter of fact, if the kind of innovation you have is knowledge-driven, then you are likely to end up poorer. Take for instance writing a good book. Unless you are a member of ASUU who can force students to patronize it, where is the reading public to buy the book? Indeed, if the book is good, it will be pirated without consequences by the other types of innovators.

    Even more challenging for ASUU is that there are few innovations from the universities in Nigeria to make their output a hot brand. Recently, Bill Gates was promoting innovative toilets from China. He lamented that more than two billion people defecate in the open and bayed the grave consequences on the health of our children. He poignantly linked water and sanitation to good health. Of course, a large chunk of Nigerians defecate in the open, some on tarred roads, like the tanker and trailer drivers who now live in their trucks parked on the road to the nations ports in Apapa and Tin Can, in Lagos.

    Yet, it is China which has improved tremendously in water, sanitation and health management that is coming up with such a quality innovation, apparently for third world countries like ASUU’s Nigeria. Whether because of the absence of research funding or of innovative academicians, the Nigerian universities are not hot-beds of innovations. If the universities are not centres of innovation and are not churning out potential innovators from its faculties, how can the lowly educated policy formulators that are occupying high offices in government take ASUU serious when they are making demands for quality education?

    With low quality products, how can ASUU hope to sell its services at a premium? So when the children are back home because of ASUU’s strike, what most parents are worried about is the economics of their stay, not the missed potentials from impotent universities. If their wards can gain the degree staying at home, many parents won’t complain. They will wonder, whether there is much difference staying in school or at home; since either way, they end up with relatively poor quality education, at graduation?

    Unfortunately, since there are very few high tech jobs that require quality university education in our dear country, there are no serious measures for the quality of university education that many possess. So in the market world, a degree is a degree, regardless of quality. To get by, it is not the quality that matters. In most cases, it is who you know. Indeed, after years of university study, many end up doing what requires mere standard secondary education.

    Regrettably, what is needed to work in the federal or state civil service is a certificate, not quality, and students can acquire that, with the on and off academic sessions that ASUU’s many strikes accommodate. So when ASUU goes on strike, neither the students nor their parents will organize a march to compel a resolution of the dispute. The few high tech jobs or really good jobs are taken over by foreign trained students, most of whom are the children of the high and mighty in the society, some of whom got their high positions or successes without much education.

    Of note, members of ASUU suffer double jeopardy since most of their children attend Nigerian universities. With their children also victims, they end up breeding successors of struggling children and students. This is so, since they cannot afford to train their children abroad, and with the strike-tainted education they are not qualified for the high-end dream jobs. Of course, the challenges faced by the students in the university leads to a limited success in life, which further dis-incentivise university education in the country.

    As academicians, ASUU knows the need for incentives, after all that is what they are primarily striking for. Perhaps it is time to ask themselves whether their resort to strike provides enough incentive to compel government to listen to their cries for better funding of universities. Without any doubt, this writer believes that Nigerian universities are grossly underfunded, and unless there is a paradigm shift, the country will continue to lag behind in all indices of life. Obviously, until we produce the critical number with quality education to drive the national development, we will continue to run in circles.

    Whether in medicine, engineering or arts, Nigeria has large pools of very educated citizens living in diaspora, who are helping their countries of residence make giant strides in science, economy and arts. Yet, Nigeria has not solved basic needs, like food, shelter and electricity, even as her population is exponentially racing to become one of the three most populated countries in the world in few years. Even scarier is that while we have not solved basic health challenges like malaria, money guzzling health issues like cancer are already at our door step.

    So, even while government can afford to ride roughshod over ASUU’s demands unlike how it deals with NLC and its affiliates, especially NUPENG; our dear country is paying and will continue to pay huge price for the poor quality of university education in the country. Even those who train abroad, comes home to suffer the general assault from poor education.

  • The Fixer departs

    Based on media reports on the build-up to the 2012 gubernatorial election in Edo State, as well as reports on the poll underway at the time, I was almost swamped by that sinking feeling summed up by the expression, “Here we go again.”

    Or, to borrow from the vast repertory of legendary Yankees baseball player and manger Yogi Berra’s felicitous locutions, “It is déjà vu all over again.”

    First, the build-up.

    In the heat of a rancorous campaign, the Federal Government, which had a vested interest in the outcome, flooded the state with soldiers in numbers not seen in the killing fields of Jos, nor in vast swathes of territory in Borno, Yobe, Bauchi, Gombe, Kaduna and Kano that Boko Haram had turned into no-go areas.

    For whose benefit was the atmosphere of fear and intimidation being confected?

    The resident police commissioner was replaced by an officer from another command, ostensibly to create a more level playing field, in case he had developed some sympathy for the incumbent governor.  But that high-minded precaution was neutralised by the possibility that the new man could just as well be coming in with his own marching orders.

    The election umpire INEC was of course not obliged to grant accreditation to all seeking election observer status.  Still, it should be able to explain clearly and convincingly why it granted some applications and denied others.  It couldn’t.

    Most worrisome, there were reports of fake voters’ cards all over the place, a development that had been brought to the attention of the INEC chair. Would INEC, or more likely the courts, have to decide the outcome on the basis of forensic evidence again, as was the case in the Osun and Ekiti gubernatorial elections?

    Then, the field reports on Election Day.

    Of election materials arriving late in many precincts, delaying accreditation, reducing the window for voting, and generally exacerbating anxieties.

    Of the incumbent, Governor Adams Oshiomhole, who should by rights be looking forward to the outcome with confidence, fretful instead, charging that INEC had failed on the threshold to conduct a free election.

    In contrast, his opponent, the PDP candidate Charles Airhiavbere, was jaunty, saying that reports reaching him from “his people” indicated that the voting has been largely favourable, and that “corrections” would be made where the voting had not gone his way.

    Then, rather ominously, the man on whom I had bestowed the accolade of “The Fixer” (someone who is skilled at arranging for things to happen, especially dishonestly. managing and organising; not to be confused with Mr Fixit, denoting a person who characteristically tinkers with or repairs things) during the presidential election debacle of June 1993, started playing coy, saying that it was too early to pick a winner.

    That was not the Tony Anenih we knew, the canny political operator who had declared shortly  after the purported election in 2007 of his candidate Oserhiemen Osunbor — subsequently voided  by the courts – not merely that Osunbor would win the next gubernatorial election due in four years, but had already won it.

    The new diffidence hardly became the sure-footed operative who had declared at the time former President Umaru Yar’Adua was barely four months in office that there would be no vacancy in Aso Rock, come the next election cycle.

    He was wrong, but no matter.

    When the man who bargained away the victory of his party’s candidate in the 1993 presidential election for a misbegotten “interim national government” and declared the day that treacherous bargain was struck the happiest day of his life – when that man was saying that it was too early to predict the outcome of an election on which he was staking his well-earned notoriety, you had to pinch yourself just to be sure you were still conscious.

    It was not for nothing, then, that in the weeks leading up to the 2012 gubernatorial election, it often seemed as if the contest was between Governor Oshiomhole and Tony “The Fixer” Anenih, who had made a career and a vast fortune out of turning winners into losers and losers into winners.  When these proclivities were backed by the Federal Might, those against whom they were deployed could hardly be blamed for getting jittery.

    The Oshiomhole Campaign, propelled by the awesome political machine of the ACN, seemed  to have anticipated this, and more.  That much was clear from their newspaper advertisement declaring categorically that its publicity machine would end all electioneering at the time stipulated by law and disavowing any campaign material published in its name after that hour.

    They must have remembered how Chief John Odigie-Oyegun’s election as SDP governor of Edo State was nearly torpedoed by one claim, among others, that he had continued to campaign right up to the poll.

    True, a tribunal had upheld the election, ruling that a candidate could not be held liable for material put out by a third party on polling day. Still, why take a chance, especially when, in these matters, precedent counts for little, as the Opposition had learned at great cost?

    Even in the Department of Dirty Tricks, those who had vowed to “re-capture” Edo State    were not found wanting.  They plastered one of the precincts in the PDP’s candidate’s constituency with pictures purporting to show Oshiomhole in a compromising posture with a teenage girl — the very picture that had been doing tawdry rounds weeks before the election, and in respect of which Oshiomhole had filed defamation lawsuit.

    And then, there was the alarming report that, weeks before the poll, the results had already been collated, showing – no prizes for making the right pick – the PDP candidate, whoever he was, the runaway winner.

    So, could the report that the result of the Edo gubernatorial poll was already signed and sealed and only waiting to be delivered be more revelation than rumour?  Was this déjà vu  all over again?  Would The Fixer show that he was still on top of his game despite some  recent setbacks, or would The Comrade take The Fixer out of political reckoning in Edo once and for all?

    The result was a rout.

    The Fixer could not even fix his own ward, much less that of his candidate. While the outcome did not signal the end of election fixing, it more than presaged the twilight of the career of the most fearsome practitioner of perhaps the darkest of political arts.  He never fixed another election.

    Fittingly, his lucrative career ended in the Edo country, where it had begun in the run-up to the 1983 General Elections.

    Just as he could not fix the nation’s decrepit road network when he was President Obasanjo’s Minister of Works, he could not fix the Nigeria Ports Authority, a task he was given as a consolation prize.

    When Anenih turned 82 three years ago, former military head of state General Abdulsalami Abubakar raised grave doubts about own political judgement and moral standing when, in a full-page newspaper advertisement, he eulogised the former chairman of the PDP’s Board of Trustees as “a national icon” and “keeper of the peace of the nation. . . a mentor to the upcoming generation.”

    Withal, a personage who had lived a life of “total commitment to the higher principles of unalloyed loyalty to the national cause,” and one whose life was “an eloquent testimony to a life  of discipline spent in sacrifice and sincere devotion to a nation . . .”

    And when Anenih died three weeks ago, aged 85, Obasanjo memorialised him in identical terms.  Anenih’s death, he said, marked the end of an “inspiring chapter of Nigeria’s history.”  Anenih’s life, he continued, was an “archetypal lesson in public service and leadership at its best.”  In the course of a lifetime of “remarkable contributions to the political sector of the nation, Obasanjo declared, Anenih became “a national icon and authentic role model.”

    A man of great personal charm the Iyasele of Esanland may well have been in some of his private relationships, and a person of great personal kindness to boot.

    But a “national icon?” An authentic role model?  “A patriot” who, according to House Speaker Yakubu Dogara, “gave his all for the unity” of Nigeria?

    Any wonder, then, that Nigeria is in a morass?