The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • As the APC faces 2019           

    As the APC faces 2019           

    The crown that had eluded President Muhammadu Buhari at three previous elections had hardly settled on his head when he was dealt a severe blow, not by the embittered stragglers of the beaten Opposition,  but by the combined forces of a stalwart of the ruling party he had worsted in the contest for the party’s presidential ticket, his acolytes, and the Opposition.

    The legislative majority Buhari was counting on to help translate his programmes and policies into law did not materialize.  The stalwart had other ideas.  In a cloak-and-dagger conspiracy, the machinery of which can be compared to a Shakespearean tragedy, he offered key legislative offices reserved for the APC as of right to the opposition in return for being elected Senate president, the third highest political office in the realm.

    That was how Dr Bukola Saraki, (APC, Kwara Central) supplanted  Senator Ahmed Lawan Ibrahim (APC, Yobe South) who had been chalked down for the post, in the process emasculating the Buhari Administration and the APC.   And that was how Ike Ekweremadu, of the PDP, who had served as deputy Senate president in the ousted Goodluck Jonathan administration, came to retain that position under the new APC Government.

    That was on June 9, 2015.

    Some members of the National Assembly, remember, were gathered in a meeting hall in Abuja, on the information that Buhari was to address them ahead of the Inauguration of the National Assembly later that day. They were still waiting there when a rump of APC senators led by Saraki, sneaked into the National Assembly, and with support from PDP senators, staged their power grab with forged  documents.  There, on national television, was a triumphal Saraki ensconced in the Speaker’s chair, gavel in hand.

    Why had Buhari not intervened to restore party discipline and due process? For an answer, the usurpers and their supporters fell back on a passage in Buhari’s Inaugural Address, wherein he had declared that, as president, he belonged “to no one and to everyone.”  By which he probably meant that, as president, he was enjoined be fair to everyone, supporter and adversary alike.

    The sentiment is unexceptionable, but the phrasing was disingenuous.  Buhari could not have meant that he was enjoined to be indifferent to the kind of scheme Saraki had hatched to become Senate president.   But that was how many inside and outside Saraki’s camp interpreted it and tried to use it    to hamstring the president.

    In truth, the president belongs in the APC, not in the PDP or any other political party.  It was through  the exertions of some key political actors that the APC was established and nurtured into a formidable political force.  The same key political actors had toiled to ensure that Buhari the party’s presidential ticket.  And it was through the exertions of party workers and across Nigeria sympathetic to his agenda that he was elected president.

    Now that he is president, he is free turn his back on them and accord their concerns no greater priority than the concerns of his sworn adversaries now in league with a faction of his party?

    In theory, perhaps, but not in the world of realpolitik.

    Buhari’s problematic phrase was even more widely interpreted as a signal that Buhari intended to cut APC national leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu to size, now that his role as kingmaker was over.  He would be consigned to the margins.  He would play no part in the selection of key personnel and wield no influence in the day-to-day running of the administration.

    This resolve was perhaps best expressed in the aftermath of the gubernatorial election in Kogi State  won by the APC ticket of Abubakar Audu and Abiodun Faleke.  Audu died after the votes were in but before the result was officially announced. The best way of honouring the people’s choice was to proclaim Faleke governor-elect and employ the party machinery or some other transparent device to designate and finally consecrate a deputy governor.

    But the party chairman John Oyegun was inveigled into referring the matter to the Federal Attorney General who, given his reputation for obfuscation, would turn the whole thing inside out and upside down.  He lived up to that reputation; his advisory opinion, adopted wholly by a compromised court, handed the governorship to Yahaya Bello.

    Faleke was Tinubu’s candidate; if he was allowed to take power as governor, that would not only enhance Tinubu’s already huge profile, it would also extend his reach and influence to “the North.” Better to contain him; alienate him even, to the point that he felt much more comfortable and more appreciated outside Nigeria than within it.

    In today’s political climate, can Buhari still affirm that he belongs to no one and to everyone?  I cannot tell.  But I do know that his current difficulties resulted from his acting out that dictum.

    His agenda is stalled, and his reelection can no longer be taken for granted.  The legislative houses in which his party holds comfortable majorities have become an entrenched opposition, holding up his Budget proposals and confirmation of some of his nominees to key positions.

    In cahoots with a resurgent PDP, they moved to amend the Constitution to eliminate a provision of the electoral law they believe will play to Buhari’s advantage if he is a candidate, not minding that the amendment could work against whomever the party puts up as its candidate.

    Meanwhile, they are poised to dump the APC and embrace whichever party seems likely to advance their personal fortunes – and the public interest be damned.

    As things stand now, the APC as we know it may well enter the 2019 race fragmented and hobbled.  It will score high on effort and low on results.  In formal terms, the responsibility for its performance belongs to Buhari.  He is the president and answerable for his acts and for acts done in his name.

    In an informal but more damning sense, the responsibility also belongs to his handpicked officials and aides who have taken advantage of his laid-back approach and sought to run the government as a closed shop.

    It is to First lady Aisha Buhari’s credit that she saw through this cynical ploy and deplored it.

    Irony of ironies,  it is to Tinubu that the beleaguered President Buhari has now turned to help bring the feuding factions of the APC together so that the can face the 2019 general elections with confidence – the same Tinubu he and his cohorts have treated most shabbily, for no good reason.

    Concerned that he was about to be used again and dumped thereafter, many of Tinubu’s friends and associates urged him to decline the assignment.  But his commitment to the survival of the baby he helped bring forth and nurtured to winning form, plus his overarching sense of public service, seem to have supervened.

    If anyone can carry out the task Buhari has assigned, it has to be Tinubu.  It must be hoped that it is not too late.

  • Grave distraction

    Grave distraction

    At a most crucial juncture, critical segments of the Nigerian elite lapse into grave — if not fatal — distraction.  They may yet live to rue a lost opportunity.

    More and more, embattled President Muhammadu Buhari looks like Eman, that tragic hero of Wole Soyinka’s play, The Strong Breed.

    Eman gave his all, to an unconscionable, insensitive, soulless and unappreciative community, just as his grander and more famous parallel, the Christ Jesus, died, so the rest of humanity — at least according to Christian tenets — might live.

    The more the president pines, the more he is scorned, if not by the quiet majority, then by a noise-some, virulent ensemble; most garrulous among whom are unfazed past wreckers, locating their own redemption in Buhari’s destruction. Yet, Buhari is nary the enemy.

    But this din is the exact opposite of the Jesus-Eman paradigm: the rest must perish for them, these noxious few, to live and thrive!

    As if bewitched, critical stakeholders of the Nigerian realm have joined this self-destruct crusade.

    In booming business are ethnic entrepreneurs, with their impassioned Fulani roasting; tribal pigeon-holing and ethnic scapegoating, their golden but empty panacea to rural banditry (read “Fulani herdsmen”), with its wanton waste of life.

    Churches live in scandalous denial of the tough economic rebuilding, play politics of the belly with their congregants’ plight and worship on the altar of cheap populism.

    Yet, that denial negates their core doctrine: purgatory before salvation — that tough path to spiritual renewal.  If you don’t purge yourself of old vices, how do you appreciate the new grace?

    A section of the media, smug, severe, all-wise and all-knowing, point fingers, lecture and hector: a very few from the position of condescending knowledge; a good many from self-yoked but badly disguised bigotry; and many, many more, just echoing the din, like some Roman plebs baying for blood, but never bothering to ask why!

    Among the commentariat, an anarchist’s manifesto would appear writ large!

    Why, even the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) appears deaf, dumb and blind to its historic mission.

    In what seems a grim revision of the resurrection order, its in-house Judases, sold to the inevitable triumph of evil over good, crow on the ascendancy; while its salvation crew, that bodes well for the country, are quiet, subdued and brow-beaten.

    Yet, this country may well sink, if the current salvage mission fails.

    The former ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)? Those suffer a power plague.   Should PDP have a sole survivor, (s)he would holler: “power! power!! power!!! till (s)he gives up the ghost. On power for power’s sake, the PDP is well and truly lost!

    In this confusion of loud nothingness, even an arid youth-old age dichotomy rages.  With no penetrating insight, talk less of solution, banal scapegoating and maligning of old age rule the roost.

    Enter some mythical “youth”, serving selves as some future deus-ex-machina, to magically resolve all issues. Crass opportunism never wears a more comical garb!

    But it so happens: Kogi’s Yahaya Bello, 43, is Nigeria’s youngest governor today.  Oyo’s Isiaka Ajimobi, at 67, is one of the oldest.  Yet, post the performance bond of each and see how distracting — if not totally irrelevant — is the age dichotomy!

    With about everyone mushy with sweet emotions, it’s no wonder everyone appears glued to symptoms.  So, the root cause(s) luxuriate without check, mutating in different crises, leading to yet more growls.  Such a vicious cycle!

    Yet, what to do is break that cycle by tasking the government on solutions.  But lo!  The media  is fixated with ethnic slurs and conspiracy theories.  So, the most vital issues receive the least attention.

    But with penetrative thinking, the narrative could change from eternal laments, with self-induced Armageddon looming nearer and nearer; to clinical thinking, which could be a glorious game-changer, like the Red Sea, parting before the rod of Moses.

    High crimes, as herdsmen killings and other violent crimes, rural and urban, are a function of mass poverty; itself, a function of thinning-out opportunities.

    Rampant sleaze is the central trigger of all these malaise.  Ethnic baiting and roasting are its notorious handmaiden, and most horrendous symptom; for the most explosive economic ruptures often manifest in ethnic tensions, where the enemy is the “other people”.

    Yet, the Buhari Presidency’s focus, since its coming, is clearly this twin-strategy: growing the real economy, to broaden economic opportunities and tackle mass poverty; and plugging the routine plunder of the public till, with its war against corruption: to free public money for public investments, economic and social.

    Both fronts have made fair progress, even with their own fair share of glitches.

    Agriculture, which posted 25 per cent of GDP in 2017, helped to power the economy back, from the recession of 2016, to a growth of 1.4 per cent, given figures from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS).  With slow but steady growth in industry (3.92 per cent in 2017) and services (0.10 per cent in 2017) and increased earnings from crude, the economy appears heading north.

    But there are glitches too.  The service sector posted 53 per cent of GDP in 2017, but it  only grew by 0.10 per cent.  This accounts for the still general sluggishness of the economy and the hunger and pains in the land.

    Besides, the increased crude earnings are neutralized by the continuing importation of refined products.  Though this is a key policy journey to nowhere from the ancien regime, full benefits from that sector are impossible without 100 per cent local refining.

    Yet, with expected better infrastructure, in roads and rail, the Federal Government is projecting a 3.5 per cent growth in 2018, compared to World Bank’s 2.5 per cent.  That means, worst case scenario, taking the World Bank estimates, the economy would grow by a further 1.1 per cent; possibly 2.1, if you take the government’s projections.

    No great leap, to be sure.  But given the near total wreck of 2015, and with far less cash at hand, it’s no little achievement.

    Besides, this is real sector growth, driven by people’s sweat; not the account-tinkering ploy of the Obasanjo-Jonathan era.  Little wonder, Nigeria is projected to become self-sufficient in rice and tubers this year.

    Parallel to developments in the real economy, the lustration of governance is on; exposing the jumbo sleaze of the Jonathan era. Yet to the nay assembly, with their media amplifiers, this lustration is nothing but an illustration of the polity’s impotence against corruption.  A nay anthem never sounded so silly!

    Yes, the regime has its own numbing scandals, not at all attune to a regime with zero tolerance for corruption.  Yet, only a skewed mindset would trumpet the latest Transparency International (TI) verdict on Nigeria as “evidence” that corruption is “rising”.

    That is nothing but sorry self-immolation.

    But then, it fits into that irrational frame, so common these days, of pillorying those working hard to salvage the sorry situation, while serenading the wreckers that dug the pit.

  • Thai tears and other fables

    Thai tears and other fables

    Even without the online medium, The Cable disproving the claims by Minister of Agriculture Audu Ogbeh that the Thais have been in lamentation ever since Nigeria put a lid on import of rice from the country, I could have sworn that the avuncular minister goofed – big time. Seven giant rice mills – the minister famously claimed at a meeting of the Presidential Fertilizer Initiative (PFI) and leadership of the Fertiliser Producers and Suppliers of Nigeria (FEPSAN) held at the Council Chamber of the Presidential Villa, Abuja, on Friday – have shut down because Nigeria’s import has fallen by 95 per cent on rice alone.

    “Just like two weeks ago, the ambassador of Thailand came to my office and said to me that we have really dealt with them”, he reportedly told his guests.

    “But I asked what did we do wrong and he said unemployment in Thailand was one of the lowest in the world, 1.2 percent, it has gone up to four percent because seven giant rice mills have shut down because Nigeria’s import has fallen by 95 percent on rice alone”, he was further quoted to have said.

    Lai Mohammed, Minister of Information and Culture, would add another dimension to the issue when, during a tour of some rice farms in Kebbi State also at the weekend stated: “As we speak today, Thailand rice growers are making passionate appeal to the Federal Government. What they are doing now is that they want to set up rice mills in Nigeria, which means we have won”.

    Won?

    To start with, if anyone needed any proof of how little has changed in the rice equation trade, a trip to any of our urban markets will far more disprove claims about overnight capacity than a thousand fact-checking could ever do. Except the two ministers would have us believe that those foreign branded rice in the popular Daleko – Mushin, or Isale Eko as indeed any of our local markets are actually local rice re-bagged as foreign, only then can they convince anyone that the Nigerian rice has truly arrived! For while the Nigerian rice may seem very much in vogue at this time, the claims about availability remains more of fantasy than reality!

    Again, thanks to The Cable for laying things bare – so to speak – the medium actually reported that Thai exports of rice in January rose by 17.6 percent just as exports grew to 37.2 percent year-on-year – a trend which clearly suggests that things are actually looking up – not down – for a country said to be in mourning over the loss of its Nigerian market. And so it goes that if we excuse the ‘alternative facts’ so presented and which flies in the face of hard facts as one of those pardonable lapses in one momentary ecstasy in the aftermath of a bountiful harvest, shouldn’t the ‘realities’ which the minister admitted to at the meeting have tempered his claims?

    This, in my view is the crux of the matter. By this I mean the minister’s reference to the terrible havoc being wreaked on this nation by our ECOWAS neighbours under the liberalisation policy. Here is how the minister framed the issue: “…we have to take one strong measure against our neighbour to the West. The smuggling is really compromising our capacity on our result.

    “Too much rice, too much fake fertilizer is still coming across the borders into this country in spite of the Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) we have with them they are not listening.

    “Maybe if the Federal Government takes one tough action, they will come and renegotiate the terms because good neighbourliness means reciprocity… We can’t be allowing them to survive at our own expense and I believe that we will do something about it,’’ he said.

    Had the minister not earlier on, proceeded to cart home the trophy before the game was over, we would, while conceding to him as being spot on, see him as offering an important perspective to the current quest to get the nation’s rice value chain up and running. For much as many are wont to see the minister’s claim about the impact of the curb on rice imports on the Thai economy as somewhat exaggerated, undeniable is that our quest for local sufficiency – whether of rice or any other commodity for that matter – would ultimately be won or lost at the nation’s borders – with Bangkok, in the case of rice constituting a major factor in the equation. Despite pretensions to the contrary, and as troubling as the proposition appears to be, it is a reality that we have to live with for a long time to come.  I do verily believe that ECOWAS Big Brother will do well to pay attention to the permissive, inter-border trade, which aside killing our economy actually puts our national interest in grave jeopardy.

    By the way, did Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo not warn us in November last year about three ship loads of 120,000 metric tons of Thailand rice said to be headed for Nigeria? Did he not also inform his guests that Nigeria in December 2016 blocked about 500,000 metric tons of rice coming into the country?

    I recall what he said of the shipment at the occasion of the Sixth Presidential Business Forum in Abuja: “It is very clear that the rice is meant for Nigeria because they don’t consume parboiled rice in that country; they consume the white broken rice…Our neighbours do excellent business with allowing rice to come into Nigeria.” He could not have been more emphatic: smuggling of agricultural produce into Nigeria, constitute an existential threat to the country’s agricultural sector.

    So much for the spirit of ECOWAS – the 43-year old sub regional body that has become something of an anachronism in the age of Brexit and Donald Trump, our neighbours would rather play transit for goods destined for the Nigerian market – goods they do not consume but nonetheless constitute a major element of its sustenance – a case of the parasite feeding on the blood of the host with the latter permanently anaemic?

    I guess it’s time Nigeria moved to review the terms of the sub-regional treaty. After all, what the Holy Book says is love your neighbour as – not more than – yourself!

  • The burden of change

    The burden of change

    Call it two lethal blows to the solar plexus – it must have been a hard time for an administration that swept into office on the chariot of change to watch everything it has labored so hard for vaporize at the speed of light.

    On Monday, February 19, Nigerians woke up to the terrible news of the abduction of 110 Dapchi schoolgirls by suspected Boko Haram militants. The insurgents, said to be dressed in military camouflage reportedly stormed the Government Girls Science Technical College (GGSTC), Dapchi, Yobe State in two 4-wheel drive vehicles painted in military colour. Firing into the air to create an atmosphere of bedlam, the hapless girls, most of who, ran into different directions for safety, were said to have run into the Boko Haram militants posing as helpers. In the siege said to have lasted for two hours, 110 schoolgirls were ferried into the unknown.

    And so here we are being forced to relive the horror of Chibok some two months into the fourth anniversary of an abduction that shook the entire world. Of course, that five and half score schoolgirls could vanish without trace has only showed how very little has changed in any real sense as far as the insurgency war raging in the northeast goes. Not only has the myth of the invincibility of the fortress occupied by the Boko Haram despite the military’s claims to the contrary persisted; the possibility of our dear country, Nigeria, still harbouring vast, ungoverned spaces, far beyond the reach of the military has again been reinforced.

    If anything, that knowledge ought to provide citizens something to chew upon for a long time.

    So also are nearly half-a-dozen uncomfortable truths. Of course, the governor, Ibrahim Geidam, has since apologised for misleading Nigerians about the occurrence. While that is pardonable considering that the governor could only have echoed the information supplied him by his aides, but then, his attempt at finger-pointing merely exposes the age-long hypocrisy of his ilk.

    His words: “I blame the whole attack on Dapchi on the military and the defence headquarters who withdrew troops from Dapchi. The attack occurred barely a week after the military withdrew the soldiers from there… Before then, Dapchi has been peaceful, there was never such incident. But just a week after they withdrew the troops, Boko Haram came to attack the town”.

    Well said.

    The governor unfortunately has, up till now, not told us why no lessons appears to have been learnt by his government – nearly 10 years into the battle that has engulfed a huge chunk of the territory under his watch. None of basic structures of intelligence appears to have been in place not to talk of security architecture to match for a region that has been volatile all this while. Nothing of the synergy between the local authorities and the security and intelligence communities as one would expect given the peculiar security challenges facing the state as indeed the entire northeast. Yet, the governor could talk of the billions of naira spent to assist the military.

    The point certainly bears stating: Had basic structures of intelligence been in place and so appropriately nourished over time, it would seem inconceivable that the chief security officer of the state would be in the dark for the whole of the two hours that the siege was said to have lasted. One can only therefore presume that the huge sum said to have been spent precluded investment in critical intelligence.

    If the truth must be told, the situation, more tellingly, speaks to the calibre of men occupying our various government houses, their understanding of the rationale of governance and their fitness for the office.

    Which takes us to the role of the military in the entire saga. Expectedly, the military has since denied that there were any soldiers stationed in Dapchi before the attack. The closest military outpost, according to Defence Spokesman, John Agim, a brigadier-general, is about 30 kilometres away. Now, even if we take the statement by the military on its face value, and if we agree that the military cannot be everywhere at the same time, it still does not excuse the slow response time, the inability to track the movement of the terrorists several days after, and its appalling overall intelligence.

    Finally, the only point that needs to be added is that, the Buhari administration, in announcing that the Boko Haram has been vanquished, apparently rejoiced too soon. Far from being over, the war has merely revealed how far the armed forces have to go to modernise itself as a fighting force, particularly one suitable for these difficult times.

  • To Akinwunmi Isola, cultural nationalist

    To Akinwunmi Isola, cultural nationalist

    Prof Akinwunmi Isola (1939-2018), famed playwright, poet, academic, actor and culture icon, passed away on February 17, a young old man at 78.

    For culture lovers, particularly his protégées in the propagation of the majesty of Yoruba culture, his death came too soon, despite his old age.

    Yet, the bitter-sweet reality of it all may just serve as a timely check: the imperative to apply the breaks at that apex, before cultural pride plumbs into into cultural chauvinism and ethnic irredentism.

    That golden spot, it must be emphasized, would approximate the Isola legacy.  Prof. Isola, from his works and other earthly exertions, was an epitome of Yoruba cultural grace sans empty arrogance.

    Right now, there is too much ethnic toxin, most of it harebrained, in matters that concern the Nigerian common humanity.  It’s an avoidable slur no sane country needs.

    Somewhat, Isola would appear similar to Immanuel Kant (1724-1804), that famous Prussian-born German philosopher, with his even more famous Categorical Imperative in ethics.

    Kant, it has been recorded, never travelled beyond a hundred miles radius from his native Königsberg, then in Prussia but now in Russia.

    Wikipedia tamped that down, calling the claim a “myth”, particularly that, that he never went beyond 16 km from his home town: Kant taught at Judtschen, now Veselovka in Russia (20 km away) and in Jarnoltowo, near Mor¹g, in Poland (145 km away).

    Yet, his lack of wide travel never affected his philosophical rigour.

    Prof. Isola too was born in Ibadan, though as all native Ibadan have home villages, Labode, one of the surrounding villages, was his ancestral homestead.

    He earned his first degree in French at the University of Ibadan, and a second degree in Yoruba Literature, from the University of Lagos, before becoming professor at the University of Ife (now Obafemi Awolowo University).

    An interview, by his widow, Mrs Adebola Isola, revealed the professor had teaching stints in Lagos.  He probably had sorties abroad and back, in the course of his academic career.

    But basically, he lived his life around Ibadan which, according to his widow, was the playwright’s prime window into the world.  That window, he regarded as the best city in the world.

    Yet, that did not dim his brilliance or reduce his impact, in his global propagation of Yoruba culture, through his plays and other works, particularly his film collaboration with Tunde Kelani, TK’s Mainframe.

    Incidentally, TK himself just turned 70 (born 26 February 1948), with the performance of Wole Soyinka’s The Lion and the Jewel (directed by Segun Adefila) running in his honour, on March 4, at the Lagos Country Club, Ikeja, Lagos.

    Ripples first came across Prof. Isola, by proxy, as a teenage boarder at Odogbolu Grammar School, now in Ogun State, in the early 1970s.

    Even then, Akinwunmi Isola was but only a faint echo off Isola Ogunsola, aka I-Show Pepper, of blessed memory.

    I-Show, popular, dashing and electric, had brought his troupe to stage, in our school, Isola’s historical tragedy, Efunsetan Aniwura, Iyalode Ibadan. It was the golden age of the Yoruba travelling theatre, and their forays to schools.

    Some forty-five years after, the final flourish, of the Efunsetan-Latoosa duel, appears as vivid as it was on that stage:

    “Efunsetan, ina mo o!” [Efunsetan, you’re doomed], thundered Latoosa.

    “Latoosa, ina mo o!”, Efunsetan countered, charm for charm, bluff for bluff, drama for drama.

    In those young minds, gripped by the high drama on stage, Efunsetan was the clear villain, and Latoosa the hero.

    Efunsetan had forced the death of the ravishing Adetutu, her favourite slave-maid who nevertheless had run foul of the grim Efunsetan household code: get pregnant and lose your life!

    Efunsetan’s only daughter had died early; and the Iyalode would be damned, as part of the prevailing feudal tyranny, to see any of her slaves conceive and give birth!

    But even with Efunsetan’s cruelty, the hero-villain divide was never that cut-and-dried.

    From accounts in Samuel Johnson’s The History of the Yorubas, it was in 1874.  Latoosa, the post-Kurunmi Aare Ona Kakanfo, was just another power freak, who despite the Ibadan constitution, with its rigorous checks and balances, would rather grab all possible powers.

    The ill-fated Iyalode, against whom Latoosa cooked up many phoney charges, was just one of his many victims.  Latoosa would later push his luck, in his gambit to rule Ibadan as a warrior-baale, despite Ibadan’s cast-iron separation of the two.  He met with fierce elite opposition.

    Ibadan was still in the throes of this elite stonewalling, when Latoosa led his hosts to the Kiriji War (1877-1893).  The resulting stalemate not only sunk, forever, Ibadan’s military hegemony, it also effectively ended the Oyo Empire, with the British enforcing peace in the Yoruba interior, with the Alaafin himself, making the first overtures.

    Efunsetan, and its fierce power play, ought to be a great lesson to current players: that the elite penchant to grab power, and vote for impunity instead of due process, often roasts the collective, on the irrational altar of a few.

    That holds true for the Yoruba traditional polity, as it does for Nigeria’s contemporary one.

    But if Isola’s striving in Efunsetan had linguistic limitations — the play was written in Yoruba — his other forays, in films, mainly of his works adapted into film, by long-term collaborators, Tunde Kelani’s Mainframe (Opomulero), had broader appeals.

    O Leku (Mainframe’s first hit) — about students’ life at the University of Ibadan and catchment areas in the early 1960s; Saworoide (a parody of the venality of military era, with special focus on the Sani Abacha dictatorship); and The Campus Queen, a more contemporary setting, also on a university campus in the 1980s/1990s, with nubile female undergraduates, making themselves merry mistresses of the corrupt and morally bankrupt military overlords, often with disastrous consequences.

    Isola, ever the avid cultural nationalist, was reportedly thrilled by O Leku, which triggered a Yoruba urban couture, a mass throw back at the high fashion of the 1960s, where the work was set.

    But all of the films did justice to Yoruba culture — songs, dances, worship, belief system and even fashion, ancient and contemporary, bound to set every Yoruba heart heaving with pride.

    Akinwunmi Isola, a culture ambassador like no other, is gone.  When comes another, with his class and grace?

    Poetic extra

    Purgatory

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    A glitch,

    in the engine,

    consigns the car to rest.

    But you,

    to a purgatory,

    in the street.

     

    There,

    the heat eats you up

    like a dragon,

    sworn to ending

    the human race

    in a blazing furnace.

     

    And the rain?

    Drenches you,

    like a drowned rat,

    except that you live,

    to tell the story.

     

    It is indeed another world,

    from your comfort zone,

    of purring auto,

    all chill inside,

    all heat outside.

     

    The street!

    Fela, the immortal bard,

    once blared:

    Eko o ni gba-gba-ku-gba!*

    But not on Monday alone,

    that tough race,

    of daily survival!

     

    The truck pusher,

    to the road,

    stakes a democratic right.

    So does the Marwa** crab,

    in its serpentine slither,

    to beat every other,

    to every available space,

    on the crowded road.

     

    Nigeria, they say,

    teems with crooks.

    But all I see, in the street,

    are hardy folks,

    sworn to forcing a living,

    or die trying.

    The purgatory!

    The street!

    Until the car finishes its rest,

    for you, absolutely no rest!

     

    *Roughly, Yoruba for Lagos (Eko) won’t compromise on its hustle

    **Lagos commuter tricycle, in jerky road movement, like an iron crab

     

    Lagos, 16 February 2018

  • Transparency International’s verdict

    As if by uncanny coincidence, two days after the Dapchi abduction, Transparency International (TI) released its verdict on the anti-corruption war showing that the country, despite the heroic efforts of the administration, actually plunged 12 places down on the overall corruption indices compared with the preceding year when it ranked 136th place. By way of contrast, Kenya, rated as more corrupt than Nigeria in 2016, has now overtaken Nigeria moving from 145 to 143th place.

    Just as one would expect, hierarchs of the Buhari administration have not only dubbed the verdict a travesty, they have gone on the overdrive in the attempt to showcase their achievements in the anti-corruption war. The administration, they insist, has blocked leakages for corruption through the rigid enforcement of the Treasury Single Account (TSA); recovered N738.9 billion was in just two years of the Buhari administration; recorded more than 140 successful prosecutions and signed international agreements to recover the proceeds of corruption and to block the laundering of stolen assets abroad by public officials, and many more.

    While these may be true, the officials, I must insist, miss the point.

    Transparency International’s work is not so much about the substance of the work being undertaken by the countries but more about the perception or what is more appropriately the optics of the anti-graft fight. Whereas the administration can imagine itself as doing the best in the current circumstances, there is certainly a whole world of difference between what it claims as achievement and the perception of the citizens about its efforts. Whereas the administration is wont to show facts and figures as proof of the efficacy of the war, the citizens are rather reminded of its sloppy handling of the fraud allegations against former Secretary to the Government of the Federation (SGF), Babachir Lawal, the Nigeria Intelligence Agency (NIA) saga, the embarrassing reinstatement into service of dismissed civil servant and fugitive Abdulrasheed Maina.

    If like most Nigerians, Transparency International appears unimpressed by the administration’s efforts, it could only sum up to the optics trumping the billions recovered.

  • Two embattled scholars

    Two embattled scholars

    The University of Ilorin stated a greater truth than it realized or intended when, in a report on its website detailing the staggering academic and professional accomplishments of the presenter of its 33rd Convocation Lecture, Professor Chris Imafidon, it described him as an “enigmatic personality.”

    More than four months after the event, the “intellectual colossus” and uber-achiever whose “rich and resounding voice tore neatly into the velvet air of the jam-packed” university of Auditorium, the “talented raconteur whose tub-thumping oratory wowed his audience for more than two hours and drove many among them to “tears of ecstasy” and who left no one in doubt about the true definition of genius,” Imafidon is in retrospect nothing if not an enigma.

    In the build-up to the Lecture, the University and other news sources had descried him as

    a multi-award winning researcher, and member of the Information Age Executive Round-table Forum – which is made up of the top 15 IT experts, decision-makers, CIOs, and executives in the UK, a consultant to governments and industry leaders, professor at Oxford University’s Keble College, and a visiting professor at leading American universities, among them including Harvard, Cornell, Columbia, Yale, and  Georgetown

    Imation’s other distinctions include serving as an internal and external post-graduate

    Examiner for Cambridge University, Imperial College, University College London, mentoring Ph.D. candidates at Queen Mary University of London, where he was Head of the Management Technology Unit.

    He raised a family of prodigies through a technique he perfected. That is no mean achievement.  He has also been listed as a leading ophthalmologist in the UK

    The foregoing should render Imafidon a polymath any times over.  But the University of Ilorin was right to call him an enigma, for an enigma he is

     

    At least one of his main bragging rights – an Oxford professorship has not checked out.  The authorities there say he does not figure in their records as student, staff, adjunct or faculty, merely that s young woman by that surname — one of Chris Imafidon’s daughters, it turned out — took a degree at their Kebel College many years ago.

    You would think that Imafidon would take high umbrage and paint the Internet and news outlets in Nigeria with pictures of himself ensconced in his book-lined, trophy-draped Oxford faculty office, or giving a tutorial, or participating at an important function of the university, all decked out in academic robes.

    Instead, he presents only his University Library Card as proof of the affiliation and challenges Oxford to demonstrate that his claim rests on shaky ground.

    Some of Imafidon’s other claims of affiliation with many other institutions, learned societies and professional bodies worldwide have turned out to be just as suspect.

    The whole thing calls to mind the case of another professor, Dr Gabriel Oyibo who burst sensationally on the intellectual scene in Nigeria some 12 years ago, when one of the more reputable Nigerian newspapers reported that he had been nominated for the Nobel Prize in physics three consecutive times.

    Albert Einstein had spent the last two decades of his life in a futile search for what has been called the “holy grail” of physics, a unified field theory that explains and the behavior of all matter, from sub-atomic particles to entire galaxies.

    In a message to a conference of the world’s leading astrophysicists in Beijing, China, in 2007, the Stephen Hawking announced that he and his colleagues were close to finding the elusive “holy grail.”

    Gabriel Oyibo was missing in Beijing.  He had no use for such gatherings. Way back in 1995, he said, he had found that “holy grail” and solved the problem Hawking and other cosmologists were still grappling with, long after Einstein.

    To this epochal breakthrough, Oyibo gave the curiously unscientific name of God Almighty’s Grand United Theorem, or GAGUT.

    GAGUT constitutes “the long awaited, the long sought, the holiest of holy grails of physics and mathematics,” he declared portentously on the website of his “research centre” OFFAPIT Institute of Technology (OITECH).

    The best evidence I could find for this rather exorbitant claim can be found a paper he presented in March 1995 at a symposium in Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York, a world-class university from which he earned his doctorate.  The paper was published in the proceedings of the symposium, with Oyibo himself as editor.

    Its title, “A General Mathematical Proof of Einstein’s Theory Using a New Group Theory,” does not immediately suggest a monumental breakthrough. But a professor familiar with the paper described it as “the first to complete the task that intrigued and challenged” Einstein.

    That feat, Edith Luchins said in a letter posted on the OITECH web site, placed Oyibo in the rank of world-class scientists, adding that “he is eminently qualified for the Nobel Prize in physics.”

    Luchins’s letter is undated, and is reproduced on the site only in part. Still, it is a ringing endorsement of Oyibo’s accomplishment, even if not exactly a nomination for a Nobel

    in physics.  Pushed relentlessly by Oyibo himself, it ignited reports in the news media in Nigeria that Oyibo had been nominated for the Nobel and catapulted him into the ranks of the immortals.

    Oyibo was flown to Nigeria, all expenses paid, by the National Universities Commission on a triumphal lecture tour. The Senate, parroting Oyibo’s claim that GAGUT could lead to a cure for HIV/AIDS and lift Africa out of its underdevelopment, passed a resolution designating him the first recipient of the African International Prize for Science and Technology.  His scraggy, contemplative visage now adorns the N50 postage stamp, which describes him as a “mathematical genius.”

    It was as if he had actually won the Nobel.

    Those versed in the scholarly scientific literature will have learned of Oyibo through

    his numerous publications in the leading journals of aeronautical engineering and mathematics, enough to earn him a professorship at one of the better universities.

    Indeed, an emeritus professor of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology said

    Oyibo had published “some good, useful papers” in aero elasticity and composite material structures that should serve him well in consideration for a Presidential Medal in Science.

    The MIT professor, John Dugundji added in a letter dated June 28, 2000, that he was not competent to judge Oyibo’s more recent work in the fundamental problems of physics – the very work on which Oyibo’s claim to the stature of a Nobelist rests.

    This subtle disclaimer, I suspect, flows from the very nature of GAGUT itself. The  theory sounds suspiciously like the Biblical account of  creation dressed in scientific jargon.  Inserting God into what purports to be a scientific theory is a derogation of the canons of science.

    Nor did Oyibo help matters by the company he keeps.

    A posting on his OITECH site once featured a resolution by the New York Progressive Baptist State Convention endorsing him for a Nobel Prize and announcing the launch of a campaign to raise $2 million to call global attention to his achievements.

    The books he claims to have written on GAGUT are nowhere to be found. Most curiously for a world-class scientist and Nobel candidate, Oyibo is not affiliated with any top-notch research university.  In fact, he has no affiliation with any university at all.

    After basking in the limelight for one brief, shining moment, Oyibo seems to have sunk into oblivion with his GAGUT. Perhaps he is busy reworking it.  The “holy grail” of physics is yet to be apprehended.

    As for Professor Imafidon, it is unlikely that he will be getting any invitations soon from any Nigerian university to present a Convocation lecture or learned address.

    A motivational speech, perhaps.  That is where his genius lies.  The University of Ilorin got its money’s worth.

  • Playing the ostrich – all over again

    Playing the ostrich – all over again

    Thursday last week, Minister of State for Petroleum Ibe Kachikwu – as if to remind Nigerians that fuel scarcity which sneaked into town in December is not about to dissipate any time soon – directed the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) to ensure that petrol queues were cleared in Abuja before Sunday.

    The minister, as reported by Vanguard, also stated that the queues have been persistent because logistics and policy issues that could end the scarcity are largely unaddressed:

    “I can tell you behind the scenes, a lot of meetings are taking place because the fuel queue issue is both logistics and policy issues.

    “We will need to address fundamental policy issues to enable it go away especially in the area where the pricing is showing differentials between the landing and sales price.

    And then, as if to remind that our chief of state is not entirely indifferent to our tears and supplications, he would also add almost superfluously: “The president is obviously very committed to keeping the price of petrol at where it is because he realises and sympathises with the sufferings of Nigerians.

    Now, let’s take the issues one by one – starting with why the directive was specific to Abuja and not nationwide.

    The minister had a ready, interesting answer: The maiden edition of the international oil and gas conference and exhibition tagged the Nigerian International Petroleum Summit (NIPS) holding from Sunday February 18 to Friday February 23: “I will hate for my colleagues to come and see the fuel queues so my directive to NNPC would be to get these queues out of Abuja”.

    By colleagues, he meant the attendees at the summit most of whom, already too familiar with our literature of ineptitude, would hardly notice in any case. Never mind that this is what the ordinary citizen has had to put up with for nearly three months running; as far as the minister was concerned, the PR disaster of having the capital city of OPEC’s sixth largest exporter of crude suffer a weeklong lockdown while the summit lasted would seem by far more than the most of excruciating pains of an anguished citizens can assuage.

    So, over to you Abuja folks; enjoy the respite while it lasts! As for the rest of the country – with notable exception of Lagos where official price still bears the semblance of ruling the market, that is, if you don’t mind the inconveniencing queues at the filling stations –market forces have long been calling the shots with petrol in some parts of the country selling for between N200-N250 a litre.

    At issue is why the nation’s pumps have been coming in drips despite the so-called massive intervention of the national oil corporation, the heroic efforts of the duo of Kachikwu and Maikanti Baru, and the legendary empathy of the chief of state with the sufferings of the people. By now, we have seen enough of the maverick psych-ops of the men of the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and their daily rounds of sealing fuel stations; the endless finger-printing between the leading actors in the fuel supply chain – NNPC, Depot and Petroleum Products Marketers Association (DAPMAN) and Independent Petroleum Marketers of Nigeria (IPMAN) as to who to hold responsible for the crisis. We are also familiar with the statistics routinely rolled out showing that the country has enough white products to last her many lifetimes, not excluding the calm assurances of those in the position to do so that good times are already at the door. Yet, the problem has not gone away.

    In fact, that the minister is still talking about “logistics and policy issues” three months after the symptoms of the familiar disease resurfaced would seem to indicate how far the government and the major institutions in the fuel supply chain would prefer to live in denial rather than put the cards on the table.

    Call the problem a good one if you may, it is a well-known fact that the current fuel price of N145 per litre was set when oil sold for $35 per barrel. Today, oil prices have since neared $70 a barrel just as the foreign reserve has been on a steady upward climb. At the last count, it was said to have hit $42 billion plus. Unfortunately, while exulting in the build-up of the foreign reserves, Nigerians may have shut their minds to the corresponding upward pressure on domestic fuel prices and consequently the steady relapse to the pre cost-recovery regime of fuel pricing particularly at a time of continuing reliance on imports.

    And so when the minister says that the president is “very committed to keeping the price of petrol at where it is because he realises and sympathises with the sufferings of Nigerians”, it can only be that the president is only too aware that the current fuel price math –elegantly framed by the minister as ‘differentials between the landing and sales price’, no longer adds up! The question here is what his administration has done to address the issue beyond playing the ostrich, hoping perhaps the problem will disappear by itself!

    To be sure, no one has yet called for a review of fuel prices. The much that has been said is that the situation is delicate – and so requires thoughtful, deliberate policy actions. This is even more so since major importers have long stopped the trade precisely because doing so at current price is as good as a one-way fare to bankruptcy. And the consequence? A space yielded exclusively to the national oil corporation – a burden that it has been unable to discharge – owing to twin factors of logistics and cash.  It certainly says a lot about the priorities of the administration that it has been practically Missing In Action (MIA) since the cost-recovery template was set in May 2016.

    That being the situation hardly merits a denial. But what do we hear? Denials and more denials from the NNPC and the federal government. Not even when the situation calls for the opening the treasury vaults to bridge cost-price recovery gap. Ostensibly for fear of giving anything away, the government’s price fixing agency – even the Petroleum Products Prices Regulatory Agency (PPPRA) has gone as far as yanking the price template element off its website as if doing so will restore things to normalcy!

    So much for the love of fatherland, it needs to be said at this time that the only crimes worse than denial is the secrecy and potential rip-off foisted by the current regime of under–recovery of fuel costs.  Perhaps, the government and the NNPC will yet inform Nigerians of the existence of a piggy bank permitted for such operations outside of the law. Until then, it stands to reason that someone, somewhere, may actually be breaking the law!

    And now I ask: Is the National Assembly MIA too?

  • Tactical anger, strategic blunder

    Tactical anger, strategic blunder

    Hysteria rules the air.  Anger fumes, shutting down clear thinking.  So, a monumental mistake might just dawn.

    If that happens, the present pains, in comparison, risks turning heavenly bliss.  So, pause, take a deep breath and think.

    For starters, x-ray two key actors in the gripping drama.

    In the red corner, to use boxing imagery, is a fuming Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic (1999-2007), leading the lynch squad.

    In the blue corner is Bola Tinubu, former governor of Lagos State (1999-2007), the corresponding period when Obasanjo was president.  He leads the think squad.

    How did both, from 1999 to 2007, manage the system thrust in their care?

    President Obasanjo met a damaged centre.  Yet, instead of aiming at a systemic rebirth, he focused on personal glory.  He exited as an emperor without an empire, though the final collapse won’t come until under President Goodluck Jonathan.

    Obasanjo won’t touch the debacle of Nigeria’s failed structure.  Indeed, his “reforms” were based on an ultra-central paradigm, from which diktat the states —and, in regal but combative subversion of a two-tier federal structure, the local governments — must take a cue or perish.

    Even, the suspect democratic institutions the military bequeathed he throatily subverted.  A slew of Senate presidents and House of Representatives speakers, only birthed the Obasanjo Leviathan.

    That juggernaut would later pounce on the states and thoroughly subvert them.

    If state legislatures were not muscled to remove governors by “simple minorities” — a brazen rape on the 1999 Constitution, under the guise of fighting corruption — Lagos, under Tinubu, was bruised for its derring-do to create additional local governments. Yet, that was the dictate of the 1999 Constitution.

    The result?  A near-total retardation of the Nigerian centre, despite its bulging cash, into a development debacle, rabidly mainstreaming mass poverty.

    But that was a natural sequence of the under-development orthodoxy, the regnant temper of the Obasanjo years: developmental deforms passed down as winning economic “reforms”.

    Although everything would grind to a virtual halt under Jonathan, the rotten foundation was during the Obasanjo years.

    There then is the power profile of the prime mover, now turned the chief mourner, of the Nigerian debacle.

    It is ode to how hysteria paralyses clear thinking that not many seem to link Obasanjo’s present histrionics to the developmental quicksand he left after eight years; which his successors nurtured for another eight.

    This systemic ruin of 16 years won’t just vanish in three.  Even the children of Israel, sole beloved of Jehovah who essayed that rashness, languished in the wilds for 40 years, instead of 40 days.

    From Abuja to lkeja: how did Governor Tinubu manage his then poor Lagos estate, now turned national trove?

    By military standard, pre-1999 Lagos had the near-best of military administrators.  Add that to Governor Lateef Jakande’s 2nd Republic exemplary tenure (1979-1983), Lagos already had a tremendous head start, ahead of most other states.

    Yet, Tinubu realized, from the very start, that what Lagos needed was not just some high falutin “reforms” but a complete re-engineering and financial overhauling, to prepare his city-state for its future role as Nigeria’s prime economic hub.

    He set about it with apostolic faith, even if the media — notorious back then as now to rush into some shallow judgment — summarily slammed him as failure in those crucial  (but bitter) first two years.

    But today’s Lagos is proof that there can’t be gain without pain.  The “jungle” that Obasanjo lampooned, from his high Abuja throne, is now an awesome example, at which the nation gapes, for winning models.

    Name them: urban renewal, key judicial reforms, and even fealty to a relative progressive political ideology, in contra-distinction to the bumbling conservatism of Obsanjo years, despite the absence of a cut-and-dried party ideological system.

    Want further proof on how tough change — positive change — can be?  Look no farther than present-day Lagos.  Less than a year from transiting from an old to a new city waste disposal paradigm, the city is already under the rubble of refuse!

    Yet, if by April the smelly, ugly mountains disappear — as the Lagos government is confident it would — it would not be any magic; just the result of deliberate and sustained planning and vigorous execution.

    So, if in the first two years Tinubu looked “hopeless”, trying to fix a not-so-damaged Lagos, how can a hopelessly raped centre be on the mend in less than three years?

    Yet, as Lagos went on to mend and consolidate over 16 years, earning nationwide acclaim along the line, Abuja had blundered, decayed and regressed over the same period, which climaxed in 2015.

    Nevertheless, there are cold stats to suggest that the Buhari Presidency is posting posting more returns for less revenue.

    From Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) statistics, the US $58 billion earned by the Federal Government from 2015-2017 was thrice less than the US $112.8 billion the Jonathan Presidency earned in its first two years.

    Yet, while it is common knowledge what the old regime did with its trove, a good chunk of the present earnings have been invested in productive ventures: agriculture, roads, power and even as stimulants to aid most states to clear their salary backlogs.

    Yes, after all said and done, pain still struts the land.  But the pain would appear that of a recuperating patient, not of a hopeless one fatally wasting away.

    Besides, if you must treasure gain, pain must follow wanton waste.  That is a natural cycle that must be ingrained into the Nigerian national psyche.

    That is the true position of things now.  But the tragedy is the din around seldom focuses on the fundamentals, to push a rigorous debate, that could even better purify the mending process.

    Rather, it veers off into the realms of emotive fantasy, conjuring some coming Utopia, full of magicians and magic workers.   Haven’t we, too many times, traversed this ruinous path?

    Which is why the debate should change from emotive excitements to rigorous interrogations.

    That is where the Obasanjo-Tinubu metaphor, the one leading the lynch camp, the other leading the think ensemble, must end the discourse.

    In the Bible, Solomon honed his wisdom in his adjudication between two prostitutes.  The one whose baby died wanted both babies sliced into two equal parts and given two grieving mothers.  But the one whose child lived counselled the preservation of life.

    Obasanjo’s huffing and puffing is nothing more than pulling down  a hard, yet grimly promising new order, that will wipe out the failed order he imposed from 1999.

    But Tinubu also should, ethnic heckling or no, throw everything into saving a new but gravely endangered order.  It may be all pain now.  But it portends all gain tomorrow, after all these raw emotions are gone.

    That is the only way to ensure the present tactical anger, does not birth in a future strategic blunder.

     

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    With so much happening so quickly, the usual recourse of this page is Matters Miscellaneous, in which I try to catch up on the glut of occurrenceswith broad strokes and in short takes.

    Today’s miscellany begins with a follow-up on last week’s column calling attention to some exceedingly attractive job openings for applicants from Nigeria, Ghana and Africa, at Michael MuchinyoIndustries Ltd, in Tokyo, Japan, manufacturers of the best car paint in the world

    The pay, only $7,000 a week as at December 2018, now stands at $10, 000 for a six-day week (Mon-Sat) and may well have risen since the column appeared.  About the only thing the successful applicant will be responsible for is income tax.  Everything else comes free. At the end of 15 years with the company, the employee stands to receive $500,000, a house,and a car by way of gratuity.

    So went the advert copy.  As a service to the public, I promised to send Muchinyo’s contact information, on request.

    Not exactly a deluge, but numerous indeed were the text and email messages that came by way of response.  A good many would-be candidates thanked me profusely for calling attention to the advert and asked if I would be so kind as to send  them Muchinyo’s contact information immediately.

    Their earnestness was touching indeed.

    I was deeply concerned, however, that their enthusiasm would be vitiated by the dire warnings of the killjoys whom we shall always have among us, unfortunately. They said the whole thing was a gigantic fraud, and that I stand to be charged with aiding and abetting.

    One of these days, I will publish a selection from the correspondence.

    Meanwhile, I am glad to relate that the killjoys, aforementioned, have it wrong on this one, and that the enthusiasts stand to have the last laugh.

    The assistant whom I had asked to call Muchinyo and apprise them of his interest in the advertised position received the email message infra from its Nigerian representative (mmuchichi@yahoo.com)  last Thursday, on the strength of his enquiry alone, without even filing an application:

    “GOOD MORNING . pls our confarmations have come from the company micheal muchinyo company now our visa ticket is aveilable in ghanaplsevery bodyhave to be in ghana by wed 21th febuary to summit the inter passport 22th thurs morning for visa. ticket collections and departure is sat  24th night by 8.45 through kotaka inter airport by hossana air to dubai and transit to cathay p air to japan tokyopls get ready and call me thanks.  Eazy.”

    It remains to wish all the successful applicants an uneventful passage to Tokyo and a fulfilling sojourn in thatgreat metropolis. Please go easy on the sushi and the sake (pronounced sakeh) they’ll be serving on Cathay Pacific.

    A Fight in the Executive Branch

    In Nigeria, nothing is impossible.  But pitched combat for power and control between a Cabinet Minister and the head of a sub-ministerial department is a rarity.  And when it does occur, it has the gripping quality of a telenovela.

    I have in mind the on-going, very public feud between the Minister of Health, Professor Isaac Adewole, and the Executive Secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme (NHIS), Professor Yusuf Usman.  Investigations raised suspicions that Usman may have bilked the agencyof some N1 billion.  The Minister asked Usman to take a vacation so that a thorough investigation could be conducted.

    Usman refused and rented a crowd to stir things up instead.  The Ministry split into two factions, pro and contra, as if the staff were card-carrying stalwarts of the Road Transport Workers Union.  Further investigations have since confirmed allegations of serious fraud at the NHIS.

    Decisive intervention from on high was clearly indicated.  It came from President Muhammadu Buhari, urging the Minister and his recalcitrant subordinate to go find ways of working together harmoniously.  Meanwhile, the Ministry is wracked by turmoil.

    Usman has been so besmirched that he cannot continue to function with any credibility.Adewale seems unwilling not resign as a matter of honour, though it is now clear that he no longer enjoys the President’s confidence.  Nor can Usman and Adewole work harmoniously.

    Both of them should go.

    Fixing the 2019 General Elections

    Well before the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) put out its schedule for the 2019 General Elections,some desperate politicians had, in manoeuvers little noticed by a public that has far more important issues to contend with, determined that the extant arrangements would not serve their ambition and had, in their sneaky ways, moved the National Assembly to carry out what amounts to nothing less than a back-door amendment to the Constitution.

    Their reasoning, as I understand it, is that staging the President election in the first of a three-stage or two-stage poll will exert a “bandwagon effect” on the entire exercise, with the result of the presidential election determining the outcome of subsequent contests.

    There is scant empirical support for the kind ofeffect the lawmakers claim they are concerned to eliminate.  If one existed, the governing political party to which most them belongwould profit the most.  So, why would they consciously seek to disempower themselves?  Certainly not out of concern for equity and fair play. That is not their way of doing business.

    In whatever case, any bandwagon or primacy-recencyeffect will operate across the entire contest, no matter the order of the elections.

    So, why not hold all the elections on the same day?

    Cattle Colonyon the Runway

    Those ubiquitous cattle minders who have turned farmlands into killing fields and laid waste rural communities, colonized AkureAirport, in Ondo State, last Saturday, virtually blockading the runway as an Air Peace plane approached for landing.

    Ekiti State Governor Ayo Fayose and others waiting to board the plane watched in horror as the pilot was forced to execute all kinds of emergency manouevers to avert crash landing.

    Isn’t that carrying open grazing too far?

    This hair-raising incident will no doubt spur Fayose to complete the Ado-Ekiti International Airport that has been his administration’s prime project.  Those obdurate herders know that their prized wards caught grazing there will end up in soup pots across the state to bolster his stalled Stomach Infrastructure programme.

    With that facility in place, the world-acclaimed poet and native son Niyi Osundare, among other distinguished native sons, can fly into Ado-Ekiti direct from his base in New Orleans, conduct a seminar on Comparative African And Asian Poetry at the state university, dash home to Ikere-Ekiti for a piping-hot pounded yam dinner and jet back to New Orleans, arriving in time to give a keynote address at a colloquium on Post-Soviet Literature in Central Europe.

    Transparency demands that I disclose the collateral benefit that will redound to me from the completion of the Ado-Ekiti International Airport.  I would be able to fly direct from Chicago to Ado-Ekiti, cutting off that cratered, accident-prone stretch from Lagos and its infestation of armed robbers and kidnappers.  From there, I should be able to endure the 80 km stretch to Kabba.

    Hurry up, Governor.  Don’t leave office without completing and inaugurating the airport. It will stand an enduring monument to your tenure.

    Finally, finally

    I wish I could broach this matter with the utmost delicacy and avoid altogether the vulgarity in which it has been framed.

    It concerns the imposing statue of the recently ousted President of South Africa, Jacob Zuma, emplaced scarcely five months ago in the Imo State capital, Owerri, by his admirer and fellow philanthropist, Owelle Governor Rochas Okorocha.

    Out of the coarsest of motives,the governor’s detractors called it “Okorocha’s erection.”  Behind his back, of course.

    Now that Zuma has become another instance of the instability of human greatness, those same detractors are wondering what will become of it.

    Keep them wondering, Your Excellency.