The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Tokyo calling

    Tokyo calling

    Half-way into the electronic edition of one of the more reputable national dailies, I found my eyes settling on an advertisement at the bottom of a right-hand page.  At first glance, there was nothing remarkable about it. Not even its cluttered appearance, for the papers carry at least a dozen adverts like that everyday, placed by marginal vendors concerned to obtain the biggest bang for their Naira.

    The typography was in like manner nondescript. The copy just lay flat on the page, without visual appeal or any kind of appeal for that matter.  That was probably not the intent, but the copy seems designed to make readers wish they were younger; that they had shunned all those campus cults and paid far greater attention to their studies.

    You know the kind of advertisements I am talking about – those inviting applications from university graduates who hold 2nd Class Upper (First Class preferred) degrees, possess four years of cognate experience, and will be 26 years old or younger at their next birthday, and please, you need not apply unless you meet these stipulations and others not spelled out in the copy.

    Such advertisements, I gather, are designed to fulfill all righteousness before officials of the Labour Department.  If the positions exist at all, if they were not placed to create the illusion that the firm was alive to its social responsibilities and solvent enough to hire the best and the brightest, the positions will have been filled long ago with far less qualified wards of influential insiders.

    Perhaps it was the tabloid headline VACANCY!  VACANCY!  VACANCY!!! that attracted my attention. Right beneath the headline, the copy announces:  22 More Men Wanted.

    Not just from anywhere, but from “Africa; Nigeria and Ghana”.

    Very precise:  22 men. So, you can weigh your chances of being hired and decide whether to apply or not.  I am myself not looking for a job, but I have a legion of relations, friends and acquaintances desperately looking for work. A good many of them have been on the job market for so long that they can no longer recall when they last held down a regular job, with salaries paid and benefits provided regularly.

    Some have never worked since graduating. If I called the advertisement to attention, perhaps one or two of them might secure a position. The odds are galactic, but one chance in a googol is still a chance.

    Also very transparent: No women. The usual people might find this particular stipulation sexist, but they will find little sympathy with those for who getting a job is serious, existential business.

    You knew right away that this was not one of those creepy agencies seeking to recruit our desperate women for the fleshpots of Rome, Milan, Naples and Turin. And there are plenty of indications to help you figure out whether the effort would be worth your while.

    The recruiter is none other than Michael Muchinyo Industry Limited of Tokyo, Japan – yes, Japan, not Tripoli or Benghazi or whatever remains of Libya. Muchinyo are, the advert copy states, “manufacturers of the best car paint in the world,” as well as “the best motor nylon tyre and rims 4x4x36.”

    Since no educational or technical qualifications or technical skills are required, it can safely be assumed that successful applicants will be trained on the job.

    From there, employees can expect to graduate to a life of abundance. In fact, it turns out that there has never been a better time than this to work with Muchinyo.  According to the advert copy, the company has just raised workers’ pay from $7,000 to $10,000 a week. This is not a misprint, please.  And the currency is the United States dollar, not the Japanese Yen.

    It gets better, dreamlike even, for employees who log 15 years of service. They will each receive a house in any city(sic) in Tokyo (sic), $500,000, and a brand new car as gratuity.

    All this, it is necessary to emphasise, comes without prejudice to many fringe benefits, including, but not limited to free medical check-ups, free ticket (further elaboration will probably be provided, but it is safe to assume that it is an airline ticket for the passage to Tokyo to resume duties), free visa, free work permit, free accommodation, and free city transportation.

    You will have to put up with those pesky taxes, unfortunately. But the work week is only six days, Monday through Saturday. You have the whole of Sunday entirely to yourself.

    To be considered for a position with Muchinyo, Nigerian applicants are required to furnish their current international passports, BTA or “Body Travelling Allowance” in the sum of $500 only.  I suspect they mean “Basic Travelling Allowance, or maybe that is what they call it in Japan.  They will also need to furnish a Doctor’s report, Police Clearance, and Drug Clearance.

    As any full-time job-seeker will tell you, these requirements are the least burdensome, slightly more than you can be expected to meet even for jobs that pay  starvation wages.  They are not asking for certificates of birth, educational attainments, prizes and distinctions, publications, performance evaluations, etc., etc., all of them originals; no certified copies, please.

    When you are done, Muchinyo helpfully counsels, send your CV and all your information to a designated yahoo email address, or call their agents (cell phone numbers supplied).  Worried that they will be besieged every working day by a surging army of applicants, they wisely omitted their office address from the advert copy.

    There you have Muchinyo’s advert copy in all its tantalising detail.

    It remains to confess that if I could pass myself off as a young man, I would suppress my instinctive aversion to great adventure and apply to be considered.  For that kind of compensation, who wouldn’t, except our National Assembly lawmakers?

    But since I cannot in good conscience apply, I have as a service to the devoted followers of this column asked my assistant to follow up on the advertisement.  Yesterday afternoon, he called one of the numbers supplied by Muchinyo.  Before the phone rang thrice , a cheery male voice asked him to call again in 30 minutes.

    Perhaps they were at that very moment taking calls from prospective applicants all over Nigeria, Ghana, and indeed Africa.

    My ever dutiful assistant called 30 minutes later.  This time, he was told to send all his application material to the email address supplied.  Do they have an office address?  To which the Muchinyo man responded with more than a hint of impatience:  What do you need an office address for?  Are we not talking to each other by phone right now?  And do you not have our email address?

    I would be impatient too, positively angry even, if I was offering such generous employment terms and a job seeker was asking for my office location, of all things.  Soon they would be asking for my name and information of the really personal kind.

    But this should not discourage those who wish to try their luck. It may well be that Muchinyo had an exceedingly busy time yesterday.

    One thing is for sure:  the phone numbers and the email that I will supply on request are genuine.  In this age of syndicated electronic crime, that is no small assurance.  To be doubly sure you may wish to check out their email address as well.

    Good luck.  In your prosperity, remember that it was this column that showed you the way.

  • Okiro, police and Nigeria’s big men

    Okiro, police and Nigeria’s big men

    Frenchman Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr it was in the 1849 issue of his journal Les Guêpes  credited with the saying – plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose (the more things change, the more they stay the same). As it has become increasingly obvious, Nigerians may have sounded clear their preference for change when they voted in the Muhammadu Buhari-led APC administration in 2015, what they are getting in return is more of the same.

    Nothing better illustrates the notorious fact than the confession from the mouth Mike Okiro, ex-top cop and chairman of Police Service Commission that the directive handed over to the police authorities in August 2015 could not be carried out. President Muhammadu Buhari, then mint-fresh in office, had at a meeting with officials of the Ministry of Police Affairs and the Police Service Commission directed the Inspector General of Police, Solomon Arise and the same Okiro to scale down on the number of policemen attached to so-called dignitaries in the country.

    Some 30 months after, Okiro says the directive could not be carried out. Feigning frustration that the throng, numbering some 150,000 out of the 400,000-strong police continue to play guard duties to Nigeria’s big men, he told the News Agency of Nigeria on Sunday in Abuja that things are still as they were. Although he stated that his commission in conjunction with the Nigeria Police Force had commenced the implementation of the withdrawal of police officers, but the exercise was stalled due to lack of fund!

    Imagine the bad mathematics of 150,000 guarding less than 100,000-odd fellows leaving the rest 250,000 to secure the 180 million people. For something so serious as to be deemed not just an emergency but an intolerable crime against the people, our one-time top cop, has, like in the manner of the praying mantis offering supplication to an absentee god, been crooning in supine, fruitless rhapsody to no one in particular: “We cannot afford to have more than half of the population of the police in private hands…the nation cannot be battling with shortage of manpower in the force while majority of these officers would be in the service of few privileged Nigerians”.

    Good heavens!

    The former number one policeman obviously feels entitled to our sympathy. After all, it is the way of the old brigade and their General Orders to rationalise why routine tasks are left undone; why simple instructions cannot be carried through with highly placed officials go shopping endlessly for alibis to deflect responsibility. Like the rationalisations that have made our public service the most irresponsive if not irresponsible in the entire universe, public service seems more like finding the goat on which to hang the crime than applying the intellect to solve an old problem. If truly money answereth all things; why not better put things to the old invisible daemon of cash without which nothing is deemed possible?

    Even at this, it seems to yours truly that Okiro and company betrayed an appalling ignorance of an equally old but handy template or manual if you like, that perhaps, would have at least excused him and others from the rigour of thinking since they appear unwilling to do so.  I refer to an earlier directive by the Federal Executive Council in March 2009. That directive, interestingly, left no one in doubt about the calibre of officials entitled to that privileged service: President, Vice President, Chief Justice of Nigeria, governors, deputy governors, Secretary to the Government of the Federation and Head of Service of the Federation. Included in the category are ministers, president of the Court of Appeal, justices of the Supreme Court, judges of the Court of Appeal, chief judge and grand khadi of a state, president of the Customary Court of Appeal, Chairman of a Local Government/Area Council, Vice Chairman of a Local Government/Area Council and Chairman of the Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC). So also are President of the Senate, Deputy President of the Senate, Speaker of the House of Representatives, Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives, Speakers of State Houses of Assembly and Deputy Speakers of State Houses of Assembly.

    With the list clearly established, Ogbonnaya Onovo, the then IGP merely put out a simple, direct and unambiguous memo: “All persons not approved to have policemen are hereby given seven days to release the police personnel attached to them, and to make alternative arrangements.

    “Such police personnel are also given seven days from today to report back to their commanders in readiness for training.

    “Heads of commands and formations whose personnel are involved are hereby warned to compile and forward the list of their returning personnel latest August 13, 2009. By this date, any policeman or woman who continues in such duty will be dismissed forthwith and delisted.”

    Okiro, rather than agree with the text thinks it is all about turning on the treasury taps,  or, if you like, finding new avenues for pouring public money into the bureaucratic sinkhole – which of course is nonsense. That the police establishment would claim to require tonnes of cash to get going for a task so simple obviously says a lot about quality of leadership at that level particularly at these changing times.

    This is far from saying that the police force does not need money. It sure does. I understand that the vote for running a Divisional Police headquarters for a whole month comes to less than N10,000. This is supposed to cover everything from fuelling, stationary and other incidentals – which more often than not, never gets to reach their targets – no thanks to the albatrosses of corruption and stifling bureaucracy. Far more than money however is that the police can do with fresh thinking. Today, we have an IGP in Ibrahim Idris, who would rather spar with his nemesis, a certain Senator Isa Hamma Misau than pour his heart and soul into the job of making the police a 21st century institution. And now as it seems to be the case,  a PSC boss thoroughly out of depth with the requirements of 21st century management that he couldn’t in nearly three years after a presidential directive was given figure out how to bring back home the crop of its men engaged in extra regimental duties.

    Now that the confession has been made, do we now need the president to restate the order for whatever it’s worth hoping that the police authorities will somehow find the sense to figure things out on or before 2019?

  • Afolabi: Ode to community value

    W ant to gauge your community value?  Fix your birthday on a Monday morning; and see how many people would turn up.

    Well, anyone of high community value would dare no such hubris.  Yet, that was what Mother Nature dared for Ayobami Oladele Atanda Afolabi (Ayo Afolabi, for short).

    He turned 70 on Monday, February 5.  His friends decided to celebrate him that same day.   The result was simply a marvel.  The main hall, of the University of Ibadan International Conference Centre, teemed with well-wishers.

    Indeed, it must be a big deal: two sitting governors (Oyo and Ondo); a deputy governor (Ogun); the secretary to a state government, with the governor’s chief of staff, plus key cabinet members (Osun); federal cabinet members (from Ekiti, Lagos and other parts of the Western Region); the South West chairmen of the All Progressives Congress (APC); professionals and academics, active and retired — gathered to celebrate a non-office holder, on a Monday morning!

    Yet, the man that triggered all this love was an Abiku — that terrible born-to-die child in Yoruba traditional belief.  Indeed when he was born in 1948, he was the fifth in a relay of nine boys; but the first not to die shortly after.

    Even then, he endured ”gbekude”, (Yoruba for: “hold death at bay”), a charmed necklace, for his first five years.  It was his parents’ final double insurance cover, that the Abiku might finally stay.

    He did — and so did four boys after him.  The Yoruba race has been the richer — and luckier — for it.

    Still, what sort of Abiku might he have been — the unfazed rebel, in Wole Soyinka’s poem of that same title? Or the one, in John Pepper Clark’s version, who could pity his plaintive parents?

    Perhaps, a bit of the two!  Still, his 70 years have manifested something of a perpetual rebel — dating back to his earliest years.

    A time was, he reportedly mocked a neighbour with facial scarifications.  But that triggered, from his mom, his own tribal mark tale.

    A day before he was to be scarified, the toddler fell ill.  On the eve of the second attempt, he fell ill again.  One the third try, the scarifier was determined to have his way, let the heavens fall.  But lo, on the eve of that now-or-never attempt, the traditional surgeon himself died! That scared off everyone.

    But beyond the Abiku-rebel-in-the-cradle, Mr. Afolabi would rebel, all through his life, against social trends that tend to retard his immediate and extended Yoruba environment, even if by that, drawing grave personal danger.

    That fetched him his intrepid reputation, echoing back to his Owu nativity, of fearless warrior-ancestors, from his native Ode-Omu.

    But unlike his more famous Owu cousin from Abeokuta, Olusegun Obasanjo, who seems rather cool towards Yoruba interest, Ayo Afolabi presses his Owu valour to Yoruba service, at the slightest opportunity, in the best Awoist and Afenifere progressive tradition.

    Yet, save a youthful blunder into politics when he was 17, in secondary school, he never played politics when Awo was still alive, in the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

    It would seem, then, a gripping irony: one of the best Awoists ever never raised the flag, when the avatar himself was alive!  Yet, not a few zealots who did, have long betrayed the cause!

    Indeed, as the saying goes, it’s not how long but how far!

    At 17, out of youthful exuberance, the young Ayo served as accidental polling agent at Tonkere, in today’s Osun, to the local candidate of the  United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA) — a 1st Republic electoral alliance between the rump of Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) and Michael Opara’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC), in the 1965 West regional elections.

    But that turned awry — indeed, near-fatal — when the losing candidate, of the  dreaded “Demo” — shortened and corrupted form for Nigerian National

    Democratic Party (NNPC) — seized his Dane gun and started shooting from his house, all through the polling precincts, sending everyone scuttling for dear lives!

    His post-secondary school years he would spend building a career as a sales, marketing and advertising professional, so much so that during the 2nd Republic he was apolitical.  But all that would change, with the  12 June 1993 presidential election annulment by the military.

    Indeed, his fiercest political battles would be the post-June 12 challenge to the Sani Abacha dictatorship, pitching rogue military elements from the North, that nevertheless had cells all over Nigeria, against nationalist elements among the Yoruba.

    It was the era of incendiary posters and organized protests, standard civil resistance menus, which nevertheless put the nervy military on edge.

    It was also the era of political prisoners of war (POWs), the harried military’s term for detained agitators, pushing for justice for MKO Abiola.

    These elements, with the late Bola Ige firmly on the saddle, in Mr. Afolabi’s sector of the “war front”, felt the annulment of MKO’s mandate was a thunderous slap on the Yoruba face.

    That, they insisted, must be resisted, even if the foot soldiers died trying.  That was the epic war that vanquished military rule but didn’t quite deliver democracy.

    Nor did it deliver justice for the slain MKO, even if his fellow Egba-man, Gen. Obasanjo, ended up as prime beneficiary.

    That was how Mr. Afolabi earned his pips in the many fierce battles for just Yoruba causes, with Nigeria’s pseudo-federal fronts providing the battle ground.

    This same trajectory has powered his partisan politicking and political activism, all through the advent of the 4th Republic, from 1999 till now.  Even when the battle appeared so hopeless and forlorn, the intrepid warrior was always ready to give it his all.

    Still, the February 5 show was much a personal celebration of Mr. Afolabi as it was an ode to community value.

    In that hall, the celebrator was a link with the past, just as he was a beam into the future.

    The master of ceremonies was Muyiwa Ige, son of the late Cicero of Esa Oke, that charismatic politician and 2nd Republic governor of Oyo State.  Mr. Afolabi was one of Ige’s trusted ideological foot soldiers.

    Afolabi’s tutelage under Ige, on setting up progressive cells and organizations, to push fairer deals for everyone, has yielded tremendous harvests: the NADECO years’ “Idile”, New Generation and Heritage groups; and post-1999 Afenifere Renewal Group (ARG), whose brainchild is the Yoruba Academy, which later birthed the Development Agenda for Western Nigeria (DAWN), which commission is the present foremost regional policy think-thank for Western Nigeria.

    His birthday also inspired sweet community service, hallmarked by how his protégés, led by Kunle Famoriyo; and other younger friends, like Niyi Akintola, SAN, masterminded a most befitting birthday bash.

    But even as Mr. Afolabi becomes one of the youngest old men in town, he would be especially pleased that a posse of youths are poised to inherit his spirit of service.

    Right there, Awa Bamiji, and his Grand Council of Yoruba Youths, honoured the celebrator with a special award at 70.

    An ode to community value never sounded sweeter — and more reassuring.

  • Between IBB and Atiku

    Between IBB and Atiku

    “May your road be rough, may you have a hard time this year” – Tai Solarin (of blessed memory), 1 January 1964

    In this season of emergency messiahs, it is meet to x-ray that Nigerian penchant to chase shadows, when common sense — hardly ever common — dictates you stick to the substance, no matter how grinding.

    Might that have inspired the late Tai Solarin’s iconoclastic wish, quoted as prelude to this piece, as relevant today as it was on 1 January 1964 when it was released, in lieu of the conventional “happy new year”?

    Indeed, may your road be rough!  In there lies any grain of natural progress.

    But most times when that happens, and Nigeria seems at a serious crossroads, a flighty ensemble gallops into town, and with thunderous roar from the dim, start vending fake magic.

    Most times, however, that easy way always forms the root for a future gnashing of teeth, in a vicious merry-go-round.

    Former President Olusegun Obsanjo’s latest fancy, the “non-partisan” Coalition for Nigeria (CN) fits pat into that umpteenth pattern — and Ripples gave his take on the Owu fox’s latest gambit in this column last week.

    Still, that would appear a crescendo to a well-calibrated mirage, masterfully conjured to hook the unwary and sucker the simplistic.  Unfortunately, the Nigerian space teems with such in their millions.

    That brings the discourse to the day’s main menu: between IBB and Atiku.

    To Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (IBB), former self-named “military president” and Abubakar Atiku, former elected Vice President of the Federal Republic, Muhammadu Buhari would appear a constant.

    In Babangida, it is how, after Buhari, a past got so frightfully awry, with a mess that climaxed in 2015; with both IBB and new, self-promoting messiah, Obasanjo, playing more than active roles.

    In Atiku, it is how, again after Buhari, a future could turn so spirally wrong; so much so that it could well nigh be beyond redemption.  Again, an Obasanjo is huffing and puffing; pawning old poison as new elixir.

    During the military era, IBB postured easy comfort, from the Buhari-Idiagbon Grim Republic, after emerging new “military president”, after a palace coup in August 1985.  At the end, he delivered nothing but sweet peril, that forged this present lament.

    Before Obasanjo barged into his party, with his CN Hobson’s choice, Atiku was staking his claim as some rosy future, after Buhari’s grim present — if not a contemporary Nigerian Pericles, the greatest of the Greek old lawgivers, then certainly a Solon, the wisest of them all.

    Indeed, Atiku postured as the latest neo-Fulani progressive-liberal in town, at home with state police (the battle cry of the fringe of those craving a rebirth of Nigeria’s skewed federalism); is comfy with “resource control” (the war cry of the Niger Delta) and absolutely in love with “restructuring” —  the turn-defeat-into-triumph gamble of the Afenifere grandees of the South West.

    In this high-pitch Atiku circus of colourful nothings, you could never lose!  Whoever gains anything from the rainbow of a soap bubble — except the thrill of its final pop?

    Perhaps the “new” Atiku sent Baba Iyabo scampering to his new CN gambit.  Perhaps it was, from the Buhari angle, that eternal panic of being out-shone by anyone in the contemporary Nigerian cosmos, especially on the anti-corruption front, that stampeded Baba into the fray.

    But whatever it was, something is escaping the duo: the high presidential institution they sunk in the mud, by their roforofo fight based on nothing but empty ego, is being restored to its full lofty heights, by quiet grace, by an incorruptible duo.

    With Baba sounding so hollow on the anti-corruption front, “federal character” in presidential appointments is his new game — hardly a crime!

    But back to IBB and Atiku in the Nigerian economic debacle.

    As a University of Ibadan undergraduate in 1984, Ripples never liked the Buhari junta’s political policy.

    The treatment of the ousted politicians was too draconian, back then hallmarking the most vicious face of military rule ever.  The arrests were also lop-sided, with a penchant to punish, just for punishment’s sake.  Thirty-four years after, that impression remains unchanged.

    But not so, the economic policy.  Back then as at now, the thrust was self-sufficiency, no matter how hard at first, to build a real local economy.  But the avant-garde experts back then, pumped full with self-underdevelopment theories, courtesy of their Western teacher-ideologues, balked.

    Buhari lost out.  IBB, charming the gullible — which was about everyone, including the media — sided with these Nigerian “expat experts”, to echo Prof. Wole Soyinka’s sarcastic pun in The Interpreters.

    In the very first week of the structural adjustment programme (SAP) in 1986, the Naira forever(?) crashed as a viable currency.

    That economic debacle, of totally surrendering to imports, while playing yo-yo with the Naira parity, hoping gushing petro-dollars would absorb the shock, had lasted all through military rule (1986-1999), and spanned the 4th Republic Obasanjo presidential establishment (1999-2015).

    Of course, there were “reforms” (that highfalutin jazz word of Obasanjo-era high orthodoxy): some of them critical (like the pension reforms); others laughable (like liberalizing petroleum downstream by refined fuel import); and yet others, trip to ego land, as Chukwuma Soludo’s NEEDS (National Economic Empowerment and Development Strategy) which, in full golden triumph, beckoned the states to come up with their own SEEDS; and the local governments, with own LEEDS.

    It was the golden age of empty sloganeering with raucous applause!

    Even when the Buhari Presidency in 2015 changed tack, and instead settled for massive agriculture to power back the local economy, these same “expat experts” pronounced a dire verdict on the new government.

    Yet, less than three years down the line, rice importation, by figures from the Nigeria Bureau of Statistics (NBS), is down by 90 per cent.  By year end 2018, according to the same NBS projection, Nigeria should be self-sufficient in rice and most other grains.

    What SAP and Obasanjo era reforms could not even touch in 30 long years, a government delivered in less than three years — and some lobbies still claim that government knows no economics!

    Atiku’s link to IBB?  Simple.  As IBB took Nigeria on an economic wild goose chase 32 years ago, followed by administrations that succeeded him, so would the “new” Atiku take Nigeria to a future economic quicksand, away from the current fast-forming firm grounds.

    If those grounds are consolidated and built upon, a robust economy would logically result, other things being equal.

    And Baba Iyabo and his CN gang?  Just empty drama and vacuous grandstanding — hardly a democratic crime!  But it could well turn vicious distraction, with its parasitic tactics of preying on current pains, only to sell a far worse future anguish.

    That is Nigeria’s current crossroads, with equal opportunity messiahs stalking the gullible.

    But as their past records have shown, over the past 32 years,  theirs is the wide and merry way that leads to perdition, not the straight-and-narrow that leads to salvation.

  • What is IBB up to?

    What is IBB up to?

    President Muhammadu Buhari and his senior aides must have spent this past weekend trying to decipher the inner meaning and long-term implications of broadsides about his Administration released for public consumption last week  by two of his predecessors.

    The first, from former President Olusegun Obasanjo, was a no-hold-barred excoriation. There is no doubting its author, for it is composed in the blunt, sledge-hammer tradition of political pamphleteering that is his trademark.  He painted in broad strokes what he regarded as Buhari’s failures, urged him not          to seek a second term, and announced he was going to convene a Coalition for Nigeria to chart the way forward, unencumbered by the dysfunctions of the existing political parties and their superannuated leaders.

    To almost everyone’s surprise, the Coalition registered its arrival on the scene in Abeokuta less than 48 hours later, with Obasanjo himself, former Osun State Governor, Olagunsoye Oyinlola, and Donald Duke, former Cross River State governor and a presidential wannabe for 2019, among other veterans.

    Even Ahmadu Ali  — the same Ali of the 1977 campus upheavals, and more recently chairman of the inept PDP would not be left out.  It has also been reported that our good friend Professor Jerry Gana, former director-general of the defunct Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI), former director-general of the defunct Directorate for Social Mobilisation, former Minister of Agriculture etc, etc, is standing by to enlist

    Give it to Obasanjo:  No one ever accused him of dilatoriness.

    But it is the second broadside and its postscript that are of concern here.  The former came in the name of former military president Ibrahim Babangida, and was released to the media by his spokesperson of 14 years, Prince Kassim Afegbua.

    In vain does one comb it for the former military president’s deft footwork, his subtlety and his willful obfuscation, all designed to give him room for escape and leave him unscathed in any ensuing rage.

    He dismissed Buhari as an analog president in an era that calls for a digital leader and challenged him to produce evidence of the “change” he said had come to lead.

    He described the killings in Benue by Fulani cattle herdsmen as a “pogrom” and brought to public attention an incident in Dansauda, in Zamfara State, in which “over 200 souls were wasted for no justifiable reason.”

    “In the fullness of our present realities,” the statement said, “we need to cooperate with President Muhammadu Buhari to complete his term of office on May 29, 2019 and collectively prepare the way for a new generation of leaders to assume the mantle of leadership in Nigeria.”

    Babangida stated that he did not intend to deny Buhari his inalienable right to vote and be voted for.  “But there comes a time in the life of a nation,” he added poignantly, when personal ambition should not override national interest.”

    This does not sound like Babangida.  My textual analysis leads me to conclude that it is Afegbua’s composition all right. In tone and phrasing, not forgetting the barbs planted here and there, it bears a striking resemblance to many statements he had issued previously for his principal.

    I recall a particular one, responding to Obasanjo’s caustic attack on Babangida,   Afegbua seized on some unsavoury disclosures Obasanjo’s estranged son, Gbenga, to bludgeon Obasanjo literally and figuratively below the belt.

    Even if that was his remit, I warned on this page, he should have discharged it with greater circumspection.  Remember, I admonished him, that there was life after Babangida.

    Reading the broadside he issued recently in Babangida’s name, I thought, “Here we go again.”  This time I was sure Babangida would disavow the explosive statement credited to him and leave his spokesperson to rue the consequence.

    So, when another statement arrived in Babangida’s name, disavowing the one previously issued by Afegbua, I chuckled.  Vindication, at last.  Afegbua had finally overreached himself.

    And when police Inspector-General Ibrahim Idris reportedly ordered Afegbua arrested for making a “fake statement,” it looked as if Afegbua was doomed.

    On close examination, I can state with confidence that the statement in question could not have been written by Afegbua.  The grammatical flaws gave the game away.  “It has been drawn to my attention a press statement . . .” it began.  It spoke of how political events and civil unrest in many parts of the country “has raised many questions” on governance and unity.

    It characterized 2018 as being “inundated with seasons of literatures” on the corporate existence of Nigeria and how “many of such literatures have shown concerns of the corporate existence of Nigeria beyond the 2019 general elections.”

    Shortly thereafter, Afegbua appeared on television and gave interviews in which he said he stood by his earlier statement on behalf of Babangida, and that he had his principal’s authority to say that much.

    So, what went wrong?

    Afegbua’s explanation has a persuasive ring.

    When the first statement was issued and some of Babangida’s friends saw how it had been sensationalized in social media, they  were worried that it might put him on a collision course with  Buhari by the social media, and then took it upon themselves to issue the lexically-challenged rebuttal.

    Afegbua said Babangida had called him to say that the original statement stood, and that its “kernel” was designed to inform public discourse, not to be taken as an attack on Buhari’s person.

    And at this writing, Afegbua has not been arrested.

    So, there you have it.

    But there is this lingering question:  What is the calculating resident of the Minna Hilltop Mansion really up to?

    It is an outrageous thought, but is he testing the waters against 2019?  Is his aim to be counted with Obasanjo as a statesman who warned against the forces impeding good governance and undermining national cohesion, while leaving himself an escape hatch in case of reprisals?  Was he putting the final seal on his 1985 broadcast announcing and justifying Buhari’s ouster as military Head of State, followed by almost two years in detention? Is this a way of making up for the umpteenth time with Obasanjo?

    You never know with IBB.

  • Again, Baba Iyabo thunders

    Again, Baba Iyabo thunders

    Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, has thundered yet again!  But it is nothing but jaded deja vu.

    Those swooning over Obasanjo’s latest Coalition for Nigeria (CN), would do well to remember his Association for Democracy and Good Governance in Nigeria (ADGN).

    He ghosted that body amidst the uproar that greeted Ibrahim Babangida’s annulment of MKO Abiola’s 12 June 1993 presidential mandate.

    Among the many starry-eyed that descended on his Ota farm, searching for leadership, was a certain ramrod Muhammadu Buhari, outraged by IBB’s ultra-recklessness.

    But as the naive were focused at doing justice by MKO, Obasanjo was priming himself for crass opportunism.

    That journey, in patriotic perfidy, landed Obasanjo in gaol.  It also cost Shehu Musa Yar’Adua his life.  Still, Obasanjo would end up the prime beneficiary of the Abacha debacle.

    It is ode to Obasanjo’s essential gracelessness that though MKO’s martyrdom ensured his second coming, he not only struggled to completely bury MKO throughout his presidential years (1999-2007), he also ogled an illegal third term which ended in a fiasco.

    So, those swearing by Baba Iyabo’s latest CN gambit, especially after strafing both the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) and the power-obsessed People’s Democratic Party (PDP), are entitled to their naivety.

    By the way, does Obasanjo’s old “Abiola is no messiah” mantra gel with his present “APC and PDP have failed, so try my CN” new war cry?

    The foxy Owu chief, pushing a so-called “third force”, brimming with patriotic zeal to save Nigeria, might just be pointing to nobody but himself!  Call it neo-third term through the bad door!

    Now, to Obasanjo’s January 24 press release on the present state of things.

    Do the counting, at least in the democratic era: Second Republic President Shehu Shagari (1979-1983), President Umaru Yar’Adua (2007-2010) and President Goodluck Jonathan (2010-2015) — all were victims of Obasanjo’s tumbling adjectives, in explosive letters, similar to the present press release on President Buhari.

    Yet, all three were Obasanjo’s power protégés.

    The Obasanjo military junta aided and abetted Richard Akinjide’s twelve-two-thirds joker that sprung Candidate Shagari from a looming presidential run-off, as the 1979 Constitution ordered.

    As outgoing president, Obasanjo declared Yar’Adua’s election a “do-or-die” affair; and inflicted such on the polity, producing the most brazen rape on democracy Nigeria ever saw, making even Yar’Adua so ashamed of his own “election”.

    Of course, Yar’Adua’s fatal illness (hardly a secret) made the sorry Jonathan a fait accompli, that would nevertheless collapse the Obasanjo presidential house of straw, of which the PDP, which he robbed of its soul, was only a grand victim; and Jonathan, poor soul, the grand fall guy.

    Tracked back to 1979, therefore, the Nigerian debacle has had but one constant: Obasanjo.  He handed over to Shagari; but that government’s collapse, after one democratic term, hallmarked Nigeria’s most virulent military rule.

    That started with Muhammadu Buhari’s stone-age despotism; featured IBB’s brutal and wayward power-wield, chalking the first annulment of presidential mandate in Nigerian history; and hit the very nadir in the stark, thieving and murderous Abacha, who had to expire for his country, which he brutally raped, to progress.

    The Obasanjo-led 4th Republic (from 1999) has followed the same regressive pattern — with Obasanjo’s successors sinking steadily in the mire, until the threatened collapse (not only of Obasanjo’s house of straw, but of the whole ruling class) of 2015, which rallied that class to rally around a clean name, to save them all.

    It is again tribute to Obasanjo’s holy illogic that his sacred Pope must consistently produce profane priests — to borrow an image of the Catholic Church.

    That, at least to the acute, captures Obasanjo’s latest media grandstanding on the present state of affairs.

    Yet, give the devil his due.  Of all charges Obasanjo laid against Buhari, the only valid one would appear the president’s ultra-narrow appointments, on the security front, along northern lines.

    Normally, since the appointees are no foreigners but Nigerians the president deems fit to do the job, Ripples won’t raise much eye brows.  This is especially so when these are evened out with a southern phalanx, on the economic management front.

    Still, there are cries that these appointees, by their alleged ethnic agenda, undermine the president and cast him as an ultra-narrow ethnic champion.  The president must address and correct these grave allegations.

    But aside from this sole point, the other allegations, coming from the former president, are tantamount to pure gas: they are logical legacies from Obasanjo’s ruinous foundation, as first president of the 4th Republic.

    PDP: That PDP is rotten, coming from Obasanjo, is simply rich.  Did anyone, living or dead, contribute more to crippling that party than the former president?

    Corruption:  Given the progeny of his Presidential Library as unfazed shrine of brazen extortion (with a sitting president and oil minister suborning the cream of Nigeria to “donate”, it’s amazing Obasanjo would have the nerves to pontificate on corruption.

    Petroleum queues: a natural result of Obasanjo’s “brilliant” policy of liberalizing petroleum downstream by product importation, instead of local refining.  The Buhari government has a sounder policy on that front than Obasanjo’s.

    Killings and tension: Much as a section of the media has fraudulently coloured herdsmen killing as novel and exclusive to the Buhari presidency, that is arrant nonsense, for herdsmen-farmers tension is nothing new.

    It happened under Obasanjo.  So did it, under Yar’Adua and Jonathan.  Instead of emotive finger-pointing and ethnic scape-goating, therefore, it is time to find lasting solutions, instead of playing to the gallery.

    Economy: Obasanjo roars on the poor management of the economy.  But pray, what were his own records, apart from wholesale pandering to Breton-woods, that gorged Nigeria of its “real economy”?

    From the Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala days of structural underdevelopment of the local economy, a government is mining the golden opportunities in agriculture, much more than any in Nigeria’s 4th Republic. Despite its huffing and puffing, that was beyond Obasanjo’s eight-year presidency.

    One term: Is it not laughable that the one that hankered after an illegal third term, now decries another’s right to a legal second?

    Obasanjo is at his usual pastime, when things are tough, and his conceit spurs him to posture to plebeian roar.

    But ask yourself, since 1979, which Obasanjo-led movement has left Nigeria better than it met it?

    Baba Iyabo is an integral part of the Nigerian mess.  If you think he can be part of the solution, you’re entitled to your democratic delusion.

  • Not exactly ‘two fighting’

    Not exactly ‘two fighting’

    Less than a week since former president Olusegun Obasanjo released his public statement excoriating President Muhammadu Buhari and the administration that he leads, Nigerians, it would seem, have done little else than reduce it to the street variety tango described as two fighting. Picture here the familiar high street scenario where two sturdy males brawl in the open, in the hot tropical sun, to the accompaniment of a horde of mostly indifferent onlookers, mostly out of pure boredom than for any real entertainment value. It does not matter that the ensuing debasement serves neither party nor the larger community any good.

    What does Obasanjo want –the question goes on and on? Mercifully, Obasanjo is not one to leave anyone with wild guesses. He says it as it is – “The lice of poor performance in government – poverty, insecurity, poor economic management, nepotism, gross dereliction of duty, condonation of misdeed – if not outright encouragement of it, lack of progress and hope for the future, lack of national cohesion and poor management of internal political dynamics and widening inequality – are very much with us today.

    “With such lice of general and specific poor performance and crying poverty with us, our fingers will not be dry of ‘blood”.

    Say what you may of the motives of the individual who has had the good fortune of serving first as a military ruler and then a two-term president, a man with such tremendous stature and one with such hefty voice in the nation’s moral universe would ordinarily be expected to speak out in times of grave national emergencies.

    Not when the fellow is Olusegun Obasanjo – as many are wont to suggest.

    Never mind his bona fide as an engaged citizen, foremost patriot and citizen of the world; or arguably his bragging rights to a slew of reforms that have taken governance under this democratic dispensation several notches up. I refer here to the pension reforms which given the mess that has been made of the old defined benefits scheme has become revolutionary, the power sector reform, the creation of anti-corruption institutions – the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Independent Corrupt Practices and Other Related Offences Commission – all of which have given governance a semblance of modernity. And so it goes in the opinion of many that the weighty intervention, coming from an Obasanjo, a man who subverted our institutions as much as he tried to build; who nearly sacrificed the fourth republic on the altar of his megalomania, must be bad news!

    First, I will say that there is nothing in the lengthy treatise that has not been said by Nigerians in different forms and for a including no less than the wife of the president, Aisha Buhari who once took to the international media to complain about the hijack of the husband’s administration by a cabal. Not even the opportunistic call on the president not to run for a second term; or even the proposal for an amorphous yet to be defined ‘Third Force’, which, in any case is not entirely dissimilar from what another group – National Intervention Movement has proposed pretends to make it anything new.

    By the way, how about putting it to Nigerians’ legendary hypocritical ways that they could not see the OBJ hand coming?  A man who took former President Goodluck Jonathan to the cleaners when the latter’s government derailed, with the APC and its then candidate Buhari effusively in praise; should it now come as a surprise that the same man will, with almost equal zeal  go public when he thinks things appear to be going wrong? If it seems any proof that the virus of narcissism in OBJ is alive and well, does it not in equal measure attest to the potency of the bacteria of opportunism in the APC and its leadership?

    I would of course argue that the current reductionism of the statement to OBJ versus PMB – or as some have in the spirit of the times elegantly coined as Herdsman versus Farmer is as distressing as it is unhelpful. That the message actually reflected the broad thinking of a large section of the population obviously explains government’s rather measured – if you like deferential – response to the unguided missile. It is therefore not a case of looking for fire when no smoke exists. The signs of stasis or failure of governance are everywhere. It is not a matter of tossing up sterling but nonetheless sterile indices of performance to convince the citizens that the country is currently doing well. A country with such profound structural problems, one so hobbled by its multifarious challenges that it routinely falls back on providence and other transcendental forces has no business pretending to be going anywhere.

    Yes, we may be doing well in agriculture; what about post-harvest losses that have reduced our agriculture to the most elemental level?  Forty billion dollars foreign reserves (which by the way, is linked to improved fortune of oil) may seem much, in real terms, it comes to no more than our capacity to import everything from bathroom slippers to high-tech machinery and even fuel over the course of a few months? How far have we addressed our industrial competitiveness which is explained as the degree to which we can convert our domestic manufactures to tangible imports in a qualitative and cost effective manner? Ever seen a country that touts plans as achievement, makes a song of the farce called annual budgets while the leadership begs citizens for patience and understanding for its slow motion governance?

    No thanks to the duplicity at the highest levels of government, our president’s track record of integrity is being sorely tested. From Maina-gate to Lawal-gate, the president is being called out almost on daily basis to answer for the indiscretions of his men. A country whose chief law officer would rather go to court to shield an accused on the run from an probe, and feigns ‘public interest’ as justification can only make itself a joke in the eyes of civilized world; a country whose minister of defence would offer heinous rationalization to mass murder deserves more than a hiding.

    As far as I can see, Nigerians have not asked anything outside what the APC federal government promised; the least it can do is deliver on them. Much as I would agree with information minister Lai Muhammed that 2019 is a distraction, I also find the exertions by the administration’s top shots at shooting down the messenger as  fruitless . Nigerians, surely the know OBJ’s capacity for mischief; time for the Buhari administration to reveal itself as a performing one, worthy of our trust. Unfortunately, it doesn’t appear to have much time left on its hands.

  • OBJ don talk

    OBJ don talk

    The title of this piece was inspired by an incident on the Zaria-Kano local train in the late 1950s.

    Three rows across the aisle from me in the half-empty third-class coach sat a passenger, his head literally buried in the newspaper he seemed to be reading, a broadsheet.  From what I could make out, it was the West African Pilot.

    I paid no further notice until some10 minutes later when, to no apparent purpose and to no one in particular, he called out rather sententiously, “Zik don talk,” nodding vigorously, as if in concurrence with the aforementioned “Zik.”

    Everyone in the coach was startled.

    “Zik” was of course Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe, scholar, legendary newspaperman, publisher of the West African Pilot and a string of regional titles, Leader of the NCNC, and premier of Eastern Nigeria.

    Some 10 minutes later, the passenger made the same declaration with the same gesture, eliciting the same response from his captive audience.

    I got up from my seat, walked past him as if I was headed to the next coach, and walked back some five minutes later just to look over his shoulder to get some idea of the material that had affected him so much.

    It was the West African Pilot all right. But he had been holding it upside down all along even as he riffed lustily on the Zik -don-talk declaration.  We never got to know what Zik actually said, nor the occasion.

    But that singular declaration has stuck with me all these years.

    I was reminded of it last week by former president Dr Olusegun Obasanjo’s special statement on the state of the nation. It was Obasanjo on the top of his ebullient form, blunt as a punch to the nose and twice as unsettling.

    Within hours of the release of the statement, “Obasanjo don talk” or variations thereof had become its summative frame. What Obasanjo said was splendidly displayed on the front pages and the headlines of Nigerian newspapers in all its prolixity, and reported concisely but with no loss of impact by the international news media.

    Abuja roadside entrepreneurs who know an opportunity when they see one, hurriedly packaged the special statement in compact, durable pamphlets and peddled them all over the city. Supplies ran out quickly, necessitating a second print run, and a third.

    The “special statement” contained nothing that you would not hear Nigerians discussing animatedly in homes, offices, bus stops, airports, beer parlours, and pepper-soup joints – indeed wherever two or three Nigerians are gathered:  the stagnant economy. the deepening frustrations of young men and women who cannot find work, the suffocating corruption, the epileptic power supply, the broken infrastructure, nepotism and lack of empathy at the highest level of government, the security vacuum that has emboldened cattle herders to turn farmlands into killing fields and entire communities into refugees, the pervasive lack of faith in public institutions, and the general loss of hope in a future that promises only more of the same.

    Given this litany of woes and Buhari’s recent medical history, Obasanjo said, Buhari would serve Nigeria best by foreswearing a second term, leaving the field to those better equipped to grapple with the country’s pressing problems.

    There is nothing new in the litany.  Pick up a newspaper or watch the news on any given day and you will find example upon example of these aberrations. What imparted a jarring salience to the message is the messenger, a personage who cannot be ignored.

    The Presidency was gracious in its response.  It pointed out areas where its policies and programmes have borne fruit – agriculture is a case in point, as are the counter-insurgency campaign against Boko  Haram and gains in the anti-corruption campaign – and admitted that much remained to be done.

    Not so Buhari’s well-placed supporters and their proxies in the traditional as well as in the misnamed  social media.

    They answered Obasanjo invective for invective.  They questioned his good faith and his qualifications for passing judgment on Buhari and offering him what they dismissed as gratuitous advice.  They reprised what was regarded at the time as a thinly-veiled attempt by Obasanjo to award himself a third term as president, contrary to the express stipulations of the Constitution. They reminded everyone that it was he who foisted on Nigeria the inept Shehu Shagari, the provincial Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, and the clueless Goodluck Jonathan.

    There was not a grain of altruism in is prescriptions, they said, only opportunism masquerading as statesmanship. His epistle, they said, was shot through and through with self-righteousness.  The Coalition for Nigeria he was proposing was nothing more than the vehicle he intended to ride back to power.

    Anyone examining Obasanjo’s record will find not a little to agree with in this excoriation.  But that is beside the point.  What matters is that millions of long-suffering Nigerians who believed that they were voting for change have seen little change and that a person of consequence like   Obasanjo spoke up for them, drawing on their lived experience.  Killing the messenger will not wipe out the message.

    True, the Administration has been in power for only two years, and has spent much of that time arresting the drift and decay of the Jonathan era.

    Still, in those two years, the public should have seen a radically different way of conducting government business and a tempo that matches the urgency of the situation.

    Obasanjo’s searing assessment need not pass as the definitive judgment on Buhari’s tenure, 2015-2019, however.

    This year will be consumed for the most part by preparations for next year’s general elections. The Administration may not be able to initiate many new programmes. But it can pursue with greater vigour and commitment those already approved. To enhance performance, it should press into service proven achievers.

    With oil now selling for N70 a barrel, the revenue profile should make more money available for projects that will advance its Change Agenda and help pare down the backlog of salaries and pensions owed public service employees and contractors. The spending will have a multiplier effect on the economy.

    Before Obasanjo released his “special statement,” the word in town was that Buhari would seek a second term. Even while he was in hospital, some influential members of his Cabinet and top officials of the APC were drumming up support for his re-election.

    Buhari himself had uncharacteristically let his guard down to confirm, more or less that he would be running.  But lately, he has been more tentative.  His close aides say he is still weighing his options.

    One thing is certain: Obasanjo’s “special statement” has shaken loose the entire field.  If Buhari decides to run, many aspirants to the Presidency who had been sitting on the fence will now see him as vulnerable, and challenge him for the APC ticket. If he decides against running, that would clear the path for Northern aspirants like the desperate Atiku Abubakar, the calculating Bukola Saraki, and the freewheeling Rabiu Kwankwaso to claim the second of the two terms they say belongs to the North by convention.

    The foregoing, I should state, is based on the assumption that APC, the PDP and the ANPP, the smallest of more than 50 fringe political parties, will not be swept away by the tide that Obasanjo’s Coalition for Nigeria is sure to unleash.

  • Why Nigerians are impatient

    Why Nigerians are impatient

    President Muhammadu Buhari appears to have rested any lingering doubts as to whether or not the cries of Nigerians on the two subjects arguably at the heart of the Nigerian dilemma have finally pierced through the impervious walls of his Aso Villa abode. Here, I refer to the renewed debate about the future of the polity in the face of the increasingly open and direct threat to its corporate existence, and the frustrating slow pace of governance that has foisted a situation of stasis on the polity. In an emphatic pushback to the charges of indifference, or of if you like diffidence on the two key issues, the President would let it be known that Nigerians and their exaggerated expectations, rather than the pace of his administration, are the problem.

    “We Nigerians can be very impatient and want to improve our conditions faster than may be possible considering our resources and capabilities. When all the aggregates of nationwide opinions are considered, my firm view is that our problems are more to do with process than structure.

    “We tried the Parliamentary system: we jettisoned it. Now there are shrill cries for a return to the Parliamentary structure. In older democracies, these systems took centuries to evolve so we cannot expect a copied system to fit neatly our purposes.

    “We must give a long period of trial and improvement before the system we have adopted is anywhere near fit for purpose.”

    That was the President on the occasion of his New Year broadcast.

    To those who argue the president is slow and appallingly self-absorbed, he made clear at the dinner he hosted in honour of chieftains of the All Progressives Congress at the Presidential Villa, Abuja Thursday last week that Nigerians ought to be thankful for his Pauline conversion:

    “I keep telling people that while I was in uniform, quite reckless and young, I got all the ministers and governors, and put them in Kirikiri. I said they were guilty until they could prove their innocence. I was also detained too.

    “I decided to drop the uniform and come back. Eventually, I am here. So really, I have gone through it over and over again.

    “This is why I am not in a hurry virtually to do anything. I will sit and reflect and continue with my clear conscience.”

    Now, the president may have sought to avail the citizens a fresh window to assess him and the administration that he leads. Even at that, it comes as a new thing that the president would seek rationalisation in a rather strange, almost incomprehensible inertia at a time of dire emergency.

    To be sure, it is possible that a sizeable number of Nigerians may not have known just how bad how things were in 2015. However, it suffices that the greater majority of the citizens knew just enough to work assiduously to replace that utterly incompetent administration headed by a man whose trajectory in public service was powered more by chance and good luck than any real preparation, a leader under whose watch governance was reduced to a grand bazaar.

    Nearly three years on, we do have a fair idea of how bad things really were. From the war in the Northeast which although required and still requires hefty resources to prosecute but which officials with their filchy hands rendered nigh impossible, the completely run down infrastructure that bears the ignoble fingerprints of each successive PDP administration since 1999, the deliberate elevation of heist to the directing principle of state policy and with it the desecration of the pillars and institutions of governance across the board, there was very little contention about the humongous work of cleaning and cranking needed to get the Nigerian machine revving back at full throttle.

    As if to pour pepper on the nation’s injury, the above challenges will coincide with yet another cycle of collapse of commodity prices that plunged the nation’s finances to the nadir.

    That was how it was nearly three years ago. If we had thought that the period was sufficient to articulate a cohesive direction of governance, to rev up the pace of governance given the administration’s specific diagnosis of near total collapse of state institutions, to break new grounds and make new friends all in the bid to get all hands on board, we are finally finding out that things are not only what they seem, but also that the perception of emergency is far from shared. Part of which is the current frustration under which the chant Sai Buhari has since yielded to #BringBackCorruption in quarters that would ordinarily have been unthinkable in recent past.

    It is not as if anyone needed reminding that things are not exactly all gloom under President Buhari. The economy is out of recession even if many will insist – nominally. Thanks to improvements in oil prices, the foreign exchange situation has stabilised just as the foreign reserve is on the upward spiral. The capital market has been quite impressive having finally found its verve after the bubble of 2008/9. I know a tribe out there who will swear that confidence has begun to return to the economy even if the only proof they have to show is the so-called 24-step leap in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business Report for 2018 which puts Nigeria 145th in 2017 as against 169th place in 2016. Many are eager to point to the impressive stride in the agricultural sector, the modest improvements in industrial capacity utilisation and the unprecedented cutbacks in food imports.

    Do all of these therefore excuse the president’s frustration with what he chose to describe as Nigerians’ impatience let alone rationalise his frustratingly slow pace?

    To start with, it is hard to see what could be deemed as “achievement” outside the usual enabler called crude oil. First, with the price of crude at nearly $70 a barrel, it seems only a matter of time before the economy returned to the now familiar trajectory of non-inclusive growth. Godwin Emefiele and company at the apex bank may have done a yeoman’s job of growing the reserve and keeping some 41-odd items at bay; it seems as yet a long shot from any real progress in the absence of robust attention to the infrastructure challenge. Clearly, if you have an economy delivering two percent growth at a time population is doing 2.6 annually, it is tempting to imagine that a luxury, such as the one the president so badly craves, is one that the country can ill-afford.

    Finally, the president thinks that the political architecture matters a little. I agree with him to the extent that the hood does not necessarily make the monk. Moreover, if the word restructuring has become so contentious and disagreeable, how about getting the federal government, in the face of the pervasive insolvency across the states, to shed some of its weight to give them some muscle? Or is that not what governance is all about?

  • The media and road to Kigali

    The media and road to Kigali

    When the Rwanda madness boiled over, a local radio it was that directed the grim orgy of point-and-kill.

    Here, “point-and-kill” is leisure lingo for local pepper soup gourmets.  But the Kigali party was a grisly affair.

    So, when Radio Mille Collines belted out the order, “Cut down the tall trees!”, “Crush the cockroaches!”, the globe was awake to perhaps the greatest horror since Hitler.

    The “tall trees” were the tall, gangling Tutsi, who though a minority, monopolized political power.  Their hunters were the Hutu, the bitter majority, bent on throwing off the Tutsi yoke.

    When the smoke cleared, on the Rwanda genocide of April-July 1994, Radio Television Mille Collines rebranded the media as nation wrecker, from nation builder.

    Yet, its hate  broadcast lasted one year: July 1993 to July 1994.

    The Rwanda genocide would be 24 years this year.  But the Nigerian media appears to have learnt nothing from the Rwanda media’s road to catastrophe.

    This is clear from the base role the media had played — and continue to play — in the crises, real or contrived, that have faced the Muhammadu Buhari presidency.

    For President Buhari, it has been one year, one major crisis: Niger Delta Avengers bombing expedition (2015/2016), Nnamdi Kanu IPOB’s ferocious harvest of hate (2016/2017) and the herdsmen killing spree (2018).

    In all of these, the media would appear bent on stoking the fires, than snuffing them out.

    The especial grouse appears the president’s Fulani nativity; which a hysterical segment — more or less the bulk of the southern press — appears determined to scapegoat and demonize to the hilt.

    Media-bred hate can only build a road to Kigali, paved with innocent skulls, blood and gore.  After Rwanda, should any country ever traverse this route?

    Still, make no mistake.  Nigeria is a federation of many ethnic nations, each with its cherished world views and idiosyncrasies; not to talk of mutual but thick prejudices, fanned by ancestral feuds, real or apocryphal.

    Such feuds and prejudices, therefore, bob up in the media, no matter how careful the gatekeepers are.

    Besides, all politics is local.  So, it is a function of the willy-nilly federalization of the Nigerian media that Daily Trust, for instance, would push for northern interests, just as The Punch would for the West, Daily Sun for the Igbo South East; just as Vanguard would cast its lot with the southern, oil-rich minorities, in the fierce contestation for plums, in the Nigerian space.

    The media, as traditional champion of local rights, fits pat into that fray, in the best tradition of crusading journalism.

    But crusading for rights is one thing.  Recklessly baiting catastrophe, is another.  In handling these crises, the media has tended towards the second than the first.

    The result is a media roaring as rabid ultra-nationalists and ethnic chauvinists; spreading hate, baiting doom and pushing a poisoned pool of bigotry, to the unwary, as an immaculate spring of fairness.

    Take the opener of the crises, the bombing spree of the so-called Niger Delta Avengers.

    Now, this was a criminal gang drafted — or which drafted itself — into the political space, following the the loss of presidential power, by local boy, Goodluck Jonathan; and resultant loss of gravy, by local parasites.

    That appeared the make-good of the threat to make Nigeria ungovernable, should President Jonathan be voted out.  The tragi-comedy, of one government becoming a fugitive to another, added to the suspect Avengers campaign.

    While the bombs boomed, Government Ekpemupolo aka Tompolo vanished, a fugitive from the law, wanted for alleged jumbo sleaze. It would appear a legitimate supposition, therefore, to claim that the Avengers bombing had more to do with covering Tompolo’s tracks, than fighting for Niger Delta rights.

    Yet, much of the South-South media, with most of the southern media in tow, framed this ultra-dangerous precedent as some Niger Delta liberation struggle. It was not.

    Now, resorting to violence, just because you lost a free election, is an atrocious precedent, which an enlightened media ought to slam as a concerned and concerted bloc.

    If today, a southern group resorted to bombing just because it lost an election, what stops a northern group following the same formula tomorrow?

    After the Avengers, came the IPOB campaign — a rabid, hate-filled denunciation of the rest of Nigeria.  Though popular among the plebs in South East streets, it put the Igbo and their interests at loggerheads, with other parts of Nigeria.

    Again, the southern media cheered on this madness, until another lunatic fringe from the North gave the Igbo residents there an  1 October 2017 exit deadline — or else!  That triggered a chain of events that eventually turned Nnamdi Kanu a fugitive from the law.

    The herdsmen killings, that broke with the new year, put the president exactly where his traducers want him — the hysterics against Fulani criminality, with not a few even suggesting presidential complicity and sweeping ethnic guilt by association!

    Again, no pity for killer herdsmen.  Killing is a grievous crime that must be stiffly punished by the state.

    But to now frame it as an exclusive Fulani crime is the apex of stupidity.  Yet, that’s the line much of the southern media push — and with such hate, rabidity and brazenness.

    But the terrible news just broke that Islamic State (IS) fanatics, with their penchant for vicious killing, may just be operating in Nigeria.

    That doesn’t automatically put in the clear, the criminal colony of herdsmen.  But it shows the folly — and danger — of a one-track media criminalization of a group, when others could well be the culprit.

    Besides, in the present seasonal hate-for-hate orchestra, the herdsman and the media could well be two sides of the same hateful coin.

    The herdsman unleashes terror in the grisly field.  The media counters, with own fervency, in the air, in the press and, of course, in the (anti)social media.

    It is terror for terror (just like an eye for an eye that makes everyone blind), that dooms all.

    Such rabidity should be infra-dig for the media, except Nigeria is doomed to the road to Kigali.

     

    Between Fafowora and Opaleye

     

    Last week was, for Ripples, a sumptuous feast in humanity, from a young old man; and an old young man.

    Young old man, Ambassador Oladapo Fafowora, 77, consultant to The Nation Editorial Board, retired — and was his sent-forth an event to remember! That was January 17.

    Old young man, Abolade Opaleye, Esq., maritime lawyer and family man extraordinaire, turned 60.  It was January 19, and all roads led to the Oriental Hotel, Lekki, for a sumptuous birthday bash, with class and glitz.

    But what made it for Ripples was the gush of testimonies, about the duo, on their humanity, their decency, their hearts of gold!

    Ambassador, happy retirement sir.  They don’t make them that suave any more.  To Opaleye, old young man, well, life begins at 60 — so no retirement for you yet.

    Thank you both for being a riveting tutorial in basic humanity. Would sure love to be like you when I grow up!