The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • A university for David Mark

    A university for David Mark

    No initiative on Nigeria’s health care delivery system is judged worthwhile these days unless it is dedicated to curtailing medical tourism.

    There are no reliable figures on the volume and aggregate expenditure on the phenomenon, but the way some political officials and educational entrepreneurs talk, it is almost as if medical tourism is the bane of the nation’s health care delivery system, if not the entire economy.

    Just before he left office, former Governor Godswill “Uncommon Transformation” Akpabio commissioned a hospital declared to be among the very best on the planet, complete with modular surgical theatres and a helipad for air ambulances ferrying in patients requiring immediate attention.

    The complex would not only make it unnecessary for patients to go seek treatment in the      UK, France, Germany, Indiana or Brazil, at the risk of having their vital organs harvested surreptitiously;  it would also make the state capital, Uyo, a salubrious and more affordable destination for ECOWAS citizens, and people from all over the world seeking specialised medical treatment.

    When Akpabio sprained an ankle in a freak accident shortly after commissioning the hospital, he was ferried, not to the hospital he had built to curtail medical tourism, but to the UK. I gather that he headed to the UK not because he likes medical tourism, but because world-class specialists expected to run the hospital were not yet “on ground”, as we say here.  Apparently, it was taking forever to process their travel papers.

    The specialists are yet to hit the ground, I am told, and the complex has been boarded up. Akpabio’s successor Governor Udom Emmanuel, it would seem, is not averse to medical tourism  Or it may well be that he has been engrossed in transforming or re-transforming whatever Akpabio had left untransformed or only partially transformed.

    If Governor Emmanuel is not averse to medical tourism, he is in excellent company.  Those    who patronise the Aso Rock Medical Centre would rather promote medical tourism than put a brake on it. That explains why the Centre could not even boast a single capillary syringe–a device they had in abundance in village dispensary when I was growing up–to say nothing of a functioning x-ray machine the last time First Lady Aisha Buhari checked.

    Why equip the place when you can travel abroad every year, premier or business class, all expenses paid, plus generous spending money?

    Despite the bad examples around, the appetite for curtailing medical tourism remains robust. At the recent opening of the Teaching Hospital of the Afe Babalola University, Ado-Ekiti, no less a personality than the Vice President, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, expressed great optimism that the facility would help reduce medical tourism.

    But nowhere has that appetite been more robust than the National Assembly, which last week passed a unanimous resolution urging the Federal Government to establish, as a matter of urgency and necessity, a comprehensive University of Health Sciences in Oturkpo, in Benue State, the hometown  of His Excellency the Distinguished Senator (Dr) David Bonaventure Aleichenu Mark.

    The resolution was the high point of discussion and debate on a motion proposed by .Senator Mark.  The discussion brought in the usual “stakeholders”:  officials of the Federal Ministry of Health as well as the Federal Ministry of Education, plus professionals in the medical sciences.  Lending intellectual muscle to the effort is the League of Idoma Professors, incorporating home and foreign-based scholars.

    David Mark’s proposal has had a chequered history.  As president of the Senate, Mark had  urged the establishment of a medical university on former President Dr Goodluck Jonathan.  Clutching at everything that might enhance his re-election chance, Jonathan had approved it.  The approval may have been in principle, but Mark considered it a fait accompli.

    The project, an example of the insidious patronage system that undergirded the Jonathan administration, never got off the ground.  A new sheriff had come to town.

    But give Mark high praise for following up and following through.

    He took up the matter with the APC -led 8th National Assembly in November 2016, steamrolled it through three readings, culminating in the enthusiastic endorsement of the Senate. All that is required now to make   it a law of the land is President Buhari’s assent.  Some influential senators are already saying that the whole thing is a done deal.

    If they had their way, the institution would be named David Mark University of Health Science and sited in his hometown, Oturkpo, in the Idoma heartland of Benue State.  Mark had failed to deliver on his promise of Apa State, but the medical university would be some redemption.

    Speaking to the bill, Mark said the university would be equipped to engage in specialized training of doctors, nurses, pharmacists and other medical health practitioners “to cushion the current admission deficit” underscored by the fact that the traditional institutions could only take 3, 000 out of nearly 160, 000 who apply every year.

    The need to curb medical tourism was, however, the theme that ran through the hearings on the proposal.

    Senator Jibrin Barau (APC, Kano North) noted that if the bill won presidential assent, it would surely reduce the rate of medical tourism among the country’s elite.

    “No one will have to fly to India or any country on medical ground if we have all the needed state-of-the-art facility on ground in our country,” he said.  “Once this university takes off, we could even export our medical practitioners, which would boost our economy. As we all know, health they say is wealth.”

    Senate President, Bukola Saraki, represented by Senator Olusola Adeyeye (APC, Osun Central) said the bill was timely, and that the establishment of the university would help mitigate the crisis in the health sector.

    When established, the university would address the issues of medical tourism and its associated capital flights amounting to some N3 billion expended by Nigerians seeking medical attention  abroad.

    Throughout the proceedings, nobody asked why setting up a new medical university, rather  than strengthening and equipping existing teaching hospitals and medical centres to world class, was the best answer to the nation’s health care crisis.

    Nobody asked how this particular institution would be the answer to medical tourism when, even if established and equipped today, it would produce no doctors for the next five years at least.  Just how many students can it accommodate anyway?

    This whole idea of curbing medical tourism through setting up a specialised medical university:  is this not a solution in search of a problem?  Just how pervasive is medical tourism?

    David Mark is to be commended on this initiative.

    Nigeria has given him a great deal – “abandoned property” czar, military governor, Minister of Communications over presiding and the nation’s octopus telecommunications network NITEL, senator of the Federal Republic since 1999 and president of that body for two consecutive four-year terms, etc, etc, and all the rights and privileges and compensation appertaining thereunto.

    In the process, he has acquired a huge portfolio of assets, reported to include two golf courses abroad, liquid wealth salted away in European and Caribbean tax shelters (remember the Panama Papers), and goodness knows what else in Nigeria.   By some accounts, he is an authentic billionaire.

    And yet, he and his cohorts want the Nigerian taxpayer to build, equip and run a medical university named for him and situated in his hometown.

    What does David Mark want to give back to a nation that has given him so much?  What material contribution does he intend to make to an institution, the establishment of which he has pursued with singular vigour?  What bequest does he want to make for having the proposed university named after him?

    Eleswhere, those seeking this kind of honour–for great honour it is, not a right -pay handsomely for it.

    Think on these things, Distinguished Senator.

  • Budget: Myth, reality and the in-between

    Exactly a week after the formal laying of the 2018 Budget before the National Assembly, there has been just enough dissection of the elements to make for treatise on Political Economy 101. It’s like a typical Nigeria football match setting: everyone is a participant, observer and coach – rolled together. From the budget size to sectoral allocations; crude oil benchmark oil price to the revenue profile; capital estimates and recurrent expenditures, debts and cost of service; trust every citizen Joe to have an ‘expert’ opinion. I recall my local vulcanizer telling me the other day that the government policy – particularly the non-faithful implementation of the budget is killing his business!

    Never mind that the economy had been long in trauma before the new-fangled buzzword called‘recession’ crawled into the national lexicon; you’ll be tempted to imagine that the cancer which has reduced the economy to a mere shadow of uitself actually begin and end with the annual ritual called budget and budgeting! Again, never mind the manufacturers long used to drawing fixed, imaginary lines year –in, year –out in the sand as if such a world exist,; it seems an inextricable part of their corporate culture to blame the budget of the government for failures in corporate decisions even when abundant evidence would seem to point to gross derelictions in inventory management. The public sector employee waves it as an alibi when the creditors show up at the door; the same for politicians when the constituents come calling for their share of the commonwealth. It is all part of the myth, being spun around an exercise, a good part of the fixation under which the budget has become a be-it -all.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. The budget is important – very. Aside letting citizens into the mind on what constitutes government priorities, it sets out the limits of what is achievable within certain parameters in any given year. It lays out the revenue profile; ditto the expenditure.  Through the budget for instance, we are able to know how many kilometres of roads are doable in a given year, the number of dams, if any, to be constructed as well as other physical projects and the costs of delivering them. Through it, we get to evaluate the efficacy of government’s previous spend with careful attention to what economists call the multiplier to enable government chart a realistic future.

    Put it to the vast understanding of the place of that instrument of public finance in their development matrix that serious governments and corporations are able to effectively deploy it to catalyse their economies, deliver on key targets and sometimes, and steer their economies in certain direction.

    Unfortunately, things are different in Nigeria. Take the 2017 budget for instance. That was the budget on which the Buhari administration’s Economic Growth and Recovery Strategy – was supposedly anchored.  Presumably, the fancy label could not have been an accident: Five successive negative growths in the preceding year had plunged the economy into recession. Inflation, exchange rate and other macro-economic variables were running riot. Manufacturers, the few that were still in business that is, could not get forex to buy; most states, no thanks to the gloom in the oil sector, could not meet up with their wage obligations. With pretty little economic activities going on, the economy was effectively on ‘hung’ mode. All of these, at a time of unprecedented infrastructure gap. The situation was one of dire emergency, hence the conventional wisdom which suggested a spend-your-way-out-of-recession strategy.

    At least, that was the expectation when the Budget was presented to the National Assembly by President Muhammadu Buhari on December 14, 2016. By Nigeria’s modest standards, the outlay was supposedly large even if, for Africa’s largest economy, it came to a tiny fraction of comparatively ‘smaller’ economies like South Africa and Egypt. It contained all the essential good stuff; roads, railways modernization, power, education, health – with allocations which although barely enough to make a dent, offered at least some hope.

    We know what happened. If we expected that the very instrument which the administration advertised as offering the best chance to take the economy out of the doldrums would receive swift passage, nothing of the sort happened. For the expectant citizenry, it would take six months from presentation to get the budget signed into law.

    Meanwhile, the economy somehow, crawled on. Thanks to the rebound in oil prices, we somehow managed to exit the recession the second quarter. More importantly, we managed in spite of the budget! Proof? How about the release of a paltry N450 billion out of the N2.2 trillion capital spend for the year – six weeks to the end of what is supposedly the terminus of the current budget cycle!

    Let’s look at the other myth that has endured – the myth that a twenty-something billion dollars spend would carry a $1.09 trillion Gross Domestic Product (GDP) load? While the myth endures, the reality of course is that the economy is simply too big for the government to wrap its hands around. And if I may add – it is far too robust for government’s tokenistic policies to make any real difference difference!  A more reasonable imperative is to find a strategy that ensures that the government creatively gets out of the pretensions that it has the answers when in fact it is the major source of the problem.

    In other words, for those looking to the budget for the miracle, the matter seems as simple as saying that the thought of a miracle is nothing but an illusion – It won’t happen. For while it is increasingly obvious that a poorly conceived and abysmally implemented budget will never make a dent on the $3 trillion outlay required to make a difference on the infrastructure situation over the course of the next 30 years, it seems to me the best time ever, to remove the illusions about the current state of our national budget as being anything other than a hollow event.

    Let me emphasise this as I close. The budget remains important. The fact of the matter however is that we are not there yet. Not in substance. Not in process. Not in implementation. And certainly not in terms of the fulfilment of the most basic expectation to the ordinary citizen for the delivery of the public good. While that is the case, the myth endures somewhat that we will get there somehow. That is why the number of white elephants continues to grow, the rite of roll-over of ill-conceived projects and the misplaced expectations that attend the process at every budget cycle.

    Didn’t they say – as it was in the very beginning…

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    For the benefit of those who need reminding, “Matters Miscellaneous” is the rubric under which, working from no particular design, I try to attend to the glut of occurrences with broad strokes and in short takes, lest some people and institutions feel neglected.

    Where to start?    Maina-gate has got to be the point of departure.

    Elements of Maina-gate

    It reads like a tale straight out of Kafka.

    A suspect in the investigation of the disappearance of some N100 billion in pension funds he was appointed to safeguard vanished from the public view for three years, during which he stayed in a safe house supposedly provided by an enforcement arm of the law he was running away from.  He was sighted living it up big-time in Dubai and other fun cities, and discovered functioning with perfect equanimity in the civil service in a higher capacity than the one from which he had been dismissed  three years earlier.   His reinstatement and rehabilitation resulted from a recommendation of the nation’s chief law officer that the head of the civil service had called flagrantly improper.

    That, in sum, is the story of Abdulrasheed Maina, one-time head of former president Goodluck Jonathan’s Task Force on Pension Reforms.

    Only in Nigeria could this have happened when a war on corruption is being waged.

    Grimly resolved not to go down alone, Maina has threatened to tell all.

    Bring it on, sir.

     

    Dino strikes gold

    Give it to Dino Melaye when it comes to full disclosure.  The APC Senator for Kogi West revealed recently that he has struck gold in a vast field with even vaster potential.

    Not through legislative work , the earnings from which he has acquired a fleet of the finest automobiles ever built, plus prime real estate in the most fetching neighboourhoods of Abuja.  Not through the video recording with which he bequeathed to the entertainment world the enchanting rhythms, the cadenced lyrics, and the captivating dance steps of Ajekun iya.

    To come right out with it, the source of the new wealth is his blockbuster book “Antidote for Corruption”.   At the last count, it had sold no fewer than 100, 000 copies, and doubtless tens of thousands more since then.

    On a recent trip to Germany, Melaye told Leke Baiyewu (Sunday Punch, November 5), he took 500 copies of the book along.  His agents have reported the stock “exhausted.”   A thousand copies sent to the United Kingdom were snatched up in double-quick time. He went to Russia with 100 copies; same story.   Ditto for the 2, 500 copies sent to five states in America.  They are demanding a new shipment.

    “I want to believe that it has been properly received,” Melaye said of the book, with the modesty that becomes him so well.

    How about the home front?

    “Within the country here, I have made huge sales,” he said. “I am laughing all the way to the bank.”

    Not bad for a compilation, the title of which was mocked as nonsensical, and the content of which was dismissed as a pastiche most likely to raise issues of copyright infringement.  Few books on The New York Times Bestseller List command this kind of international attention.

    And to think that the volume is just Melaye’s first literary outing!

    I hear that the authors of the anthologised entries are sharpening their knives and combing the text for anything on which they might be able to ground a copyright infringement law.

    When they strike, the good Senator cannot claim that the book was a commercial failure.  Commercial failures don’t send anyone laughing all the way to the bank, not when the top item on the person’s shopping list, according to inside sources, is a customised personal jet.

     

    Profiler, beware

    In these digital times, a library is just several clicks away on your computer screen.  Putting together a profile has never been easier.  Click your way into Wikipedia, and presto!

    But when several persons share the same name, it takes extra care to avoid a monumental mix-up, the kind that occurred last Sunday in one newspaper’s feature on what it called “Seven strong men around Buhari.”

    Among them, of course, is Abba Kyari, President Muhammadu Buhari’s Chief of Staff.  Only a few things the newspaper published about him were accurate:  his name, his picture, his education at Warwick and Cambridge, and his current designation. Almost everything else was wrong.

    Abba Kyari was not born in 1938; he did not attend Barewa College – I should know, because  he and I belong in the same alma mater, St Paul’s College, Wusasa, Zaria, since renamed Kufena College.  He did not enlist in the Nigerian Army in 1959 as an Officer Cadet.  He never served as artillery commander in the Kaduna-based 1 Brigade of the nor as Commanding Officer of the Kano-based 5th Battalion of the Nigerian Army

    Buhari’s Chief of Staff never served as military governor of North Central State during the Yakubu Gowon regime.  He never held any of the other positions he was reported to have held.  He never led the Northern delegation to the 1994 Constitutional Conference.

    That sweeping biography belongs to Abba Kyari’s older namesake but no relation, the late Major-General Abba Kyari.

     

    72 hours without phone service

    “Emergency calls only”

    For 72 hours last week, that was the message that bobbed up on the screen of my cell phone.  And I was experiencing the phenomenon for the second time in six weeks.  I could not reach the vast majority of my contacts who have no email.  They too could not reach me.  It was all so disorienting.

    Comparing notes with subscribers to the particular service provider, I was somewhat relieved that the fault was with the provider, not with my cell phone.  There had been no previous warning about service interruption, no indication of how long it would last, and no apologies when service was finally restored.

    Is this how brands lose their appeal?

    It is now perfectly notorious that all GSM service providers have sold and continued to sell far more lines than their carrying capacity; hence the disembodied and disingenuous rationalisations for those failed calls with which subscribers have become painfully familiar.

    “Your call did not go through.”  They never tell you why.

    “All lines to the country you are calling are busy.”  How so?

    “Your call is being forwarded.”  Even when no forwarding information or mechanism is indicated?

    “The subscriber you are calling cannot be reached?”  Really?

    And so on and so forth.  Now you know.

    Is there no national security implication to these discontinuities?

     

    Betweeen sleuthing and lawmaking

    In practice, there should be no sharp dividing line between the investigative function and the lawmaking function of the Senate. But lately, the one appears to have supplanted the other.

    At any given time, the Senate is inviting or threatening to invite one official or institution to appear before it, claiming to have uncovered massive fraud in one ministry, department or agency of government or another, and altogether positioning itself as a de facto EFCC, whose leadership it is    sworn to cripple, if not eviscerate altogether.

    The problem here is that the Senate suffers fatally from a credibility deficit.

    Here is an institution that has not audited its own financial transactions in six years, and concerning which it is only a slight exaggeration to say that it will have a hard time winning a transparency contest against a Black Hole, the hulk of a burned-out star with a density so high that not even light can escape from it.

    Whatever happened, by the way, to the challenge to the law “as revised” on which the ascendancy of the Senate president and his deputy was supposedly grounded – a document which the best authorities have put down as an inept forgery?

    They must be hoping to run down the clock on that one.

     

    Relief in Owerri

    I hear they are hugely relieved in the Imo State capital, Owerri, that the kerfuffle worked up by the life-size likeness of South Africa’s President Jacob Zuma that Governor Rochas Okorocha unveiled to mark his honored guest’s visit has subsided.

    Government House, Owerri, was flooded with messages from South Africa’s irreverent social media and its ungrateful patrons urging Okorocha to keep the original and send down the copy.

    All over Nigeria, and especially in Imo State, the attentive audience tittered endlessly about  what the media malignantly called “Okorocha’s erection.”

    Whatever happened to our value system?

     

  • Good product, bad pitch

    Good product, bad pitch — that, in marketing terms, about captures the current “restructuring campaign”, to correct the anomaly of Nigeria’s “unitary federalism”.

    Sure, other things being equal, Nigeria needs to urgently re-federalize to development and prosperity; from the current unitary illusion of mass stagnation and poverty.

    And yes, all things considered, the most promising elixir would appear “restructuring”.  That tool is essentially economic.  But like everything Nigerian, it has been corrupted — one hopes not irredeemably? — by crass politics.

    Indeed worse: corrupted by the dross of other impurities that can only imperil its much desired realization.  Yet, without it, Nigeria appears fated to just wilt away.

    In the South West, its pristine forte, restructuring is polluted by the unfazed pushers of Yoruba nationalism, if not outright irredentism.

    To this insensitive lobby, restructuring is yet another umpteenth proof of a Yoruba superior world view, before which every other part of the country must crouch and bow!  It is pure manifest goodness, other fears be damned!

    But that is even the purest of this impure motive. When you mix this relative “purity” with the harsh campaign of the electoral losers of 2015, savagely spurring the stallion of “restructuring” to thrust themselves back where they once lost face, you can appreciate the harm they do to the cause.

    In the South East, the howling neophytes out there, as new converts bawling the sheer beauty of their new faith, have infected the cause with Biafra and allied malcontents.

    But their tactics to cope with the present pathology of losing power would appear without  prejudice to future strategies of a changed equation of power (or lolly) re-gained — restructuring be damned!

    So though for “restructuring”, the mythical “South” — for while Nigeria surely has a geographical South, it hardly has a political South — appears to band together, that sweetheart alliance is unlikely to hold, if the power calculus changes.

    Pray, if the South-South (the eternally cheated and disadvantaged minorities), under Goodluck Jonathan completely forgot “restructuring”, just for a few years of presidential glory, what is the assurance that “restructuring” won’t vanish, from the South East front, for a few years of Igbo presidency?

    Ay, President Jonathan staged a last-minute national conference towards some re-federalization.  But who doesn’t know that was cynical fobbing to fend off a looming defeat at the polls, after a most catastrophic tenure?

    Even in the South West, pristine home of restructuring, the dominant elite appears now split: between the brutal, self-serving activism by the Afenifere old guard, operating from the core philosophy of post-defeat sour grapes; and the new-found moderation of the triumphant bloc, that with Muhammadu Buhari’s North West in 2015, sent Jonathan and his court to presidential purgatory.

    But even with the purest of motives, selling “restructuring” in the current stentorian tones, which suggests a plus for the South but a minus for the North, is set to send the North stonewalling.

    Yet, the North is no god to be propitiated, by retaining a nation-wrecking unitary federalism — whatever that means — that thrives on rent to a few; but death to the majority.

    Indeed, if it quakes with fear, that comeuppance would appear well earned.  For all its dominance of the political space since independence, and its monopoly of the military era (save the Obasanjo accidental interregnum from 1976-1979), the northern dominant power elite has had little to show — not to their long-suffering masses, not to Nigerians as a whole.

    Still, comeuppance or no, the North is unlikely to just roll over, if it fears the new order might fairly dominate it, as by the present order, it has unfairly dominated others.

    It’s a perfectly normal human reaction.  Yet, the present order could lead nowhere but collective death.  That’s why the “restructuring” pitch must change tack.

    “Restructuring” is not necessarily against the North for its past dominance.  It is rather for a future Nigerian renaissance, that is a win-win for all.

    Clinical thinking therefore demands a change of message, which aim is to secure a pan-Nigeria consensus.  The North and the South must therefore talk to each other, instead of yelling at each other.

    That brings the discourse back to the “mythical” South, politically speaking.

    It is good the “South” is developing some consensus over “restructuring”. But it would even be better for it to first explore and cement confidence and trust-building core principles.  Otherwise, that alliance could vanish at the very first show of storm.

    The old West (now South West) and the old East (now South East and South-South) had always drifted apart, vis-a-vis their political engagement with the North.

    The last Southern Governors Meeting, before this year’s, was in 2005.  Shortly after, everything fizzled out.

    It was the high noon of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hegemony, and the whole swathe of the old East was too busy enjoying federal power, to pay attention to any “southern” distraction.

    At the beginning of the 2nd Republic (1979-1983), the Nigeria People’s Party (NPP), which won in the old Anambra and Imo states — and also in Plateau State — opted for an alliance with the North-led National Party of Nigeria (NPN), as against the West-led Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN).  The two minority states back then in the old East, Rivers and Cross River, were NPN states.

    At its end, even after the NPN-NPP alliance had collapsed, the Progressive Parties Alliance (PPA), supposed to fuse UPN, NPP, Great Nigeria People’s Party (GNPP) and a faction of Aminu Kano’s People’s Redemption Party (PRP), could not agree on a common presidential candidate between Zik and Awo.

    They went into the 1983 election separate; and got all roasted by the NPN formidable rigging incinerator.

    The 1983 experience was a near-encore of the tail end of the 1st Republic, when the United Progressive Grand Alliance (UPGA), between the rump of the West’s Action Group (AG) and the East’s National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC).

    That, too little, too late, came after the Northern People’s Congress (NPC)-NCNC power alliance had crashed.  An ill-fated boycott ensured the Nigerian National Alliance (NNA) — NPC plus Ladoke Akintola’s Nigerian National Democratic Party (NNDP) — romped into a crushing victory, that nevertheless crushed the 1st Republic.

    Could the AG’s offer to NCNC, for an alliance that would have crowned Zik as prime minister at independence, in exchange for Awo as Finance minister, have made a difference in East-West entente, and therefore better southern solidarity?  That is pure conjecture now.

    But the notorious fact of history is that rapprochement never came to be.  Nothing, in the present, suggests the ancient feuds that drove that development have disappeared, especially with the raw pathosis  that oozed from Nnamdi Kanu’s scalding Biafra campaign.

    This foray into history is not to prove an intra-South entente is impossible.

    Rather, it is to show it would be a hard road to travel — like any other good thing.

    Therefore, the geographical South must first morph into a cohesive political South, before it can pull off a pan-Nigeria consensus on “restructuring”.

    Even then, “restructuring” must be served as win-win, not win-lose.  That is the logical way to earn a pan-Nigeria consensus, to productively re-federalize Nigeria.

  • Ease of Doing Business: One thing thou lacketh…

    For a country renowned for its stifling bureaucracy, corruption and red tape, the report that Nigeria has moved by – wait for it – 24 places on the annual global ranking of Ease of Doing Business should ordinarily gladden the heart. From being 169th in 2017 and 170th in the 2016 edition, Nigeria, according to the World Bank 2018 report now takes the 145th spot out of 190 economies ranked.

    If it is any consolation, she joins El Salvador, India, Malawi, Brunei Darussalam, Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Zambia and Djibouti in the league of 10 top improvers – countries said to have carried out numerous reforms to improve their business environments.

    “These economies together, implemented 53 business regulation reforms across 10 of the areas measured by doing business.

    “Overall, the 10 top improvers implemented the most regulatory reforms in the area of getting credit, starting a business, dealing with construction permits and paying taxes,’ the report said.

    Thanks to the work of the Osinbajo-led Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) set up in July 2016 by President Muhammadu Buhari; something, it appears, is finally being done about those retrograde forces holding the economy down. Among the priority bills said to be in the kitty are the National Collateral Registry Bill and the Credit Bureau Services Bill designed to make it easier for businesses to get access to credit; the coming of the Visa-On-Arrival process to include e-submission of applications to dedicated desk at Nigeria Immigration Service and, the push to eliminate manual baggage searches at airport. All of these, no doubt, part of the package designed to make Nigeria a global investment destination.

    Now, I do not deny that reforms are important. After all, we all are somewhat agreed that Nigeria can do with a better environment for doing business. And that many of the regulations currently guiding the process are, to put it mildly, archaic.

    There is however a limit to what improved regulations can achieve in the face of infrastructural limitations. One part of the problem is whether our globalist aspirations can be described as realistic at a time the minimalist conditions for erecting a truly modern economy are a long way yet. Never mind our pretensions about being the biggest economy on the continent, a lot has certainly been said of our antediluvian infrastructure support for business and so require no further elaboration. Ours is a financial services environment which, although touts credit as the life-blood of business yet prefers to operate a usurious regime that sucks the very life out of business. Do we talk about the port system so riddled with corruption and inefficiency that the turnaround time of vessels has shifted from an average of three days to 30 days? Talk of the malignancies of corruption and indolence that ensures that nothing gets to move unless they are moved!

    All of these, unfortunately, are nowhere near the systemic decay in the very foundations for human capital development which in the end can only guarantee that the so-called improved regulations sunder apart.

    This is where I find the theme of the World Bank 2018 report “Doing Business 2018: Reforming to create jobs” interesting.  For a country in a perpetual reform mode – and which admittedly the so-called fruits of reform have remained forlorn, this year’s theme merely affirms the centrality of the human capital question in the debate on growth and development; a subtle rebuke on the comparatively limited attention the Nigerian government continues to pay to the building pillars of development in its haste to be garlanded among the global best.

    Now, if my understanding of the obsession with easing our business process is any correct, it is about getting our businesses up and running; the inescapable assumption is that other things – including the expansion of opportunities for our young people to be productively engaged – would naturally follow!

    It seems to me part of the same patently false assumptions underlying the craze for foreign direct investment at a time local companies are known to be dying in their dozens.  Whoever told the government that the foreigner-investor stood a chance in a clime that has proven a veritable graveyard to countless indigenous entrepreneurial efforts?

    Sure we know that the so-called job magic won’t happen unless the citizens, particularly the youths, are prepared for that future. It certainly will not happen any more than the 70 percent left out of the 1.7 million who sat for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination without success will automatically land in one of the difficult-to-find but no less derided vocational institutions. This can only happen when the provision is made.

    Presently, we know that our educational system is in crisis. Now that is an understatement: It is broken. I’m not here talking only about universities whose products are now routinely tagged as ‘unemployable’ but of a sector that cannot even guarantee the supply of low to middle level skills needed to get basic industrial or household tasks, done. Gone are the days of standards – and standardization – when you needed a Grade Three certification from the Department of Labour to get a job in the formal sector. It does not matter whether the job was masonry or driving, each came with its own standards and certification just as progress came with crossing next hurdle in the proficiency ladder and so on and so forth.

    All of those now belong in memory.

    What to do? Something far beyond what the current fixation with regulations can ever do: Bring the standards back! Start with an ethical reorientation that affirms not just the dignity of labour but one that assures that trade practices run on the principle of fair wage for a day’s labour.

    Second: Bring back the technical colleges. That way, the nation would be better primed to take advantage of the current reform efforts. One centre of excellence in each of the six-geo-political zones would not be a bad idea at this time. Yes, we are in an emergency. Pump in money – I mean tonnes of it – into equipment and training of vocational personnel. In an age of cutting-edge technologies, it seems the least the federal government can do ensure that the trainees maintain the competitive edge. By the way, some states, notably Lagos with its technical schools and Kwara with its International Vocational Centre are already doing something in this regard.

    I say – there is room for more across the states to bolster the critical skills pool to get the country running on its feet. Sure, those steps offer a faster route to economic recovery than the World Bank Ease of Doing Business prescriptions would.

  • BudgIT and stats for stats’ sake

    BudgIT and stats for stats’ sake

    BudgIT’s dire verdict, on states and their debts, made sensational headlines.  But it was hinged on two suspect premises.

    One, the delegitimization, if not criminalization, of debts.  That premise is arch-conservative, if not outright archaic.

    Good old usury is at the core of any financial system, international or local — barring the alternative Islamic banking.  It makes the big difference between working for money and money working for you.

    Besides, with the neo-con unrelenting screeds about smaller government and more private sector participation, the debt market gathers more fillip.

    BudgIT’s second suspect premise is a fixation with growth without development.  Its analyses gripe at “heavy” debts.  But it freezes its mind to whatever developmental goods such “heavy debts” could do.

    That rings true of Lagos (which BudgIT canonizes as the best) and Osun (which BudgIT demonizes, using its one-track technique, as the worst).  It would appear not completely right, if not outright wrong, on both scores.

    But there is a valid fact that appears to drive BudgIT’s fear — and dire verdict: both the Federal Government and the states have a parlous record of misapplied debts, thus causing socio-economic troubles for the future generation.

    Still, not even legitimate fears should cripple financial creativity, in the grim reality of vanishing resources.

    If you don’t have the cash to stimulate economic growth and midwife development by providing social infrastructure, and you still shun the debt market, all you are running is a voodoo economy that, sooner than later, would collapse on you.

    That is the point BudgIT missed; but which Lagos and Osun excellently push.  That has helped to revamp the Lagos economy as a national model.  It may yet push the Osun economy outside the perpetual woods.

    Ironically, the statistical nay voices, that back then told Lagos it was heading for doom, when the Bola Tinubu governorship started the financial revolution way back in its first term (1999-2003), is now telling Osun it’s on a scary journey to nowhere.

    Yet, linked to its meagre earnings from the Federation Account, Osun would appear to trump every other state, in the quality of infrastructure it has birthed.  The creative use of debt did the seeming magic.

    Now, how can that be bad for anyone — the Osun economy, the Osun people or even the Osun future generation, on whose behalf BudgIT’s ringing stats yelp, in an amusing irony of statistical hysteria?

    But back to Lagos and BudgIT fears.

    When Lagos embarked on massive urban infrastructure renewal, most — if not all — of the roads were not tollable: Kudirat Abiola Way (old Oregun Road), Awolowo Road, South West Ikoyi, Yaba-Lawanson-Itire road, Ikotun-Igando road, LASU-Iba road and the Lagos Business District, complete with the renovation of the Tinubu fountain and statue, finished at the tail-end of the Tinubu government in 2007.

    Yet, all the roads gave business and commerce a fillip, boosted real estate value and enhanced the state’s ability to expand its tax net and boost internally generated revenue (IGR).

    Lagos couldn’t have achieved this great infrastructural upgrade by depending on conventional sources of funding, with an IGR of N600 million a month as at May 1999.

    Yet, when Lagos started its financial activism, getting into the bond market and approaching international finance agencies for developmental loans, the emotive lobby wept and howled and whimpered that Lagos was shackling its future generation to soulless peonage.

    The present realities have debunked that.  Lagos, by those very actions, has become a model economy among Nigerian states.

    But if Lagos continues to borrow — by BudgIT’s stats, at 24.2 per cent of states’ total debt, the highest borrower — it is because the job is not yet done; and it’s still in the throes of expanding its economy to suit its sweet-sour bill as the country’s foremost land of opportunities, not because its managers are reckless or soulless.

    Yes, a bit of caution would do — everything after all, no matter how well done, can be improved upon.

    But that caution should come with empathy — empathy, springing from thorough understanding; not statistical stacking of cards that spreads needless alarms.

    Back to Osun, and BudgIT’s penchant for stats for stats’ sake, flowing from a wilful lack of appreciation of the complete picture, is well and truly alarming.

    Here is Osun, in BudgIT’s dock, verbatim as reported by Premium Times:

    “Osun’s spending plan over the years came with the borrowing of N18.38 billion to build six mini-stadia to amuse, and at best make its youthful population active.

    “Also borrowed was N30 billion at a lending rate of 14.75 per cent, for roads and waterworks infrastructure which generate no income and therefore cannot provide for long-term sustainability repayment plans.

    “Another N11.4 billion was borrowed at a 14.75per cent lending rate to build schools, which would also unfortunately bring in no income into the State’s coffers. Even more debilitating to Osun’s economic prospects was that the repayments for all these debts ran concurrently, and deductions were made out of whatever revenue was to accrue to Osun State.

    “Taking these loans which did nothing to improve internally generated revenue amid large Overhead costs means the bulk of the State’s existing revenue is instead diverted into debt repayment.”

    Running through the BudgIT “charge sheet” is the craven worship of capital; and abject contempt for human development — hence the gratuitous lines about building mini-stadia to “amuse” Osun youth (so, you can’t boost the economy through sports?); and waterworks not fetching cash.

    Yet, the human is the most critical in the developmental mix.

    Indeed,  BudgIT’s claim that borrowing to build schools is wasted investment, simply because it doesn’t translate to instant cash, is nothing but ringing fallacy.  Behind every investment is the concept of delayed gratification.

    Besides, between Osun and Ondo, two neighbouring states, with two parallel situations, history beckons.

    Two governments, at very early stages in their lives, staged educational summits.  While Osun used its to revamp and radically modernize education, and still preserve Awolowo’s most vital developmental legacy of free education, Ondo, by vibes coming out of its summit, appears preparing to wriggle out of it.  Yet, Ondo grosses some coins from oil, Osun doesn’t.

    If these “expat experts” (with apologies to Wole Soyinka’s The Interpreters) cannot appreciate the sacrifice to the future generation that went into Osun’s thinking, they can at least save the empty statistics that not only suggests the contrary but also helps to mislead the unwary.

    The penchant to mislead also applies to BudgIT’s claim that because some roads are not tolled, they don’t — or can’t — contribute to IGR.  That is another fallacy; as the Lagos experience has shown.

    Lagos and Osun are battling the odds in the worst of economic times. The least they deserve is misleading stats, that shut from its sight the complete picture.

  • Economy on bailout mode

    How can anyone go to bed and sleep soundly when workers have not been paid their salaries for months? I actually wonder how the workers feed their families, pay their rents and even pay school fees for their children.’

    That was President Muhammadu Buhari at a parley with a group of governors led by the chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, Abdul’Aziz Yari, at the State House, Abuja last week. If the statement was meant to convey the President’s frustration with the fiscal crisis ravaging the states – the crisis that has hobbled their capacity to meet their obligations to their workers – it would appear that his presidency either misdiagnosed the ailment, or rather conveniently, substituted placebo for an organic therapy.

    To the extent that neither option comes near to being a way out of the problem, the least that can be said is that it does not bode well for an administration known to stake much claims to change.

    One takes it that the President meant well. Otherwise he wouldn’t have called out the club of governors. However, if after two cycles of bailout and another two rounds of Paris Club refunds, the situation in almost all states have neither changed in any appreciable sense nor their future any assured than it was before the intervention, the only conclusion left is that the bailout instrument hasn’t quite worked the magic. Whereas the report of death by suicide, of the 54-year-old Kogi State civil servant Edward Soje over an alleged 11 months’ salary arrears merely drives home the horror of the current situation far beyond the daily statistics reeled out on the countless casualties – either of pensioners collapsing at verification venues or of those still in active service succumbing to the same fate on their way to work – could have ever done, we must acknowledge that a solution is not even yet on sight!

    To state therefore that the fiscal crisis has since moved from being an epidemic to something of a pandemic is merely stating the obvious. With the exception of the federal government, the Federal Capital City administration and half a dozen out of the 36 states, it continues to be a story of insolvency writ large. The blame game of course has not been in short supply with most commentators, almost without exception, instinctively laying the blame exclusively on the laps of the governors most of whom are accused of not only run their states as personal fiefdoms, but live extravagantly, totally oblivious of their environment. This of course is aside the now familiar charge of lacking the creative imagination required for such a time like this. And so it goes on that the governors that having begged for the job should not be indulged since they knew what they were getting into.

    The governors’ job, as I once wrote on this page, has suddenly become the most hazardous job in the world! Did I hear someone say – serves them right?

    Again, like I said before, those who believe the grandstanding and the lie about the federal government being a model in fiscal rectitude are obviously entitled to their delusion. A central government which rakes a whopping 54 percent of the federally collectible revenue and yet maintains a recurring cycle of deficit budgeting on the scale that we have seen has no business lecturing the states on their handling of finances.

    Clearly, if it seems incongruous that the same outsized government would go sourcing for nearly a third of the funds required to execute its 2017 budget from the international financial markets, consider also that a single federal agency – the Nigerian Ports Authority –actually proposes to spend N278 billion out of its projected N288 billion revenue – some 96 percent leaving a paltry N10 for the federation account for 2017. How about that as a window into the swamp described as the federal bureaucracy?

    The figure, by the way, is more than the Ogun State budget of N221 billion; Borno’s N183 billion and Enugu’s N105 billion for the same period – without the accompanying bureaucracy.  We are talking here of the budget of a single agency of the federal government under the supervision of a board exceeding those of state governments for the entire year! Consider also for instance, that in 2016, NPA’s revenue was N201,146,319,843, out of which N174,009,312,695, representing 86 per cent, was expended according to the Senate. NPA is not alone in this; the same could be said of other agencies. Ever heard of the bureaucracy’s cart driving the nation’s development horse?

    The other day, yours truly had raised the question of where the Paris Club funds were kept all this while. I raised the question because it takes an economy run on patriarchal, paternalistic lines to have the kind of trillions being announced as Paris Club refunds warehoused somewhere and the governors of the owner-states subjected to the daily taunting, humiliation and ridicule such as we have seen of late. Surely, nothing can be more ironical that a federal government on a borrowing binge purporting to teach a bunch of insolvent states fiscal rectitude. Only a country where different standards behaviour is expected of different grades of actors in the system can such be contemplated.

    Having put the economy on bailout mode, one assumes that the President has sufficient grasp of its staid arithmetic to be able to pronounce authoritatively not just about its place in the nation’s political economy but in restoring the states to sound financial health. With 50 percent of the Paris Club refund left to share, the president obviously need not worry about availability since the funds are already in the kitty. And now with the Excess Crude Account (ECA) reportedly hitting $2.31billion in September, working on Plan B can expectedly begin in earnest.  After all, the governors have spoken. And so citizens can look forward to another cycle of Paris Club naira rain.

    Trust me; the Parisian cash rain would be far less troubling to the anaemic states; for sure, it allows the governors to kick the problem down the road while sparing them the rigour of effective governance. You can bet that the option would be just as attractive to the benevolent federal government who needn’t bother about either shedding its bloated weight let alone be called to answer for the 54 percent unearned and undeserved share from the piggy bank.

    As it was in the very beginning, so shall it be. A terrible cycle – that is.

  • Gani and the curse of Aole

    Gani and the curse of Aole

    Gani Adams’ thirst for the controversial Aare Ona Kakanfo title, is clearly  a push for self-actualization, after attaining the basics of life.

    But given the jinx that comes with the deal, a yearn for societal recognition never comes with more baleful sweepstakes.

    Ola Rotimi, in Kurunmi, put the ruin of Kurunmi of Ijaye, yet another Kakanfo, in the tale of the tortoise and his doomed travel.

    Mr. Tortoise, the playwright teased, when would you return from your journey?

    When I am disgraced, disgraced, disgraced, the tortoise chanted, as if stung and frozen by hubris, when I am disgraced!

    Mr. Tortoise was the powerful Kakanfo Kurunmi of Ijaye, for picking war, when he could have chosen peace, against the equally formidable Ibadan army, led by Basorun Ogunmola.  At the end, Kurunmi perished, with his five sons; and his city lay in ruins.

    That was 1861, when the Oyo Empire was on a crumbling run.

    Shortly after, Latoosa, the Ibadan war general, had a crack at the Kakanfo title.  Baited to mount the Olubadan stool, he balked:  the Olubadan was a “woman”, since by the Ibadan constitution, he was forbidden from going to war. But he, Latoosa, was a man of valour!

    His wish, unspoken but loud enough, was to annex Olubadan to his Kakanfo title.  But at the end, not even the mighty Latoosa could push his wish through.

    Latoosa fell ill and died during the Kiriji campaign (1877-1893); forcing a constitutional stalemate.  That merged into a hideous stalemate the Kiriji War had become, against the Ekiti Parapo, under the hardy Ogedengbe of Ilesa.  Latoosa, history records, was the last general to lead Ibadan’s last war as a military power.  But he didn’t conquer.

    Still, Kurunmi and Latoosa were latter-day victims of the Kakanfo jinx.  The jinx itself originated from the ancients, marked by the dreadful Aole curse.

    Alaafin Aole so wanted to get rid of the powerful Kakanfo Afonja, the Ilorin warlord and most dreaded war general in the Oyo Empire of his day, who without much ado, annexed the Kakanfo title, after Kakanfo Oyabi died.

    Alaafin Aole didn’t like that one bit.  So, he saddled Afonja with an un-winnable war, such that after 90 days, and the Kakanfo didn’t triumph, he would commit suicide, by the severe code of his office.

    But Afonja and war confederates somewhat penetrated the plot and hatched a counter-plot.  From the battle zone, they sent the king an empty but covered calabash — a grim symbol of total rejection, at which the Alaafin must end his life.

    Aole did.  But he laid a curse — the dreaded curse of Aole — which doomed the Yoruba country to endless wars, plunder and capture; by kith-and-kin and by aliens.

    Afonja of Ilorin, true enough, was the first victim of that curse.  He not only died in his final battle with his Fulani usurpers, under the treacherous Alimi, he also lost Ilorin, his city, to them.

    Thus began the Kakanfo jinx — which seems to have endured, with its latest victim the late MKO Abiola, who died in detention in 1998.

    That is the title Gani Adams just inherited.

    But as the Kakanfo of the ancient era was soaked in jinx, the Kakanfo of the modern era is drenched in the fierce politics of the Yoruba progressive/conservative divide — one, bowing to the moral majesty of the Ooni of Ife (custodian of the Yoruba cradle); the other, holding fealty to the imperial supremacy of the Alaafin of Oyo (proud inheritor of the Oyo Empire, the sole imperial state in Yoruba history).

    Under the British colonial order and Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group (AG) government in early independence years, the Ooni of Ife, Oba Adesoji Aderemi (reigned 1930-1980), had scaled unmatched ascendancy, which climaxed in his appointment as Western Region governor (1960-1962), and re-established his post-empire preeminence in Yorubaland.

    In contrast, no thanks to Alaafin Adeniran Adeyemi II’s squabble with the AG establishment (deposed in 1955 after mounting the throne in 1945), the Alaafin had sunk in the opposite direction.

    So, when as Regional Premier, Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA) became the Aare Ona Kakanfo (the first in the modern era) in 1962, it was in the thick of the AG schism and regional crisis.

    It was also a rally, by the Oyo-speaking Yoruba, for one of their own, against the Awo AG establishment.  It was Yoruba neo-civil war under high-wire politics, with high calibre casualties.

    Awo went to gaol.  But SLA also perished in the 15 January 1966 coup, to sustain the jinx that the Kakanfo seldom ended well.

    The MKO Kakanfo story also followed the same pattern.  Abiola’s Kakanfo path was the Yoruba conservatives’ challenge to Awo’s post-2nd Republic (1979-1983) progressive mainstream.  MKO had led a futile charge, from the conservative National Party of Nigeria (NPN), to uproot that hegemony.

    Though MKO was named Kakanfo in 1988 (three clear years after the fall of the 2nd Republic and one year after Awo’s death), it was in the context of the Ooni-Alaafin tango for supremacy in the old Oyo State (now Oyo and Osun states).  Abiola, a Gbagura man from Egbaland, had an Oyo ancestry.  His father was Balogun of Ojoo, Ibadan.

    Still, 10 years later in 1998, the Kakanfo jinx struck again.  MKO died in the Abacha gulag, after languishing there for four years, for challenging the lawless annulment of his presidential mandate.  Cold comfort, though: MKO died a martyr of Nigerian democracy.

    Ironically, Gani Adams is blundering on the Kakanfo title, after the rather rash politicking of 2015.

    The South West progressives had split, with the old Awoists supporting President Goodluck Jonathan, simply because they detested the other faction, under Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, doing an electoral entente with Muhammadu Buhari’s North West.

    Adams, with Dr. Frederick Fasehun, threw their Oodua People’s Congress (OPC) lot with the Afenifere grandees, but in exchange for electoral lucre — a controversial oil pipeline contract.

    OPC also later rallied for their commander-in-chief with a Lagos show of brazen outlawry, just to press their loyalty.  They lost the election but OPC gained fresh notoriety, derision and contempt from civil and polite society.

    Ironically, with his Kakanfo announcement, Gani’s old allies in the Afenifere camp have thumbed it down  as rash, callow and over-ambitious.  But the other camp has given him qualified encouragement.

    Is this then the birth of fresh electoral alliances for 2019?

    Adams himself has been rather excitable over the Kakanfo jinx — who wouldn’t? — telling anyone he would buck it by not dying young.  That is no illegitimate wish, and his lovers would say amen to that.

    But the Kakanfo is not unlike fearlessly treading where angels dread.  Still, however his tenure ends nestles in the womb of time.

     

  • Roadblocks to restructuring

    Roadblocks to restructuring

    By whatever name the attentive public chooses to call it, restructuring is going to rank high on the national discourse until it is addressed forthrightly. But there is a formidable obstacle in the way: the National Assembly, which has never missed an opportunity to assert that the power to alter or revise the Constitution or write a new one rests with the legislature.

    The Speaker of the House of Representatives, Yakubu Dogara, told State House  Correspondents in Abuja last week that, based on the Constitution, The National Assembly has the last say on the matter, no matter how loud or insistent the agitation and clamour for change.

    President Muhammadu Buhari has also said that constitutional review belongs in the province of the National Assembly, though not exclusively.  He has insinuated into the process the National Council of State, an advisory body that has no defined role under the Constitution and meets at the president’s pleasure.

    This is a misapprehension that can only compound matters.

    But both Dogara and Buhari have unwittingly identified a major roadblock to restructuring Nigeria.

    The letter of the Constitution, it is true, vests the National Assembly with the power of review and revision.  But we must never forget the Constitution’s origins.  Conceived in secrecy and fashioned in unseemly haste, it was foisted on the nation by an exhausted military regime whose legitimacy at its departure was at best dubious.

    The Constitution’s preface, “We, the people. . .” is a solemn lie, according to the best authorities.

    In its financial transactions, the National Assembly has been as transparent as a brick wall.  Nobody knows how much its members have elected to pay themselves.  But the indications are that their self-assigned compensation is obscene compared with what obtains in the world’s most prosperous nations. Placed in the national context, it is downright unconscionable.

    More often than not, the Assembly is on vacation.  Even when it is in session, the rate of absenteeism is high.  The financial cost to the nation is so huge that not a few thoughtful Nigerians have proposed replacing the present House with one whose members serve part-time, as in the First Republic, and abolishing the Senate outright, as the Republic of Guinea has done with great benefit to its exchequer but without loss in the quality of  law-making.

    This kind of arrangement may well be canvassed when the constitutional review gets underway.

    Is it conceivable that a self-dealing National Assembly that has “the last word,” according to Dogara, will approve a measure, that will effectively terminate the outrageous compensation its members enjoy – N29 million a month, according to  one account they have denied but not refuted with facts and figures?

    As my colleague Ropo Sekoni remarked in his September 15, 2017 column for this newspaper, “A legislature that is afraid to disclose to citizens what it pays itself does not have the credibility to write a new constitution.”

    When the National Assembly deliberated on a raft of proposals emanating from its own committees the other day, it rejected on the threshold a call for the devolution of powers, a measure designed to retrieve Nigeria from the centrally-administered state it had become and set it firmly on the federal path on which it was founded.

    If the National Assembly could be so hostile to devolution, a central issue in any serious effort to review the Constitution, there is no reason to expect it to do little more than tinker with a document demanding comprehensive revision, if not wholesale re-writing.

    On the other hand, in keeping with its propensity for self-dealing, the National Assembly approved proposals that would confer constitutional immunity on its principal officers and also bestow on them membership of the National Council of State.

    The All Cross River Nationals Front has furnished another reason why the National Assembly cannot be the proper forum for restructuring the country.  In a communiqué  issued on October 6, 2017 at the end of its meeting in the Cross River State capital, Calabar, the Front declared that it was time to have “precise and free discussions” on the articles of association among the different peoples of Nigeria, “with all options open for discussion.”

    More to the point, it stated that the machinery for negotiation cannot lie with the National Assembly “because of the imbalance in representation structured into the National Assembly by various military regimes.”

    This imbalance, it should be added, accounts for the fact that Kano State has  more than twice as many entrenched Local Government Areas (44) as Lagos State (20) which officially has roughly the same population as Kano State.

    The path to a new Constitution, then, is blockaded unless the constitutional clause vesting the National Assembly with the power to amend that foundational document is rendered inoperative.  The pre-eminent legal scholar, Professor Ben Nwabueze, has suggested suspending that clause to clear the way for a body with constituent powers to write a new constitution, while the National Assembly busies itself with making laws for the governance of Nigeria.

    But will a self-dealing National Assembly assent to such a proposition?

    Absent such an assent, however, efforts to give Nigeria a new constitution will grind on and on, through the state assemblies and back to the National Assembly.  The task cannot be completed in the life of the Eighth National Assembly, nor perhaps even in that of its successor.

    But unless the controversial clause is suspended, the task cannot begin in sound earnest, and the Nigerian state will stagger from political crisis to deeper political crisis.

     

    From Himself the Igodomigodo, Osahon (Patrick) Obahiagbon

     

    “My dear big brother:

    “Let me seek your imprimatur to asseverate ab ovo, how anatomically mollycoddled I always feel whenever you have found the time out of your perspicacious, percipient and intellectually hieratic ensconcement to find out what could be spinning in my encephalon, on our nation state, in your hebdomadal cerebral lucubrations.

    “Am in caboodle concordance with your very good self, Professor ltse Sagay and others who have didactically lampooned, serially lacerated and pooh-poohed the sodom and gomorrah that the National Assembly has become.

    “For me really, what is even more of the moment and deservable of mental pabulum more than the humongous lucre has to do with what I stigmatise as the picaninny legislative chicaneries, parliamentary makossa gymkhana and pachucoism preponderantly striding the National Assembly on matters pro bono publico that I find myself most times asking the question: cui bono the National Assembly?

    “I have always pertinaciously held the view that Nigeria’s democracy cannot be more elevated, dignified, ennobled and salubriously disposed more than its representatives and it’s up to the high priests, oligarchs and hierarchs of our respective political parties to put in place a party nomination configuration that will manacle all political gladiators, carpetbaggers, philistines and vacuous narcissistic epicureans who have no business in the sacred precincts of parliament either at the state or national level.

    “Unless and until a sifting process is put in place we will continue to be saddled with political jokers, opportunists ,and jobbers and little wonder also that a resort to muscles, brawn, hiceps and biceps rather than grey matter are frequently deployed in the various hallowed (now becoming hollowed) chambers across the country.”

    Even if I had not named my friend and aburo Patrick as the author of the foregoing correspondence, the attentive public would easily have divined his identity.

    Every sentence, if not every word, is a dead giveaway, stamped as it is with his trademark hyperpolysesquipedalianism.

    Nobody does it like His Magniloquence.

     

  • Final rites for Abiku Discos?

    For the tribe of those, of which yours truly is included, that have long called for a comprehensive review of the power sector privatisation, the suggestion that the federal government is finally mulling the option can only be a vindication of sorts. Responding to a request by Tony Elumelu, the billionaire chairman of Heirs Holding – an operator in the power sector – for a fresh injection of funds to bail out the electricity sector during one of the plenaries at at the 23rd Nigeria Economic Summit (NES) last week, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, spoke the mind of the tribe: transfer ownership to new investors if you can’t get the bsuiness going!

    The same point would be echoed to newsmen by Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed also in the course of the summit that the government and other stakeholders had come to the realisation that something critical needed to be done quickly in the power sector.

    She told the journalists: “The power sector has been privatised but I’m sure every Nigerian can attest to the fact that the privatisation has not worked well, in the sense of what we sought to achieve in terms of power efficiency… We have now come to the point where government which is a stakeholder in the power sector and other stakeholders must come together and decide and cede some of their holdings to new investors that will inject new funding; investors that have the expertise to grow the power sector that will serve Nigerians.”

    “It’s a process that is on-going, it involves negotiating with the existing owners and also with the government in deciding the right level of holdings that will go up for another round of sale.

    “The privatisation has not worked out. We discovered that many of the companies are indebted to the banks, making it difficult for them to make fresh investments in their infrastructure. All stakeholders must come together to grow the sector, especially in discussing with the existing owners.”

    Call it the moment of truth – and you are damned right. The same truth which Power, Works and Housing Minister, Babatunde Fashola, had long admitted but apparently feels too constrained to do anything about.  Recall that the minister had earlier in May during the 15th edition of the monthly power sector operators’ meeting in Jos, had attempted to read something of a riot act to the operators. Then he had made it clear that their perennial whining over service and operational issues had become galling: “You must do more to improve service, rather than complain about old infrastructure. I wish to remind you that nobody forced you to buy those assets and you knew what you were buying”. He had equally told them that their cartel – the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED), had no place in the process noting that his ministry will not deal with it “because the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) acting for the National Council on Privatization (NCP) did not contract the asset sales and performance agreements with an association and neither did Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission grant you licenses as an association.”

    But then, those were not the only issues dealt with at the May monthly meeting of the operators. In addition to the recurring issue of the failure of the operators to provide their customers with prepaid meters, the other sticky issue was their claim to exclusivity rights in their distribution areas.  A case in point is Enugu Disco which sought to contest the space with the 188-megawatt Geometric Power, Aba at a time the same Enugu Disco could not guarantee basic services to households in the East. Fashola made clear that he could not understand the logic of “standing in the way of a consumer seeking to get for himself what the service provider, Disco, has failed or is unable to give them”.

    The untold story of course was that the Discos wanted more for doing less. They wanted to call the shots even when there was yet no proof that they had invested a dime to improve the sector; higher tariffs on the old billing methodologies that robbed Peter to pay Paul; assurances that the ultimate guarantor would always watch their backs irrespective of whether or not they fulfilled their basic service obligations to customers. Finally, despite being private entities, they craved for a system that sees nothing wrong with being permanently hooked on government life support.

    That was some five months ago.

    With the latest request, we must thank Elumelu for letting us know that things have not changed. Not that Nigerians routinely dealt a bad card by the inept contraptions described as distribution companies were ever at any point in doubt about how bad things are. The difference this time is that the federal government would appear to be saying – no more; going as far as pushing for fresh hands to move the sector forward.

    It comes to a Eureka moment.

    More thanks should go to Vice President Osinbajo for letting Nigerians know that there is yet, a third way. Before now, we have heard from no less personality than Minister Fashola that an attempt to review the process that delivered the abiku Discos will not only be counterproductive but would set the nation back by several years. Remember the same wearisome arguments about negative signals being sent to investors – the god of process that slips into the sleep mode when public interest is about to be mangled but automatically kicks in each time the government steps in to right the wrongs of the injured citizen? Did you say only in Nigeria?

    Have the actors on the privatisation divide finally come around to agree that the exercise has served neither party  well? Possibly. While those on the receiving of the daily deteriorating service affirm that the exercise has yielded no appreciable investments to raise expectations of possible upgrade in capacity or improvements in service thresholds either now in the foreseeable future, the investors have also realised that Discos are not the pots of fortune they had thought it would be. A difficult if not a hopeless marriage if ever there was one.

    Salvage is of course not impossible. By this I mean a win-win for both sides. With the federal government holding 40 percent equity, the task would seem as simple as persuading a club of non-performers to shed a sizeable chunk of their holdings to a proven core investor. That way, everyone, hopefully, wins!

    As for possible resistance, with many of the operators already in serial breaches of the various Service Level Agreements, persuasion shouldn’t be an entirely difficult proposition. It is about finding the process!