The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Sit-tightism: A primer

    Sit-tightism: A primer

    Sit-tightism.

    An ugly word, I admit; ungainly in print and not easy on the tongue.  It may partake of the allure of “whirligig,” but it doesn’t have the enchanting cadence of that word.  It looks like a cheap intrusion upon the English language, the type that is all too common in messages posted on the Internet by malignant persons who have just learned the power and the magic of the computer keyboard.

    I was sure I had heard the word before and even seen it, probably back during military president Ibrahim Babangida’s misbegotten political transition, if not much earlier.    It may well have been coined by one of our compatriots, to whom such things come all too naturally.

    When in doubt, look it up.  I did and voilà, there it was, in all its ungainliness, in an online dictionary.  Whatever its provenance, and regardless of its inelegance, it has now been legitimised by usage.

    The earliest entry I found was in the May 12, 2003, editorial in the Kenya newspaper The Standard.  It didn’t expressly define the term, but the meaning is clear from the context.  “Anti-democratic arm-twisting, manipulation of the ballot and Constitution for the purpose of sit-tightism is totally anachronistic in the post –Cold War . . .” the editorial said, apropos of Zimbabwe’s President Robert “Uncle Bob” Mugabe.

    Some 13 years later, a blogger would decry the hardy phenomenon as a “virulent antithesis of constitutionalism” that is still “very much a significant part” of Africa’s political culture.”

    There you have it:  An ugly word, fittingly denoting and connoting an ugly phenomenon.

    No prizes for figuring out that “sit-tightism “comes from “sit tight,” which, despite its plainness, has the great merit of packing more vigour and of being more evocative, than its noun form.  It means simply to stay put, to remain in one’s place.

    What could be more harmless?

    But “sit-tight” can also stand as an adjective, and it was in that form, I now recall, that I had first encountered it, and in which it is most often employed to damaging effect.

    Think of the “sit-tight ministers” who first figured on the Nigerian political scene in the 1950s and have been with us ever since in one guise or another, mostly as public officials.  They refuse to resign when ordered to do so by the political parties whose platform they rode to the position, or by insistent public opinion when they have become wholly discredited.

    They just sit tight.  They remain in place, immovable.

    Dial back to 1952, to the crisis spawned by the major deficiencies the Dr Nnamdi Azikiwe’s NCNC and Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Action Group discovered in the 1951 Macpherson Constitution that was supposed to have conferred some measure of self-government on the regions when in practice it did nothing of the sort.

    Zik, in the East, and Awo in the West, were determined to bring down the Constitution. The AG Central Ministers resigned.  But a majority faction of the NCNC wanted to give it a fair trial. Buoyed by this development, the Central Ministers representing the NCNC at the Centre refused to vacate their portfolios.

    Even when the NCNC dismissed them from the party, they still sat tight, in Lagos.

    When Zik moved to reshuffle the Council of Ministers in the East, where a majority faction     of the governing NCNC was sympathetic to the Lagos “sit-tight” ministers, all nine regional ministers signed letters of resignation, to be submitted by the party’s hierarchy to the colonial governor the next day.

    Zik got there only to learn that, overnight, six of the nine, apparently on learning that they would not be reappointed, had written to the governor to withdraw their letters of resignation, claiming that the letters had been obtained by fraud or coercion.

    And they sat tight in their portfolios.  They even teamed up with the other sit-tight ministers from the Centre and legislators who had resigned from the Eastern House of Assembly to form a new political party.

    That, if you will, is an outline of how sit-tightism entered Nigerian politics.  And what fertile soil it found!

    The fastidious historian will dial back to the 1820s when Afonja, a general in the Oyo Empire, enlisted the Muslim cleric, Alimi, a leader of Fulani settlers in Ilorin, together with Nupe and Borno Muslim slaves and mercenaries in the town, to help sustain his rebellion against his principal, the Alaafin.

    Afonja’s would-be helpers, their eyes forever on the main chance, killed him, installed Alimi’s son, Abdulsalami, as emir and incorporated Ilorin as an emirate of the Sokoto Caliphate.   Since then, Alimi’s descendants have been sitting tight on the Ilorin throne, in what may well be the record in these parts for sit-tightism.  No power-sharing, no rotation, no shaking, 120 years on.

    Fast-forward to 1962, less than two years after independence.  The regional governor removed premier S. L. Akintola after a majority of the members of the Western Nigeria House of Assembly signified that he no longer enjoyed their confidence.

    Akintola sat tight.  AKINTOLA TAKU, the Daily Times proclaimed, in a headline for the ages.

    Nor is sit-tightism an affliction of only civilian politicians.

    Two years ahead of the date General Yakubu Gowon had set for handing back power to a democratically elected government, he declared the date no longer feasible.  He was all set to sit tight, but his colleagues ousted him.

    General Olusegun Obasanjo’s reputation rests in part on his voluntarily relinquishing power in 1979 to a democratically elected government, at the end of a carefully articulated and well executed transition programme.   Mohammed Haruna, until recently a columnist for this newspaper, has stated with accustomed iconoclasm that the reputation is bogus; that Obasanjo did crave continuation in power (i.e. sitting tight) but was dissuaded by General TY Danjuma and others who controlled the battalions.

    The jury is not yet out on that one.

    Fast-forward still to 1985, to the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida who took Nigeria through a transition programme that a noted scholar has called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”   The whole thing was a preface to sit-tightism.  In the end, he was undone by one self-engineered ambuscade too many.

    The final phase of Babangida’s tenure was even more emblematic of sit-tightism.

    We have it on the authority of the peerless legal scholar Professor Ben Nwabueze, who was a member of Babangida’s misbegotten Transitional Council, that no more than two of 106 decrees the military president churned out between January and August 1993 were ever referred to the Council for discussion, comment, advice, or even for information.  The two did not include the decree that annulled the presidential election and the one that sought to eviscerate the news media.

    “Judged by its exclusion from law-making,” Nwabueze has written, the Council’s role in government was one of “almost total irrelevance and insignificance.”  And yet, not one of its members resigned; not its titular head, Ernest Shonekan, nor any of its 14 other members. They all sat tight.

    Indeed, through all the indignities Babangida heaped on his handpicked officials for eight years, not one among them resigned.  Political scientists will find that period a rewarding study in sit-tightism and its correlate, careerism.

    Before Sani Abacha, the mandatory retirement age in the public service was 55 years or 35 years on the job, whichever came first.  Raising the retirement age was Abacha’s first step in sitting tight.  He consolidated it by corralling the five political parties that existed at his pleasure into making him their presidential candidate.  If death had not supervened, he would today be one of the leading contenders for the African Medal in Sit-tightism.

    His ministers from the Southwest sat tight, even after their NADECO sponsors had urged them to resign.

    If Vincent Ogbulafor had his way, the PDP would have sat tight in power for 60 years to start with.  Not to worry; his one-time colleagues, Dr Bukola Saraki and Ike Ekweremadu, are carrying on that tradition in the Senate in their own way.

  • ECOWAS’s sweet poison

    ECOWAS’s sweet poison

    African proverb goes the not-so-gentle wind that sets the pap seller’s nerve on the edge merely serves notice to the flour seller that the danger is right at the door. So also goes the saying about the proverbial bird perched precariously on the line: neither the rope nor the bird would know comfort in the ensuing asymmetrical relationship. These sayings came to my mind as I reflected on the increasingly testy relations between Big Brother Nigeria and its ECOWAS neighbours – more so, in the wake of new measures being pushed aggressively by the Nigerian government to deal with the debilitating economic crisis.
    Today, if the myth has endured that the Nigerian economy somehow possesses an infinitely elastic capacity to withstand all manners of abuses without tipping over, the new dawn would not only suggest how hollow our pretenses about our status as an economic giant, but the fat lie that we can become all manner of things to all manner of interests without paying a huge price. For while it seems given that the Nigerian economy given its relative size only needs to cough for the economy of its neighbours to suffer fits, the assumption has probably held all along that the Big Brother– ever ready to play the brother’s keeper – will continue to carry on, no matter what.
    Some people are no doubt in for a rude awakening. For even if we didn’t cast away pretenses about being the sub region’s beast of burden; or even pretend that our nationalist forces, still too subtle if not incoherent, are barely recognizable; clearly, the dimming prospects of an early recovery from the current recession makes such a nary proposition a nary one at this time. It is a natural law rooted in the quest for survival. I guess it’s the dawn of our economic nationalism.
    In this, Nigerians only need to pay attention to developments at our border posts to appreciate the point being made. Let’s flashback to May 2013. Then, the Federal Government had slammed a ban of rice importation through the nation’s land borders. Having set 2015 as target date for local sufficiency in rice production after massive investment promotion in the sub sector, the government had rightly reasoned that the booming trade puts its plan into jeopardy.
    That was more than three years ago. The route, as far as we know remains shut to rice importers. Three years after –no thanks to the ability of our nationals to cut corners but more importantly, our neighbours’ ready disposition to subvert our economy without any threat of sanctions, more vessels from Thailand with thousands of cargoes are today headed for Benin, Niger Republic, borders than those headed for the Lagos Port even when these consignments have Lagos, Port Harcourt and Kano as final destinations. In fact, only last week, Agriculture Minister, Audu Ogbeh would raise the alarm about some 571,000 metric tonnes of parboiled rice from Thailand arriving Benin Republic headed for the Nigerian market for, as you guessed – Christmas.
    Need I talk about frozen poultry products – which although officially banned, are not only found in every nook and cranny of our markets but are already massed in warehouses along the borders waiting to be smuggled in. And all of this at a time our local producers are gasping for breath.
    Now, if all goes according to the plan of Audu Ogbeh and company, the entire 571,000 metric tonnes of rice would not be coming into the country anytime soon – certainly not for this Christmas or the New Year festivities.
    The same is also true of the other major item of trade – the used car business. Whereas our local ports are next to idle – no thanks to the impossible forex regime that have rendered importation a no-go, Nigerians have found attraction in the neighbouring ports ostensibly because shipping and duties are by far cheaper. Never mind the agreement which mandates Benin Customs to hand over their Nigerian-bound cargo to the Nigerian Customs for assessment. These are observed in the breach. Or the cost to the Nigerian treasury said to be hundreds of billions annually. As it appears, the chicks may have come to roost – the Big Brother seems to have had enough: effective January 2017, vehicle imports will no longer be allowed through the land borders. Once again, our pretence about getting our neighbour to behave responsibly has fallen flat.
    The reality of course is that times are changing. At a time of shrinking exchequer, Nigeria obviously needs all the revenue from all legitimate sources. That’s not all. Its agriculture and industry needs all the protection that it can get from foreign invaders hiding under the ECOWAS protocol. Not only that, it struggles to deal with the situation in which its backyard has become a huge dump for all manners of imports.
    I understand the old debate about the unfriendliness of our ports, the crippling bureaucracy and the mind-boggling corruption said to make doing business such hell and how this makes the neighbouring ports attractive. No doubt, there is a lot to be said of the need to streamline our port operations and procedures to make the more competitive and business friendly. After cycles of interminable reforms, they are legitimate arguments to make now and for all time.
    At issue is whether these concerns should be allowed to obviate mounting concerns about duplicity of our ECOWAS neighbours, particularly when their activities are injurious to us. We must of course understand that none of these goods are produced in the sub region, which of course raises the unlikelihood of their ban being seen as a violation of the ECOWAS protocol on free movement of goods and services. Moreover, the idea that a supposedly friendly neighbour will deliberately set itself up as a transit camp for goods destined for a third party country in brazen violation of its own domestic policies would seem far beyond the pale of modern trade protocols. That, unfortunately is the terrible situation which the sub regional body has found itself.
    And so what to do? Simple. The Big Brother may not have the money or muscle to build a Trumpean wall along its borders. What it must find is the will to enforce the rules governing trade with its neighbours. And this must come with a certain knowledge of costs of breaches being very steep. After all, the Holy Writ says that one should love one’s neighbours as – not more – than oneself.

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    It is miscellany time again.  Time to catch up with broad strokes and short takes on recent occurrences, lest the personalities involved feel neglected.

    The Fixer departs

    Tony “The Fixer” Anenih has been marking his long-awaited retirement from party politics with a memoir, titled My Life and Nigerian Politics. A memoir being among other things an exercise in self-redemption and self justification, he sought to repudiate his renown for turning election winners into losers and losers into winners.

    It was on account of this propensity that I christened him “The Fixer,” back in 1993, at the height of the June 12 presidential election crisis when, as national chairman of SDP he led a team of likeminded chiselers to bargain away Chief Moshood Abiola’s victory and settled             instead for an Interim National Government as the vehicle to “move Nigeria forward.”

    That trade-off was a grand betrayal of millions of Nigerians yearning for a new order that held a vast promise not just for national growth and development, but more crucially for forging one nation out of the plethora of tribes inhabiting the space called Nigeria.

    Anenih has described the day the agreement setting up the ING was struck – a day of infamy, the jarring echoes of which can be heard even now – as “the happiest day” of his life.

    He must have been living a life of unspeakable misery up to that moment.

    Anenih says in the book that military president Ibrahim Babangida’s calculation was that the NRC candidate Bashir Tofa would win the election, thus empowering the authorities to pivot  on the many infractions of the electoral law Tofa had committed wittingly or unwittingly to justify annulling the election and hand Babangida the perfect excuse for clinging on to power.

    Against their uninformed calculations, Abiola won a sweeping victory, the type that no presidential candidate had ever won in Nigeria or is likely to repeat.  Babangida then had to manufacture all kinds of reasons for annulling the election, from the implausible to the infantile.

    To cite just one such reason:  The election had to be annulled because it failed the test of “absolute fidelity” to the rule of law, said the self-designated president who routinely enacted retroactive laws and just as routinely eviscerated the jurisdiction of the courts.

    The truth is that Babangida simply did not want to give up power, and would have found or confected any number of reasons for annulling the election, no matter who won.

    Anenih is quitting his tawdry trade when his reputation is in tatters.  He will never get another chance to mend it.  But he surely has earned his rest.

    Just how much is N2.1 billion?

    It is a vast sum of money that can buy almost everything one desires and still leave more than pocket change.  But it is hard to conceive its bulk, its physical dimension.

    It has been calculated that if you stack up one million US dollar bills, you will end up with a pile that is as high as the Empire State building in New York, including its antenna spire.  That translates into 1,454 feet, or 443 metres from the ground.

    If you stacked up one billion Naira in one Naira bills, your pile would reach at least twice the maximum altitude of 52,000 ft for commercial airliners – or six miles from the ground, assuming that the one Naira bill and the one US dollar bill have the same thickness.  And that is just one billion Naira.

    But we are talking two billion Naira and some, the amount of money reportedly ferried to Ayo Fayose and company, by agents of the Jonathan Administration, on the eve of the 2014 Ekiti gubernatorial election, Musiliu Obanikoro, Minister of State for Defence.

    If you prefer an avoirdupois perspective to a vertical one, here is how the thing shakes out:  The chopper they hired for the task had to make two trips.  It could not deliver in just one trip.  The bullion van that conveyed the money from Akure airport to Ado-Ekiti fared better.  It needed just one trip.  Though it is just a year old, it moaned and groaned and coughed and belched all the way to destination, I gather, never having ferried such freight before.

    Roughly one half of this sum –N1.1 billion- was reportedly handed over to Fayose’s agents at             his Spotless Hotel, in Ado-Ekiti, and the balance went into his Zenith Bank account .  The remittance was to ensure that the PDP and Fayose would prevail over incumbent Governor Kayode Fayemi and the APC.

    The bank’s staff took 10 full days to count the money.  The electronic counters deployed for the task just kept breaking down, unaccustomed to such heavy traffic.  Such was the strain on the  staffers doing the counting that they had to take a two-week paid vacation thereafter, according to knowledgeable sources.

    The luckless clerks at Spotless Hotel, which is far less endowed with banking hardware than  Zenith Bank, spent at least twice as many days to sort things out.  By one credible account, the hotel even had to shut down for the exercise, fobbing off its curious okada clientele with the bogus claim that stock-taking was in progress.

    Judges and Money

    It is not yet proven that the vast sums of money reportedly found warehoused in the official residence of some senior officers of the judiciary were proceeds of the corruption and perversion of justice, or the fruits of conduct inconsistent with their exalted positions.

    One judge said his son had given him the money for safekeeping.  Isn’t that refreshing, edifying even, in the days when children are so disobliging, that some children repose more faith in their parents than they do in the banks?

    Another judge said the money came from selling rice after hours.  As everyone knows, tedium is the hallmark of a judge’s life.  No fun, no variety; just one stultifying case after another.  If a judge decides to sell rice on the side to break the monotony, and to make a roaring financial success of it, personally, I would give him high praise for enterprise.  Seriously.

    Yet another judge says the money allegedly found in his house was his cumulative savings over the years from his unspent salary and allowances.  Now, if all our top officials were as frugal, as self-denying and as abstemious as the judge aforementioned, would the economy now be in recession?  Would our foreign reserve be so anaemic?  And would the rate of inflation have risen so dramatically?

    Prosecuting the judge in question is, in my view, tantamount to criminalising thrift.  Instead, I would recommend a Presidential Medal for Parsimony.

    One judge says he was groggy from anti-malaria medication when DSS operatives barged into his residence to conduct their unlawful search, only to emerge from one section of the house  bearing a vast sum of money in local and foreign currencies and order him, by force of arms, to acknowledge that the haul had been found on his property.

    It is deeply to be regretted that the judge was not accorded the humane and decent treatment enjoined by the Constitution.   What would the DSS have lost by suspending its operation and rushing him to hospital?

    Still another judge has been charged with receiving sums of money in local and foreign currencies running into billions of Naira from law litigants and law firms between 2013 and 2016, with his wife reportedly serving as liaison.

    That is ominous.  A woman can no longer collect on behalf of her husband?  And judges cannot warehouse their money, like the women traders at Oke-Arin Market, in Lagos?

    This war on corruption sef!

  • Of elite spat and the economy

    Of elite spat and the economy

    Nothing epitomizes our tragedy as a nation than the latest squabble among the monetary elite over issues that would in normal times be deemed classified. For while I am well assured that these are no ordinary times, we must agree that it goes beyond the pale for an erstwhile number one banker to dare to hang the federal government and the monetary authorities out there in the merciless sun like the Emir of Kano, Muhammadu Sanusi II did at the the Savannah Centre for Diplomacy, Democracy and Development dialogue last Friday. Although never known to take prisoners, it was again vintage SLS in what is arguably the most emphatic put-down of the Buhari administration till date.
    To be sure, that would not be the first time the monarch will be giving the federal government a hiding. Recall that the monarch had at the 15th meeting of the Joint Planning Board and National Council on Development Planning in Kano August 24 similarly took the Buhari-led federal government to the cleaners: “If you take a brand-new car and hand it over to a driver who doesn’t have a licence to drive it and you are involved in an accident, you can’t say you are surprised, unless you are some kind of an idiot…We should not just keep blaming the previous administration; we also made some mistakes in the current administration”.
    However, whereas Nigerians may have lately heard such descriptions as “clueless” and “incompetent” in what has become the routine characterization of the administration; the monarch’s latest summation that “the problem of the current government is not having the right policies to fix the current economic woes” would appear to mark the final parting of ways between him and the Buhari administration, a final statement about his perception about those running the government. Here, it does not appear to matter whether the issue is the federal government’s 2017-19 borrowing plan which he insisted would not sail through, or the Central bank loose monetary management of which he accuses the latter of being only a little more than an appendage of a bumbling fiscal authorities, one observes, not just his barely disguised contempt for the judgment of those calling the shots but a disavowal of everything that the Buhari administration is doing to stop the downward slide in the economy.
    “I can tell you for free, if the Senate today approves that we can borrow $30bn, honestly, no one will lend to us. It should be approved and I will like to see how you will go to the international market with an economy that has five exchange rates”, he says of the now controversial loan request.
    Rather gloatingly, he would not hesitate to go for the apex bank’s underbelly: “CBN claims on the federal government now tops N4.7 trillion, equal to almost 50 per cent of the FGN’s total domestic debt… This is a clear violation of the Central Bank Act of 2007 (Section 38.2), which caps advances to the FGN at five per cent of last year’s revenues”. The country’s heavy indebtedness, he further claimed, has led into the situation in which out of every one naira made, 40 kobo of it goes to debt repayment and 60 kobo is left for salaries, health, education, power, and infrastructure.
    That was Muhammadu Sanusi II at the SCDDD dialogue last week. Although the president’s spokesman and that of the apex bank have since issued separate statements denying the substance of the emir’s charges and accusation, it is expected that there will be no shortage of opinions on the matter in the coming days if not weeks over what smacks of the monarch’s indiscretion.
    Was Sanusi in order? To start with, we must see something unusual in the revered monarch coming out as he did. Surely, the matter goes beyond stating the facts as he saw them; rather, it is about the exploitation of the revered office for a less than altruistic ends by an individual known to be given to exaggeration. Remember the erstwhile number one banker who could not even get his figures right before hitting the road to disclaim the other party only to be forced to eat the humble pie?
    One had thought before now that mindless activism was incompatible with the revered institution of the monarchy, particularly when the occupant is an individual that has not only served at the highest policy levels but retains a measure of privileged access to the seat of power. Even permitting that his advice was shunned by hierarchs of the administration, would that suffice to take the administration to the laundry house? And who is making the judgment call? The lone individual who think he has all the answers as against a government that has the benefit of alternative viewpoints? And to what purposes? To force a change of direction or to needlessly antagonize the government? And who wins?
    In the convoluted public space, Nigerians can permit themselves the luxury of which factions of the elite to support on the issue, there can be no debating the damage that such tactless interjection can do to the public cause. For while no one denies that the economy is in terrible shape; or that the therapies being applied by the managers are having their desired effects; and just as a lot has been said of the insularity of this administration, particularly its reluctance to be open to new ideas, the real issue really is whether what the nation deserves at the moment is an ‘all-knowing intellectual powerhouse’ firing all cylinders from outside of the cathedra of power. At this time, what we must worry over are contributions that are not only unhelpful but are clearly designed to maximally distract.
    What alternative policies is Emir Sanusi offering? Nothing that the public is not already aware of. First, he is averse to debts. That is understandable. Unfortunately, he has not told us where the funds to finance the huge infrastructure gaps will come from. Are we to assume that this would also come from the nation’s reeling private sector? Secondly, he wants the CBN to let go of the naira. Yes, for the naira not only to find its value but to eliminate the multiple exchange rates. How that would address the current forex fetish, he does not tell. Or even crisis of management occasioned by the severe shortage of foreign currencies. Or the tribe of the currency speculators who have long mastered the art of shifting the goalposts at every whim? Easier, it appears to sell the mantra of a free floating naira than confront the delinquencies of the elite, the mind-boggling capital transfers which offer no tangible returns to the national economy, and the terribly short-sighted policies which have nursed the climate in which industries which ought to be sources of forex to the nation are themselves hung on the narrow forex market.
    Surely, that is neither what the nation want nor desire.

    .

  • Fidel: Man, model, and legend

    Fidel: Man, model, and legend

    On October 25, 1983, President Ronald Reagan launched a U.S. military invasion of the small Caribbean island of Grenada, with token forces from some client states in the region.

    The immediate provocation, it seemed, was a military coup that installed a Marxist as prime minister.  There was also this lingering provocation:  the ongoing construction of a large airport on the island to boost tourism, the mainstay of the country’s economy.

    The Reagan administration claimed the airport was designed to serve as a Communist beachhead into the region and to the Americas. It did not matter that the airport was designed by Canadians, and funded in part by Libya, Algeria, and the UK.

    The presence of dozens of Cuban construction crews on the project site was conclusive evidence, Reagan said, of a Soviet- Cuban military build-up that the United States could not countenance.  The island’s Marxist government, Reagan further claimed, posed a threat to an estimated 1,ooo Americans on the island, most of them students at a medical school.

    It was of no consequences that no such threat was ever established.

    The invasion ran its desultory course within a week, leaving some 64 Cuban construction workers stranded. The Reagan administration dangled before them every blandishment if only they would denounce Cuban President Fidel Castro and defect to the United States.

    Their families and dependents would be spirited out of Cuba to join them in the United States in a life of comfort beyond their wildest imagining.  All they needed to do was to denounce Castro and defect.  Uncle Sam would take care of the rest.

    Not one among the 64 fell for the offer.

    This incident contrasted sharply with images of all sorts and conditions of men, women and children fleeing from the horrors of life in Cuba in dinghies and all manner of contraptions and risking everything in quest of freedom and a better life 93 treacherous miles across from the Florida Straits – images that had become a staple of television news.

    Hundreds, perhaps thousands, perished in the quest.  And yet the exodus continued.

    Back in Granada, the Cuban construction workers, all 64 of them, had spurned an offer that hundreds of thousands of their compatriots would have accepted on the threshold.  What  was going on?

    It may well be that accepting Reagan’s offer carried much greater risk than setting out from Cuba on the treacherous passage to Florida.  Still, I found it intriguing that not one among the Cuban workers stranded in Grenada accepted it.

    The occasion for these reminiscences is the death last Friday of Fidel Alejandro Castro Ruz, architect and leader of the Cuban revolution, From the moment he entered Havana in January 1959 at the head of a column of  his comrades-in-arms to finish off the corrupt dictator Fulgencio Battista and his regime, cheered on by thousands of admirers, until he transferred power to his brother Rául on account of his failing health in 2006, he dominated Cuba by the sheer force of his personality and by his symbolism.

    His enjoyed a global stature that seemed improbable for the leader of a Third World nation with a population of just 11 million

    That stature stemmed from many factors:  His personal charisma, emblematised by his military bearing, his regulation combat fatigues, and the lush beard and sideburns that framed his strong, masculine visage.

    Among my generation, Castro conferred revolutionary credentials of sorts on beards.  Full disclosure:  I myself kept one for more than a decade. I shaved it off on the eve of my nuptial in 1975.  Everyone said I looked much better without it, and I could not muster the confidence to re-grow it, except for the six months in 1996 that I was homeless.  But I digress.

    Castro’s global stature also stemmed from surviving not a few attempts by the CIA to assassinate him, from taking personal charge to rout, at the Bay of Pigs, an army of Cuban exiles and volunteers trained and equipped by the United States, to overrun Cuba and oust  him.

    It derived from his defying and outliving nine American presidents and weathering the blockade they instituted or tightened against Cuba, with the aim of grounding its economy           and thereby stirring up a mass revolt against the island’s communist government ,

    It has to be said that it also derived from his simple lifestyle, devoid of ostentation and vainglory. He was never tainted by allegations of corruption.

    In the face of the blockade and other hostile acts directed at Cuba chiefly by the United States, Cuba under Fidel Castro’s leadership, sought to build a new society to supplant the one that always had to reckon with the economic calculations of the United Fruit Company even as the country catered to the fancies and fantasies of American playboys.

    Within one generation, Cuba wiped out illiteracy.  Today, it has one of the highest literacy rates in the world.  It built a health care infrastructure that makes up in efficiency and effectiveness what it lacks in sophistication.   Education and health care, regarded as fundamental rights, are provided free.

    While many countries grapple with an acute shortage of doctors, Cuba produces far more doctors than it needs, and sends the rest to needy countries. It is instructive that throughout his long illness, Castro never sought medical treatment abroad.  Some doctors were brought   in from Spain to examine him, and that was that.

    He established a sports programme that produced and continues to produce world-class athletes.

    But for the decisive intervention of the Cuban military, in Cutie Cuanavale, and in Cunene Province to the south, apartheid South Africa’s forces would have overrun Angola.  Namibia’s march to independence would have been halted, and apartheid in all its debauchery would have lived on much longer.

    A large segment of the Cuban population took great pride in the gains of the revolution.  Was it these gains, then, and the pride that flowed from them that made the 64 Cuban military engineers trapped in Grenada spurn Reagan’s invitation to denounce Castro and defect to the United States, there to enjoy life on a scale Cuba could never provide?  Were they in effect saying that there is much more to life than material comforts?

    Let no one romanticise the Cuban revolution, however.  It led to crippling deprivations.  It upended, as all revolutions do, careers and projects and ambitions.  It led to an abridgement of fundamental rights.  It brought in its wake a massive flight of capital and talent.  It created a fundamental leveling, above which there is scant opportunity to rise.

    But it taught the world the meaning of self-reliance.  Even in the midst of deprivations, even after subsidies vanished with the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was no mass starvation in Cuba, no begging in the streets, no prostitution, no epidemics.

    Amidst the decrepit buildings and on the streets that make Havana look like a junkyard for American automobiles from the 1950s, life goes on at a rhythm that says to the over-curious visitor:  If you are looking for the unhappiest place on earth, go elsewhere.

    In death as in life, Castro remains a polarising figure.  Millions of Cubans and across the world venerated him almost to the point of deification.  Millions in Cuba and less so across the world loathed him to the point of execration.

    I am reminded of the latter phenomenon by this headline from the 1970s, spread across the front page of one of the Miami newspapers:

     

    Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too, Too Bad.

    Castro Narrowly Escapes Drowning.

    But there is no denying that Castro was a singular personage, and that history will count him among the greatest figures of the 20th century.

  • Panorama

    Panorama

    CAll it “Panorama Nigeriana”, and you are quite right: all of the laughs, all of the cries, and the full range in-between, of a people condemned to high drama, wholesome or toxic!
    That is the story of Nigeria this collection of newspaper cartoons shows, with masterful strokes.
    But is it an accident that this book has no title: this compilation, by Azeez Ozi Sanni, The Nation ace cartoonist, of his cartoons published in the newspaper, between 2007 and 2010?
    Bar the cartoonist’s name, and his bragging right as “Cartoonist of the Year …” , for some three hegemonic years, etched with a golden foil and, of course, The Nation logo, there is no title capturing the book’s theme.
    But there is a collage, in full colour, encased in the troubled Nigerian space: of a lawless soldier doing a bla-la show — but was that a soldier, or a felon disguised as one? Of a policeman — wetin you carry? — extorting his favourite N5; of a rogue politician toasting his rare fortune, over his latest “Ghana must go” acquisition; of awesomely-armed robbers holding up a bank, of a Press whose “lips” are firmly padlocked — a hyperbole, to be sure; of high blues in a prison cell, of …”
    Perfectly Nigerian, isn’t it?
    Still, why no title?  A mere happenstance?  Or a cartoonist’s symbolic decision to,  picturesquely, cut to the chase, and shunning verbiage?
    O, there is yet another query: on how the cartoons are arranged, over some 162 pages. Is this too deliberate; or just another accident?
    The collection opens with a tribute to MKO Abiola, the martyr of June 12, with “votaries” toasting to his ultimate sacrifice and golden memory: “To justice, wisdom and freedom …” — big sounding cant, to usher in — “Happy democracy in Nigeria.”
    But it ends — well, almost — with President Goodluck Jonathan, pledging of the 2011 election — of which he was the principal beneficiary — to make all votes count.
    The MKO-Jonathan contrast couldn’t be more dramatic, in peculiar Nigeria: MKO won an election and did everything to retrieve his annulled mandate.
    But his death in detention only left Nigerians with the sense of what might have been.
    Jonathan, on the other hand, accessed power relatively easily, perhaps  because MKO’s martyrdom had taught the Nigerian power cowboys some grim lessons.
    Yet, Jonathan ended up the ultimate presidential misfit, though Muhammadu Buhari appears the ultimate fall guy, of Jonathan’s ultimate misdeeds.
    But that telling contrast only prepared the mind for the parting shot, loud and hard: a cauldron of luckless Nigerians, sizzling in brothy  “hot soup”!
    The hissing fuel belching the cooking fire, like some harmattan-dry firewood? Sectarian religious riots.  Economic stagnation. Fuel palaver. Corruption. Epileptic power supply!
    Welcome to the Nigerian hell!
    Yet, Nigerians kid themselves, at least by the cartoonist’s punch line: “We are Nigerians … good people, great nation!  Was that Dora Akunyili beaming from beyond?
    But for the living: hell to some.  But surely, peculiar paradise to others?  How would Fela have put it — s(h)uffering and s(h)miling?
    Again, was this — a sort of plot — just happenstance?  Or a deliberate and crafty arrangement by the cartoonist to hit home his message, with a devastating climax?
    If deliberate, then Sanni would appear some dramatic philosopher, teasing his compatriots out of their stupor!
    Indeed, the sweeping leitmotif for this work would appear that searing maverick-conscience of society,  often located, in Igbo Nollywood movies, in some lowly drunkard, or even a lunatic — a societal nobody, that nevertheless exposes, with relish, the folly of the high-and-mighty!
    Or the free communal “yabis”, to put it in Fela-speak, of the Ado Ekiti, Ekiti State, Udi Iroko yearly festival of yore, in which not even the Ewi, the town’s paramount ruler himself, escaped the all-seeing eyes, and free-lashing tongue, against any secret peccadilloes!
    So, in this Sanni observatory of cartoons, there are no off-limits.  The patrician and the plebeian; the president and the pauper, hobnob in an irreverent republic, where everyone is taken through the same strictures.
    Welcome to the Sanni Republic of Laughter — but for only those not at the receiving end of his sharp and searing strokes!
    You’ve got to pity Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, in this collection.  An icon of a debased order, who nevertheless loves to play the holy pope, his portraiture is a bit unsparing — yet not unfair!
    In one of the most hilarious of the cartoons, Obasanjo beams down from a marble-like BABA throne, as high and mighty as Olumo Rock!  Sprawled before him is a breed of fancifully dressed but self-debased humanity.
    “Congratulations, godfather of all the godfathers!” roared a section of this patrician-rabble.  “Your Highness,” another section bawled, “Any other Baba is simply a counterfeit.  Long live your Imperial Majesty!”
    In the cartoonist’s irreverent cosmos, it is the BABA Palace of Democratic Feudalism!
    When Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, the fiery anti-establishment rod, passed away, Sanni emerged with three “crocodiles”: 1. Baba crocodile. 2. Evil Genius.  3. Unnamed.
    Verdict?  The pillars of Nigeria’s rotten establishment shed crocodile tears at Gani’s death.  Might they then be happy — or more aptly, be relieved — in private?  Your guess!
    This grim life in contemporary Nigeria the cartoonist also captured with the progressive decline in Nigerians’ welfare, in their country’s first 49 years.  Pre-independence: the colonial master pleaded — “manage that … we are growing”.  The citizen took his share — not much, but still not unreasonable.
    Twenty-five years later, the same plea, but a smaller portion, even if the pot of “government goodies” was bigger. The citizen? More ragged.
    On the virtual eve of 50 years — 49 years after independence — all hell broke loose!  The pot had grown bigger still but the citizen grew tinier, scrawnier and even more ragged.
    And wonders of wonders!  As the “leader” mumbled “manage that … we are growing”, there was virtually nothing in the citizen’s plate. Yet, the rogue government gorged itself in full view!
    Still, there is some grim humor lightening up the jeremiads — as in the boy that teases his father, proposing to take him out for ice cream on May Day.  But wait for it — on the “change” in the father’s lean pocket.  The old man did not find it funny!
    This is a compendium of life in this country, ably captured with devastating strokes, as the daily drama unfolds.
    Ever want to laugh at yourself, as catharsis in these times of biting economic hardship?  The Sanni collection of cartoons could well be a fitting therapy!
    It’s a Nigerian panorama.  You just might need the humor to navigate your balance!

  • Budget 2017: The coming firefight

    Budget 2017: The coming firefight

    “I am waiting for the 2017 budget to be brought to us in Council. Any sign of padding anywhere, I will remove it.”
    That was President Muhammadu Buhari speaking to an audience of the Governance Support Group, GSG, at State House, Abuja last Friday. Recalling his sojourn in government as governor, oil minister, head of state, and chairman of the Petroleum Trust Fund (PTF) since 1975, he told his visitors: “never did I hear the word ‘padding’ till the 2016 Budget”. The newspapers would also report the President as remonstrating with unnamed parties said to be deliberately turning blind eyes to prevailing realities in the country: “They don’t want to reflect on the situation in which we are, economically. They want to live the same way; they simply want business as usual”.
    That perhaps was the President’s way of serving notice that Budget 2017 would be different from that of 2016. Of course, not a few Nigerians would remember the many controversies which started shortly after it was presented to the National Assembly and which nearly aborted the entire exercise. Yours truly would recall that the original budget document presented in the full glare of national television would be declared missing days after, the handiwork of some sloppy officials at the executive branch, desperate to cover their incompetent asses!
    The dust had barely settled when a group, described as ‘budget mafia’ allegedly smuggled some 6,000-odd items into the budget – ‘padding’ the expenditure estimates by N1.7 trillion. In the aftermath, the Presidency not only had to do a rework of the entire exercise but got the officials involved disciplined. Today, if the testimony of Abdulmumin Jibrin, the former chairman of the House of Representatives Committee has any grain of truth, the final copy signed into law by the President could not have been anything but a mangled job.
    Today, if we discount the fact that the bungling executive has somehow managed to present a straight face in all of these to distraught Nigerians, more confounding is citizens’ indifference of face of the terrible performance outcomes of a document presented to them as embodying their quest for change. Little wonder the tolerability of the president’s play on the so-called padding.
    But then, who remembers anything about Budget 2016. Few weeks ago, the National Assembly couldn’t get the executive to account for the performance of the 2016 Budget. Trust our lawmakers, the matter only came up because the Presidency accused them of stonewalling on the consideration of the Medium Term Expenditure framework documents presented to them since October. That was not before the lawmakers turned down the president’s request for a jumbo loan of nearly $30 billion over a three year period.
    For now, no matter; Budget 2017 is here already.
    Here is what matters: the economy is shrinking. Ten months after Buhari’s reflationary budget – a budget said to be unprecedented in the nation’s history, the economy, according to the National Bureau of Statistics reportedly shrunk again in the third quarter by 2.24 percent. In the quarter before, it contracted by 2.1 percent. No thanks to the administration’s fiscal policies, many more factories are closing than new start-ups are opening. Whereas manufacturers can’t get forex to buy, it is boom time for the so-called black market. Overall, the economy continues to dive.
    A word on the semantics of ‘padding’. What is a budget? My understanding is that it is what the lawmakers pass as such and assented to by the executive. No doubt, the President reserves the right to withhold assent via a veto; the same way that the National Assembly retains the prerogative to override. Only in the context of the convoluted political cum institutional atmosphere in which the nation has found itself, would a sanctimonious President venture beyond the bully pulpit to the legislative arena. For while yours truly is wont to say that there are simply too many things wrong with our budgets, part of the reason virtually every Citizen Joe can claim to be an authority on the budgeting process is that it belongs to everybody and nobody! Has the bug hit the presidency too?
    The budget is of course our problem. As we saw in the 2016 Budget imbroglio, the civil servants, as guilty as their masters in the political establishment in reducing the process to a farce. More than the politicians, they know where to insert the pork and the earmarks. Proof that they are masters of the game is to be found in the sprawling real estates in our state capitals and Abuja.
    To be sure, the politicians, given to ostentation and conspicuous consumption, are in my view, very poor learners. You know when they are in town in their gleaming SUVs and other assorted vehicles in tow – riding dangerously through our crater-infested roads, threatening to run other road users out of the way! The civil servants, masters of the decoy, do theirs differently – always preferring to play Mr. Anonymous. They are the master class.
    The problem with our lawmakers, as I see it, is their penchant to act the face of royalty – a privilege reserved for the executive branch. Many of us would rather indulge operatives in the executive branch living beyond the common herd than they would of the lawmaker.
    I have said it before; the bigger problem is the executive branch. Beyond the annual ritual, what do we get? Excuses? We have heard them complain of inclement weather, funds, bureaucracy etc. as if these forces suddenly chanced upon us. In the end, we settle for a fraction of the value projected only to get back to the ritual of the next cycle of budget.
    Back to President Buhari. Would the President agree that the budget instrument rendered only a little more than a piece of paper by a bunch of clueless operatives in the executive branch is less toxic than one filled with earmarks?
    That, at least, is what the President appears to suggest to his audience last week. Isn’t it about time the executive began to remove the log in its eyes?

  • Negotiating with Niger Delta leaders

    Negotiating with Niger Delta leaders

    President Muhammadu Buhari met the leaders/representatives of the Niger Delta, or rather the oil producing states, on November 1, 2016 on the lingering economic and security issues in the oil producing areas. The Niger Delta leaders presented a list of 16 demands as condition for peace in the region. Further, two other demands were added: that there should be no mistake of announcing policies and plans, relating to the issues, without vigorous public scrutiny and inputs; and that the problem would remain if those affected were excluded from the process of designing the solutions to those problems. Yet, the leaders were said to have condemned criminality and destruction of national assets in the region. On his own part, the President told the leaders that he did not want a quick solution to the issues they raised, but that he needed to get to the root of the matter.

    Indeed, the President’s quest and responsibility for first getting to the root of the issues is what leadership demands. However, that is where the real problem lies. We all want to go to heaven, but none of us wants to die or even obey the Lord’s commands as preconditions. We want to take all the money, but expect someone else to take care of our needs. Nearly all the 16 demands of the Niger Delta are cost related and justification given for previous interventions received, including some that were not sought for. But, then, where is the money? It is with oil producing states. In this month (October) alone, while the states in the federation (including the oil producing) shared N135.56bn, eight oil producing states first received N28.4bn under derivation. Nothing was given to solid mineral producing states. Therefore, to address these issues the rights of the oil producing states must be known and appreciated by the Federal Government on the one hand and the oil producing states, communities and individuals on the other.

    These rights, as specific to the region and general to all the federating units, are imbedded in the constitution and other international laws and agreements. Yet, these documents were thrown away by two arms of government: the Executive and the Legislature. We cannot blame the Judiciary as no interpretation was demanded of it. The seed of the problem was sown by the former. As far back as 2000 when I was on the Federation Accounts Allocation Committee as the Accountant-General of Kaduna State, I drew the attention of the committee’s obvious errors in the computation of the mineral revenue as a basis for implementing the 13% derivation to no avail. To drive the point further, I wrote a paper to show the error being committed by the committee for which no correction was made. As if this error was not enough, the National Assembly came and abolished the onshore-offshore dichotomy in the determination of the mineral revenue.

    Every dialogue and negotiation starts with each party sitting on its right and understanding the rights of the other followed by concessions. The Federation Account Allocation Committee, FAAC, had unilaterally, against the constitution and outside the demand of the oil producing states, grouped revenues not provided by the constitution into mineral revenues. Historical antecedents and constitutional provisions are very clear on this. Drawing from my 2000 paper, I shall summarise this.

    The inclusion of derivation as a factor in the allocation of national revenue is not new. The Phillipson Commission Report, 1946, considered three principles for sharing non-declared revenue (revenues collected by the Central Government) to include: derivation, even progress and population of the then regional governments. This was implemented from 1948-1952. The Hicks Phillipson Commission Report of 1951 considered four factors: Independent revenue, derivation, need and national interest. This ran for two years only. The Chick Commission of 1953 had, as part of its terms of reference, the task of ensuring “that the total revenue available to the nation are allocated in such a way that the principle of derivation is followed to the fullest, compatible with meeting the reasonable needs of the centre and each region”. This operated for five years, 1954 -1959. While mineral royalties were allocated in full to the regions from which the mineral was extracted, company tax (including companies engaged in mining) proceeds were retained in full by the centre. There was also Raismen Commission (1958) whose report was implemented from 1960 – 1965. In this, revenue from mining rents and royalties were allocated among the regions whose areas the mining existed, the centre and the distributable pool. There was also the Binns Commission Report (1964) that had among its terms “examining the appropriateness, in the prevailing circumstances (then) in the country, of the formula for the allocation of the proceeds of mining rents and royalties laid down in Section 140 of the Nigerian Constitution”. The commission focused on the Distributable Pool Account and rejected sharing among the regions on the basis of derivation. The principle of financial needs was also rejected and the Distributable Pool was allocated in the ratio of 42:30:20:8 to Northern Region, Western Region, Eastern Region and Mid-Western Region respectively. The basis for the distribution was “financial accountability”.

    With the coup in 1966, the constitution decree No 15 of 1967 was promulgated and 12 states created. The only change the military did was to share to the states in each region what accrued to the regions. There was also the Okigbo Report, after which little modifications were made to the formula of sharing the distributable revenue for some time. A weight of 1% on mineral revenue had been allowed for derivation until the 1999 constitution put a final seal on the issue of derivation – a minimum of 13% inserted. Section 162(2) which took effect from 1st January 2000;

    “…Provided that the principle of derivation shall be constantly reflected in any formula as being not less than thirteen percent of the revenue accruing to Federation Account directly from any natural resources”(Emphasis provided).

    The stock of literature provided by the reports of the various ad-hoc committees/commissions for the review of the fiscal arrangements has not provided the list of revenue items that constitute the mineral revenue – as well as the constitution. However, mention was frequently made of mineral rents and royalties whenever derivation principle was recommended. Interestingly, all agitations for derivation were only on the two – rents and royalties. The constitution drafters must have, also, had this in mind to have used the phrase “directly from any natural resources”. Only the two qualify: rent payable on land allocated and royalty payable on oil realised.

    Despite the clarity of the reports and the constitution, the FAAC ignored the provisions therein and decided to be calculating and paying the 13% on a sum of six revenue items, namely: Crude oil receipt, petroleum profit tax, royalty, rent, penalty for gas flared and petroleum inspectorate charges. It also ignored all international conventions that stipulate off shore as only under national governments – not states. Additional explanation can be given.

    One, crude oil receipts represent the sale proceed from the sale of the share from investment in the joint venture with some oil majors. This crude should have been charged royalty on the total volume, including the portion attributable to the oil major. Further charges is like a farmer letting a piece of land for a fee and token (royalty) on yield then coming round to demand share from sales proceed from the sale of farm produce realised and/or profit. Two, profit tax is payable by the companies engaged in the oil business on their operations after realising oil and payments of rents and royalties. Every company is subjected to taxation. Having received rent and royalties, receiving tax income will amount to double charges by the OPS and negating the constitutional provision – direct and natural. Three, penalty for gas flared has an inverse relationship with the quality of natural resources realise, the more gas a company flares, the more money it pays. As in the name, it is a penalty for refusing to use natural resources and not for derivation. Four, inspectorate charges has nothing to do with real oil, but a kind of levy to help fund the Ministry or the Inspectorate Department in the discharge of inspectorate activities.

    Therefore, while the President struggles with the 16 demands from the Niger Delta, the first is to follow the advice of the leaders: subjecting the demands to vigorous public scrutiny and inputs, including all those affected in the process of designing the solutions to these problems – this will include all federating units; as well as his promise to take his time to get to the root of the matter. Doing these will take him to understanding that a number of things have gone wrong, especially duplications in resource allocation and institutional arrangements – MDAs, states, appointments, projects and other incentives created. He will also realise that even with Fiscal Federalism and full resource control, the OPS will not partake in crude oil sale and they also agree to let go tax. Thus, the President needs to understand these fully and also make the region understand as well. While the centre can handle some, others will call for understanding and acceptance of other stakeholders – states and local governments. A constitutional tinkering may also be required for some. This, I strongly caution, as the obvious consequences are dare and historically unpleasant. It further needs to be understood that whatever is agreed upon should be a standard applicable to other oil producing states, including Lagos and those likely to come on board in the Chad Basin, Bida Trough and Benue Valley, as well as a solid mineral producing areas.

    As a general guide, every negotiation should, in meeting the yearnings of any group or political enclave, work towards achieving the objective of allocating scarce resources as to enhance national development and unity. To the oil producing states or rather, mineral producing states in general, that receive deviation, it will be prudent, transparent, accountable and purposeful for each to create a fund into which the monthly collection will be budgeted, lodged and utilised independently with active participation of all stakeholders in the state. This fund should cater for most of the issues the states agitate for and the reasons for the derivation principle.

     

    • Haruna Y. Sa’eed wrote from Kaduna.
  • With WS on Wolexit

    With WS on Wolexit

    In vogue: hustling and bustling Prof. Wole Soyinka, our own WS, to make good his threat — to shred his American green card, should Donald Trump win the US presidency.
    Well, Donald has won, goes the sharp taunt. So what is WS still doing in Trump Country?
    Reminds you — doesn’t it? — of Satan taking the Christ Jesus to the pinnacle of the mount; and daring him to jump down, just to prove he was the Divine Son?
    But what makes Satan think, at least according to Christian theology, that Jesus needed Satan’s validation that the Christ was the Son of the Most High?
    What makes Satan even think, at least according to Christian fatalism, he could drag Jesus anywhere, to prove anything, if the Divine Father had not sanctioned that satanic rascality, divined to end in nothing but divine glory, for the Divine Son?
    Of course, with his traducers, WS is far less formidable.  He is no godhead.  Nor is he backed by any theology or fatalism, Christian or otherwise.  Nor is he, for that matter, divine by any shred of imagination.
    So, you could understand the leering and the jeering and the gloating and the scoffing — in fact, the satanic triumphalism — of the rabble on cyberspace, plus their no less virulent terra firma cousins, including a female television presenter, waxing poetic and lyrical, on her Silverbird TV show: “Uncle Wole, tear it, tear it; Uncle Wole, tear it …”, she piped, in irreverent mockery, in smug foolery!
    Still, what does this empty-sounding child of TV artificiality know?
    As Jesus needed no Satan to prove his divine essence, WS needs no rabble to validate his essence.  A lifetime work has done that — and, with WS at 82,  it is still work-in-progress!
    That, more or less, was the purpose of WS’s telling riposte: “Red card, green card: notes towards the management of hysteria”.
    Fitting response, by the way.  You can trust WS to fight his own war, in his own way, on his own terms and with his own class!
    Still, were terrestrial divinity a possibility, and the criteria were a lifetime of uncompromising commitment to justice, human dignity and basic fairness, WS would be only one of the few earthly divines; and among the fewer still, among his own compatriots.
    But many Nigerians appear to have made their peace with abuse, forced or wilful, they probably would marvel and rail at a WS, who still takes — and has always taken — his humanity seriously.
    That would explain the virulent reaction over the Trump affair.
    Why, they must have told themselves, would anyone bluff the all-mighty Uncle Sam, — he, of the famed gravy-land, anyone would do anything to access?
    Bluff!  Why would WS, the WS we know, bluff anyone?  But that is the point: the WS we know!
    What of the WS they don’t know — even if it is an open book?  Enter then, the delicious territory of sweet ignorance!
    Still, Ripples must admit some lead, over some of the younger folks, in this WS business.
    Growing up in the 1970s, he saw live, the trio that virtually swore that, under their charge, Nigeria would never go to seeds, no matter how it tried.
    The oldest of this trio was Obafemi Awolowo.  In the 1970s, though Awo still lived, his legend was fully formed.  He had, in the 1950s, pulled off the greatest social revolution in Nigerian history, with his free primary education programme, in the old West.
    By the 1970s, however, he was playing the constant Jeremiah, as his name indeed was, warning the terrible breed, military or civilian, resolved to undo their country.  Nobody listened; and the result is today’s dystopia, where Nigerians merrily flee Nigeria.
    The second, was the irreplaceable Tai Solarin — he of the revolutionary new year’s wish: “May your road be rough!”, while others throated “Happy new year!”
    A maverick on the side of anything decent, he was an iconoclast of toady conventions.  He set up his famous Mayflower School, Ikenne, Ogun State, to push his vision of education as self-reliance.  He died, virtually on active duty, on the march against  Sani Abacha’s fascism, on a Lagos street, where he was tear-gassed.
    WS was the youngest of this trio.  Every book he wrote, every play he staged, every speech he gave, everything he did, and every gesture he made, he was resolved on one thing: banish all cant and deliver on your basic humanity — or you had him to contend with.
    His play, A Dance in the Forest, presented at Nigeria’s independence in 1960, spoilt Nigeria’s independence party, by its iconoclastic truth: Nigeria’s flag independence was a joke, if the elite didn’t change their ruinous ways!  The joke today is on the elite back then, who scowled at WS’s audacity.
    His Jero Plays “prophesied” the locust of Nigerian desk generals — coup making parasites, who would promote themselves generals without seeing battle, or even enduring martial discomfort.  “After all,” a self-deprecating Brother Jero signed off in Jero’s Metamorphosis, “it is the fashion these days to be a desk general!”
    In Death and the King’s Horseman, it was fatal comeuppance for those who crave privilege without responsibility, for it took the Elesin’s western-trained medic son’s honourable suicide to force, on his traditional father, a shameful death. Yet, the Elesin was the traditional gentry man that lapped up the palace gravy but tried to dodge the fatal duty that went with the bargain!
    In Unlimited Liability Company, a special purpose musical collabo, with Tunji Oyelana and the Benders, a political satire was never so mirthful! Indeed, a happy dirge for the thieving politicians of President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic: elegy for the fallen politicians but sweet parody, in the ears of the people, their powerless victims.
    In Ibadan: Penkelemes Years, you saw the protagonist as citizen-combatant against putative fascism in 1st Republic Western Region; and in You Must Set Forth at Dawn, you saw a sole citizen’s audacious stand against a moving train, mustering a Third Force, to stop approaching war!
    That soon landed him in gaol, an experience that birthed The Man Died, WS’s Nigerian Civil War prison memoirs.
    This then was the man a generation, proudly ignorant of their own history, mock over his threatened Wolexit from Trump’s America.
    But even if they didn’t have Ripples’ youthful “ringside seat”, of seeing the trio of Awo, Solarin and WS strive hard to save Nigeria from itself, couldn’t they have read about the man before so recklessly letting fly their ignorance?
    If WS threatens America with Wolexit, it is probably because America needs WS more than WS needs America. That should be a lesson to Nigeria: if we fix our country, shouldn’t others need us more than we need them? But that might even be vanity fair.
    The basic reason for Wolexit is clear. With Trump’s entry, the American space becomes toxic for any self-respecting human.
    That is the alarm of Wolexit.

  • Who defends the public interest?

    Yours truly has in the past few days taken on a self-assigned task of finding the lesser evil between a clueless and indifferent government, one increasing known for its shocking lack of compassion, and a hopelessly inept service delivery sector that spends a good deal of time explaining why the job cannot be done than get on with it.
    My reason, neither borne of serendipity nor brainwave was informed by separate but related events which not only exemplify the utter helplessness of the citizen when ill-treated by those expected to make life more bearable, but the complicity of the government.
    You know the story of last week’s traffic snarl on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway. The harvest of deaths and destruction was supposed to be the climax of the daily agonies experienced by those unfortunate to ply the route, including those unfortunate to live along the corridor for nearly two months running. For the hordes of Nigerians forced to endure the daily rod of affliction inflicted by Julius Berger and the works ministry, the story of tears and sorrow must by now be mouthful. Nigerians, I guess, are expected to understand what is supposed to be a major surgery without anesthesia, one of the necessary sacrifices to reach Buhari’s Promised Land – yes, the dividends of their absentee government!
    By the way, where else but in Nigeria would a construction company be allowed to shut a whole or part of a vital artery like the Lagos-Ibadan, probably the busiest on the continent without partnering with relevant stakeholders to deploy resources – men and material – to free up traffic and to guarantee the security of lives?
    Truth is, it happens here only because no one thinks that Nigerians lives matter. How sad!
    I move on to another tale – the poor service delivery culture currently threatening the power sector.
    Early this year, my neighbourhood, like most in the country, was suddenly plunged into darkness. At the time, there was no guessing the culprit: the Niger Delta militants sworn to bring the nation’s economy to its knees amidst reports that they had successfully put out the Forcados Terminal gas pipeline – a facility that supplies 40 percent of the gas used in the power plants.
    A high-powered visitation by no less than the Vice President two months after ended with the assurance that the facility would be fixed by May. And so began the waiting game. May came and went. Then June, July, August and September – with absolutely no improvement in power supply in the neighbourhood.
    Convinced that the explanations would have to be sought outside of the general one about gas supply, the activist Community Development Association swung into action. Nearly two-score visits to the local Distribution Company, including a high-powered representation to the company’s management after, no one in the rank and file of the distribution company could be certain about what the problem was! Not the area controller who was obviously at the end of his tether or anyone among his team of engineers could locate the problem. In the end, the chief executive officer of the company could only offer platitudes.
    Only last week did the company successfully punctuate the reign of darkness; and this came after the community’s reported plan to storm the corporate suites of the Disco this week. Trust the company; it returned the community to status quo ante hours after! Talk about a simple engineering problem in the hands of a sector famed for its efficiency enduring for more than six months!
    I write here about Ikeja Disco. In truth, the story is no less true of the distribution companies in Lagos, Enugu, Ibadan, Port Harcourt, Yola and wherever where the tales continue to abound of unending frustrations in the hands of inept operators that have since run out of alibis. Where operators are not complaining of inability to recover debts owed, the electricity bulk trader is being crippled in the event of the discos not meeting up with their financial obligations. The result is an industry in jeopardy – short of something drastic happenning.
    And so the question arises: where is the future in all of this?
    At the moment, only the federal government can afford to pretend that the future is anything but dire. Only last weekend, the Managing Director of the Benin Electricity Distribution Company, Olufunke Osibodu, told Nigerians not to expect any improvement in the power sector in the next five years.
    Her exact words: “We need to be ready as citizens also, to accept and live with the pain that we have to go through, and allow time as our friends. As Nigerians, often we are the ones that deceive our politicians. The politicians believe that the only way to go is to promise everything immediately possible. Promise that everything is possible today so that they can get elected. But when you see that it is not, so we want to give them time and use time as our friends.
    “It is the same story for the power industry. When I tell my friends, that forget any improvement for the next five years, they are scared, but that is the truth. We need minimum of five years to invest before we see result”.
    And then her parting shot “Because Nigerians are impatient, we start pushing our governments and they start reversing good things they have done in various ways. So we need to be more patient.”
    Patience?
    By the way, those were the very sentiments expressed by Babatunde Raji Fashola, Minister of Power, Works and Housing when he recently told those calling for the reversal of the power sector privatisation exercise to perish the thought.
    Said the minister at the 5th European Union (EU)-Nigeria Business Forum: “The Federal Government will respect and uphold the contract it has been committed to and inherited from the past administration…If those calling for revisiting of the privatisation of the power sector meant to say improving the governance, performance and efficiency, then, I am here for that. If revisiting it will mean that Distribution Companies (DISCOs) should open up and investments should come in, I am for that. If it means that the entire power sector will become very efficient, I will support it. But, I will not support cancelling of the contracts we had with them”.
    Like Osibodu, the minister obviously thinks our world will cave in without the inept investors: “If we revoke privatisation of the sector, investors will carry their bags and go, they will tell others that Nigeria is not reliable for investment”.
    In vain did I find any remote reference by the minister to any fresh initiative by the operators to jumpstart the sector or even to address some of the lingering concerns that have stifled their operations. Neither did I detect a push by the government to commit them to a work plan to bring succor to the hapless electricity consumer in the shortest possible time.
    A bungling service provider in serial breaches of MoUs, taking solace in a nebulous contract to escape sanctions; a minister, sworn to defend the public cause, invoking the letters of an agreement that is as good as void? Does anyone still see why some people say that the country is not serious?