The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Samson in the House

    Samson in the House

    There appears a Samson in the People’s House, a people’s house with nary any people’s sympathy.

    And indeed, his warning is dire: if — or more chilling, when — I go down, you all go down with me!  That reminds you of the Samson complex, doesn’t it?

    The Biblical Samson, after fondly betraying himself to the sweet laps of Delilah, and got his locks — his power joker — cropped, requested of Jehovah to grant him a last burst of energy, with which he, with his Philistine traducers, would perish.

    Jehovah granted his wish.  So, Samson paid for his uxorious folly, while treacherous Delilah and fellow Philistines paid for their perfidy.

    Well, embattled Abdulmumin Jibrin was, on September 28, suspended as member of the House of Representatives. Before, as the Yoruba would say, melodious tunes turned subversive proverbs, he was chairman, House Appropriation Committee.  But now, in a testy atmosphere of legislative combat, he recalls that Samson misadventure.

    And the legislator,  from Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency of Kano, doesn’t seem to particularly care if the House — which appears rather to stink — sinks with him: he that openly admits he is no moral paragon!

    Talk of a neo-Samson of the House of Representatives power politics!

    You still doubt?  Then, just listen to these rather damning allegations, against the House leadership, majority and minority — all have sinned, and fallen short of the glory of God fashion!  It had to do with alleged “running costs”.

    If Jibrin’s allegations are true, it would appear a rather sickening bazaar out there, in the people’s house — even as the people themselves pine.

    It would appear a legislative equivalent of a fattening pastor tending a wilting flock of congregants!

    The allegations, with ‘Samson’ Jibrin first admitting his own folly.  As chair, House Appropriation Committee, he admitted collecting N650 million as “running costs”.  His committee is accused of orchestrating the alleged padding of the 2015 federal budget, by the House of Representatives.

    On that, however, Jibrin would appear in vile but unfazed company, given the running costs attached to the offices of the principal officers.

    The specific allegations, on alleged “running cost” payouts, are the following:  the Speaker (N1.5 billion), Deputy Speaker (N800 million), House Majority Leader (N1.2 billion), Deputy House Majority Leader (N1.2 billion), House Whip (N1.2 billion), Deputy House Whip (N700 million), House Minority Leader (N800 million), House Minority Whip (N700 million) and Deputy Minority Whip (N700 million).

    But as the mind tries to fend off the shock, as too surreal to be true, Jubril enters a most chilling sign-off: “I have documents to back up all these”!

    Now, could these allegations be true?  The investigating authorities have to find out.

    But even at this preliminary stage, Ripples cannot escape that disturbing feeling of a schizophrenic administration: a disciplined and earnest-sounding presidency that wants to make things right; but a wayward and greedy legislature, that won’t lose its sleep, it appears, even if things go awry.

    Throw in a neither-nor judiciary, of which some key members, even by National Judicial Council (NJC) findings, are nothing but abominable soldiers of fortune bivouacked on the Bench.  What you get is a most unflattering situation of contemporary Nigeria!

    Yet, it would be fatal to just fold hands and continue lamenting in despair.  Something urgent — and tough — must be done to stop these alleged misconducts.

    That brings the discourse to the House of Representatives’ reaction to the Jubrin allegations.

    It is rich indeed, that a House, which risks ripping, almost beyond repair,  whatever remains of its corporate image, if Jibrin’s allegations are true, has reacted with a fist of mail.

    That would appear an institutional equivalent of one person shouting the other down and threatening to destroy him, simply because he risks losing a well-marshalled argument.

    Indeed, suspending the crusading member,  would not banish the damaging allegations.  It would only give them a life of their own, as too many Nigerians — poor folks —are just too ready to believe the worst about their own government.

    So, the mail-fisted approach would only lionize Jubrin but demonize the House as an entity.  And if the allegations are empty?  That would be double jeopardy!  People would ask, and not without reason, why was the House cracking down, if it had nothing to hide on those allegations?

    Why, by moving fast to lock up Jubrin’s office, someone, somewhere had a satanic sense of humour — for the abiding image appears barring the doors, when the damning facts had escaped!

    You could, of course, say the House suspended Jubrin after due process, the member having shunned the Ethics and Privileges Committee, set up look into his alleged conduct.

    But even that would appear to smack of cover-up, since the Committee’s terms of reference was clearly Jubrin’s audacity to accuse the House of wrong-doings, not looking into the alleged misconducts, from a neutral and dispassionate point of view.  But all that is sub-judice now, since the member has sued.

    Still, another matter ought to be tested in the courts, the bit of suspending erring House members, with all due respect to  rights and privileges of members.

    Where does the House’s privileges end, as against the right of an erring member to represent his or her constituents?  And which of these two chain of rights is more basic — the one, an institutional convention; the other, a constitutional mandate?

    In other words, can a legislature legally and legitimately banish constituency representation in parliament, simply because it found a member guilty of some affront against the House?  Can it do this without breaching the grund norm, on which itself is hinged?

    In this specific case of Abudlmumin Jibrin.  The man was elected to represent the  Kiru/Bebeji federal constituency of Kano.  Now, for alleged slight against the House, he has been suspended for 180 legislative days — a whole legislative year.

    For allegedly breaching “the practices and precedents of the House of Representatives”, he is even sentenced to apologizing to the House — failure of which could mean another extension of the ban?

    So, for Jibrin’s alleged offences, a House which is essentially a chamber of equals, can deny Jibrin’s constituents their Constitution-guaranteed representation, while preserving the rights of other constituents nationwide?

    Where indeed does the right of the House stop and where do citizen’s right to be represented in parliament, as stipulated by the Constitution, begin?  And again, which of these two rights is more basic?

    This polity sure needs a legal interpretation on this matter.

    Meanwhile, the Samson shake-down in the House of Representatives is not necessarily bad for the polity.  Indeed, for a jurisdiction struggling to regain its moral compass, it is good.

    So, Ripples would not be fazed, were Jubrin to politically perish with Speaker Yakubu Dogara, and others mentioned in the alleged insensitive scam.  If the National Assembly had bred itself on wrong political socialization, of unconscionably gulping the people’s money, this collapse is as good as any to wean it to the straight-and-narrow path, of national salvation.

    That is why the Jubrin suspension grandstanding would just not do.  What to do is thoroughly investigate the charges and punish the guilty.”

  • In the throes of a recession

    In the throes of a recession

    Hard times are well and truly upon us.

    Gloom encircles the polity and despondency defines the national mood, all because the economy is in recession.  Everyone is feeling the pinch,  the privileged to a lesser extent than the average person, and the average person to a lesser degree than the underclass.

    A wave of panic is sweeping the country, at a time that calls for cool, focused deliberation and creative thinking.  A blame game is in full swing, with one segment of the population, comprising for the most part stragglers of the inept Jonathan administration under which official corruption and fiscal brigandage reached new heights, blaming the nation’s economic woes on President Muhammadu Buhari’s administration.  They promised us change, but plunged us into a regression, they have been saying of the APC-led government.

    Buhari and the APC answer back that what Dr Jonathan and his team bequeathed to them was a poisoned chalice, a system riddled through and through with dysfunction of the most intractable kind, and that the drift and decay of that era cannot be arrested overnight, to say nothing of getting the economy back to full throttle.

    To which the Jonathan people rejoin:  You were elected to fix the economy, based on your campaign promise, not to blame your predecessor nor dwell endlessly on the depredations of the recent past, brazen as they were. Get on with it, or make way for someone who can fix it.

    They have a point, but it is no more than a debating point.

    To fix the economy, it is necessary to understand how the nation came to this troubling pass.  Those who fail to examine the past, it has been said, are condemned to relive it. In their wisdom, our elders have it that if you do not know where you are going, you should at least know where you came from.

    Buhari can be criticised for his dilatoriness, for not hitting the ground running — pardon the cliché — for taking an inordinately long time to put together his cabinet, and most crucially, an economic team.   Timely action on his part might have helped slow the slide into recession, but he cannot be blamed for not fixing the economy in just one year.

    A recession does not happen overnight.  It develops through a slow accretion of adverse economic indicators.  The warning signs can be seen as the process unfolds, but that process usually cannot be arrested in the short term.  When all the elements coalesce into a full-blown recession, the task becomes even more difficult.

    There is no quick fix to a recession.  Japan was mired in a recession for almost a decade.  The effort to get the economy humming again resulted in stagflation – stagnant growth with inflation.  Europe — take out Germany — has been stuck in recession for some five years, and the United States has just begun to recover from a recession in which it had languished for more than five years.

    The Minister of Finance, Kemi Adeosun, may have been trying to calm the public when she said the recession would bottom out by the end of next year.  Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele probably had the same purpose when he said the worst was already behind us

    To which we must say, Amen.  But they and other political officials must not raise false hopes and expectations.  Failure of their projections can only deepen the frustration and discontent so palpable on the streets and in homes. Even if you come up with the most efficacious measures, they take time to turn the economy around.

    Unsettling as it is, a recession is not a strange phenomenon.  In fact, it is part and parcel of the capitalist economic system, characterised by cyclical booms and busts.

    As Dr Oladapo Fafowora has pointed out in a perceptive essay in this newspaper (September 22), only in two countries in the world is the economy not in recession:  China and India.  Even so, China’s superheated economy has cooled down considerably.

    Nobody, not even academic and professional economists, knows how the economy really works  If this seems like an indictment of the high priesthood of the dismal science, it is coming from one of their own, Paul Krugman, the youngest person to have been awarded the Nobel Medal in Economic Science and one of the most respected scholars in the business.

    Certain measures work under certain circumstance; some measures that work under one circumstance fail in other circumstances.   Plus, there is the human element.  Humans learn and grow and change and dissemble and behave in ways that defy prediction or even rationality.  That is why economists are forever hedging their bets with the caveat ceteris paribus.

    The problem is that, outside the laboratory where you can control one variable or another, ceteris is rarely paribus.

    As an example, consider the excitement in the community of financial and economic experts when the Central Bank did exactly what they had been urging:  deregulate and liberalise the foreign exchange market.  The underlying theory holds that the measure will result in a sharp narrowing, if not outright convergence, of the foreign exchange rate at the so-called parallel market and the official foreign exchange rate.

    Rather than shrink, the gap between the two exchange rates actually widened significantly.

    There you have it:  A beautiful theory murdered in Nigeria by a gang of brutal facts.

    In the long run, the economy always recovers.  Some measures may hasten recovery in certain places and under certain circumstances but prove ineffective elsewhere.  But the economy always recovers, steered by Adam Smith’s “invisible hands”.

    In the long run we all are dead, of course, as John Milton Keynes, whose middle name I erroneously rendered as “Maynard” several columns ago —thank you Eghosa Imade — has reminded us.  But recessions are not forever.Nor is a recession a meltdown, although it can culminate in a depression.  Going by present indications, we are far from that conjuncture.

    There is therefore no cause for panic, nor for a panicked response.

    Raising taxes in a recession is not good policy.  A better course is to widen the revenue net and cut existing taxes to put more money into the pockets of taxpayers.  Interest rates should be cut as well to encourage borrowing for businesses that will create jobs.

    Selling off national assets to generate revenue has been canvassed as a way of turning the economy around.  Every auction of public assets has been like a fire sale, with the items going to political officials or their cronies.

    Pouring billions into the economy to stimulate it is good.  But that should not translate into throwing money at the problem and in the hope that it will go away.  Spending should be targeted at productive growth, job creation and poverty reduction.

    How about cutting drastically the cost of running the government – the obscene compensation lawmakers appropriate unto themselves  from the public purse, not forgetting the equally obscene compensation local government political officials enjoy, and the fleets of armoured limousines political officials acquire for themselves as emblems of power, again, from the public purse?

    Rather than raise premature expectations of recovery, political officials should be counselling patience, and sacrifice.  Especially sacrifice. But they must be seen to be tackling the most pressing issues of the day with conviction and imagination.  It is not enough for them to say that they feel the pain of the public; they must be seen to be sharing in it.

    President Buhari should have prefaced his request for emergency powers to tackle the recession with a national broadcast calling attention to the state of the economy, outlining the measures the administration intends to take, warning that there is no quick fix, calling for patience and sacrifice and assuring the public that there is no cause for panic.

    He can still use that bully pulpit to great advantage even as the National Assembly deliberates on his request.

  • This way for editorial terror?

    there is an intriguing paradox in the control mix — of power, authority, legitimacy and influence.

    Power barks and growls.  Yet, it is the most impotent, of all four, especially  when misapplied.  Influence, on the other hand, is muted.  But when deftly applied, it is the most potent.

    Authority and legitimacy, mid-points in the continuum, belong to the realm of delegations.

    Authority is the formal seal to wield power, which the ruled invest in the ruler.  Legitimacy is the “holding brief”, which the ruled retain, but are content to lend the ruler, until (s)he starts acting outside the agreed brief.

    So, what’s this — some Tuesday morning voyage in power philosophy?

    No.  Just clear though disturbing musing on emotive framing of media investigations, when the subject is safeguarding media power and influence.

    The specific object of musing is “Recession: Governors lavish billions of Naira on bulletproof cars for selves, wives,” a story published in the Saturday Punch of September 24.

    With all due respect to the conceiving and publishing editors, that was one story that could do with more clinical detachment, against base emotional outpouring.

    The culprit, it is clear, is the editors’  failure to distinguish between the legitimate duty of the state to secure whoever is governor; and wayward governors that misapply public funds.

    “Pouring editorial fire on crooked politicians”, may well be a laudable tradition with the crusading press, dating back to the evolution of the press, as a social cleanser, in the United States and Europe.  But such crusades are driven by facts — hardly on rumours and hearsay.

    So, proceeding from a conceptual mix-up to build a sensational reportage on what, at best, even from the story’s offering, was glorified hearsay, borders on nothing but editorial terrorism.

    Editorial terrorism abuses public and sacred trust to injure fellow citizens. It is bad for the polity.  It is bad for the media.  It is bad for everyone in the democratic space.

    But why this seeming column excoriation of a rival newspaper?  Peer envy, aimed at de-marketing a competitor?  Certainly not.

    Abuse of column space, just as Ripples claims the editors did of a sacred trust?  Neither!

    The reason, however, is simple, even if the chore is unpleasant: to protect a polity and preserve a legacy.  More presently, on preserving a legacy.

    Now, protecting a polity.  In February 1976, a certain Murtala Muhammad, then military head of state, was shot dead in cold blood, at Ikoyi, Lagos. Even with the instinct of a callow secondary school boy back then, Ripples scoffed at Murtala’s rashness as an impulsive messiah.  But many Nigerians roared their approval.

    Forty years down the line, Ripples remains unconvinced — and with good hindsight too!  Indeed, even as Murtala’s tactical manoeuvres elicited roaring approval, they condemned vital institutions of state — especially the civil service — to strategic ruin, still plaguing the polity.

    Still, Nigerians back then approved, in their thousands.  So, what then might have happened, had the Murtala government taken Gen. Muhammad’s personal security much more professionally?

    Perhaps the brave soldier would not have fallen by Buka Sukar Dimka’s subversive bullets.  Perhaps the story of Nigeria would have been entirely different.  Perhaps the present ruins would have been averted.  Perhaps …

    A thousand perhaps — and to safeguard only one life — whether in prosperity or adversity!

    That single fact underscores the conceptual naivety, with all due respect to the editors, of this Saturday Punch story.  And the ringing illogic: because hunger rules the land, the state must shirk its duty to its high officials!

    Besides, which loyal servant of state would disclose strategic information about its fleet of armoured vehicles?

    And with scant any authoritative voice, do you now build your story on the soto voce — a story that clearly attempts to criminalize legitimate security spends, on the altar of cheap populism; and demonize governors, many of whom, even among the mentioned, may well be innocent of the charges?

    Talking of gubernatorial demonization, the case of The Punch versus Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola, bobs up again!  For the umpteenth time, Aregbesola is leaping off the Punch black books!

    Now, is the newspaper in earnest this time round? Or is this yet another example of a disturbing pastime of editorial terrorism, against Aregbesola and his government?

    When Osun declared the Islamic New Year as work-free — a lawful and legitimate action by the 1999 Constitution — The Punch, in no time, dubbed the governor a gubernatorial mullah.  So did it when Christian-Muslim dispute arose over the hijab, as school uniform complement.

    When it was time to demonize a few over the salary crisis — a mere symptom of a grave economic meltdown — the newspaper led the virtual Aregbesola lynch crowd.

    Why, even Ben Murray-Bruce, the “common sense” senator from Bayelsa, drove himself into a falsetto, chirping merrily about donating part of his National Assembly bounties to feed starving Osun civil servants!

    Now, it so happens: Murray-Bruce’s Bayelsa can’t pay its workers, but good old Benny has lost his sweet voice!  Are there no “starving” civil servants in Bayelsa, and shouldn’t charity begin at home?

    Still, in the midst of the economic crisis, it is the much-lampooned Osun that sets the pace for others in social and physical infrastructure, a feat seemingly beyond the reach of even oil-rich Bayelsa!

    Now, it is the gubernatorial armoured car campaign!  But given the story’s watery conception, with all due respect, would it be right to suppose it is yet another mega-garb, for the newspaper’s ready victims of editorial terror, among whom Aregbesola is prime candidate?

    But why is even this a columnist’s headache, since Ripples is no spokesperson for any of the governors, even if he is, for the umpteenth time defending Aregbesola’s right to media fairness?

    That returns the discourse to preserving a legacy.

    Since 1859, the Nigerian press has earned a reputation for speaking out against any form of oppression, no matter the Leviathan from which it comes.

    James Bright Davies, owner-editor of Nigerian Times (later Times of Nigeria) went to prison twice, for crusading against British colonial greed. That was in the 1910s.

    Herbert Macaulay leveraged his Lagos News (later Lagos Daily News) as Lagos natives’ bulwark against colonial oppression, in land and water rate affairs, among many other agitations.  Its audacity soon earned the newspaper the unflattering elite moniker of “Lagos Daily Rag”!  That was in the 1920s.

    Much closer, the military era stiff media challenge, against military feudalists, starred the likes of The News, Tell, The Guardian, The Punch itself and National Concord, among others.  All these were well acclaimed epochal feats, for which the Nigerian press earned due plaudits.

    It is under this rubric of editorial crusading that The Punch may have positioned its armoured car story — no crime!

    But to preserve this great legacy, the newspaper must strive at hard facts.  Otherwise, it risks chipping away at a reputation, built on patent good faith over 157 years, because of conceptual haziness.

    Otherwise, the Nigerian press may well resign itself to thrusting raw power but losing real influence.

  • Season of unreason II

    Season of unreason II

    Only those unfamiliar with the ways of the leadership of the labour movement will be surprised by its resort to threat of ‘fire and brimstone’ over the plan by the federal government to sell some national assets to raise cash.

    Africa’s richest businessman, Aliko Dangote, it was that stirred the hornets’ nest penultimate week when he told the South African broadcaster, CNBC Africa that the shortest route out of the recession is to sell some of our national assets.

    He reportedly told CNBC Africa: “We have a lot of assets to sell. We can sell part of the joint venture; part of the shares…. We also have another asset I think we don’t really need – the African Finance Corporation; it can fetch them $800million easily. My own suggestion before was that they should even sell 100 percent of NLNG. I don’t think government should be in any business of investing in sectors of LNG. A company like that, with earnings of $1.5 billion on the average, they should get anywhere between $12 billion and $15 billion.”

    A week after, the National Economic Council, a body comprised of the 36 governors chaired by Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, gave its imprimatur. Listed for sale are – government shares in Joint Venture Companies (JVCs),   Nigeria Liquefied Natural Gas (NLNG), some aircraft in the presidential fleet, and the four refineries in Kaduna, Port Harcourt and Warri.

    By the weekend, on Sunday September 26 precisely, Labour –  never mind that the rank and file had neither met nor got its various organs to sufficiently interrogate the measure in the light the challenges currently facing the Nigerian economy – was literally on war path: the sale, it pronounced, is not only unacceptable, it would be resisted.

    Of the plan, Petroleum and Natural Gas Senior Staff Association of Nigeria, PENGASSAN, one of two unions in the oil industry says: “The plan meant to solve short-term financial obligations is targeted at handing over our collective wealth to a few individuals and further impoverish the rest of our countrymen and women.”

    And then the warning:  “Any attempt to sell these national assets will be met with stiff resistance from the association, as PENGASSAN will galvanise every support, including that of our sister union and labour centres to shut down this country by ensuring that every activity in the oil and gas sector is brought to a complete halt”.

    The Trade Union Congress, TUC, on its part would let it be known that it would collaborate with the two major unions in the oil sector to ground the economy should the sale proceed because, the planned sale of the assets was ‘flawed’.  TUC President Bala Kaigama, told newsmen that had those who invested in the assets sold them, the current administration would not have met them.

    Let’s be clear upfront: the debate is one that neither its protagonists nor the government can win. Not even now; or anytime in the future. It’s the same old contest between economics and populism; the wearisome, but stultifying ideological debate about national assets and what to do with them when exigencies arise. Flowing from the debate is the assumption  that public assets are sacrosanct – to be held in trust from generation to generation – even when as it is often the case, they neither deliver value as service providers nor justify taxpayers’ funds used to keep them as going concerns. Or, as in extreme cases, when the entities are left abandoned with predictable results in value depletion, the question of what to do with them has remained an unsettled one – just like Grandpa’s ancient clock that must be preserved even for its nuisance value!

    We are however talking of a different scenario. One of grave national emergency – a situation in which government finances have plummeted to such an extent that it is gasping for breath making governance such a herculean task and in an environment of unprecedented infrastructure gaps.

    No thanks to Niger Delta agitators’ strangulating hold on the nation’s oil production, its main forex earner, Nigeria is currently locked in a death-throe struggle to cover its import bill. At a time it requires forex for anything from household consumables to fuel to keep vehicles and factories running and to finance the war in the North-east, earnings have depleted to such an abysmal level that it is a daily struggle to keep basic governance going.

    That is the context in which the Buhari administration is currently challenged to perform what is akin to magic. By this, one refers to meeting the recurrent bills; financing capital expenditure so critical to halting the recession; meeting the daily forex requirements of our hordes of importers – all of which are needed to get the country on the recovery path, at a time of serious internal security challenges.

    Try as anyone might to understate the nation’s revenue problem at this time, that our country faces a threatening insolvency, is beyond deniability. By now, the illusion that the country is earning enough to meet up its bills ought to have worn off; truth is – we are impecunious!

    And so while labour, like most segments of the Nigerian population, appears to appreciate the need for massive infrastructural renewal programmes to lift the country out of the morass, the irony is that the same body would rather choose to sacrifice one of the more viable policy options to expeditiously raise cash on the altar of some jaded ideology.

    Labour is right in one respect: the nation has never got it right. Not on Power Holdings Company, not Nitel, certainly not the countless public entities which have succumbed to the gavel of the Bureau for Privatisation. The result is that very few Nigerians consider the entire privatisation as anything but a scam.

    The mistake however is to conflate the principle with the botched process. Had labour bothered to undertake the due rigour of painstaking research, Nigerians would have had the benefit of their informed position as against the current play at demagoguery.

    Let’s examine the argument against the sale of the national assets. The arguments are two-fold: first, that the country would never get fair value for the assets; and second, that these assets represent our patrimony and so should be kept willy-nilly. There is a third argument – the possibility of private power growing to a point where it not only stifles competition but is allowed to become stronger than the state.

    These are legitimate fears. However, I  find none of the problems that cannot be addressed – some by legislation and others by clear, transparent administrative action! In any case, can the nation afford to surrender to the fear of the past?

    So what would Nigeria lose by letting go of its ‘lucrative’ holdings in NLNG? Indeed, other than the annual payouts in dividends and perhaps the hefty allowances of its officials on the board of the company, there is pretty little else that Nigeria will miss.

    I perfectly understand the confusion over ownership and the imperative of service and the tendency to conflate them. In a globalizing world where premium is placed in service as against labels of ownership, it comes to a big tragedy that the Nigerian labour movement has remained locked in the ideological time warp entirely of its own making. Little wonder it is leading from behind!

  • Change: Duel over nothing

    Change: Duel over nothing

    Today marks the 12th day of dueling over Buhari’s latest campaign chariot inelegantly christened – Change Begins with Me. With pretty few concrete deliverables since riding into office on the crest of ‘change’ nearly 16 months after, most Nigerians, at least from the range of opinions expressed thus far, would appear to have neither the patience nor the stomach for the Buhari administration’s latest foray into the ethical arena. First is the avoidable tango over the conception of the Change Begins with Me; then followed the Presidential speech brouhaha and all the issues in between; (never it seems, has a flag-ship initiative of a supposed change administration succumb so fatally to identity – if not legitimacy – crisis).

    As if that was not itself a bad omen for what is ordinarily a tumultuous sail into the frightful ethical waters, the barely disguised irritation and blanket dismissal by a cross-section of the Nigerian commentariat would seem to suggest something fundamentally wrong with the campaign ab initio.

    Understandably, there are those who have great difficulty with living down the inelegant attempt to ‘deflect’ responsibility which the object – “me” represents – the idea that the change ought to begin with the masses as against the officials charged with public duty. At issue here is the moral authority to demand from the ordinary folk – a new ethical orientation – when the change drivers have themselves refused to shed their wasteful, profligate ways. Related is the question of the motive of an administration that promised change in the conduct of government business suddenly changing tunes mid-course about the imperative of ‘change without’ – and this at a time the weight of evidence seems to suggest so heavily of how little has changed in any real sense in the texture of governance.

    I understand the basis of the anger. Indeed, the issues are beyond deniability. Sixteen months into the change era, there is little substance to suggest any real momentum or an understanding of the direction of change. With indices pointing to nowhere in particular, the daily ritual of motions without locomotion is such that the citizens have been thrown into the guessing game. If we had expected the Buhari administration to crank and restream the old bureaucratic machine to deliver maximum efficiency and progress so sorely needed at a time of dire national emergency, it has been a season of confounding, suffocating stasis by a most ambivalent administration. It couldn’t be worse.

    With perhaps the notable exception of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) which, for obvious reasons, has been on the overdrive, other institutions are virtually on ‘sleep’ mode – caught up, apparently in the frenzy of the one-track war when all signs read – emergency. So palpable is the resultant climate of uncertainties fostered by the collapse of commodity prices that one can cut it with the knife; need one add other tell-tale signs such as the negative spiral in the value of the national currency, the unprecedented collapse of productivity across the board, and the increasing restiveness of the youth population to underscore how serious the situation is?

    A high profile campaign on ethical rebirth could only have been seen as a costly distraction at a time like this. Yet, warts and all, the campaign, as far as I can see, can never be too late.

    Why Change Begins with Me? I say why not? Agreed, the state of the economy has assumed a status of life and death; however, the imperative of the campaign to reorient our values as a people however defined constitutes no less than a matter of our survival as a nation. If anything, it is inextricably linked to our destiny as a people. As far as yours truly can see, we race against time in what is clearly a mission to either win the war of values or perish as a people. I do not mean ‘change’ in the narrow definition of the concept that some critics have passed for subterfuge, but rather of the need to do things the right way, to treat others fair and equitably, to demand accountability from those who govern us, to ensure that things are done correctly both by the governor and the governed, and to raise the bar in public conduct for everyone. In short, the ordinary things that makes the huge difference between man and beast! Those for me are the substance of change!

    Today, we have become largely an indifferent society – a people known to moan and whine about everything under the sun – from the oppressive, smouldering heat to the activities of the service provider, who, after delivering fifth-rate service nonetheless insists on charging premium. While it seems part of our culture to demand the best in terms of what money can buy, a part of us are so ready to settle for the less than the commensurate value in return!

    We tolerate the corrupt, the indolent official, the thieving service provider; the predatory market woman who has long mastered the art of delivering less for the value exchange, the cleric who declares magisterially to the faithful that he’s answerable to no one. At a Parents Teachers Association meeting recently, I actually saw a mob (parents?) descend on the principal for the crime of asking the pupils to suffer the indignity of cleaning their dormitory toilets! The same parents who only moments before railed and ranted against the government, would neither allow their wards to grasp the concept of dignity of labour, nor one of respect for constituted authority! And this is the generation expected to carry the baton!

    It takes their knowing of this peculiar psychology of the Nigerian to appreciate why things can’t seem to work!

    Yes, change, if it must endure, must begin within. That is the lesson from great societies. It is not for nothing that Singapore, the country we love to cite as exemplar development model, is derogatorily called a nanny state. Yes, their great leader, Lee Kuan Yew, worked to provide the ambience for change; the citizens however did their part to internalise it. They understand what discipline means to an orderly society. I recall Babatunde Fashola, current minister for works, framing the concept elegantly as the soft infrastructure of the human mind.  Like the renewed calls for the restructuring of the country which represents the hardware part, I would rather see Change Begins with Me from the prism of the necessity to get the individual to play his/her part, knowing that the restructuring will neither take us to the great society that we crave nor the country we could ever love without our being able to get rid of the toxic culture of indifference, of mediocrity that daily assail our humanity.

    So, let the change begin – with me. The campaign is only the starting point!

     

  • Before Edo decides

    Before Edo decides

    There is an eerie parallel between 14 February 2015 and 10 September 2016.

    The presidential election was fixed for 14 February 2016, until Sambo Dasuki, then President Goodluck Jonathan’s National Security Adviser (NSA), went to Chatham House, London, to launch the plot that would climax in the postponement, till 30 March 2016, of the polls for alleged security reasons.

    Now, the Edo gubernatorial polls were fixed for September 10.  All was set, until the Police and Directorate of Secret Services (DSS), clamoured for a postponement, for security reasons.  The new date is September 28, a Wednesday.

    Not unlike in 2015, INEC first resisted.  Then, it capitulated.

    But that has sent tongues wagging.  Just as it was alleged that Jonathan and co panicked, many are now swearing Oshiomhole and co are panicking, because of fear of defeat.

    Still, for all you know, it could well be fib and counter-fib.    The PDP that pushes the panic theory could well be planting grand disinformation, and amplifying it among its own.

    The APC that floats a counter-narrative, of alleged Nyesom Wike and Ifeanyi Okowa-aided PDP importation of a violent band to rig, could also be counter-fibbing.

    Fair is foul and foul is fair in a fierce electoral contest!

    Yet, the reason the security agencies gave this time would appear plausible: that on the virtual eve of Sallah, they could expose the general population to soft terror attack, by pulling out Police units outside Edo, to secure the Edo polls.

    Given the history and profile of terror attacks, that would appear more plausible than Dasuki’s Chatham House reason: that the armed forces, hitherto snoozing before Boko Haram, just sprang awake to face down their nemesis, with putative electoral defeat facing the president!

    Still, there are always grounds for doubts, plausible or cynical, simply because institutions of state are just not strong enough.  Why, the same security agencies merrily corralled into doing PDP’s alleged bidding only last year, are now being accused of doing APC’s bidding!

    But beyond conspiracy theories and rather feeble state institutions, on what basis might PDP triumph in Edo polls, so much so that its formidability would cause so much panic, to suggest skewing, against it, the security infrastructure?

    The party’s stellar records during the Lucky Igbinedion gubernatorial days?  Or, the superlative competence of the Jonathan presidential years?  Even to the most romantic of PDP fanatics, their inner voice would scream and screech: these eras were unmitigated disasters!

    Then, the growing whispering campaign that neither Godwin Obaseki (GO) nor Osagie Ize-Iyamu (OII) is of any good?

    Incidentally, that same neither-nor condescension crept up between Jonathan and Buhari last year; and, in the looming US presidential election, is creeping up between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

    But look closely.  It would appear to emerge from elements that have closet issues with Oshiomhole but are not gutsy enough to root for Ize-Iyamu, with his terrible Edo PDP baggage.  So, the contrived hee-haw may just shadow that abject lack of moral conviction!

    Indeed, by the sheer force of Oshimhole’s achievements, guilt-by-association ought to have condemned Ize-Iyamu to irredeemable electoral slaughter, while galvanizing  Obaseki to a soar-away win.

    But the Comrade Governor’s alleged manipulation of the APC ticket, pulling all the stops to push protégée GO; and coupling him with alleged alter ego, Phillip Shaibu, now in the House of Representatives, virtually from his own clan, seem to have infuriated not a few, and gifted PDP a new lease.

    Now, the new war cry, bawled with all musterable partisan roar: Shaibu means Oshiomhole quits, yet Oshiomhole retains power!

    Now, that can be explosively emotive!  A people terribly injured, on the eve of a major election, could indeed engineer an electorally sobering result!

    Still, must Edo, in the expression of unrestrained rage, cut its nose to spite its face?  Electorally, it can.

    But then, its long-suffering people, not the flighty politicians, always on the lookout for the best of deals, will bear the scar.

    The Ekiti experience, that propelled Ayo Fayose to power, for fury against Kayode Fayemi’s person, if not policy, is a living example, of rash electoral choices.

    But more on that presently!

    Meanwhile, not a few have also direly warned, hinting at some electoral Armageddon to come: Edo (and possibly Ondo) gubernatorial polls would be plebiscites on the Muhammadu Buhari presidency, by a baleful people, grappling with excruciating pains.

    For the excitable, fiercely riveted on only the present, that would appear hot electoral scarecrow, before which the Oshiomhole camp must crouch and mutter their last prayers!  But for the more perspective, history and institutional memory dictate otherwise.

    At the onset of Obafemi Awolowo’s Free Primary Education programme in the old Western Region, which the opposition National Council of Nigerians and the Cameroons (NCNC) sold as some blight set to wipe out the people’s agrarian wealth, the Action Group (AG) lost in the next round of polls.

    But two years later, the electorate got wiser, by the sheer developmental beauty of that programme.  Though free education demanded some taxation — to which the opposition incited the people to growl — it assured the populace a better strategic deal.  That was 1955; and present-day Edo, where NCNC was very strong, was in the Midwest segment of that region.

    The moral?  That the present bites hard does not preclude a golden future.  That was Awo’s compass to greatness; and that may well be replicated again, if the Buhari reforms succeed, even if Buhari is no philosopher king in the mould of Awo.

    But he is as much an ascetic as Awo; and like Awo too,  he towers above his contemporaries with sheer moral authority, powered by unchallenged integrity.

    Still, back to the Ekiti-Edo parallel.  In the course of the GO campaign, Lagos Governor, Akinwunmi Ambode, told the story of Lagos; and how everything it has achieved, as the most economically vibrant state in Nigeria, dated back to a solid foundation laid in 1999; and sustained ever since.

    Edo, unfortunately, is a diametric opposite.  Under Lucky Igbinedion (1999-2007) there was no foundation.  Just ruthless, ceaseless, soulless looting — so much so that the former governor was tried and convicted for sleaze.  However, in the corrupt spirit of times, he only got a slap on the wrist.

    So, if Igbinedion is rightly quoted — that the next Edo governor would emerge from his “political family”, then it is a monumental battery on Nigerians’ collective psyche.  But if Edo, on the eve of a major election, on account of some rage tolerates such tomfoolery, who are outsiders to cry more than the bereaved?

    But suffice it to say: with such permissiveness, Edo would appear fated to the Ekiti model of ruin (no thanks to electoral folly); than the Lagos model of boom (thanks to electoral wisdom).  Whichever choice Edo makes would have clear-cut consequences.

    Indeed, a politician like Fayemi, victim of bad electoral choices, only grieves for days, or months.  But the people, like the Ekiti, who wilfully bring such choices upon themselves, condemn a generation to avoidable doom.

    So Edo, which would it be?

    September 28 beckons!

  • A leaf from Jonathan’s playbook?

    A leaf from Jonathan’s playbook?

    Did the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), fearing defeat in the Edo gubernatorial election scheduled for last Saturday, lean on the Federal Government to corral the Department of State Service and the Police High Command into demanding postponement of the poll for three weeks, citing security concerns?

    That, at any rate, is the case that has been made against the APC, Ekiti State Governor Ayodele Fayose leading the charge, as always.

    If true, it would mean that the APC took a leaf from the playbook the PDP and former president Dr Goodluck Jonathan employed in the run-up to the 2015 presidential election.  Then, virtually every indicator suggested powerfully that they would be routed at the polls.

    And so, in desperation they trotted out Sambo Dasuki, the former National Security Adviser now standing trial on multiple charges of corruption, to demand, on security grounds, that the election be postponed for several weeks.

    The real intention, of course, was to slow down the APC’s momentum, and to ensure that, having exhausted its war chest and other resources in the run-up to Election Day, it would be in no position to counter the ferocious Naira rain, beg your pardon, Dollar rain, that Jonathan loosed on the APC’s stronghold.

    It did not work.  Despite its overwhelming advantage in every department, except in the hearts and minds of the attentive electorate, the PDP sill went down to comprehensive defeat.

    So, if in today’s altered political environment the APC is predicating its electoral strategy in Edo State on Jonathan’s 2015 playbook, it must know that success is not guaranteed.

    Based on objective factors, especially on Comrade Governor Adams Oshiomhole’s sterling achievement in office, the APC should romp to an easy victory.  But there is nothing objective about politics, suffused as it often is, with factors that defy rationality.  For evidence, you do not have to look beyond Ekiti and Ayo Fayose, aforementioned.

    It may well be, on the other hand, that the Department of State Service and the Police High Command have in their possession credible and indissoluble evidence that some miscreants were set to launch a campaign of murder and mayhem across several states at the time scheduled for the election.

    They were in possession of this intelligence, and yet did not prevail on President Muhammadu Buhari to cancel a well publicised election-eve trip to Benin City to campaign for his party’s candidate?   That must be accounted a grave dereliction.

    Did they come by the intelligence between the President’s visit and the commencement of voting? That would have left them little time to analyse and verify it to the point of judging it credible enough to warrant arresting an election process already well under way.

    In the end, it may well have been a classic instance of “better late than never.”  Better to act precipitately on intelligence that may even be hazy, better to act from an abundance of caution than fail to act and thus yield the day to the merchants of murder and mayhem.

    One can concede all this and yet deplore the language the DSS and the Police High Command employed in conveying their reservations, namely that they could not guarantee the safety of anyone who went ahead to stage or participate in the election.

    The language is, of course, not new.  One recalls former Police Inspector-General Sunday Adewusi’s chilling warning to those who might be thinking of standing in President Shehu Shagari’s way:  The riot police, armed for battle, would descend upon them like mad dogs, and there would be no consequences.  They would kill, and they would go.

    One also recalls another police chief, Abubakar Tsav, head of the Lagos Command in the time of the brutal dictator Sani Abacha.  Whenever civil society organisations indicated that they were about to stage peaceful protests, he would urge parents and guardians to keep their children and wards indoors because the police could not guarantee their safety if they ventured outdoors.

    This is self-indictment of the highest order, disavowal even, of their constitutional responsibilities.

    If the Department of State Service and the Police High Command cannot guarantee the safety of citizens engaging peacefully in lawful activity, if they cannot contain and thwart those who would wantonly attack law-abiding citizens, of what practical use are they to society?

    Beyond this, the role of the DSS and the Police High Command in causing the Edo State gubernatorial poll to be postponed raises anew questions about Nigeria’s peculiar federalism.  It is offensive to the Federal Principle that the Centre should be vested with the power to determine when and how an election is to be held in a constituent State.

    Sooner or later, they will have to resolve this and other issues which lie at the heart of Nigeria’s malaise.

     

    Now this, From Himself the Igodomigodo:

    To those who cannot see beyond the estimable Patrick Obahiagbon’s magniloquence — and they abound plenteously — hereunder is a testimonial to his punctiliousness and to the celerity with which he conducts business, being his engaging and recondite response to the Open Letter I addressed to him in this space last week:

    My own Oga and Senior Brother:

    I must posthaste begin this piece by apologising that my response to the very weighty and crucial issues you have raised with the scintillating brilliance of a luminiferous mind is coming a clear 24 hours late.

    I was eager to respond with the agility of a monkey but for the whirligig of the governorship contestations in Edo State just now.  But permit of me the imprimatur to reassure you my brother of my supreme aplomb regarding the fact of the good people of Edo State returning APC to governance.

    They won’t be voting in APC because we have been Angels my senior brother but they will resoundingly do so because the Comrade Governor has been able to admiringly retrieve the paraplegic ship of state from the vice and pestilential grip of political pachucos and economic philistines and cornucopiously satiated the utilitarian question and performed multum in parvo.

    May I also thank you exceedingly and through you most Nigerians who do understand that my stoic equanimity and sangfroid predilection in the face of de die in diem socio-political putrescence and economic makosa dance, cascading from all facets of our institutional orifices, certainly does not stem from fecklessness or Olympian aloofness.

    You said it all, my brother, when you posited the fact of my being incommoded by my extant asphyxiating rules of engagement.  Let me, however, reassure you that this has been one immolation in my life reminiscent of the 12 labours of Hercules to the extent that I have had to “laugh without laughing and to laugh even when in serious pains”, if I may paraphrase one of our distinguished Nigerian writers.

    I pray that your latitudinarian spirit of Pantagruelian discernment never suffer atrophy as your aburo burst out from the trammelling jack of lantern of bureaucratic bubbles in futuro.

    My respect and admiration always SIR…

     

  • Season of anomie

    Season of anomie

    There is a creeping contest in the land.  Whoever howls most, about the nation’s present woes, appears sure of some Nobel Prize in mass melancholy!

    But isn’t Tiger Woe — whose devastating spring pushes pan-Nigerian wailing to a crescendo — obvious and gut-tearing enough?

    Must folks fall over themselves to screech its cruel “tigeritude”, in the very words of our own WS, the very tiger of progressive populism himself?

    O, you must have noticed!  This headline is straight from the mouth of our esteemed Nobel Laureate, the title of the second of his two novels, the first being The Interpreters.

    In Season of Anomy (1973), Wole Soyinka painted the anomie of military rule, and the parasitic (un)civil class that, with the soldiers, conspired to rape and plunder their country.

    Why, at that nadir, Anomy even creatively foretold the Sani Abacha horror, at the tail-end of military misrule.

    Any citizen that stood against that stark dictator was doomed to slaughter!  That was the fictional Zaki Amuri, in Anomy, feudal lord of Cross-River!

    Between Abacha and Amuri, can you spot a difference — or, for that matter, between feudalism and military rule in Nigeria?

    But all those latter-day ruin had their roots in early-day politics-driven anarchy of 1st Republic Western Nigeria.

    Back then, the vote-heisting Demo (formally named: Nigerian National Democratic Party, NNDP), of Samuel Ladoke Akintola and Remi Fani-Kayode, gloried in brazen political turpitude.

    The ruling Northern People’s Congress, NPC’s decision to condone Demo’s electoral rascality, for short-term political gain, sparked the first coup d’état.

    From WS, more facts on that troubling period of Nigerian history would come with autobiographical memoirs: Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years, and later, You Must Set Forth At Dawn.

    That then, was the rotten foundation of the present mess.

    Of course, the military’s wasted years — that useless god that left its votaries much worse than it met them — worsened the situation.

    Add Olusegun Obasanjo’s empty but doomed swagger, in the first crucial eight years of this republic.  Add too, Goodluck Jonathan’s near-undertaking business, in the last six years of the ancien regime.

    Now, even factor in the notorious Nigerian amnesia, natural or wilful, when the subject is institutional memory.  But could anybody have forgotten, so soon, the havoc of the swamp criminals, euphemistically called militants — walking their talk to sabotage and ground the economy, by bombing oil installations?

    All these would appear doom — wilful doom — foretold!  Yet, for this countrywide wailing orchestra, sweet din blissfully swallows any foreground history of reason.

    Their grouse? That  Muhammadu Buhari, struggling with his braves to fix the millennial mess, has no magic fixes!

    Still, this anomie is especially devastating because the pocket hurts; and the stomach rumbles.  You don’t reason with the hungry, do you?

    Even then, it is tanking to corrode the basic norms, fast becoming value-neuter:  the problem solvers are the new devils; while those that led us to perdition are newly consecrated saints, in a new national cathedral of unrestrained grief and explosive passion!

    That, by the way, cuts through the sectors: ecclesiastical, political and even the media, now wearing plebeianism, as some unfazed badge of honour!

    From the ecclesiastical front, the goodly Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, retired Catholic Archbishop of Lagos, warns: Buhari, Nigerians are hungry, in much the same snappy voice as Oby Esekwezili and her BBOG crusaders, virtually holding a gun to the President’s head to, willy-nilly, produce the Chibok girls, or else!

    Yet, beyond cheap populism, that inflames passion sans solving any problem, His Lordship owes the Catholic faithful that dot on his very words, the moral duty of preaching understanding in these delicate and perilous times.

    The intervention, from the political front, would appear even worse, with the immaculate Shehu Sani, senator of the Federal Republic from the ruling APC, playing the ostrich; declaring all would have perished before Buhari finished his reforms!  Pray, should the president then fold his arms — and join the lamentation gang?

    Yet, this senator is part and parcel of Bukola Saraki’s National Assembly, legislative children of perdition, that have shown little affinity with — or sensitivity to — the pains in the land.

    On the other side of the aisle, the doomed PDP grandstands over the magical clearing of the debacle its 16 years of ruins piled up.  And to underscore this audacity, Her Audaciousness, Dame Patience Jonathan, just laid claim to some US $31 million in frozen cash deposits!

    Need we forget — her husband, President Goodluck Jonathan, practically sold the last national family silver to feed the crave of the criminal ring, clamped round him in power?

    But perhaps the most asinine intervention, so far, has got to come from the media.  A columnist, of some repute, put the rhetorical question: Buhari, the worst president ever?  That was enough signal for his votaries of hate and bigotry to do their thing, eye-blazing and mouth-foaming!

    Another reduced the new “Change Starts with me” campaign to a personal tussle between the column — if not the columnist — and a minister, in a column codification of the market-folks’ whims and caprices!

    Want to feel the scandalous lack of empathy with whatever the Buhari government is doing to fix the problems?  Just pick up the papers, with their sensational headlines, and hysterical columns!

    The issue, mark you, is neither the democratic right to report; nor the people’s right to know.  It is rather  the Fourth Estate’s lack of emotional intelligence to push empathy, even while at its critical duty, in times of extreme national angst, as now.

    So, the Nigerian media, after 157 years of practice, cannot still summon that?  Shame!

    This media resort to culpable hysteria may well become veritable embarrassment, when these hard times are gone and done with!

    Predictably, like a people blinded by too much of their own tears, the whimpering party can’t even see the early lights, now piercing the dank clouds.

    In the North East, a joyful company drummed through the streets, announcing its homecoming, after years of Boko Haram sack.  But to the howling, cynical assembly, “nothing is happening”!

    Progressively, if creeping, power is getting better, with many neighbourhoods in Lagos, reporting no less than 15 hours a day.  Even then, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, former high-flying Lagos governor, remains their “minister of darkness”!

    On the food front, there are already talks about Kebbi rice, Anambra rice, Ebonyi rice, Dangote rice, etc, which, when they fully hit the market, may force prices down from N20, 000 a bag to N8, 000 — or even less!

    But the moral here is not even the putative tumbling of rice prices, to tame the rumbling tummy.  It is weaning Nigerians from that grand folly  — that their palate is just too delicate for local rice!  That is the mind-restructuring only temporary adversity can force down.

    To be sure, the Buhari government still has a lot to do, if it must deliver on its promise.  But given this dire historical juncture, the people should acknowledge little gains, while awaiting the big ones.

    That would be far better than the present distracting bedlam.

  • To my aburo Patrick, Himself the Igodomigodo

    To my aburo Patrick, Himself the Igodomigodo

    Pardon me for kick-starting this missive with this peculiarly Nigerian locution:  How far?

    The enquiry contains more than a hint of jocosity, to be sure, but there is nothing jocose about it insofar as it relates to the state of the nation, the Nigerian condition, of which you are a perceptive observer and incisive analyst.

    I say nothing of course of  your coruscating erudition and wit, in contradistinction to those hacks who, in desperate yearning for anything emblematic of distinction, however fleeting and fragmentary, however tenuous, are forever advertising themselves as “Abuja-based public affairs commentators.”

    The truth of the matter, the indissoluble actuality as you personally experienced it during your memorable and eventful sojourn in the House of the People in that city, with its asphyxiating sterility is that they are for the most part unemployed and unattached freeloaders, if not unreconstructed scroungers outright.  Even in your present disposition, you have encountered a surfeit of them, I am sure.

    It is deeply to be lamented that the aforementioned disposition has incommoded you in no small measure, rendering you not just invisible but also inaudible.  I still find it incomprehensible, inexplicable even, that a person of your vivaciousness, spontaneity and sensibilities can feel obliged to observe so much restraint in face of the daily occurrences that provoke nothing short of atrabilious rage even when each is considered as a singularity.

    Taken cumulatively, as a totality, the occurrences are nothing if not benumbing.  Your resolute and unflappable equanimity in the face of all this is eminently to be lauded.

    Unlike many of our compatriots of easy gullibility, I do not suppose for a nanosecond, however, that this apparent equanimity stems from fecklessness; I know you too much to entertain such a misimpression.  I know it has been forced upon you by the rules of engagement under which you currently operate.

    When you were not thus shackled, your voice resonated with unmatched clarity and eloquence rendered all the more arresting by your consummate mastery of cadenced, sesquipedalian oration delivered right off the cuff – unlike some of your colleagues who could not make the most prosaic statement off script and are consequently not remembered for anything except their propensity for self-aggrandisement of the most ravenous kind, by which I mean, gorging themselves remorselessly on the national patrimony.

    It cannot have been easy for a person of your public spiritedness and unswerving commitment to what is noble and just and of good report to live through an almost endless march of events of the most stultifying kind and yet refrain from giving utterance to disapproval and disapprobation even in the most subdued of tones, sotto voce, so to speak.

    And the events, in all their discombobulation, in all their furious gallop, are legion.  Where to start, then? Where to delineate as a point of departure in this excursus?

    Is it the Senate Rules of Order, as amended, which threw up a leadership that has been embroiled in a crisis of authority and legitimacy and credibility and integrity since that body launched its current session more than a year ago?  Or the perjury trial, the carnivalesque optics of which may appear to a first-time visitor to these parts as a coronation, replete with fawning adulation and saccharine glorification?

    Or Budget 2016 that has performed enough disappearing and re-appearing acts to turn the Cheshire cat into a rank amateur in the business, a mewling infant?  Or again Budget 2016 that was padded with layers upon layers of pork when a version which seemed closest to being authentic was eventually found?

    Or should I commence with the crash of the oil market and its deleterious consequences for everything: the Exchequer and the economy, not forgetting the Naira which has since become like an orphan abandoned, and the attendant disequilibrium and disarticulation in transactions of every kind and even social intercourse?

    I will enter no comment on the vexed and perennial subject of fuel subsidy, whether real or contrived.    I recall your spirited and illumining intervention the last time it was the focal point, the core issue of perfervid national discourse, and how it compelled abandonment of the perilous trajectory on which the authorities were determined to embark, and a near-complete reversion to the status quo ante, consonant with vociferous public demand.

    The price of that precious combustible has since escalated, with nary a public rally by the usual sworn opponents.  But where in the time of regulation there was a drought there is now in the time of de-regulation a cascading torrent, a glut.  Still, despite the superabundant revenue accruing to Abuja following deregulation, there have been dark intimations, registering just above whispering level, of some stubborn residual subsidy requiring radical excision.

    Save your heaviest ordnance for that conjuncture, Aburo.  It is not quite over yet.

    Something tells me, Aburo, you are fully primed for the looming battle for the succession on the home turf.  Having worked in close juxtaposition with the Comrade Governor – no, I under- state it horribly and crave your indulgence to take it back – having served him as trusted adviser, sounding board, confidant, having taken charge of organising his schedule and his work flow, you doubtless apprehend more than anyone else the factors that have conduced to his phenomenal success.

    Do you espy any of those traits or factors in any of the contenders?  It is again deeply to be regretted that even if you do, you cannot so proclaim under current rules of engagement.  Such, alas, is the perversity of bureaucracy.

    But you are nothing if not creative, my dear Aburo.  I am sure you will fabricate, with your accustomed ingenuousness a design that will help beam on the battle for the succession your unrivalled knowledge of the Comrade Governor, his vision, his work habits, his temperament, his proclivities and all those factors that shaped the great legacy he is bequeathing to the grateful people of Edo State and indeed to posterity.

    Someone who claims to be privy to recondite secrets tells me that reports to the effect that the Grand Fixer has been neutered, rendered hors de combat, are vastly exaggerated, and that he is lurking patiently in the shadows, waiting to charge into battle at the sound of the bell.

    Is there any veracity to the report, even a scintilla of verisimilitude?  I ask mostly of our curiosity, not from diffidence.  I know that with you and the other stalwarts in his corner, the Comrade Governor can contain a dozen grand fixers.

    That would be all for now, my dear Aburo.  Something tells me we will hear from or of you soon, over the chants of victory and the promise of continuity.

    Until then, I remain your Egbon and kindred soul.

  • When is right time to say ‘no more’?

    When is right time to say ‘no more’?

    It was, no doubt, long in coming – although most people would prefer to deny the signsof a looming petrol price hike. Never mind that that the prices of domestic fuel, kerosene, and its industrial fuel counterpart, diesel, have long hit the roof. For most Nigerians, it was perhaps sufficient to pretend that the day will never come when the price of their famous product, petrol, would also answer to the dynamics of the freewheeling marketforces unleashed in the wake of naira’s floatation.

    Take it or leave it – it goes without saying that the declaration by the hitherto unknown association – a body ofex-Group Managing Directors the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – goes beyond flying of the kite;painful as their prognostications may appear to be, it is real economics.

    Of course, their statement as read by the minister of state for Petroleum Resources, Ibe Kachikwu was explicit as can be: “They (the GMDs) noted”, the statementwent, “that the petrol price of N145/litre is not congruent with the liberalisation policy especially with the foreign exchange rate and other price determining components such as crude cost, Nigerian Ports Authority charges, etc. remaining uncapped.”As would be expected, they also voiced their concerns with the declining crude oil production level and its consequences on the environment and the nation’s revenue as well as fears that the current situation, if unchecked, could lead to the crippling of the corporation.

    We have certainly turned full cycle, haven’t we? Are theseex-NNPC helmsmen crying wolf where there is none? I certainly donot think so. Apart from being correct in their prognosis of the future, I don’t think anyone would dare to deny the picture so graphically painted given the situation in which we currently shell a whopping 40 percent of our entire forex outlay on fuel imports. Grim would in fact be an understatement in the circumstance that the nation currently finds itself.

    Of course, the story of how the nation got to this point is now a familiar one. It is the story of a nation that spends fortunes to import what it ordinarily has a comparative advantage to produce. With four refineries said to have a combined capacity to process 425,000 barrels of crude daily – all of them run down, we have made an industry of living in the terrible illusion that those contraptions could somehow be made to work. If we had thought that the cycles of Turn Around Maintenances (TAMs) that straddled 16 years of PDPs inept administrations would have settled the question of what to do with the moribund entities, the Buhari administration’s policy on them has been a study not just in unexampled vacillation, but one of utter incoherence. A year and half into its four-year tenure, it remains a mixed signal – no one can claim to know with certainty the mind of the federal government on the issue of the refineries.

    By the way, three months ago, Nigerians could have sworn that their nightmares in the hand of fuel marketers had finally ended. That was after the federal government finally resolved that “any Nigerian entity is now free to import the product, subject to existing quality specifications and other guidelines issued by Regulatory Agencies”.After a reportedly stormy meeting in Abuja which had in attendance the Leadership of the Senate, House of Representatives, Governors Forum, and Labour Unions (NLC, TUC, NUPENG, and PENGASSAN) in May, Kachikwu would declare rather magisterially afterwards that “All oil marketerswill be allowed to import PMS on the basis of FOREX procured from secondary sources and accordingly PPPRA template will reflect this in the pricing of the product”.

    Too bad that no one envisaged the terror that would be unleashed by the crippling forex scarcity – three months after. At a time, the naira officially sold for N199 to the United States dollars, the marketers had insisted on a ‘comfort exchange rate’ of N285 – the basis of which the May template which pegs petrol price at N145 per litre was determined. Today, the same naira has since hit N420 to the USD. Couldn’t anyone have envisaged the situation? Given the acute scarcity of forex – and the near impossibility of increasing supply of same in the foreseeable future, was it a case of postponing the evil day –a scenario of we will cross the bridge when we get there?

    It appears we are there much sooner than later. The situation, to be sure, is a Catch-22 situation. While the possibility of maintaining the current template and hence return to the ancien regime of subsidising petrol at a time the nation is desperately looking for funds for its programmes is would qualify as toxic proposition; the alternative, which is to allow the price to adjust to the dictates of the exchange mechanism (that is hike) in the situation of worsening poverty and unemployment is even worse.

    I would agree that the Buhari administration deserves understanding in some respects. That the nation currently spends 40 percent on forex is certainly not its making. Indeed, for a nation hung on imports as a result of the myopic policies of successive administrations before it, there is pretty little that the administration could have done to reverse the tide in any serious way particularly in the near term.This is where those blaming the administration for the current travails of the economy miss the point.

    It is however a different matter to suggest that the administration could not have foreseen some of the negative effects of its forex policy. After throwing the naira to the hounds, what does the government expect? That the petrol importer will to hold on to the prophecy of CBN governor Godwin Emefiele that naira will settle at N250 to the USD?

    That the spike of the dollar to N420 would be a passing phase hence the expectation that patriotic importers forbear with a price freeze?Ever heard of voodoo economics!

    I guess the choice ahead is tough enough without the thought of additional burden on the citizen or the requirement that the treasury pick the bill of the quantum differential from forex fluctuations. Whereas the former is guaranteed to send more citizens to their early graves, the latter will most certainly knock the bottom off the economy already struggling to wade through the bout of depression.

    My opinion? I will advise that the federal government let the season roll. Yes, the experts have spoken; it is not always the case that they are right. Left to choose between a dead or dying NNPC and premature sentencing of Nigerians to their early graves, Nigerians would gladly inter a contraption that has brought them more anguish than real service.

    The truth is – we are not even there yet.