The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Kogi: These inconclusive times

    Kogi: These inconclusive times

    Several years ago, Boko Haram elements operated almost at will in parts of Kogi State, notably  in the Igala and Ebira country, terrorising communities, blowing up prisons and setting free the inmates, and manufacturing the infernal bombs with which they wrought their signature devastation and ruin.

    They were flushed out unceremoniously.

    The terrain was never hospitable anyway, and they were too thinly dispersed to duplicate their vicious grip on the Northeast.

    Recently, however, residents of the capital, Lokoja, caught more than a whiff of Boko Haram’s ideological soul mates, the Taliban and the so-called Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), propagated wittingly or unwittingly by the state’s pathetically insecure governor, Yahaya Bello, product of a process that made a mockery of law, logic, common sense, and elementary decency.

    Residents of the city woke up one morning several weeks ago to find that, in the dead of night, some unidentified persons had bulldozed and pulverised just about every roundabout that beautified the landscape and eased the flow of traffic. Where they once stood, dusty, unsightly gashes stared at passers-by like open wounds.

    At this writing, no one has been arrested and charged with willful and malicious destruction of public property.  There is therefore reason to believe that if the demolition was not ordered from above – decreed personally by the governor, that is — it was surely carried out with his blessing.

    This conclusion is strengthened by what is being said in official circles that the structures were defective not just structurally but also aesthetically, and that they had to be taken down.

    But where is it documented that they were accident-prone or constituted safety hazards?  And why was that determination not communicated officially to the residents.

    Why, for that matter, did the structures have to be taken down, in the night, all of them, and in one fell swoop?  Why were they not taken down one or two at a time, and a schedule for their reconstruction published?

    In any case, how can a demolition derby be the priority of a government that cannot pay its employees their wages or pensions, sustain existing services and maintain public facilities — how can this be the first order of business of any government, even a clueless government headed by a an inconclusive governor aided by a legislature that is more inconclusive still?

    Scarce funds that should have gone to serve more productive ends will now have to be appropriated to rebuild structures that should not have been demolished in the first instance.

    Nigerians are used to seeing wrecking crews tear down all manner of structures on the grounds that they were built without official permits, failed to comply with specifications, constituted a danger to public and environmental safety, or that the space was required for overriding public purpose. But a government demolishing with petulant disdain public structures erected with public funds duly appropriated — perfectly innocuous, functioning structures for that matter?

    This barbarous recourse takes political brutalism to a new low.   It calls to mind the depredations of the Taliban in Pakistan, and of ISIL in Iraq and Syria.  The one has been smashing up monuments erected unto Buddha, and the other has been smashing up ancient artefacts that have over millennia stood witness to the civilisation of the Arab world.

    To be sure, the parallel is inexact.  But the conclusion is not far-fetched that the Kogi demolition derby springs from the same mindset as the depredations of the Taliban and ISIL.  It will come as no surprise, therefore, if inconclusive Governor Bello in one of those muggy nights for which Lokoja is notorious, dispatched his wrecking crew to smash up priceless artifacts of Nigeria’s colonial history dotting that city, among them Lord Lugard’s residence and Bishop Samuel Ajayi’s vicarage.

    Before Bello does so, it is necesssary to remind him that he cannot remain an inconclusive governor forever.  He will conclude his tenure one day, probably sooner than later.  Then, he will lose the immunity that has shielded him from prosecution for a contemptible crime against public property.

    The claim that the Kogi structures were torn down because they were judged unsafe or inappropriate is puerile.  By whose lights, it is necessary to ask again, were they so judged? And by what metrics?

    The real reason must be sought in the insecurity of the governing class, and the fetishism in which they have consequently sought redemption.  Exercising power without anything that can be called a mandate, Bello has more reason than any of his predecessors to feel deeply insecure, and therefore to resort to voodoo.

    When I was visiting the other day, the word out there in the streets of Lokoja was that Bello’s strategists – an ecumenical team cutting across all creeds —  had divined that all the roundabouts in the town were infernal booby traps under which lay some of the most infernal objects conceivable, interred there with the dastardly objective of making Kogi ungovernable.

    Deep inside one of the more prominent structures bulldozed, I gather that they found two corpses placed back to back and facing opposite directions.  The horrible symbolism did not escape the crack diviners.  The Ebira, the ethnic group which Bello belongs, were to be locked into permanent  enmity with the Kogi Yoruba, the so-called Okun, who constitute the political base of the rival claimant to the governorship, Abiodun Faleke.

    And this was just one of the malevolent designs encoded in more than 20 roundabouts to which the Kogi authorities took the bulldozer and the wrecking ball that muggy night.

    I was told that a room in one government office had been out of bounds for as long as anyone could remember.  There was no formal decree to that effect; it was simply that everyone high and low had learned to avoid it from a healthy instinct for self-preservation.

    Not Bello.  Acting on orders, one of his aides shot a stream of bullets into the lock in a bid to force it open.  Whereupon, I was told, a viscous red gushed out of the bullet holes as if from a geyser. Forensic experts have been working since then to unravel the mystery of the viscous red fluid. Their findings will no doubt be of interest to students of the para-normal.

    The bodies found deep inside what used to be a roundabout before Bello came inconclusively on the scene is a different matter, however.

    That site is a crime scene.

    Bello should have had the crime properly investigated with a view to bringing the perpetrators to justice.  Who were the persons entombed in the scene?  How did they meet their gruesome fate? Who placed their bodies there?  Who supervised the project, with what kind of inducement, from whom?

    I don’t envy him.

    In the Muhammadu Buhari era, life even after the most conclusive governorship is uncertain enough. An inconclusive tenure that throws up the prospect of criminal prosecution for malicious damage to public property and destruction of evidence at a crime scene has got to be the ultimate nightmare.

  • Two chambers, two spirits

    Two chambers: one, a putative pointer to a redemptive future; the other, a snarling mirror of a decadent past.

    That is the stark choice before a nation at a terrible crossroads — between an executive of rectitude and a parliament of turpitude.

    Which would it be?

    That is the harsh story behind the trial of Senate President, Bukola Saraki.  But Saraki himself, seeming unfazed poster boy of public notoriety, is only a fitting metaphor for the rotten chamber he heads.

    If the Saraki bloc wins, it would be back, full gallop, to the cumulative rot that brewed this present mess.

    If that bloc loses, Nigeria may well be on to some redemption; for the state would have institutionalised punishing prebendal sleaze, more or less a sickly norm, evidenced by Saraki’s continued resent of his lawful trial for alleged sleaze.

    Of course, neither the Buhari Presidency nor Saraki-headed National Assembly is a wholesale chamber of saints and sinners.  Indeed, the executive is no more an exclusive chamber of saints any more than the legislature is an exclusive chamber of devils.

    Still, between President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, and Senate President Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker, Yakubu Dogara, it is obvious which side inspires public confidence, when the issue is decent governance.

    And, as if to bare their fangs, up has come a so-called Senate G-77, reported junior senators bent on cutting their teeth in infamy, who, even with all the issues on ground, have passionately committed themselves to warring for own share of “juicy” committees — and, of course, defending Saraki!

    Who might they be levelling their angry guns at?  Ranking senators, whose alleged humongous appetite for “juicy committees” rankle!   Some juice!

    Between Saraki and this venal brood, therefore, would appear the all-too-common story of senatorial children of perdition — a doomed ensemble finding a ruined leader!

    But that is as true of G-77, as it is of the self-destruct 8th National Assembly, that would fully pay for its public service crimes at the fullness of time.

    But as much as Saraki (using the Senate to play the Samson, that would rather take everybody down for his personal foibles) kids himself he is the real deal, he is only a tool in the crafty and evil hands of the electorally vanquished, up in their fond game of blocking positive change in the lives of the people.

    Indeed, it doesn’t require any especial acuity: Saraki is only a poor puppet in the power game of the defeated PDP.  No crime — if the subject is political contestation, where fair would appear foul and vice-versa.

    But when the issue transcends petty political rascality, and becomes a vicious war to roll back gains against corruption, corruption that has, for too long, under-developed the people, resulting in mass anguish and pains, then it is nothing but capital crime of political hue: one side must die for the other to prevail.

    That is critical juncture Nigeria is right now.  Unfortunately, the ever sloppy Nigerian ruling elite, who got a historic second chance with the Goodluck Jonathan defeat of March 2015, are dozing through it all.

    They have forgotten, doomed souls: had Jonathan triumphed in 2015, with his spectacular personal incompetence and the monumental rot that had accrued under his watch, it is doubtful if, by now, they won’t all have been buried under its un-mourned rubble!  But doomed souls, they have forgotten!

    That is why the losing camp would plot, to the death, against the tackling of corruption, corruption whose roaring ocean may yet bury them all!

    That is why the winners’ camp would quake with savage growls over undelivered pork: who gets what in electoral war booty, after a thumping victory, resulting from spectacular electoral slaughter!

    As for the judiciary, it is the season of playing Pontius Pilate with the soiled hands of a sea pirate.  Nigeria’s judicial establishment, under CJN Mahmud Mohammed, make a great show of due process.

    But their body language would appear to  betray un-due process — or, in any case, if they had their way, illicit process in favour of corruption.  The only thing hindering them right now, it appears, is a hostile public opinion, which sits in merciless judgment, daring them to show their true colours.

    As for lawyers, the so-called priests in the temple of justice, from the courtroom rookie to the silk, they are the contemporary equivalent of Eli’s wayward sons, Hophni and Phineas, who turned their father’s noble ministry into a heinous swindle.  So, no matter the outrage from anywhere, there is no stopping this racketeering, under the guise of due process!

    Still, for all his personal failings, Jonathan became presidential flotsam and jetsam, to be thrown overboard for the power vessel to remain afloat, because of cumulative atrocities under previous PDP administrations from 1999.

    For all his anti-corruption affectations, President Olusegun Obasanjo (1999-2007) erected a stout pillar of corruption, political and governmental, on which subsequent PDP federal administrations built.

    Even in trying to find for transparency, Obasanjo’s simple minority impeachment code corrupted and corroded Nigeria’s nascent parliamentary processes.  It took the yeoman efforts from the now self-besieged courts to clear Obasanjo’s mess.

    But even then, at the apex of his hubris, he suborned the cream of Business Nigeria, extorted “donations” as sitting president and Oil minister, and with the proceeds, built himself a self-indicting temple of corruption, in the so-called Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library!

    Umaru Yar’Adua’s fault — goodly soul! — was allowing Obasanjo to talk him into accepting a job his failing health could not cope with.  But that fatal error heralded the ascent of Jonathan, whose tragic misreading of the situation, with his merry corruption-as-usual credo, resulted directly into this present mess.

    If Saraki, indeed, is the unfazed face of unrepentant sleaze in the public space, it should surprise no one that the alleged gross misdemeanour, for which the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) is trying him, started during Obasanjo’s second term.

    Any other proof that Jonathan, despite his personal fecklessness, was only the logical victim of an irredeemable system of corruption and rot fated to collapse, sooner than later?

    It is this putative collapse, and the resultant grief to all, that the Buhari Presidency is trying to avert.  That is the long and short of the epic war against sleaze, of which Saraki’s CCT case is only a grotesque metaphor.

    But it is also this epic but noble battle that Saraki’s Senate — the most diminished in the democratic history of Nigeria since 1960 — is trying to constitute a foolish bastion against.  Even then, Saraki and his vile senatorial hosts are only merry puppets in the cynical finger of PDP, which grand survival strategy is stalling on its old evil ways, in its deluded logic that evil would always trump good.  Still, that thinking, the last time round, fetched it an electoral bloody nose!

    But again, this is crunch time.  And there can be no sitting on the fence.  It is either you are for light or for darkness.

    Ripples casts his lot for light.  Where do you and yours stand?

  • Malami and Kogi crisis

    Malami and Kogi crisis

    After procuring an interim government for the people of Kogi State, it would seem inevitable that President Buhari’s Attorney General and Minister of Justice Abubakar Malami, SAN would go the extra mile to avail every prop to the contraption described as government strutting the Lugard House. After all, one of the established novelties about the current occupancy of the Kogi Government House is that the number one law officer, rather than the electoral umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC (certainly not the electors ) – actually helped to bring it into being by its strange ‘advisory’ of midnight substitution!

    After perusing the letter by AGF Malami addressed to the Inspector General Police, Solomon Arase on the on-going crisis in my dear state, one needed to look no further to know who the piper calling the current tunes in the state is! The hand may appear like Esau’s; there can be no doubting that the voice is that of Jacob! The masquerade, finally, has been unmasked right in the market square.

    Months after, and with the substantive issues surrounding the so-called “inconclusive” elections that brought a ‘stranger’ to the APC ticket still unresolved by the nation’s courts, Nigerians would no doubt remember that it all started from one man’s unsolicited advisory.

    They would certainly remember that on November 21, 2015 Kogi voters had trooped out to vote to elect a new governor. And also that the poll returned 240,867 votes for the APC ticket of Abubakar Audu and James Abiodun Faleke and 199,415 for Idris Wada and Yomi Awoniyi of the Peoples Democratic Party.  And then, Audu died.

    That in a rather bizarre twist to an election that was as good as concluded, a vacillating INEC had declared the poll ‘inconclusive’ AFTER an ‘advisory’ from the nation’s chief law officer, Malami.

    Yes, Malami it was that decreed the substitution of the APC ticket, letting in all manners of opportunistic developments on which the destiny of the state and its people is now hung!

    First, it was Yahya Bello – a runner up in the APC governorship primary, pronounced candidate without a running mate. Then, an Audu/Faleke ticket ordinarily seen as good to go – with 240,867 votes –later declared ‘technically’ voided. And finally a governor riding into the gubernatorial mansion with barely 6,000 votes!

    Some have argued that the AGF’s initial intervention, against the run of equity and fair-play is what has plunged the state into the current crisis. They are probably right. But then, it is the courts that have the final say on the matter. The fact however is that neither the party – APC nor the government it purportedly gave birth, have known peace ever since that intervention hence the current situation in which the state is not only at war with itself but a governing party torn right through the middle. Presently, the state lawmakers are set upon themselves with a group of five lawmakers, supported by the executive, not only driving the majority – described as G-15 – out of town, but have since assumed the functions of the whole house!

    In a new twist, APC leaders in the state went for broke penultimate week: they passed a vote of no confidence on Governor, Yahya Bello in what marks a new phase in the fratricidal war.

    It may well be that the travesty currently playing out at the Kogi State House of Assembly is nothing novel. After all, in 2009, Ogun State, under former governor Gbenga Daniel saw a group of minority lawmakers not only sack the majority, but went as far as daring them to come near the precincts of the parliament building at the risk of lives or limbs! It also happened in Ekiti, where Governor Ayodele Fayose led a group of six renegade lawmakers to sack the majority of 19 lawmakers. It played out in Rivers State, where six members with the backing of former President Goodluck Jonathan and wife, Patience, took on 27 lawmakers while purporting to remove the elected speaker, Otelemaba Amachree.

    If we thought that such travesties and barefaced impunity was gone with the PDP administration, the spectacle playing out in Kogi and the curious intervention by the AGF would seem to indicate that nothing really has changed!

    The issue is of course whether both arms of the National Assembly acted right in taking over the state House of Assembly. On this, it is expected that opinions would be divided.  However, what is not in dispute is that the state legislature was factionalised; neither is there any contention that the activities of the members had gone beyond mere legislative bickering to constituting a grave threat to the peace of the state. Or that a minority, G-5 with the active support of the police and the governor, had created a situation in which the lawmaking business could only be strictly on their terms or perhaps such other terms as dictated by the conniving but floundering executive!

    Be that as it may, AGF Malami would have us know that there was no “sufficient legal basis” for the National Assembly to have taken over the lawmaking responsibilities of the state legislature. That “sufficient legal basis”, according to him, would only happen when the entire state is on fire!

    How about the AGF’s ‘consequential order’ that “the determination by the National Assembly that the alleged impeachment of the Speaker of the House of Assembly by ‘five members of the House of Assembly’ was ‘null and void’ was an exercise of judicial power by the Legislature, contrary to Section 6 of the 1999 Constitution (as amended)…?

    I thought the courts, rather than the AGF, held the power to review the actions of the National Assembly, including the executive branch!

    Or this – that the National Assembly’s description “of the alleged action of the Nigeria Police Force in purportedly providing protection for five persons as an act that was tantamount to ‘subverting the provision of the Constitution’ as matters of constitutionality that are issues for judicial determination”?

    Interesting times indeed!

    I am not a lawyer and so cannot claim to comprehend Malami’s specious jurisprudence. What is perhaps least expected is that the nation’s chief law officer would become a facilitator of the absurdity going on in the state. But even more worrisome is that the AGF has not proven to be an uninterested party in the sordid affair that has thrown the state into limbo.

    For me, last week’s mumbo jumbo by IG Arase is an eye opener; I can’t wait for the time when the AGF finally makes his appearance before the parliament he so derided. It promises to be an interesting encounter.

     

  • Patricia Etteh: The fall and the triumph

    Patricia Etteh: The fall and the triumph

    Even by Nigerian standards, her rise was nothing short of dizzying.

    Literally out of nowhere – no I take that back; from the remote back bench of the House of Representatives, where she had sponsored no Bill, demonstrated nothing that could be called a grasp of parliamentary procedure nor made any memorable speech, Patricia Olubunmi Foluke  Etteh was catapulted to Speaker of House, in Nigeria’s pecking order the fourth most powerful person of the Realm, ranking behind the President, the Vice President and the Senate President.

    Elected from a federal constituency in Osun in 1999 on the platform of the opposition Alliance for Democracy, she had switched to the ruling PDP, “the biggest political party in Africa” as it called itself then without research, and held her seat in 2003. She won re-election four years later on its platform and succeeded Aminu Bello Masari in June 2007, when the PDP zoned the position to the so-called Southwest, thanks to her powerful sponsors.

    I recall the giddy excitement with which she travelled, entourage in tow, from one town to another, mainly in the Southwest, seeking royal blessings and, of course, basking in the accolade of Nigeria’s fourth most powerful person.  Among her devoted followers, that was not distinction enough; with the first three in the national pecking order being men, they had to present her as Nigeria’s most powerful woman.

    They had luck on their side.  The demure First Lady, Turai Yar’Adua, who knew how matters actually stood, allowed them to indulge their conceit.  Something tells me that if this had happened during her time in Aso Rock, Dame Patience Faka Jonathan would have summoned the Speaker and warned her solemnly to desist from pressing a claim that bordered on sedition and ordered her to rein in her misguided followers.

    The Dame might not even have needed to go that far.  A mere expression of disapproval would have done the job.  Fear of courting that famous disapproval was the beginning of political wisdom.   Ask those who had the temerity not merely to allege but to positively assert that the Chibok girls had indeed been abducted and spirited to places unknown.

    Etteh’s political opponents inside and outside the House did not take kindly to her preferment.  Aided by the envious, they mocked her modest educational attainments in and out of season.  The more polite among them dismissed her as a mere hairdresser; others given to slanderous talk portrayed her as little more than the indigent hair weaver who plied her trade by the roadside.

    In vain did she point out that she was a cosmetologist, qualified from one of the finest institutions in the business — in the UK for that matter, not in some Third World backwater, and certainly not from those fly-by-night Internet-based sites that offer training up to the doctoral level in everything from basket-weaving to brain surgery in 20 easy lessons.

    Her adversaries remained unmoved even after learning that she had earned a diploma in law from the University of Abuja, with a BSc in political science “in view.”  What this phrase meant in practical terms was unclear. It could mean that she intended to enter the programme one day. Or that she was enrolled in the programme and expected to graduate some years down the line.

    The sheer elasticity of that term played into her opponents’ hands; they berated and baited and taunted her endlessly.  For a while, she mustered enough support within the House and outside the House to maintain what was always a tenuous hold on the Speakership.

    In the end, Patricia Etteh’s fall, occasioned by allegations of sleaze, was almost as precipitous as her ascent had been steep.  The main charge was that she had unlawfully spent some N620 million – yes, 620 million Naira, not dollars, and not a misprint — in upgrading her official residence, and had awarded the contracts to her cronies.

    Today, that figure would have to be in the gazillions to cause a stir in the National Assembly, even if backed by indissoluble evidence of malfeasance pieced together by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission and the Code of Conduct Tribunal over the learned and not-so-learned objections of a trainload of attorneys manipulating every interstice of law and process to prevent the matter from coming to trial.

    What a difference two parliamentary sessions make!

    To continue:  Etteh’s response that the upgrade was not merely for her official residence but for a “cluster of houses” in which her residence and her deputy’s were the main structures did not move her vocal critics who, claiming to constitute the “Integrity Group” within the House of Representatives, demanded her resignation..  Another group, just as vocal in its support for Etteh, registered far less on the scale of probity and conviction.

    It all came to a showdown on the House floor, where one Dino Melaye, doubling as Etteh’s personal bodyguard and stalwart of the pro-Etteh group, displayed kick-boxing skills that   only the most accomplished mixed martial arts practitioner could have put together at short notice, nevertheless came out of the dust-up with his designer agbada shredded and his nose bloodied.

    But it was too little too late. Following several weeks of turmoil in the House, Etteh resigned as Speaker on October 30, 2007.  She had been just five months on the job. Having lost her exalted perch, she did not seek re-election and disappeared from the public view.

    Speculations were rife that she was away in London taking a refresher course, preparatory to setting up a world-class beauty parlour where she would employ her skills as a cosmetologist to groom  only the richest of the rich, with special rates for her former National Assembly colleagues and their spouses.

    Slanderers, all.

    Etteh was in fact immersed in legal and forensic studies at Buckingham University, in London, alma mater to an impressive list of public figures in Nigeria, among them the late Chris Okolie, Ebenezer “Ebino Topsy” Babatope and Prince Olagunsoye Oyinlola.

    With the LL.B. of that prestigious university under her belt, she now has the distinction of being the first trained Nigerian cosmetologist and lawyer of any gender.  If that title turns out to be disputed, this being Nigeria, she can withal lay unassailable claim to being the first and only female Speaker of the House of Representatives thus far.

    Welcome back, Madam Speaker, new and improved, a study in perseverance.  Long, long may you wear your hard-won wig and gown.

    You have returned to find Dino Melaye, allowing for the Lamborghini and prime real estate holdings in Abuja exactly where you had left him nine years— engaging in the verbal equivalent of mixed martial arts in defending another beleaguered principal, Senator Bukola Saraki, whom he has declared “un-removable”even as Saraki sinks deeper and deeper in the mire of disrepute with each passing day, taking the Senate along as his hostage.

    You will also have discovered that in Abuja, untrammelled racketeering is what now passes for law-making.

  • Senatorial rascality

    Senatorial rascality

    “Stealing, stealing, stealing, o stealing,

    Stealing in the name of the Lord,

    My father’s house of worship has become a den of thieves,

    Stealing in the name of the Lord …” — Max Romeo, reggae artiste

     

    There is an ongoing rascality in the hallowed Senate of the Federal Republic.  It is nothing but brazen institutional subversion, criminal breach of trust and monumental breach of faith.

    It is akin to what doomed Luficer from the brightest son of the morning, the most beautiful of the archangels and beloved of God Almighty, to Satan, the eternally damned prince of darkness.

    Dr. Bukola Saraki, the president of the Senate, is all but doomed — no thanks to his free choices.  All his present troubles — his trial before the Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT), the Panama Papers where his name isn’t exactly written in gold, et al — stream from conscious and deliberate choices he made in the past.

    Even the alleged trigger of his Code of Conduct Bureau (CCB) debacle, viz the accusations of dodgy declaration of assets to defraud the state — Saraki’s controversial emergence as Senate president — was a conscious and deliberate choice.

    When it was time to duel for the Senate presidency, every fair mind agreed it was Saraki’s constitutional right to run.  Besides, if his new-Peoples Democratic Party (nPDP) faction warred to gain the presidency for the All Progressives Congress (APC), it was only fair they were duly compensated in the new government.

    Now if, among the APC legacy parties, Muhammadu Buhari (Congress for Progressive Change) was occupying the presidency and Yemi Osinbajo (Action Congress of Nigeria) had landed the vice-presidency, it was only fair that nPDP be allowed a share of the victory spoils.  If that translated to the Sente presidency, so be it.

    All that was still within the confines of democratic equity, decency and fairness. But Saraki’s resort to outright perfidy changed that equation.

    You don’t betray your party, sell its due, the Senate deputy presidency, to the PDP, arrogantly shun intra-APC rapprochement to fill the other party positions, and expect not to murder sleep!  Remember the tale of Macbeth?  Glamis has murdered sleep, so Cawdor shall sleep no more!

    That is the long and short of Saraki’s current odyssey.

    Even the fuel for his judicial roasting (if you prefer the emotive bleat trending in the embattled senate President’s camp), Saraki merrily provided.

    His alleged dodgy declaration of asset, which will form the pillar of evidence against him in court, would appear a clear-eyed decision to cheat.

    So, is his newly exposed Panama Papers misadventure, in which he was alleged, as Kwara governor, to have bought a shell company off his wife for £3 million sterling.  Now, where did that huge dough come from?

    Which patriotic citizen would confect £3 million, from virtual nowhere, to consummate such an ultra-secret deal, as sitting governor?  Meanwhile the law was clear: such opaque business was absolutely forbidden.

    Did Saraki, in his high conceit, think impunity would last forever?  Did he think secrets would stay buried for aye?  Again, a clear, conscious and deliberate choice.

    But as Saraki made noxious past choices that now blight his present, he and his confederates, are making present choices that may yet blast their future.

    These devious Senate manoeuvres are a parliamentary equivalent of the Biblical money changers and other petty criminals turning the temple of the Most High into a filthy mart, from which the venal chief priest made a hefty kill.

    That inspired the Max Romeo number quoted above.  But so offensive was the original deed that even the meek and gentle Jesus was riled into his most ferocious bout of anger the Bible recorded.

    For Saraki’s sake, Senator Peter Nwabuoshi (PDP Delta) — this Peter seems founded on the quicksand of legislative cant not on the rock of fair legislation — is pushing a bogus amendment to the CCB&T Act.

    For Saraki’s sake, Senator Isah Misau (APC Bauchi) has launched a most cynical amendment to the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA) 2015.  Because that law exempts the court martial from its coverage, and CCT is not listed under section 6(6) of the 1999 Constitution as amended, stating the courts under ACJA purview, ACJA, posits Misau’s amendment, should be made not to operate in CCT!

    Disingenuous, isn’t it — so that Saraki can continue to dodge and hedge and stall, instead of grabbing legitimate opportunity to prove his innocence?

    For Saraki’s sake, Deputy Senate President, Ike Ekweremadu, presides over the provocative defilement of the grandest legislative portal in the land.  But who does not know the embattled Ike is also playing a vicious game of self-survival, being also doomed by the Senate rule forgery that catapulted Saraki and Ekweremadu into office?

    Help, legislative barbarians and Talibans, on a crude, pre-historic mission, are at Nigeria’s parliamentary gate!  But we would be damned if we just laid down to be slaughtered!

    But for these legislative dark angels who would, willy-nilly, fall with their Lucifer, Saraki’s comeuppance, based on a grating sense of entitlement, is long overdue.

    When Saraki the Father “ported” from the All Nigeria People’s Party (ANPP) in 2003, to teach then sitting Governor Mohammed Lawal (now dead) some harsh lessons in realpolitik, Saraki the Son was the joker.

    If I make others governor and they all prove ingrates, Baba Oloye mused, why not my own son?  Meanwhile, Kwara, the feudal colony, had no say at all.  It merrily acquiesced.

    That same sense of ernest and transparent entitlement would spur the Son to unhorse the Father.  After brother Bukola’s tenure, it was sister Gbemisola’s turn, in the Saraki Turn-By-Turn Kwara Unlimited!

    But he did right — for Baba Oloye’s hubris would probably had laid waste the Saraki dynasty enterprise, particularly in a conservative state with a sizable, if not predominantly, Muslim population.  But by handing his father filial humiliation, instead of honour, Saraki the Son doomed himself.

    Could that be the cause of the present Saraki troubles?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

    But one thing is clear: the Sarakis are in the second generation of democratic feudalism (never mind the contradiction in terms), where Kwara is only a vassal state.

    It is the same sense of feudal lordship that Saraki has brought to the Senate.  First, he emerged with a suspect rule the police have found to be pure forgery.  Then, he won’t exit until the laws are skewed, in the most bizarre of manners, so he can evade the law, to retain his Senate presidency.  What hubris!

    From the Evan-Evans tale of the late Evan Enwerem, first Senate president of the 4th Republic, the Senate has had its fair share of charlatans as leaders.

    But it is doubtful if the Senate has ever been put through a worse grill of muck, as Saraki and his band of desperadoes are now doing.  It is legislative gangsterism writ large!

    That is why Nigerians must take note of all the senators involved in this grand outrage. We must scour the law books to make them pay for their heinous rascality — after all, that a cleric enjoys ex-cathedral immunity does not shield him from crime he commits at his job.

  • Budget 2016: Saboteurs within?

    Budget 2016: Saboteurs within?

    The Muhamadu Buhari Presidency is alleging hideous “mutilation” of Budget 2016, just passed by the National Assembly.

    That is delaying the presidential assent to the Appropriation Bill; and the frenetic economic activity, with the probable money ease, expected to follow.

    The alleged “mutilations” affect key infrastructure proposals, including the coastal Calabar-Lagos standard gauge rail project.  Nigeria’s N60 billion counterpart funding, a crucial component of a proposed $2 billion (N400 billion) loan from China to implement the project, was allegedly expunged from the document.

    But that claim has drawn fierce legislative-executive  exchanges.  The National Assembly has riposted, through Abdulmumin Jibrin, House Approximation Committee chair, that the so-called Calabar-Lagos rail wasn’t originally part of the budget.  Ay, admitted the executive, but it was in the amended estimates the president re-submitted.

    According to a report in The Nation of Sunday of April 10, the parliament allegedly made a complete mess of estimates to complete crucial road arteries nationwide.  Instead of endorsing that spending plan, it shovelled funds for new roads, such that, at the end of the day, neither the old nor the new would have been completed.

    So did it make an alleged mess of the bulk of the health components of the social infrastructure the budget was designed to fund. Alleged over-provision for rural health facilities and boreholes, already provisioned for; and alleged scrapping of funds to buy drugs for major public health campaigns, like HIV/AIDS and Polio.

    But again here, the National Assembly balks.  The Health mix-up arose from the original padding, with the Health minister, it recalled, spectacularly disowning his ministry’s estimates.

    Now, after all the see-saw, what really is happening?

    Is this a case of a careless executive, pushing its fault on, and infernally scapegoating an already notorious National Assembly, which has not, for once, fired popular imagination?

    Or, internal sabotage, by an anti-development (if not outright anti-people) National Assembly, wilfully abusing its powers of budgetary oversight?

    Or just infantile politics by an errant ensemble, the supposed bastion of the people’s democratic dreams, hopes and aspirations, bent on turning all to a hideous nightmare?

    More worrisome: the news that the Lagos-Kano modern rail project was left intact but the Calabar-Lagos project was scrapped, introduced a noxious regional politics into the whole mix.

    If true, why would northern national legislators band together to pass the Lagos-Kano rail project but the southern ones, in both the Senate and the House of Representatives, conspire to let go of a key infrastructure thrust, that could change the face of the South East and South-South economies for good?

    For the South-South and South East representatives, could it be a case of mindless spite, the political equivalent of cutting your nose to spite your face?

    For the South West ones, a case of culpable indifference that damned the politically grumpy South East and South South to stew in their perceived spite?

    If that were true, wouldn’t the South-South, despite its huge oil resources, no thanks to its own lawmakers, make itself Nigeria’s political Tantalus?  Tantalus (from which came the English word “tantalize”) was the Greek wretch, fated to eternally gawk at choice fruits and sparkling water, but never tasting neither!

    Indeed, if South-South parliamentarians share the mentality of Rivers Governor, Nyesom Wike, who because of political differences with his predecessor would abandon the state’s monorail project, then they would have put the South-South in further developmental bind.

    And is the South East, due to nothing but bad politics, resigned to its perennial anthem of “marginalization”, when its representatives could make a huge difference by playing the politics of development, as opposed to politics of spite?

    But at the end of it all, isn’t everyone in a lose-lose situation, further  deepening the intolerable mass poverty and lack of opportunities in the land?

    O, could this “dummy” be why the National Assembly wanted to blind-sight the president into signing the bill without providing him with the detailed breakdown?

    That the president wouldn’t give the National Assembly the benefit of the doubt — doesn’t that raise a big question about the legislature’s trust quotient?

    Questions, questions, questions!  But at the end of the day, the answer lies in the National Assembly leadership.

    Since 1999, when President Olusegun Obasanjo roasted the National Assembly in the furnace of the controversial furniture allowance, the national legislature has never really recovered its image.  So, should there be any controversy, not a few would rather pronounce it guilty, before it proves its innocence!

    With the current 8th National Assembly, that perceived integrity gap even got worse.

    To start with, the rule by which the Bukola Saraki-led leadership in the Senate emerged was a forgery.  The Police already investigated and established that forgery.  But somehow, the Federal Attorney-General, for curious reasons, would not press a charge, as required under the law.

    Then, there are the many troubles of Senate President Saraki, all hinged on alleged lack of basic integrity in government and scant regard for public morality.

    The ongoing Code of Conduct Tribunal trials and the newly brewing Panama papers scandals have cast a serious pall on the corporate integrity of the legislature — if the fish’s head is rotten, isn’t the body dead? — and its leadership’s likely temptation to fudge and block, just to have one back on the executive, allegedly orchestrating the CCT trials.

    The putative motive to stall even gets starker, when the subject is political nitty-gritty.  The trade-off to make Saraki senate president changed the power calculus. Rebel APC legislators banding with the PDP, which strategic interest is seeing the APC government fail, further points in the direction of plausible sabotage of the budget, to settle political scores.

    Is Budget 2016, programmed to reflate the economy and give Nigerians a new lease of economic life, a victim of political war gaming?  No conclusive proof.  But there appears a disturbing pointer.

    That is why Nigerians must rise and rally against any such negative manifestation.  With the current pains in the land, this budget is too important to be left to the whims and caprices of degenerate politicians.

    So, the executive and legislature must make a success — and fast — of their ongoing palaver to sort out the mess.

    As for probable saboteurs, that is a grand betrayal of sacred trust.  A legislator is to make laws for the good of his polity, not to play politics to inflict more pains on his electors.

    That is why the electors, betrayed and hurt, must take specific notices of such errant and irresponsible behaviour; and punish hard, whoever is culpable, at the next electoral cycle.

  • Buhari in China

    Buhari in China

    By the time you are reading this, it will be Day 2 of President Muhammadu Buhari’s five-day visit to China. A major highlight of the visit is the signing of a $2 billion package to finance some critical infrastructure. Although still sketchy, the details, we are told, include a brand new railway from Lagos to Calabar and from Lagos – Kano, in addition to sundry projects ranging from agriculture, mining, electric power generation and road construction.  Call it the fruits of the earlier visit in February of Buhari’s Finance Minister Kemi Adeosun to Beijing, the projects are expected to give practical effect to the change agenda.

    We have certainly been there before. If anything, Nigerians must be wondering if there is some magic in China that makes it mandatory for successive Nigerian leaders to worship in the Far East country’s altar of “agreement”. Recall that in April 2005, President Olusegun Obasanjo was guest to Chinese President Hu Jintao. The 2005 visit, his third to the country, ended with signing of some cooperation documents. Both countries, we were told, had “agreed to establish a strategic partnership within the framework of South-South cooperation and to enhance political and economic cooperation”.

    What followed in October 2006 was the signing of an $8.3-billion contract for the construction of a railway line from Lagos to Kano. At the signing, President Obasanjo gleefully announced to Nigerians that the “new standard gauge track, north-south line was only the first phase of a modernisation programme that would cover two major longitudinal lines”. The second, he said, would link Port Harcourt with Jos and “five latitudinal lines that would also link all the 36 state capitals in Nigeria”. Under that first phase, about 1 315km of standard rail line was to have been constructed –to be financed by the $2.5-billion loan facility granted by the Chinese government.

    July 2013, it was the turn of President Goodluck Jonathan. In a visit that spanned four days, an accord to facilitate $1.1bn in low-interest loans for much-needed infrastructure was also signed. The loan, according to Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, Jonathan’s finance minister who also coordinated the economy at the time, was part of $3bn approved by China at interest rates of less than three percent.

    The foregoing is to show Nigerians are no strangers to the Chinese. They are, to put it in local parlance, our customers. Just as they are also no strangers to railway modernisation that successive administrations have continued to sell as dummy – or the China Civil Engineering Construction Corporation (CCECC) – a company that has proven in time, as the undertaker of the Nigerian railway system. Didn’t the same CCECC undertake the Sani Abacha-era modernisation that did little to improve the railway system?

    And where are we today? Like the moribund power sector that continues to gulp billions and billions of taxpayers money with less and less electric power to distribute, the truth is that the billions of dollars sunk into the rail sector – a good chunk of which were borrowed funds – have neither transformed nor adequately serviced the Lugardian contraption bequeathed to us by the colonial authorities.

    The Obasanjo modernisation project, despite the noise, practically achieved nothing. In fact, no sooner than the late President Umaru Yar’Adua assumed office than he ordered what was later described as “scoping” of the project – a euphemism for scaling down. At issue was the opaqueness of the contract. Specifically, the contract was said to have been inflated from the original $5.billion to $8.3billion; it also reportedly fell short of due process.

    The Jonathan-era revitalisation of the Lagos-Jebba rail lines which reportedly cost the treasury over N12 billion was no different. Today, few Nigerians remember the incident of a coach careering off the tracks moments after commissioning.  Same for the rehabilitation of the 2,119 kilometres Eastern rail lines which reportedly cost N67 billion; it turned out be one of Jonathan’s re-election projects.

    Not even the flagship modernisation project, the Abuja-Kaduna fast train, funded with US$500 million dollars concessionary loan from China Exim Bank and SURE-P funds is without its fair share of controversy. The last time, the Project Manager of the constructing firm – the Chinese Civil Engineering and Construction Company, Etim Abak, told the Senate Committee on the Federal Capital Territory that “former President Olusegun Obasanjo awarded the Abuja Rail Project in 2007 without an engineering design or a Memorandum of Understanding”. He alleged that the Minister of FCT and current governor of Kaduna State, Mallam Nasir el-Rufai, “signed the $841.645,898m contract based on an uncalculated estimate”. Nigerians also heard that the contract, which covered 60.67-kilometres, was inflated by $10million per km and that the length was later reduced to 45km without refund of the cost for the 15.67 km that was hived off from the project!

    Today, Nigerians have stopped wondering where zillions of dollars contracted in their name under the guise modernisation went. As in all things public, it has simply gone with the wind.

    So what do we expect this time? Not much difference I guess. First, the Nigerian officialdom, the scourge of many an otherwise well-conceived projects, is alive and well. Although the usual culprit is the nation’s number pathology, Corruption Incorporated, there is however more in the benign pathology of bad faith, bungling ineptitude and the benumbing incompetence that makes the Nigerian public service the circus that it has become.

    Think of the controversies that have dogged Budget 2016 as only a symptom of a deeper, malignant affliction. It explains why the power sector is prostrate; why the highways have become hell-ways; it explains why our aeroplanes sometimes fall from the skies. It is called the Nigerian factor. Picture, at a time of grave emergency, something as ordinary as preparing a budget and its associated process of passage eventuating in virtual lockdown! And we are not talking of implementation time when the vultures would come swooning for their share of the N6 trillion pie!

    As President Buhari gets down to sign the dotted lines of his $2 billion package, he would do well to remember that the battle is on two fronts: the Nigerian daemon and our Chinese friends.

    Far from defeated, the Nigerians daemon is  only in the waiting mode. In the circumstance, the battle is not even half won. In contending with them, he will surely have his hand full.

    So also are our Chinese “friends”. The President will need to shine his eyes well well! In a world where rabid self-interest rules, there is no such thing as a friendly enemy; either a friend or a foe. As they say, half bread is better than none – only if the bread is not laced with poison! President Buhari would also do well to inform his Chinese hosts that dumping of fake and substandard goods is not only hurting our economy, it is  killing Nigerians in record numbers. Of course, we need help, the type that would lift our material conditions as opposed to those that would enslave.  Nigerians know what I am talking about!

    Once again, Mr. President, you will do well to shine your eyes. Have a safe trip, sir!

  • The Senate’s Order-gate: A reprise

    The Senate’s Order-gate: A reprise

    If it seems churlish to bring up yet another tawdry matter involving Dr Bukola Saraki at a time he is battling desperately to save his increasingly tenuous political future, the blame belongs squarely in his camp.

    The matter centres on the investigation, concerning which little has been heard lately, of the status of the instrument on which Saraki and his confederates relied to foist him on the Senate as its president and Ike Ekweremadu a stalwart of the minority PDP, as deputy president.

    I will return to that issue presently.

    After Saraki had forlornly employed every trick on and off the statute books — aided by a trainload of some of the most senior attorneys in the business — to block the Code of Conduct Tribunal from putting him in the dock on charges of perjury, he declared that he was glad he was finally getting a chance to prove his innocence in a court of law.

    It was as if the CCT and those he has accused of subjecting him to “political persecution” had prevented him from having his day in court.

    Testimony by the first prosecution witness has pointed at malfeasance on Saraki’s part on a scale almost beyond belief.   But one has learned not to jump to conclusions in these matters.  The hallowed principle of audi alteram partem – Hear the other side – must be our guide.  Besides, our laws presume an accused person innocent until he or she is proven guilty.

    Still, it does not help Saraki’s cause in the least that several days into his trial, he was named in leaked documents — the so-called Panama Papers – purportedly detailing all manner of shady transactions in shell companies based in offshore tax havens, along with some of the world’s most powerful and influential figures.

    His answer to the charge that he failed to declare assets belonging to his wife as required by law was that the assets at issue belonged to his wife’s well-heeled family.  Not so, says his wife’s attorney.  The assets belong to Mrs Toyin Saraki, not to her family, the attorney has asserted. If true, this disclosure can only complicate matters for Saraki

    In whatever case, it has strengthened calls for Saraki’s resignation from his Senate colleagues, civil society organisations and diverse groups.  They are saying that, given the charges arrayed against him, he has lost the legitimacy and moral authority to remain in office. And they have vowed to embark on demonstrations to press their case.

    All this, Saraki has said dismissively, is the work of his “political foes” out to turn his ongoing trial into a tool to damage his “political career.”

    Some career!

    Such people, he said through his ill-used chief spokesman, Yusuph Olaniyonu, had started distributing money and other materials to faceless civil society organisations, market men and women associations and other shadowy groups with a view to instigating demonstrations in Lagos, Abuja and Ilorin.

    Saraki should know, being a past master at such things.

    “They believe that the ongoing trial at the Code of Conduct Tribunal provides them the opportunity to stampede Dr. Saraki out of office so that their defeated objective of getting their lackey into the office of Senate President will be realised,” the statement continued.

    Blaming everyone except himself as is his trademark, Saraki added:  “This is another desperate move by these spineless (emphasis mine) politicians to achieve through the back door what they failed to realise on the floor of the Senate.”

    Here, Saraki, sly as ever, is resorting again to the threadbare claim that his “election” to the office of Senate president over the objections of his “political foes” — in actuality the hierarchy of the ruling APC and all but a handful of the APC majority in the Senate —was the root cause of his problems.  But the Code of Conduct Bureau’s investigations predated his so-called election and were grounded substantially on petitions filed by public interest groups in Kwara where he had reigned as governor for eight rapacious years.

    There was always something underhanded, insidious and smart-alecky about the process through which Saraki, in stark pursuit of his personal ambition, conspired with all 49 members from the Opposition PDP and nine renegades from the APC to wrest control of the Senate from the ruling APC.

    The extant rules stood impregnably in the way of this creepy project.  So, new rules had to be devised and pressed into immediate service.  To create the illusion that everything was being done by the book, make it clear from the outset that the exercise was undergirded by the Senate’s own rule-book, to wit:  Standing Orders 2015 “as amended.”

    That phrase, designed to assure the public that scrupulous adherence to law lay at the heart of the process that threw up Saraki and Ekweremadu as the Senate’s leaders, instead gave away the game in a manner the conspirators had not envisaged.

    It immediately begged several searching questions:  Amended by whom?  When? Where?  And how?

    When the 7th Senate was prorogued, the law in force was the Senate Standing Orders 2007 “as amended,” according to the best authorities.  And until the Senate convened to elect new officers, it transacted no official business whatsoever.

    So, how did Standing Orders 2007 (as amended), which required all members of the Senate to participate in the nominating and voting for the Senate president and deputy president morph into House Standing Orders 2015 (as amended), which states rather lamely that members of the Senate are entitled to participate in voting for Senate president and deputy president?

    The import of this disingenuous phrasing in the 2015 document is that any senator who did not participate in nominating and voting for the Senate leaders had done so by choice.  It was designed to put a seal on the legislative coup Saraki and his confederates were planning to stage with just one-half of the Senate membership present and voting.

    As far back as July 2015, the police had determined that the document at issue was a forgery.  The Director of Public Prosecutions of the Federation, Mohammed Diri, issued a legal opinion concurring in that finding and recommended that those behind it be identified and charged with criminal conspiracy, forgery, breach of official trust, and unlawful assembly.

    Toward that end, the legal opinion also set forth some questions the police should answer definitively, namely:  Who authorised promulgation of Senate Standing Order 2105? Who published it? Who approved it?  Who paid for its publication?  Who distributed it?

    The Ministry of Justice, then headed by immediate past Solicitor-General of the Federation and permanent secretary of the Ministry of Justice, Abubakar Yola, also concurred in the legal opinion and stated that the Senate leadership election, based as it was on forged documents, was null and void.

    But the Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, AbubakarMalami (SAN), who took office four months after the legal opinion was issued has not formally entered nolle prosequi, but that is the practical effect of his being disinclined to commence prosecution.

    Cui bono?  Whose interest is he serving? Whom is he protecting?

    The police seem just as disinclined to pursue investigations to answer the questions formulated by the DPP. Again, cui bono?

    What more will it take to move the nation’s chief law officer and the nation’s law enforcement agency to discharge their duties as spelled out in the Constitution that those who confected House Order 15 and their proxies have so brazenly subverted?

    Despite all the buffeting, Saraki has served notice to the “spineless politicians” aforementioned and their misguided agents that he would not allow any distraction to take him away from his responsibility as President of the Senate and Chairman of the National Assembly.

    Some responsibility!

    It is almost as if the post is his birthright.

    He is either practically unconscious or he is too far gone in his hubris and his overweening sense of entitlement to see that the game is up.

  • Growing up amidst brands

    Growing up amidst brands

    To no particular purpose, I found myself thinking the other day of some of the brands I have known since childhood. To my surprise, a good many of them are still around, a tribute to their durability in an era in which many artifacts hardly live up to their vaunted billing and many more are as evanescent as rainbow gold.

    The house in Kabba was full of brands.

    Dad drove a Mercury V8 sedan, shaved with Gillette razor blades, wrote his journal entries in Lett’s Desk Diary with a Parker 51 fountain pen with a ceramic cobalt-blue barrel and a gold clip that used only Quink ink, squirted Peak milk into his occasional afternoon cup brewed from original Lipton tea leaves that came in a yellow can, sweetened it with Tate and Lyle sugar, did his official correspondence on a portable Remington typewriter, followed world and local news on a Bush radio powered first by Exide car battery and later by a bulky Berec battery pack, and litup the family lounge at night with a Tilley gas lamp.

    Fuel for the car and for Dad’s trucking business came, first, in 44-gallon steel drums, and later from the Mobil filling station, the only one in town.  Sunflower Kerosene came in squat tin receptacles holding four imperial gallons.

    Back then, the BSA motorcycle was a big status symbol, even if it came with a single ‘silencer’. The double-silencer model was capital. Even a Raleigh or Rudge bicycle got you some attention.

    I cannot recall when I last saw or used Tate and Lyle’s cubed sugar. It dissolved far too slowly, but that was no accident, I would gather some decades later.  The manufacturers had taken into account the tropical clime in which it was marketed.  If it did not stand up to the moist and damp air, it turned deliquescent and messy.  The British were ever so thoughtful.

    Not so the French.  They made their St Louis cubed sugar dissolve almost in an instant, and it soon supplanted the British brand.

    I used to gaze with envy at two older brothers holidaying from high school as they spread Blue Band margarine on boiled yam at breakfast or lunch.

    Star beer was the beverage of entertainment; in fact it was synonymous with beer, and its pitch man was the delightful cartoon character  Sammy Sparkle, who thought nothing of stopping cricket matches because it was time for Star.  They said the beer went well with Bicycle cigarette.

    Talking of beverages:  In the beginning there was Krola, which looked and tasted like what would later enter the market as Coca cola. From a distance, Guinness Stout, with its dark like Kola could well have been another name for that line of beverage was just another name and would taste just the same.

    One day I pilfered a half-pint bottle from a crate Dad kept in a store for his visitors from out of town. Unable to open it, I drove into the crown a sharp iron stake, the type the women of the house used for checking whether the yam in the huge cast-iron kettle that stood on three legs was ready for pounding.

    As its content burst forth in a foaming cascade, I seized the bottle with both hands and took a mouthful.  It tasted like cascara sagrada, a popular purgative in those days that was almost as repellent as liquid quinine. I spilled it out immediately.  Since then I have not touched Guinness Stout.

    Ovaltine was far and away the favourite family beverage, with or without milk and sugar.  Surreptitiously shoveling heaps of the brown powder into the mouth was always a delightful even if illicit and hence punishable pleasure.  Nescafe has been just as durable.

    Remember Trebor peppermints? Whether rectangular or round, it kept your throat agreeably tingled, and freshened your mouth and your breath. I haven’t checked them out lately but they were in the market up to several years ago, handed out to shoppers in place of small change the paper currency could not accommodate.

    Good old Vaseline must be one of the most durable ointments ever manufactured.  Usually standing on the shelf beside it was Mentholatum in the white and blue container that looked like a snuff box.  It was balm you used for almost every purpose.  Thermogene, in the white and red snuff box, was for external use only.

    If you bruised or sprained your knee or ankle, there was always Dr Sloan’s liniment, bearing Dr Sloan’s lean, mustachioed visage on the pack in which the bottle came and on the bottle itself. Are you by any chance reading this, Professor Remi Olatunbosun, alumnus of Igbobi, formerly of the University of Lagos, and most recently of the University of Birmingham?

    Talking of medications, there was the analgesic of first resort, APC, which the former first lady Patience Faka Jonathan, having regard to the contemporary political formation of the same name, dismissed as an expired drug?   In the event, what expired was the debauched kleptocracy over which her husband gleefully presided.

    For tough laundry jobs, there was Key soap, which came in long bars.  More delicate laundry called for Sunlight, which came in tablets as did the pinkish toilet soap Lifebuoy.  I haven’t seen Sunlight soap in a long time, but Lifebuoy is alive and well.  I recall buying a tablet from a supermarket in the United States last summer, more from nostalgia than from pressing need.

    If you wanted to add some sparkle to white fabrics, you soaked them in water containing a pinch of Robin Blue (aquamarine), rinsed gently, and put them out to dry. The stuff is still very much around.

    If you wanted your skin to be as lustrous as that of eight of every ten film stars who regularly used it, then Lux toilet soap was your brand, though I had no idea who a film star was.  Lux is still on the supermarket shelf.  Is Pepsodent still there?   It was the toothpaste you graduated to after dispensing with your chewing stick.  Yardley’s was the obligatory face powder for men.,

    The first men’s designer shirt I recall noting was Aristocrat.  Later came Rael Brook and Arrow and Double 2 and Van Heusen, made by the finest European clothiers.  Of these, only Arrow and Van Heusen are still highly visible in the stores, but they are more likely to have been made in the sweatshops of Thailand or Vietnam or Pakistan.

    Cecil Gee leather shoes with two-inch high crepe soles were à la mode.  Does anyone still wear them?  Then there was the quiet elegance of Clarks sandals, of which the quintessence was perhaps the Cross sandals.

    Even today, we still think of Afghanistan as a remote, inaccessible place that might as well be on the other side of the moon.  But it existed back then in our daily life through the indelible ink Kandahar, probably made in that city, now a metaphor for the mayhem that always places that country in the news focus for the wrong reasons.

    Asepso, the tablet soap containing mercury iodide, was a favourite among those bleaching the skin or those who wanted to make their faces picture-perfect.  Lather it on to the face, leave for several minutes, then wash it off, and you got the desired result.  If you let the lather stay on the fact for too long it could turn your face into a puffy mess.

    The Singer sewing machine has run the entire gamut from manual to electric and to electronic, apparently without compromising whatever it was that made the brand synonymous with sewing.

    Back then, Hoover used to be the first and last thing, indeed the only thing, in vacuum cleaning.  So much so that one of the officials of the Abacha regime grew up bearing that name, on account of his predilection for gobbling up every good thing in his sight.

    He was the original obtainer.

  • Budget and its myths

    Budget and its myths

    With the reported passing of the budget by the National Assembly last week, the game of endurance to which Nigerians have been subjected would appear to be over. Barring that the issues raised by the President on the budget becoming another occasion for mutual recriminations and needless showmanship, Nigerians can heave a sigh of relief that the balm in finally at their doorsteps.

    Thanks to the enduring myth that everything begins and ends with what government chooses to do or not to do, the ritual of budget and budgeting have come to acquire the character of a fetish. The manufacturer, we are told, needs to know the direction government is headed before plodding on; same for our flight-by-night portfolio investor friends – they can’t seem to find the nerves to do anything until the budget is passed! Even the farmer, we are told, has learnt to hold back his cropping plans for the fear of the government magic called the budget! Hopefully, their nightmares are over!

    Agreed, the budget is an important document. Not only does it lay out the government‘s financial plan, the statement embodies its philosophy and its priorities in a given year. To that extent, it is very important. My point of departure is when the instrument is elevated to the level of fetish – in which case it becomes an alibi for doing nothing!

    Let me state that this year’s budget is important in more ways than one for the Buhari administration. First, beyond the fact that it is the administration’s first budget in office, the wave of expectation that swept it into office makes it a defining one.  Added to that is that the budget is coming at a particularly difficult time – a period of low oil revenues at a time of massive infrastructure gaps, worrisomely low industrial cum manufacturing capacity and low consumer spending. Indeed, those understandably were the challenges Budget 2016 sought to confront. Expansive in ambitions, it coming was to herald the proverbial crossing of the Red Sea.

    I have argued elsewhere that the N350 billion set aside for capital spend in the 2016 Budget is a huge amount by any standard. Even by Nigeria’s profligate standards, it represents a haul, which, well applied could go a long way to make a difference to the parlous infrastructural situation – even if, as we know, that the tidy sum, in the hand of our thieving cabal may be no more than ‘chicken change’ to service their idle fantasies. This is where the long-suffering Nigerians who have in the past few weeks endured the sweltering sun in vain search for fuel to buy, the citizens currently under the throes of insomnia from the unbearable heat after being sucked into the evil devices of the utility companies, and for whom the administration had promised relief, would need to pray!

    Let me proceed by setting out some of the myths that have endured about our budgets against the backdrop of what the budget cannot do. First is the idea of the budget as cure-all pills to our many troubles. It is certainly not! As a financial statement, what it does is set out parameters for what is achievable in a given year – and this to the extent that the constraining variables would allow. This is where the ritual of shadow-boxing comes to me as a great distraction. If you ask me, I’ll say that the time spent picking needless quarrels on the budget details would be better saved to ensure that citizens get value for every kobo spent!

    I have looked at Budget 2016. I have no reason to see it as more of the same as some critics are wont to do. The intentions are certainly grand as the motif is fascinating. For the throng out there who see government as catalyst, the expansionary budget should resonate in a positive way. The truth however is that the 2016 Budget outlay is at best a tiny droplet in the ocean of the nation’s infrastructural needs. For instance, in June last year, this newspaper quoted Africa Infrastructure Country Diagnostic (AICD) 2011 Report as estimating that Nigeria required sustained spending of $14.2 billion per annum over the next decade in order to address the infrastructure challenge. That is some 45 percent of the entire 2016 Budget – to be spent exclusively for infrastructure upgrade alone! And this at a time we are celebrating 30 percent capital votes as great achievement!  The newspaper also quoted former Finance Minister and Coordinator of the Economy, Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala as putting the sum needed for road upgrades, bridge repairs, the energy sector, hospitals and schools at a whopping N10.63 trillion ($67 billion). Again, if we compare with the entire 2016 Budget of N6.06 trillion; the stark reality of what we face comes very clear.

    I do not deny the potential impact of a well structured budget intervention can make. By this I mean the direct impact of the upgrade of the infrastructure on the cost of doing business and the multiplier effects of the massive spending at this time. It is however a different matter to pretend that we are anywhere near the Eldorado when we are in fact a long way from home!

    The above scenario comes to one basic truth: government’s role comes to a minor scratch given what is needed to turn things around. The crux of the challenge is how to meet the funding gap. In this, we certainly have a good idea of where to turn to help – the private sector. This is where the government needs to put more efforts.

    Perhaps I need to make the distinction here: I do not here refer to the oft-touted portfolio investor who have long mastered the art of reaping without really sowing, the throng that is loudest in promoting and adorning sundry in-equities under the garb of liberalisation; the club ever so ready to hit the wires at the onset of trouble.

    I am here talking here of genuine investors who truly appreciate and are willing to take advantage of the nation’s vast potentials to invest. Trust me: with the right ambience and incentives, they’ll come trooping in!

    Finally, one thing which the budget will never address is the fuel crisis. Today, the crisis has not only reached the boiling point, it has metastasised to such an extent that the nation current chaffs under its debility. I refer here to the 40 percent of the entire forex outlay spent on fuel importation. Picture the difference it would make to the naira if we didn’t need to spend that amount on fuel importation. Can anyone imagine the other countless possibilities from that prospect? We need those kind of multipliers fast!