The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Whither Buhari Bounce?

    Whither Buhari Bounce?

    Nine months after, Nigerians may have found that they rejoiced too soon about the so-called Buhari Effect and its presumed impact on our public institutions. For die-hards of the Buhari administration who only a while ago thought little of appropriating the modest appearances of “progress” observed few days after the coming of the new Sheriff, going as far as investing it with a garb of extraordinariness, it must be a new lesson in the day that the magic has turned to a mere fleeting shadow given the nation’s steady regression of the last three weeks.

    For the throng, it must be a terrible time indeed.

    Across the board, the indices are anything but “progress”. If anything, it’s more of the same – worse in some respects. The nation’s currency – the naira – is in terrible shape. By weekend, it traded N320 to the United States dollars. Our foreign reserves – no thanks to the plunge in oil prices – are in full negative flight. From $28.2 billion in January, it shrunk further to $27.8 as at the end of February – barely enough to cover four months of imports. For an import dependent nation – with practically nothing, save oil to export, that can only spell trouble.

    The security situation remains as troubling as ever. Presently, our gallant troops may well be on the final stages of routing the band of insurgents – the Boko Haram – in the North-east, the Fulani herdsmen – our new nightmares –  are off the leash with their orgy of rape, killing and maiming not-so-fellow Nigerians. The same with the menace of kidnapping that have assumed epidemic proportion.

    As if the situation is not grim enough, our old nightmares have returned in full force. The fuel shortages have returned full blast – never mind that it never really went anywhere. Yet again, it is a season of finger-pointing: the government blames the two foremost unions in the industry; the unions on their part – ever so eager to dredge up all manners of ‘agreements’ with the employers and government to justify their penchant for strikes – in turn accuse the government of reneging on them. The third leg in the triumvirate, the marketers blame the government for falling behind in its obligations to them; the government in turn accuse them of lacking in patriotism or of outright sabotage. Ever heard of deregulated chaos?

    The same is true of the power sector. A decade plus after the coming of the Power Sector Reform Act, what we have done is replace government monopoly with the reign of a cartel of disparate players answerable to no one in particular! And now we are learning that beneath the façade of changes are the same old, crippling structures of inefficiency, corruption, red tape and tyranny of a hubristic kind! Imagine when we thought things had changed for the better; and at a time we are supposed to be ramping up power generation, all it took was a bunch of brigands and outlaws to throw the system into crisis to let us know that things are not as they seem. And now for that, we have a paralysis that has endured for three weeks running!

    If the lessons of the current paralysis said to have been caused by vandalism and the sabotage of power infrastructure are any instructive, it is how very little things have refused to change; it is a classic throwback to the ancien regime.

    And now, in what must be a cruel irony, the throng once described by Presidential handlers as wailing wailers are not only having fun, they have drawn a new battle in our minds on the state of the nation with their brand new hash-tag – #Bring back corruption (read Goodluck Jonathan)!

    Stumbling on their verse in the cyber-sphere recently, I couldn’t but chuckle:

    With Corruption a bag of pure water was N80 / Without Corruption a bag of pure water is N150

    With Corruption dollar was N180 / Without Corruption dollar is N400

    With Corruption I have 20hrs electricity at low tariff / Without Corruption I have 7hrs electricity with 45% increase in tariff

    With Corruption Keke to my house takes N50 / Without Corruption Keke to my house takes N100

    With Corruption smallest Indomie was N40 / Without Corruption smallest Indomie is N60

    With corruption a bag of rice costs N8,500 /  Without corruption it is N14,000.

    # I stand with Corruption

    # Bring back our corruption

    Do I smell Stockholm syndrome here – a psychological phenomenon in which the victim express empathy, sympathy and positive feelings toward the victimiser – a longing for a return to bondage, the proverbial Egypt?

    As for the wailers, if we excuse their artful preying on the nation’s tragedy as indeed mischief laden in their verse, not so their cruel, opportunistic displacement of effect for cause in their explanation of the current morass for which they are most culpable. Much as they are entitled to their nostalgia about the laissez-faire regime and its ethos of plunder –which they are not even ashamed to admit to – their attempt to place things on the same pedestal with the salvaging administration only because of the palpable frustration with the latter’s slow pace, or if you like, its rather pathetic response to the broad range of challenges hobbling the economy, must pass as the greatest affront to the sensibility of every self-respecting Nigerian.

    This however is hardly a denial that the growing impatience with the Buhari administration is anything but real. For instance, Governance Advancement Initiative for Nigeria (GAIN) in their February survey reportedly found that more Nigerians for the first time since December 2015 scored Buhari low on jobs, economy, and power. Not all, it reported the President’s approval rating as dropping from 63.4 per cent in January to 32.8 per cent. When compared with an earlier poll which found that majority of respondents actually blamed former President Goodluck Jonathan for our current economic woes, the waning magic of Buhari Effect is perhaps better appreciated.

    What to do? Simple: the administration needs to sit up. By sitting up I mean embarking on hands-on, effective governance. Time for the Buhari administration to offer the nation a clear, discernable roadmap on the whole range of problems holding the country down; to inject a sense of urgency and purpose into the business. Suffice to say that these elements are currently lacking.

    Last week for instance, I listened to the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Malami (SAN), threaten to bring the roof down on any person suspected to have engaged in foreign exchange round-tripping. Said he: “It has become obvious that having failed in the attempt to force devaluation, certain forces have now aligned to create an artificial situation whose primary purpose is to undermine the economic programmme of the Buhari administration”.

    My response: That’s drama – more of the same – not governance. If as the minister claims, he has “proofs”, shouldn’t the minister have simply gone after the saboteurs rather than treat Nigerians to what is becoming a wearisome melodrama? Didn’t the sportswear giant Nike say – Just Do It?

  • Dark days in America

    Dark days in America

    YOU know that adversity has well and truly come to the forest when the pawpaw fruit tree takes the floor at a gathering of the denizens and demands to be counted as one its stalwarts.

    You know that it is a dark era in American politics when the prohibitive front runner for the Presidential ticket of the Republican Party –hereafter the GOP, as in Grand Old Party – is the foul-mouthed Donald Trump, his immediate challenger is the venal Ted Cruz, and the other contestant whom it would be courteous to call a challenger is the robotic Marco Rubio.

    These three of the four candidates still standing are spawns of the extreme right wing that has seized the heart and soul of the GOP over the past three decades, ably supported by a string of ultra-conservative think-tanks, so-called evangelicals, Rupert Murdoch’s media empire, a posse of millionaires determined to use money to bend the political   process to their will, and a Supreme Court that is for all practical purposes the high council of the GOP in judicial robes.  They are creatures of the people who produced Sarah Palin and similar aberrations.

    Now the very forces that created them are aghast and flailing desperately to block the frontrunner and promote one of the other two main contenders the least of three evils.

    Trump outscores Cruz and Rubio in notoriety and villainy, but both seem cut from the same cloth.

    Take Cruz first.

    In 1997, Michael Wayne Haley was prosecuted for stealing a calculator from a store. The crime carried a maximum two-year prison term. But prosecutors mistakenly treated Haley as a habitual offender. The judge did not detect the error, and sentenced Haley to a jail term of 16 years.

    The mistake was eventually discovered and Haley sought relief.  Ted Cruz, then solicitor-general of Texas, would have none of it and petitioned the Supreme Court to keep Haley in prison for the full 16 years.

    “Justice Anthony Kennedy’s interjection during oral arguments was telling.  “Is there some rule that you can’t confess error in your state?” he asked.  Haley was subsequently released. But by then, he had spent six years in jail.

    New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks cited this case in characterising Ted Cruz as “a stranger to most of what would generally be considered the Christian virtues: humility, mercy, compassion and grace.” Cruz’s behaviour in the Haley case, he wrote,”is almost the dictionary definition of pharisaism: an overzealous application of the letter of the law in a way that violates the spirit of the law, as well as fairness and mercy.”

    Until he was sandbagged in one debate by Chris Christie, the New Jersey Governor who has since dropped out of the race, Marco Rubio, the first –term U. S. Senator for Florida with the razor- thin résumé, carried on as if he was running against Obama, whom he addressed in the most disrespectful terms and accused of the heinous crime of trying to “change” America.

    The election, he said repeatedly, was about who was ready to serve as commander-in-chief from Day One, as if being the son of a bar tender and a hotel maid, a circumstance he always brought up, was the ultimate preparation for that supreme office.   That is how far gone he is in his delusion.  Though running a distant third, he has even urged Cruz to get out of the race and leave him to face Trump.  He says he is the only Republican candidate who can beat the likely Democratic candidate, Clinton, in a presidential election.

    It is to these two, Cruz and Rubio, that the GOP establishment has turned for salvation.

    They are pouring tens of millions of dollars into television advertising across key states, portraying Trump, for whom there is no sympathy in this corner, as a figure without any redeeming value.

    They had looked on with glee as Trump challenged President Barack Obama’s American citizenship, claiming that the people he had sent to Hawaii, Obama’s homestate, had come up with findings that would shock everyone.  He never released the alleged findings, and the news media did not challenge him to produce them or shut up.

    They had looked on approvingly as their ranks obstructed one Obama initiative after another, treated him with the utmost contempt, cast him as a Moslem terrorist-sympathiser, threatened to impeach him for “treason” and sought to de-legitimise him in every way inconceivable – all in an effort “to take the country back.”  They did not stir when First Lady Michelle Obama was portrayed in their media as first cousin of a chimpanzee that escaped from a zoo in Oklahoma.

    While all this was going on, Mitt Romney, President Obama’s opponent in the 2012 presidential election, would only say that he would not have used the language of Obama’s calumniators.  The calumny itself apparently sat well with him.

    In that election Romney actively sought and revelled in Trump’s endorsement, lauding the property developer as one of the most successful businessmen in America and as someone who has created thousands of jobs.

    Now, irony of ironies, it is the same Romney leading the Stop Trump brigade, denouncing Trump as a phony and a fraud, and as morally unfit to lead America.

    Romney apparently does not realise that he is one of the elite the movement conservatives have rejected to embrace the Trumps and Cruzes and Rubios – the voters whose minds they had poisoned with their racist rants, their homophobia, their rejection of science, their craven bid to disenfranchise African American and Hispanic voters, and their perversion of Holy Writ.

    Romney has little following and even less credibility. The health insurance scheme he instituted as governor of Massachusetts was so successful that it served as the template for what has come to be known as Obamacare.

    Yet, sensing the undercurrent of reflex opposition to Obamacare from the GOP camp, he vowed in 2012 that if elected president, he would repeal it in his first day in office.  Such is the cynicism, the utter lack of principle that drives those who created and now seek desperately to  ditch the monsters haunting and threatening to devour them.

    For all I care, they can stop Trump and foist either Cruz or Rubio or any other demagogue on the American electorate in November.  The centre has shifted from under their feet.  Long live their distemper.

  • Ese: odyssey of a nation

    Ese: odyssey of a nation

    The story of Ese Rita Oruru, 14, appears the odyssey of a minor whose youth faces sunset at dawn.

    If indeed she is five months pregnant, she would be only a child, in her womb, carrying another!  That has life-long implications — and complications.

    However, Ese is only a metaphor for a nation at war with itself, but living in denial: permissive youth, distracted families, dysfunctional homes and subverted institutions.  The result: subverted mores, laws and processes.

    Even closer, you see the traditional fault lines: Muslim vs Christian and North vs South; each guarding its turf, and spewing deep distrusts, biases and prejudices.  That unleashes a fierce but mutual cultural antipathy.

    In that moral netherworld, the natural (and rational) sense of universal good or bad is lost.  Evil is never evil without stupid justifications.  Good is never good without asinine reservations.  There is nary a sense of national outrage, no matter how outrageous the crime.

    It is a national and collective tragedy.

    What are the facts here?  Yunusa Dahiru aka Yellow, 25, took Ese Oruru, 13, from her Opolo, Yenagoa, Bayelsa State, home to Tofar-Danga, in Kura local government, Kano State.  When the story climaxed, Ese had not only been converted to Islam, she had landed a pregnancy, at a mere 14 years!

    A unanimous Nigerian outrage should have greeted Yellow’s misconduct, which clearly landed Ese in yellow peril — and there is outrage, all right.

    But that anger is modulated by regional biases: moderated to protect, from ridicule, the northern ethos, no matter how skewed; or over-flared, to express southern ire, to the point of cultural and religious profiling.

    However, religious profiling also introduced a cross regional inanity: the imperative to defend your faith, no matter what, under mass attack.  That would explain the rather ridiculous intervention, with all due respect to the scholar, by Prof. Ishaq Akintola, director of Muslim Rights Concern (MURIC).

    He claims Islam has no age barrier in marriage — a right claim, experts in Islamic jurisprudence say, but in a wrong context.  In the context of the Ese saga, does it then mean a 13-year-old can be married off, even with the consent of her parents?

    To the extent that all foreign faiths, including Christianity and Islam, are cultural imperialism, there is always going to be controversies over the right Islamic position.  But when a foreign culture is hazy, what is the position in Prof. Akintola’s native Yoruba?

    It is clear, however, that the good professor just cracked under a felt anti-Islam blitz.  He had earlier told Punch that Ese’s purported conversion to Islam was a nullity, since a minor couldn’t be converted from the faith of his or her parents.

    But back to reportage and North-South bias, taking Daily Trust (North) and The Sun (South) as examples.

    Daily Trust’s March 6 story: “Ese & Yunusa affair: the untold story” gave the impression Yunusa and Ese were some love-struck Romeo and Juliet, that eloped to marry, shunning opposition from their respective parents.

    But the very supposition, that a 13-year-old can “elope” with a 25-year old, is galling.  That would appear a clear deodorisation of clear crime; and suggests some social permissiveness, which the newspaper may not be proud of, but felt obliged to rationalise.

    That was unfortunate because even if Ese really “eloped”, in the eyes of the law, she did not know what she was doing.  So, it was the lawful duty of the adult, Yunusa, to caution and redirect her.

    Besides, why did he take the girl to Kano and not remain in Yenagoa?  A damning motive that suggests Kano offered a more socially permissive milieu to whatever he planned to do?

    On the other hand, The Sun of March 7 interviews  with Ese and mum: “I don’t know how I got to Kano” (Ese) and “Irate youths almost killed me at emir’s palace” (mum), gave the impression Ese’s parents were victims of daughter’s kidnap by a total and unconscionable stranger.  Facts don’t support that.

    For starters, even from The Sun interviews, how come Mrs Oruru quickly connected her daughter’s disappearance with Yunusa’s, if Ese’s family and Yunusa did not have some prior relationship?

    From the Trust story, it turned out Yunusa had known the family for no less than 10 years.  So, in all of those years, how much did the Orurus monitor Ese’s relations to male customers at her mum’s eatery, to ensure the minor didn’t get in harm’s way?

    Still on parents’ negligence, Yunusa’s parents would appear even more indicted.  Yunusa’s father really sounded ridiculous to everyone but himself, when he claimed Ese followed his son willingly, so the Police should release Yunusa.

    Besides, aside from formalising Ese’s purported conversion, what else did Yunusa’s father do to sway his son from his illegal action?

    O, the purported conversion!  There is certainly something grimly cynical about trotting an under-aged girl to a Chief Imam, invest her in a new robe, gift her a new name, and declare her a Muslim, newly minted!

    And it is extremely provocative for fellow Nigerians, of different faiths, to helplessly suffer the capture of their children and wards, because they are locked up in emirs’ palaces, as trophies of forced conversions and worse: forced marriages.

    Ese’s is only one of hundreds of such crimes, though mercifully, she was not forcefully married before her seven-month odyssey ended.

    Such brazenness drives the southern profiling of the North, an unfortunate profiling that labels that region as some paedophiles’ haven, in which every single being is guilty.  That cannot be.  But that is why northern governments should deal with their deviants — and be clearly seen to do so.

    Back to the Trust story, one is rather impressed at the robustness of northern traditional institutions, at the centre of which is the Emir’s Palace: the office of the district head, the Hisbah Board, the Shari’ah  Commission, leading all the way to the Emir’s Palace.

    That the palace voided Ese’s purported conversion, on her procured age of 18, underscores robust checks-and-balances, that result in self-correction.

    Unfortunately however, there would appear wilful human subversion of processes, as those institutions are robust.  A serious case is Ese’s pregnancy.  If indeed she was under the care of  one Muquaddas Kura, an aide of the Kura district head, who got her pregnant under his roof?

    Again, the Kano government (and by extension, other northern governments) should weed off such wilful subversions, to eliminate charges of institutional cover-ups.

    But for those subversions, Ese would perhaps have been set free in a week or two, and thus forestall the pregnancy she now carries.  So, all those involved in that subversion and cover-up, from the Emirate Council to the Police, should be fished out, prosecuted and punished.

    By the way, why hasn’t anyone spoken to Yunusa?  Why is he quoted through secondary sources, when he is alive to state his own side?

    After all said and done, Ese is pregnant, a mere child carrying a child.  Beyond the tempest of blame and counter-blame, this national shame won’t not be over until she is well taken care of; and her future rehabilitated.

  • Once upon a life-changing picture

    Once upon a life-changing picture

    By now, almost everyone in the attentive audience in Nigeria and even abroad knows Olajumoke’s story.

    If anyone quips “Olajumoke who?” at the mention of that name, simply add “the bread seller.”  That should settle it.  For she is the only person bearing that name and most recently in that line of business who has been the focus of media attention lately and, meaning no disrespect to other bearers of that evocative name, the only Olajumoke that seems to matter at this time.

    Balancing a pyramid of loaves of Agege bread on her head as she made her rounds in one of the seedier neighbourhoods of Lagos, the winsome mother of two strayed into a photo shoot, of which the hip-hop artist Tinie Tempah was the subject.  But when the shoot was published in the social media, it was the woman carrying a pyramid of neatly stacked loaves of bread on her head that caught public attention.

    Everyone wanted to know her identity.  The photographer, TY Bello, eventually located her, gave her a makeover, and published her pictures in This Day Style magazine.

    Olajumoke’s life has not been and will never be the same again. The pictures catapulted her from obscurity – from near invisibility, despite that pyramid of loaves of bread – to celebrity.    It is the stuff of fairy tales.

    Banks that would have turned down her application for a loan on the threshold have now signed her up as brand ambassador.  Were she minded to seek a loan from them now, they would gladly oblige.  What collateral can be greater or more valuable than the star herself?

    Her clients also include manufacturers of consumer goods, fashion houses and modelling agencies, and she is billed to figure as a face of Lagos as the state celebrates its 50th anniversary next year.

    From the world of rowdy bus-stops and crowded buses and perhaps the occasional taxi cab, from the world of roadside meals washed down with “pure water” sachets, from nondescript clothing and flip –flops, she has been thrust into the world of limousines and airports and air travel and four-course meals in the swankiest restaurants and hotels and designer apparel and high-heeled shoes.

    A property developer has offered her a luxury apartment that only the most upwardly mobile can aspire to live in or own in one of the most opulent neighbourhoods in town, and has thrown into the bargain a fund for the education of Olajumoke’s children up to university.

    Without stating whether it has been so commissioned, an Instagram site has announced that it is accepting bookings from those who may need Olajumoke’s services.  Business has been brisk, I gather.

    The evangelical churches that promise deliverance and prosperity now daily invoke her as a “point of contact” in their supplication for transformative miracles in the lives of their teeming congregations.

    She has been a subject of countless profiles in the national and international media and even her name has undergone some transformation of the eponymous kind:  ThisDay’s Olusegun Adeniyi has coined the term Olajumokeism to denote the phenomenon that Olajumoke’s life emblematises.

    The perceptive and engaging Punch columnist Abimbola Adelakun has in a sober piece pointed out that Olajumoke’s dizzying rise to stardom illustrates for the most part the failure of a system that afforded her no formal education and reduced her – and millions like her – to the drudgery and danger of street hawking.

    But Adelakun’s is almost a lonely voice.  Virtually everyone else is celebrating and wishing fervently that an Olajumoke would surface in their lives, now, in these disarticulated times.

    I envy Olajumoke and her family their good fortune.  But if it is not properly managed, they are going to pay a high price for it.  Even the most sophisticated among us will find it difficult to handle a change of fortune so spectacular. For poor Olajumoke, it is a case of too much too soon.

    Her anonymity  – the anonymity that allowed her to be herself, to mind her business, to be not too concerned about what people are saying or thinking about her, to live her life quietly and unobtrusively and by her own rules and judgment,  will be the first casualty of her new, treacherous world.

    Lost also is the environment she has always known, now replaced by a world of minders and agents, and teeming with supplicants and opportunists and persons of dubious character and even more dubious motives.  This setting opens the door to vicious exploitation – the type that has, even in better-regulated societies, brought down many a celebrity precipitously down from affluence to indigence.

    Think also of what Olajumoke’s sudden fame will do to her husband Sunday, who makes a modest income from fitting aluminum door and window frames, and is probably only slightly more knowledgeable about the ways of the world, but is now thrust into Olajumoke’s new circle — the men and women, especially the men, who will spare no effort to make her believe that she deserves better.

    If his wife’s name survives her quantum leap to fame, his family name probably won’t. I can almost see them taking her aside and telling her solemnly that Orisaguna simply won’t cut it and that if she wants to really get on, the name would have to be replaced by something more cadenced.

    I am reminded of a certain actress originally named Norma Jeane, whose story has some parallels with Olajumoke’s.  Her minders, sensing that she could not enter Hollywood with a name like that, changed it to Marilyn Monroe.

    She became an instant hit.

    Examples abound of persons who came into sudden fame and affluence but wished in retrospect  that fortune had left them severely alone.

    There is, to take a local instance, the butcher Olagunju from Ede, Osun State, known mostly  by his first name like Olajumoke, who won £75, 000 on the Littlewoods pools in the 1950s.  Back then, that sum put Olagunju in the league of some of the wealthiest persons in the British Empire.

    Even with the strongest will in the world, you cannot have that kind of money and remain a butcher.  Advice flowed from every corner urging upon him a lifestyle that matched his new wealth.  More wives, to be sure.  Landed property.   Some business ventures.

    They sold him land that belonged to the Nigerian Railway Corporation.  His pools betting company was paying out much more than it was taking in, and was soon grounded.  They made him a “father” of the Action Group, and he had to pay the dues that came with the honour. One organisation after another sought his financial support.

    The money soon ran out.  Thereafter, Olagunju would introduce himself wistfully as the “olowo Ede ojoun,” literally, the wealthy Ede man of yore.

    To return to Olajumoke:  Asked what she would like to do with her new life, she said she would like to go to school and train to become a lawyer.  That is a good sign that stardom and occasion have not gone into her head.

    The assets that have brought her fame will fade over time; other stars will take her place.  Her dream is of a future that is secure.

    Those who truly wish her well should help her keep that dream splendidly in view.

  • Ambode, legacy beckons

    Ambode, legacy beckons

    Remember “Ambode, history beckons”? (10 November 2015)  That was Ripples’ challenge, during those not-too-halcyon days of Governor Akinwunmi Ambode’s rather stormy beginning.

    As if on cue from some hell, tanker drivers and allied articulated trucks descended on Lagos with a vengeance; while a rebellious LASTMA snapped, napping and snoring to press its ire.

    Traffic robbery went on a tail-spin.  Neighbourhood thieves declared burglaries their new growth area.  Outlaw Okada riders danced vigorous Shoki on major highways, thumbing their noses at the law that barred them.  Swashbuckling marine robbers cum kidnappers swooped on their victims, and zoomed off in speed boats, with their loot, in provocative triumph.

    Lagos, hitherto assumed solid and settled, was going under — and the new helmsman was the culprit-in-chief!  The governor that exited was a strongman.  The governor that took over was a sissy.  When The Economist weighed in, all hell broke loose!

    The London weekly dismissed the new governor as clueless and near-useless in a savage putdown, to which the government’s publicists felt obliged to issue a sharp riposte.

    Grand distraction!  You don’t bandy words with a medium so set in its ways, a supercilious newspaper (in)famous for its condescension (though not unfounded, in many cases) towards Africa and its umpteenth sad tale of bad leaders.

    Better to focus on your job; and sadistically watch The Economist gobble its own vomit, if the vice-hold of its neo-liberal ideology would allow.  That was November 2015.

    But now?

    The narrative, from all objective indices, has changed.  The governor appears growing into, and settling well, in his job, one of the toughest in the country.  And his entry winning strategy would appear two-pronged: infrastructure (basically fixing inner-city roads) and security, with the well-reported Light Up Lagos project as an adjunct of the government’s security policy.

    A third prong, on the policy front, is job creation, courtesy of the N25 billion Lagos State Employment Trust Fund Law.  Under the Fund, to run over four years, N6.6 billion has been allocated under the 2016 budget.  However, its impact, on job creation in Lagos, cannot be gauged until much later.

    On the other hand, there is ample evidence of state-wide general rehabilitation of roads.  Visit the far reaches of Lagos, particularly the non-elite areas of Alimosho and allied company, which Governor Babatunde Fashola was said to have touched least, compared with the upscale areas like Lekki, Victoria Island and Ikoyi, and Ambode’s work loudly speaks.

    Denizens of Okota, Isolo, Egbe, Ikotun, Egbeda, Abule Egba, Agege and so on clearly see a determined government focused on fixing bad inner roads.  From Ikotun down to Oke-Afa in Isolo, to Okota Road, then on to the popular Cele junction with the Oshodi-Isolo Expressway, it has been a smooth and jolly ride, with that critical artery nearing completion.

    Work is also advanced on the six-lane artery, of interlocked stones, that links Okota Palace Way, with Amuwo Odofin, en route to Mile 2 and Festac Town.  This project, however, was started; and a part of it completed, under Fashola.

    All of these projects, according to Governor Ambode at his second quarterly town hall meeting at City Hall, Lagos, were parts of the completed 300 major roads, 66 other major ones as work-in-progress, and 80 other inner roads embarked upon in the 57 local governments in the state.  This is aside from the 114 roads, two in each local government, to be completed in six months.

    But the crowning glory of Ambode’s infrastructural intervention would appear the flyovers to be constructed at both Ajah, in the Lekki area and Abule-Egba, near Agege.  Both sites are notorious for terrible traffic snarls.

    While the governor’s road record is glaring, he felt confident enough to crow to his guests, at the City Hall town hall meeting, that crime, under his charge, had dropped by 65 per cent — and he sounded very credible.

    He sounded believable because his government just invested N4.8 billion from the Lagos State Security Trust Fund (LSSTF) on security hardware: patrol cars, patrol bikes, choppers, communication gadgets and allied technology.  Beyond the frills of launch was also the operational innovation of dedicated dumps to fuel the cars.

    Integrated into the security programme is the Light Up Lagos project, an aggressive scheme in which the city is progressively lit up, thereby denying criminals of nightly havens.  Also allied to all this is the demolition of markets which, the authorities say, double as virtual snake holes for felons.

    The market demolition bit though is a double-edged sword: unless the market folks are resettled, loss of income could trigger further crimes.

    Still, from the nervous transition from the Fashola to the Ambode era, Lagos presently appears to enjoy a new lease: the governor growing into his job and getting more confident by the day; and the people seeming to believe in their new helmsman, after an initial doubt.

    But it’s not celebration time yet.  Outlaw Okada riders are still a pest, flitting to and fro on expressways where they are barred, and remaining, as ever, the menace they have become.  So, are unruly Danfo drivers, scandalously socialised into bad road habits, because of no effective sanctions.  Ripples just hopes the newly inaugurated mobile courts would bring them to order.

    Even on roads, it’s not yet uhuru.  Fashola, the governor’s predecessor, is now Power, Works and Housing minister.  So, these two great sons of Lagos must collaborate to fix federal roads in the state.  A constant eyesore is the Berliet-Ilasa-Hassan failed sections of the Mile 2-Oshodi expressway, for Oshodi-bound commuters.  And talking about housing, the governor should try and resume the Lagos Homs project, the ambitious mass housing project his predecessor started.

    But beyond individual administrations, the beauty of Lagos is its ever deepening developmental institutions.

    LASTMA (traffic police) and KAI (environmental police) date back to the Bola Tinubu era.  Despite public complaints of overzealousness against both, they are alive and well.  LSSTF bears Fashola’s signature.  Yet, it is on its wings that Ambode is deepening security in Lagos with clear success.

    When in December Ambode delivers the first phase of the Lagos light rail, from Okokomaiko to the Lagos Marina, it would yet be another salute to positive continuation.  That project has also spanned three administrations: Tinubu, Fashola and Ambode.  So, has the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT), which construction started at the dusk of the Tinubu era.

    Lagos therefore, coasting towards its golden jubilee by 2017 (created 1967), despite the current economic challenges nationwide, appears confident of itself, despite its rippling developmental tension.

    By “Ambode, history beckons” (10 November 2015), Ripples only called on Governor Ambode, then under intense pressure, to choose either the hard-won successes of most of his predecessors; or fold over, embracing the rare failure of one or two.

    It is pleasant to report that the governor is finding his own niche; like his illustrious predecessors, that vaulted formidable obstacles to make a roaring success of their tenures.  Though its morning yet, the governor appears primed to push his own legacy.

    Lagos can only be the better for it.

     

     

     

  • From Stiglitz to Ezekwesili

    From Stiglitz to Ezekwesili

    Never mind that the naira has been “technically” devalued, the debate on whether or not to throw the currency to the market hounds is getting more interesting by the day. I just finished reading an interesting piece titled Closing Developing Countries’ Capital Drain written by the duo of Joseph E. Stiglitz and Hamid Rashid. I must confess that the piece blew my mind. I therefore recommend it for reader’s enjoyment.

    As if he needs any introduction, Stiglitz is Nobel laureate in economic sciences and professor at the Columbia University, United States while Rashid is a former director-general for multilateral economic affairs at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Bangladesh, senior adviser at the UNDP’s Bureau for Development Policy, and Chief of Global Economic Monitoring at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs. Both therefore should know.

    Why do I find the piece by the duo irresistible? It is the way they attempted to frame dilemma facing developing countries at this time – a refreshing call away from the puerile market orthodoxies in an unequal world!

    I also love their contextualisation of the current challenges facing us as “not just falling commodity prices, but also massive capital outflows”.

    The facts, as they say, speak for themselves. The duo, for instance, would have us know that from  a net capital inflow of $2.2 trillion in the five years of 2009-2014, net outflows from developing countries in 2015 alone, exceeded $600 billion –more than one-quarter of the inflows they received during the previous six years.

    They also note that “the largest outflows have been through banking channels, with international banks reducing their gross credit exposures to developing countries by more than $800 billion in 2015”.

    You ask why? It’s no other than the slowdown in China and the collapse of oil prices by more than 60% since July 2014!

    For the developing economies, the impact of the trend cannot be anything but devastating: “drying up liquidity, increasing the costs of borrowing and debt service, weakening currencies, depleting reserves, and leading to decreases in equity and other asset prices… large knock-on effects on the real economy, including severe damage to developing countries’ growth prospects.

    Familiar? It seems to me that some foreigners know where the rains started to beat us far more than our own people!

    Among many prescriptions, they wrote: “In some cases, it may be necessary to introduce selective, targeted, and time-bound capital controls to stem outflows, especially outflows through banking channels. This would entail, for example, restricting capital transfers between parent banks in developed countries and their subsidiaries or branches in developing countries. Following the successful Malaysian example in 1997, developing countries could also temporarily suspend all capital withdrawals to stabilize capital flows and exchange rates. This is perhaps the only recourse for many developing countries to avoid a catastrophic financial crisis. It is important that they act soon”.

    The above piece was written last week! Nowhere did I find the duo luxuriate in the illusion that the market would somehow self-regulate! And this is at a time our home grown economists would rather have us throw our forex vaults so the vultures can come and do as they please!

    This is why I found the offering by our very own Oby Ezekwesili, former minister and World Bank Vice president in the Vanguard of Sunday February 28 titled Ideologies don’t deliver results for the poor on the subject totally strange if not incomprehensible. Her piece supposedly to a critique of the Buhari administration’s economic policies turned out to be more than a validation of my piece of last week titled What the hell is wrong with us. Not only is her position a repudiation of the position of Stiglitz and co. in its obsesion with the market, it sadly takes strategic national intetrest out of the national economic equation!

    Samples: The president’s now well publicized and known stance on the acute foreign exchange crisis has magnified nervousness about his economic management history and ideology-centred policy direction…So strong is the president’s view on the value of the Naira that he uses words like “murder the Naira” to foreclose any consideration of alternative perspectives. It is precisely because of this manner of framing tough economic policy choices that the country is at this time engaged in an unhealthy debate that lacks empirical foundations and nuance”. So the problem is with the word “murder”? How about the activities of speculators that do more than murder the currency?

    And this: “Nigeria has oscillated from a command and control regime with government as driver in resource allocation to a more market oriented system since the past 30 years. We however can be said to now have a broad coalition and even near consensus that the market economy framework has served us better”.

    Only because the piggy back had hitherto been overflowing?

    And yet another: “…The effort at controlling and commanding the demand for foreign exchange can only worsen already bad economic distortions. It is these distortions, more than dollar demand side issues that form the crux of our current account and fiscal crises”.

    Because Bloomberg and The Economist said so?

    Left to the Ezekwesilis of this world, Nigeria’s problems begins and ends with the so-called market forces – nothing in between. To be sure, most Nigerians would probably agree that the current administration lacks a coherent economic direction just as many would readily concede that the administration that promised change could do far better than it is presently doing both in terms of rigour and pace. Like many, I have had to express my frustrations with a president who appears hung on old paradigms like for instance in choosing to retain the refineries and its forays into aviation.

    It is however a different call with the administration’s forex management policy particularly its insistence on not devaluing the currency. It is pragmatic and sound – far better than Ezekwesili’s overly romantic view of the market as the most effective allocator of a dwindling national resource like forex at a time of negative accretion! And we are here talking of a market controlled by speculators and street dealers! In other words, have the invisible forces call the shot while making the case for the sovereign to be in retreat?

    Let me raise a question that I didn’t find the space to ask last week: which true businessman would buy dollars at the rate of N400? To keep the factories going in spite of consumer purchasing power or what? Why can’t we push for our country to do what other civilised countries do – by rendering the hawking of currencies on the highways irrelevant?  Why should anyone seek to canonise the s so-called black market?

     

  • Annals of justice: The Affluenza Defence

    Annals of justice: The Affluenza Defence

    Given the plethora of ongoing prosecutions brought by the EFCC in the Obtainment Scandal that has been tied indissolubly to the beleaguered former National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki (hence Dasukigate), other corruption cases in the works and still others that are sure to follow, and given the creativity and ingenuity of our lawyers, I predict with a great deal of confidence that some exciting new terms will soon enter the lexicon of litigation in Nigeria.

    The Affluenza Defence is coming.  You haven’t heard of the Affluenza Defence?

    Let me explain, then, starting with the term “affluenza.”  It signifies not just affluence, but suggests powerfully that the condition is a psychological malaise with some negative ramifications.

    At least one American court has recognised it as an extenuating factor even for conduct of the most egregious kind.

    On June 5, 2013, Ethan Couch, 16, was driving under the influence of alcohol — his blood-alcohol level was three times the legal limit for adult drivers — when he rammed his pick-up van into some pedestrians, killing four of them.  Two passengers riding at the back of the truck suffered serious injuries, one of them to the extent that he can only communicate by blinking his eyes.

    At the trial, in Forth Worth, Texas, a psychologist testifying for the defence blamed it all on affluenza.  The juvenile on trial, he said, had been so coddled by his wealthy parents that he could not distinguish between proper and improper conduct.

    Invoking her discretionary powers, a juvenile court judge more or less accepted the affluenza defence.  She ordered that Couch be placed on probation in a long-term treatment facility.  But Couch found his way out of there, skipped a parole appearance and, with his mother, fled to Mexico. They have since been brought back to face fresh charges.

    The Affluenza Defence is just what you would expect in a litigious society, of which the United States is the quintessence.  No charge is so frivolous you will not find someone pressing it and no plea so outrageous that you will not find someone canvassing it.

    Here I am reminded of the man who stole a car from a parking lot in New York, and while driving it away crashed it, losing both legs.

    He filed a law suit demanding compensation from the owner of the vehicle, claiming that the accident had resulted from the owner’s failure to maintain the vehicle in a good running condition.

    The suit was dismissed.

    But the fact that a lawyer saw some merit in it and took it up goes to show how far some people will go in trying to make the law work for them even in the most unpromising of circumstances. And how far some lawyers will go to accommodate them.

    I will not be surprised if the case even went to appeal.

    Another case involved a motorist who left the steering wheel and went to the kitchenette at the rear of his Winnebago to make some coffee.  The vehicle veered off the highway and crashed, leaving him with serious injuries.

    He filed for damages from the vehicle’s manufacturer, saying that nowhere in the operational manual or the terms of purchase was it stated expressly that you could not take a few minutes off while driving to make yourself some coffee or fix yourself any drink you fancy.

    The case was also thrown out.

    It is all of a piece with what they call chutzpah (kootspah), Yiddish for overweening impudence, the classic example being the man who killed his parents and at his sentencing begged for leniency because he is an orphan.

    As the saying goes, you can’t blame a guy for trying.

    So, don’t be surprised if someone freighted with far more lawless conduct than Couch and a rap sheet stretching from the Gateway City to Abuja and back blames it all on the suffocating affluence of his upbringing.

    I certainly will not be surprised if a judge were to accept it.  After all, there is example for it.

    Stare decisis. 

    And the affluenza-stricken fellow’s travelling choir will dutifully intone, “As Your Lordship pleases.”

    From affluenza, it is but a short, logical step to its opposite, what I call indigentza, the state of being indigent.  I make bold to say that, like affluenza, it is also a psychological malaise with its own pathology, guaranteed to enter the legal vocabulary very soon, considering that the vast majority of Nigerians are raised in indigence , if not stark penury.

    Now, indigence and penury are at least as likely as affluence to corrode character and judgment and to breed delinquency.  So, why should they not be regarded as extenuating factors in criminal trials, and indeed in all matters before the courts?

    So a political official before whom even court judges and traditional rulers cower because of his violent impulses, who brooks no dissent and carries on as an erratic emperor answerable not even to himself, and has withal a rap sheet stretching from the Fountain of Knowledge to Abuja and back – something tells me that if this political official is ever called to account, he will enter a plea based on the Indigentza Defence.

    He will argue, assuming he submits to the authority of any court, that he was brought up in poverty so stark and pervasive that he never had a chance to develop a sense of right and wrong, and of decency and indecency.  This condition, he will insist, lies at the root of his countless schizoid acts and omissions; in short, that he is more victim than villain.

     

    A change of designation

     

    Wearing another hat, I am also Editorial Adviser of this newspaper.  This designation dates from its founding some 10 years ago.

    But I find that, 21 years after I resigned from my former perch in Rutam House, I am still widely referred to in the media as “the former chairman of the Editorial Board of The Guardian.”

    It is almost as if those vesting me with that title do not know or do not recognise my current status as Editorial Adviser of The Nation.

    If they do not cease and desist forthwith from this practice, I will buy space in major print and online newspapers serving formal notice of a change in designation and send them the bill.

    Here, for their benefit, is a draft of the announcement:

    “I, Olatunji Dare, widely referred to as the former chairman of the Editorial Board of The Guardian, wish henceforth to be known, referred to and addressed as Editorial Adviser of The Nation.  All former documents remain valid.”

  • What the hell is wrong with us?

    What the hell is wrong with us?

    Last week, the South African clothing company, Truworths, finally took its exit from our shores citing stringent regulation of stock imports, foreign exchange controls and rising costs as its reasons. It’s Chief Executive Officer Michael Mark would tell Bloomberg in a phone interview that “The regulations were making it extraordinarily difficult to get stock into the stores, we couldn’t get money out, so there was no point any longer…Obviously everyone gets exited about Nigeria because of its size, but I think they’ve taken an incredible strain with internal problems in the country politically and then there are the issues with their oil.”

    Earlier on in 2013, its compatriot, Woolworths similarly exited with the closure of its three stores in the country citing the same factors of high rental costs, duties and difficulties getting stock into stores. “It’s a tough market, with high rental expenses and I felt you needed to get big or get out,” Ian Moir, its chief executive officer had recalled in a chat with reporters in Johannesburg, last Tuesday. “We made the right call; we didn’t see things really changing there for the next 10 years.”

    At a time of record level unemployment, the news of yet another business drawing shutters on its operations in the country would ordinarily be a big deal. For the tribe who can’t seem to see anything good in the restrictive policies of the Central Bank as affecting the utilisation of forex, it is supposed to be another evidence of the unworkability of the foreign exchange regime that has plumbed the naira to its lowest depths ever in the so-called parallel market with the currency exchanging for N400 to the United States dollar last week.

    The truth however is that the story of the two South African retailers is somewhat illustrative of all that is wrong with us as a nation –the fetish that we have made of foreign direct investment as well as astounding inability to articulate our interests in the complex and confounding global marketplace where national interest rules.  Today, the South African cloth makers have since moved on in their global outreaches while the so-called biggest economy is stuck with debating whether or not to throw its embattled currency into the hounds.

    President Muhammadu certainly spoke my mind on the raging issue of devaluation when, in faraway Sharm El-Sheik, Egypt last week, he ruled out any official devaluation of the naira. At the Presidential Panel Roundtable on Investment and Growth Opportunities in the North African country, the President again restated his resolve: the naira won’t be devalued. He told those “who have developed taste for foreign luxury goods” to continue to pay for them rather pressure government to devalue the naira.

    He asked: “Developed countries are competing among themselves and when they devalue they compete better and manufacture and export more. But we are not competing and exporting but importing everything including toothpicks. So, why should we devalue our currency?” According to him, “We want to be more productive and self-sufficient in food and other basic things such as clothing. For our government, we like to encourage local production and efficiency…The land is there and we need machinery inputs, fertilizer and insecticides”.

    It seems to me that the President has been far more persuasive that the throng that have made a song of devaluation as a pill that we must swallow even when the so-called benefits are only known to them.

    The issues are certainly not rocket science. With foreign reserves barely sufficient to cover few months of imports, and with the price of our principal export permanently headed south, the choice before us is simply limited. Even our wards studying in foreign shores have since imbibed the wisdom of adjusting to the new reality. I recall that a month ago, my ward studying at a Canadian university actually bought the nation’s dollars at N200 with her ATM at a time the official rate was some N145. And that was long before the Bankers Committee determined that they – and our hordes of medical tourists – would no long be eligible for forex through the official channel. Today, our hordes of virtual shoppers at home and abroad have similar stories to tell of a forex market that has somehow liberalised itself! The point that must not be lost is that we do not have enough to go round. And simply because we do not have enough, the path of wisdom is to ensure that what is available is allocated in a way to deliver maximum benefits.

    At this time, we can choose to play the prodigal by  throwing our forex vaults open – hoping perhaps – that the currency will sooner find its level. It never will. That is why I cannot agree more with the reasoning by government that the luxury of waiting for the market to determine the allocation of a finite commodity like a forex in an unequal world is an unwise one! That’s why I am amazed that bodies like the Lagos Chambers of Commerce and Industries and the manufacturers’ umbrella body – the Manufacturers Association of Nigeria (MAN) would dare to suggest that the naira be left to float with the tide! I ask – to whose benefits? Their foreign portfolio-investor friends ever so ready to hit the airports at the first signs of trouble?

    Let’s go back to the story of Truworths. Would the company have exited were the forex restrictions not to be in place? May be; maybe not. I understand the issue of rising costs is obviously a major factor in the decisions; it seems however unlikely that the company would have left so long as it has the window to flood the Nigerian market with South African fabrics.

    My big question remains: Why would a foreign company exist solely to sell its foreign goods in the country? Why should it seek to be entitled to unrestricted access to our forex at a time like this?

    Now, compare with our Aba cloth maker who despite the harsh environment still manages to keep by. He knows he has nowhere to go; for good or bad, he has learnt to take things in their stride. He needs forex to bring in equipment, to modernise his offering in a competitively globalising world. Above all, he knows what it means to create wealth with nothing. So, why would his government not protect him against the hordes of foreign invaders who so much love to reap where they have not sown?

     

     

     

     

  • Supreme curse

    Supreme curse

    Want to gauge the health of a nation?

    First, gauge the moral health of its judiciary (Their Lords Temporal and their officiating lawyers), its clergy (Their Lords Spiritual) and its editors (famed keepers of its Fourth Estate).

    Indeed, a society that condones corrupt judges, amoral pastors and hustling, integrity-challenged editors is pretty doomed.

    Ripples, for obvious reasons, cannot pronounce on the venality or otherwise of the media.  That would be tantamount to playing judge over own case.

    Generally, however, a certain Hades appears to have deadened the senses of key pillars of Nigeria’s decent society.  That contagion has afflicted all: the church, the courts, the media and even the bureaucracy, given the alarming tales of the soulless padding of a supposedly corrective budget.

    The rot, in this system, is real and deep!

    But the most devastated, it would appear, is the church.  It seems to have lost its sense of moral outrage, despite being, with the mosque, the chief custodian of societal morality and spirituality.  With its seeming indifference to the Buhari anti-corruption war, Nigerian Christendom appears embarrassingly unfazed by the galloping decadence in the land.

    Very early in the day, Father Matthew Hassan Kukah, Catholic Bishop of Sokoto, had practically told President Muhammadu Buhari to forget about sleaze; and get on with the business of governance.

    It never occurred to His Lordship, perhaps, that governance is all about maximising resources for development; and graft, the most vicious strain of which now plagues the land, is not unlike pouring water into a sieve.

    Pray, how do you retain those resources, to get on with the so-called business of governance, if you don’t seal the sieve?

    Another Matthew, saintly Pastor at the Pentecostal Kingsway International Christian Church (KICC), offered Buhari his saintly kiss: the president shouldn’t spend more than 20 per cent of his time fighting corruption!  Has the good pastor been doing a spiritual audit on the president’s time management?

    Between the two Matthews, one Catholic, the other Pentecostal, you could feel the Church’s rather coy body language towards, if not outright disavowal of, the sleaze war: a front at which it ought to be a natural ally and ardent champion.

    But should you still be in doubt, Anthony Cardinal Olubunmi Okogie, retired Archbishop of Lagos and hero of pressing the people’s right under military misrule, left you with none.  In a well publicised statement, the revered man of God thundered, in holy rage: what the hell was all the noise about Buhari’s change mantra?

    All these would appear to have prepared the grounds for Bishop David Oyedepo’s holy gaffe at Uyo.

    Officiating at the thanksgiving for the Supreme Court validation of Akwa Ibom’s segment of the rotten Siamese-elections in Akwa Ibom and Rivers states, the founder of the Living Faith Church Worldwide, aka Winners’ Chapel, declared: “We are celebrating the victory of light over darkness”!

    Without blinking.  Without any sense of irony.

    That perhaps shows how far gone the Church is, in the abject loss of its moral compass!

    Still, it is only fair to mention that, as all this anomie plays out, Reverend Chris Okotie, Presiding Pastor at Household of God Church, Lagos, has come down hard on the widespread cant in the church.

    In a series of well-reasoned articles in newspapers, he has condemned the wide and merry way the Church has chosen; and told the president to stick to his straight-and-narrow against graft.

    That Nigerian Christendom places Okotie at the periphery of its “Holiest of Holies”, and not its sacred centre, may just underscore how far Christian Nigeria may have departed from righteousness, as its central core.

    But despite Pastor Okotie’s stout intervention, a disturbing cross-validation appears afoot, with Bishop Oyedepo’s Uyo sensational declaration.

    As Their Lords Temporal legally beatified “free and fair” elections, of lost lives and hacked limbs; and also technically knocked out the card reader, the technology deliberately inserted to prove bloated ballot, Their Lords Spiritual appear not averse to consecrating same with spiritual humbug!

    This grand conspiracy against polite society, by its supposed Palladium of the courts and the church, would appear just too devastating for the hurting citizen of conscience!  Arise o, compatriots!  O, citizen of conscience, you are on your own!

    Still, the Supreme said it found for law.  You perhaps would give them the benefit of the doubt, since only Their Lordships, with their ensemble of erudite lawyers, are learned in the arcane business of Law and allied matters.  The rest of us are only educated — and most times, poorly so!

    But what would the church give as excuse, for so tragically spurning its core?  Perhaps the hard and harsh slugging for spiritual market share!

    In that blessed jungle, where by the way there is no paddy (apologies to musician, 2Baba), the gladiators, particularly the prosperity-mouthing Pentecostals, see no evil, hear no evil, just gun for market share!

    That has been devastating for society.

    For starters, the Hades that numbed the apex court and the church, also appears to have numbed the Budget 2016 racketeers, reported civil servants, who would not depart their old evil ways, despite the mass suffering in the land; and are absolutely unimpressed by any strange mantra about change.

    Make no mistake: the buck stops on the table of President Buhari, who ought to have done all due diligence before pushing out the document.  But that some devious civil servants still essayed such a risk, with the prevalent mass anti-sleaze national temper, just shows how deep our country is in rot.

    So, you still think Muhammadu Buhari, the fiery archangel against sleaze, is the new sheriff in town?  Nope!  Hades, the Greek god, and ruler of the dead in Greek cosmogony, is!  And the land appears eerily draped in its heavy shroud!

    That takes the matter back to the press, the vaunted Fourth Estate of the Realm.  Truth be told, many a journalist may well be venal, skewing their pens to the dictates of the highest bidder.  After all, everyone has sinned and fallen short of glory!

    Still, many are no more than misguided theorists, who fail to notice the tectonic shift in the nation’s mood against sleaze, the raw agony in the land, and the mass determination of a people to make things right.   Alas, they continue to barge their stubborn heads against the wall, risking analytical irrelevance and tempting readers’ utter contempt.

    But the controversial Supreme Court verdicts, the decadence in the church and the indifferent segment of the media, for whatever motive, are all symptoms of a serious affliction: a supreme curse of moral apathy hovers over the land.

    For that curse to be soundly defeated, and for the nation to regain its soul, the Buhari administration must do more to mobilise the people, to push without cease.

    That is the only way to compel these failing critical pillars to abandon their wide and merry way to perdition; and embrace the straight and narrow path that leads to national salvation.

  • Again, Budget 2016

    Again, Budget 2016

    It is probably just as well that the National Assembly has suspended discussion and deliberation on President Muhammadu Buhari’s budget proposals for fiscal 2016.  There is simply no way to move forward on a document so gravely flawed and so lacking in the basic integrity with which Buhari is widely credited.

    The more one learns about the budget proposals, the more one is distressed that it was ever presented as a Budget of Change.  For it is nothing of the sort.  It is in many ways a budget of Continuity – continuity of the feeding frenzy, the financial recklessness and the sheer rapacity of the Jonathan years.  And it tests sorely the public’s faith in the capacity of the Buhari Administration to set Nigeria on a new path.

    A budget of change would have questioned rigorously the fundamental assumptions on which previous budgets were grounded. A budget prepared at a time revenues from oil exports had fallen by more than 60 per cent would have rejected out of hand the business-as –usual approach in favour of something lean, even mean, if only to signal indeed that hard times are here and will be with us for quite a while.

    It would have scrutinised every proposed expenditure unsentimentally, cutting out whatever is not absolutely necessary and demanding, if an expenditure is warranted, that it be met at a cost that takes into account the nation’s diminished financial circumstances.  It would have resonated with a call for sacrifice and prudence.

    Thus, it would have questioned whether the President and Vice President and their families should for all practical purposes be wards of the Nigerian state, with their every need and desire and fancy met from the public purse, in a country where the anaemic minimum wage of N18, 000 goes unpaid for months.

    But what do we find?

    To take one scandalous example:   The budget makes outrageous provisions for the kitchen equipment and cookware and ancillary stuff  on which the previous year’s budget – and the one before it – had received outlays that bordered on the obscene.

    What happened to all the kitchen equipment and cookware and related stuff provided for in the State House budget every year Dr Jonathan was in office?  Were any purchases made?  What happened to last year’s purchase, and the previous year’s?  Was the material ever inventoried?

    They probably did so much cooking and preparing cassava bread in the place that at year’s end, the equipment purchased only the previous year for tens of millions of Naira – junk stuff most likely, like the military hardware acquired during the same period, were no longer serviceable.

    But with a new resident in the Villa, one not given to the bacchanalia and the gastronomic proclivities of the previous resident and his train, there is no excuse for such profligacy.

    This is indeed the time to consider privatising the entire catering operation at the Villa, in keeping with the public-private partnership strategy that has become obligatory for solving national problems. That way, the government pays a charge on the catering, without having to buy a new set of kitchen equipment every year.

    Take, as a second example the more than N4.9 million earmarked for books for the office of the Vice President for fiscal 2016.  It is considerably less than the previous year’s outlay of N7.5 million, though the incumbent is a legal scholar and practitioner of the first rank, unlike his predecessor, an architect who never pretended to be a bibliophile.

    Though relatively small, the expenditure on books for the former vice president’s office for fiscal 2015 year cries out for justification, as does the proposed expenditure in the 2016 Budget for the current vice president.

    Were books actually bought in 2015?  Who determined what books should be bought?  What subjects do they cover? Where are the books now?   Are they in safe custody, properly catalogued and available to staffers of the Vice President’s office and officials in other bureaus of the Presidency?  Or did the former vice president take them away as personal effects, to be read in the leisure he never enjoyed in office?

    Who determined that Vice President Yemi Osinbajo’s suite should boast a library crammed with books worth nearly N5 million?  What subjects will the volumes cover?  Even if he is inclined to read them all, he will never have the time.  They may even constitute a distraction.  So, whom are the budget planners trying to impress?

    But the puzzle does not end there.   A cable linking one part of the Presidential Villa to other drivers’ rest room is to be installed for  some N322 million, and another linking a Guest House to the generator room is to be installed for N213 million.

    How did these come to be budget priorities in these hard times?  If they had hitherto run the place without these cables, why install them now when the cost could serve more urgent needs?

    Then there is the allocation of N618.6 million for electrical lighting and fittings at the Villa, and another N37.7 million for electrical distribution boards and other cables.  What happened to the electrical lighting and fittings and distribution boards and cables that previously served the Villa?  All of them went bust in one fell swoop?  Or were there none to begin with, in which case it is necessary to ask:  What then makes them so urgent now?

    In testimony before the Senate Committee on Health, Professor Isaac Adewole stopped just short of calling the budget document for his ministry a forgery.  He disavowed it, saying that it had been doctored in such a way as to upend the ministry’s priorities.

    The Minister of Information and Culture, Lai Mohammed, discovered a “strange” provision of N230 million and N168 million for the purchase of computers for the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN) and the Film and Video Censors Board.

    The budget proposals for the Investments and Securities Tribunal, it has turned out, were copied word for word from the previous year’s submission.

    These are just some of the willful errors, duplications, inflated prices, misplaced priorities and shoddiness with which the 2016 budget documents are strewn.  The Federal Government blames it on a “budget mafia,” entrenched civil servants who have made a career of gaming the system for corrupt self-enrichment.

    This will not do.  Members of the so-called mafia report to superior officials who in turn report to the President, who is on record as saying that he took so long to name a cabinet because he wanted to be sure that he had the right officials in the right places.

    With regard to the 2016 budget, this seems not to have been the case.  By their negligence, indifference and complicity, Buhari’s senior officials have caused him and the nation great embarrassment.  They have also undermined public faith in his commitment to change, and in his administration’s capacity to break away from the failed habits of the past.

    They should not go unpunished.

    What this budget fiasco has revealed is in a fundamental sense a failure of auditing.  Public institutions operate for years on end without being audited.  Errors, witting and unwitting, go undetected and become self-perpetuating.

    No effort to combat official malfeasance, however spirited, can succeed without a strong and responsive audit mechanism.