The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Ding-dong over electricity tariff

    Ding-dong over electricity tariff

    Last week’s standoff between the electricity distribution companies and the Organised Labour over tariff hike has, in a manner of speaking, exhumed a corpse which both parties have suffered the illusion of laying to rest but which in fact remains ‘live’. One here talks of the farce that the post-Power Sector Reform Act 2005 has ushered in – a sector that is liberalised only in name. We may have come a long way from when the debate on the provision of the public was split along ideological lines; what we could not have bargained for is the motley assembly of anaemic rent collectors described as Discos under a so-called market environment.

    Eleven years after the institutional framework designed to usher in the regime of liberalisation is said to have kicked in, our old nightmare may have changed hands, the problems that dogged the ancien regime have magnified in geometric proportions – far beyond our wildest imagination. Some two and half years after the handover of the assets to the 14 privately-owned successor-companies of the Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN), it is increasingly clear that the sector, in the hands of the new owners, is headed nowhere.

    I have taken time to peruse the issues at the heart of the current dispute. I must confess that it was, initially, somewhat tempting to dismiss this latest agitation by labour as just of those things. To start with, I understand that labour, like any body of consumers would loathe any idea of a tariff hike no matter how justifiable. But even much more than that is my growing frustration with the group over what I consider as its fixations with old ways and means in a vastly changing world! I cite a ready example in the oil subsidy debate over which labour was needlessly obdurate even when it was so apparent that the subsidy burden had become an albatross too heavy a burden for the treasury to continue to bear.  I have never seen a more destructive fixation than that! One can therefore understand the basis of my initial irritation.

    This time around however, things are different. Labour is right. It’s time for the Discos – or whatever they are called – to sweat for their money. At this time, no one denies that the issue of tariff review has been on the table for so long; indeed, it is one of the key pillars of the power sector reform. Moreover, that is not what labour’s agitation is about.

    I must concede that the NLC President, Comrade Ayuba Wabba did a fantastic job of distilling the issues in his joint statement with his Trade Union Congress counterpart on their plan to picket the Discos last week. Among the many factors cited were: an alleged non-compliance with section 76 of the Power Sector Reform Act 2005 in effecting the increase; the lack of appreciable improvement in service delivery compounded by the non-compliance with the signed privatization Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) of November 1, 2013, which stipulates that within 18 months gestation period, all consumers are to be metered. There was also reference to an alleged disobedience of a subsisting Court Order by Justice Mohammed Idris of the Federal High Court, Ikoyi, Lagos, dated  May 28, 2015, prohibiting further increment until the determination of the substantive suit; and finally, that the timing of the increase aside negating the current economic realities would further impoverish Nigerians.

    Without question, the issues, as outlined by the labour leaders, aptly capture what has now become the unending regime of frustrations of the electricity consumer in the hands of the operators. Today, steady electricity remains a rarity. While it is bad enough that the massive investments promised by the new entities have failed materialise, or worse still, unimaginable that the sector is still looking up to the federal government to bail it out, it is outrageous to imagine a technology-driven sector like power insisting on doing things by the rule of the thumb in 2016! That, to me is the crux of the matter.

    Again, labour is a pain in the ass. Now, I am not even certain that I would endorse its methods 100 percent! But that is not the issue. What is at issue is a service provider insisting on reaping before turning the soil around! And now labour says NO! As far as winning the argument goes, I’ll give the moral advantage to our men on the agitation front as theirs has become a public duty imposed by the exigencies of the time in the event of the failure of the regulatory agencies to act in their defence.

    Where do we go from here? Honestly, it is difficult to answer. As flawed as the process of privatisation has turned out to be, going back on the process will certainly prove difficult if not impossible. Truth is – the feud over tariff obviously masks a more fundamental problem; it is in fact symptomatic of a deeper problem – which is the absence of capacity, both technical and managerial, by the current crop of players. As it appears, we are stuck in the middle of a deep sea with no rescue in sight!

    I guess the least we can do at this time is getting the different companies to live up to the obligations spelt out in their MOUs with the understanding that failure comes with hefty sanctions. Such options as possible force sale should not be ruled out. That should not prove difficult for the government.

    Finally, the federal government may want to sit back and ask itself if the business of liberalisation stops at parcelling out the power firms as against attracting the huge funds it claimed it could not afford into the sector. How about committing the investors into a clear roadmap with timelines? Why would the power companies insist on sucking the juice and asking the consumer to feed on the roughage? Is that what their liberalisation teach?

  • Fables, 50 years after

    Fables, 50 years after

    It is only 50 years, after Major Kaduna Chukwuma Nzeogwu’s coup d’état changed, forever, the face of political Nigeria.

    But the dramatic twists and turns that have hallmarked this historic juncture echoes Ghanaian, Ayi Kwei Armah’s novel, Two Thousand Seasons.

    Two Thousand Seasons is a celebratory fable of Africa’s pristine goodness; but deprecatory flak at its wayward children, whose naivety allowed first Arab, and later, European colonialism; complete with the stream of consciousness narrative technique.

    Fifty years after Nzeogwu, Nigeria’s contemporary narrative canvass quakes with no less dramatic fable of 1st Republic sainthood; and a political stream of consciousness that would rather not tell the sorry tale as it was, but as the present colourful narrators would rather wish!

    It is the high season of historical spin.

    Another golden anniversary — and opportunity — for serious soul searching, to save the nation from its wild past, seems lost to wilful manipulation.

    But how can we honestly chart the future, with our indifferent present, if we cannot grapple with, and throw off, our notorious past?

    By the splurge of publications, particularly from the perceived 1st Republic “Sinners’ Corner”, there seems a determined effort to rehabilitate soiled images.  No crime, to be sure.

    From the southern flank, the camps of SLA Akintola and Festus Okotie-Eboh were particularly bubbly — and for good reasons.

    Beyond SLA emerging, over the ages, as some dark angel in the Yoruba black-or-white political cosmos, the famed orator from Ogbomoso would appear fairly charged with subverting parliamentary democracy.  The violent shock from that wilful subversion eventually overthrew the 1st Republic.

    Akintola Taku (Akintola balks), was the sensational Daily Times headline of 26 May 1962, as the drama in the Western House unfolded, on 25 May 1962.

    Akintola’s refusal to quit, after he had lost the numbers to stay on as Premier, triggered the House of Representatives federal self-help to declare a state of emergency in the West.  That later inspired the wetie (mass arson and general anarchy) crisis, that eventually forced the military putsch.

    These were grave, wilful and fatal subversion of democratic institutions.  And wetie itself was direct mass insurrection against in-your-face electoral banditry in the Western elections of 1964.

    Two allies, SLA’s deputy, Remi Fani-Kayode, boasted the Demo party would win whether the people voted it or not.  Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa-Balewa’s government would rather secure an ally, than do the right thing by law.

    That made SLA some patron saint of barefaced electoral robbery; and no less brazen state-aided crime to keep electoral loot.  That delinquency has plagued Nigerian politics till today.

    Now, that is a dire historical portraiture to log; and the SLA family and loved ones do no wrong by sprucing up their paterfamilias’s image.  But it can’t be at the huge cost re-writing history.

    In the final analysis, we have a country to build; and we may as well face the chore with as much historical sincerity as possible.

    The burden from the Okotie-Eboh front is no less heavy.  Offspring of the flamboyant Itsekiri merchant-pillar of the National Council of Nigerian Citizens (NCNC) of his day, now — not untrue — portray PM Balewa’s Finance minister as a stupendously wealth party hierarch, who sustained NNPC with his munificence, even lending the party money.

    But then, much earlier, the late Harold Smith, a former Oxford-trained British colonial official in Nigeria, had come up with a rather unflattering picture of Okotie-Eboh as allegedly venal, with rather low personal morality, bordering on concupiscence.

    Major Nzeogwu, in his ill-fated coup speech, also descended on alleged “10 per-centers”, frittering the nation’s treasure for instant personal pleasure.  The martial ire that anchored the coup, before its paradise dissolved in alleged ethnic manipulation, didn’t exactly lack popular support.  This was clear in the West, which mostly bore the emerging fascism, gradually swallowing the Federal Republic.

    Now, Smith alleged venality.  Nzeogwu scorned “10 per-centing”, as a capital developmental crime against the Nigerian state and its citizens.  The Okotie-Eboh clan also claim their patriarch was so rich he was lending his NCNC money to run its affairs.

    Could the Omimi-Ejoh then have made a re-coup of 10 per cent from each loan — perfectly legitimate economic earnings, but in political morality not so squeaky clean?

    Honestly, from Smith’s ruinous portraiture, the Itsekiri chief would appear some guardian angel of venal politics, a plague that has stuck with Nigeria — witness the Buhari high profile war against corruption.

    Still, maybe Smith was wrong and the Okotie-Ebohs are right.  Again, they do no wrong trying to salvage their forebear’s image. But Nigerians, that continue to bear the full brunt of these epochal blunders, are entitled to the truth to safely navigate the future.

    From the Arewa front has come this main debate: the pair of the Sardauna, Alhaji Ahmadu Bello, Premier of Northern Nigeria and Alhaji Tafawa-Balewa, his viceroy in Lagos — were they Nigerian nationalists or northern irredentists?

    The North insists — and passionately too — that they were Nigerian nationalists.  With all due respect, Ripples begs to demur.  In the domination-prone temper of Nigeria’s immediate pre-independence and 1st Republic politics, they would appear more of northern champions, than Nigerian nationalists.

    Still, it would appear a game of domination gone awry.  The southern pair of Nnamdi Azikiwe and Obafemi Awolowo must have, at a time, thought the North was there for the picking, since it lagged behind in key developmental indices, as the parameter was clearly advance in Western education and civilisation.

    Besides, if the North were not some perceived soft target, why would the pair accept independence under such crushing anti-South conditions: skewed political geography, no strict protocols to protect minority interests, and an impossible three-region federation, where one (the North) is vaster than its two combined southern cousins?  By the way, that structural imbalance continues to evoke needless tension.

    With a sleight of hand, however  — the major grouse of Harold Smith’s revolt and anger in Blue Collar Lawman, his unpublished book — the British turned things round for the North.  And suddenly, the putative dominated became the dominator!

    In that book, Smith alleged the British rigging of the census to provide the North the right demographics to dominate.  He also claimed the British fiddled the Independence vote to gift the North the kingdom soon to pass from imperialists’ hands — allegedly rewarding the North for its elite loyalty; but scourging the South for its elite rascality.

    For the starry-eyed romantics thundering as if impunity and institutional subversion debuted with the military, Awo provided many examples of such in his book, The Travails of Democracy and the Rule of Law: CJN Adetokunbo Ademola letting off a cocktail jab at someone “who must oppose for opposing sake” (judiciary playing politics); PM Tafawa-Balewa who grumbled that Awo  “called himself” Leader of Opposition (head of government subversive of the Constitution); and East Premier Michael Opara who snapped the Federal Government had powers to “abolish” misbehaving regional governments (executive outlawry against Nigerian federalism).

    Nigeria may have progressively decayed over the years.  But the seeds of that decay were there from the very beginning.

    Fifty years after Nzeogwu’s coup, therefore, offers a golden opportunity to fix the  basics — not to weave new colorful fables, which could doom the country from ever learning from its past blunders.

     

  • ‘I, formerly known as . . .’

    ‘I, formerly known as . . .’

    No, I am not about to change my name.

    I have merely been paying closer attention than usual to the classified advertisement pages of the newspapers lately, following the example of the House of Representatives.

    They are chockfull of notices announcing name changes that usually begin, “I formerly known  as…” or “I formerly known and addressed as…” The closing phrase emphasises that all previous documents remain valid.

    Advertisement revenue has been at an all-time low, forcing newspapers to cut pagination drastically. But revenue from the classified pages, especially those featuring name changes, has never been greater.   By one estimate, the pages have grown at least five-fold.  At N4,500 per crack, and with some 100 inserts crammed into one of the several pages featuring that kind of material, we are talking serious money here.  In these hard times, it is almost as if the newspapers have struck gold.

    And the process of effecting this transformative change is as easy as it is cheap. Just go to the nearest newspaper house with your marriage certificate or sworn affidavit and a draft of the statement you want published, plonk down N4,500 – one of the best bargains you will find anywhere in this era of the shrinking Naira  — and it is done.  Even if you factor in the fee for the commissioner of oath operating under licence or by the roadside, it is still a great bargain.

    Many of the changes being advertised are innocuous, resulting mostly from marriage or re-marriage or divorce, or conversion to a new faith.

    Or from revulsion at having to bear a particular name, especially if that name is identified with a public figure who has fallen into disrepute.  An example that comes to mind here is Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola, the last premier of Western Nigeria.

    Following his assassination in the bloody January 15, 1966 coup, the classified advertisement pages of the Daily Sketch overflowed day after day with notices from his Yoruba kinsfolk sharing his last name disavowing it, despite its intimations of nobility.  Not for them the risk of being associated in any way with the man they perceived as a major architect of the mayhem that had paralysed Western Nigeria for two years and in a way prepared the ground for the coup that would claim his life.

    Today, if Akintola is not regarded as a martyr, he is certainly no longer an object of loathing abhorrence.  He is acclaimed by many as a statesman and one of the founding fathers of Nigeria, patron-saint of the mainstreamers, and a communicator of the first rank.  A public university, located appropriately in his hometown, Ogbomoso, in Oyo State, bears his name. The name has been decoupled from his persona, its lustre restored.

    I should mention in passing that, down the ages, many who had found their names unprepossessing and could not bear to go through life so encumbered had changed them drastically.  Who can blame the Soviet tyrant formerly known as Djugashvili for changing his name to Stalin?

    Some of the name changes being announced in the newspapers are minor, the type I made more than 50 years ago by simply dropping the name I had been baptised with as an infant, long before it could appear on any official document that really mattered.  You wonder whether it is worth bringing such changes to public notice.  The persons doing so must have their reasons, I suppose.

    But not a few of the advertised changes are intriguing.   The new name is a re-arrangement of the old name, a permutation and combination of sorts.  It is as if the advertiser had just realised or learned in mid life or even well past that milestone that the previous combination was an error requiring urgent correction.

    The person formerly known and addressed as XYZ wishes henceforth and with immediate effect to be known and addressed as YZX, XZY,ZYX, or YXZ, without prejudice to all former documents

    Examples, names slightly altered:

    Omoloba Olanifemi Sadiku wishes to confirm to the general public that he is also Lanrewaju Olanifemi.

    No doubt as an act of courtesy, and for the avoidance of doubt, as the uniquely Nigerian expression goes, Osunyemi Babatile Daniel wants the general public to know and remember at all times that he and Oladele Immanuel Babatile Daniel are one and the same person.

    The gentleman formerly and variously known as James Okwat and Okwat Wiseman Okon now wishes to be known and addressed as Okwat Wiseman Okon James.  Kindly take note of this change, Zenith Bank and First Bank in particular, and the public in general.

    The lady who used to be known as Ethamor Mercy henceforth wishes to be known and addressed as Inneh Mercy Joseph Oluaye.

    Moses Olusegun Asola now wishes to be called Durofola Olusegun Moses.

    And please take note that Okafo Peter Amadi, Okoroafo Paul Ameobi and Okafo Pete-Bok refer to one and the same person who, desirous of saving the public and the institutions with which he has been affiliated the trouble of sorting things out, but without doing violence to previous documents on which those names appear, now wishes to be known simply as Okafo Pete Amadi.

    Note, too, that Kassy Lundi Palinus, also Kassie Monday Paulinus, being one and the same person, now wishes to be known and addressed as Kassy Lundi Stallone.

    Decidedly curiouser are the changes that amount to a wholesale repudiation of the name the bearers had answered for decades and used in all manner of transactions, and the adoption of new names that bear little or no connection to the previous names, previous documents remaining valid.

    Here are some random examples, names slightly changed: and previous documents remaining valid.

    The lady formerly Katharine Ifeyinwa Okunwa now wishes to be known and addressed as Oluwaseun Mustapha.

    Legum Friday, apparently fed up with having his first name misspelled as “Legume,” now wishes to be known as Precious Agba Abaah.

    The fellow formerly addressed as Omotegbe Osahunwa, and who has suffered the additional misfortune of having his birthday wrongly entered in official documents as May 4, 1981, now wishes to be known as Anaigolu Dodi Edmond, and to have October 4, 1982 recognised as his authentic birthday. Notwithstanding the errors aforementioned, all previous documents remain valid.

    And the good lady formerly known as Ehimare Sandy Lawrenta will henceforth be known as Obihuku Ibheke Lawrenca.

    It is this latter category of name changes that has moved the House of Representatives to call on the Central Bank of Nigeria and the Nigeria Police to check the antecedents of new applicants for the Bank Verification Number, persuaded that the frequent change of names in national dailies could be a way to circumvent the process and perpetrate fraudulent acts.

    Nor did the House stop here.  It mandated its Standing Committees on Information, Police, Judiciary and Banking and Currency to investigate the matter.

    Easy, Honourable Ones, easy.

    Nigerians can no longer change their names and identities as frequently as they please  — they cannot exercise their freedom of speech —without the legislature of all institutions, inciting the banking regulatory authorities and the police and the EFCC against them?

    What is this country coming to?

  • Buhari’s anti-looting drive

    Buhari’s anti-looting drive

    On the rule of law debate viz-a-viz the fight against corruption, Ripples has moved on. But not some reader-citizens who want to contribute their bit to the public debate now trending, to use that online lingo, in the public space. Col. Innocent Azubike Nass is my guest today. Please enjoy.

    There is this popular argument that President Muhammadu Buhari is not properly following the “rule of law” or “due process of the law” in his anti-corruption (more-specifically anti-looting) fight.

    This often suggests that for an effective anti-corruption fight, the president should first change certain criminal procedures/laws before seriously tackling the monumental corruption in our society.  That could be as good as advising him to soften or give up the fight, under the excuse of judicial hindrances.

    In the annals of American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), there are innumerable cases of re-arresting a suspect on trial who has been granted bail.

    There are also cases of other law-enforcement agencies taking related actions, such as Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) arresting and deporting back an in-coming witness or plaintiff who has valid court papers and visa.

    Many of the current arch-proponents of ‘Government must obey all court orders on bail’ do not seem to care to mention this other side of the coin to balance the argument.

    Nigerian society has reached a heartlessly devilish dimension of looting and sharing of the commonwealth of the nation by a few well-entrenched, well-networked and deep-pocketed elites; who had serially proven to have ways of outsmarting and compromising certain judicial processes to evade justice.  They deploy their wealth and influence to that effect.

    The current cases involve the looting and sharing of war fund, while our fighting soldiers were being humiliated and killed in hundreds for lack of appropriate weapons and equipment in the fight against Boko Haram.

    Thousands of civilians were killed and several hundreds of thousands displaced from their homes and living in refugee camps; both in Nigeria and in the neighbouring countries, while those that looted and shared the war fund live and swim in obscene wealth and luxury, with properties and bank accounts littered in Nigeria and in foreign countries, just as majority of Nigerian masses live in abject poverty and helplessness.

    So, does an elected president have the executive power to take certain radical actions if he is convinced it is in the over-riding interest of the nation and the people?

    In about 1864 (during American civil war between the Union side and the Confederates), President Abraham Lincoln, through an executive order/decree, suspended the legal “writ of summons”, made a law that was back-dated (retrospective effect) and used it to try some detained saboteur suspects, and those convicted were executed within days after the review of the judgment. 

    He did that because he was convinced that the masterminds of the saboteur network could exploit existing legal loopholes to beat the law, while their foot-soldiers were more easily trapped.  Lincoln wondered how he could sanction the execution of convicted foot-soldiers (“the little solder boy who deserts”) while their masterminds remained free to do more harm to the society, under the subterfuge of legal technicalities.  Lincoln saw the survival of the United States as greater than the lives of those few individuals.

    For that decision, President Lincoln came under sustained attacks and media condemnation, as well as litigation, all orchestrated by some American human-rights activist groups and public affairs commentators.  But the overwhelming majority of Unionist Americans (who had less media publicity) tacitly supported Lincoln.  Posterity had since reckoned that he acted in over-riding national interest for the survival of the United States.

    During the Second World War, shortly after Japanese forces attacked and destroyed American naval base at Pearl Harbour in late 1941, which drew the United States into the war, the United States judiciary found itself in a delicate and controversial situation.  This was related to the security measures being taken to identify and weed off internal saboteurs, most of whom were of dual-citizenship (particularly Japanese-Americans and German-Americans).

    There were reported cases of saboteurs and spies caught while transmitting information to the enemy (the Axis powers).  The detention, investigation and trial of these suspects became a problem under the law, as civil libertarians cried out loudly against abuse of fundamental human rights of suspects (who by law were presumed innocent until court proves otherwise), and the rule of law as enshrined in American constitution.

    There was also wide-spread public hysteria calling for severe action against enemies of the nation, irrespective of the niceties of the legal due process.  In a celebrated case brought by a group of civil libertarians to the U.S. Supreme Court in 1942, Chief Justice Robert Jackson, against the strong argument of civil libertarians on the issues of “interrogation without the due process of law” and prolonged detention of suspects, gave his famous ruling that the United States “Constitution is not a suicide pact”.

    Chief Justice Robert Jackson argued that the constitution and laws of the United States were made for good, order, peace and harmony within the society.  That is the spirit of the law.  But an unanticipated situation had arisen whereby evil-minded forces threaten the values and the very existence of the nation, exploiting the liberal values to destroy the very same society. In that case the spirit of the law overruled the letters of the law.   The Supreme Court sanctioned the mass internment of Japanese-Americans.  It vacated the decision two years later when the war situation had stabilized.

    The purpose of this recollection is to show that even the judiciary has a very crucial patriotic role to play in checkmating the forces that threaten to destroy our values as an ordered human society, rather than take subterfuge under legal helplessness and technicalities.

    President Buhari needs decisive actions in the anti-corruption fight, if effective impact is to be achieved.  A loud minority of opinions and commentaries could dominate most media outlets.  That could be acceptable as part of the dynamics of change.

    But the overwhelming majority of Nigerian masses (and sizeable minority of elites) enthusiastically support Mr. President to give entrenched corruption a tough fight and stubbornly resist the desperate fight-back by corruption network.

    Yes, there is a genuine fear of abuse of such executive presidential power.  Nigeria’s recent history is replete with such abuses.  But under the present situation, the president has got to take resolute action, and take responsibility for the outcome.

    There could be no other effective way to pull Nigeria out of the woods.

     

    • Col. Nass, who retired from the Nigerian Army in 2006, is based in Enugu.

     

  • The budget circus

    The budget circus

    So soon after we are supposed to have been done with the riddle of how a budget presented in the full view of a global audience of allegedly took a walk from the chambers of the National Assembly undetected, a new chapter to the controversy appears to have been opened at the weekend. This time, it is not the usual culprit, the National Assembly but a group described by the Presidency as the budget mafia that is being charged with mangling the 2016 budget.

    The specific charges range from an alleged inflation of expenditure items by some N1.7 trillion, the smuggling of some 6,000-odd items into the budget and criminal sabotage.

    Here is how an unnamed source captured the saga as quoted by this newspaper: “Bureaucratic resistance and entrenched systemic corrupt practices dogged every move of the presidency to produce proposals reflecting financial prudence and frugality, during the preparation of the 2016 Budget now before the National Assembly. For instance, after learning that the presidency was considering a large budget of possibly N8 trillion in order to significantly increase capital expenditure, bureaucrats brought a proposal of N9.7 trillion for overhead and capital spending even without personnel spending. Of the proposed N9.7 trillion, the bureaucrats planned to spend an alarming N3 trillion on overhead alone but the presidency eventually slashed this to N163b lower by 8% than 2015 budget which was N177billion, indicating massive cut of some of the main provisions by the Buhari presidency”.

    “These bureaucrats also proposed to spend N2.1 trillion on personnel for the 2016 estimates compared to about N1.8 trillion in the 2015 budget. But the presidency also cut this down to N1.7 trillion in the final estimates sent to the legislature…”

    “We were virtually doing vigil to beat the time since the budget had to be presented before the end of the year to the National Assembly and while some of the civil servants eventually cooperated, those who were resistant caused the insertions of many of the provisions that are now embarrassing the government…”

    “The situation and its fallout were so bad that it provoked the annoyance of the President who nonetheless kept his cool buying time so as to meet the target date for the presentation of the budget in line with extant laws and regulations governing the budget process…”

    Knowing the mind of the administration, the nightmare of the civil servants may have just begun. Already, we are told that a number of top civil servants have been pencilled to go. Hopefully, there will be enough provisions in the Civil Service General Orders to hang the recalcitrant officials in the sun.

    Given that the Presidency has since moved to correct the identified distortions, why has it suddenly become an issue? By the way, where were its own officials when these so-called manipulations were taking place? Why seek to score cheap, needless points since the administration has had its way?

    These are certainly unusual times.

    To begin with, there is something painfully unnerving about the penchant by the Buhari administration to play games at a time like this. Earlier on, we saw its ignoble attempt to hold the National Assembly responsible for a problem it created. For the throng – of which yours truly is one – ever so ready to give the Presidency the benefit of the doubt, the latest development must come as a teachable moment. Truth is – if ever a budget could be described as sloppy, the 2016 budget would stand apart.

    As they say – the devil is in the details. Check out the billions proposed for exotic cars – by an administration that promises to do things differently; the proposed residences of the trio of Vice President, Senate President and Speaker, House of Representatives at a princely cost of N5 billion and several other expenditure heads clearly out of tune with current moods. How does one explain the fact that the capital estimates for the State House Clinics dwarfs those proposed for our teaching hospitals altogether? Those are the issues Nigerians are interested in finding answers to. That demand is a far cry from current attempts to frontload alibis for failure!

    So the Presidency is “embarrassed”? Nigerians are put it mildly, scandalised.

    It isn’t as if Nigerians are ignorant of the near-infinite capacity of the civil servants to do mischief though. Indeed, I don’t know of many Nigerians who would shed tears for the civil servants wherever and whenever the Buhari anti-corruption onslaught hits their quarters. The administration only needs to look at the sprawling real estate dotting Abuja skyline some 80 percent of which are said to belong to federal civil servants to appreciate how much our civil servants have helped themselves at our expense!

    The attempt to use our budget as alibi to excuse its tardiness is what I consider as unacceptable. Nearly eight months on, it must be exasperating for Nigerians to watch an administration they reposed so much faith falter on every count. It is worse than tragic. We are certainly far too much into motions without locomotion. It’s time to get moving.

     

    Supreme Court and the rest of us

    The news came at the weekend that the Supreme Court has finally upended all the gains brought on by the adoption of the card reader in the electoral process. That is most unfortunate. An online medium while adducing reasons why the election of Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State was upheld quoted the apex court to have said “that while provision was made for the use of the Electronic Card Reader Machine for accreditation of voters in the Approved Guidelines and Regulations for the conduct of the 2015 general elections, the device was never “intended to supplant, displace or supersede” the Voters’ Register”.

    By that ruling, the apex court appears to have thrown that singular innovation applauded globally into the bin. It is worse than tragedy.

     

     

     

     

     

  • What are they doing now?

    What are they doing now?

    What are some of yesterday’s people doing now?

    Now that they have time on their hands and considering their diminished circumstances, a good many of them must be reflecting on the awful instability of human greatness.

    Previously, if they had time to reflect at all, it was about how to pull in the next N100 million from the public purse and stay in place to pull in another N100 million or multiples thereof at the earliest opportunity.

    And as we have been learning to our grief with each passing day, there was never a shortage of opportunity or pretext.

    They probably still have lots of resources – enough, at any rate, to engineer a curious reversal in the epochal case that started out as The Federal Republic of Nigeria v Obtainers Unlimited & Others but is now shaping up as Obtainers Unlimited & Others v The Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    Identified perpetrators, who have in diverse ways fessed up to “obtaining “ have nevertheless put on the garb of victimhood and are with help from their confederates and sympathisers, challenging those seeking to bring them to justice to defend and justify the quest.

    It is a familiar conjuncture, and the reason why corruption has blossomed.  Remember Nuhu Ribadu, and how they ran him out of office and out of town? Can any lessons be learned where  no lessons were taught?

    The quest for restitution should be pursued with vigour, but also with diligence.  It cannot be abandoned.  It cannot be deferred.   There may not be another day.

    To return to the beginning, what follows is the first instalment of an occasional series that will speak to the prefatory question, namely:  What are some of yesterday’s people doing now?

    The two most powerful women of the era happily behind us now are confronting realities they never could have imagined.  So ubiquitous was Mrs Patience Jonathan, so forcefully did she intrude into so many areas of state action, so irresistible a force had she become that it was being suggested quite seriously in some quarters that the safest thing was to entrench her in the Constitution her husband was set to give Nigeria.

    That way, so went the reasoning, she could at least be managed.

    And the signals, I gather, were that Dr Jonathan, having tried without success to rein her in with the intervention of elders flown from the creeks of the Delta to Abuja for the purpose, would not be averse to a constitutional fix. Unfortunately, it never came to be.

    That may be just as well.  Not much has been heard lately from that quarter.  Perhaps she has finally dedicated herself to peaceful pursuits, now that she can no longer engage in nor advocate lawless action without having to face the consequences.

    Diezani Alison-Madueke presided daintily over the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, the heart of the petroleum industry that was losing 25 per cent of its daily output to what a British report called  “political officials,” while also bleeding  the country dry through payment of bogus import subsidies to the administration’s retinue of freeloaders.

    Yet she remained untouchable.  If Dr Jonathan were still in the saddle, there is little doubt that, despite her illness, she would have continued to preside over what is without question the most corrupt public sector organisation in Nigeria, and one of the most corrupt anywhere.

    She must be regretting that she did not quit when she was diagnosed with cancer.  That would have earned her a great deal of empathy.  Now, she has to cope with its ravages while attending to the genteel but insistent demands of the police and courts in the UK for information about her time in office.

    The man at the centre of all this, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, has been having a time of his life, especially abroad, garnering  prizes and commendations, overseeing national elections, being toasted and feted as the statesman he aspires to be and the great democrat he never was.

    His stock seemed set to rise and rise and rise until The Economist, that master of the pernicious putdown, dismissed him in its current issue as “an ineffectual buffoon.”

    Ouch.

    That magazine is no longer on my reading list.   I have not held a copy in my hand nor paid more than cursory attention to its online manifestations since August 2002 when, as the Bush Administration was exploring with almost maniacal frenzy just about anything that could furnish a pretext for the invasion of Iraq, it had this banner on its cover:   WE VOTE FOR WAR.

    It would be hard to come up with a more disreputable headline or a more pernicious piece of advocacy than the one laid out under it.  Here you have some privileged white boys sipping tea in their cosy offices in London and with smug complacency, if not sang froid, “voting” for a war to be fought by other people’s children and fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers –  a war that will claim tens of thousands of lives, and upended the lives of the millions who survived it

    All for a lie – a transparent lie.

    Given the mindset of the war-mongering US Republican Party and the hawks George W.Bush surrounded himself with, the only question left was when the invasion would start, not if.  The Economist had made their case for war.

    When it dismissed Dr Jonathan as an ineffectual buffoon, it was doing what it does best – the savage putdown.  Jonathan may be ineffectual, but buffoon he ain’t.

    Just wait until he locates that dodgy dissertation, dusts it up and cranks out seminal paper after seminal paper, the type that is sure to guarantee him a Lifetime Achievement Award of the World Congress of Ichthyologists. And if he can make the time to settle down to apply that supple mind and well-honed sense of discrimination to work out the definitive distinction between corruption and stealing, even The Economist will have to admit that it was wrong about him.

    The last time we heard from Labaran Maku, Dr Jonathan’s Minister of Information, he had just been clobbered at the Nassarawa gubernatorial election, which he contested on the platform of the Labour Party, the PDP having disowned him.  He had made his mark in the cabinet by staging jamborees he called Good Governance Tours, during which he ostensibly gauged how each state government was delivering.  Only the PDP states measured up; in Lagos, take away the federal projects and Governor Babatunde Fashola was just an empty barrel, Maku said.

    I cannot yet confirm it, but I hear Maku is planning to get into tourism big-time, drawing on the skills that had served him so well in the Jonathan cabinet.

    When Femi Fani-Kayode, who now wishes to be known and addressed as Olukayode (former documents presumably remaining valid) was warning so stridently the other day that hell would break lose if anything happened to the beleaguered former National Security Adviser Sambo Dasuki, someone quipped to my hearing:  E dey talk like person wey don obtain well well.

    Easy, I upbraided the fellow.  The jury is no out yet.

    Meanwhile, I hear he has de-mothballed his wig and gown and re-organised his well-stocked  law library.  Next time Dasuki and some of the more notable suspects appear in court, do not be surprised if you find Fani-Kayode in their corner, decked up in lawyer’s garb and lugging an arsenal of private facts on which he will draw copiously

     

    Did Donald Trump really say that?

    My column for last week (Donald Trump’s delusional world) was based entirely on disparaging remarks the frontrunner for the Republican ticket in November’s U.S. Presidential election was widely reported to have made about Nigeria and Nigerians.

    It sounded very much like what Trump has been saying and could have said.  In journalism, there is a rule of thumb that if something looks like a duck, walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it must be a duck.  I had followed that rule and pronounced Trump guilty as charged, without verification.

    I report with regret that I can find no authoritative source for the statement at issue.   It was a brilliant spoof, and I can almost hear its author laughing heartily.

  • The matter of tax

    The matter of tax

    With nary a prospect of rebound in the price of the liquid gold in the near term, the debate on alternative revenue sources has suddenly acquired a strident and interesting tone. Only last week, my colleague, Tunji Adegboyega in his Sunday column practically took the National Assembly to the cleaners over their suggestion that the federal government should rather grow the tax revenue than finance the budget from borrowing.

    Poor senators! They had in the course of their debate on the general principles of the 2016 budget drawn attention to the debt component said to average N500 billion daily which they considered outrageous. Senate Chief Whip, Olusola Adeyeye (APC Osun Central) who led the debate thought that what the nation needed at this time was to go back to the model of governance used during the First Republic where every adult was made to pay tax.

    As he recalled:  “Nobody in my village will go to his farm until he can produce his tax receipt; we need ingenuity to bring this to pass. We must begin to tax things like cigarettes, alcohol; you beat your wife, you pay heavily…Text messages cost N3.81 a page: if we add just N1 to a page of text message and we say that money belongs to government, we will make billions.

    He did end there: “We must install toll on roads, but that is not enough: across the world, when you park at any airport, you pay per hour; we must do what the rest of the world does…We must begin to tax allowances; Nigeria is the only country that shelters the bulk of the earnings of its workers and call them allowances. You don’t want your allowances taxed? They will be taxed because they must be taxed.”

    Those were what my colleague would have none of. He thinks Nigerians are already overburdened as it is. And just because the current public finance system ill-serves the ordinary citizen, he thinks there is no basis to demand more sacrifice while our profligate parliamentarians live their lives to the hilt. And so for starters he counsels that the lawmakers think outside the box!

    There are two isues here. The first is whether the call by the senators have any merit. The second is whether our-pampered, overpaid and under-performing lawmakers should be the ones pushing for more taxation at this time.

    Let’s be very clear about what the issues really are.

    The first is that the nation is practically broke. If we weren’t, we wouldn’t be talking about a budget of N6.08 trillion with an assumption of a whopping N2.2 trillion deficit. Unfortunately, we are also talking of a budget which assumes a sales price of $38 for its barrel of crude at a time crude goes for sub-$30. If the present situation, fostered by the obduracy of major oil producers in their opposition to any idea of production cut is grim, the re-entry of the Iran crude into the market simply forecloses the possibility of imminnent oil price rebound. Like I said not too long ago, we are on to a long, dark night.

    The second is that the options open to us as a nation is increasingly limited. While we are nowhere yet near the balance of payment crisis of the late 1980s, the full-blown symptoms of a maldajusted economy are firmly set upon us. I see most of the contribution to the current debate on the economy not taking sufficient time to chew upon the implications of the global oil movements against the demands of the local economy; had they done so, they would have appreciated not just the nature but the depth of the current emergency. Today, we know that some 24 out 36 states have their receivables falling far behind recurrent expenditures. Indeed, with understandably the exception of the federal government and one or two states, the rest being unable to discharge their responsibilities to their workers ought to be in receivership by now!

    But even more fundamental is the yawning infrastructure gap. Whether it is roads, power, railways, or the hydrocarbons sector, at least we all agree that the supporting infrastructures for a modern economy are virtually non-existent. Few months into the lean season, we are yet again pretending to be wise to the need to diversify the economy, improve its competititivenes and generally get Nigerians working. Except that we forget that none of these can be delivered without massive public expenditure; and not while we remain oblivious to the need for current sacrifices to ensure the future good.

    Nigerians are certainly not alone when it comes to loathing the tax idea. Even in the so-called advanced economies, discussions on the subject are oftentimes impassioned. Yet, it is at the core of the social contract between the governed and the governing authorities. Aside being one of the oldest ways to redistribute wealth, it is the most sustainable way to finance public expenditure.

    Let’s come to the question: are Nigerians overburdened with tax? The figures obviously suggest otherwise. In the course of a simple check on the tax-to-GDP ratio for different countries for year 2015, my findings are most instructive. Whereas the tax-to-GDP ratio for Nigeria ranks bottom at 6.1 percent, that of Egypt is 15.8 percent; Gambia 18.9 percent; Ghana 20.8 percent; Kenya 18.4 percent. In this, Nigeria compares well with the Saudis at 5.3 percent.

    The point is – we can do far more than we are currently doing on taxation. For instance, at the current five percent rate, Nigeria probably pays the least Value Added Tax (VAT) on the continent. Under the ECOWAS common tarrif, Nigeria is supposed to be paying 14 percent. Aside paying the lowest rate, a good number of items that could have been brought under VAT are currently excluded. In the current circumstances, the debate on VAT has become legitimate.

    Le me say this: whenever the subject of tax comes us, the images that readily pops up is the tax man chasing obdurate folks in strret corners for the tax certificate. Apart from being the image many of us grew up with, it’s one of the enduring myths of taxation being an oppressive machine. The world has changed and with it new methods for tax collection.  Changing with the times means finding more creative ways to collect tax.

    For now, we can debate all the methods in the world, the peccadilloes of our governing elite and their tax and spend tendencies. These are certainly legitimate. But let’s not imagine that there can be an alternative to tax.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

  • Supreme Court, Rivers and death of electoral sanity

    Supreme Court, Rivers and death of electoral sanity

    Go forth, electoral bandits. In the next bout of re-runs in Rivers and elsewhere, kill, maim, rape and raze!  It is perfectly legal!

    Besides, if Ezenwo Wike and co can get away with electoral murder, so could you!

    Isn’t that the latest message from the Supreme Court of Nigeria, by its decision on the Rivers gubernatorial poll?

    Without a doubt; though legal puritans would hee-haw, and insist on awaiting their Lordship’s formal reasons for what appears an outrageous slaughter of electoral reason.

    Still, don’t we all feel a sense of déjà vu?  Haven’t we traversed this path before?

    No, this is not making a Judas of the Nigerian judiciary.  But by its characteristic softness on electoral turpitude, and its seeming penchant to aid and abet electoral larceny, hiding behind narrow legalism, it would appear as guilty of undermining Nigeria’s political evolution, as the executive and the legislature.

    The Supreme Court, in 1979, found that the twelve-two-thirds of 19 states was 12 two-thirds states; not 13.  That was clearly more of legal gerrymandering, given that the apex court only canonised the legal opinion of an involved partisan, Chief Richard Akinjide, SAN, national legal adviser to the then National Party of Nigeria (NPN).

    Besides, the pall of politics, on a matter that ought to be 100 per cent judicial, rested on two troubling pillars: the then Federal Electoral Commission (FEDECO) had, in previous decisions, always interpreted twelve-two-thirds of 19 states as 13, even in registering political parties.  Also, the Supreme Court decreed its clearly controversial decision would not serve as precedent.

    But why — if it was so sure its decision was unassailable: in law, in good conscience and in common sense?

    Still, what if the judiciary had let the 1979 election run its legal course, and not given political cunning a legal jab in the arm?

    For starters, President Shehu Shagari and his NPN would have escaped that crushing legitimacy burden, which they never overcame, all through their four years and three months in power.  Besides, they probably would not have imbibed that fatal electoral permissiveness; bating them to rig first, and sort out the messy aftermath with an indulgent, if not collusive, judiciary.

    Besides, the 2nd Republic would probably have survived.  If it had, Nigerians would have been saved the trauma of the most vicious strain of military rule, spanning 1984 to 1999, not discounting the diarchy from January 1992 to November 1993, during which the freest election in Nigerian history was annulled.

    That era hit its nadir with Sani Abacha’s fist-of-mail tyranny, his brazen raid on the public till and the near-unravelling of the Nigerian military.

    In 2008, the Justice James Ogebe-chaired Presidential Election Tribunal, with the full complement of five justices, beatified the odious Umaru Yar’Adua presidential mandate.  Among its infamous stands was that non-serialisation needed not invalidate a ballot.  The Supreme Court later gave that rotten election its blessed kiss.

    But thank God, the goodly Yar’Adua himself (God bless his soul) was unconvinced, though surrendering the most looted presidential ballot in Nigerian history would appear a no-option.  He set up the Lawal Muhammadu Uwais-chaired Electoral Reforms Panel.

    That panel had a certain Attahiru Jega, later to become Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) chair.  The foreign and domestic flak the 2007 elections drew must have made quite a mark on Prof. Jega and his INEC.  A direct response, at saner and more sanctified polls, were the computer-chip voter card and its authenticator, the card reader.

    With that technology, the prospects that the 2015 polls would be free of soulless ballot-stuffing and criminal figure-cooking were quite high.  Besides, the instant audit of voters, with the card-reader recording accredited voters, against the ones that actually voted, would give electoral transparency a fillip.

    Though the final details of their Lordships’ decision are yet to be out, unlike the two lower courts before it, the Supreme Court, perhaps itself buried in arcane legality, has all but buried the card reader as a force in sane elections!  Yet, that technology appears the scientific curb on the self-destruct Nigerian politician, merrily eager to poison his own ecology, en route to grabbing power.

    And how sweet, of Nigeria’s apex court: betraying hardly any institutional memory, no sense of history, neither a sense of sociology nor morality, hardly any antenna to pick the angst of the cheated and the bullied, just narrow and crass legalism!  For all you know, the apex judicial conclave in the land was in Mars when the Rivers electoral shame unfolded!

    Yet, here was the damning verdict of the Independent Election Monitoring Group (IEMG), South-South zone, dated 12 April 2015, and signed by one Esther Achor, Esq.

    On Rivers’ general electoral anarchy: “Shocking cases of cold blooded killings and beheading, obstruction of votes, arson, voter intimidation, ballot snatching, missing result sheets, presenting of fake ballot papers, multiple thumb-printing, campaigning at polling units, compromise of ad-hoc staffs, absence of level playing environment, violence against media personnel and impunity were witnessed in different magnitude across the length and breadth of the state.  These acts were brazen.”

    And on the card reader: “In a number of cases, the card reader functioned well.  In others, it was abandoned for manual accreditation, contrary to the rule of INEC; and this facilitated irregular thumb-printing/massive rigging.”  Did anyone smell wilful sabotage, for a preconceived end?

    That is the profane Rivers poll that the Supreme Court has given its sacred kiss!

    Besides, where is the correlation in all of this judicial anomie?  A judiciary that voided almost all of the Rivers House of Assembly seats, contested same place, same time as the governorship, is the same judiciary — and the brightest of its flower, to boot! — okaying the Rivers gubernatorial poll, even after the Governorship Election Tribunal and the Court of Appeal had held it was a grand fraud!

    When the Supreme Court played blatant politics with the law in 1979, the ultimate result was a collapsed democratic republic; and trauma of military rule as Nigerians never knew before.

    The eventual cost of this Rivers electoral brutality looms in the belly of time.  But on one thing, Ripples is sure: the organised anarchy of military rule is gone and best forgotten.  But if our courts continue to aid and abet electoral pillage, against good conscience and common sense, they may well be working overtime to birth free-wheeling anarchy.

    If that comes, even their Lord Justices would realise, in Fela-speak, wig-and-gown na stuff, na tailor dey sew am!  At the earliest hint of the military’s overarching power hubris, the immortal Fela had declared: uniform na khaki, na tailor dey sew am!

    The moral?  Only an ordered society respects persons, positions and institutions.  If you doubt, ask brother jurists in Somalia!

    In the immediate, however, the Rivers re-runs come with great peril.  The bandits that pulled Wike’s electoral barbarity are probably ready to pounce.  But the other side, latterly weaned from the folly of awaiting justice, and now buoyed by “federal might”, would certainly not lay to be slaughtered.

    Is this then a judiciary-paved road to electoral Mogadishu?  Ripples hopes not!

  • Donald Trump’s delusional world

    Donald Trump’s delusional world

    Not a few expatriate Nigerians in the United States have been fretting since Republican Presidential hopeful Donald Trump threatened to send them packing if he wins November’s presidential election.

    “To make America great again, we need to get rid of the Muslims, Mexicans and the Africans, especially the Nigerians,” Trump said. “They take all our jobs, jobs meant for honest hard working Americans, and when we don’t give them the jobs, the Muslims blow us up.”

    This was a new one.  Nigerians as a group had previously figured on his catalogue of bugbears only as crime-prone elements.  And this latest was just a preamble.

    “We need to get the Africans out. Not the blacks, the Africans. Especially the Nigerians,” he elaborated.  They’re everywhere. I went for a rally in Alaska and met just one African in the entire state. Where was he from? Nigeria! He’s in Alaska taking our jobs. They’re in Houston taking our jobs. Why can’t they stay in their own country? Why? I’ll tell you why.

    “Because they are corrupt,” he said to vehement cheering by a predominantly white audience   of some 10, 000 at a rally in Wichita, Kansas.  “Their governments are so corrupt, they rob the people blind and bring it all here to spend. And their people run away and come down here and  take our jobs.  We can’t have that! If I become president, we’ll send them all home. We’ll build a wall at the Atlantic Shore. Then maybe we’ll re-colonise them because obviously they did not learn a damn thing from the British!”

    There you have it, Himself the Donald, the tabloid media personality and cartoon character on the top of his flippant, foul-mouthed, demagogic form.  Do not expect him to do anything differently yet, because what he has been doing so far has served him well.  It has kept him at or near the top of the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries, supposedly the bellwether of political preference in an election year, and as prohibitive front runner in national polls for the Republican ticket.

    What the statesman and British Prime Minister Arthur James Balfour (1848 – 1930) said of a speech by one of his contemporaries can be said with justice about Trump’s broadside: “There were some things that were true, and some things that were trite; but what was true was trite, and what was not trite was not true.”

    It is true, but trite, that a good many Nigerians are involved in syndicated extortion, credit card fraud and other scams of like nature that a name has even been created for the phenomenon: “The Nigerian Connection.

    Through their own gullibility and credulity and a predilection for reaping where they did not sow, hundreds of Americans have fallen victim to these scams.  In whatever case, it is not proven that Nigerians are more given to criminal activity than other national or sub-national groups in the United States.

    It is true, but trite, that Nigerians are to be found even in Alaska.  They are everywhere trying to earn a decent living like other residents.  Were business or pleasure to take Trump to Greenland and beyond, indeed to the farthest regions of the world inhabited by humans, he will find Nigerians there. That is not a flaw in their character but a tribute to their enterprise, their sense of adventure, their irrepressible spirit.

    It is again true, but trite, that there is much corruption in public life in Nigeria, and that many public officials who have corruptly enriched themselves warehouse their loot in the United States, in the expectation that it will buy them life most abundant.

    Since taking office in May 2015, the administration of President Muhammadu Buhari has been  unmasking the corruption that virtually bankrupted Nigeria under Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s  watch, identifying perpetrators in high places, and preparing the ground to bring them to justice. Dasukigate is only the best-known manifestation of this exercise.

    So, it is no news that corruption is a big issue in Nigeria. Nor is it a revelation that major American oil companies – think Halliburton – have over the decades aided and abetted it big-time.

    A good many Nigerians might not be averse to being re-colonised, this time by the United States as Trump said he might do if elected, the British having made a hash of it.  One recalls how, at a very low point — as if there was ever a high point! — in the Second Republic, a tearful Imo State Governor Sam Mbakwe, whom no one ever accused of flippancy, wished the British could be brought back to continue where they had left off.

    Decades earlier, the question was being asked in homes and on the streets:  When will this independence end?  Even now, today, it is not inconceivable that there is still some yearning among some of our compatriots, however muted, for the return of Britannica.

    So it is true, but tiresomely trite, that corruption in Nigeria has assumed industrial proportions. And Trump was all triteness when he hurled his broadsides at Nigeria and Nigerians.  And where he was not trite, he was a peddler of falsehood.

    It is not true and not trite that Nigerians have been taking jobs meant for “honest, hardworking Americans.”  To put it baldly, it is a shameless lie.

     

    What jobs?

    Certainly not the job of healing the sick and tending their wounds and caring for the old and infirm that tens of thousands of doctors, nurses and medical workers who claim Nigerian nationality carry out everyday.

    In the tri-State area of New York, New Jersey and Connecticut that Trump is familiar with, the health care delivery system will virtually collapse if the Nigerians he has been denigrating were to pull out.

    The educational establishments from primary school all the way to research universities will   be the poorer without the Nigerians who serve as teachers, administrators, senior faculty and scientists engaged in cutting-edge research.

    There are more Nigerian doctors, more Nigerian engineers and more Nigerian professors  in the United States than in Nigeria.  Virtually all of them earned their places in the system by competition and superior performance, not by “taking away jobs meant for honest, hard-working Americans.”  And they have kept their places in the system the same way – by superior performance.

    Not that it would make any difference to Trump if he knew it, but according to recent research, Nigerians constitute the largest group in the United States with graduate – or post graduate, as we say in Nigeria –degrees.

    These are not your thieves stealing jobs from hard-working Americans.  These are people          who have, through diligent study and application, earned their places under the American sun, a good many of them as American as Trump and Mark Rubio, and more American than the Canadian-born Ted Cruz.

    To those Nigerians out there freaking out about what Trump might do to them in the very unlikely event that he is elected U. S. president, I say: rest easy.  I commend to you President Harry Truman’s commiseration with five-star general and World War II Supreme Allied Commander, Dwight Eisenhower, who was about to succeed him in The White House.

    “Poor Ike,” Truman lamented.  “He will give orders, and nothing will happen.”

    If Trump issues arbitrary orders, or pursues any of his other crack-brained ideas, he will find himself blockaded by the system of checks and balances, if not by entrenched interests.  Little will change.  About the only way he or any president for that matter can get anything done on the domestic front – even lofty things — is to tinker around the edges.

    Ask Barack Hussein Obama.

  • Afenifere and the kiss of death

    Afenifere and the kiss of death

    For the umpteenth time, Ripples is constrained to cite the tortoise in the Yoruba tale.  Asked when he would return from his trip, while bidding his folks farewell, he promised to return, only when he was disgraced!

    Indeed, ace playwright, the late Ola Rotimi, was so fascinated by this tortoise quip that he used it to anchor the tragedy of Kurunmi, the ill-fated Aare Ona Kakanfo and Ijaye warlord, in his tragic play, Kurunmi.

    Kurunmi, generalissimo of the Oyo imperial army, bated himself to self-ruin by his classic confrontation with Ibadan, the Oyo imperial garrison, under the command of Basorun Ogunmola, in those 19th century years of blood, gore and plunder, in the pre-colonial Yoruba country.

    Good old hubris, couched in Yoruba native-speak, assailed the tortoise. That explains his irrational answer.  The same hubris goaded Kurunmi’s tragic unhorsing; just as it is behind the unfolding but spectacular unravelling of the Afenifere gerontocracy, in contemporary Yoruba political country.

    Pa Olu Falae’s popular censure, following the old man’s N100 million “obtainment” from Dasukigate, would appear a gripping sub-plot of that high drama.

    Indeed, Chief Falae’s unfolding odyssey would appear the stuff of which Grecian tragedies are made.

    Like Kehinde (last to come) in the Yoruba concept of twins, that nevertheless claims seniority over Taye (precursor), Chief Falae zoomed past about everyone to eminence.  His Taye (to revisit that Yoruba twin metaphor), included battle-hardened veterans of the Awolowo political combat of the 1st Republic, that claim a near-divine right to the Awo political franchise.

    Though a latter-day Afenifere joiner, his delicate positioning between Awoist high orthodoxy that balks at injustice from any quarters, and the Babangida-era new breed progressives that accused Shehu Musa Yar’Adua and co of perfidy, at throwing MKO Abiola’s June 12, 1993 presidential mandate, splendidly paved Falae’s way.

    The Awoist old guard was uneasy with MKO, given Abiola’s past brush with Awo.  Yet, they couldn’t, by their ideological DNA, be indifferent to the annulment.  That a Yoruba man was victim was grand bonus.

    On the other hand, though MKO was not ungrateful for Afenifere’s rally, he appeared more at ease with the younger elements, not the old fundamentalists.  Falae, again appeared the merry median between the two.

    At things would pan out, Chief Falae had the historical distinction of announcing the birth of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), the final vehicle to battle Gen. Sani Abacha to the virtual death.  He also — need we recall? — beat the great Chief Bola Ige to the Alliance for Democracy (AD) presidential ticket in 1999.

    How Falae blazed the historic NADECO trail is rendered in Clapping With One Hand by a participant-observer, Olawale Oshun, in the first of his trilogy on the June 12 saga.  The other two books are The Open Grave and The Kiss of Death.

    But as Falae bolted to the top before everyone, he appears fated, by Dasukigate, to career down the abyss, also before anyone!

    There is a story making the rounds — that Falae was booed in church, while telling his own side of Dasukigate.  At best, the story might be true.  At worst, it is only apocryphal.

    But true or false, its believability only underscores the Yoruba obduracy against fallen heroes, particularly when accused of venality and abject lack of character.  The Akure high chief now treads that perilous path.

    But even as Falae’s odyssey unfolds (at least in the angry Yoruba streets), he may yet remain a hero to the Afenifere gerontocracy.  What if the N100 million Chief Falae collected was less for the Social Democratic Party (SDP), of which he is national chairman, but more for Afenifere, in which he is regional champion?

    This puzzle is not illegitimate because of the dissonance coming from within SDP.  A national source claimed the chief rendered only N5 million; and even then, did not disclose the source of the “donation”.  The Ogun SDP was even shriller in disowning Falae, claiming the state branch of the party never got a dime.

    So, where did the money go?  Or is Papa stoically not ratting on others?

    The angst in the South West is as much shock at the Dasukigate chink in Falae’s hitherto formidable integrity armour, as it is linking Afenifere (Afenifere of Awo, the immaculate avatar), to free-wheeling sleaze in contemporary Nigeria.

    Indeed, Afenifere of late had developed the disturbing conceit of the tortoise that courted nothing but disgrace.  The body’s 2015 pre-election and electioneering manoeuvres were disgraceful — and wilfully self-destructive.

    Awo never swam against the wish of his supporters.  Indeed, his political canonisation stemmed from Awo, the ultimate policy wonk; as much as from Awo, the symbiotic politician: he led, but was also led, by his people.

    But in their self-imposed season of anomie, Afenifere committed the ultimate ideological apostasy, by their own Awoist doctrine: pushed the wrong cause, backed the wrong horse, kept the wrong company, and coalesced behind the wrong person, as arrowhead to Aso Rock, in Ondo Governor, Olusegun Mimiko, ruthless political hustler and survivalist, who just defected to the wide-and-merry Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), from the supposedly straight-and-narrow Labour Party (LP).

    But whoever traded with Mimiko and made a profit: the late Adebayo Adefarati, the late Olusegun Agagu, Ali Olanusi or even Bola Tinubu?

    Ah, Asiwaju Tinubu!  That must be the original trigger: for if Tinubu moved right, the Afenifere grandees must move left, if he moved up, Afenifere must move down, even if it were the most asinine thing to do!

    But why would a conclave of wise elders and seasoned political generalissimos bait themselves into sure misfortune, just because of the fortune of one man?

    Spite.  Concentrated spite often brews concentrated flaws, which could well deliver concentrated catastrophe!

    That applies to Chief Falae, as it applies to the Afenifere conclave.

    Incidentally, the full title of the last, of Hon. Oshun’s trilogy on June 12 is: The Kiss of Death: Afenifere and the Infidels.  Some  grim prophecy there, it would appear!

    So, have the old fundamentalists of Awoism turned infidels to their own cause, and therefore earned the kiss of ideological death?

    Just a thought.