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Category: Tuesday

Kogi: Because I am involved

In a matter of hours, Yahya Bello will be sworn in as Governor of the Confluence State. Thanks to the triumvirate of the Independent National Electoral Commission, (INEC), the Attorney General of the Federation, Abubakar Malami, SAN, and the leadership of the All Progressives Congress, the good people of Kogi, will be having someone they did not elect to preside over their affairs at least until such a time the judiciary finally decides one way or the other.

I have said it before, what is playing out in Kogi is worse than travesty; what makes it hard to swallow that this is happening in a supposedly constitutional environment. For no matter what anyone may say, and no matter the attempt by our ever opportunistic politicians to muddle things up, there are too many issues too sticky to live down.

One of them is the strenuous attempt to override the will of the voters who trooped out to vote on November 21, 2015 to elect a new governor. No matter what holy book the supplanter chooses to swear with, it does not change the fact that the people did not have Bello on the ballot at the point they exercised their franchise last November. Yes, the people voted for APC, but they also trusted the duo of Audu and Faleke to give them their mandates! And that mandate precludes their Bello! This is what APC conveniently forgets. Yes, the party sponsors the candidates, without the candidate, there is no contest!

And while it is tragic that the APC would seek to elevate its internal party primary over and above an election that was adjudged transparent and fair; surely, INEC, not least the APC supplanter, Bello must know that the so-called December 5, 2015 supplementary poll, which delivered a mere 13,000 votes for a candidate that was not on the original ballot, is at best a case of holding on to thin straw! Tomorrow’s party of inauguration therefore changes nothing!

And if I may add – APC ought to have realised by now, the futility of its attempt to deny Abiodun Faleke, Prince Abubakar’s running mate, the fruits of their joint victory. For sure, it’s surely going to be a long, dark night for the APC and their anointed one.

I have heard some so-called stakeholders suggest that the people of Kogi should let things be if only in the spirit of the new-found rapprochement between the West and Central Senatorial Districts both of which have jointly clamoured for power to rotate to them. On the surface, they have a point.

For those who don’t know, a little background would suffice. The state like many of its counterparts in the federation, sits on a tripod: Kogi West, Kogi Central and Kogi East. Since its creation, the state has been ruled exclusively by the dominant Igala from the East. From 1999- 2003, it was Abubakar Audu followed by Ibrahim Idris 2003-2011, and then Idris Wada 2011-to date. Before the primaries, I understand a lot of work was done by the West and Central to get power to shift in the spirit of equity. Unfortunately, like in previous attempts, those efforts, as valiant as it was, could not break the Igala hegemony. In the end, Audu and Wada both Igalas emerged on the tickets of the APC and PDP.

And so we had an election in November. And then, Audu the APC candidate who was set to win the election died. At the time of his death, the election was practically concluded save for 91 polling units scattered across the state. Soon after, INEC pronounced the election inconclusive. Not done, a supposedly independent electoral body, with battery of lawyers at their beck, opted to turn to the government’s chief law officer for direction! Nigerians know how the story went: a stranger to the APC ticket was drafted from nowhere to complete an exercise that was as good as delivered! As a result, history was made: a governor elected with 13,000 electors!

To many, it probably matters not that an election took place on November 21, 2015. It is supposed to matter less still that the election produced a clear outcome – 240,867 votes for the APC ticket of Abubakar Audu and James Abiodun Faleke, and 199,415 for the outgoing team of Idris Wada and Yomi Awoniyi of the Peoples Democratic Party. Aside not being on the ticket, we are supposed to forget that the claim by Yahya to the gubernatorial office was that he took part in a primary which he lost! For now, law, justice and public policy are meant to count for nothing since the end – power shift – has more than justified the patent INEC-aided impunity!

That is the tragedy in the Confluence State.

What the future portends for the state is hard to tell at this stage. It seems to me that the story has only just begun. The state is certainly in for a long night. For a state that has been in perpetual stasis, development will, for sure, be on hold. Trust the resurgence of old animosities and cleavages in a state that has had its own fair share of security troubles.

A state where primary school teachers were on forced holidays for more than a year because they could not be paid; a state where workers salaries are a privilege rather than a right. I have written on this page of the experience of hell on the highways; henceforth, citizens can brace up for the worst. All of this because INEC not only chose to surrender its independence, but sacrificed principles for expediency.

For the good people of Kogi, it seems a case of the father eating the sour grapes, with the children’s teeth set on the edge. It is an unenviable position to be in.

January 26, 2016
Budget 2016: So far, so dodgy
When word came from somewhere in the Senate the other day that the entire 2016 Budget – all N6.08 trillion of it – had gone missing, disappeared, vanished, millions of Nigerians looking up to it for a reprieve from their miseries must have felt as if they had been pole-axed.

If there is one thing on which all Nigerians are agreed, it is that nothing is impossible in Nigeria. Still, it was almost inconceivable that such a colossal amount would have vanished in a mere three weeks. Not even Sani Abacha and the Goodluck Ebele Jonathan Administration in their cumulative profligacy and kleptomania could have made such a colossal sum perform a disappearing act so unceremoniously.

Much to everybody’s relief, it turned out that only the budget documents were missing – the tome President Muhammadu Buhari had presented to the National Assembly in a sturdy receptacle that looked like the national flag in three dimensions just before the lawmakers left for their umpteenth recess in six months.

They returned, only to find that the hard copy and the soft copies supposed to have been made for members of the Senate were nowhere to be found. Dutiful and public-spirited as ever, they raised the alarm: The budget documents had gone missing.

Not so, said the Speaker of the House of Representatives, the other chamber of the National Assembly. The documents were intact and available, and members of that chamber were not complaining.

Still, the word out there was that the budget documents were indeed missing, and public concern shifted to what must have happened to them.

According to one early theory, Buhari had pulled a 4-1-9 on the National Assembly. The box he had presented to the Assembly with such critical solemnity on December 22, 2015, so goes the theory, contained no documents at all, only stale air.

But how then did the House of Representatives come by what they are purporting to be Budget 2016 documents. Were they forgeries, like Standing Orders 2015 “as amended”?

Another theory posited that Olisa Metuh must have in a fit of petulant rage eaten up the documents. But why did he consume only the copies meant for the Senate and spare those meant for the House of Representatives? Plus, no one can eat up hundreds of pages and not succumb to terminal dyspepsia in the process.

According to yet another theory, following the mugging the Budget proposals suffered in the news media, Buhari had surreptitiously spirited away the documents, reworked them and returned them to the National Assembly in like manner.

Buhari’s Senior Special Assistant on National Assembly Matters, Ita Enang, seems to have rendered this theory plausible when he declined to address forthrightly the charge that the documents had been doctored, saying instead that the kerfuffle was “sensitive” and that both sides were working toward a resolution.

Nor did federal officials refute this theory when they described the controversy over the Budget offhand as a “distraction “and “a storm in a tea-cup.”

What is “sensitive” about a public document, the contents of which have been analysed in the news media and discussed and debated on dozens of various platforms? Why were Enang and other federal officials less than forthcoming on the matter?

In whatever case, why would Buhari withdraw the Budget documents surreptitiously when he can with a formal letter to the National Assembly change, modify or disavow altogether any request he may have placed before it? After all, the Budget is a work in progress.

Meanwhile, the Senate decided to take all the guessing and grandstanding out of the matter and directed its Committee on Ethics and Privileges to ascertain what really was the matter with Budget 2016.

The Committee has since “revealed” that the Budget papers were not really missing, only that there were “two versions” before the Senate. One version has been christened the Enang Budget, and the other one credited to Buhari.

But not before the story of the dodgy budget had made the headlines and front pages of the news media across the world and gone viral on social media. And not before Nigerians had lampooned it as only Nigerians can.

One comment doing the rounds on YouTube, with a picture of a man clutching a pile of akara wrapped in paper went thus:

“If you buy suya, akara or guguru, please crosscheck the (wrapping) papers to avoid eating our 2016 Budget.”

You hear, all ye patrons of roadside food vendors.

Another had a picture of stern looking armed security officials rummaging in cluttered office: Cutline: ”DSS raids Metuh’s office in search of missing budget.”

Another comment, entirely pictorial, shows two men peering intently into a sewer, hoping they might find the missing budget in the murky stench.

Yet another comment showed a long line of men trying to push a passenger down on its side. Caption: ”Don’t joke about this missing Budget O. They have checked the National Assembly. Now we are in Agege searching under buses.”

Another comment shows Buhari and Vice- President Osinbajo in a lounge chair as they laughed mirthfully, with Osinbajo proclaiming triumphantly, “We don play them.” To which a certain BGIS (who is he?) responded, “Dem go find budget taya. Oya, go edit am.”

Then, there is this evocative one showing Buhari in a white robe, hands clasped in supplication; the bubble from his mouth has him saying, in lamentation: “These people have come again o. They stole my certificate. Now they have stolen my Budget.”

One picture shows three rams, two of them chewing on opposite ends of a large piece of paper. ”Buhari,” one of the goats said in a manner both mocking and taunting, “If you want your Budget, you can come have it.”

Amidst all the theories, the declarations and the declamations and the proclamations, the best available information – I am here taking the Senate Committee on Ethics (ha!) and Rules (ha! ha) on trust, which is a risky thing to do – the best available information is that there are at least two versions of the Budget document.

Maybe we will know in the days ahead how one version differs from the other, the discrepancies and interpolations that have been discovered between the two.

The National Budget is fundamentally a political instrument. It often conceals at least as much as it reveals, and implementation always falls short of intent; in sum, there is always an element of dodginess to it.

Budget 2016 is no different. The Executive Branch and the legislative Branch are locked in dodgy games of their own, even before debate has commenced in earnest. When it eventually gets under way, the debate must not turn out to be one long exercise in dodginess.

By the way, have you heard that the Constitution has also gone missing?
- This piece was written before it was reported that President Buhari has formally revised his Budget proposals.
January 19, 2016
For Buhari. What about you?

In 1984, the late Gani Fawehinmi, SAM, SAN, spectacularly broke ranks with his legal commune. That clan dotted on “due process” — no crime! — and distanced itself from the post-2nd Republic corruption trials, before special tribunals.

Those trials handed convicted former political office holders jumbo gaol sentences for corruption. The Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) decreed its members should stay off the cases, since it perceived the process as skewed against justice.

But Gani, famous loner often at his best when acting solo, cut to the chase: this was humongous, nation-ruining sleaze, not to be deodorised by any legalistic cant. So, Gani balked.

Was he right? Ripples, then as an undergraduate, bristling at the “brazen injustice”, thought so. But what if Gani was right; and the rest of us were wrong?

What if Gani was so prescient he thought if Nigeria didn’t crush the elephantine greed of its thieving elite, with as little misleading legal fizz as possible, the country could, 32 years later, just be fated to another Dasukigate, quite stratospheric, when compared with the industrial-scale looting of the Abacha era?

And if the present generation, cheering or jeering Dasukigate, did not fully grasp the danger of this tragic continuum of greed and lunatic graft; and the stealing status quo were to continue?

In another 32 years: would there even be a state, from which citizens under serious censure — and rightly so for alleged heist — demand “rule of law” with such self-serving hypocrisy? And if the state had been eaten into pulp by a rapacious few, how can it guarantee any rights to anyone?

All these queries are coming up because two vital pillars of the modern state, the bar and the media, on the Muhammadu Buhari anti-graft war, are already equivocating. Yet, they know galloping graft brings clear and present ruin.

In fairness to the lawyers, and with all due respect to their most altruistic, they tend to have a rather sweet penchant for private joy, rather than collective bliss. One of them sensationally declared the alleged disobedience to court orders, by the Buhari Presidency, would endanger legal practice! Now, was that wilful truth or awful Freudian slip?

Still, a towering legal voice has spoken for the epoch, beyond the titillating aroma of present client briefs. Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, declared: any court ruling on present corruption cases should take cognisance of law as it takes of public opinion. A golden intervention there! The great Gani too, in 1984, did a procedural equivalent of class suicide, just to underscore his outrage against sleaze, while his peers got fixated with sterile procedure.

Still, from the least socially conscious to the most radical of crusading attorneys, every lawyer is covered by the lawyers’ creed: the right of every accused to legal representation.

The media has no such luxury, particularly in society-damaging times, that the free and wild looting of the Jonathan era has made of the present.

In times of great throes, the media ought to champion the spirit of the age: editorials echoing the great angst in the land, and columns speaking the pains and anguish of the meek, the silenced and the repressed.

But even with the outrage in the land, a section of the media stay wrapped in a sterile cocoon; as cold and insensitive as the uproar in the streets is hot and impassioned.

Take two of the brightest stars in the glittering sky of The Nation.

For two consecutive Sundays (January 3 and 10), Palladium, that formidable back page column on Sundays, went into a deep philosophical, analytical and theoretical trance; and with a vengeance, conjured the alchemy and metaphysics of democracy; and its inalienable rights.

At the end of that trance, Buhari (who tries hard to right grievous wrongs) had become the villain; those accused of egregious sleaze, unfairly repressed citizens; and the throes in the land, which their stupendous heists have caused, mere “popular sentiments against the so-called treasury looters.”

So called! Call that the Palladium beatification, and you are spot on!

By his third straight offering (January 18), Palladium had worked himself into virtual hysteria, dismissing both the president and the entire anti-sleaze outrage as “wrong”. Well, Mighty Palladium is entitled to his romantic fixation, fast morphing into quixotic delusion!

Sam Omatseye, in his “Catching a thief” (January 11) entered and exited with great flourish and élan, with every line dripping with charming erudition. But at the end, the columnist ended up as a finger-pointer. The anti-corruption war, he tended to imply, is Buhari’s personal battle, in which the president must float or sink! How so?

Yeah, a more sympathetic reading has suggested Sam only decried the lack of an elite anti-corruption critical mass; as well as an organised mass vanguard. That is not unreasonable — and perhaps the administration should do more mobilisation on this score.

But where stands the columnist? And, for that matter, you: the grand victim of those grand heists?

The hegemony of Western culture stands on ancient Greek civilisation. Yet at an epoch, Greece would appear even more debauched than contemporary Nigeria.

Draco (7th century BC), bristled at the mass decadence of the Athens of his day. He tackled it harsh and hard; but earned notoriety by bequeathing humanity the word, “draconian”.

Solon (6th century BC), reformed Draco’s harsh laws. He earned admiration down the ages, for he was hailed as “Solon the Wise”.

Pericles (5th century BC), an Athenian naval general, was even victim of his age’s liberality. By the instrumentality of the ostrakon (which birthed the word, “ostracise”), he was banished for a period, for being “too popular”. But he came back in triumph to be lawgiver, and presided over the most golden era of Athenian — and Greek — civilisation.

A common thread runs through the triad, over three different centuries: each faced the challenge of his time, guided by the temper of his age. But without Draco, would there have been Pericles?

From the “ten-percenters” of the First Republic, Nigerian unconscionable elite thieves have grown more brazen in their prependal crimes. A Draco shock therapy would, therefore, appear inevitable, nay imperative, to nudge them, the hard way, back to redemption. Perhaps that is President Buhari’s historical mission?

Still, let the courts be fair to all. But with glaring records of bad faith from these elite thieves and their colluding lawyers, let no procedural romantics conjure scarecrows that canonise the impunity to commit crimes and get away with them; but demonise state agents that apply legitimate measures to secure justice for the rest of us.

That is as much corruption of the public space, as unbridled stealing of public funds is corruption of the polity.

Therefore, President Buhari should shun the din of naysayers and do the needful to retrieve every kobo, stolen from the public till.

Ripples is with him all of the way. What about you?

Just 40 days of vacation and it looked like 40 years, watching from the sidelines, Nigeria’s ever gripping public theatre. It’s nice to be back. Happy new year, folks!

January 19, 2016
Nigerian economy and its undertakers

Merely by the strength of the forces arrayed against the naira at the moment, it seems a matter of time before the currency is taken to the Golgotha. It’s the morbid season hence the swooning of the vultures for the proverbial carcass. As it seems, not even the valiant efforts of Godwin Emefiele and his men at the apex bank would suffice to stave off the cataclysm in the face of the reprobate forces massed against the Nigerian economy.

Ask anyone about the factors responsible for the current travails of the naira. You’d be surprised at the range of answers you get. Oil would of course remain the chief culprit. With a barrel of crude at sub $30, the economic Armageddon, surely is set upon us. With barely enough left after paying wages, the exotic tastes of our over-pampered elites would seem for now out of the consumptive equation.

For many however, the problem simply begins and ends with Emefiele and his colleagues at the apex bank. This position appears to have gained some traction in the weeks following the restrictions placed on the forex market. I perfectly understand the angst of traders in the 41-odd items precluded from Emefiele’s naira auction. I guess it would also apply to manufacturers and operators in the real sector who can’t seem to find forex in the official window despite Emefiele’s grand promise to meet all of their legitimate demands. Add to the group, the operators of bureau de change who were only last week ousted from accessing Emefiele’s greenback trove – never mind their protestation that their segment is a mere five percent of the market; all of them have just about something to say about the Emefiele wahala!

Unfortunately, if we aren’t so eager to embrace simplistic solutions even at the risk of fatal misdiagnosis; or put in another way – if we are not so enamoured about placebos to the point of misplacing them for the curative drug, it seems to me the best time – if ever there was – to take a hard look at what fundamentally ails the Nigerian economy and by extension the naira.

I have followed with amusement the argument of those who insist that the currency be left to float as indeed some of the other related jargons about letting the naira find its true value. Well, yours truly is still waiting to be ‘educated’ on the ‘true value’ of a product known to be finite in supply and indeterminate in demand – short of making the argument for the speculators to overrun the market since their price, arguably approximates the so-called real value of the naira!

That is however a different matter. Today, I talk of a more insidious threat to the national economy. I speak of the enemies adorned in the garb of friends. I speak of the tragedy of a nation hung on so-called foreign investment while local initiatives are left to flounder. Today, if we have learnt our lessons from the exit of foreign portfolio investors at the first signs of the global credit crisis in 2008/9, it is how barely we have taken in the hard lessons. Remember that the singular exit cost the Nigerian bourse $5 billion from which the market is yet to recover. Five years on, it took the long-predicted rumble in global oil prices for the shacks to cart away $4 billion overnight; our bourse has been reeling in the aftershock ever since.

Of course we are back to the same ruinous path. Today, only few Nigerians know about the multiple billions of dollars carted away in remittances, charges, patent and royalties and other sundry charges by our do-gooder foreign investors. By the way, that is hardly a crime particularly when values are delivered to the economy. The problem is when the so-called foreign investors increasingly become mere conduits for repatriating billions of our limited foreign cash through their dubious mechanisms of over-invoicing. Guess you know by now who gets to benefit the most when the patron saints of the IMF come calling with their demands for greater liberalisation of the forex market! Never mind that it is the surest path to their usual policy support instruments (PSI), a euphemism for the bitter pills of adjustment that our citizens have come to loathe when things go critical wrong!

The point I seek to make is that economic nationalism has gone beyond the textbook stuff. Whatever may be said of the cement manufacturing sector at the moment, it is adjudged a success story by any standards. With combined capacity of the nation’s cement plants in excess of local requirements, it is little wonder that Emefiele and co can dare to call the bluff of cement importers!

Contrast with the cartel of fuel importers that continues to insist on holding the nation by the jugular. The story of the billions spent on the racket of fuel imports and its multiple industries of rent along the value chain are by now familiar. What is little known is that Oil Cartel Inc. actually consumes 34 percent of the entire demand for foreign exchange.

Still want to know why the naira will not recover in near term?

Now, if that seems a stiff price to pay to get Africa’s largest economy moving, there is at least some good news that our ordeal will soon be over. I speak of the day when the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote Refineries and Petrochemical Complex would finally come on stream – in 2018. Should things go as planned, the country would from that date save a third of its current forex requirements used for fuel imports!

As it appears, there is no end to the milking of the Nigerian cow. Late last year, many newspapers gleefully reported on the threat by foreign airlines to reduce their flights to Nigeria. The reason – as you might guess – is said to be the difficulties being encountered in remitting their sales abroad.

Of course, save for the tinge of blackmail, the issue of what they choose to do or not to do is entirely their prerogative. And while we are at it, one of the more notorious of the airlines has since laid off its half-dozen Nigerian crew. And if it seems sufficiently galling that Nigerian passengers pay about 76 percent more in the premium class of European carriers on their West African route, what about their sworn opposition that have rendered the principle of reciprocity embedded in the various Bilateral Air Services Agreement (BASA) nugatory?

It couldn’t get more bizarre that the biggest economy on the continent is expected to catch cold because a cartel of foreign airlines dared to sneeze over difficulties being experienced in their attempts to cart home $470 million –the value of third quarter 2015 ticket sales.

Still wondering about the beneficiaries of the tutorials on forex liberalisation?

I close. The old saying that soldier go, soldier comes but barrack remain holds true. The nation’s economy to which its fate is inextricably tied, is for us to make or mar. While our home-grown experts junket foreign capitals in search of foreign investment of dubious values, yours truly merely ask that they spare a thought to local entrepreneurial efforts. With a fraction of the support given their foreign counterparts, and with massive investment in infrastructure, I wager that the local business will soar like the eagle.

Trust me.

January 19, 2016
First Draft: A Manual for these times

Two weeks into the year, chances are that 13 per cent of those who made solemn resolutions of the ameliorative kind will have defaulted or given up altogether.

If you belong in this group, do not despair. Your ranks will swell and swell, and by year’s end, encompass the vast majority–90 per cent, according those who keep such records—of all those who made New Year resolutions.

And then, it will be time for another round of resolutions.

Making a vow at a stroke past midnight on December 31 gives it an extra snap. The person behind the vow is saying that he or she is set to forsake the old habits of the year that has passed irretrievably and to embrace new, better, healthier, and altogether more agreeable habits.

But you need not wait until a minute past midnight on December 31 before entering into new vows. You can make your resolution on a whim, on the spur of the moment any day of the week or month of the year, and it would not be a whit less significant than a New Year resolution.

It may help, but you need not wait for one year to flow seamlessly into another before you resolve to give up smoking, a lifestyle change that is far less difficult than is generally supposed.

Ask Samuel Langhorne Clemens, known to the world as Mark Twain.

“Giving up smoking is easy,” the great writer declared.   “I have done it a thousand times.” Maybe you have, too, with respect to drinking. I certainly have found losing weight and giving up procrastination exceedingly easy, because I have done both at least a thousand times.

With regard to giving up procrastination, I have been greatly assisted by the musings of the English writer Jerome K Jerome, who said he loved work so much that he always made sure he saved some for the next day. Plus, you can always bask in the conceit, as many of us in the league of procrastinators do, that some of our best work comes from having our backs to the wall.

Dasukigate has gone down as a benchmark in the annals of sleaze even before its dimensions are revealed in full. Not surprisingly, some well-connected sources tell me, it has spawned a raft of resolutions among the attentive audience, especially among members of the political and mercantile classes implicated in its breath-taking depredations.

What follows is a summary of binding resolutions passed unanimously at emergency caucuses of the attentive audiences, aforementioned. I see it as the first draft of a Manual for these times.

At one caucus, all present and voting solemnly resolved, individually and collectively, never to treat voluntarily or involuntarily with the Office of the National Security Adviser, but to report to the appropriate authorities any invitation from that Office or any of its agents to discuss any issue whatsoever, and to seek a perpetual injunction barring that Office or any of its functionaries from inviting any member of the caucus, their relation or servant for any purpose whatsoever.

At another caucus, all present and participating resolved firmly and irrevocably to run away as fast as their legs can carry them from any place, forum or institution where “obtaining” is going on or rumoured to be going on, and to proceed therefrom to report the matter to the nearest magistrate. For the avoidance of doubt, the caucus pledged to subject to the same treatment any place or forum or institution that has the potential to cater to obtainers, however slight.

At yet another caucus, it was unanimously resolved that if the usual people were to bring in a sack of money, it would be dead on arrival unless it came with forensic evidence of its source. And that is just for a start.   Other questions will follow. What is it meant for? How much is in there, and in what currencies? Why was it brought there, and not sent to another forum?

The caucus will insist on detailed and precise instructions on disbursement, who gets how much, and for what purpose. If the caucus is satisfied that the money is from a legitimate source and is designed to be spent for a legitimate purpose, it will ask the courier to take the sack away and bring it back at an appointed date.

On that day, with all those named on the distribution list present, the money will be shared out. Each taker will issue a receipt. The caucus will keep the originals and send copies through the courier to the source.

Another caucus laid down strict guidelines for any public official desirous of staging a reception in honour of its members. The host will be required to swear to an affidavit stating how much will be spent on the event, and where the money is coming from, plus a detailed account of the foods to be provided and the cost per serving, the year the wines on offer were bottled, the cost of each sip, and the average number of sips per bottle.

These measures, the caucus says, are designed to pre-empt a situation in which, long after the event, the guest is informed that the four-course meal at the banquet added up to $100 per serving, and that each sip of the vintage wine was worth $100, and that the hosts expected the beneficiary and his crowd to do the needful.

Yet another caucus resolved that if any government agency wants to profit from the expertise of its members, it must furnish a letter of interest spelling out the exact nature of the expertise, what it is required for, and how it will be applied. And it will accept no payment outside the agreed terms, which will have been duly certified as reasonable by the appropriate agency.

The caucus says its members will not allow themselves to be flattered into believing that their “advice,” however recondite its basis and however efficacious, is in monetary terms worth more than the combined annual pay of 200 university professors.

Another caucus has solemnly resolved that if any of its members found some footloose money in his or her account, whether it is N400 million or even N4, the person should raise the alarm, demand to know how it landed there, when, through whom, and in respect of what transaction.

The culture of “donations” came up at a meeting of another caucus. The members resolved never to solicit or accept any donation from any ministry, department or agency for any cause whatsoever, persuaded that the fear of donations from officialdom is the beginning of political wisdom.   Any donation made in a public cause despite this declaration will be publicly acknowledged and maintained in proper custody, the caucus emphasised.

It remains to conclude this interim report with related developments in the spiritual sphere. Members attending this particular caucus noted that while some among them possess the gift of prophecy and can work miracles with prayer, they will no longer demand or accept a “spiritual allowance” or prayer money for their intercession. Otherwise, they say, the whole thing will become indistinguishable from charlatanism.

That resolve is laudable indeed, considering that charlatanism sells big-time in Nigeria.

January 12, 2016
Rule or ruse of law?

With the nation’s mighty and powerful being hauled one after the other before the courts to account their share of the bazaar called armsgate, one of the more positive dimensions to the onslaught on vice in high places must be the current move from the asinine debate about the absolute right of an alleged felon to hop on the plane for a medical appointment in some foreign capitals to the centrality of law in the entire process.

Now, thanks to President Muhammadu Buhari’s spectacular gaffe in his maiden media chat, the fangled phrase, rule of law has suddenly gained elevation – I daresay, not so much because some Nigerians – in their love for cant – are necessarily firm believers in the concept, but because some have found in it an opportunity to do what they do best – talk!

Obviously, you won’t be a Nigerian if you don’t have one or two things to say on the current developments. As a matter of fact, I wager to say that Nigerians would have found something else to talk about had the President not flown off the handle at the media chat. If it seems a measure of their so-called indignation that they have been talking since, it is also moot point that Nigerians aren’t so much agreed on the definition let alone the strategy to fight the monster called corruption!

No question about it – President Buhari goofed – big time. It is after all elementary that the law presumes an offender innocent until the state successfully proves its case in the court of law. His reference to the “atrocities people like Dasuki committed” on the basis of which he believes he should not be entitled to bail is as absurd as it is untenable. The same also applies to the case of Nnamdi Kanu – the leader of the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) – standing trial for treasonable offences. Surely, the President has no business speaking condescendingly on any citizen let alone determining their guilt before the full course of trial. For many, the two cases – you can add the Shiites crisis in Kaduna as the third – are sufficient to detract from the administrations rule of law armour.

I beg to disagree. To reduce the war to the President’s sin of indiscretion is certainly taking things a bit too far. Once again, I am forced to draw upon the example of an accident scene. In the typical bedlam, whereas the milder cases are often the loudest in their shrill cries to draw attention to themselves, the trained medic is careful to isolate those lying still –ostensibly because they have little or no energy to draw upon – for urgent attention.

It is no accident that the rule of law has suddenly become handy in the current circumstances. If it seems by far more tolerable to present as alibi than the unending dog-fights over the seizure of international passports which comes to the right to travel abroad to receive some specialised medical treatments, its seduction, to be sure, would lie its universal appeal and its inviolability – something resonates more with the lawyers, the populace and the international community.

But then, this is precisely the part that I am worried about. Of course, we know the pathology of the powerful. They are not just contented with breaking the law, neither are they averse to twisting the law in such ways and manner as to defeat the course of justice. What about their penchant to undermine the judicial system? Have we not seen a counsel lampoon a judge in an open court only for the same counsel to turn round to ask the luckless judge to recuse himself from the case since he could no longer be trusted to be unbiased after insulting his lordship? That is the level of delinquency to which the judiciary has sunk. Today, we know that a clever attorney and a letter from a foreign infirmary are significant steps to freedom from the rigours of trial and defeat for the justice system. Ours is a clime where those with the means can literally procure the licence to kill. In any case, such are not supposed to be a problem – or are they?

Suddenly, with a fresh breeze of change, we are told that the powerful cannot bear to suffer the allergy of minor irritations that attenuate the justice delivery system! That is bunkum. The same men who allegedly despatched others to their untimely deaths; the individuals who acts of omission and commission are alleged to have rendered millions homeless cannot bear to spend the harsh harmattan weather away from their loved ones! What about those who converted the parastatals in their charge to piggy banks to dispense all manners of favours? And now to imagine that the rest of us, no less victims of their avarice and greed –being enlisted in their orchestra of shame!

I am of course for the rule of law. It is important to regulate the behaviour of different actors in the polity. The chant at the moment is unfortunately, an elite pastime aimed at promoting the false choice between the rule and the ends of justice. The point remains that while the rule must avail for the accused to make his demands within the ambits of the law; it should be no less for the investigators to do their jobs– also within the ambits of the same law – unfettered. That this can come with some minor irritations should not suffice for the clamour to bring the roof down on everyone heads!

Again, the point is – while the brazen violations of the rule of law are intolerable any day, those who seek to erect their fangled concept on the foundations of anomie are welcome to their illusion that the path leads anywhere else than one of societal disintegration. Surely, that is not what we want – or is it?

January 12, 2016
Thoughts on Budget 2016

It is that time of year again, the release of the Federal Budget proposals, when we all become economists, at least for the three or four weeks that the plan dominates public discourse.

And why not?

After all we buy and sell and make and consume, and we are all subject to the vagaries of the Market which, to misquote Emerson, is in the saddle and rides all mankind. And there are those who would argue that, in a literal rather than technical sense, homo economicus is no less a plausible creature than homo sapiens.

If the statesman who led France through World War 1, Georges Clemenceau, had not said memorably that war is far too important to be left to the generals, another wise man would surely have laid it down with greater truth that economics is far too important to be left to the economists.

But don’t say that to the hearing of professional economists who have turned what used to be the engaging discipline of political economy into one of the most arcane specialisms, often involving facility with figures on a level with particle physicists; it is all equations and equations and graphs upon graphs and probabilities upon probabilities, not forgetting ceteris paribus.

Maybe that is why real economists do not take it kindly when dilettantes, to say nothing of lay people and even market women, presume to comment on the economy, a point made most eloquently by Dr Kalu Idika Kalu, the embattled Minister of Finance of the Babangida regime when the nation was debating the wisdom or unwisdom of taking a huge loan from the IMF that came booby-trapped with a Structural Adjustment Programme.

If Kalu had his way, something tells me that he would have made possession of a doctorate in economics from the world’s most prestigious academies the minimum qualification for participating in that debate.

He was never so incensed, I gather, as when one Bamako Jaji, obviously no economist, clinically took the whole SAP edifice apart in an op-ed piece for The Guardian titled “Against Kalunomics.” The Minister inquired frantically about the true name and identity of Bamako Jaji, aforementioned, with a view to challenging him to a public debate, and engaging him in single combat if that did not settle the matter.

“Bamako Jaji,” it is now safe to reveal, is none other than our own Biodun Jeyifo, who turns 70 this week. Congratulations, BJ, and welcome to the Club.

As I was saying before I landed myself in a labyrinth of digressions, this is the time when we all pivot on the much awaited federal budget proposals to sound off as economists and experts in matters fiscal. Although it is no more than a statement of intent that is more often honoured in the breach than in the observance, we invest it with the power of the accomplished fact. We take the deed for the intent. Thus, in Babangida’s time, it was not unusual to celebrate the release of the budget estimates with a sumptuous state banquet.

The hysterical Olisa Metuh, publicity secretary of the discredited PDP who is reportedly due to keep a date soon with the EFCC in the investigation of charges related to obtainment, has predictably dismissed the 2016 Budget proposals as a fraud and a scheme to enslave Nigerians of the present and future generations.

I will steer the middle ground between the reflex exultation of the Babangida years and the schizoid denunciation that is Metuh’s trademark.

Given the steady attenuation of the Naira, it is a wonder that estimated expenditure came out in billions rather googols (a googol is the number 1 followed by one hundred zeros). And if you factor in the declining fortunes of the Naira and the rate of inflation, officially put at a very conservative 9.3 per cent, the increase in this year’s expenditure over the previous year’s at a time of shrinking revenues is understandable.

Nearly one-third of the estimated expenditure is going to be borrowed. At first blush, this seems unwise, even profligate. Why not simply live within your means?

It depends on what the borrowed funds are used for. If you borrow to eat, to finance consumption, you are sowing the seeds of future economic and social turmoil. But if you borrow to finance projects that will create jobs and stimulate demand, if your borrowing is an investment in the future, you are sowing the seeds of prosperity. Borrowing outside this framework should be discouraged.

President Buhari was therefore right to have taken a dim view of the Senate’s outrageous proposal to buy luxury American-specification SUVs – no Dubai-assembled vehicles, please, for each of its 109 members for oversight committee duties, and to replace the 10-vehicle convoy of its president with exotica of the same vintage, at cost of N4.7 billion.

It is unfeeling, and downright provocative at a time when the authorities in a great many of their constituencies are saying that they can no longer afford to pay the anaemic minimum monthly wage N18,000, which they have never paid regularly anyway.

What happened to the last set of vehicles purchased for oversight work? Where is their conscience, their empathy? Is being a ward of the state their idea of public service?

By the same reasoning, the President should disavow the plan to buy a fleet of luxury cars for his senior officials who are guaranteed loans to buy their own vehicles, plus generous allowances for maintaining them.

And he should also raise serious questions on the plan to spend N5 billion for official residences for the vice president, the Senate president and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. What happened to the official residences built for the last holders of those offices? Will the government embark on this kind of construction each time new people take over these offices?

It has to be said that the President’s Economic Team – who are the members, by the way? – did him and the APC a bad turn in the way it approached a Budget designed to launch their agenda of Change. The team seems to have used previous budget proposals as their template, adding millions of Naira here and shaving off millions there, instead of determining whether an expenditure is warranted in the first place.

Only that approach can explain why new expenditures are now being proposed on kitchenware and cookware as were presumably expended in the budget for the previous year and the year before that on those very items, and on computers, exotic birds for the Aso Villa lawns, and so on and so forth.

What kind of kitchenware and cookware and computer hardware is it that has to b e replaced every year?

There is perhaps no greater task before the Buhari Administration than tamping down youth unemployment. As is the case with almost every aspect of Nigerian life, including the national population, reliable figures are hard to come by. When government officials who have a vested interest in keeping appearances rosy claim that as many as 25 per cent of young Nigerians are unemployed or underemployed, the chances are that the actual figure is around 40 per cent.

Neither figure is good for the nation’s health. The plan to employ 500,000 teachers during the fiscal year is to be commended, but only as a start. In recent years, not much attention has been given to adult and non-formal education on the one hand, and on the other hand to continuing education, the type that helps the newly literate stay literate. Vocational training has also been neglected.

Programmes designed for these ends can open up at least another 500,000 teaching jobs all over the country and sustain a book publishing industry that will open up still more jobs.

A highly literate population with matching skills is a prime national asset, and few will contest the wisdom and indeed the imperative of investing in it.

January 5, 2016
Trouble with Buhari budget

Trust Nigerians, they have since been voicing out their concerns not just on the size of President Muhammadu Buhari Budget 2016 but also the contents of the fiscal instrument expected to signpost change. Yes, not a few, have been mystified by its expansionary outlay in a period of vastly declining national revenues. With oil prices showing no signs of imminent rebound, and in the unlikelihood of revenues from non-oil sources making up for the gap in the near time, and now with debt –re-emerging as a principal factor in our public finance matrix –naturally, there ought to be a lot to talk. After all, it is barely a decade after our celebrated exit from the debtor cartel of London and Paris Clubs –subsequent to which we are supposed to suffer the debt allergy.

To suggest that the issues are being properly framed is however a different matter. I do not want to delve into PDP’s characterisation of the N6.8 trillion budget as “a big fraud and executive conspiracy tailored towards mortgaging the future of the nation”. If Nigerians are any bemused by the PDP’s rant especially its verbose dismissal of the budget as “completely unrealistic and duplicitously embellished with impractical predication”, I’ll say that they ought to have better things to do than listen to the tutorials from a party that was midwife to the most profligate administration ever to known to man! Recall that under PDP’s disastrous rule, total earnings not only exceeded those of previous administration combined, yet the party left the country faring worse under all known indices of human development!

And so I speak of well-founded concerns that have been expressed in some quarters about the budget. I start with the rather ambitious revenue projection of N3.86 trillion in a year the federal government plans to spend N6.08 trillion – hence a N2.2 trillion deficit. Much as the idea of a deficit is not necessarily a bad one– no matter that it is a mere 2.16 percent of the debt-GDP ratio – the option of borrowing to fix the gap says pretty little about our experience of fiscal rectitude –or lack thereof. Are we not living witnesses to huge loans contracted on humongous terms which in the end delivered pretty little by way of value? As if the assumption that the managers of the economy have learnt their lessons from past experience of debt management is not dangerous enough, the administration appears to have glossed over capacity issues that have dogged every cycle of budget implementation.

In any case, the key assumptions of the budget must be seen as troubling enough. At a time a record number of our crude vessels are said to be stranded at sea looking for buyers, the Buhari administration obviously did not think it a bad idea to count the chicks before they are hatched. If you ask me – again I’ll say that the administration’s bet on pumping 2.2 million barrels of crude daily is hardly the way to wean the country off its addiction to oil! As for the $38 a barrel benchmark – another key assumption – is it a case of the administration’s hierarchs knowing something about the dynamics of oil price that Nigerians, nay the rest of the world do not know at this time?

Agreed, the options for getting the country out of the cul-de-sac are somewhat very limited at this time. Were the nation’s infrastructural gaps not as wide as we currently have; or the institutions not so broken to such an extent that any talk of putting a foundation for economic recovery on it seems domed ab initio; and the unemployment situation so grave as to constitute a national security issue, we’d probably have enough time to debate on the niceties of massive public expenditure cuts or some modest efforts to align expenditure with revenue – which for all practical purposes seems at the moment the surest route to nowhere. It’s probably one luxury we cannot afford given the dire emergency.

So, I do not think the option is for the country to do nothing as the wailers appear to suggest. In fact, I am willing to endorse the general principles behind the budget in so far as it recognises that some bold, expansionary measures (which the government seems best placed to put in place particularly at this time) are needed to give fillip to the economy. The implementation of the conditional cash transfer of N5,000 to the under-class – a novelty – promises to be interesting just as the school feeding programme is potentially revolutionary. I will aver in the same breathe that the 30 percent planned spend on capital projects, though rather modest, is a positive move given that the need for the realignment of the capital-recurrent component goes to the heart of our budget problem. Although it is still early in the day to make definitive affirmations on outcomes, the mere fact that successive PDP administrations found it impossible to move in any concrete way in that direction for the whole of 16 years obviously makes it a plus for the Buhari administration.

Still, there are many things wrong with the so-called ‘budget of change’. It is broadly, as far as I can see, more of the same. The quest to prune the cost of running the bureaucracy remains largely, unconquerable. Our bureaucratic cart continues to drive (or if you like – drag), the development horse. President Buhari’s wish is therefore one thing; our smart Alec bureaucrats and their allies in the political establishment will almost inevitably have their ways. Talk of assortment of projects with dubious economic utility; a budget stuffed with pork and earmarks – there you have them in plenitude in the budget of change.

Samples. I look at the huge votes for choice toys for officials – the billions to be spent on exotic cars – by both the executive and the legislature; I cannot but wonder if these are meant for tourists or wayfarers as opposed to public servants. I understand why shelling out huge sums in foreign exchange to procure the fancy toys would keep our big men happy; however, for an administration that promises to do things differently, we expected things to at least reflect current moods. It’s hard to imagine that this is happening at a time Godwin Emefiele and company at the apex bank have taken on the drastic measure of clamping down on petty users of foreign exchange like our students abroad; a time when traders in the 41-odd items precluded from access to foreign exchange have become overnight economic refugees. I thought that our lordships would, if only for the sake of symbolism, reflect upon their lust for the exotica and show solidarity with the rest of us for once! The same goes for the residences proposed for the trio of Vice President, Senate President and Speaker, House of Representatives at a princely cost of N5 billion. At this time – and from funds known to be largely borrowed? To the extent that no one has yet told us that these gentlemen sleep in the streets of Abuja, some of those capital projections surely, can wait!

Happy New Year to you all!

January 5, 2016
A lawyer’s call, and a scare

Of the columns that have appeared in this space every Tuesday this year, one in particular clings in my memory, but not on account of its impact, the controversy that trailed it, and the abuse and curses rained on me by readers who felt disappointed or displeased.

I remember it clearly because, of all the things I have written recently in this line of business, it came closest to giving me a scare,

A call had come from the office in Lagos asking whether my phone number should be released to Alhaji Femi Okunnu (SAN), who had asked to talk with me.

Now, it isn’t everyday a Senior Advocate of Nigeria wants to talk with you. I have more than a nodding acquaintance with a few of them, from long before they found fame and fortune. Okunnu was not one of them.

I had known him from a distance since 1964 when he was a dashing young lawyer who cruised about Lagos in a Volkswagen Beetle. His trademark goatee meshed with a luxuriant crop of hair parted on the left and his horn-rimmed glasses to project an engaged person marked for the leadership ranks of the Nigerian Left.

The last time I met him was in 1994. He had come to Rutam House to thank The Guardian for breaking the Osborne Foreshore scandal. In the time of military president Ibrahim Babangida, prime real estate reclaimed from sea at public expense was secretly parcelled out among the regime’s cronies and clients.

You knew that this was no ordinary development because, well before the plots were laid out, paved roads and arteries and drainage had been constructed on the site. Underground electricity cables had been laid and street lamps set in place, aglow with fluorescent lighting day and night. And this was at a time when even some of the finest residential neighbourhoods had to put up with epileptic power supply.

Naming names, The Guardian had demanded that the allotments be revoked. The Lagos State government and some powerful influences in Lagos pivoted on the paper’s reporting to challenge the acquisition of the site and the allotments at law. Okunnu, I believe, was their lead attorney.

They won in the court of first instance. Several days later, Okunnu was in Rutam House, at the head of a delegation, to thank The Guardian. But this was a time of utter lawlessness in Nigeria, when the regime routinely ousted the jurisdiction of the courts and even rendered the African Charter of Human and People’s Rights nugatory.

The authorities simply consecrated the theft under another subterfuge.

That was 1994. But here we are, some 21 years later, and at my base in central Illinois, I get a message that Okunnu would like to talk with me.

Before responding I did some quick thinking. I pulled up my recent submissions and went through them. Nothing I had written could have moved anyone to retain a senior attorney to seek compensation for injuries. My breathing regained its rhythm.

But it was a Tuesday. Could it be that my column for that day was the problem?

Titled “An unwelcome visitor,” it was about Tony Blair, also known as “Phony Tony,” the former British prime minister who confected a dossier that helped build a case for the American-led invasion and destruction of Iraqi in which Blair had, in the face of strong opposition from his fellow Labour parliamentarians and public opinion, led Britain to prosecute enthusiastically as the major ally of the United States..

I had written that, in a just world, Blair would be standing trial for war crimes and crimes against humanity, not gallivanting all over the globe as a money-grubbing lobbyist, and certainly not featuring as keynote speaker in the workshop that the APC had organised on the eve of taking office to identify its priorities and firm up its agenda.

Strong words, I grant. Had Tony Blair by any chance briefed Okunnu to institute a defamation lawsuit against me on account of those words? If that was the case, I had every reason to breathe easier still.

If it came to that, I would plead justification – that the publication was essentially truthful

If that seemed risky, I would urge my attorneys to press the court to adopt the ruling in the case of New York Times v Sullivan, which makes it all but impossible for any public official or public figure to recover for injury to reputation unless such persons can prove that the publication was made with “actual malice,” meaning that its author or publisher not only knew that the material was false, but had gone on to publish it with reckless disregard to its falsity.

Very few plaintiffs ever win under this standard, not even if the publication contained some material errors.

Satisfied that I was in no danger of being shafted by a multi-million Naira lawsuit by the hubristic Tony Blair, I called Okunnu.

“Tunji,” he said with avuncular familiarity. “How are you?”

“I am fine, sir,” I responded.

“I have seen your article in The Nation,” he said.

For the next 30 seconds or so – it had seemed like an eternity – he said nothing.

I began to get that sinking feeling. Could it be that he was telegraphing that this was not going to be a friendly encounter?

“I have seen your article,” he resumed. “But I have not read it.”

There was cause for relief there. If he had not read the article, he could not have concluded that only a multi-million Naira defamation lawsuit could even begin to repair the damage it might have inflicted on his client

Okunnu told me how he had called Lai Mohammed, the publicity secretary (as he then was) of the APC and asked what in the world could have led them to bring in Tony Blair, of all persons, to feature as a keynote speaker at the party’s transition workshop. Lai Mohammed had then told him that I had made essentially the same point in my column. He had then decided to save it for later reading, but not before talking with me.

He went on to give me a run-down of all the acts and omissions that transformed Blair from one of the most admired figures in British and international politics to one of the most despised. He brought up the latest developments at the Chilcot Commission looking into Britain’s role in the Iraq war

My column had captured much of what he said, and I told him that if he had not read it, he needed not do so since it contained nothing he did not know. He was enormously well informed.

The discussion ended on a far more amiable note than I had expected. I promised to call on him during my next visit to Lagos.

Tony Blair, I should add, did not show up the following day at the event he was supposed to headline. He had slunk away in the night, and his place was taken by Peter Mandelson, who had held senior cabinet positions under Blair. A devoted follower of this column told me months later that, after reading the Blair piece, he had wagered that Blair would not show up. He won the wager.

As I reviewed the day’s encounter my mind went back to the Femi Okunnu of the 1960s and his friend and Hull University contemporary Tayo Akpata and their left-wing activism, and to their sudden lurch to the Right during the military regime of General Yakubu Gowon.

How did the Left lose the twain, and their collaborators in The Committee of Ten?

December 29, 2015
Annals of obtainment: A postscript

As the running scandal that is now sure to go down in the annals of sleaze as Dasukigate seeps drip by tawdry drip into the fount of public discourse, one cannot but marvel at the casualness, the utter disregard for consequences with which vast sums of money earmarked for national security were handed out even to persons who had not set out to obtain.

One veteran says he has never met Dasuki and never obtained from him. He was minding his own business when they brought him $230,000, a far cry from the N100 million they claim to have given him.

They didn’t tell him the source. They didn’t tell him what it was for. He apparently assumed that it was for old times’ sake, or for business as usual, not knowing that it was stolen money.

Pardon the digression, but it brings to mind Dominique Strauss-Kahn , the randy billionaire former president of the IMF who would have been elected president of France in 2012 if he had not sexually assaulted a maid in a swanky New York hotel the previous year. On trial for participating in prostitution ring in France, he pleaded that since the women were naked, he had no way of knowing that they were prostitutes.

Maybe the women should have put on identifying apparel, just as the package delivered to the veteran, aforementioned, should have been stamped “Stolen Money.”

One free-floating, crackerjack social scientist was busy in his book-lined study putting the finishing touches to his magnum opus, “The Unified Theory of Society,” when National Security came calling for help. Dutiful patriot that he is, he shoved aside the papers on his desk and went to work.

As if partial recompense for the Nobel Prize they thought he should have been awarded long ago if those doddering old men in Oslo had not been intellectually fossilised, National Security handed him N450 million for his labours.

One expired political godfather to whom they said they handed N100 million says it was actually N500 million and that he simply passed it on, N100 million apiece, to the lesser godfathers in the zone, taking nothing for himself.

Those who claim to know him well say they believe him. They say he would rather donate than obtain, and that it is not for nothing that he is called “Donatus” — behind his back.

Amidst the back and forth, one strand of Dasukigate risks getting lost. As the story goes, on hearing that huge sums of money were being handed out without appropriation, one influential lawmaker went to the main depository and threatened to bring the matter before the appropriate oversight body of one of the legislative houses unless he was, shall we say, accommodated.

Knowing that this was no idle threat and that the fellow was firmly resolved to obtain from the colossal slush fund they were dispensing, they quickly handed him N250 million in hush money. So the story goes, at any rate.

Are the authorities investigating it?

Then there is the story set in Akwa Ibom that may or may not be related to Dasukigate. In a controversial raid on a wing of Government House Complex in the state capital, Uyo, security operatives searching for illegal arms reported stumbling upon “a stockpile of dollars, “not the stockpile of illegal arms they expected to find.

What became of the stockpile? Has its owner –or custodian – been identified? Where did it come from, and what purpose or purposes was it meant to serve?

Jankara journalism

After Bode George conned him into doing a stultifying white-wash job on the contract-splitting scam at the Nigerian Ports Authority, you would think that the self-certified chief of Area Boys and leading practitioner of Jankara journalism has learned some lessons in real journalism and humility.

Fat chance.

There he was again the other day, this media wayfarer, pontificating that the Nigerian print media establishment is made up of “the Zombie Press” and others, with apparently nothing in between.

Irrespective of the issue at hand,” he has written (Vanguard, October 11, 2015), “all the reader needs to know is where the interest of the owner lies and he can virtually write all the columns, editorials, comments, letters to the editor that would appear,” pro and contra, in the “Zombie Press, “ of which he names this newspaper as an exemplar.

He cites as one of his two test cases Saraki’s “emergence” as Senate president. All the “journalists” (inverted commas in the original) writing for the Zombie Press, he found as he had confidently expected, took the same position, despite the fact that “some of these writers are Professors (including Emeritus Professors), and holders of advanced degrees.”

This Emeritus Professor of Journalism holds and has stated at every opportunity that Saraki’s path to the presidency of the Senate was base and ignoble. That view is shared by tens of thousands, perhaps millions of Nigerians who are not in any way connected with this newspaper.

Anyone who sincerely believes that Saraki’s conduct in the matter is the quintessence of propriety and nobility should come out forthrightly and say so, instead of sniping at those who hold a contrary view or ascribing improper motives to them.

The second test case in the Jankara study – such as it was — centres on perceptions of President Muhammadu Buhari’s performance in office.

Those “Zombies” who called Yar’Adua “Baba Go Slow” in 2007 are now unanimous in asking Nigerians to allow Buhari to operate at his own pace, whereas the other Zombies who had supported Yar’Adua back in 2007 have been carpeting Buhari for being too slow. In each case, the editors operate as if the only view that counts is that of those who agree with their publisher, the study asserts.

I don’t know what happens at the paper where the researcher moonlights, but that is not how The Nation is run. You have to wonder whether he really reads the newspaper. The views expressed on its pages are far more nuanced than a casual researcher can fathom.

Plus, they don’t do nuance at Jankara, I gather.

Then, this : Those ‘Zombie” newspapers “are so predictable that one must ask: whatever happened to self-respect? Is it possible that 20 educated and intelligent adults could agree on every important issue – unless “none thinks very much”?

Do the columnists and editorial writers and editors he is excoriating in fact agree on every important issue? What is the evidence for this sweeping assertion on the basis of which the author gratuitously questions the education, intelligence and self-respect or persons, many of whom are not one whit less educated, less intelligent and less self-respecting than he is?

Pity they also don’t do civility at Jankara.

Worse than Jankara journalism

Late this past Sunday, a friend called my attention to a longish piece in Nigerian Tribune purporting to be an interview with the eminent legal scholar and Senior Advocate, Professor Itse Sagay.

Three or four paragraphs into it, I was already doubting its authenticity. By the time I was done, my doubts were confirmed. The statements credited to Professor Sagay lacked the clarity of thought and the elegance of exposition that are his hallmark. In part fact-free and in part driven by bilious rage, the piece seemed to have been put together by an Olisa Metuh clone.

It has since been confirmed that the “interview” was a forgery through and through.

December 22, 2015