The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Sweet poison called devaluation

    Sweet poison called devaluation

    I perfectly understand where Emir Muhammad Sanusi 11 was coming from when, at the All Africa Business Leaders Award West Africa in Lagos last week, he not only added his weighty voice to the strident calls for the removal of the subsidy payments on fuel, but went as far as calling for the devaluation of the naira. If his exasperation with the Buhari administration’s fixation with the past – which I also share – was palpable, even more frustrating is the current situation in which Nigeria “in the first two quarters of this year… spent over 500 billion naira on debt servicing”, a figure expected to climb over the N1trillion mark by the end of the year. His summary that the sum involved is “more than the amount of money budgeted for health, education and defence combined” obviously calls for sober reflection.

    Certainly difficult to fault is his prescription that the federal government “shut down, especially those expense lines that have been known historically to be the sights of those seeking rent” of which fuel subsidy stands out; so also is his call for the expansion of the tax base and an increase in Value Added Tax (VAT) borne of sound realism.

    I would even argue that the momentum for changing the status quo may have been lost by the federal government’s vacillation.

    Again, I couldn’t agree more with His eminence when he says: “We can’t continue having an economy where we collect tax from oil companies, collect tax, maybe, from the telecoms companies, and then 60, 70 per cent of the GDP does not pay taxes.” Clearly, an overhaul of our entire tax system is long overdue.

    Just as relevant is his historicity: “In 2009, we had a huge crisis. Oil prices crashed from 140 dollars to less than 40 dollars….But at that time, the government had a number of advantages. The previous administration had saved a lot. There were physical buffers”.

    “The situation today is different. We spent years deceiving ourselves, calling ourselves the 21st biggest economy in the world based on something called rebasing. We said our debt to GDP ratio was 11 per cent and that the ratio looked very good. Yes we had a debt to GDP ratio of 11 per cent, but we were spending 33 per cent of government revenue servicing debts.”

    His prescription of devaluation is however a different kettle of fish: “Let’s stop being in denial, we cannot artificially hold up the currency…If we have to make a choice between economic growth and devaluation, my recommendation is that we protect growth.”

    His argument, though wearisome, is somewhat familiar: We should be easing monetary restrictions at this time, to allow the naira to find its true value (whatever that means), to stem the run on the foreign reserves, and ostensibly to halt the flight by portfolio investors said to be leaving in droves.

    Such line of reasoning, I would argue, is not only specious but clearly disingenuous. That these are the kind of arguments you hear from boardroom gurus, our elite club of financial analysts, the so-called players and dealers in the financial markets sometimes leaves one to wonder about the interest(s) they represent.

    Agreed, the current monetary policy restriction is bad business for many. For the trader whose sole merchandise is trade in tooth-picks; or the importer of rice who suddenly finds that he can no longer access the official foreign exchange window, and the importer of 39-odd assorted items effectively barred from making transfers from the local domiciliary account; these are hardly the best of times. It is understandable that the weeping have been quite strident among the members. These are however the minor players in the rot that have defined the Nigerian condition.

    There is however another club for which the current restrictions have come to spell BIG TROUBLE. I refer to the elite club that have long perfected the art of preying on the financial system through illicit financial outflows. Because members of the class have the voice and money to buy spaces in the media, they are best placed to push their toxic agenda on the unsuspecting public. Their tools which could range from outright plunder through direct over-invoicing to illicit transfers packaged through such institutions as National Office for Technology Acquisition and Promotion (NOTAP) are only coming into focus because our store of foreign exchange once considered inexhaustible is drying up.

    By the way, Nigerians would be seeing more wailing and gnashing of teeth in the coming days.  The best we can do at this time is strip their pretence, their cleverly-disguised but less-than altruistic motives bare for the world to see.

    I must make the point: Nothing can be said to be wrong with self-interest. Self interest is perhaps as old as Homo erectus; as a matter of fact, classical economic thinkers have long recognised it as one of the drivers of economic action. Modern nations do more than merely draw a line between special interests – particularly of an injurious kind– and the collective interest – going as far as aligning the former with the latter. In Nigeria, the reverse – or worse – is the case. In our case, our hordes of ruthless players exist merely to take advantage of our weak institutions to plunder and rape.

    Clearly, these are what the current restrictions are expected to correct. Perfect resistance is therefore expected.

    Back to the issue of the sweet-poison of devaluation being prescribed. Question is – what will it achieve? Pretty little that I can see. For a nation that produces next to nothing, it can only inflict more hardship and suffering – a situation of double jeopardy on the people. As for our volume of crude, it is set by OPEC quota which means that we cannot produce more even if we wanted to. As one would imagine, prices of goods are guaranteed to rise astronomically. For our hordes of ailing industries, input costs will certainly rise. For the many already in the throes of death, it would sound their death knell.  By the way, where are the factories in the event of the devaluation to earn foreign exchange into the nation’s coffers?

    For those vilifying the tight monetary policy measures, the question must be – what options are left for the monetary authorities in an environment where the economy is awash with slush funds but not enough to plough into the real sector? Allow the naira to continue to ‘find value’ until we have the Zimbabwe scenario in our hands?

    Left to me, prodding the federal government to go after our big time actors involved in illicit capital transfers should deliver far more benefits to everyone that the hues and cries over nothing. Or what do you think?

     

  • Immunity for all

    Immunity for all

    It is one of the most seminal ideas – no, I take that back:  It is far and away the most seminal idea ever proposed from the floor of the National Assembly since constitutional rule was restored in 1999.

    This time, I will not economise my material and keep readers in suspense as is my wont.  I will come right out with it and state without fear of contradiction that the proposal to confer immunity on the principal officers of the National Assembly, with collateral benefit for the Chief Justice of Nigeria, lest the judicial branch feels neglected, is the most thoughtful and sagacious matter that ever came out of its hallowed precincts.

    Its wisdom is self-evident.

    When the president of the Senate is hauled from one court to another to answer charges resulting from criminal investigations, he is bound to be distracted.  When he is distracted, the business of the Senate is bound to be disrupted.

    Only this past weekend, another official of the Senate was grilled for some nine hours by the  EFCC in the investigation of serious fraud.  And the indications are that, in the coming weeks, more lawmakers will be called in for questioning by one anti-corruption agency or another.

    This practice, if not checked, will cripple the National Assembly.  And the public the Assembly serves with such unstinting devotion and solicitude will be the loser.  It will undermine the autonomy of the legislative branch that Senate President Bukola Saraki has been guarding so jealously.

    The immunity being canvassed for principal officers of the legislature and the chief justice is therefore a step in the right direction, a major step to be sure, but only a step. And it is flawed, dangerous flawed, as I see it, in one important respect:  it is limited to only a few officials who constitute less than one per cent of the population.

    How can democracy thrive in such a setting?  Limited immunity is, like limited franchise, inegalitarian.  Being inegalitarian, it is incompatible with democracy.  If we are serious about enthroning democracy – and I am persuaded that we are, since all our policy makers never tire of so proclaiming – we should widen the immunity the National Assembly is mulling.

    Since all citizens are equal before the law and the Constitution, the immunity will have to be accorded all citizens without exception.  “Immunity for all,” not in 2020, but today, now, should be the new rallying cry.

    The President, Vice President, governors and their deputies enjoy constitutional immunity,  as they should.  But the immunity ends the moment they leave office.  Should they have to face any kind of harassment thereafter?  Conferring them with immunity that has no limit will insulate them from such indignity.

    Judges and officers of the law also enjoy the legal protection for what they say or do in the discharge of their official functions.  Again, why a limited immunity?  What would be lost by granting them full immunity in every context and contingency, so that they can live the rest of their days in peace and contentment?

    How about the police?  If they had to worry about the consequences of arresting, locking up or beating up the wrong suspect, would they ever move diligently against suspects or actual criminals?  And, mind you, many of those they go after are dangerous men and women packing superior firepower.  It is bad enough that the police are ill-clad,  ill-housed and ill-paid.  Must they also be denied total and unfettered immunity?

    Recently, some courts have been issuing orders restraining the police in perpetuity from arresting, detaining or prosecuting some suspects in the investigation of criminal activity.  That is a kind of immunity all right, but only for some favoured and well-heeled persons.  Why not democratise the whole thing and confer immunity on everyone in the community?

    Lawmakers already enjoy parliamentary immunity.  Whatever they say on the floor of the House properly convened about anybody in the course of a debate or discussion, however injurious it may be to an individual or institution, is absolutely privileged.  No successful defamation law suit can flow from it.

    But why limit the immunity to statements made during parliamentary debates?   Why not extend it to the statements they make outside the National Assembly, and to their conduct generally? If they had to worry about the intended or unintended consequences of their conduct, would they ever pursue their work diligently?

    And if the media had to worry about defamation lawsuits, can they really uphold the duty and accountability of the government to the public as enjoined by the Constitution?  To do that, they have to be accorded boundless immunity.

    Before American-style medical malpractice lawsuits cripple our healthcare delivery system, doctors and hospitals will have to be granted full immunity.  If they had to answer for everything that goes wrong under them, they will spend more time worrying about the vast sums they will have to shell out as damages than thinking of how to improve their skills.

    Through sheer terror, drivers of taxis, mini buses , trailers, tankers and articulated vehicles and their unions conferred immunity on themselves long ago.  They drive unmindful of other road users, they park anywhere and obstruct the flow of traffic, and are ever so ready to visit violent reprisal on anyone who questions their behaviour.

    Full and unfettered immunity might just be the elixir that will make them more amenable to civilised conduct.

    When I was growing up, parents and teachers operated on the principle that if you spared the rod, you spoiled the child.  These days, teachers are wielding the cane less frequently, for fear of what Ade’s parent might do if they gave him a real spanking.   So, even under the greatest provocation, they cannot touch Ade.   The result is that Ade grows more and more intractable.

    Granting teachers full and complete immunity is the surest path to restoring Nigeria’s lost educational glory.

    Several years ago, a principal who made it impossible for students to cheat in the West African School Certificate examination was punished, the authorities said, for putting the students at a competitive disadvantage.  That would not happen in a situation where teachers enjoy complete immunity.

    As for those who aid and abet examination malpractices by selling live questions to willing buyers, they already enjoy close to absolute immunity.  As far as I know, no one peddling live exam papers has been arrested, much less prosecuted.  All that remains is to formalise the immunity and extend it to their sundry patrons.  The immunity will also have to extend to parents who from sheer desperation take university matriculation exams as proxy for their children who cannot make the cut.

    Landlords who forcibly evict disobliging tenants should not have to answer at law.  Whose house is it anyway?  But in a society that guarantees equal protection under the law, the tenant who stands his ground should also enjoy the fullest immunity.

    Under this new doctrine, banks that advance dubious loans to even more dubious borrowers  should enjoy the fullest immunity from liability.  So should delinquent borrowers.

    I almost forgot the elections umpire INEC, which gets shafted with more law suits in a single year that all other public agencies combined.   Should it not be insulated from such rascality?  And should election candidates also not enjoy complete immunity from whatever INEC does or fails to do?

    As the late and much-lamented Dr K. O. Mbadiwe would have said, let immunity jam immunity.

  • Customs and our rice headache

    Customs and our rice headache

    Rice, the Nigerian staple was thrice in the news last week. First was the report that the federal government is working towards the banning of importation of the product by 2018. That was supposed to be the outcome of the meeting of frontline governors of rice-producing states of Sokoto, Kano, Adamawa and Zamfara with the Vice President, Yemi Osinbajo. At the meeting were the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN), Godwin Emefiele, the Permanent Secretary of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Sunday Echono and officials of the National Planning Commission (NPC).

    Zamfara State governor, Abdulaziz Yari, summed up the outcome of the meeting thus: “We discussed how we could boost rice production in Nigeria and start thinking about how we are going to put policy in place on how rice importation will be banned in the country. We have the potential; we have the human resources; we have the arable land to grow rice. In the next two years, we will not need to bring rice from outside Nigeria. We are going to ban it”.

    That same week, newspapers reported Comptroller-General of Customs, Col. Hameed Ali (rtd), as ordering immediate removal of rice from import restriction list and the re-introduction of import duty payment at land borders. Wale Adeniyi the Customs PRO, explained the rationale for the new measure thus: “Over the years importation has been restricted to the seaports because border authorities have found it difficult to effectively monitor and control importation of rice…When the decision to ban it (rice) was taken, it was not an effective measure because smuggling of the product thrives with people using different means of conveyance including small trucks, bicycles and even animals – putting them on donkeys and some actually carry it on their heads”.

    Finally, there was yet another report credited to the same Customs CGS to the effect that there was no going back on the recovery of the   N23.6 billion tariff debts owed the federal government by rice importers.

    On the latter, perhaps a recap of the long-running story will obviously put the issues in clear perspective: The quartet of OLAM, Stallion/Popular Foods/Masco Agro, Ebony Agro and Conti Agro (Milan) were alleged to have imported 750,253,03 metric tons over and above their approved rice import quota. There was supposed to be a gentleman agreement with the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and the Customs that could bring in their consignment on the understanding that anything above the allotted quota would attract non-preferential tariff of 10 per cent import duty and additional with 60 per cent levy – against the preferential rate of 10 per cent and 20 per cent levy.

    Now, the story is that the four firms reneged on the agreement on receipt of the invoice(s) for the sum of N26.3 billion representing the total duty/levy value on the excess on their individual quotas. As a result, the customs in July sealed their warehouses. Now, to underscore the no nonsense mission of the new sheriff, the Customs boss last week told his men he wants the debts paid in full!

    Meanwhile, the rice importers – not used to taking prisoners – have literally declared war with the Customs whom they accuse of imposing retroactive taxes on them and using unorthodox, strong-arm tactics to collect them!

    The different strands of the rice story obviously strike a familiar chord. The developments – although disparate – merely parody the multiple afflictions of a nation perpetually in a flux; the main elements such as the mortal failure of national will, the criminal impunity fostered in the environment of wilting institutions and the endemic corruption that has now assumed the way of life are merely its derivatives. The result is the bewildering statistics of rice imports put at some $800 million annually and the huge unsold stock of the local paddy rice at a time many integrated rice mills are said to be looking for rice to process.

    Now, let’s take the issues one by one.

    I start with the governors. In seeking a new initiative on rice, the governors obviously mean well. But then, if good intentions are all that is required to turn the tide, we would not be sitting pretty as the second largest importer of rice in the universe today.  As a matter of fact, recent initiatives such as the Presidential Initiative on increased Rice Production (2002-2007), the Nigerian National Rice Development Strategy (2009 -2018) not to talk of the boundless activism of the Jonathan Transformation years ought to have guaranteed us pre-eminent producer status!

    The point here is that the governors have neither said anything new nor done anything different from what obtained in the past. The quest towards self-sufficiency whether in rice or any commodity for that matter, would not come by wishing it to happen. It will only materialise through meticulous planning and hard work which, unfortunately, is not yet in place!

    We may have done well to highlight the problems; our ability to carry the farmers along remains a big problem. For all years of high drama couched as transformation agenda, the farmers still can’t access cheap credit and improved seedlings just as processing mills remains palpably inadequate. Overall, it appears that the investors counted upon by the immediate past administration to deliver on its rice agenda couldn’t make up their minds on whether to remain in the rice import trade or venture into production and processing. Or, isn’t that what the tango over quotas and duty/differentials all about?

    That takes us to the next issue – the removal of rice from import restriction list and the re-introduction of import duty payment at land borders – a measure I’ll simply describe as contradictory. Rice, if you may recall, was one of the items named in the CBN prohibition list – for which access to foreign exchange through the official window was banned. That measure, together with the existing discriminatory levy and tariff was supposed to be a lethal blow to rice importation. At this time, only the customs can explain how the measure fits into the nation’s drive to ramp up domestic rice production.

    For while it may be true that the extant measures have proved to be insufficient deterrent to the smuggling of the commodity through the land borders, the issue is that the very idea that the problem can be cured by throwing the borders open is not only defeatist, it is perhaps mitigated only by the possibility of more revenue. The issue, therefore isn’t so much about ramping up domestic production but rather an attempt to pass off an intractable problem.

    At the moment, it would certainly suit the customs top brass to seek “to reorganise their anti-smuggling operations in the border areas and ensure that all those importers through the borders bring their rice through approved routes and pay their extant duty”; only in due course will they find that a new theatre of corruption has been opened for corrupt elements in their midst to operate!

  • Age of doubt

    Age of doubt

    It’s scepticism all round, over President Muhammdu Buhari’s long-awaited list of ministers; and Nigerians do appear to suffer the syndrome of that Yoruba figure who, sick and tired of seeing phonies, permanently shut his eyes, in vigorous protest.

    But pray, in that period of voluntary blindness, what if the very original wanders by?

    That passionate sense of doubt somewhat echoes William Butler Yeats (1865-1939), the Irish playwright, poet and cultural nationalist, who won the Nobel in 1923.

    He won because his poetry voiced deep Irish dissonance, when his people chaffed under British imperialism, cultural and political.

    Still, he has had quite an influence on Nigeria’s literary temper.

    Yeats’s “The Second Coming”, provided the title for Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, perhaps the most famous book to come out of Nigeria — an indeed, all of Africa.

    Besides, Nigeria and its shambolic governance over time, could well be the political equivalent of the Yeats poetic chaos, of the falcon not hearing the falconer.

    Even then, his quote that opened this piece — the best lack all convictions, while the worst/are full of passionate intensity — could well have been penned to dramatically capture Nigeria’s current high age of doubt.

    “These ‘analogue’ ministers”, quipped a columnist with The Nation.  But with all due respect to the democratic licence to differ, there appeared little digital proof in his own writing!

    Another snapped: a “breathe of stale air”.  But again, pretty little evidence of freshness, outside seeming group-think — hardly a crime, though.

    Yet another savaged the president with alleged “ancient thinking”, perhaps simply because Muhammadu Buhari doesn’t wax poetic in the neo-liberal lingo of growth sans development.

    But what did the likes of Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, the very epitome of cutting-edge technocracy in governance, do with the economy, aside from count empty beans?

    No matter!  Nigerians have been too much bitten in the past.  The age of innocence is lost.  They are in no hurry to trust anyone again — not even the near-ascetic and puritan  Muhammadu Buhari, who at least holds the high promise he won’t steal — or tolerate stealing — in office.

    Still, the rather mundane bases for the rippling scepticism is worrying.  Take the rather one-track debate of youth versus old age, from which has come the Audu Ogbeh example.

    Saraki, the father, as senate leader, announced Mr. Ogbeh’s name as nominated minister, in the Second Republic.  Now Saraki, the son, as senate president, is considering Mr. Ogbeh as putative minister.  Conclusive proof: Mr. Ogbeh is “recycled” and therefore “useless”!

    How about that for (il)Logic 101!

    First, there is something noxious about the creeping contention that age is useless, simply because a few senior citizens, over the years, had given less than a good account of themselves.  It all smirks of lack of enough introspection to think matters through.

    Take Mr. Ogbeh.  At 35 in 1982, he was made minister, in the Second Republic (1979-1983) under the Shehu Shagari presidency.  He was about the youngest in that cabinet.  But when that dispensation collapsed, and principal characters were probed for alleged sleaze, he came out smelling of the proverbial roses, despite his relative tender age.

    Then, the same Mr. Ogbeh, as Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national chairman, had a sensational but principled fall-out with President Olusegun Obasanjo, over the then Anambra Governor, Chris Ngige, kidnap saga, on which the president was hee-hawing.

    He got railroaded out of office, which, looking back now, was the beginning of the end for the ruling PDP.  But the career farmer from Benue State kept his integrity intact.

    Indeed, in an age where politicians flit across party lines, like some wayward witches on broomsticks, the moment he joined the then Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN), he never looked back.  In the run-up to the All Progressives Congress (APC) presidential win, he played his own part, once marshalling farmers to sell some million tubers of yam to raise money for Buhari’s presidential run.

    Now, what simplistic thinking would hold that such a proven man of conscience and integrity jars against a new order, promising rectitude, simply because he is now 68 and was minister at 35?

    Still, on age and youth.  The senior citizens today — Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Chukwuemeka Odumegwu-Ojukwu, Ahmadu Bello (all of blessed memory), Gen. Yakubu Gowon, Obasanjo, Gen. Theophilus Danjuma, Gen. Buhari, at his first coming as military head of state, Gen. Ibrahim Babangida and  Philip Asiodu (he of the “super permanent secretaries” fame) — what were their modal ages when they gloried or fumbled in office?  Dashing youths or aged and decrepit?

    So long for the shallow, mutually exclusive, dichotomy between age and youth!

    And yes, the politician versus technocrat argument!  First, what was Awo, when he wrought great development wonders in his days as Western Region premier — politician or technocrat?  And what, indeed, was Babatunde Fashola as Lagos governor and Kayode Fayemi, as Ekiti governor?  Ay, what is Nasir El-Rufai now as Kaduna governor?  Or Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, then as Lagos governor or now as national leader of APC — politicians or technocrats?

    So long for another phoney dichotomy, when there is none!

    Indeed, there appears something eminently dishonourable about the so-called clamour for “technocrats”.  Where were these “technocrats” during the whoops of electioneering?  So, the so-called “politicians” are good enough for the rigours of elections, but only “technocrats” can excel in government?

    Like Tinubu, Fashola, Fayemi and El-Rufai, all technocrats in their own rights, that technocrat secretly salivating the gravy of office, solely on the strength of his “expertise”, should first scale the strictures of politics and politicking!  Insisting on reaping where you didn’t sow is as much a corruption of the ethos of politics, as sleaze is a corruption of the ethos of governance.

    Still, all this Babel of Doubt, reasonable or not, means just one thing: Buhari is condemned to delivering — and there will be no excuses.

    So, Femi Adesina and Garba Shehu (for the Presidency), and whoever becomes the Information  minister, aside from the new party spokesperson, given the imminent exit of Alhaji Lai Mohammed, have their job cut out.

    They will do well to open a vigorous communication segment to every policy and programme, to continuously engage the public.  They sure could do more of that, right now, to calm the voluble Buhari-sceptic army.

    At the end of the day, however, only results matter.  Obasanjo started well, in the opinion of not a few, with some promise of renaissance.  But all too soon, no thanks to his grave personal failings and contradictions, he ended a damp squib.

    Only performance, solid performance, can cure longsuffering Nigerians of their hard-earned scepticism.  In Nigeria’s contemporary history, only Awo and Buhari approached the presidential job with a prospect of human sainthood, and firm control over team.

    Awo never got the job.  But Buhari has.  So, it’s time the president leveraged his sparse personal baggage, push his ministers hard along the narrow and winding path, guided by superb policy and programmes, to deliver the goods — and keep Nigerians believing again.

  • Saraki: The public’s turn

    Saraki: The public’s turn

    Not many of the columns posted in this space have drawn as many reactions as the most recent one (“Beyond the list,” October 6, 2015).

    The part that seems to have resonated the most was the concluding paragraph, here reproduced for ease of reference:

    “I am hoping that when the (confirmation) hearings get under way, at least one nominee will look Saraki in the face and say, ‘Senator, with all due respect to your office, you lack the moral integrity to sit in judgment as to whether I should serve on the President Buhari’s cabinet or not.  I cannot and will not submit to your authority in this matter.  I thank the President for the nomination, but must for the reason I have stated respectfully withdraw my name from consideration.’”

    The reactions speak for themselves.  I am reporting virtually all the salient ones, edited for space and coherence.  My aim is not to advance a cause, but to share with the attentive public some sense of the balance of opinion in this corner on an issue that is likely to define, for better or worse, the Buhari administration and its commitment to enthroning probity in public life.

     

    *

    Disciplined leadership is important to infuse and inculcate the right attitudes indispensable to meaningful progress.  Dr Bukola Saraki should learn what morality is all about by evaluating himself and taking a look at his conducts so far.  If a man goes into public office, he must be prepared for the consequences.  He must make himself proof against calumny.  In this, honesty is crucial. Adegoke O. O. Bako, Ibadan.

    Any nominee who acted the last paragraph will not only be stoned, but may fetch jungle justice from friends, family and even his wìfe or the husband as the case may be. –Anon.

    The case on Saraki is political and should be handled with care. Hence we may be sitting on a keg of a gun powder as a nation – Dr Albert Olajide Akinyemi, Ikole-Ekiti.

    Whether Saraki is corrupt or not is not the issue.  The fact remains that constitutionally, he will preside over the screening of ministerial nominees and he has the final say on who is cleared or not. – Anon.

    When will Nigerians develop mentally to the state referred to in the last paragraph of “Beyond the list”?  The Bukola Saraki I know could have stepped aside for moral reasons, pending the determination of the issue at stake – Joe Ehalaiye, Kogi State

    If any ministerial nominee thinks he is bold enough, let him confront the Senate president by telling him he doesn’t have the integrity to screen him and see if such a nominee will not be disqualified — Anon

    Your desire at your age to stand the truth on its head just to malign Saraki and satisfy your master is shameful.  For your information, Saraki and other dignitaries were assaulted by workers protesting non-payments.  It’s amazing how much space The Nation devotes to the Saraki bashing project.  We know it will soon be Buhari when he fails your master.  Anon

    Mr. Kabba (Okun) man. What actually is your problem with the Senate President, an Ilorin man? Old politics in the old Kwara State? Uhunn…time shall tell. I supposed by now, you ought to be an elder statesman. Anon.

    Leave Saraki alone. Where were you when Asiwaju went to CCT in 2011?  You were quiet. You are very partial. I will never read your comment again. Tokunbo.

    I’ve expected you to, at least investigate other political office holders, especially governors, past and present including your paymaster and tell the public your findings in respect of fraud or corrupt practices. If your sword of attack is directed at Bukola Saraki alone, any reasonable  reader will assess you as a mere archetype of personified journalist who lacks the ethics –Anon

    Re:  Beyond the list:  “. . .respectfully withdraw from consideration.” What a fantastic conclusion on your article.  I hope a nominee with a standing integrity could declare this. Alhaji (Dr) Senator Abubakar Olusola Saraki found himself entangled in a political cobweb and should only do the needful, to retain the little respect that he still has.   Biyi Adesanya, Ibadan.

    I’m still waiting for that day when The Nation will stop attacking Tinubu’s presumed enemies in politics. Well, he who pays the piper always dictates the tune. halabi42@yahoo.com

    I‘m not a politician, but an old Shell retiree, retired 23 years ago. Reading through your At  Home Abroad comments in today’s The Nation, I broadly salute you and say well done.  If Saraki is truly educated and honourable, he should at this point put in his resignation. Engr JK, Gasper.

    A very beautiful piece.  Let’s hope one of the nominees would be bold enough to speak up. Anon

    I cannot think of a more appropriate and damning response to your biased intervention on the Saraki matter than what Professor Ayo Olukotun aptly captures as “The Corruption of Anti-corruption”, on the back page of The Punch of September 25, 2015.  Kuteyi R.R, Ondo.

    Will it not be abnormal for an accused facing 13 charges with criminal undertone to screen ministerial nominees of the President of the biggest black nation in the world? Please let him know that he needs to be preparing for his defence on October 21, 22 and 23, 2015. ‘Wole Olatunbosun.

    You have passed this level you exhibited in your today’s article.  It’s very pedestrian and mediocre. We expect better intellectual inputs.  Anon

    Your article proves what a loyal employee you are. Imagine the way Saraki is searched and found is the same way the owner of The Nation is searched. By now, you would have been looking for another job.  Ogbadu

    Truth is bitter as always, but has to be told all the same. Well done sir for saying it the way it is. – Tony Iheanacho, Jos.

    Since Senate president Saraki has a case to answer over illegal assets declaration, he is not entitled to preside over the screening of ministerial nominees. —chika nnorom

    That was a masterpiece. The likes of Dino Melaye know that Senate confirmation in Nigeria is for sale.  This is the Senate’s harvest period; they waited long for it to come. Dino should not fool us. As for Saraki, red oil trying to wash the soap! What do you get?  Rubbish. Yes, let him forever get stuck “in the hole he dug himself into” Moses Imiegha

    “Beyond the list” was the tonic I need after much thought about the nation. The FG should not allow any political solution to any judicial matter in this country any more. Let the so-called Senate president continue his lying. The truth is that he was stoned in Ilorin.  Those senators supporting Saraki cannot go back to their constituencies and tell them. They are all liars. Your ink shall never dry. Abdulrahaman Yusuf.

    Re:.”Beyond the list” credited to Olatunji Dare in The Nation of October 6 is a piece that calls for sober reflection. Why is it that the Yoruba are always after themselves? I advise they should borrow a leaf from other tribes. Steve

    I always appreciate the flow in AT  HOME ABROAD. I will like to comment on “Beyond the list.”  The legislature can overturn the judgment of the court simply by enacting or amending a law. Please see S.E.C. v. Kasunmu  (2009) 10 NWLR (Pt. 1150) 509. Anon.

    The list of ministerial nominees unveiled turned out to be mixed bag of heavily corrupt, superbly corrupt and moderately corrupt Nigerians. Nothing to cheer. Rather than any of them looking Saraki in the face, they are most likely to lobby him not to expose them.  Whether charged to court or not, we know them. Anon

     

    *

    Nigerians voted decisively for change.  Following the election, heady intimations of a new dawn swept the landscape.  Many were cautious, skeptical even, because they have lived through too  many false dawns.

    This must not be another false dawn.

  • Parliament wants immunity

    Parliament wants immunity

    Folks, your parliament wants immunity!

    But what is the assurance that immunity won’t breed parliamentary impunity, the most violent antipode to the very concept of democracy?

    Can you imagine a kabiyesi parliament — a parliament that cannot be questioned, even by its own electors?

    Yet, it is this much abused “democracy” that this self-serving ensemble mouth themselves as most authentic living symbols!

    Since 1999, when former President Olusegun Obasanjo roasted the National Assembly on the populist altar of “furniture allowance”, portraying the new brood of legislators as a band of unconscionable gluttons devoted to nobody’s welfare but their own, Ripples had always thought Nigerians unfair to their elected representatives.

    For one, President Obasanjo was scorching parliament and projecting himself as some people’s champion, too holy for a profane legislature to touch.  Yet, the president parliament must touch, by constitutional oversight.

    That populist ploy was, of course, dangerous Machiavellian gambit, subversive of rigorous checks-and-balances, on which presidential democracy is erected.

    For another, the president on the grandstand furiously excoriated legislative pork; but was stone quiet on the perks of his own ministers; and the brood of unelected others, in executive sinecure.

    Besides, Nigeria’s successive military coups had consigned the legislature as the least developed of the three governmental arms, since it was the only arm sacrificed during military rule.  For that sole reason, it deserved some empathy.

    Still, with Leo Ogor’s sensational announcement of immunity dreams for its topmost principal officers, Ripples just wonders if the National Assembly, not popular in the streets even in the best of times, is not bent on a self-destruct path.

    Mr. Ogor, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) member and Minority Leader of the House of Representatives, announced with glee the legislature was mulling over a constitutional amendment that would gift immunity to the Senate president and his deputy, as well as the Speaker and Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives.  In the spirit of subversive generosity, the Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN) too was a putative beneficiary!

    The logic?  Well, the president (national) and governors (states), heads of the executive, enjoy the immunity clause.  So, why not “democratise” immunity, to include the heads of the other two arms?

    Indeed, why not, other things being equal?  But that is the snag: other things were far from equal.  Really, Mr. Ogor’s statement came across as some provocative sword of Damocles, from a parliament chaffing at the “insult” of docking Senate President, Bukola Saraki, for alleged corruption.

    Mr. Ogor’s seeming unstated illogic?  That the Constitution grants the president immunity, and the senate president none, appears “unacceptable” to parliament; and must be reversed forthwith.

    But wouldn’t self-help itself — and that’s what Ogor’s threat amounts to — be a cynical corruption of the hallowed trust of law making?

    Besides, when did legislative immunity become an issue — before or after Saraki’s Code of Conduct odyssey? Didn’t those chaffing now read the Constitution before they opted for the National Assembly, instead of running for president or governor, to enjoy immunity?

    And having made their choice, should they corrupt the process with self-help, not only cynically hinting that the law is an ass; but also that the processes leading to lawmaking is outright asinine, since legislators can corral powers to legislate for their short-term selfish interests, rather than for the perpetual good of the polity?

    Should they even pull off this gambit, how would it possibly save Saraki from having his day in court, even if his body language violently rails against that due process?  Could parliament, in all good — and democratic! — conscience, make the law retroactive to save the embattled senate president?

    Still, for all you know, Mr. Ogor could well have been speaking for himself, and no one else.  He could also be the quintessential honourable gentleman, as his House membership presupposes, incapable of cant.

    But he could also be flying a kite for an incipient campaign.

    Given his political trajectory, a scion of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), a party splendidly undone by its own impunity, impunity would appear never far away.  From his PDP culture, therefore, a cynical push for legislative immunity, en route to legislative impunity, would appear coming with the territory.

    Still, the real story behind the Ogor immunity drama is the clash of vision between President Muhammadu Buhari and Senate President Saraki, on what governance should be in a season of change.

    In fairness, the crisis started from Buhari’s presidential naivety of declaring himself disinterested in whoever headed the Senate or the House of Representatives.

    But in fairness to the president too, no decent person would have expected Saraki’s vaulting desperation, which fired his brazen sell-out of his party — and its right to the deputy senate presidency — to the opposition PDP, to corral subversive votes, to land the Senate presidency.

    Now, the PDP sits pretty, not giving a damn if the new order fails.  Neither does Saraki, it appears, so long as he achieves his aim.  It’s all so reminiscent of the infamous quote of Lucifer, in John Milton’s Paradise Lost: “Better to rule in hell than serve in heaven”!

    Soon enough, if this crisis persists, rebel APC senators in Saraki’s camp, could just drop their neither-nor facade, and queue behind their master.  Whence then would he lead them?

    Remain Lucifer, still the proud Son of the Morning, in the ruling party (whatever its name)?  Or a full descent into Satan, in hellish opposition, stubbornly living the quip of ruling in hell, rather than serving in heaven?  Time will tell!

    This monstrous see-saw of change-but-no-change, therefore, drives this crisis.  The threat of legislative immunity is only the latest symptom, of the high-octane power play for the soul of change: the Buhari vanguard of change for real change; or the Saraki school’s change as mere illusion.

    But before the politicians get ahead of themselves, cooking deals and expecting the docile people to helplessly watch from the sidelines, let everyone know.

    For all his braggadocio, Senator Saraki only boasts the mandate of a third of a state, his senatorial district in Kwara State.  At the end of the day, the senate presidency, when the chips are down, is more a function of honour and of influence, than of power.

    On the other hand, President Buhari boasts a national mandate.  While to the tactful, soft power always trumps hard power, between the president and the senate president, there is little doubt as to who wields a bigger mandate.

    And lest everyone forgets: Buhari’s win was as much a victory for the opposition as it was redemption for the self-destruct ruling elite, which PDP was heedlessly rushing to the political gallows.

    A few months hence of Jonathan’s anomie, and maybe Nigeria’s present ruling elite would have been buried under the Nigerian rubble?

    That is why Buhari holds it a historic duty to enact the positive change his presidential win promised.  That is his contract with Nigeria.

    The Saraki dilution, via PDP intrusion, is not part of that solemn deal.  It is a terrible distraction that must be removed — and fast.

  • Now that the list is here

    Now that the list is here

    For a list that that took four long months in coming, it was perhaps expected that Nigerians would swing into the overdrive as soon as it was released. That was exactly what happened penultimate week when President Muhammadu Buhari finally released the first batch of his would-be ministers. As one might imagine, not only are Nigerians are still somewhat divided on the question of whether the wait for it has been worth it, there is also the more pertinent question of whether the nominees can be said to exemplify the change that the administration promised. All of this, I suspect, flow not just from the weight of expectations from the ordinary and the not-so-ordinary folk on the administration’s promise of a new direction, but also from the image of the no-nonsense, perhaps saintly President that Nigerians have come to know – one not only expected to do things very differently and more importantly, one sworn to set a new moral tone for the polity.

    To be fair to the President, I cannot exactly recall him – or any of his aides – promising Nigerians angels as ministers. In any case, the whole idea that the administration would require angels to get the job done can only be arrant nonsense. However, much as I would agree that the judgment of who best to work with the President to deliver must necessarily be his, the issue of whether the President needed nearly the whole of four months to come up with the same faces that have dominated the space in the last 16 years and more has suddenly become legitimate in the increasingly shifting perceptions of this Presidency as a tardy one. And while the charge of gerontocracy might sound somewhat exaggerated, the fact that the average age of cabinet nominees is 61  in a nation where some of the biggest corporations are run by 30-something to 40-something year olds would again tend to speak volumes about the president’s understanding and judgment of the complexities of current time.

    More importantly for an administration that has been accused of lacking direction, the cabinet list did very little to assuage such concerns. At the individual level, there is no question that some of the nominees having proven their mettles in different theatres of our national life can be counted among the very best perhaps anywhere in the world. I could even go as far as to describe the team as star-studded as far as pooling a team goes. But then, like the story of our national soccer team – the Super Eagles, having the greatest players does not always translate to the deliver of great outcomes!

    At this time, the question must be – what does the team represent? In other words, where is the country headed? Yes, I am willing to recognise and celebrate the individual brilliance of say – Babatunde Raji Fashola, the famed technocratic pedigree of an Ibe Kachikwu or a Chris Ngige; question is how does these square with the gut instinct of a team leader stuck to ancient paradigms?

    Let me illustrate. Few weeks ago, in a moment of rare candour, the Group Managing Director of NNPC told us that any expectations of optimal  performance of the refineries coming after the latest cycle of Turn Around Maintenance (TAM) was at best misplaced. Those were the same refineries said to have falling under the Buhari Effect and over which some Nigerians were already popping champagne.  Save for the President who apparently wanted the refineries working at all costs – he told Nigerians that the refineries would have long been auctioned off to save the nation the pretence of having working refineries! Did I hear someone say that President looks forward to the return of Nigeria Airways and perhaps the Nigerian National Shipping Line?

    We know where we are today: the country is in a mess today because of the corruption and maladministration of the past. Our public service is in shambles. Major infrastructures have over the years suffered neglect hence the nation is currently ranked among the least competitive in the world. Today, our price of our principal commodity – oil has dipped to a point that we now struggle to meet recurrent bills.

    Yes, corruption is a major problem. That was why I couldn’t agree more with the President when he said that we either kill the menace or it would kill us. Our President has no doubt rightly placed a lot of stock on killing corruption. It bears stating however that killing corruption does not in itself guarantee the good life! The pathway to the good life is new paradigms, bold ideas and lots of discipline and hard work. Yes, money answereth all problems but ideas – and well conceived paradigms – rule the universe! Problem is – Nigerians haven’t begun to see the kind of ideas on which the future optimism can be anchored.

    So, what do we expect in the coming months? An economy in which the state remains the dominant player as the President’s instinct for the nostalgia would appear to prefer, or one which the private sector is given the muscle to do what it does best while the state strengthens its regulatory arm? If it settles for the former, where would the funds come from? That is the simple question that the organised private sector has long sought answers for. And that is what Nigerians expect answers for even before the ministers take their seats.

     

  • Beyond the list

    Beyond the list

    A head of its official release just as last week was ending, the most closely-guarded and most anticipated list in Nigeria’s political history sprang a huge leak.

    Senate President Bukola Saraki is keeping what has been released so far to his obdurate chest, bravely keeping up the pretence that he is a worthy occupant of that post and a worthy recipient of the document, even after being docked like a common miscreant.  I will return to this point shortly.

    Perhaps by the time you read this piece, Buhari will have released the complement.

    Never was a list so highly anticipated.  And it was not just by those jockeying for cabinet positions.  Having a close relation or friend or even the merest acquaintance in the cabinet is the closest thing to being a cabinet minister.  It could translate into easy money, financial help, juicy contracts, jobs for dependents who have been pounding the streets forlornly since graduating five years ago, and perhaps even into a huge leap from obscurity to celebrity.

    Interest and speculation were therefore very high among those with eyes trained on the main chance.  And in the ranks of such persons whose candidates found favour, there is already great rejoicing, as reflected in the upsurge in special thanksgiving sessions during Sunday worship.  The celebrations, aso ebi and all, will come later, with the scale varying directly as the perceived juiciness of the assigned ministry.

    There has also been a corresponding upsurge in supplication with regard to the content of the supplementary list.  Fervent prayers, with fasting and solemn pledges, are being said that those who did not figure in the first list will figure prominently in the coming one, and that    the outcome will confirm the wisdom of the ancients that those who laugh last laugh best.

    Some of those desperately hoping for cabinet positions fuelled interest and speculation in the process by insinuating themselves in the media as prospects receiving serious and active consideration, hoping thereby that if  Buhari does not know their merit, the media would tell  him just what he is missing.

    This tactic hasn’t always worked, but can you blame anyone for trying?

    Basking in Saraki’s faded glory instead of establishing his own bona fides, the mercurial Senator Dino Melaye has declared that the confirmation hearings will be thorough; that the era of “bow and go,” whereby a candidate for confirmation is asked to take a bow and move on, without any enquiry into his or her qualifications and fitness for the office, is over.

    It is to be hoped that this is not another example of the empty talk for which Melaye has become notorious. It would be nice if, for once, the Senate did its home work and put the candidates through the searching examination that will show how qualified they are to be ministers in these uncertain times that demand substantive mastery, and a huge capacity for learning, adaptation and innovation.

    President Buhari should help the Senate in his regard by attaching a portfolio to each nominee. The idea that any person adjudged fit for ministerial office can function as political head of any ministry, a carry-over from the Shagari era, is preposterous.  A person who can muddle through as Minister of Parks and Gardens is unlikely to do a credible job as Minister of Science and Technology or as Minister for the Navy.

    Vice versa, persons eminently suitable for those posts will most likely make a hash of the Parks and Gardens portfolio.

    In times past, some senators would now be preparing for a rich harvest.  Prospective cabinet members knew that it was one thing — the easy part, in fact— to be nominated, and quite another to be confirmed.   It was not unusual for hints to be planted by persons claiming to work within the system that the path might be lubricated with a substantial infusion of cash or goods routed through them, or for candidates to offer same upfront, without waiting to be asked.

    Either way, the “system” was the winner.

    Not this time; not under the new Sheriff.

    What role will Saraki play in all this?

    He is stuck in the hole he dug himself into, and continues to dig furiously.  Docked like a common criminal, he presumed to lecture the presiding judge on the law and the Constitution.  Instead of the triumphal homecoming that crowds had been rented to accord him in Ilorin, he was pelted with water sachets and stones and called the most repellent names at the praying grounds during Sallah and had to be spirited away for his own safety.

    The event was captured on video and splendidly reported by the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), the nation’s most professional and most reliable media source.  But Saraki’s spokespersons claim that it never took place.  So much for their credibility.

    To counter his Sallah misadventure and  create the illusion that he was in good standing,  Saraki suborned major traditional rulers in Kwara State, among them a retired judge of the Court of Appeal, who, as I was reminded by a younger friend the other day, might have become the nation’s chief justice, to pay him the courtesy visit that was usually accorded the serving governor, and to confer on him a vote of confidence even as he faced ongoing criminal investigations.

    When the Senate resumed after yet another well-compensated recess, he launched into a self-serving oration about how he had become Senate President in accordance with the constitutional provision that the Senate would elect one of its own to the post, and how he was being persecuted on account of that fact, and for his vow to safeguard the “independence” of the Legislative Branch.

    But not before stage-managing another vote of confidence.

    Why does a person who is completely innocent need so many votes of confidence?

    Yes, the Senate is enjoined to elect one of its own as president.  It also prescribes the manner in which the choice is to be made.  There is also the weighty matter of the spirit of the law.  Saraki subverted the spirit of the law to become president.  Withal, he is a defendant in a charge of forgery – forgery of the rules of procedure that governed his election.

    The “independence” of the legislature that Saraki says he is out to protect is a threadbare pretext. The legislature is just one of the three arms of government.  Its bills become law only when the President assents to them.  It can delay or revise, but only rarely can it countermand the President.  And whereas the courts can invalidate any act of the legislature incompatible with the Constitution, the legislature cannot overturn the verdict of the courts.

    So, where is the “independence” Saraki says he is out to protect?  “Independence” from whom, and for what?

    What will it take to make him realise that he cannot continue to preside over the Senate without  destroying that institution?  How many more of these sophomoric stunts can he stage in his desperation to hold on to office?

    I am hoping that when the hearings get under way, at least one nominee will look Saraki in the face and say, “Senator, with all due respect to your office, you lack the honour and the moral integrity to sit in judgment as to whether I should serve on the President Buhari’s cabinet or not.  I cannot in good conscience submit to your authority in this matter.  I thank the President for the nomination, but must for the reason I have stated respectfully withdraw from consideration.”

  • OGA

    OGA

    OGA — Otunba Gani Adams — he kept on calling himself that, each time he made a prize presentation, pronouncing OGA as the Yoruba would pronounce “chameleon”.

    Was the symbolism lost on him?

    It must have, particularly with his branded persona as a Yoruba cultural ambassador; juxtaposed with his election-time hustle as political activist — a Goodluck Jonathan activist — with a suspect cause.

    On this occasion, however, OGA’s culture persona came in handy.  In fact, it handed him the highest perk on the high table, as chief guest of honour and part-sponsor of the event.

    It was September 28.  First-year students, taking Traditional African Festival and Theatre (TAFT), a mandatory course at the Creative Arts Department of the University of Lagos (UNILAG), were enacting whatever they had learnt about Nigeria’s panoply of yearly festivals.

    On show, therefore, were Zangbeto (the famous festival among the Egun in Badagry, Lagos), Suharo (a festival among the Ijaw in Bayelsa State), Borri (which predated the Othman Dan Fodio Islamic revolution in northern Nigeria) and Ojude Oba (the yearly trado-community festival, though staged after the Islamic Eid-el-Kabir, among the Ijebu, in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State).

    Ripples was there, a doting father, to the call of a sweet daughter, Tolu, who said her lecturer, Steve James, who about everyone over there calls “Uncle Steve”, insisted parents and family should attend; claiming such would fetch 10 marks.  Tolu was among the cast of Borri, that eventually won the festival cup.

    Dr. Otun Rasheed, initiator of the TAFT practical pageant, explained the rationale for the festival.  He recalled how, as a student in the same department, the late Prof. Bode Osanyin taught him TAFT.  But each time his set of students were told to go witness — and maybe participate in — real festivals, they were scared off by fetish superstitions (even taboos) that if something or the other was done or not done, the result would be fatal.

    As a teacher himself, Dr. Rasheed initiated the TAFT festival since, he explained, many elite parents often shut their offspring out of traditional festivals, since they feel such are toxic to the cultural health of the children.  But he wanted his students to have a real feel of such festivals.  He had staged the festival (the TAFT examination practical) in the last 10 years.

    Mr. James, president of the Guild of Nigerian Dancers and a Unilag cultural officer, is TAFT’s present teacher, though he moves on, next academic session as a lecturer, to the Federal University, Lafia (FULAFIA), Nasarawa State.

    He told Ripples that since he wanted the festival’s 11th edition to be grand and memorable — he went in search of culture “icons”, which explained the OGA link.

    Ojude Oba’s performance earned third place (out of four) because they presented as near-life a performance as possible.  But art should add some dramatic spark.  For instance, the Ojude compere spoke in English, with a mixture of plain Yoruba.  But the Ijebu dialect could have added an opening spice of drama and humour.

    Then, the Miss and Mr Ojude Oba pageant should, perhaps, have come heavily caricatured — ladies with over-sized boobs; and men with deliberately awkward gaits, for example — which could perhaps have excited the audience; and marked the performance up.  Why these dramatic gambits were lost on the cast was surprising, for Olanrewaju Omiyinka, the veteran Baba Ijesa of Yoruba Nollywood, who has made a dramatic career caricaturing the Ijesa trait and tongue, played the sweetly costumed Awujale.

    But perhaps Omiyinka was only just another student; and the students had strict instructions from their handlers!  The only spark in the performance was Tunji Ameen, the fair-skinned young man who played the expatriate guest from the British High Commission.  His distinctly British accent got the audience swooning.

    Borri was action-packed, with frenetic music, sheer animation, superb choreography, energetic dancing, and raw action, of trickery and treachery, served in high-octane dance drama.  Its win was therefore no surprise.  Ripples, however, had not arrived when Suharo (4th) and Zangbeto (2nd) performed.

    OGA — Otunba Gani Adams — gave a good account of himself all through, serenading and being serenaded by, that polite company, in an often snobbish and supercilious campus setting.  He also pledged a bigger sponsorship for next year’s festival, aside from coming, next time round, with an entourage of traditional rulers.

    In giving out prizes, to four deemed best performers in each of the four groups, and the most outstanding coordinator, OGA’s Olokun Foundation bankrolled a prize-money of N25, 000 to each of the winners.  Now, that is no great sum.  But it could be the world to students, who still depend on others; more so when it came from acclaimed merit and hard work.

    OGA also presented plaques to the two lecturers vital to the TAFT festival: Drs Rasheed and Cornell Onyekaba.  He was in turn presented with a plaque, when Mr. James announced “only an Otunba can honour an Otunba” — and up bobbed “Otunba” Tunji Sotimirin, dramatist, theatre teacher and he of Konkere music fame, with his signature tasselled cap!

    What followed was another bout of serenading and counter-serenading, with OGA drinking in every sweet drop!

    Gani Adams has come a long way, from those early days as anonymous apprentice in Mushin, arguably the underclass capital of traditional Lagos; to the heroic days of Odua People’s Congress’s  contribution, if unorthodox, to the June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment struggle; the not-so-heroic intra-OPC street mugging and turf wars; and now a branded culture ambassador, vaulting an underclass denizen to role-model a bevy of Unilag undergraduates, on the culture plane.

    Still, not a few would sneer: Gani Adams, as campus role model?

    But OGA too could vehemently riposte, quoting a character in Ola Rotimi’s The Gods Are Not to Blame: the cock grumbles he has no teeth, yet it swallows polished corn.  The goat that has teeth, what does it eat but raw leaves?

    Even as he struggled with his elocution, Adams’ basic educational challenge was glaring.  But how many of those not educationally challenged in that crowd — including yours truly — matched his singular recognition on the day?

    Besides Adams, by his careful distinction between traditional practice and fetish worship, showed an understanding of African culture well beyond the ken of many of the hyper-lettered in the elite class — many Christians and Muslims the Yoruba simply dismiss as “gba were m’esin” (madly fanatical in their adopted foreign faith).

    Surely, by his cultural activism, OGA does no wrong? And if an underclass denizen’s stock rises, to the extent that he proudly stands before a select campus crowd, does it not prove that the underclass or the elite are a function of accidents of birth, in a society that boasts no equal opportunity?

    Still, OGA must beware of the chameleon syndrome.  You can’t be a Yoruba culture ambassador, yet betray the omoluabi (well-bred) ethos — the best manifestation of that civilisation — by turning political racketeer during election time.

    Yet, that was what Gani did in the build-up to the 2015 election, with his OPC’s infamous invasion of Lagos, for the integrity-challenged Goodluck Jonathan presidency.

  • Ekiti: Your own airport, coming soon

    Ekiti: Your own airport, coming soon

    If there was a prize for the most robust, sustained and unsparing criticism of Ayo Fayose as governor of Ekiti, as aspirant to that office and as a castaway from it, this column would be the runaway winner.

    It has excoriated him again and again over his ill-conceived Integrated Poultry Project that gulped more than  a billion Naira – double that amount in today’s money – without delivering a single egg.  It has knocked him for his morbidity of thought and expression, for disrobing, in a manner of speaking, his own mother in the public square just to score a cheap political point, for his scattershot approach to governance, for his verbal incontinence, and for a general disposition that borders on megalomania.

    By my reckoning, only General Ibrahim Babangida, the former military president, has figured more often in this space than Fayose as an unedifying subject, if not as an outright villain.

    Seeing that this is yet another piece on Fayose, those who have found my strictures on him most agreeable would sit back, confident that this is going to be another sandbagging for the so and so.  Those who have always found the strictures tiresome and uncharitable, and have communicated their displeasure to me with the forthrightness that becomes Fayose so well,will most likely yawn, shake their heads and turn the page.

    Today, I am not going to follow that beaten path, and it is not just out of a desire to exercise a columnist’s sovereign right not to be too predictable.  I am going to disappoint Fayose’s implacable critics who count me as their patron, and I am going to surprise his teeming admirers who hold me in especial loathing.

    I do so not cavalierly but with great deliberation, on a matter that admits of no equivocation and no prevarication.  The merit of the matter at issue is so transparent that anyone who cannot fathom it and rejoice in it has got to be practically unconscious.

    To come right out it, I am thinking of the international airport that Fayose is set to build in the State capital, Ado-Ekiti.  Construction will start any moment from now, inside sources tell me.

    In their commentary, the usual naysayers —with whom I must today respectfully part company — have exhausted all the entries in the Thesaurus for “undesirable,” but they are not done yet.  These people, mind you, are the elite.  They did not vote for Fayose.  Instead, they slandered him relentlessly.

    Now, having catered adequately to the stomach infrastructure of the adoring masses, Fayose is against his better judgment giving the misguided elite an airport, and instead of praising him for being magnanimous when he could have been vindictive, they are denouncing him.

    Some of them are claiming that the project was in fact conceived by former Governor Segun Oni, and that Fayose merely appropriated it.  Such pettiness!  What really counts is the person giving life and form to what was no more than a dream in Oni’s head.  That person is Fayose.  And he is doing so against all odds – plummeting oil revenues, unpaid salaries and pensions, educational levies and mounting unrest.

    It is heartening that he is not in the least fazed by these pesky developments, nor by the base ingratitude of the elite, aforementioned.  If the elite are too blinded by spite to see that the project is being undertaken in their best interest and that they stand to profit the most from it, well might Fayose say in pained resignation:  So much for all their vaunted book learning.

    The project will go ahead whether they like it or not.

    I can now reveal that the facility will be officially known as Dr Goodluck Ebele Jonathan International Airport, Ado-Ekiti, with the telegraphic address GEJIA. This gesture is in grateful appreciation of the former president’s role in ensuring Fayose’s return to power eight years after an ignominious exit, and subsequently keeping Ekiti off-limits to other political parties.

    The airport is also being named in Dr Jonathan’s honour because he has promised to employ his new status as an acclaimed and much sought-after international statesman to help mobilise funds and resources that will make the airport second to none in the ECOWAS region if not in Africa.

    Those who think this is going to be another monument to folly are mistaken.  The potential is vast, and it is sure to translate into actuality once the project is completed.  In fact, I can reveal that the aviation community, led by the International Civil Aviation Organisation, has already asked to be identified with it at every stage.

    Consider just a few of the staggering gains that are guaranteed to flow from the project.

    Now, there is no academic specialism so abstruse or recondite that you will not find several scholars of Ekiti extraction at its cutting edge.   For lack of opportunities at home, these scholars are scattered all over the world.  A good many of them would like to give their homeland the benefit of their expertise through weekend seminars and boot camps.

    But they have been deterred by the prospect of being mugged at Lagos airport or along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway and at points in between, or being crushed by unlatched containers falling off rickety trucks.

    A direct flight to Ado-Ekiti  from London, Paris, Geneva, Frankfurt, Moscow, New York, Boston, Bologna, Berlin, Vienna, Washington DC, Los Angeles and other centres of advanced learning where they reside is exactly what these scholars need to help consolidate Ekiti’s place as the Fountain of Knowledge.

    With such a facility in place, the much-garlanded poet and Distinguished Professor of English, Dr Niyi Osundare, could take off from New Orleans in the morning, fly direct to Ado-Ekiti for an evening of poetry reading and return the very next day to his base in time to conduct a post-doctoral seminar on the Poetics and Aesthetics of Chaucer, Aeschylus, Okigbo and Walcott, with nary a hint of stress.

    For foreign-based Ekiti indigenes, a visit home would no longer be an endurance test, with long waits at connecting points.  You just fly direct into Ado-Ekiti, and within an hour, you’ll be home tucking into a hot meal of original pounded yam, not the insipid, synthetic stuff they sell in supermarkets.

    Intrigued by Governor Fayose’s ideology of stomach infrastructure, some of the world’s leading social scientists have been studying that phenomenon, as well as the role of okada riders as agents of political mobilisation and social enforcement, albeit from a distance.  With direct international flights to Ado- Ekiti, they can now converge on the entire state to conduct definitive fieldwork that will take these developments to the next level and place them in the proper epistemological context.

    These scholars can sniff a paradigm shift or a theoretical breakthrough from the end of the earth, and they believe Ekiti is where it is happening.  Hooray to the Fountain.

    Consider also the boom that tourism will experience.  I can already see jetliners from all over the world bringing tourists to the enchanting but under-patronised Ikogosi Springs and other wonders with which the Ekiti landscape is strewn, not forgetting the Idanre Hills close by in Ondo State.

    Europeans and Americans seeking escape from the harsh Northern Hemisphere summer will flock to Ekiti to savour the equable clime of Efon Alaye and Iyin-Ekiti, less than an hour’s ride from the international airport.

    The construction of JEGIA will create and sustain thousands of jobs, transform Ekiti’s economy from rural to global, boost trade and commerce and, in the process, generate so much revenue that the state will have to face the difficult task of figuring out what to do with such sudden affluence.

    The foregoing is only a conspectus of what Ekiti State stands to gain by Fayose’s visionary plan to build an international airport in Ado-Ekiti. It is nothing less than a stroke of genius.

    The usual critics can scoff to their hearts’ content.  On this one, I am solidly behind him.  Let the building commence.  I can hardly wait to fly into the airport direct from Peoria, Illinois, confident that I would be home in Kabba within an hour of clearing my luggage.