The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • CONtroversy

    It perhaps was there all along; but with the criminal annulment of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, CONtroversy made a brazen landing in Nigeria’s political public space.

    It is equal opportunity yarn: no moral, no conscience, no ethos, no decorum; just stiff, unconscionable bluff, doubly assured that impunity, in-your-face impunity, rules the roost.

    CONtroversy simply cons (or more accurately, badgers) the opposite party — often, the wronged — into submission!

    So, being such an amoral jungle, only the soulless bully, who presses into action the most outrageous of humbug and most audacious of lies, not to mention the most heartless of media spins, prevails.

    Again, back to June 12.  An election was held, the cleanest and freest in Nigeria’s history.  Somebody won: MKO Abiola (God bless his soul!).  Somebody lost: Bashir Tofa.

    But then some power criminals, under the military presidency of Gen. Ibrahim Babangida, had other ideas.  Their fatal conceit?  That they could erase, without breaking a sweat, the electoral will of the 14 million Nigerians that voted.

    After galloping from impunity to impunity, surely June 12 would be yet another impunity Nigerians must drink in — or chuck it?

    Well, it turned a rather nasty pass, birthing the most fearsome intra-Nigeria war of attrition, that set the country’s South West against the power hegemonists: hustlers who represented no one; but who nevertheless grandstand as “northern”, and their cells nationwide.

    After five years, when the dust cleared, the military which had always usurped power and subverted government, had itself thoroughly self-subverted, so much so that it barely kept its integrity.

    That misadventure’s bitter after-taste lingered even longer: in the military’s disgraceful show against Boko Haram under President Goodluck Jonathan, only mercifully rolled back, since President Muhammadu Buhari’s take-over on May 31.

    For the North, it was even more politically galling.  For not declaiming a few power prodigals that — in the North’s name, real or perceived — criminally abused their uniforms, a region that assumed the conceit that power was its for the asking, risked a cruel shut-out.

    That explained the political entente fundamental to forging the present 4th Republic, with former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s arranged choice to “appease” the South West.

    Obasanjo, after a  failed attempt at an illegal third term, returned the favour.  He gifted the North his own choice of northerner, in the late Umaru Musa Yar’Adua, despite the open secret of his illness.

    The death of Yar’Adua, and the rise of Goodluck Jonathan — despite the illicit stonewalling by the so-called Katsina cabal — left the North, yet again, trapped in the thick jungle of power wilderness!  Not bad for a community that refused to call to order, a few wayward rascals, among its ranks!

    But Muhammadu Buhari, hardly a hit with the northern power elite, would change all that.

    So, for once, the northern power elite — indeed, the errant Nigerian ruling class — would rely on a personage they would rather not do business with, to salvage them from their own putative self-ruin.  Really, in the closing months of the Jonathan Presidency, this breed was getting endangered, for the polity was melting down!

    See where politics without ethos can land a people?

    At the core of this morass is the queer idea of solo infraction but vicarious guilt.

    ‘The Saraki saga, however it pans out, should teach everyone braggadocio does not pay, especially if you have a mighty lot to hide’

    A politician steals solo.  But when it’s time to do the time, his action attains an ethnic or religious hue, making his putative guilt vicarious, even if he represented only himself when he did the alleged crime.

    That explains the umpteenth lobby for a politician in distress, by his local potentates or religious orders, reported with glee in the media, as if it was the divine thing to do.

    Still, pathos is a universal emotion.  The fall of the vilest of leaders unleashes some deep pity: the fall of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein, hanged on Eid-el-Kabir Day, 30 December 2006, for instance.  Or Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi, felled by pursuing rebels, in the streets.

    Even in classical literature and Shakespeare, that tragic heroes die of their own follies didn’t dam societal pathos.  So, when Anthony in Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra gambled away his share of the Roman empire, on the loins of Eygpt’s Queen Cleopatra, he knew there would be terrible consequences — and indeed, there was.

    But Nigeria is less the universal humanity symbolised by pathos, but more of its abuse.  It is a country a public figure would deliberately challenge the law in a no-contest; yet when the law roars back in its full majesty, his community, that had played dumb during the rash challenge, would jerk awake to bawl “victimisation”!

    The Bukola Saraki saga is before a court of law.  Needless to say, controversy is at play, for or against.  Judgment will come, one way or another.

    But even as that plays out, a manoeuvre is already on — to fill the senate presidential seat, should Saraki finally fall.  From newspaper reports, the opposition Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) is set to pounce on the Senate Presidency.

    Again, the rule is not decency, not morality, not fairness, not even basic reason; just crass real-politik — read unconscionable audacity — for how would a minority party in parliament plot to seize the natural right of the majority, and will kid itself everything would be well?

    Meanwhile, the polity is near-funereally silent now, while this reckless stratagem goes on.  It is the bliss of the reckless dog, biting man.  But when the irate man starts biting that dog, the place will explode with pitiable screams of “victimisation”, “high-handedness” and allied epithets of cheap pity!

    Even the so-called “front runners”, in the alleged plot, are just a laugh: Ike Ekweremadu, controversial Senate deputy president, courtesy of Saraki’s brazen sell-out of his party for personal glory; Godswill Akpabio, even more controversial Senate minority leader and megalomaniacal former Akwa Ibom governor, and David Mark, former Senate president, who may yet keep a date with history for his alleged great deeds (or misdeeds!) of scuttling June 12, despite returning as one of the greatest beneficiaries of reinstated democracy.

    MKO’s ghost, after all, still hovers over the political space!  It took a whole of 16 years for PDP to self-destroy in its politics of soulless opportunism.  It should take even less for tigers of that ancien regime to politically perish too, should they continue in their old gbaju e (urban Yoruba street quip for audacious) ways.

    The Saraki saga, however it pans out, should teach everyone braggadocio does not pay, especially if you have a mighty lot to hide.  But then, that comes with the territory of political impunity, which has assumed a sickening political culture.

    President Buhari should leverage his personal integrity to crush this monster, even if his presidency uses the skulls of a few errant politicians to crack that evil coconut.

    Or Nigeria goes nowhere — for no country progresses without a moral core on which it anchors its national ethos.

  • New wine in old wineskins

    Even the club of die-hards sworn to give the Buhari administration the benefit of the doubt in perpetuity must by now be exasperated at its apparent inability to articulate a clear, coherent direction for the economy exactly four months after taking charge. For while nearly everyone swears that the Buhari body language is working magic with proofs cited as the fight against corruption, the on-going process of streamlining and revamping the machineries/finances of government, the much improved electricity and fuel supply situation, and of course the renewed onslaught against the insurgents in the North-east, there is the temptation to luxuriate in the illusion that the future is somehow here and that we can afford to dither on important decisions that ought be made even NOW.

    I came to this conclusion after reading a report credited to new Group Managing Director of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, Ibe Kachikwu as published by The Cable – an online publication last week. The meat of the report is that the refineries are currently working at 30 percent capacity as against the minimum 60 percent required to generate profit. That for me was a revelation. I have actually seen some people swear that the refineries are already working 100 percent – thanks to the Buhari effect!

    The other part – just as interesting is what he said about the refineries: “Personally, I will have chosen to sell the refineries; but President Buhari has instructed that they should be fixed. After they are fixed, if they still operate below 60 percent, we will know what to do”!

    By the way, the ultimatum given by President Muhammadu Buhari and re-echoed by Kachikwu to fix the refineries expires in December! Now, if his information is any correct, only the Port Harcourt refinery stands a reasonable chance of meeting the deadline! Which goes to show that there some things the chant of “change” cannot simply decree into being!

    To be sure, President Muhammadu Buhari cannot be faulted on the ground of good intentions. As one-time petroleum minister, the President should ordinarily be in good stead to proffer the way forward for the refineries. More than that, only a cold-hearted leader can fail to be moved by the racket of fuel importation and the irreparable damage it has done to the economy. Today, the economy continues to the bled by the twin rackets of huge import bills and its associated subsidy. But then, the greater problem is what the President has prescribed as solution – the magic placebo called the Buhari effect – the magic which cures all ailments!

    Part of the current illusions is that there are no costs to pay for the choices we have made. Presently, if fuel importers are not complaining, it is not because they are not being owed huge subsidy bills. The NNPC is being asked to carry the burden of fuel importation apparently because it has a huge pool it can draw upon. Soon enough, the current whispers will transform to loud murmuring across the board; by then everyone will realise that all is not exactly well.

    Secondly, that somehow the same individuals under whose watch the refineries went down would somehow supply the magic. Or that the nation’s work habits have transformed overnight. Pure illusions.

    If you ask me – while I’ll not be so uncharitable as to describe the President as out of date – he seems to have stuck to the old manual written in the sixties and seventies – which sees the state as the ultimate provider of the public good! The real problem as I can see it that the President thinks that he can put his new wine in the old wineskins while expecting nothing to give.

    To return to the refineries – the world has simply moved. Today, even at their optimal levels, the four refineries combined cannot deliver anything near the 40 million litres said to be our daily consumption of petrol. The choice we face is therefore clear: to aggressively pursue the licensing of more refineries to boost capacity by getting more private sector players on board.

    If the truth must be told – the four refineries are no hoppers! They are in terrible states owing to years of neglect of their Turn Around Maintenance. To the extent that every cycle of TAM has since turned out to be avenues to siphon scarce public revenue, Nigeria will do better to let them go. President Obasanjo knew enough to sell two of them to the Bluestar consortium for a record $700 million. Now, it is doubtful that anyone would offer anything near that tidy sum despite the billions sunk into them since. In the circumstance, what the nation can hope for is the prospect of enhanced performance in the event of a future sale. That should be the primary concern of the Buhari administration.

    Here is what I think the President should do – and urgently: Let the refineries go. Good thing that the GMD-NNPC thinks they should be let go. Next, take out whatever elements remain in the pricing template and let Nigerians bear the full cost of the fuel at the pump. This is what the current wisdom dictates.

    ‘To the extent that every cycle of TAM has since turned out to be avenues to siphon scarce public revenue, Nigeria will do better to let them go. President Obasanjo knew enough to sell two of them to the Bluestar consortium for a record $700 million. Now, it is doubtful that anyone would offer anything near that tidy sum despite the billions sunk into them since’

  • Saraki: Time to step down

    Saraki: Time to step down

    When you find yourself in a hole, stop digging.

    This is the time-tested piece of advice I would have passed on to the beleaguered Senate President Bukola Saraki if he was not too far gone in his self- absorption, his overweening sense of entitlement, his predilection for cutting corners, and his Raskolnikov Complex, the delusion named for the central character in Dostoyevsky great novel, Crime and Punishment, that the rules do not apply to him.

    Summoned to appear before the Code of Conduct Tribunal(CCT) in the investigation of some baffling inconsistencies in his declaration of assets, he spurns the order, dismisses the charges as false and frivolous, awards himself an acquittal, and seeks a court to block the Tribunal’sproceedings.

    In response to this contumacy, the CCT issued a Bench warrant for his arrest.  Saraki petitioned another court in a bid to void the warrant.  Based on that petition, he again failed to show up before the CCT.

    The CCT, Saraki charged, was being used to fight political opponents “to achieve through the back door what some people cannot get through democratic process.”

    It is almost as if it was through the front door, and in a process emblematic of the best democratic practice, that he had emerged Senate president.  I use the word “emerged” deliberately.  By his own account, he had been in hiding until it was safe to join his fellow plotters on the floor of the National Assembly where he was canonised in a proceeding that seemed like the parliamentary equivalent of a street mugging.

    His spokesperson warns that “we should not destroy our political institutions and heat up the polity for selfish reasons” in a desperate bid to settle political scores and nail imaginary enemies, adding gravely:  “Let us all learn from history.”

    Again, it is almost as if the process through which Saraki became Senate president was the quintessence of altruism and selflessness, and that it had, withal, brought down the nation’s political temperature from dangerously high to super normal.

    The Tribunal’s summons, his spokesperson further said, amounted to an abuse of the rule of law which portends danger to the judicial system.  Saraki affects the language of democracy but readily employs the tactics of a backroom fixer.  He is ever so ready to remind everyone that he ranks third in the nation’s constitutional order. Yet his conduct is sometimes almost indistinguishable from that of a political tout.

    Where is the noblesse oblige that should always inform the conduct of the holder of his exalted office?

    Within hours of the CCT’s order enjoining Saraki to appear before it, a shadowy organisation calling itself Nigerians of Conscience Against Impunity rushed a full-page advertisement to the major newspapers, demanding that officials of the Code of Conduct Bureau resign immediately and face prosecution for “gross violations” of their office.

    It was all so reminiscent of the shabby tactics Saraki’s surrogates in the Senate employed when his wife was invited for questioning by the EFCC in connection with some mysterious lodgments in her banking transactions.   In what was clearly an act of petulant vindictiveness, they announced that the National Assembly was set to launch an investigation into reports that EFCC officials had corruptly enriched themselves with funds recovered from fraudsters.

    In the wake of all this drama,  another –or perhaps the same set — set of Saraki’s surrogates recruited a huge delegation to travel from Ilorin to Abuja for the express purpose of conferring on him a traditional title of dubious worth.  The real purpose of the visitation, I suspect, was to create for the embattled Senate president the illusion of mass popularity and acceptability.

    One of his proxies even has it that Saraki is being pursued because of his zero tolerance for corruption, in keeping with the notorious fact that if you fight corruption, corruption will fight you back.

    No comment.

    Thus has Saraki continued to dig and dig with increasing fury since finding himself in a hole last June, in the hope that he can spend or bluff or bully or lawyer his way out of it.  He deepened that hole yesterday when he failed to appear before the CCT which had issued a Bench warrant for his arrest.

    One of his former comrades in the old PDP and one-time Minister of Works, Adeseye Ogunlewe, has warned that a situation in which the Senate president keeps making trips to             the courts would not only “put Nigeria in bad light” but slow down activities in the National Assembly, which would in turn affect the nation.

    Ogunlewe said if  Saraki appeared before the Tribunal and was found guilty, Saraki would appeal the verdict  to the High Court (sic).  If his guilt was affirmed there, Saraki would take his case to the Court of Appeal.  And if found guilty there, Saraki would head to the Supreme Court.

    Prosecuting Saraki was therefore not a good move, according to Ogunlewe.”Imagine the amount of time that would be wasted and the effect it will have on the legislative work within that period.

    If this intervention was designed to help Saraki keep the post of Senate president, it achieved the precise opposite.  It makes a powerful case for Saraki’s immediate and unconditional resignation, regardless of his guilt or innocence.

    A Senate president traipsing from one court to another would be a pathetic sight indeed, even if it is to answer traffic charges.  But we are dealing with investigations into allegations of serious fraud.  That the president of the Senate could figure in these allegations, however tangentially, should be cause for his resignation

    Noblesse oblige enjoins such an official to resign at the merest intimation of sleaze, real or merely perceived, in his conduct.

    In Saraki’s case, these intimations can no longer be ignored.  There is the matter of the forged House Rules with which he procured the post of Senate president.  There are the ongoing investigations into his wife’s finances.  There is the charge that he made false entries in declaring his assets.  And there is festering matter of how hundreds of depositors lost small fortunes in the family-owned bank that he ran aground, with nary a dent on his personal fortune.

    Each of these issues should move a public official in a country that sets a high store by probity to step down. Together, they make a compelling case for Saraki’s resignation.

    Saraki cannot be the public face of the Senate of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.  He does not have the gravitas to steer through the legislature the agenda on which President Muhammadu Buhari ran and won. He lacks the moral standing to preside over the hearings at which Buhari’s nominees for important positions are confirmed or rejected.

    Saraki, being Saraki, will most likely hang in there and hang tough.

    That might serve him well if he can pull it off.  But it cannot serve the larger national interest that he now claims to be espousing.  Everyday that Saraki continues to wield the gavel diminishes the office of the Senate president and the stature of the Senate.

    If he will not step down voluntarily, the Senate should, even if only from a sound instinct for self –preservation, ask him to go or face impeachment.

    This national nightmare cannot continue for much longer.

  • Of change and counter-change

    Lores, on the Russian Bolshevik revolution of October 1917, ooze with revolution and counter-revolution elements, resulting in massive revolutionary purges.

    What would chroniclers write about Nigeria’s current era of change — from a Conservative (centre-right) to a Progressive (centre-left) ruling elite — a lore of change and counter-change agents, with its inevitable intra-elite power purge?

    That should agitate the mind of power scholars, particularly with the unfolding Code of Conduct Tribunal (CCT) high drama, involving Senate President, Bukola Saraki.

    On one-on-one comparison, but attaching absolutely no values, moral or ideological, Saraki may well pass for the Trotsky of this era.

    Leon Trotsky (1879-1940) was the communist theorist and purist, who at different times, famously fell out with both Lenin and Stalin, Soviet communist icons, because of his rather liberal mind.

    Now, you won’t, by any stretch of imagination, compare Trotsky with Saraki on ideological purity or liberalness of mind or even perceived championship of the common good.  Yet, their odysseys appear uncannily similar.

    In 1913, Trotsky who, before declaring himself non-aligned, had joined and dumped the Menshevik (minority) and Bolshevik (majority) factions of the emergent Russian Communist Party, had written a rather strong letter to Nickolay Chikheidze, a Menshevik leader, protesting the Bolsheviks’ appropriation of Pravda, the name of Trotsky’s rested newspaper, for their new workers-oriented newspaper in St. Petersburg, the then capital. Though he harshly criticised Lenin’s role in the matter (Lenin was Bolshevik), he soon forgot all about it.

    But unfortunately for him, the secret police got a copy of the letter and filed it away.  When Lenin died in 1924 — Lenin that would rather Trotsky, his No. 2, succeed him — the letter surfaced from nowhere: as “evidence” of Trotsky’s hatred for Lenin!  The letter, 11 years after, was of course, the handiwork of  Stalin and his scheming power troika: Stalin, with Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev.

    Stalin would not rest until the exiled Trotsky was state-assassinated in 1940, in his Mexico home.  His crime?  He was a counter-revolutionary!

    Saraki left office, as Kwara governor, in 2011.  The allegations of irregularities in assets declaration, for which Saraki has been dragged before CCT, are at least four years old (2011-2015) or, if you count from 2003 (considering allegations of anticipatory assets declaration), 12 years old (2003-2015)!  Now, see the uncanny similarity between Saraki and Trotsky?

    “Saraki’s messy win was a brazen legislative counterpoise to presidential puritanism, on which the 2015 election was won and lost’

    So, is somebody, somewhere in the change movement, as the Stalin troika did of Trotsky, trying to undo Saraki?  Maybe.  Maybe not.

    But even if that were the case, it is only valid on the emotional front.  On the legal lane, the case is not statute-barred; so the length of years would appear immaterial.

    Still, Olisa Metuh, Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) spokesperson, has gone on overdrive, in what Prof. Olatunji Dare, The Nation columnist, would call “hysterical screeds”, alleging the Muhammadu Buhari presidency’s descent into dictatorship and fascism.

    But how so — and what is PDP’s especial interest in a Senate president that doesn’t even belong to its fold?  To protect its deputy senate presidential “loot”?

    Lai Mohammed, the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC) spokesperson, has riposted in no less vigorous drama, dismissing the PDP shrill as ignoble campaign against President Buhari’s war against sleaze; and extending the PDP man an umpteenth invitation to come learn how to do “proper” opposition criticism!

    Senator Saraki’s supporters too have been all tears and all growl, gruffly bellowing queries over the prosecution’s timing — why now? they snap — and figured (rather triumphantly, even in depression) that the CCT drama is all about the senate presidency; which they insist Saraki won fair and square.

    Saraki’s opposers, nevertheless, counter he corralled that office in the vilest and most crooked of manners.

    So, how does Saraki himself come across in this whole saga?  Hardly more sinned against than sinned!

    At best, he cuts the picture of the Yoruba quip: doomed to a fiery end, yet merrily frolics with fuel!  If he goes down with this, it would be hubris yet again taking its costly pound of flesh — hubris, that implacable enemy, posing as friend, to (wo)men of means!

    Truth to tell: Saraki’s senate presidency win was desperation-fired perfidy classically unveiled — and maybe, in his quiet moments, beyond the din of subversive whoop of support, he would perhaps wish things had panned out differently.

    To be sure, Saraki’s and opponents’ intra-APC quibbling over party position, supremacy and allied claims are equal-opportunity assertions, neither here nor there.  Really, at that period, with different factions of the APC amalgam trying to annex the soul of the new ruling party, how would you define the “party”?  And if you could not, in all good conscience, how would you honestly come up with “party supremacy”?  Which party  — and which supremacy?

    But Saraki’s despicable sell-out of his party, crassly trading off the senate deputy presidency to the opposition PDP, was the limit of perfidy, which would always come back to haunt him, even if he weathers this present storm.  His blunt refusal to compromise with his intra-party opponents, in the filling of other principal positions, unlike Speaker Yakubu Dogara who wisely did that, only worsened matters.

    The rather rotten method of Saraki’s win has burrowed a big chink in his moral armour, even as his supporters go now on an emotive binge, claiming their principal is being “persecuted”.

    Emotion is sweet.  But it hardly changes the grim and objective situation — what lawyers would call “notorious facts”.  The notorious fact is that a case is before a tribunal; and the Senate president is obliged to avail himself of doughty defence.  Motives, no matter how dodgy or suspicious, hardly turn prosecution to persecution, so long as the alleged offence was committed; and the accused had his or her fair day in court!

    Saraki’s messy win was a corruption of the parliamentary process.  A corruption of political conventions.  A corruption of public decency.  A corruption of basic morality.

    That was a brazen legislative counterpoise to presidential puritanism, on which the 2015 election was won and lost.  For the scion of Baba Oloye, it may well prove costly, if not outright politically fatal.

    But don’t count out Saraki — a political cat with nine lives!  Besides, these are just allegations, allegations that amount to nothing until rigorous prosecution, scrupulous defence and a fair and transparent verdict: whether of shameful conviction or triumphal acquittal.

    For the APC, however, this must be a sober moment.  The party would appear in a flux; and its ability to deliver on its electoral promises of positive change, and even its future integrity, appears on its ability to resolve the furious war between change and anti-change agents among its own ranks; after its rainbow coalition, of moral and ideological neuters, has coasted to federal power.

    How it resolves its internal contradictions may well decide its future; and Nigeria’s wellbeing — after a failed military rule; and PDP’s callous frittering of hope in the first 16 years of this democratic republic.

  • Nearer to moment of truth

    With most states of the federation presently surviving on the financial lifeline packaged by Abuja, and with majority practically living only for the present, we must put it to the nature of the times that our attitudes to crisis have neither reflected the gravity of the situation we currently face, nor has it elicited the kind of radical measures that would ordinarily be expected in the circumstance.

    By itself, the extraordinary measure of shelling out N338 billion to bailout some nearly one score insolvent states ought to ominous enough. However, merely by the emerging attitude both at the level of governments and the labour unions, there is almost the temptation to see the emerging development as nothing unusual; and that just because the nation has been through this route before, that it would somehow manage to pull through. That probably explains the demands on the governors of the affected states to simply get on with the business of sharing the windfall.

    Now, no matter how one looks at the bailout package itself, it must be admitted that the intervention, in the circumstance, makes eminent sense. It is after all, elementary economics that massive injection of cash would give fillip to the economies of the states, shore up demand for good and services and generally boost economic activities. Beyond that, short of practically shutting down the states’ bureaucracies and hence the states’ infrastructure of governance and hence risk possible destabilisation of the polity, the options available to the federal government would appear limited.

    So – here we are with 19 out of the 36 states collecting the huge sums with no strings attached, on terms that ordinarily qualify as extremely generous and as some have argued, tended to reward fiscal indiscipline and profligacy. I must say that the latter point is not without some merits. This is to the extent that no questions are asked about how the individual states got into the mess; their plan get out of the hole; and as far as anyone can see, no verifiable premise  on the basis of which the lending authorities can make informed judgment about the abilities of the state to pay what they have collected. Here, the assumption appears to be that there is no limit to the extent to which sovereign debts can be pushed down the road since there would always be something in the distributive pool to share. So, as always, life goes on.

    The trouble here is that our nightmares have only just begun. To start with, in the unlikelihood of imminent recovery in crude prices whether in the short, medium or long term, the federal government has merely helped to postpone the evil day. If the call by some governors on their workers to understand that there will still be governments to run after the settlement of the arrears of wages; or that the bailout is nothing more than a temporary balm; and that those outside of the public service are just as entitled to their share of the bailout via improved service delivery; if these and many such calls have been heard at all, the message does not appear to have sunk in. In the event of the failure of the state governments to re-order their priorities, hearken to the call to realign their bloated bureaucracies, cut down on wastes while boosting their internally generated revenues, that message would certainly dawn much sooner than later.

    Those sufficiently knowledgeable about the events of the eighties which eventuated in the unwelcome intervention by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the painful adjustments visited on the economy ought to be able to recognise the tell-tale signs of a looming financial Armageddon. Much as we pretend that we are nowhere there yet, the same old symptoms of insolvency, trade and currency imbalances are such that we can ignore them to our peril. It seems to me only a matter of time before something gives.

    And what can we do? I must confess that there is not much we can do as far as the price of our main export product is concerned. However, the much that can be said of the Buhari administration in the last few months is its resolve to confront the multiple demons of corruption headlong and to get behemoth institutions like the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC), Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA) to play strictly by the rules by remitting their revenues appropriately to the federation account. Now, with all the hues and cries about the operation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA) as having the potential to hobble the operations of some agencies, overall, it is somewhat accepted that the measure has become necessary to stop further bleeding of the national treasury.

    Of course, there is still the question of what to do with fuel subsidy which currently gulps billions but which the Buhari administration thinks is the least of our problems.

    However, good as some of the measures already in place are, it must be said that they are not nearly sufficient given the magnitude of the problem. For even if we block all the avenues of waste, bring corruption to the barest minimum, there is little indication that what would be available would still suffice to go round, let alone to service the needs of the bureaucracy or fund the yawning infrastructure gaps.

    Beyond all of these is the more problematic issue of what to do with our current distributive federalism with its premium on sharing which in my view, is our number one problem.

    This is where my sympathy goes to the governors. It is their tough luck that that they have found themselves in a mess they didn’t create. To the extent that it is how things have always been, they are merely the victims of a distorted fiscal practice that have persisted for so long.

    My problem is the whining and moaning currently going on in most Government Houses. If one expected fresh thinking on the crisis, yours truly has found absolutely none. Save the wild embrace of the Buhari palliative across the land. As with all things easy and cheap, the bitter reality awaits sooner than later. That will be the ultimate moment of truth – for everyone.

    ‘My problem is the whining and moaning currently going on in most Government Houses. If one expected fresh thinking on the crisis, yours truly has found absolutely none. Save the wild embrace of the Buhari palliative across the land. As with all things easy and cheap, the bitter reality awaits sooner than later. That will be the ultimate moment of truth – for everyone’

  • The war on corruption

    When then candidate Muhammadu Buhari made his now famous statement “if we don’t kill corruption, corruption will kill Nigeria” in the course of his campaign for the presidency earlier this year, not a few Nigerians agreed and silently wished that the former Head of State triumph at the April 14 presidential election.

    And when it came to pass that the candidate of the then opposition All Progressives Congress (APC) party was the victor in the election, the whole nation, save a few, heaved a sigh of relief that the 16 years of unbridled corruption under the “largest political party in Africa” the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) has finally been terminated. And to a great and better future for Nigeria they looked when Mr Muhammadu Buhari mounted the saddle on May 29, this year, taking over from Dr Goodluck Jonathan as President and Commander-In-Chief.

    A President Buhari at the helm is seen not by a few as signaling not only the beginning of the end for corruption and impunity in the country but also a rebirth for a giant of a nation that has been on all fours since inception.

    The fight against corruption Nigerians expect would now be given a sharp teeth with the two main anti-corruption agencies, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) and Independent Corrupt Practices and other Related Offences Commission (ICPC) in vigorous pursuit of corrupt elements in our society. And the two agencies have seemingly been up to the task, pursuing their assignments without fear or favour. The government, meaning the presidency, we are made to believe, has also been working behind the scene with core operatives of the immediate past regime to secretly refund public funds they have stolen from our common purse, to prevent prosecution and punishment. Good. But we should also be told who these people are, if only to shame them.

    All these are gladdening to hear and Nigerians are beginning to not only hope for the best, but also feeling the best. The bad boys are being dealt with, we all seem to agree. Kudos to EFCC and ICPC. But what of the Code of Conduct Bureau and its twin agency, the Code of Conduct Tribunal, what are they up to? Have they been sleeping? Not really. Last week, the CCB and CCT entered the fray and all hell has been let loose since then. I hope you know what I am talking about. In case you are still in the dark, recall that a little over a week ago, the Bureau dragged Senate President, Bukola Saraki before the Code of Conduct Tribunal on a 13-count charge bordering on false declaration of asset. The president of the National Assembly and third in line to Nigeria’s presidency narrowly escaped being docked as his lawyers cleverly approached a Federal High Court to challenge the CCT. Though the Tribunal is also fighting back, issuing a bench warrant for the arrest of the SP, the matter clearly presents the sternest test to date to the Buhari administration fight against corruption.

    Senator Saraki is the first big fish to be entangled in this anti corruption web and it remains to be seen how the matter would be treated. The allegations are no doubt weighty, but mere allegations they remain until the man is proven guilty. For now he is innocent of all the charges.

    But while the matter is best left for the judiciary to handle, the political fallout from Saraki’s arraignment is as interesting as the matter itself. Expectedly, Nigerians, not the least, members of the ruling All Progressives Congress are sharply divided on the matter. While some see it as a move in the right direction to cleanse the stable of corruption, sympathizers of the Senate President are seeing it as a political vendetta against Saraki as punishment for defying his party to contest the presidency of the Senate and also getting a member of the opposition on board as his deputy.

    Considering the frosty relationship between President Buhari and Senator Saraki since the Senate presidency election and the division it generated within the leadership of the APC, it is very difficult not to believe the Saraki supporters, while at the same time their assertion is very difficult to prove. And now that the presidency has distanced itself from the travail of Saraki in the hands of the CCB and CCT, it becomes more difficult to pin the matter on President Buhari. But this is politics, anything is possible. Did I hear you say CHANGE?

    While the APC people are bickering over the matter, the PDP is expectedly licking its lips over the development, accusing the president and his party of political witch hunt in its anti corruption war, conveniently ignoring the fact that the monumental corruption that we are talking of in Nigeria today took place under PDP’s watch. Let’s put that aside for now.

    While the politicians from both sides could be excused for holding different views on the matter, what is perhaps surprising is the position of the leadership of the National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) on the matter.  Over the weekend in Abuja, NANS president Tijani Sheu teamed up with the Director General of a political association called Heritage Group and threatened to protest Saraki’s arraignment and trial at foreign embassies in the federal capital. Ironically, the same Sheu had on September 2 led a group of Nigerian students to the presidential villa in Abuja to pledge support for Buhari’s anti-corruption campaign. So what is he up to or rather, in what direction is he leading Nigerian students?  I don’t want to read too much into this but suffice to say that the Nigerian youth, especially student leaders should exercise restrain when commenting on issues outside their knowledge lest they fall victim to cheap political opportunism. They are better advised to think before they speak and to always keep quiet when they have nothing to say.

    How would protesting at foreign embassies help the cause of fighting corruption which NANS told Buhari on September 2 that it supports, or stop the CCB from going ahead with its case with Saraki if  indeed it has a case against the Senate President? What I think the students should concern themselves with is the integrity of the process. If the CCB thinks it has any case against Saraki, it should proceed at the tribunal as stipulated by law. And if the Senate President thinks otherwise, he should go and fight it out at the tribunal and clear his name. And if he can get the Appeal court to stop the tribunal, fine.

    Let the right things be done. Imputing political motive to the CCB’s action would not change the fact that the matter at hand is a legal matter and should be so treated. I can see this matter getting to the Supreme Court, whichever side loses, and this will ultimately be good for the system. Once the matter is decided one way or the other by the courts,  Nigerians would do well to forget about it and forge ahead. But then, the war should not stop with Saraki. There are many others public officers with similar stories, it is when the CCB pursues their case with the same vigor as Saraki’s that the doubters of the anti corruption war would be put to shame.

     

    Goodnight Mama H.I.D Awolowo

     

    Just as the Awolowo family of Ikenne , Ogun State was getting set for the centenary birthday celebration of their Matriarch, Mama Hannah Idowu Dideolu, slated for later this year, death came calling last Saturday and took away the ‘Jewel of Inestimable Value’ of their father, Chief Obafemi Awolowo.

    Chief Mrs HID Awolowo, the Yeye Oba of Ife died at the age of 99. She would have been 100 years old on November 25, 2015.

    Coming 28years after the death of her husband, Mama lived a life worthy of emulation by all women, especially wives of our politicians and other public office holders. She stood by her husband through out his political life and remained steadfast to his political ideology even after his death. She doggedly kept the Awolowo flag flying all these years after her husband’s death. May her soul rest in perfect peace. Amen.

     

  • Our Girls; PMB: Farmland is not ‘No Man’s Land’, NLC; ‘aguntasolo.com’; Roads or ‘Nigeria Airways

    Our Girls are still missing since April 15 2014. The military coalition is making progress. If done three years ago, we would never have had 20,000+ murdered and four million unhappy and often helpless ‘Internally Displaced Persons’. We must add as a cause of IDPs, the over 20,000 killed in the 20 year+ lethal Fulani herdsmen vs farmers war. Why do the herdsmen see farm land as ‘Federal No Man’s Land’ with ‘free’ cattle fodder, with no compensation offered? Is this a thinly disguised attempt to redress past failed ‘conquest and humiliate’ strategies? President Buhari must stop this war. The recent marches in Plateau and Nassarawa states where I did my NYSC in 1975/6 in Jos and Lafia leave me cold at the crimes committed. It is so easy to kill in Nigeria and we are so easy to kill. Just call yourself a ‘militia’ and you can kill at will. When Boko Haram is curbed, the same military is required for the Fulani herdsmen/farmers war, and the soldiers must ensure ‘‘Freedom and Security for Farmers in the ‘Front Line States’ ‘’.

    Happily the Third War in Nigeria, The Anti-Corruption War, is active at federal Level. All thieves must return amounts stolen and be imprisoned in proportion. A financial crime is as deadly as a violent crime. A crime is criminal, period! The term ‘Financial Crime’ must not make the crime ‘less criminal’, than the crime of an armed robber. It is not okay to commit a ‘financial crime’. Even law enforcement agencies ‘cooperate’ by charging such criminals with ‘MONEY LAUNDERING’ which has a MAXIMUM JAIL TERM OF JUST TWO YEARS, no matter the amount involved- N100,000 or N27billion! This is a legal scam law to deceive Nigerians that justice is occurring when it is criminal unwritten ‘plea bargaining’.

    For the anti-corruption war to work, it requires to progress from federal command and control for spread Buhari-ism to all states and LGAs for ‘national spread and federal character’ of anti-corruption. The NLC-led nationwide anti-corruption war march is not politics. The NLC and Co must practicalise things to guarantee the anti-corruption war’s success. The worker and the family will benefit from ‘Zero Corruption’. Every kobo stolen is stolen from people programmes aimed at making Nigerians own Nigeria, be they workers, children or retired. The NLC should produce ‘Anti-Corruption Ways and Means Guidelines’ and strategise to confront their own internal and also external corruption. The NLC and others must harness ‘useful Anti-Corruption information’. WHISTLE BLOWING MUST BECOME A RESPECTABLE PROFESSION with a Honours List and Role Model Status in Nigeria and Annual Whistleblowers Awards.

    The migration and trafficking nightmare are a sobering lesson for Africa’s corruption-prone leaders and thieves from public coffers. Under the uninspiring engine-rooms of corruption – the regimes of Babangida, Abacha, Abdusalami and Obasanjo – many Nigerians emigrated or were forced by circumstance to flee to Europe for normal work and even prostitution or died of thirst in the Sahara or drowned in the Mediterranean. The media should ban them and stop reporting every antic and word of these Ex-Presidents – a daily insult to Nigerians living in darkness. They richly deserve the Buhari anti-corruption treatment,

    The national anti-corruption project must be disseminated and domesticated nationwide in every village and by all organisations, societies, groups, forces and services. Let every honest Nigerian contribute to this anti-corruption war from Boy Scouts to PTAs. Every Nigerian will benefit from a bribe-free society. Bribery can be stopped immediately, overnight.

    Every Nigerian has experienced the corruption of the Nigerian uniform. President Buhari has an enormous task but in reality, it is easily achieved by delegation of authority and ready recourse to ‘termination of appointment (TOA) and ‘Pre-Signed Letters of Resignation’ from his management team. He can reverse this ugly but permanent stain on Nigeria’s flag by giving each ‘Head of Uniform and Organisation’ an ultimatum- a ‘Priority 1 Internal Anti-Corruption Drive’. ‘Stop Corruption Top To Bottom Immediately Today Or Face Sack in one month’. Give them one month to bring corruption to a halt. Invite the public to report to a ‘Corruption Monitor’ database. A monthly meeting thereafter will keep everyone on their toes and create the ‘ZERO CORRUPTION MODEL’. The Customs, Police, security agencies, VIO, FRSC, LGA road officials, SON, NAFDAC, judges, magistrates, greedy tax consultants and exorbitant levy imposers, road maintenance agencies, ministry officials, professionals, electricity [non]suppliers all on the long ‘accused of corruption’ list! They all need to be ‘under surveillance’ by anti-corruption citizens. By the time Buhari has ‘accepted’ the resignation of three or four successive IGPs, SON or NAFDAC bosses in three months, the police will fall in line from Constable to Commissioner as will the others.

    President Buhari should add ‘aguntasolo.com’ to his reading list. I agree that the national carrier  idea is strictly about pride and to be avoided like a plague in Nigeria’s weak economy. The New Nigeria Airways will cost us dearly but profit only 0.1% of Nigerians. Instead, that money could build many railways, 100 bridges and 500 roads used by 100% of Nigerians. After killing corruption, Buhari must have a legacy and plan to be more than ‘Buhari- The Anti-Corruption Tsar’ but also ‘Buhari- The Great Road/Bridge Builder’. He must avoid becoming ‘Buhari – the failed New Nigerian Airways Man’.  The Ibadan Lagos road is screaming to be completed. On Sunday afternoon September 13, it took seven hours to reach Lagos.

    ‘The national anti-corruption project must be disseminated and domesticated nationwide in every village and by all organisations, societies, groups, forces and services. Let every honest Nigerian contribute to this anti-corruption war from Boy Scouts to PTAs’

  • My Fears for Buhari (2)

    Last week, this column dwelt on the president’s 100 days in office. It highlighted the initial hiccups, particularly the unending drama at the National Assembly which, by all account, is still simmering and could slow down the wheel of governance. It also touched on other problems and prospects of the Buhari administration.

    Quite refreshingly, Nigerians have embarked on a countdown to the formation of the much-awaited new cabinet which the president has promised to put together before the end of this month. Sure, the composition of the new cabinet will provide a binocular for people to view the direction of the new administration, most importantly, the road it will take to usher in its change agenda.

    Only last week, the president insisted that past officials of government, including elected governors, ministers and other appointees who still had in their possession, diplomatic passports, should hand them over immediately. That, in itself, is a departure from the rotten past where former government officials who had ended their services to the country or who were even disgraced out of office, still enjoy the perks of office, including waving their diplomatic passports at international airports.

    Anyway, like all new governments, the Buhari administration has launched itself into a flurry of action and activities to implement diverse novel policy and governance directions to stymie those put in place by the last Jonathan administration. Some of these novel ideas include, the observance of new rules of engagement in the Civil Service that has invariably made a cabinet minister a ceremonial head of a ministry, the running of a single treasury account for all manners of payment and expenditure by a Ministry, Department and Agency (MDA); the determination to arrest revenue leakages in both the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC and lately, the Nigeria Customs Service, NCS, among others.

    There was also the reappointment of Alhaji Habibu Abdullahi, as the Managing Director of the Nigerian Ports Authority, in place of Alhaji Sanusi Ado Bayero, who was appointed to the position in the twilight of the Jonathan administration. All these graphically illustrate the race to erase all vestiges of the past government and replace it with a redemptive coloration.

    Now, the president is confronted with the albatross of fulfilling many of the campaign promises he made to Nigerians in the heat of the hustling that preceded the Presidential election. With the benefit of hindsight, many Nigerians are beginning to see that with the realities on ground, it will virtually be very Herculean, if not impossible, to fulfill the President’s “messianic” promises such as feeding school pupils and students; payment of a Welfare Allowance of N5,000 to all unemployed Nigerian youths; considerably bringing down the exchange rate of the naira to other currencies and all that.

    It is conventional wisdom that apart from Admiral Murtala Nyako, the immediate past elected governor of Adamawa State, no President’s party man or woman is currently being investigated or facing trial for corruption or corruptive practices. This has elicited some loud whispers in the polity. The fact of the Nyako case is that he was already being sought for trial before he escaped overseas and only came back to Nigeria to face his EFCC inquisitors after Buhari was sworn in as Nigeria’s President on May 29. Many Nigerians are aware of the apparent selective amnesia on the part of the government agencies responsible for the investigation and prosecution of alleged cases of corruption and corruptive practices. In their view, the exercise, which is Buhari’s main thrust of coming into office, may not be holistic and all-encompassing, if the opposition PDP alone is made to face the scrutiny of these federal anti-corruption agencies, while others are walking free.

    Concurrently, the impending probe of the sourcing, payments and delivery of military hardware and consumables, albeit, in the public domain, may unearth figures, in and out of the military establishment, who may have soiled their hands. The concern of this column is that this tribe of treasury looters, may, out of self-protection and interests, take or initiate proactive actions to protect those interests through unconstitutional means. This scenario is also indicative of the “powerful oil barons” and those “hidden” interests in the purchase and operations of the various unbundled units of the defunct Power Holding Company of Nigeria, PHCN, who may baulk at moves to either expose them or truncate their avenues of milking our common patrimony.

    Surprisingly, rather than concentrate on providing good governance, a mantra that formed a major plank of the people’s acceptance of the APC/Buhari aggregation prior to the election, the party and, by extension, the President, has not dropped its toga of being in the opposition. The party’s predilection for joining issues on any topic and its predisposition to stirring the hornet’s nest of contentious issues, have tended to create a backlash of problems for the president. For example, sometime ago, a governor told everyone with authoritative glee that President Buhari was given a list of persons who stole and stashed away billions of Nigeria’s petro-dollars. He also said a former minister has been slated for trial and consequent jailing. Soon after, the American State Department came out, forcefully, to deny that anything of that sort ever happened during President Buhari’s recent visit to the United States of America.

    However, an area that most people are not paying any attention to is the subterranean moves and posturing for the presidential election of 2019, even when the newly-sworn-in federal government is still tottering and trying to consolidate. There is no gainsaying the fact that the virtual “war” for the soul of the National Assembly cadre of principal officers was one fought solely to position certain persons for the prime positions at the presidency, post-2019. Among the top echelon and rank and file of the APC, there are talks of the likelihood of President Buhari resorting to the “Mandela Option”, that is, doing one presidential term and leaving the terrain open to the likes of Nasir Ahmed el-Rufai, Rabiu Musa Kwankwaso; Atiku Abubakar, Abubakar Bukola Saraki, who is currently in the visible and powerful position of President of the Senate and others.

    It is for this reason that activities at the various power points in the APC are now geared towards having a foothold, no matter how tenuous, in the cabinet currently being put together by the President. In addition to labouring to be in the good books of Buhari, those with ambitions for 2019, are strengthening their stranglehold on the fiefdoms they presently control for a possible last-ditch bid for the formation of a new party, where their interests or objectives, will be best served. Many consider the current posturing as a dress rehearsal for 2019 as the fireworks will commence as soon as the President engages the home-bend at the dusk of his first term.

    There is a school of thought also, that conjectures a grand plan in which the President’s foot-soldiers will, either by self-help or prodding from the main man himself, plot a second term, which, in any case, he is constitutionally-entitled to, and in the process, rubbish the ambitions of those who are rearing to go after his job. What the above scenarios signpost is that whichever way it is viewed, the president’s path is laden with mines with the likelihood of, God forbid, some catastrophic consequences. This is the more reason the president should consistently be on the alert and continuously watch his back.

    As it is, President Muhammadu Buhari has a date with history, positively or negatively, depending on how he handles the myriad of problems and challenges that presently confront his administration and the nation. But he will be best remembered for either assuaging the dire conditions of the larger mass of the Nigerian people or for compounding them.                                                                  • Concluded.

     

  • These disarticulated times

    These disarticulated times

    THese must be uneasy times for public officials.

    In Nigeria, nothing succeeds like public service.  It transforms those who were only yesterday struggling with the rent or mortgage into owners of choice property in some of the nation’s swankiest neighbouhoods and in the most sought-after sections of the business district.

    But now, they can no longer find refuge in the example of the one who “didn’t give a damn” about declaring his assets, acquired for the most part if not wholly through public service.

    The new man gives a damn, and has vowed to ensure that everyone on his team gives a damn.  If you are already inside and don’t give a damn, start packing up.  But remember that you may still be summoned to explain long after you are gone.

    If you are outside and looking to go in, you must belong unquestionably in the ranks of those who give a damn.  Otherwise, perish the thought.  You are much safer where you are, unless some past entanglements of the shady kind that you have long forgotten suddenly bobs up.

    In this season of startling disclosures stemming from principle or malevolence and everything in between, propelled by so-called social media that thrive on rumour and gossip and high scandal, who can vouch that such entanglements will not be exhumed and thrust into the public arena?

    Few developments are more indicative of these unsettling times than the recent raid on the hallowed premises of the Government House Complex in Uyo, Akwa Ibom, by operatives of the Department of State Security, following a tip-off by disaffected insiders.  There, the officials said, they found a quantity of arms and Improvised Explosive Devices — fancy name for dirty roadside bombs.

    Not quite a stockpile of munitions, to be sure.  But they found something much more tantalising – bundle upon bundle upon bundle of U. S. 100 dollar bills stacked up in one awe-inspiring heap.  So overawed were the DSS operatives that they could not immediately find a word for the spectacle.  So, they called it a stockpile

    Call it whatever you will:  the lesson is clear.  There is nowhere to hide again. There is no place to hide anymore.  No sanctuary even in the Presidential Lodge of a Government House Complex.  What is the country coming to?

    If you can’t put money away in the banks because of tighter regulations and can’t put stuff in the Governor’s Lodge because of all those aides who won’t mind their own business and you cannot store it in the Presidential Lodge without the intrusive DSS barging in just like that, and all this because you are a so-called public official, you have to ask, pardon the cliché, whether the game is worth the candle.

    All this drama was taking place as the former lord of the manor, who has not formally handed it over to his handpicked successor, was fighting for his life in a British hospital, following injuries he suffered when his car collided with a U.S. Embassy car as he was rushing to the airport to catch a flight to visit his family in America.

    Instead of wishing him a quick and complete recovery, many of those he served to the best of his ability for eight years – the same people who were forever trumpeting the “uncommon transformation”he wrought in Uyo – unlike his contemporary, former President Goodluck Jonathan, who could not effect transformation of the common kind – were taunting  him.  Unfeeling ingrates, all.

    Why, they are asking, why did he not check into the world-class hospital he said he had built in Uyo – a facility that is at par with, if not superior to, any other anywhere in the world, equipped to handle every ailment and every emergency, one designed to serve as the final destination for medical tourists in Africa and the wider world?

    A chopper could have ferried him right to the helipad atop the facility in a fraction of the time and the cost of flying him to the UK, and saved him all the pain and discomfort.

    They have been asking:  Has he no faith in the world-class hospital that is one of his signature achievements?

    Governor Godswill Akpabio deserves the benefit of the doubt on this one.  Surely, he must know what works best, unlike his misguided critics.

    But these are definitively times out of joint.

    So far, only President Muhammadu Buhari and Vice President Yemi Osinbajo have given the public a glimpse of their assets.  And if what I am hearing about the twain in this respect is anything to go by, public office just lost its allure.

    Why submit yourself to it when everyone knows your net worth, when you cannot create the illusion of affluence nor feign penury, and when importuning relatives and acquaintances  you’ve been fobbing off with disingenuous excuses now have proof you could be much more supportive if you were not such a  skinflint?

    I have with my own ears heard people ask: What is Buhari doing with 270 cows and four cars and several homes and a bank deposit close to N30 million, given his ascetic lifestyle? He doesn’t need all that stuff, especially now that he has become a ward of the Nigerian state.   Why doesn’t he give it all to his adoring talakawa?

    Would they have idolised him so much if they knew that, for all practical purposes, he was not one of them, merely one who empathises with them?  And now that they know his net worth, would they still hold him in high adoration?

    Henceforth, Buhari can expect to be bombarded with requests for financial and material assistance from his personal abundance by supplicants who now believe with growing confidence that he will have to find an excuse other than insolvency for not meeting their requests.

    If they cannot get to him directly, they will harass his relations in Daura, who will in turn harass him. If the Daura people cannot get to him directly, they will harass the First Lady, who will pass on the message and perhaps even do a little harassing of her own so as to get them off her back.

    I do not envy Osinbajo, in the least.  With almost a million dollars, plus close to N100 million in liquid cash, not counting homes in the UK and in the most opulent neighbourhoods in Lagos, his place is now assured, in the popular consciousness at least, in the ranks of persons of great wealth.

    Nobody will be fooled by those nondescript suits of which he is so fond, a carryover perhaps from his days as a law professor, nor by the modesty that becomes him so well.  He has money in the bank, and he will now be judged by how readily he is willing to share it with those who assert a claim to his estate, rightly or wrongly.

    If a relation wants him to help put a marbled roof on an uncompleted bungalow, and another wants him to assume responsibility for tuition and fees for a distant cousin who has just gained admission to the University of Saskatchewan for a Master’s degree in Advanced Eskimo Studies, and yet another relation wants him to foot the bill for hip replacement surgery in Brazil, he cannot now decline without being judged positively heartless, what with all those millions.

    You now know why everyone is rooting for public officials to declare their assets publicly – everyone, that is, except those who have something to declare.  Those who have nothing to declare are lying in wait with sharpened knives to carve out their own piece of the action.

    That is why the embattled Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike, has stated for the record that under no circumstance will he make a public declaration of his assets.

    Can you blame him?

  • Osun, after the salary demon

    After a stream of cheery developmental news, the Osun opposition, with both hands, grabbed the demon of unpaid salaries — and hard, it nailed the Osun government.

    It thoroughly demonised Governor Rauf Aregbesola and his ambitious social and physical infrastructure programmes, donning the Ogbeni in an unflattering garb — a grand hypocrite in the progressive space, that should be condemned by all!

    Which lover of the masses, they ask in triumph, cheeks bathed in subversive tears, would sit pretty and watch his people go hungry, months on end, without salaries?

    It was all emotive blackmail, of course.  On the salary issue, the governor was not unfazed any more than he created the failure, though his finances were rather tight, with virtually every kobo over-leveraged, on ambitious — over-ambitious, many insist — capital projects, such that any shock, no matter how slight, was catastrophic.

    The real culprit was, however, former President Goodluck Jonathan — his recklessness with the national till. This point Ripples made in “Osun’s politics of the belly” (July 7), when it argued that since the Jonathan Presidency caused the problem, the Muhammadu Buhari Presidency should fix it, instead of the media roasting of victim governors, which solved no problems.  The president did just that.

    But the blackmail grandly resonated.  Those unconvinced by its logic were easily swept by its pathos; with not a few succumbing fast to plaintive kith-and-kin, going hungry and clearly angry, for not earning salary, for no less than six months.

    Well, all is fair in war — and the Osun government, in the clouds most times, plummeted back to earth!

    Now, with a Federal Government-secured loan to clear the salary backlog, is the demonization set to end?  Not a chance!

    For one, play on emotions is the exclusive preserve of those who cannot build clinical arguments; or the mischievous, who have nary a case.

    For another, the Osun opposition is not about dismantling its egbirin ote — what the Yoruba would call a complex web of intrigues — for in Aregbesola’s failure lies their own salvation!  When, after all, comes from the gods, another potent blackmail weapon, ala unpaid salaries, to torture a clear and present nemesis?

    So, enter a fresh controversy: the reported verification, in the build-up to clearing the salary arrears.

    The Osun opposition insists it is yet another example of the government’s coldness to the plight of the Osun workers — for why is the verification bobbing up “now”, on the virtual eve of settling what was owed?  Some especially creative minds even posit, swearing by all they hold dear, that the government had “fixed” the salary money to earn some “quick interest”, while workers continued starving!

    To be sure, the government has not exactly done itself much favour by the verification’s timing, with its high blackmail value: its opponents’ penchant for eternal spinning; and a jaded workers’ near-zero resistance to emotional manipulation, masquerading as hot sympathy.

    Still, the government insists that since Osun would continue re-paying the loan far into the future, it was an excellent time to vet the salary bill, lest the money ends in some ghost pockets.  That makes a lot of sense, though not a few would be too angry to see reason with it.

    It could also well be that a few ghosts and their ambassadors are the most trenchant in the protest racket — for the more raucous the racket, the more the confusion; and the more the confusion, the better chances the ghosts continue to get paid!

    Whatever is happening, the Ogbeni owes the Osun people clear explanations and full disclosure.  At the end, the government would do what it must do to protect public money and its own integrity.

    So, with the opposition always buzzing with mischief, of the most fantastic hue, it may be morning yet on Osun’s day of eternal intrigue!

    Still, the Osun government must be gratified it continues to point the way, for the rest of the country, to the welfare state; despite its lean resources.  Two policy news appear to reinforce this point.

    Two weeks ago, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo announced the Federal Government was set to implement the All Progressives Congress (APC) campaign promise of a schools feeding programme, which, apart from boosting school attendance, would also boost investment in agriculture, catering and allied lines.

    On September 9 in Osogbo, as the Universal Basic Education Commission (UBEC) kicked off its nationwide distribution of plastic chairs to schools, a Federal Government official confirmed Osun’s leadership in this schools welfare programme.

    “The home-grown school feeding programme, the O’Meal,” said UBEC’s Dr. Yakubu Gambo, “is one programme that has endeared the governor to us because he is the only governor doing it despite the capital intensive nature of the programme.”

    Governor Aregbesola, present at the occasion, weighed in: “We are building state-of-the-art 100 elementary schools, 50 middle schools and 20 high schools.  This is a big project by any standard,” he gushed, “which has injected life into the construction industry; and has provided jobs for artisans and professionals.”

    Prince Felix Awofisayo, the Osun SUBEB chief, was not left out of the developmental whoop: “Let me reiterate that the provision of functional education for the citizenry,” he declared, “as the administration is anchored on the implementation of a cohesive and an all-encompassing six-point integral plan.”

    So much developmental news in a day — a far cry from rumbling tummies, plotting adversaries and scapegoating media, just as it was at the beginning, before the salary demon!

    It is the final triumph, then?  Hardly!

    ‘Governor Aregbesola needs a cabinet now to finish as strongly as he started, before the salary catastrophe.  If he delays, he risks facing a crisis — an internal crisis — much more lethal than the hell-raising Osun opposition can ever muster’

    And the battle next time would not be solely from the Osun opposition, even if its bad-tempered buzz would always vibrate; but more dangerously from inside Aregbesola’s own camp, which may well, not unfairly, declare itself starved of legitimate pork.

    Thank God, the salary odyssey is coming to an end.  The Ogbeni should draw a closure as swiftly as he can, and bring smiles back to the cheeks of Osun workers.  He should also seek funds to complete his grand capital projects, among them crucial roads.  It is nice developmental news, from Osun, is hitting the wires again, after the horror tales of the past months.

    But the come-back would not be complete without the governor constituting a cabinet. Nearing the end of the first year in a four-year second term, it is time to bring in as many bright and committed minds as possible — for it is a challenging juncture, demanding a brilliant and committed collective.  It could make the difference between success and failure.

    Governor Aregbesola needs a cabinet now to finish as strongly as he started, before the interregnum of the salary catastrophe.  If he delays, he risks facing a crisis — an internal crisis — much more lethal than the hell-raising Osun opposition can ever muster.