The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Politicians abhor Easter

    Politicians abhor Easter

    President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT), governors, former presidential aspirants, and various cadres of party leaders, have all profoundly espoused the message of Easter which is sacrifice, love and charity. Some have even called on Nigerians to emulate the sacrificial lamb, Lord Jesus Christ, who willingly laid down his life for the salvation of mankind. In their epistles, they prop Nigerians to emulate Jesus, so the nation could make a quantum leap to overcome her many challenges. But do they heed their own message?

    In his Easter message, PBAT praised Nigerians for their resilience in the face of harsh economic challenges, associated with his reform agenda. His spokesman Ajuri Ngelale, puts it succinctly: “The President strongly commends Nigerians for the sacrifices they have made in the past few months for the nation to be steered to the path of recovery and sustainable growth, assuring them that the seeds of patience which they have sown are beginning to sprout and will in no time bring forth abundance of good fruits.”

    In his message through his special adviser on media and publicity, Eseme Eyiboh, the senate president Godswill Akpabio said: “Just as Jesus Christ in His humility and love offered Himself for redemption of mankind, I admonish us to emulate Him and make sacrifices for one another.” Governor Siminalayi Fubara, in his message enthused: “At the heart of Easter is the triumph of light over darkness. It is a season that reminds us that the Almighty God can turn an unpleasant situation around for the good of His people.”

    The Minister of the FCT Nyesem Wike, postulated: “In the story of Easter, we find the ultimate symbol of sacrifice in the selfless act of Jesus Christ, who laid down His life for the redemption of humanity.” Similar good words for the nation were delivered by former vice president and presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), Atiku Abubakar, and that of the Labour Party (LP), Peter Obi, who attended the Easter Mass, organized by the Archbishop of Onitsha, Most Rev. Valerian Okeke, at Onitsha Correctional Centre.  

    Read Also: Why we did not recover $69.4 million electricity debt, by NBET

    But despite these profound messages of love, charity and sacrifice, one wonders why all the wars going on between our politicians? For example, FCT Minister Nyesom Wike and Governor Simi Fubara, presently, are mortal enemies. Is it that they don’t hear their own messages and that of their other colleagues, who are pontificating on the essence of Easter? Or is it, a case of doctors who don’t use their own medicine? Clearly, the trouble between Wike and his former protégé Fubara, can be solved if they imbibe the spirit of sacrifice embodied by Jesus Christ.

    While Wike is claiming that Fubara is working to destroy the political structure that brought him to power, Fubara is alleging that Wike is overbearing and seeking to remote-control his government. The fallout of the war has been enormous on the state, with the most visible being the burning down and subsequent pulling down of the legislative building of the state. The temporal peace achieved by the intervention of President Tinubu appears to be yielding to pressure, with the state House of Assembly threatening to resume the impeachment proceeding earlier halted.

    Again, in the Labour Party, a civil war has broken out between the party’s executive committee and the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC), which claim to be the owners of the party. In what the NLC has described as a kangaroo convention, Julius Abure, was conveniently returned for a fresh tenure as party chairman. While Abure is saying the convention met all the requirements of law, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC), has technically declared the convention invalid, by saying, INEC, did not monitor the convention as required by the Electoral Act.

    On it part, the president of NLC, Joe Ajaero, is also not sitting comfy, as the presidency has declared him a politician in labour’s clothing. This column has earlier warned Ajaero, that the NLC was moving into the slippery terrain of party politics, with all its consequences. Now, while the NLC president, unabashedly claims to be the owners of Labour Party, the president of the party, tutors him that the party is an independent legal entity, under the law, and cannot be owned by the NLC.

    Stirring in Kaduna State, is another potential war between the former governor of the state, Nasir El Rufai and his protégé and successor, Senator Uba Sani. Firing the first salvo, El Rufai’s son, Bashir El-Rufai, claimed that Governor Sani, is incompetent for disclosing the heavy indebtedness of the state publicly, and how it has impacted the payment of salaries. His elder brother, and House of Representatives member, Bello El-Rufai, who appears more amenable to the message of Easter, disagrees with his brother.

    In his intervention, the Honourable affirms loyalty to the state governor, nothing that there is nothing wrong in the governor publicly declaring the financial health of the state. In pledging his loyalty, he noted that his father, the former governor, declared the money handed over to the incumbent governor, in the handover notes. Other former friends turned foes, who have abandoned the message of Easter, are Governor Godwin Obaseki of Edo State, and his estranged friend and deputy, Phillip Shuaibu, presently facing impeachment threats. Interestingly, when Obaseki was warring with his predecessor, Adams Oshiomhole, the deputy governor, Shuaibu, abandoned his mentor, Oshiomhole and sided with Obaseki.

    There are several other examples of politicians across the country, showing that while our politicians pontificate about the enduring sacrifice of Jesus Christ, which as one of them noted is the reason for the season, their actions are far from their words. But how can they be preaching sacrifice, when they are not ready to make the littlest of such sacrifices. Jesus whom they ask us to emulate, in case they don’t understand, was sinless, but willingly gave his life for the sake of sinners.

    Throughout his ministry, Jesus showed empathy and love to the poor and the downtrodden. He fed and cured them at no cost. When the powerful forces of the day sought to put heavy loads on them, he sided with the lowly of heart. He eschewed violence of any sort, and even when his disciples sought to defend him with violence, he rebuked them, and replaced an ear that was caught off. Above all, he gave his life, in atonement for the sins of others.

    So, clearly while their messages at Easter resonate, their actions enrage the people. They cannot ask the people to emulate Jesus, the reason for the season, when their actions show them as enemies of the teaching of Jesus Christ. No doubt, if they can practice a modicum of the love espoused by Jesus, the nation would be the better for it. Perhaps, 2024, will herald a new beginning.

  • Abure ta ku!

    Abure ta ku!

    Abure “ta ku”?  Or Abure wins round one?

    How exactly do you couch the latest gripping melodrama from the Labour Party (LP)-Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) war front?

    If you want a true classic, steeped in high-octane power intrigues, reminiscent of the titanic political battles of Nigeria’s 1st Republic (1960-1966), dub it “Abure ta ku”!

    But if you’d prefer a humdrum headline, which nevertheless ruled the media roost from the late 1970s till the 1990s, toasting the courtroom histrionics of the late Gani Fawehinmi, SAN, SAM, then just say “Abure wins round one”.

    Abure wins round one — because it’s early days yet; and you can’t predict the final swing of the victory pendulum.

    But back to the 1st Republic Titans and classic battles.

    Abure digs in — that appears the closet English equivalent of Abure “ta ku”. Still, it’s too cold — indeed, too frigid — to capture the Yoruba original’s tonal dramatics.

    It echoes “Akintola ta ku”, a Daily Times front page banner headline of 28 May 1962, cast by one of Nigeria’s all-time journalism greats, Alhaji Babatunde Jose. 

    Read Also: Why we did not recover $69.4 million electricity debt, by NBET

    Alhaji Jose, a Titan of the media, was then czar at Daily Times (now defunct), then Nigeria’s media market leader and foremost newspaper chain.  Alhaji Jose, in Walking A Tightrope, his autobiography and memoirs, confirmed he indeed cast that headline.

    Western Region Premier, Chief Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA), had just been fired by a majority in the Western House of Assembly — a majority loyal to Chief Obafemi Awolowo; in the bitter and dirty dispute for the soul of the Action Group (AG), between Chief Awolowo (AG Leader) and SLA (Deputy Leader but Western Region Premier).

    Akintola balked at the so-called sack, thus jarring against British Parliamentary conventions.  Hence, the dramatic Akintola ta ku — a headline, using today’s social media lingo, that immediately went viral!

    That western drama, because the federal authorities tried to strong-arm the process, would trigger a national crisis that would sink that republic on 15 January 1966.

    On the other hand, “Gani wins round one” would later ring out, during the best-forgotten military era, as Gani, SAM — senior advocate of the masses — won yet another of his many famous injunctions, in his many legal pursuits to secure the dignity of the powerless, against the mighty establishment.

    To be sure, Gani the Great won many famous and landmark cases, to huge media applause.  But that he always won “round one” did not mean he prevailed in every particular case. 

    That should hold some cold comfort for Joe Ajaero and his — shell-shocked? — NLC ensemble.  They just got outflanked by Julius Abure. 

    Foxy Jules just earned himself — by hook or by crook — another four-year stint as national chair of the troubled LP, to the chagrin of boisterous Joe!

    Joe Ajaero!  Who would have thought!  That he, the famed garrison commander of Labour’s “agbero” tactics, just got caged, if not outright cooked, by same “agbero” politics, for the control of the soul of LP!

    Who would have thought!  That Abure — meek and gentle Abure — would overawe the loud and trenchant Ajaero, who preens at intimidating others, over LP: via the March 27 Nnewi, Anambra State, LP convention, that just coronated Abure as LP czar for four more years!

    Abure!  He is Julius, yes.  But he appears very far from Caesar — that flamboyant  figure of imperial Rome and the tragic hero of Shakespeare’s tragedy, Julius Caesar! 

    Rather, he tends to mirror Cassius, in Julius Caesar.  Caesar himself spotted the Cassius danger: “Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look.  He thinks too much.  Such men are dangerous.”

    But Mark Antony dismissed such fears: “Fear him not, Caesar; he’s not dangerous” — a fatal mis-advice.  Mighty Caesar soon became cadaver at the Capitol: no thanks to a murderous conspiracy by Cassius, Casca and hateful gang.  Even the noble Brutus — who didn’t hate Caesar but only loved Rome — was part of that envious murder.

    Now, Abure may not look hungry or “dangerous” as Cassius.  But he certainly is lean! 

    He just showed Ajaero and his noisy Aluta crowd the lean-and-mean in the realpolitik of party power grab, beyond lousy picketing and predictable hell-raising. 

    Who would have thought!  That Ajaero and his NLC old guard could be noisy outsiders, from the LP mansion they conceived and actually built!  Who would have thought!

    Still, serves the NLC old guard right.  For too long, they kept mum, as political hustlers and Labour merchants raped LP for filthy lucre, their much flaunted ideology-exceptional maiden, each election season.  Now, they jerk awake with a start: heretics have elbowed their high priests off their high temple!

    For eight long years, the LP/NLC Jerusalem was Akure, where Ondo Governor Olusegun Mimiko (2009-2017) was busy playing LP chief boys scout and high priest. 

    Now, Mimiko was no better or worse than the hoard of South West hustlers, often hiding behind Awo’s social democracy ideology for power and political relevance.  But he certainly was no Labour ideologue. 

    So, when Mimiko was done with LP, he floated ZLP — Zenith Labour Party — before he hit his political nadir and returned to his PDP vomit.  He probably was too shame-faced to return to the Alliance for Democracy (AD)-AC-ACN-APC tendencies because he had razed bridges, in his futile rat race for a post-power South West political juggernaut.

    Alex Otti, the current lone LP governor of Abia, is even a starker capitalist — no crime.

    Still, while the war rages, he plants one foot in LP.  He plants another in NLC.  He wouldn’t host, in Umuahia,  Abure’s controversial convention.  Yet, he despatched his deputy to the Nnewi show.  Call it the sacred Otti doctrine of absolute non-alienation!

    Peter Obi?  That one is one trophy both Ajaero and Abure would feud to death to keep! Even as Abure holds fast to his poisoned chalice of a new tenure, LP assures its 2027 presidential ticket is Obi’s — except he refuses.

    For that cheeky promise, Ripples would give anything to see the face of Ajaero –Ajaero, the Obi fanatic — a gargoyle of a scowl?  Who knows!

    Still, what Obi did was flaunt his Obidient bona fides.  Obi may have lost the 2023 polls, he sang.  But his Obidients clearly won!

    Now, what’s that — the peripatetic Obi giving very early warning that he’d take his Obidients elsewhere, should the Labour war endure? 

    But perhaps too — to placate Ajaero? — Obi pronounced his distance from Abure’s controversial convention.  Enter the Labour political bride of the year — long after the great Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe (God bless his soul)!

    The evolving doom of LP is that those who know ideology know no electoral victory; those who know electoral victory know no ideology. 

    Isn’t that a clear pathway to structural death for a party that keeps deluding itself with queer exceptionalism in Nigerian politics?

    LP had better snap out of its self-imposed delusion.  Still, the present crisis presents it an opportunity re-find itself and assert its ideological soul. 

    Otherwise, it should say its last prayers; and embrace the disgraceful death its partisan whoring of the last 20 years eminently merits.

  • A welcome declaration

    A welcome declaration

    • By Jaiyeola J. Lewu

    Nigeria is blessed with a huge landmass and over 80 million hectares of arable land for crop production. Unfortunately, it is left uncultivated while the demand for food outstrips the supply, a situation that would not have occurred had the land been cultivated.

    Another debilitating issue has been insecurity in the country. Since the menace of Boko Haram and other terrorist gangs in the country began, farmers have been prevented from going to their farms to cultivate their crops. In some instances, farmers are forced to pay rent or royalty to terrorists in order to be allowed to engage in crop production, and even where they are allowed, they are forced at gunpoint to give up large portions of their harvests or pay up before harvesting.

    Due to climate change, early rains have started in earnest in many places since the end of February and have continued into March. Consequently, Nigerian farmers are looking up to both the federal and state governments to effect the establishment of the proposed agro-rangers who will provide some security assurance to them in order to return to their farms.

    It is disheartening to hear of the donation of wheat grains to Nigeria by war-torn Ukraine which is fighting a serious war with Russia, a superpower, despite our capacity to feed ourselves.

    President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared an emergency on agriculture with the hope that there would be food security in the short and medium terms. So far, there appears to be no strategic planning or programme tied to the emergency; no concrete action has emerged towards actualizing the aims of the declaration.

    The main thing that we hear or see is the release of palliatives of grains from government silos which constitute only a meagre drop in the ocean.  We hear the promise of the president to cultivate over 150,000 hectares of arable land in each state of the federation.  There are no signs that equipment has been deployed to clear the land so that planting can start and the effort to prevent the spread of hunger.

    Every passing day, the news media report that millions of Nigerians are hungry.  That is unhealthy, socially and politically.  As the saying goes, “A hungry man is an angry man.”

    Many Nigerians have resorted to scouting around the cities in search of warehouses, particularly those of NEMA, in an attempt to find out where foodstuffs are kept so as to cart away bags of rice, cooking oil, and other commodities. The attacks on food storage facilities have now escalated to highway robbery of trucks suspected of carrying food items including spaghetti, macaroni, rice, and other food items.

    Demonstrations have continued in many parts of the country including those of the labour unions, market women, students, and some other civil society organizations, against hunger and mounting food prices.

     The situation might not have come to this stage if the government had in 2022 heeded to predictions of a looming food crisis in the country.

    In my article in The Nation of June 4, 2022, I wrote about the looming mass hunger in Nigeria and the need at that time for urgent preventive actions against food scarcity, and also against cattle herders that were rampaging farmlands across Nigeria.

    I urged the government to retrieve silos for strategic food reserves from the Commodity Exchange that leased them and stressed the importance of assisting farmers with fertilisers and quality seeds.

    I called attention to the US $1.2 billion loan signed by Nigeria with a consortium of lenders, namely: the Deutsche Bank, the Islamic Organisation Bank, and the Brazilian Development Bank, which was to provide Nigeria with 10,000 tractors, 500 equipment and 623 service centers in the 774 local government areas, and create 100,000 jobs.

    If the loan was conscientiously put into what it was meant for, Nigeria’s food crisis and hunger that are now unfolding and raging in the country might have been averted.

    In 2023 when I observed that the items for which the loan was obtained had not been supplied, I wrote another article titled: “To Forestall A Looming Food Crisis in Nigeria”, which was published in March 2023 in The Nation, calling for former president, Muhammadu Buhari to constitute a Panel of Inquiry into the whereabouts of the $1.2 billion loan or the 10,000 tractors, 500 equipment and 623 service centers in 774 local government areas of Nigeria.

    I suggested that the panel should comprise the following – the ministries of finance, budget and planning, agriculture and food security, justice and the Central Bank of Nigeria.

    In addition, the consortium of the three banks were to be included in the panel.

    Unfortunately, President Buhari apparently did nothing about it.  Undeterred, on August 3, 2023, shortly after the inauguration of President Tinubu, I reprised the matter, asking him to set up the panel which his predecessor failed to do.

    Had the loan or the tractors and equipment been acquired and put to effective use, there would have been no need for the Presidential Declaration on Agriculture which so far has not shown any positive effect on the country’s food security.

    Prices of food, goods, and services have skyrocketed, following the removal of petroleum subsidies and the collapse of the naira vis-à-vis foreign currencies. Even the prices of goods and services that do not depend on foreign currencies are pegged to the exchange rates of those currencies.

    Read Also: No ransom paid for school children’s release – Fed Govt

    The time has now come for both the federal and state governments to encourage and assist farmers through inputs availability and price reduction. The Commodity Boards that President Tinubu promised to set up to assure farmers reliable markets and prices for their produce should be inaugurated without delay.

    Such assistance and assurance would no doubt result in higher productivity and higher incomes for farmers.

    It is essential that President Tinubu should set up an investigative panel to locate and retrieve the syndicated loan from whoever has been sitting on it, and the tractors and other equipment it was supposed to provide.

    If the package recently announced by the Minister of Agriculture is different from the one contained in the 2020 Agreement, it will be a welcome development, which should be an integral part of his Renewed Hope Agenda.

    •Dr Lewu served as Nigeria’s ambassador to Brazil, Uruguay, and Paraguay.

    •Olatunji Dare AT HOME ABROAD returns next week.

  • Promise of Niger

    Promise of Niger

    A not-so-veiled message from the Captain and Vice Captain, at two high-profile events, and the jeremiads from some of the crew members have all but vanished.

    “Some of us are confused about whether to abuse the past or the present; or to make excuse for the future,” President Bola Tinubu observed in Minna, while flagging off the Niger State food security and agricultural mechanization programme, complete with adequate ranching for herders.  “But that is not in my dictionary.”

    Vice President Kashim Shettima, at the public presentation of Sam Omatseye’s book, Beating All Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Bola Tinubu Became President: “Yes, we are having challenges.  And we are not here to apportion blame.  Leadership,” he stressed, “is about accepting responsibility and finding solutions to national challenges.”

    And voila!  The anti-Muhammadu Buhari-era growling, fast becoming a sickening pastime among some Tinubu administration hierarchs, has all but vanished!

    That’s highly welcome.  Lamentation is nothing but emotional paralysis.  Paralysis never solves a problem.  Rather, It creates more.  But hard, punishing thinking does.

    Incidentally, the same period (of more gruelling thinking, less sweet grumbling) has somewhat chalked up relief from the Naira front — with the Naira highly appreciating, even if it’s still far too low, in parity to the dollar, given the strength of the Nigerian economy, relative to other African countries, anyway.

    “Lagos is Nigeria’s richest state, producing about US$ 90 billion a year in goods and services,” The Economist once gushed, “making its economy bigger than that of most African countries, including Ghana and Kenya.”

    Yet, Lagos is only a pie — a major pie, to be sure — from the Nigerian economy.  So, why would the Naira crumble more against the dollar, than the Ghana Cedi; or the Francophone West Africa CFAS; or the Kenyan Shilling?

    Also, potential glad tidings from the oil refining front.  With both the NNPC Ltd’s Port Harcourt Refinery and the Dangote facility set to push out wet products, news of a possible fall in pump prices of petroleum products is making the rounds.

    It’s, therefore, welcome to the brass tacks, after an impassioned bout of sweet lamentations and self-distractions.  It’s nice to start thinking development again!

    As the President and Vice President have rightly insisted, the Tinubu government was voted in to raise PMB-era achievements a higher notch, while also fixing that era’s drawbacks — without prejudice to investigating, prosecuting and securing conviction for any alleged crimes, by any member of the ancien regime.

    But tackling alleged regime felons is one thing.  Sweeping, omnibus tarring of the old order is another — particularly when both old and new are products of the same APC; and PMB’s scorecard also helped in getting President Tinubu elected, though, to be fair, the president’s campaign pushed out clear plans to further improve things.

    Besides, in partisan strategic tracking, which is smarter?  Intra-APC regime bickering? Or a neat, tidy contrast between what PDP did in 16 years, against APC’s own records, across sectors in eight, going to nine years?

    But even beyond partisan manouevers: wouldn’t such tidy categorization correctly track progress, stagnation and retrogress, and mirror a more definite status of things, than the customary penchant to feast on rot, wilfully deny credible achievements and proclaim doom, in a never-ending fit of avid self-loathing?

    Nothing epitomizes such positive continuity, not to mention an admirable re-focus, more than Niger State’s audacious agricultural plan, which President Tinubu flagged off on March 11.

    That may be a state programme, as distinct from a Federal Government’s.  But in it sits sound synergy that speaks to the Federal Government staying true on the critical theme of food security, driven by agricultural processing, if PMB’s agricultural activism must be built upon.

    That the president himself was there to buy into the project was a huge symbolism in Federal-state collaboration; and state-state economic partnership, to deepen the real sector using, as lynchpin, the various segments of agriculture.

    The promise of Niger! 

    The project, dubbed Total Agricultural Support Programme (TASP), in concert with Campo Company of Brazil, already has, in ready investments, 500 large capacity tractors, 50 harvesters of sundry grades, 200 power tillers and 1, 000 agricultural and irrigation equipment of varying types.

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    Irrigation speaks to all-year, all-round farming, to maximize Nigeria’s traditional two farming seasons.  The dam component speaks to power security, via hydro-powered electricity, so imperative for agricultural processing — by cottage industries linked to farms, providing job opportunities for the rural youth.

    “We are bringing about 140 kilometres of water irrigation to this place from Shiroro Dam,” Governor Bago told a visiting Nigerian Union of Journalists (NUJ) delegation. “We are bringing 80 megawatts of power to the Airport City Project.”

    The “shop window”, for this extensive crop/animal husbandry processing mart, is an “Airport City Free Zone” — a free trade zone, projected to be the biggest of its type in Africa when in full bloom — processing diary products, vegetables and fruits; and moving such products abroad, or to other Nigerian states, as per appropriate orders, thus further deepening the real sector, creating fresh jobs along the value chain.

    But as the Niger government thinks processed crops, meat and dairy, the Federal Transport ministry should think rail link and penetration to further tackle food inflation.

    Again, pushing out diary products, with the level of mechanized investments in TASP, suggests a much more embedded livestock-processing industry, much deeper and far more sophisticated than herding from one spot to another.  That itself suggests a well thought out ranching policy, as an integral part of TASP.

    Visiting President Tinubu also gushed over restructuring the agricultural ecosystem, with happy farmers and settled herders, driving their trade in peace.

    “I know what it means for roaming cows to eat crops and the vegetation of our land.  I know it’s painful,” the president admitted. “But when we reorient the herder and make provision for cattle rearing (reading ranching) we can address that.  You are the governors who are to provide the land. I, as President,” he pledged, “am committed to providing a comprehensive programme that will solve this problem.”

    Besides, no less than four states — Benue, Kogi, Kwara and Lagos — have plugged into TASP, with memoranda of understanding.  Lagos, for once, needs a lot of paddy rice to feed its massive rice mill in Imota, via Ikorodu (the biggest in West Africa), send the price of rice crashing in its markets and give inflation a bloody nose.

    It exciting that Niger State, which boasts the largest land mass in Nigeria — 76, 363 square kilometres — is pressing its vast land resource into serious economic use. 

    The riveting promise of Minna is the glimmer of hope for inter-state agricultural collaboration for the good of all.

    Let everyone plug into it.  It might well be the latest step to ensuring food security.

  • As naira rebounds

    As naira rebounds

    Understandably, much of the reactions that have greeted the somewhat steady rebound of the naira have centred on whether perceptible gains was merely a fleeting phase or whether it signals an imminent return of strength in a permanent sense of which most Nigerians apparently feel that the local currency was entitled. For much as many would vehemently disagree that the administration is on track in its push to reset the entire gamut monetary policy management, fewer still would deny that the broad set of remedies in place to address the drift are beginning to work some magic; and that the economy may in fact be finally be turning the corner under the watchful eyes of its current managers.

    The same of course could be said of the much hyped food shortages that has since been revealed as one of more drama than substance, a rather family but nonetheless opportunistic misdiagnosis to serve narrow partisan ends.

    Agreed, there can be no misstatement of the current realities in the land. As they say in the local parlance –country hard! True, not only is inflation is at the highest, punishing levels ever, for businesses, the cost of keeping afloat has tended to be somewhat unbearable. There is also no denying the hunger in the land with prices of foodstuffs increasingly unaffordable. And surely, no one denies that the removal of subsidy on petrol and the harmonisation of the different rates in the foreign exchange market by the apex bank have come to constitute the main drivers to the hardship currently being experienced.

    But then, like a typical Nigerian accident scene where all you see is bedlam, there was initially, an exaggerated sense of panic that tended to get in the way of what is supposed to be ordinarily, a well-designed policy intervention.  From massive looting of warehouses and storage facilities by supposedly angry and hungry mobs, we heard of trucks being waylaid and their goods carted away by criminal elements to wherever; there was at some point, a sense of the state being in retreat as hoodlums – said to be looking for food – took over.

    Yet, if the truth must be told; ours was certainly not a case of essential commodities suddenly disappearing from the markets and supermarkets and with it a return to the regime of rationing of so-called Essencos as we had in the 80s; nothing of drought or pestilences in such degrees as to occasion massive crop failures and resultant famine. Insecurity was of course a major problem particularly in the rural areas with farmers across the country reporting inability to tend to their enterprise. Again, in all of these, there has – all of these while – been no suggestion that the country ever needed massive, wholesale importation of food and other essential commodities to address the hunger problem!

    Yet, if the panic stoked by the coalescing of the different forces said to be responding to the hunger stimulus could be said to rate high on the Richter scale, the management of the entire episode has been just as astounding!

    Mercifully, the situation is now different with civility finally returning. From Lagos to Niger, Borno to Oyo, Ogun to Kebbi, now the story across the board is that things are beginning to quieten; whereas the pangs of hunger may not have faded completely, there is at least a sense that some things are being done to quieten the accompanying rumbles of the stomach!

    Have the correct lessons been learnt? It seems yet early in the day to say. I supposed there is – at least at the moment – an increasing understanding of what each actor in the agricultural value chain is expected to bring to the table. Which means those looking to the steely precincts of the Three Arms Zone are simply wasting their time. Abuja has neither the land to till nor the farmhand to put to work. Even the old top-down approach of a federal government purchasing and distributing tractors and other vital farm equipment to state governments have become somewhat anachronistic.

    The states have the land, the structures and so should be encouraged to find the means to get the business done with the federal government availing them robust fiscal support in credit, tax waivers and incentives.

    Back to our beloved naira. I understand the concerns being raised about the value of the currency at this time. Should it be N1,200 or a return to N500 to one United States dollars?  Such discussions would seem to me as being utterly misplaced at this time. Agreed, Yemi Cardoso and his team have done well to put measures in place for effective monetary policy management. While the country can expect to harvest the returns in the long term, it seems to me as wishful considering that the fundamentals of the economy have not changed in any appreciable measure.

    Read Also: FEC approves fund to bridge $878bn national infrastructure deficit

    Unlike the current obsession with the value of the currency which in the long run could actually return to the country to the same starting block of import dependency, greater focus should be on currency stability with strict emphasis on the diversification on forex sources. What we are dealing with here goes beyond the sentiment of having a strong national currency. It is about the nation’s capacity to produce those basic essentials that it truly needs and competitively too. It is also about whether or not it can generate sufficient foreign exchange to import those things it cannot produce locally. In another sense, it comes to the question of whether a country with very little export base can afford the luxury of a strong currency without endangering any real prospects of export-led development.

    Yes, our super patriots making the case of naira-dollar parity might want to know that the South Korean currency – the Won, yesterday traded at 1,339.9714 to the United States dollar! Yes, the currency of that famed industrial powerhouse equally traded at 0.98977818 to our beloved naira!

    Talk of a country whose productivity compares with most of the developed world and one that actually boasts of top of the range industrial goods from automobiles to electronics preferring to keep its currency ‘undervalued’ to ensure an appreciable competitive edge for its exports and also to guarantee its slice of the pie in the highly competitive global trade arena!

    I do understand the tough choices that the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration is challenged to make. They are neither for the faint-hearted nor for those given to populism. They are painful but necessary choices if the country must leapfrog into the future that we all claim to desire.

    I mean a future in which the dream of a graduate after 10 years of working is to buy a ‘brand new tokunbo’ car because his country continues to lack both the technical and credit infrastructure to afford him/her the so-called ‘tear-rubber’!

    To those still reminiscing in the so-called good old times, the message at this time should be – where have that past led us!

  • KSM walks for life

    KSM walks for life

    Across the country, last Saturday, the Knights of St. Mulumba (KSM), campaigned on the streets against killings and domestic violence of any sort. The annual program is even more significant, considering the violent killings, by bandits, kidnappers, agitators and abortionists. Tagged “prolife walk”, Knights and Ladies of KSM mounted loud speakers, shared banners and engaged in one-on-one campaigns, proclaiming that life is scared and no one should take another person’s life, which is a gift from God. 

    The prolife campaign should assume a national vigour, considering the gruelling experience of victims of kidnapping, especially children in the northern part of the country, where mass abductions have become a weapon in the hands of kidnappers, terrorists and allied bandits. Last Sunday, the macabre dance with the fate of 137 abducted Kaduna school children ended. The children abducted from LEA Primary Secondary School, Kuriga, Chikun Local Government Area, Kaduna state on March 7, were taken into the forest while a ransom of N1 billion was demanded for their release, with March 27, as deadline for payment.         

    Significantly, there was confusion about the actual number of abducted children. While some media organs reported that 280 persons were abducted, the Kaduna State government announced that the entire abducted children have been freed. The Director Defence Media Operations, Maj Gen Edward Buba, in a statement claimed that 137 abducted children from LEA primary school were rescued in Zamfara State.  He also announced that 16 pupils taken hostage in Gada LGA of Sokoto state have also been rescued.

    While we give thanks to God for their release, there are many more kidnapped children whose lives are in the hands of these anti-life elements. Of note, the media briefing did not mention whether the abductors were captured or killed in combat operations.  Last weekend, troops of the 7 Division also rescued 78 hostages made up of 35 women and 43 children in Borno State. According the military, enclaves and villages where the elements of the Islamic State of West African Province and the JAS in northeast are, were cleared in the mission.

    There are other violent activities that have made life very cheap across the country. One common cause is communal clashes. Recently, four officers and 13 soldiers said to be on a peace mission in Okuama community in Ughelli, Delta State, were ambushed and killed. While there is a debate about the mission of the soldiers, the concern for this piece is that lives have been wasted. The aggrieved soldiers have occupied the community and vowed to fish out the killers, and there are worries that many more lives may be wasted.

    Again, the perennial communal clashes in Plateau state have resulted in several losses of lives. The most recent over the weekend happened between the Taroh and Motola youths in Mikang Local Government Area of the state. Of course, Plateau is the epicentre of industrial scale killing, burning and wanton destruction of lives and properties resulting from the clashes between farmers and herders. There are reports that over 60,000 have died in the farmers/herders clashes across the country as at the beginning of this year. Fortunately, the spate of attacks seems to have reduced.

    According to Nextier SPD Policy Weekly, terrorism and activities of Fulani herdsmen escalated during the regime of President Muhammadu Buhari. The medium reported that between 2017 and 2020, suspected Fulani herdsmen carried out 654 attacks and killed 2539 Nigerians. The report further claimed that despite the huge expenses of about N12 trillion on security, under Buhari, insecurity got worse, with banditry spreading across the northwest, and north-central, while unknown gunmen spread across the southeast, and kidnapping in the southwest and south-south.

    Read Also: No ransom paid for school children’s release – Fed Govt

    The KSM campaigners also walked against domestic violence. According to several reports, domestic violence is on the rise in Nigeria. The CLEEN foundation reports that one in every three respondents identified themselves as victims of domestic violence. The violence takes many forms including physical, sexual, emotional and mental abuses. The Foundation’s 2021 National Crime and Safety Survey demonstrates that 31% of national sample confessed to being victims of domestic violence. It reports that common forms of violence against women in Nigeria include rape, acid attacks, molestation, wife beating, and corporal punishment.

    While traditionally, it is a permissive culture for men to “discipline” their wives, resulting in the higher numbers of domestic violence against women, there are also cases of domestic violence against men, in some cases leading to outright killing. According to a Guardian newspaper report in 2021, at least once a week, there is a case of a man beating, maiming or killing his wife, and in rare cases, a woman dealing with the husband in like manner.

    The report indicates that because Nigeria is a patriarchal society, men have the notion that upon the payment of bride price, they own their wives and take steps to chastise or discipline her, as they wish. Sadly, domestic violence is predominant within the lower income earners, perhaps because of the economic pressure associated with it. There are also reports that substance abuse, infertility and unemployment are factors that are linked with domestic violence. While there are efforts to curb the menace, through legislation and advocacy, a lot more needs to be done.

    One of the core pro-life interests of the KSM is the fervent opposition to abortion. The group passionately professes, promotes and defends the Catholic doctrine against abortion. For them, life starts at conception and nothing must be done to alter the divine wishes of the creator from conception to delivery. According to a Guttmacher Institute, there are an estimated 456,000 unsafe abortions done in Nigeria, every year. Luckily, the Catholic Church and the law of the land are substantially on the same page on abortion, which is illegal in Nigeria.

    Both the Criminal Code and the Penal Code criminalise abortion. Section 228 criminalizes attempt to procure abortion, and provides for a sentence of 14 years’ imprisonment. On its part section 229 provides for seven years for any woman who tries to commit abortion by herself or submits herself for abortion. On its part, section 232 of the penal code provides that any person who voluntarily causes a woman to miscarry, except for saving the life of the woman, shall be punished for a term of imprisonment extending to fourteen years or more.

    The Knights and Ladies of St. Mulumba, walked to draw attention to the Biblical assertion that life is sacred. By preaching to the public, they seek to impact positively on the rising incidents of killings across the country. Hopefully, they draw the attention of the governments at all levels, to put necessary measures to abate the killings. In the season of Easter, they propagate love, charity and almsgiving.

  • The First Lady and a neo-Ayatollah

    The First Lady and a neo-Ayatollah

    Oluremi Tinubu, wife of President Bola Tinubu, and most recently a three-term lawmaker as a Senator in the National Assembly of the Federal Republic, is probably the demurest First Lady Nigeria has ever had, a distinction she shares, in my judgement, with Turai Yar’Adua, late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s widow.

    Not for her the meddlesome obtrusiveness, the showy arrogance, the delusion of consequential presence, the exhibitionism, the feigned compassion, and the tinselled glamour of some former first ladies.  Nor could anyone accuse her of the crassness and the boorishness of one first lady that still rankle a decade later.

    In the eight years that her husband served as Governor of Lagos State, she went about quietly supporting his administration with her own outreach programmes that touched every segment of society.

    As a three-term senator representing Lagos Central, she marshalled her official grants, plus funds from her well-endowed family, to run some of the most effective intervention programmes in the nation.  Her Constituency Office in Lagos was a meeting point for residents seeking grants for education, small business, skills acquisition, housing, and relief from myriad dislocations of life in the megalopolis.

    She was often there in person, listening attentively and sympathetically to, and learning from, her visitors.  When they reached some milestone, won some award or attained some distinction, she celebrated and rejoiced with them.   Her personal touch brightened many lives and contrasted sharply with the practice of some of her colleagues who think that distributing some household items at noisy ceremonies is their highest obligation.

    She has carried on in this manner for some two decades without scandal, a rarity in a country where hardly a day passes without someone in her position of privilege being caught in conduct unbecoming, or being profiled in high scandal.

    All this makes it the more unfathomable that a Muslim cleric from  Bauchi State or a pretender to that title, identified as Idris Tenshi, decreed a fatwah – a death sentence, no less – on her the other day.

    Her crime?

    The unforgivable sin of being a Christian, an arna, Hausa for “unbeliever,” in the world of the cleric and his fellow travellers, the most loathsome animal in all of creation.

    He had not judged her guilty of blasphemy or of impiety or of any conduct deemed to be in flagrant conflict with  Islamic doctrine as the novelist, Salman Rushdie was adjudged to have done when Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa on him and the publishers of The Satanic Verses in 1989.  

    In whatever case, the cleric is no Khomeini.  Even if he is a latter-day Khomeini, 2024 is not 1989.  And Nigeria is assuredly not the Islamic State of Iran.

    But it is an ominous development all the same, and should be viewed with the utmost seriousness. It will not do to dismiss the cleric as an attention-seeking fanatic of little or no consequence.  For it is often from such obscure provenances that the seeds of murderous fanaticism are propagated.

    It is doubly disquieting that there has been no resounding condemnation of the fatwa in the ranks of the Muslim faithful, which would at least have made it made it clear that the cleric spoke for nobody but himself, and that those who might be inclined to heed his morbid edict are on their own, and that there is no tolerance whatsoever for that kind of conduct.

    Silence is not to be mistaken for endorsement, to be sure.  But an unequivocal condemnation of the fatwa and a repudiation of its author would have served society much better than silence. 

    Nigeria, it is necessary to insist, is a nation of many religions, many faiths, and many deities. One symbol is as good as another provided everyone attaches the same meaning to them. The Constitution guarantees freedom of worship, as well as freedom to abstain from religious worship.

    Nigeria has no official state religion, and any effort to decree one into existence or to creepily insinuate it into the polity will never succeed

    From pronouncing a fatwa on Oluremi Tinubu for being a Christian, it is but a short step to pronouncing a fatwa on all Nigerians who are not adherents of Islam. It is an act of incitement pure and simple.

    It is no answer to this charge that Mrs Tinubu has come to no harm thus far, or that the issuer of the edict is a person of little or no consequence in the scheme of things.

    Her reaction in the face of primal threat bespeaks her quiet grace and faith, in contradistinction to the cleric’s hysterical rant.

    “I am not afraid of death,” she said defiantly during a visit with Bauchi State Governor, Bala Mohammed.  “I want to say that I am too old to be afraid. If God has granted me more than 60 years on earth, I shouldn’t be afraid of death.”

    Read Also: First Lady seeks stiffer penalties for  kidnappers

    Governor Mohammed stands almost alone among influential Muslims in his ringing condemnation of the fatwa and its proponent, describing the whole thing as “a national embarrassment” and assuring the First Lady that its proponent would be punished.

    It is worse than a national embarrassment, Your Excellency.  It is an incitement to murder and a solicitation of murder.  And it is not the governor’s province to punish Idris Tenshi. He has no such power.  The power belongs in the office of the chief law officer of Bauchi State, the attorney-general. 

    Tenshi has reportedly apologized, but an apology for an offence of that enormity cannot be an indemnity against prosecution.  The lesson has to be taught that such conduct will not be tolerated.

    Karl Marx wrote somewhere – and I am paraphrasing – that a moribund society produces its own morbid gravediggers. There are already too many of this tribe in Nigeria: bandits, kidnappers, cultists, ritualists, herders, peddlers of fake medications – the whole desperate lot.

    To add to this catalogue those who claim a divine mandate to order the killing of fellow humans who believe differently or worship differently makes Nigeria a far more dangerous place still.

  • Divide and rule in senate

    Divide and rule in senate

    The senate has become a laboratory for divide and rule tactics. While the House of Representatives which passed the same 2024 national budget that the senate passed is enjoying tranquillity, the senate almost boiled over last week over the passage of that same budget. Of course, this column will not hold brief for either arm of the National Assembly which over the years passes perhaps the opaquest budget any country that claims to be practicing democracy, can pass.   

    But the fact is that the hullaballoo about padded budget is merely a subterfuge because every year the National Assembly determines what goes into the national budget, regardless of the protestations of the executive. And more so, Senator Abdul Ningi, who raised the alarm has recanted the claim, knowing that what himself and his colleagues engaged in this year, is not different from the mishmash of cutting and pasting, which the National Assembly has done over the years. He knows also that over the years, members of the National Assembly add some shameful subheads to the budget in the name of constituency project.

    So, nothing is different, except that the forces he represents are not comfortable with the leadership of the National Assembly residing in the south, just like the executive. The forces merely used the northern senators’ forum as a springboard to divide the senate, with budget-padding as the catalyst. Interestingly, the Northern Senators’ Forum is an amalgamation of senators from different political parties, and if he had succeeded in pooling the wool over the eyes of other senators, the group could have been working for the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), which is presently a minority in the senate, or other interests.  

    As espoused by political philosophers, divide and rule is a tactics used by a dominant power to maintain dominance over those it has control or wishes to have control over. It is used in politics, military and foreign policy to achieve the same purpose. In politics, the sovereign can use it to maintain control over the subjects, by promoting some over others, and engendering enmity and unbridled competition within the subjects. 

    Similar tactics can also be used in the military, to create doubts in the mind of the enemy over the loyalty of the commanders. The tactics through propaganda can also be employed in foreign policy, to weaken a military alliance, and gain advantage. The tactics of divide and rule has been used from time immemorial to gain advantage over opponents. For example, during the Nigerian-Biafra civil war, Gen. Gowon created 12 states out of the Eastern Region, to turn the minorities against the separatist agenda of Biafra.   

    Within the National Assembly, since 1999, the senate appears to be the laboratory for the practice of divide and rule, each time a southerner is elected as the senate president. The tactics was most effective in the senate, when the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) zoned the senate presidency to the southeast. Within eight years, the senate had a turnover of five presidents. The power fingered for that irregular turnover of senate presidents was President Olusegun Obasanjo, who allegedly was seeking for a senate president he could manipulate.

    But since President Bola Ahmed Tinubu supported the emergence Godswill Akpabio, which power is seeking to divide the senate, so Akpabio can be removed or weakened in the performance of his duties? There are various pointers: Hausa-Fulani oligarchic power, which wishes to regain the leadership of the National Assembly. The sympathizers of PDP, who are in All Progressives Congress (APC), teaming up with the members of the PDP. Or a coalition of various groups teaming up with those who lost out in the elections, to Akpabio, and even to PBAT, during the presidential election.

    As should be evident to senators (1999-2007), especially those from the southeast, who acquiesced to the incessant changes in the senate during the Obasanjo era, they were mere pawns in the hands of forces bent on dominating them. Employing divide and rule tactics, the forces were able to keep them in disarray and ensured that they were unable to exercise the enormous constitutional powers granted them by the 1999 constitution. Until they bonded and starred back at Obasanjo, they remained a pawn in President Obasanjo’s hand.

    The 10th senate is in similar quandary, even though the forces at play are different. While not holding brief for Akpabio, it is strange that while some people wanted to set the senate on the boil, the other arm of the National Assembly which passed the same budget was cool. I don’t believe that members of the House of Representatives would be smiling, if their colleagues in the senate took them for a ride, by padding the budget for their own benefit while they were left out.

    That is not the character of the National Assembly that Nigerians are carrying on their back since 1999. The two arms of the National Assembly operate on a quid pro quo basis, and nothing appears to have changed. Perhaps, the leadership of the southern senators have realized the power of unity, prompting their revitalization of the southern senators’ forum, as a counter foil to the northern senators’ forum, which Senator Ningi, tried to use to achieve his political agenda.

    Read Also: Senate condemns killing of Army personnel in Delta state

    Most likely, the forces around Akpabio, employed similar tactics of divide and rule to get the northern senators to renounce their leader, one after another, which eventually led to his capitulation. Seeing the handwriting on the wall, Senator Ningi, after his suspension for three months, also resigned his leadership of the Northern Senators’ Forum. Having failed in the ultimate plan, to destabilize the senate, and perhaps force a change in leadership, Senator Ningi has been recanting his assertion about the claims on the 2024 budget.

    He denied that he ever claimed there are two budgets, one made up of N25 trillion, and another N28 trillion. He denied alleging that the senators padded the budget, as if the national budget is a product of the senate alone. In solidarity, his collaborators in the senate are all owing up to benefiting from the constituency projects running into hundreds of millions, information they have always shied away from giving out.

    There is no doubt that the National Assembly members have minimal interest in the affairs of the down-trodden masses. A firm proof is the unlawful budgetary allocation they enjoy, in flagrant disobedience to the provision of the Third Schedule, Part N, of the 1999 constitution (as amended), which gifts the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission (RMAFC), the power to determine senators’ salaries and emoluments.

    Unfortunately, the power tussle in the senate has nothing to do with that abuse of the constitution. Obviously, Ningi, was merely pushing to foist a hegemonic interest.

  • Ningi: Uneasy calm after the storm

    Ningi: Uneasy calm after the storm

    Watchers of the budgetary process and its nuances ought to be forgiven for choosing to focus rather disproportionally on the computational, if not the utterly incomprehensible arithmetic, over Budget 2024 of the federal government now that some calm seems to have settled after the storm.

    Yet, much as the ‘snitching’ (for want of a better word) by a senator on his colleagues have become somewhat the central issue in the so-called budget padding saga, with the so-called breaches of the privilege of members in the upper legislative chamber and with it the bringing of the hallowed institution into disrepute becoming the dominant theme, there remains, in my view, no less troubling questions about the entire mess that speaks to the hypocrisy of a section of the nation’s elite and their Janus-face predilection; the opportunistic politics of ‘we’ versus ‘them’, the stoking of the same old divisions, the fault lines of north versus south.

    Yes, Senator Abdul Ningi was dead wrong when he insinuated at his BBC interview that the Senate – a body to which he belongs and which holds the power over the purse either tinkered or padded the budget. If that smacks of self-indictment, no less is his equally mischievous charge (could it be plain ignorance?), alleging the existence of a parallel budget which he claimed, is unknown to his sectional northern senators forum and perhaps the generality of the Nigerian population.

    Never mind the tepid disclaimer; could the senator truly be said to be speaking for himself alone? Yours truly remains unaware of any strident disclaimer of the grave charge that a budget duly passed by both houses of the parliament was designed in such a way as to inflict a ‘huge damage’ to the north! Yet, we move on!

    In other words; those weighty charges might be considered personal views to which the senator is eminently entitled; can we also say of his subsequent revelation at the same BBC interview, that the body, NSF actually paid a consultant to review the same budget as lacking their acquiescence?

    Beyond the noise and the hyperventilation over the so-called padding; this is where yours truly has had quite a bit of trouble comprehending! A consultant engaged by a forum of northern senators to review the national budget? Could the suspended senator, even as chair of the body, have acted without the concurrence of other members?

    And to what purpose might that be? To confirm, as insinuated by the senator, acting alone or at the behest of the NSF, ‘the huge damage’ done to the north and the country?

    Note the deliberate equation of ‘north’ with the country.

    Would the weaponisation of the budget instrument be tolerable in an already supercharged political environment?

    By the way, my understanding is that we are here dealing with a national budget that was not only presented by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu to the two houses of parliament in joint sitting but also in the full glare of television cameras as indeed a global audience. We heard stories and reports of different committees of the two chambers working on the document for weeks with defence sessions with ministries, departments and agencies (MDAs); the sitting of the harmonisation committee from where it was finally passed into both houses for adoption and subsequent assent by the president.

    So, where are the smoking guns? The patchwork of ill-digested proposals authored by bureaucrats that speaks more to an inherent poor capacity and incompetence than anything else? The squabbles about who gets the bigger pie among the disparate actors in the annual ritual sharing whatever is on the table?  And who are those casting the proverbial stones here?

    Seriously; at what point did Senator Ningi and his NSF consider the federal government’s Budget 2024 as being anti-north hence the need for their hired consultant to establish that exact degree to which it is? And if, as later revealed in the course of the brouhaha, that the distinguished Bauchi senator drew the attention of the senate president, Godswill Akpabio, to the concerns of the northern senators with the latter showing willingness to look into the matter on its merit, was it also part of the script that Senator Ningi would head for the BBC Hausa Service moments after assuring Akpabio that the final report of the ‘consultants’ would be availed him whenever it was ready?

    Did Ningi and his NSF also communicate their concerns with the Speaker of the House of Representatives, who incidentally is a fellow northerner?

    The whole affair strikes one as being far more sinister than the distinguished senator was willing to put out.

    All the same, we must thank Senator Ningi and his colleagues that one good thing has since come out of the development. We now have, if not entirely brand new, a revamped Southern Senators Forum, SSF not only to serve as counter-foil, but a forum to slug things out with their northern counterparts, whenever and if ever, things get to that! Clearly, if the unfolding development is any indication of the disdain with which some so-called northern senators hold the current leadership of the senate, it merely confirms what Nigerians already know of how politics continue to trump public service at a time the country is supposed to be yearning for fast-track development.

    Read Also: Budget padding: salient questions nobody is asking Ningi

    Is the storm then over? Of course, the mere capitulation of the distinguished senator and his subsequent rustication, far from being a happy ending, has only ended a chapter in what promises to be a running story. Most assuredly not; those powerful elements in the northern forum may have thrown the mouthy senator under the bus to save their skins; it certainly would be foolhardy for Godswill Akpabio’s leadership of the upper house to let down their guards. And so the distractions, as against real, effective governance, continue, perhaps until 2027!

    Which takes us to the matter with Budget 2024? Is the budget document perfect?

    Let me answer this way: there is no such thing as a perfect budget document. Not even in America where most Nigerians are only too eager to point as their model of best practices. Even the noise about the so-called padding is somewhat misplaced. Yes, Nigerians might want to know that America has, what in congressional parlance is called ‘earmarks’, money for projects that individual lawmakers slip into major congressional budget bills to cater to local issues. Moreover, the debate about whether those who possess the power of the purse also reserve the power to tinker with the elements is merely academic; it will remain so perhaps until kingdom come. What is important is for the process to be made more accessible and transparent and that every single kobo disbursed is made to deliver commensurate value to the citizen. Whether it is ‘zonal intervention projects’ or the more controversial issue of constituency projects over which members have not only drawn their swords but have left the country still bitterly divided, the key is for every interested Nigerian to be able to track how public funds are spent and to remove possible duplications.

    That to me is a far cry from the current mob culture of seeking to throw the baby out with the bath water. 

  • Labour wars

    Labour wars

    It’s mutual opportunism gone awry — the Labour Party (LP)-Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) rumble.  But the surprise is the fierce — if not the sudden — bust-up.

    Can you imagine: Julius Abure’s LP excoriating the seldom introspective Joe Ajaero, earlier drubbed by irate Imo partisans during Comrade Joe’s illicit foray into Owerri — an LP politician-at-heart, moonlighting as avid Labour unionist, but fobbing no one but himself?

    Or Ajaero’s NLC Political Commission firing the first shot — the voice of Jacob but the hands of Esau, as LP’s Obiorah Ifor alleged — counter-blasting its rather territorial Aluta guardian archangel, even calling out  Ajaero to quit his “rascality” as NLC president; and come vie as LP national chairman, if indeed, he loves LP more than its card-carrying members?

    So, the height-challenged Joe and the tall, lanky Julius now go toe-to-toe on the Labour boxing ring — like Anthony Joshua and Cameroonian Francis Ngannou?

    Who is David and who is Goliath in this fierce battle for the soul of Labour — or rather in the gambit of political smart Alecs using Labour’s name to make hay?

    Indeed, mutual opportunism always cops a sorry end — and this would appear yet another living proof.  But it might be morning yet on the Labour rumbling wars!

    How will all that impact workers, in these harsh economic times, when they need focused leaders to extract the best possible deals from the government and the private sector, on the virtual eve of sealing a new national minimum wage?

    But maybe the spine of organized Labour deserves the often distracted Joe Ajaero?  His often comical resort to unworkable strikes ought to have sparked instant rank-and-file rebuke, if not outright mutiny.

    But lo!  The Labour “mass” seems to suffer, rather gladly, Ajaero’s costly distractions. Their cross!  No else would carry it but themselves.

    Still, this smouldering LP/NLC tiff oozed out with both sides posturing on high value, no matter how pretentious.

    Read Also: Labour party disagrees with reps members on national convention

    The NLC Political Commission lobbed the first bomb — Julius Abure was running a one-man show: a one-man show birthing needless crises in LP; the holy LP, which cadres and members must be beyond reproach, as the proverbial Caesar’s wife!

    The NLC bombed Abure, decrying the LP national chair’s inability to “showcase the leadership qualities epitomized in the founding ideology of the Labour Party”.  That, it claims, makes him unfit for the position, yet he clings to it, thus triggering crises all round.

    Is Abure fairly docked for alleged sit-tight syndrome?  Only LP insiders can tell.  But pray, what’s LP’s “founding ideology”, as the NLC Political Commission claims?

    From Ondo’s Olusegun Mimiko, that first gifted LP its first high political office in the Ondo governorship (2009-2017), to Peter Obi, candidate for the clannish and faith-zealot tendencies of Nigerian politics, and unfazed shaman for the starry-eyed youth, LP’s practical “ideology” has been partisan whoredom.

    In-between elections, LP ghosts into a sepulchral quiet — only to burst into life during election seasons, cat-walking for hire, to the highest bidder!  It’s a growth area LP’s smart Alec leaders have milked all their hustling and whoring years.

    It was same under Dan Iwuanyanwu, LP pioneer national chair (2004-2014). 

    It has been the same under Julius Abure, the “comrade” that has hugged the capitalist Peter Obi with such beatitude, as if his chairmanship life depends on it.  It probably does!

    It probably would be the same in the post-Abure years, when Peter Obi would have moved on — he did from APGA and PDP, didn’t he: despite his “oath” to the late Emeka Odumegwu Ojukwu that he’d never leave APGA? — and LP, true to its “founding philosophy”, goes after the next partisan punters, to stay politically relevant.

    The NLC can huff and puff as it likes.  But LP isn’t about changing!

    For LP allegedly scorning its over-bearing control, the NLC sapped Abure with a sole administrator complex: “The sole administrator mentality of Mr. Abure,” the NLC roared, “has stood in the way of efforts by the NLC Political Commission to intervene and resolve the leadership crises in the Labour Party.”

    Again, only insiders could confirm or reject this charge. But might it be a case of madmen and specialists, to pun the title of one of Prof. Wole Soyinka’s popular plays?

    But Obiorah Ifor, LP’s national spokesperson since the ouster of Abayomi Arabambi — he of the Lamidi Apapa faction, bitterly feuding for the party’s soul — quickly dismissed any notion LP would be a sitting duck for NLC’s savage bazookas.

    Obiorah Ifor!  Since he took charge as LP national publicity secretary, he has always blazed away from the hips.  You don’t know what drives him, though: a clannish fealty to Peter Obi?  Or a rabid ideologue of LP’s rank opportunism during election seasons?

    Whatever drives him, the fiery Ifor hasn’t disappointed, with his staccato of return fire, since NLC opened the first front in the Labour war.

    He reminded the uppity NLC, should anyone suffer culpable amnesia:  “Labour Party has a life of its own, different from that of the Nigeria Labour Congress.” 

    Is that so, though?  Can the child, LP, be totally detached from his parent, NLC?

    He further dismissed NLC as a bundle of contradictions.  He opened a virtual can of worms in NLC-LP antipathy and alleged blackmail, reportedly dating back to 2014, giving Ajaero a free tutorial on drinking from the wise pool of the likes of Ayuba Waba (Ajaero’s predecessor) and Olaleye Quadri (former Trade Union Congress president),  on polite collaboration, as against Ajaero’s alleged crude domination.

    Then, the big gun: “This is an NLC which cannot think of calling a protest and sustaining it, in order to get the attention of the government for the interest of the workers.” 

    Ouch! — that hurts — for it underscores Ajaero’s strike-first-think-later habit — which he has deployed in four not-so-glorious strikes between 29 May 2023 and now. 

    Coming from inside Labour, that’s a sucker punch! Though it’s no secret that Ajaero’s rashness, coupled with his hare-brained politicking, may have hurt workers’ interest much more than it helped, such censure coming from inside Labour, is all the more nettling.

    But even more nettling, the Ifor rhetorical question: “Can the NLC of today in any way be compared to NLC of the then Hassan Sunmonu [the first NLC president, 1978- 1984], Adams Oshiomhole — charismatic and cerebral, though as physique-challenged as Ajaero — and a few others in the past?”

    Sour grapes?  Or searing fact?

    The NLC-LP rumble is yet another manifestation of the systemic void in the Nigerian political party system, which LP epitomizes, perhaps more than any other.

    But the double tragedy here is the tale of rampaging elephants.  When that happens, the grass underneath suffers. 

    Workers deserve far better than capitalist shamans spurring LP, at a gallop, for opportunistic power; or a wolf in sheep’s skin using NLC for personal power and glory.

    But then again, it’s the workers’ cross to lug — no one else’s.