The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Governance and palliatives

    Governance and palliatives

    Palliative.

    When that word entered the vocabulary of social discourse, and of news writing and reporting in Nigeria, I was not a little disquieted.

    For one thing, it is not easy on the tongue.  For another, it is not a headline word. Old-school editors back in the days before offset printing would have blue-pencilled it out of news copy reflexively and upbraided whoever cleared it for publication.

    Even in this digital age, editors concerned more with serving the public than taking advantage of the ease of formatting would hesitate to use it in a headline. They would look for a shorter, simpler, word.

    But Nigerians, right down to those inhabiting the remotest village, have come to acquire so much familiarity with the word that only the most pedantic of editors would now regard it as a red signal. 

    You hear it rendered in local and regional tonal variations in boardrooms and in the market square, the motor park, at festivals, at naming and burial ceremonies, and indeed wherever two or three Nigerians are gathered.  You hear it come off the lips of the old and the young and the very young, the well-schooled, the not-so-schooled, and the totally unschooled.

    I cannot with confidence dat   e its precise entry into our lexicon, but am almost prepared to assert that it graduated into a staple of social and political commentary in the time of former President Goodluck Jonathan.  

    These days, no discourse on the Nigerian condition passes muster unless it is perfused with details of palliatives currently on offer, the ones that preceded them, how they had been hijacked or misappropriated, and how they have on the whole failed to meet the ends for which they were designed.

    In whatever context, the Federal Government is the primary actor, with state governments playing a secondary role.  A visitor to this clime might well report to the audience back home that, in Nigeria, they are running a government by palliatives.

    “Social media” outlets, pardon the oxymoron, are awash in portrayals of the palliatives in theory and practice.   In one, masquerades, regarded in folk culture as creatures from the other world, are asking for their share of the palliatives being distributed or announced every passing day.

    They didn’t look famished and didn’t sound angry.  Perhaps that is the conduct their abode enjoins.  Still, it must be asked: What is going on there? Is it also riven by politics, propaganda, inflation, hoarding, profiteering, shortages, empty silos, epileptic exchange rates, and Boko Haram’s depredations?

    In another depiction, the national mood is set to the stirring tune and resonant cadences of Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” from Messiah.   Here are the opening lines in Pidgin English, riffed appropriately:

    I deh hungry/Me dey hungry/I dey hungry/I deeh hungry . . .

    Then, these lines, addressed directly to the president, the vice president, senators, ministers, governors, and the government:

    Belle dey worry me/Make you give me chop. . .  

    And then, the explosive clincher:

    We–dey/Hun–gry          

    The performance was the work of a professional or practiced amateur choir, their trained, voices ringing out loud and clear and touching the soul, as in the great Chorus, of which the rendition is a parody.

    No assemblage of hungry persons could have sung with such gusto, such vitality, and such vibrancy.  Nor was there the merest whiff of anger in their voices.  On the contrary, their voices radiated joy, ecstasy even, and contentment.  The voices did not reflect what is conveyed in daily discourse as anger.

    But the hunger out there is real enough, even if anecdotal.  The anger seems sporadic and, in part, engineered.  Still. It will not do to say that it is all a matter of perception. They need to be addressed with concrete, targeted, and well-delivered measures. For, as sociologists tell us, if a situation is perceived as real, it is real in its consequences.

    The authorities must start by asking the right questions.  What exactly is the problem, or combination of problems convulsing the polity?

    To a good many of our compatriots, these questions have a simple, one-word answer:  Tinubu.  If only President Bola Tinubu had installed the right people in his cabinet and executive agencies and pursued the right policies, the country would not have found itself in this parlous state, they insist.

    Their solution?  Tinubu should resign and make way for a more competent chief executive. They are silent as to who should replace him, and how that person should be chosen.

    Others are calling for a military coup to sweep Tinubu off the political platform and supplant the entire governing apparatus.  It is as if a cabinet shuffle with tanks will turn things around.

    Many of his appointees would not have passed the merit test, it is true.  They owe their jobs to political, regional, ethnic, and religious balancing.  But even if he had picked the ablest persons in the land, they would still not have made much difference in the nine months they have been in office.

    The problems have deep roots. 

    Just a few years after independence, the Balewa Government launched an Austerity Programme.  It was his answer to some of the very problems confronting the nation today.  The temper of the times was memorialized in a hit tune by the late high-life maestro, Victor Olaiya, and by other musicians. 

    The times are hard, they crooned.  There is no money in town, no jobs, prices are high, and everyone is yearning for money.

    At his first coming as Head of State, General Muhammadu Buhari inherited an economy driven to the brink of collapse by the depredations of the Shagari Administration.  Money and basic commodities were rationed; imports were controlled by a regime of licensing,

    Military President Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP) was advertised as the perfect answer to Nigeria’s political and economic problems.  On paper, it seemed to fit that bill.  In practice, however, it cemented the foundation of our present woes by turning the country into a laboratory for crackbrained experiments in economics and politics.

    Read Also: NEDC to distribute 300,000 bags of rice, others as palliatives

     It was he who introduced the two-tier exchange rate mechanism that enriched him and his cronies, bled the treasury and pauperized the general public. That mechanism is at work today in a more vicious form.  It was under his regime that banking became a racket, a proving ground for syndicated swindlers.

    President Olusegun Obasanjo came into office full of ideas and goodwill at home and abroad.  He believed, and many shared the belief, that he could move mountains.  He spoke the language of reform and, to his credit, transformed the broken telephony system, and gave public servants a living pension. 

    He got rid of public enterprises that were a drain on the nation’s finances. But they ended up, heavily discounted, in the pockets of the well-connected.  The purposes they served, however patchily, were lost to the public.

    More out of loyalty to his departed former deputy, General Shehu Musa Yar’Adua than from a sound assessment of his record and potential, he foisted the terminally ill Umar Musa Yar’Adua on the nation as president.  A cabal seized the space, and the nation drifted.

    Goodluck Jonathan, whom Obasanjo again foisted on the nation, was no improvement. He was called “clueless” so often that a visitor to these parts might have thought it was his middle name.  It was in his time, I think, that Nigeria slid down so precipitously on the International Misery Index that it came to be regarded as the world’s “poverty capital.”  Oil smuggling and oil importation intensified; national refining capacity collapsed.

    Buhari 2.0 made no pretence about managing the economy.  He simply got his obliging, or rather, conniving Central Bank governor, Godwin Emefiele, to print billions upon billions of Naira to keep the government running.  Potemkin rice plantations littered the countryside, of which the rice pyramids that sprang up overnight in Abuja and vanished just as suddenly were a product.

    The value of the Naira dropped steadily and forecasts of an exchange rate of N1000 to one U. S dollar that many dismissed as apocalyptic became a self-fulfilling prophecy.  Buhari’s so-called reform measures knocked the bottom out of the economy.

    To compound matters, as Boko Haram and murderous herders and freelance bandits made farming a dangerous occupation, harvests dwindled steadily, over the years, resulting in food shortages.

    The foregoing is the baleful bequest President Tinubu was handed nine months ago.

    After a slow start, he has launched policies and programs designed to turn adversity into advantage.  It is not going to happen overnight, and things may even get worse before they get better.  Policies and programmes are not self-executing.  They need to be implemented and monitored by competent, conscientious, and committed officials.

    To effect a lasting change in the nation’s fortunes, Tinubu needs cadres of such officials. He must not tolerate the fecklessness and lassitude that now parade some important corridors of power.                                                                                            

  • Minimum wedge

    Minimum wedge

    Since the value of the naira depreciated, this column has been clamouring for a new minimum wage for Nigerian workers, as it considers the present minimum wage unconscionable. For this writer, it is unimaginable that officials of federal and state governments in position of authority to affect a change in the nation’s minimum wage could go to church or mosque to ask for the mercy of God, when they are exceedingly merciless to the Nigerian workers, under their care.

    Even for a slave labourer, N30,000 a month, as wage, even before the present runaway inflationary pressure on goods and services is abysmally ridiculous. Now, with the value of the naira so badly depreciated, every genuine patriot in government and the private sector should contribute his or her best efforts to help the tripartite committee on minimum wage recommend a realistic new minimum wage, for necessary legislation.

    It is encouraging that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT) has inaugurated a 37-member tripartite committee on national minimum wage, led by Alhaji Bukar Goni Aji. The committee is made up of representatives of federal and state governments, the organized private sector and the labour unions. In his address presented by Vice President Kashim Shettima, PBAT said “The minimum wage represents the least amount of compensation an employee should receive for their labour, and as such, it should be rooted in social justice and equity.”

    This writer agrees. The National Minimum Wage Act of 1981 came into effect in response the charter of demands by the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) in 1980. As provided by the Act, the national minimum wage undergoes a review every five years, but as recent events have shown, five years is a long time considering the inflationary pressure on the price of goods and services. But sadly, some state governments have not paid the present N30,000 minimum wage, signed into law five years ago by former President Muhammadu Buhari.

    The committee which has commenced work recently conducted consultations across the six geopolitical zones. The demands at the zones, show wide disparity across them. While NLC in southwest demanded N794,000, the Trade Union Congress (TUC) demanded N447,000 per month. The organized labour in the northeast proposed N560,000 per month. From the north-central, the NLC demanded N709,000, while the TUC demanded N447,000. In the south-east, TUC proposed N447,000, while NLC proposed 540,000. The NLC proposed N850,000 and TUC N447,000 in the south-south region, while in the northwest, NLC wanted N480,000.

    From the presentations, it is clear that the NLC is aiming hire than the TUC, for a new minimum wage. On its part, few state governments showed any form of interest in the public hearing. The few present proposed between N60,000 and N70,000. That is a far cry from the demands of the labour unions. In their presentations, some of the labour unions argued that they are relying on the prices of goods and services in arriving at their proposals, while the government representatives claim to be proposing what the governments can pay.

    Again, while the proposal by the TUC appears to be consistent across the geopolitical zones, the NLC made divergent proposals across the zones. The state governments which boycotted the sitting may be hoping that the farther they are from the sitting, the more likely they can wish away the trouble that comes with wage review. Whatever caused the boycott, it is important that the state governments participate actively in the negotiation for a new national minimum wage in obedience to the provisions of the labour law.

    Read Also: States reject Labour’s new minimum wage demands

    The NLC and TUC should collaborate in the spirit of collective bargaining if they wish to have a speedy resolution of a new minimum wage to be recommended to the executive which will in it turn send an executive bill to the National Assembly for enactment into law. Unfortunately, the NLC was looking at the short-run, when its president Comrade Joe Ajaero, justified going it alone, when he called the recent two-day strike action. Of course there is strength in unity.

    That is the principle behind collective bargaining, which is enshrined in the labour laws, and which is why the NLC and TUC have the right to bargain on behalf of their affiliate unions. To achieve a speedy determination of a realistic wage for Nigerian workers, NLC and TUC should propose a realistic new wage in the overall interest of Nigerian workers. When Comrade Ajaero was bluffing that it is only his national executive committee that he listens to, it may mean he and other leaders are not giving that organ a quality advice.

    Perhaps that explains why the labour union has made strike its best option, to express angst over the deplorable economic crisis inherited by the PBAT administration. While it is the responsibility of the present administration to cure the ills afflicting the national economy, the expectations from the administration should be situated in a historical contest. Again, while it is the duty of the labour leaders to push for a better working condition for its members, it should also guide their members to achieve the most enduring benefit.

    What this column expects from the labour leaders is to examine the economic programs of the new government: its short, medium and long term plans for the national economy. And depending on their findings, engage the government, on how to ameliorate its impact on the workers. Restructuring the national economy, and getting it to rebound in the long run is more important than the immediate gains workers can get from arm-twisting the government, through strike actions, at vulnerable periods like now.

    To arrive at a minimum wage, the three parties involved in the negotiation must work hard to gain each other’s confidence. If any of the three parties choose to become a wedge in the process, enacting a new minimum wage would become a tiresome process. And while the parties bicker, the workers suffer. Luckily, PBAT has reiterated his desire to have a new minimum wage, within the next month. This column hopes that the governors are also enthusiastic about paying workers a living wage as the president has enthused.

    The labour unions must also help themselves by making realistic offers. The figures from the public hearings are not realistic, considering the economic health of our dear country. While it is true that the politicians are criminally enriching themselves, the civil servants cannot rely on such a misnomer to fix their own wages, if they can. Instead of joining the league of sinners, they should rather work and pray for the sinners to repent. The private sector hopefully will as usual be the least problematic wedge in arriving at a new minimum wage.

    The negotiation of a new national minimum wage deserves minimum wedge, as the nation will become healthier, with a new minimum wage.

  • Like cement, like rice?

    Like cement, like rice?

    Trust Peter Obi — perhaps Nigeria’s foremost political chichidodo — to mock, with relish, the Ukraine grains (yes: “war-torn” Ukraine) to North East Nigeria. 

    That was a World Food Programme (WFP) though, under the aegis of the United Nations. Boko Haram may have been degraded.  But  its war pestilence endures: hence the WFP donation to that war-weary, war-crippled, vast corridor.

    Still, such stunning reach for base emotions suits Holy Gregrory just fine, as it riles up his unthinking mob, ever hooked on empty but heady sensations.

    Like that Ghana bird that loathes human wastes but is hooked on maggots,  public rot — real, imagined or outright contrived — feeds Obi’s immaculate political papacy. 

    That’s why he would whip up the Ukraine grain to trumpet “hunger in the land”; and sneer at the tragedy of the Customs rice stampede in Lagos, to home in on the grand paradox of “war-torn” Ukraine “feeding” peacetime Nigeria!

    Sacred Peter is wired that way — the chichidodo that hates faeces but craves maggots!

    Yet, Nigeria suffers no food scarcity, though it also hugs the harsh paradox of ultra-high food prices.  The question is why?

    Indeed, despite the security challenges that threaten the food security gains of the Muhammadu Buhari years — even before that government exited — there is no famine. 

    Today, Nigeria is Africa’s No. 1 producer of rice: which explains the post-2015 spur of rice mills nationwide — no less than 199 mills, as at January 2024.

    By 2020, Nigeria produced eight million metric tonnes (MT) of paddy rice (up from three million MT)  — more than half of Africa’s average of 14.6 million tonnes. 

    In five short years (2015-2020), Nigeria overtook Egypt, hitherto Africa’s No. 1, according to Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) statistics.

    With 59 million MT, Nigeria is also the world’s No. 1 producer of cassava: 20 per cent, which means one of every five tubers globally, according to FAO statistics in 2021.

    Rice and cassava are only poster-boy symbols for other grains and tubers, areas in which Nigeria made great strides during the Buhari years — feats the Tinubu order is anxious to consolidate and surpass, especially in agricultural processing to birth jobs.

    But it’s no uhuru yet on food security. 

    Even as Africa’s rice No. 1, and the world’s No. 13, Nigeria was still Africa’s top rice importer, though imports progressively plummeted, from 2015: 2014 (1.24 million MT); 2015 (244, 131 MT); 2016 (58, 260 MT) — just as China: No. 1 rice producer globally but also No. 1 global importer of the grain.

    There are even newer worries on new food challenges, via a report widely reported in the media on March 8.

    A caution from Cadre Harmonise, a global food security monitoring ally of FAO, has warned that no less than 31 million Nigerians could face some food crises between June and August; aside from 24.7 million others, already in it, from this current March stretching to May.

    Though the projection talks of 26 states, the epicentres are clear: Adamawa (1.1 million), Borno (2.1 million), Yobe (1.5 million) — all near-prostrate after the Boko Haram plague.

    Also Sokoto and Zamfara states in the North West — vortex of banditry and kidnapping — would be heavily impacted.

    So, the worst impacted areas lug heavy insecurity burdens: the large swaths of the North East (remnants of Boko Haram), and the banditry-prone North West.

    That gives a clear direction to the Tinubu government on where to train its big guns to wipe out these violent felons.  It also validates the WFP wisdom of gifting the North East timely Ukraine grains.

    Read Also: Cement manufacturers declare N710b profit

    Still, imagine if all of these had happened pre-2015, with Nigeria growing just over three million MT of paddy rice! 

    Imagine if Russia had invaded Ukraine in 2015, not 2022: starting a war that imperilled Ukraine, with its global grain basket!

    Nigeria, it must be stated, dodged that grain bullet, thanks to the Buhari-era agricultural activism, with its whoop of “grow what you eat and eat what you grow!” 

    What earns credit for that push was the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) Anchor Borrowers Scheme (ABS).  Now, from everyone is the maniacal condemnation of  the “corruption” that allegedly rocked that scheme — no crime. 

    But blowing your top over sharp practices — by all means! — but turning coy over clear triumphs, from that same process, is grand metaphor for the grand corruption of fairness.  That’s the mother of all corruption — of values! 

    Unfortunately, that’s typically Nigerian: embellish failures; tamp down triumphs, and cry in fashionable distress like lost hyenas!

    But if you don’t track success as robustly as you track failure, how do you accurately gauge your progress and build on them? 

    That’s the prime challenge before the Tinubu order, with many of its prime ministers developing a blame-game complex that could surely derail their focus on consolidating the good of the PMB era, while correcting the bad.

    Still, the crux of the message here is neither flaying this new order jeremiad, nor rallying for the ancien regime.

    It is rather to warn against the emergent Nigerian local rice industry going the way of cement: a few Oligarchs entrenching selves and fixing prices so ridiculous local rice may well be costlier than imported brands — pretty much the cement story!

    The time to crush such a tendency is now, before the folks involved get too comfy. Besides, while both rice (food) and cement (shelter) are basic human needs, one is more basic than the other — and rice anchors the food demand of the common folks.

    Indeed, the evolution of the cement market, with its perpetual high ex-factory prices, is intriguing.

    It dawned with the halcyon days of imported cement powder to be locally bagged.  Then, the roar for local production, since limestone — cement’s main raw material — nestles in huge quantities in Nigeria’s bowels: North, West or East.  Later, the admirable move to localize the industry. 

    But lo!  Cement was a buyer bargain when most of it was imported, with few local makers; but a clear buyer nightmare, as an entrenched local industry, with even many of the big boys branching out to establish plants in other African countries!

    Howzat? — to borrow that popular phrase of the game of cricket!

    While not acting as disincentive to new investments, the Tinubu government should move fast to sanitize the rice market, while building on the agricultural strides of the Buhari years, before rice acquires the notoriety of irrational cement prices.

    By the way, that should also be the mindset to approach the fuel market, now that Nigeria stands on the cusp of local refining of petroleum products. 

    Cement is such a prime bad example for local capacity.  No other emergent market should follow that self-destruct path.

  • As they prepare to write a new constitution

    As they prepare to write a new constitution

    The National Assembly, relying on a provision in the 1999 Constitution whose legitimacy is widely disputed, is set to embark on yet another attempt to produce a new constitution for Nigeria.

    Previous attempts by former leaders, from Muhammadu Buhari in his first and second coming, to Ibrahim Babangida, Abdulsalami Abubakar, Olusegun Obasanjo, and Goodluck Jonathan, to change the Basic Law produced minimal changes or ended in futility. They all sprang from questionable motives.

    The extant constitution, foisted on the nation by General Abubakar, was kept closely guarded              until it came into operation in 1999.  It came so freighted with misimpressions of the nation’s problems, culture, needs, and egregious drafting errors, that there have been loud and insistent calls for its abrogation and replacement.

    Perhaps the best effort by the House of Representatives in addressing that need occurred in 2012-2013.  But the present legislature must resist every effort to follow the path trod then. 

    Reviewing that path, House Deputy Speaker, Emeka Ihedioha and chair of the review committee, was all over the place congratulating himself and his colleagues on executing what by his reckoning was one of the rarest political feats ever wrought in this clime.

    “We have kept faith with Nigerians,” he proclaimed, in an article detailing the exertions the House of Representatives put itself through in its self-serving and utterly misconceived task of fashioning a new Constitution for Nigeria (ThisDay, April 19, 2013).

    He recalled how, on December 10, 2012, all 360 members of the House fanned out across the country to their constituencies to stage town hall meetings at which various “stakeholders” deliberated on a 43-item template of issues they would like to see amended in the 1999 Constitution.

    Discussions at the sessions were not merely free and robust, Ihedioha wrote, they were resoundingly “participatory.” Thereafter, votes were taken and recorded in full view of all the participants. Each member of the House then presented a report, incorporating voting results from his or her constituency and backed by video evidence, to the secretariat of the ad hoc Committee on the Review of the Constitution.

    The reports were then deposited at the secretariat of the Constitution Review Committee, which again invited representatives of “stakeholders” to join with its staffers to collate the results.

    According to Ihedioha, the outcome, presented to the House of Representatives the previous week, categorically represented “the voice” of the Nigerian people regarding what changes they would like to see in an amended constitution.

    The process was nothing of the sort. In conception and execution, it is as incurably flawed as the 1999 Constitution it was supposed to modify. It is certainly not an improvement.

    What the nation needed then and needs today is not a trainload of amendments to a constitution that is so shot through with errors and omissions, and so constricted in its underlying assumptions, that it cannot serve as a useful guide for resolving the conflicts convulsing the country.

    The people had no hand in preparing the agenda. They took no part in designing the “43-item template” that constituted the substance of discourse – assuming it is not a case of unnecessary dignification to call what took place a “discourse.”

    Those whom House members railroaded from their constituencies into attending the town meetings were for the most part self-selected or induced by the prospect of free food and drinks and gifts the Honourable Visitor from Abuja was expected to provide. In no sense could they be said to represent the political tendencies or shades of opinion in their constituencies, much less in the country.

    There was no independent verification of the “collation” that followed each town meeting. The House member who staged the meeting and had a vested interest in showing that it was a “robust” grassroots deliberative forum, the kind of which Nigeria had never witnessed, was responsible for the “collation.”  The “video evidence” presented to authenticate the proceedings showed, if anything, that they were at bottom a mockery.

    Or “a sham and a monumental failure,” as High Chief Rita Lori-Ogbebor, the influential minority-rights activist called it, in a withering critique (ThisDay, November 13, 2012) of the town meeting held in her Delta State constituency of Warri. The exercise, she said, was “nothing more than a ploy to rubber stamp the selfish agenda of those who organized it.”

    The Warri Town Hall meeting took place the day President Goodluck Jonathan was visiting for the birthday celebrations of the televangelist, Ayo Oristsejafor.  Scheduled to start at 9 a.m. it did not begin until 4 p.m. By then, many of those who had gathered for the event had left.

    Only one minute was allowed for indicating “yes” or “no” to 43 questions on the template. That was the sum total of the “discussions.”

    But even where they were better organized, one cannot term them “consultations.” Asking members of the audience to answer “yes” or “no” to the questions on the template cannot be called “consultations” without doing great violence to language. Nor can it be honestly claimed that the outcome represented the “voice” of the people.

    What a good-faith exercise requires is a forum at which persons elected for the purpose of re-writing the constitution meet over a period of time to deliberate, no options foreclosed, on a wide range of significant national issues in a spirit of give-and-take, and come up with a document reflects a broad national consensus on which a healthier union can be founded.

    One of the issues that have been convulsing Nigeria is that federalism – the bedrock principle on which the nation was established — has over the years been abandoned, to the point that Nigeria today is more or less a centrally administered state.

    The so-called public hearings evaded the problem altogether, or sought to perpetuate it.

    One of the items on their template required the audience to indicate by yes or no whether the electoral commissions in the states should be abolished, leaving it to the Independent National Electoral Commission to conduct all polls. 

    No one desirous of restoring true federalism would ask a question like that.

    And in Lagos State of all places, a majority of attendees – the very people who stand to lose the most – reportedly voted to deny federal funds to local governments allegedly created outside the framework of the1999 Constitution.

    That outcome seems wildly implausible.

    The more fundamental question was, and remains, whether Kano State, which allegedly has roughly the same population as Lagos State, should have three times as many local governments as Lagos State, and three times as many representatives in the lower House of the National Assembly.

    The foregoing, in sum, was the process Emeka Ihedioha and his colleagues in the House of Representatives advertised as a great breakthrough. This was the doom-laden product they wanted Nigerians to accept as an unprecedented act of keeping faith with the public. 

    A re-structured federation, based on a new constitution truly warranted by the preface “We, the People,” has been the recurrent demand of recent times.  Toward this end, it has

    been proposed  that the six so-called geo-political zones first canvassed at the Constitutional Conference convened by General Sani Abacha be recognized as the federating units. 

     But it should be remembered that the Conference was confected as a way of avoiding coming to terms with the problems arising from the annulled 1993 presidential election.  Besides, if implemented, it would for the most part create six smaller versions of Nigeria, reproducing in the smaller units the very problems it was designed to solve. 

    Read Also: Oronsaye report: Labour cautions Fed Govt against job loss

     At any rate, that is what is most likely to happen if the dozens of ethnic nationalities inhabiting Niger State, Kogi, Kwara, Benue, Nassarawa, and Plateau, all in the Northwest Zone, are corralled into a federating unit?

     Creating yet more states, it has also been urged, is the best answer to Nigeria’s problems.  Most of the existing states are barely viable, and creating more will only strengthen the centre.  Besides, even if every city in Nigeria were constituted into a state, there would still be elements within it demanding a separate state of their own.

     The structure most likely to make for the greatest happiness of the greatest number of Nigerians, as I see it, is one in which state boundaries would be coterminous with ethnic and linguistic categories.

     Some denounce such an arrangement as a surrender to what they call “primordial instincts.”    The departed eminent political scientist Claude Ake, and one of the most cosmopolitan Nigerians ever, saw it differently. 

     Calling such an arrangement “ethnonationalism,’’ he argued that it provides a people a chance            “to affirm their humanity against the forces of homogenization, and to claim a social space and a cultural milieu in which they can feel at home, assert their cultural identity and self-determination for their ethnicity or nationality.”

    Any restructuring that ignores this fundamental truth can only perpetuate the agonies Nigeria’s nationalities.

  • Nigeria on the move

    Nigeria on the move

    Although it might seem premature to describe the silent war going on in the country as akin to ‘revolution’, there are sufficient signs to suggest that our much-abused country is set on an irreversible trajectory.  Whether these signpost a new dawn in the wings is however a different matter; in a country where the not so silent majority are used to picking the wrong battles, where supposed opinion leaders are the first to misinform with a view to manipulate, any suggestion of ‘progress’ in the current circumstance might be dubbed ‘satanic’.

    What is incontrovertible is that the old order, increasingly enfeebled, have done little else than gawk in horror at the pace at which the changes are taking place. Of course, they do not consider the unfolding scenario as being funny – and that is understandable. But much as it might seem logical to expect resistance particularly in a climate enabled by ignorance and a horrendous bureaucratic superstructure, only in recent days we have seen anger and bile from the camp of those opposed to everything that the Tinubu administration represents rise to such levels as to trigger alarms.

    Sure, a tactical battle may have been won when President Bola Tinubu terminated the iniquitous regime of fuel subsidy on May 29, 2023. But so has resistance has been no less relentless; and that is even long after the more enlightened segments of the population have come to agree that the controversial fuel subsidy had to go in the light of national imperatives. And so when the government is not being accused of being utterly insensitive, it is charged with not doing enough to tame the monstrous inflationary spiral that attenuated it. Even the palliatives rolled out by the government were dubbed as too late and perhaps too little. For a government that cannot seem to do right in the eyes of its sworn enemies, even the logical consequences of the subsidy removal were held aloft as the surest evidence of how ill-prepared it is for governance, proof of the administration’s whimsical impulsive, if not entirely show-boat proclivities.

    Thou shall know the truth…and that truth shall set you free – so says the Holy Writ.

    In our peculiar circumstance, a good number of Nigerians would appear either too locked up in their self-curated prisons of prejudices or boxed into some narrow ideological alleys to understand either the import or the meaning of truth. For far from the dreary balance sheets painted by those for whom the measures essentially came to collective hunger and its cost-of-living correlates, the measures which the government have undertaken, although inevitable, could not have been any less courageous or revolutionary.  If anything, they underlie the need to re-set the political economy, to redirect it from the current ruinous path of entitlement to a more responsible path. After all, public education and health continues to enjoy robust subsidies, far more than the average citizen would care to admit.

    Understandably, the traditional, but nonetheless superficial argument was that the N3tn budgeted for subsidy, say from June 2022 to June 2023, was certainly wasteful; and that it would deliver far more public good than the petrol tanks of the estimated 11,605,207 vehicles on Nigeria’s roads. Again, it bears emphasis that the subsidy debate is far more nuanced; certainly more complex, than is usually put out by the government.

    Yes, it is about the political economy, the patently retrogressive pricing mechanism under which the more affluent gets to enjoy more of the subsidy and with this the massive diversion of resources that would otherwise have been deployed to provide critical infrastructure. More importantly, it is about the value Nigerians place on current consumption and its long term sustainability, particularly when the resource in question is a wasting one. While the measure would seem ordinarily revolutionary in that context, Nigerians should be able to appreciate why those involved in the N3trilion business will be hard pressed to give up without a fight! 

    Talk of the administration’s many battles; a new battle is also being waged ferociously at the monetary governance front with Olayemi Cardoso leading the charge. First, attention had to be turned to the kalo-kalo business that the forex market had become. A market where a supposedly tiny segment said to represent a paltry five percent would not only call the shots but have grown to service the peccadilloes of the privileged and the highly connected. As far as Cardoso’s apex bank was concerned, the market and with it the gross distortions they brought, had to go so that a semblance of order could return. And so without as much as firing a single shot, Cardoso announced the unification of all segments of the forex market, the result of which saw the naira not only reeling but yet to recover.

    While that was supposed to be bad business for the tiny segment that hawked currencies like one would oranges in street corners, it has become something of a casus belli. And while the result, although predictable, has been somewhat catastrophic for our beloved naira, only few are willing to understand that the CBN does not print the dollar notes and that what the apex bank had done is to level the playing ground for all classes of players. And so it became something of a call to arms by just about everyone with an axe to grind with the Tinubu administration. Manufacturers and their unending cycle of forex dependence; importers and their penchant to cut corners, speculators and all manners of players banded together in a collective outrage at what is supposed to be a ‘killer’ policy – the same players who only a while ago confessed that the so-called official market was pure fiction and that the black market was where things happen.

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    Lest I forget, the undertakers: the banks. Many of them, by the way, have long perfected the art of robbing Peter to further rob Paul; imagine all of them pooling their voices in some feigned anger at what these mean for business, when in truth, they are mourning the interment of their infrastructure of easy money!

    Unfortunately, that is not the only fight that Cardoso and company would have to fight to win. Cleaning the apex bank of the Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) of image that Godwin Emefiele and company had foisted on the bank, particularly the odious N30 trillion Ways and Means advances unleashed in the former administration’s moments of financial brigandage is another top priority. And so is the subversion of every rule of modern banking by the regulator under an assumed national exigency. Yours truly refers here to those dubious interventions that reduced the apex bank to a lender of the first resort! And the riddle: the circumstances surrounding the brazen looting – allegedly done under the klieg light of CCTV cameras – of $6 million cash from the vaults of the apex bank by minders of the national treasury.

    Like Mr President his principal, Cardoso needs our prayers to win against these forces massed in battle.

  • Rail, o compatriots

    Rail, o compatriots

    For President Bola Tinubu, the inauguration of the Lagos Red Rail, on February 29, was a tri-triumph: an iron will that won’t be bent, a clear vision that won’t be smashed, a soaring dream that won’t be downed — no matter how hard others tried.

    “I am pleased to declare to you that the momentum of greatness we kick-started a quarter of a century ago has become an unstoppable reality,” he gushed.  “It’s not a crime to dream big.  Just stay focused and stay on course …”

    The PDP Abuja powers actually thought it was a crime — to be crushed with vicious federal might.  President Olusegun Obasanjo, flexing, bristling, rippling and preening, would share his rail right-of-way glory with nobody!  Lagos had better forget that rail pipe dream, or else …

    That was the titanic struggle for Lagos urban rail — the audacity of a federalist governor that dared to dream; dreams that must die as long as the overlords lived!

    Yet, that dream has lived, even if those powers have lived to see its bloom, in contrast to the inevitable wilt of own threats and muscle-flexing! 

    Tinubu, the underdog of Lagos in 2003, just returned in triumph to actualize his Lagos rail dream as president in 2024 — and in tough times too, that proclaim rail as central to any economic revamp.

    Call it the triumph of brain over brawn.  It’s the supreme spice of history! 

    Still, Obasanjo wasn’t the only federal czar against rail liberalization, even if he would blow an opportunity for redemption, though his government cobbled together a comprehensive national rail development road map, late in his second term: 2006.

    President Muhammadu Buhari, who like Obasanjo was military Head of State before serving two terms as elected president (2015-2023), grabbed that redemptive chance.

    Major Gen. Buhari got fairly docked for junking the Lagos Metroline rail project — the vision of Alhaji Lateef Jakande, the 2nd Republic iconic Lagos governor.

    But it was President Buhari, with Rotimi Amaechi, his rail czar, that gave rail its stunning rebirth.  Buhari went after rail — and Amaechi sure was walking the talk! — with such a harried hurry that branded fleeting time enemy No. 1: which indeed it was. 

    Ironically, Buhari latched onto Obasanjo’s national rail master plan for own rail redemption, though he traded his old military command mindset with a liberal rail temper, that hugged federal-states rail corridor-sharing.

    That suited Lagos just fine.  But for former Governor Akinwunmi Ambode that somewhat froze the Mile 2-Orile-Lagos Marina Blue Line corridor for four years, the Blue Rail could perhaps have come on stream during his tenure (2015-2019).

    With Amaechi bursting to and fro to secure the Lagos end of the Lagos-Ibadan standard-gauge rail, to get the Lagos-Ibadan section of the Lagos-Kano rail ready before the 2019 elections, it was rail business unusual! 

    Ambode’s successor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, somewhat cottoned onto Amaechi’s zeal — and born, in record time, was the 37-km Agbado-Oyingbo Red Rail corridor, co-sharing tracks with the Lagos-Ibadan rail, now set to tame the soaring cost of doing business along that long corridor — much the same as the Blue Line has been doing, at its own much shorter Lagos Marina-Mile 2 end.

    Imagine what routinized urban rail would have meant to petrol subsidy removal: neutering cost-push inflation from soaring transportation costs, smothering today’s soar-away inflation on food, arresting the mass hunger in the land?

    Imagine the smooth take-off of Lagos rail in, say, 2007, without having the federal arid bedlam of clinging to the rail right of way — a ferocious dog in a manger that can’t dream but won’t allow sub-nationals who can?

    Imagine other states following the Lagos example?  Imagine what difference penetrating rail would have done today to Nigeria’s struggling real sector?

    If only blind central powers of Abuja had allowed right things done at right times!

    Which brings the matter to the sweet myth that Buhari handed over an economy that was a “dead horse standing” — the hysteria now echoed by some Tinubu administration prime voices, to fend off momentary pressure from taunting opposition.

    A “dead horse standing” was original to Anambra Governor, Prof. Chukwuma Soludo, a former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), under Presidents Obasanjo and Umaru Musa Yar’Adua (God bless his sweet soul!).

    In a Channels TV video clip that went viral, Soludo, renowned professor of Economics, cooed and crowed, regaling how his five-year stint at CBN brought forth hitherto unknown monetary policy glories — with foreign reserves thundering, the dollar parity to the Naira crashing and sundry glad tidings, from the government’s banker.

    He now juxtaposed the activist tenure of the well-lampooned Godwin Emefiele, knocking it for contesting the fiscal space with the Federal Government, granting reckless ways-and-means facilities and dubbing that era a “failure” — which could well have been.  That has prompted the mass singsong: Buhari was a total failure.

    Still, the monetarist purity of the Soludo years: how many additional kilometres of highways nationwide did it avail the fiscal authorities?  How many extra kilometres of rail?  How did it revamp agriculture and boost food security?  How many old refineries did it fix; and new ones, built?

    Yet, the “failed” Buhari years accounted for the 2nd Niger Bridge, the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway, the Loko-Oweto Bridge, the Lagos-Ibadan standard gauge rail, the Dangote Refinery, which offered the Tinubu government the swagger to remove fuel subsidy, the raft of roads and bridges in marshy land, which, when completed, will link oil-rich Bonny to the Rivers mainland for the first time; and of course, rare agricultural strides that thrust Nigeria from “nowhere” to be Africa’s No. 1 rice cultivator, overtaking Egypt in five short years!

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    Now, if infrastructure is the spur of the economy, how can a Buhari government that doubled infrastructure to GDP ratio (according to the government’s exit stats) from 1:5 to 2:5, in ultra-lean times, be a total economic “failure”; but one that flaunted brilliant books, with hardly a dent on infrastructure, in times of robust earnings, a rousing economic success?

    Is that claim itself not a severe contradiction in terms?  Or the economists are just having fun, beatified in their “leisure of the theory class” — as Palladium, The Nation on Sunday back-page columnist, dismissed the Soludo Strategic Agenda for the Naira of 2007?

    The idea here is not to rubbish anyone — that would be rude and uncouth.

    It’s rather to remind the Tinubu administration to re-angle own narratives from 2015.  De-coupling Tinubu from the Buhari government is, at best, short-term cold comfort.  At worst, it’s strategic disaster: for the administration would have failed to show the salvage mission started in 2015, after the umpteenth PDP mess that lasted 16 years.

    That would give the arch-wreckers of yesterday — who now rail and screech more than anyone at the gargoyle their centralist stonewalling created — the delusion that they could be the arch-saviours of tomorrow.

  • Southeast rising

    Southeast rising

    At long last, the much awaited 188MW Geometric Power Plant in Aba, Abia State, has become a reality. Thanks to the doggedness of Professor Barth Nnaji and his team who kept pushing despite many challenges. Even for bystanders, it has been a tortious marathon race, for the past two decades, from conception to reality. Many are now pointing at that power generation and distribution model, as the way out of the electricity crisis that Nigeria is facing. This column agrees with that postulation. 

    According to an analyst, the 188MW power plant is programmed to generate approximately 135,360,000 kWh of electricity per month, which at roughly 500 kWh per household would serve about 270,720 households. According to Professor Nnaji, the choice of Aba for the power plant was deliberate, considering the manufacturing potentials of the city. No doubt, Aba is a preeminent industrial centre in the Southeast and leads in leather works and garment production in Nigeria, and its products are easily passed off as made in Italy.

    So, the provision of permanent power could turn Aba to the industrial hub of the southeast and even parts of south-south considering its proximity to Rivers State.

    No doubt, the shortage of electricity is the greatest impediment to the economic prosperity of Nigeria. With the entire country sharing about 4,886.40 MW of electricity last year, which periodically fluctuated to less than 2000 MW, and zero, when the national grid collapses, as it often does, the Aba model is the way to go. The 188 MW serves a fenced off area, encompassing industrial and residential areas.

    The Geometric Power Plant also has its dedicated gas pipeline of 27km, and may not suffer the debilitating gas supply challenges that have made a mockery of the several power plants initiated during the regime of President Olusegun Obasanjo in the Niger Delta area. So, the plant generates, and distributes to end use consumers. That solves the present challenges across the country, where power generation and distribution companies are perpetually quarrelling over who is responsible for the crisis in the electricity sector across the country.

    While the generating companies (Gencos) claim they generated about 14000 MW, the distribution companies (discos) distribute about 4000 MW, with part of the problem attributable to the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), which owns the national grid that collapses regularly. The Geometric Power Plant has its own localized distribution wires, cables, poles, meters and transformers. So, the problem associated with vandalized transmission lines across the vast unchartered Nigerian forests is solved with the localized transmission lines.

    This column has for years called for the decentralization of the transmission line, otherwise called the national grid. According to Punch, the national grid collapsed 46 times in six years. And most of the times, the reason given is that vandals have tampered with the line in difficult terrains. This column reiterates that the grid should be regionalized, so that interventions can be quicker and consequences of collapse reduced, to the affected areas.

    Of course, there is the problem associated with the existing contracts between the federal government and the existing discos, which seem to have covered the entire country, save for few exceptions like the fenced up area reserved for the Geometric Power Plant. Perhaps while taking steps to untangle the contracts in a way agreeable to both parties, to starve a long drawn legal battle, the ministry of justice should advice on ways to create more fenced up areas for other investors.

    Notably, the Gencos have breached many clauses in their agreement, and the 10-year initial privatization period has expired. There is also the paucity of investors willing to invest the huge resources required by the power plants and distribution networks to be efficient. One of the reasons for the disinterest by investors is the tight control of the tariff by the federal government agency, the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC). That leaves Nigeria is a difficult position.

    And because of the economic impacts of the removal of petroleum subsidy and the deregulation of exchange rate, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s administration is unwilling to yield to cost-reflective electricity tariff. The administration is in a difficult situation, because without allowing the discos to charge cost-reflective tariff, investors would not invest to upgrade the facilities. On its own, the federal government cannot raise the capital required, to buy off the investors and upgrade the infrastructure required for efficient power supply.  

    The way out may therefore be to fence off more commercial centres and high-brow areas, where users can pay cost reflective tariffs, and hand them over to investors willing to go the way of Geometric Power Plant, in terms of upgrading the facilities, and charging commercial tariffs. After all, the discos are already operating what they call dedicated lines, but which are very expensive to access, because the customers are few and scattered.

    But with residents of some highbrow arears already getting regular power supply for which they pay higher tariffs, this column believes a lot of such possibilities exist to be tapped into. Of course, with many clusters making an alternative arrangement away from the Gencos, discos and TCN, the nation will be the better for it. And if there is improvement in the economy and inflation is tamed, the subsidy regime in the electricity sector can also be removed so that investors would have the confidence to come into the sector with their investments.

    Also, on their part, the discos, with the support of the federal and state governments can concession some of their concession arears to private equity investors, where the model of Geometric Power Plant can be replicated. After all, it makes neither commercial nor common sense for Discos to hold onto large area where they are hamstrung to apply commercial tariffs because of regulations by NERC. So, where possible they can parcel out part of what they hold to other investors, and collaborate to make better returns on their investments.

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    Hopefully, the southeast would tap into the Geometric Power model, for the economic renaissance of the region, as promoted by vice president, Kashim Shettima, who represented PBAT at the commissioning of the power plant recently. Governor Peter Mbah of Enugu State, who signed the Enugu State Electricity Bill into law last September, has promised to play in the generation, transmission, and distribution segments of the market. We await his style of play.

    Luckily for Abia State, they now have Governor Alex Otti, who understands how to make the state prosper, unlike the consumerism of the previous eras. As I have argued on other occasions, there is need for collaboration within regions. Hopefully, the Southeast Development Commission, if it becomes a reality, can tap into the burgeoning electricity market, and help reincarnate the region as an economic power house.

  • Again, who killed Dele Giwa?

    Again, who killed Dele Giwa?

    Some 34 years after Dele Giwa, crusading journalist and founding editor of the defunct Newswatch was killed in what remains one of the most horrific acts of preternatural malevolence ever carried out in Nigeria, nothing has been established beyond the fact and the manner of the murder.

    “Who killed Dele Giwa?” has been a recurring question ever since.  Whodunit?

    Former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, with whom Giwa enjoyed a cozy relationship, that he was not loath to advertise, has been and remains a principal suspect in the murder.  No arrests were made, and no suspects have been arrested, and no persons have been charged, much less prosecuted in what passed for the official investigation of the murder: a travesty perfused by obfuscation, intimidation, blackmail, perjury, denialism, and all the bureaucratic weapons that officialdom can conjure up.

    There was ample reason for regarding Babangida as a principal suspect in the murder.

    Just two days before that ghastly incident, a senior official of the Directorate of Military Intelligence, had accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition to stage a socialist revolution in Nigeria.

    The charge was preposterous. Giwa had nothing but contempt for socialism. He was a shining advertisement for capitalism and the market economy. But he had, in a widely discussed column, warned that if the structural adjustment programme on which the government was pinning all its hopes for economic recovery failed, the authorities would be stoned publicly.

    Alarmed at the charge, Giwa quickly briefed his attorney, the late and much lamented Gani Fawehinmi, and asked him to pursue the matter at law. The following day, a security chief, Colonel Halilu Akilu, called to reassure Giwa that the accusation had resulted from a misunderstanding; that the matter had been cleared, and that Giwa should think nothing to it.

    Asked by Giwa’s wife, Funmi, why he had been calling repeatedly, Akilu said it was to obtain directions to Giwa’s home so he could stop by on his way to the airport to board a flight to Kano, as a demonstration of his good faith. Akilu then went on to intimate that a parcel from the commander-in-chief, most likely an invitation to some official event, was on its way to Giwa’s home.

    A few hours later, the emissary arrived. Giwas’s son, Billy, collected the parcel and handed it to his father who was seated at the dining table, in the company of Kayode Soyinka, the London correspondent of Newswatch, who was visiting from the UK. The envelope, which bore the seal of the Presidency, was marked “To be opened by addressee only.”

    Giwa had said, “This must be from the Presidency.”  Those were his last words. As he opened it where it lay on his lap, the package exploded, pulverizing his pelvis, setting a section of the house on fire and reducing the cars parked in the garage to smouldering heaps of mangled metal.

    Giwa died as he was being rushed to a nearby hospital. Miraculously, Soyinka survived, and so did Giwa’s wife and baby daughter, who were in another section of the house.

    If they had perished with Giwa, the authorities would have passed off the blast as an accident waiting to happen.

    Had they not publicly accused Giwa of illegally importing and stockpiling arms and ammunition? The ordinance had exploded, killing its procurer, they would have said. There would have been no witnesses to suggest anything to the contrary.

    A perfect murder would have been committed.

    If the foregoing narrative provides largely circumstantial evidence, the murder weapon unequivocally implicated the Military Intelligence establishment.  It was not the kind of thing you could purchase off the shelf at a hardware store, nor the kind that could be assembled in a journeyman technician’s workshop, nor yet the kind that could be fabricated at the local blacksmith’s foundry.

    Yet the official investigators looked everywhere except where the evidence pointed.

    Kayode Soyinka, the visiting Newswatch correspondent who had witnessed the incident, came to be named a suspect. If he was not complicit in the crime, senior state security officials said, how come he had survived the blast when his host seated across from him had perished

    My brother, Herbert Tunde Dare, a deputy commissioner of police with the Special Branch, had been assigned to the investigation. Soon after he set out with his accustomed energy and commitment – failure was not in his dictionary – he was transferred from Lagos to Kaduna but kept on the case. He had been summoned to Lagos to file a preliminary report and had planned to return to Kaduna the same way he had travelled to Lagos: by air. But at the last minute, the police authorities came up with an assignment that warranted his returning to base by road.

    Somewhere between Jebba and Mokwa, in Niger State, he was killed in a curious motor accident. Announcing his death, the police said he had lost control of his car while trying to overtake another vehicle and crashed. He had died instantly, they said.  The wreck of the car he was alleged to be driving was never produced. The police said an unnamed driver and an unnamed aide assigned to him for the trip were injured in the accident but had been treated at an unidentified hospital and discharged.

    Francis Karieren, the one-time test cricketer and retired police chief and my brother Herbert’s former supervisor at the old ‘E’ Brand of the Police and a consultant on security matters with the Editorial Board of The Guardian, of which I was a member, said the official announcement of Hebert’s death was anomalous.  In laying the blame on Herbert’s shoulder, the police broke sharply with tradition, he said, adding, “They never do that to their own.”

    They did so in Herbert’s case to pre-empt further inquiry.  Case closed.

    Fed up with the dilatoriness of the police in the investigation of the murder of his client, Gani Fawehinmi decided to institute a private prosecution. The court of first instance allowed itself to be misled to hold that Fawehinmi’s court filing was libellous, and it went on to order Fawehinmi to pay damages in the amount of N5 million, then a huge fortune, failing which his office housing probably the nation’s richest  Law Library would be auctioned.

    An appellate court set aside this egregious ruling.

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    The Oputa Truth and Reconciliation Commission, before which Babangida and his military colleagues declined to appear, made a finding that there was evidence to suggest that Babangida and his security chiefs, Brigadier General Halilu Akilu and Colonel A. K. Togun, are “accountable for the death of Dele Giwa by letter bomb.”  It recommended that the case be reopened for further investigation “in the public interest.”

    Hear Babangida’s testimony in his own words, in this interview with Karl Maier, as recorded by Maier in his book “This House Has Fallen: Midnight in Nigeria.”

    “It was emotive. There was a lot of passion. I think one of the problems was that the people, or more or less the media … up to now nobody seemed to say okay let’s look at these things dispassionately. But from the word go, the government did it. That’s the first reaction. The media, his friends, and most important, the lawyers, the crusaders in this thing. Then anybody who would want to say something different from the popularly held belief, you were seen as part of it. So they succeeded in getting only one side of the story dished up.

    “But we carried out investigations,” Babangida continued. “We had leads. There were questions we asked but nobody went into this thing about the so-called questions that we asked. But the circumstantial aspect of it. . . Akilu spoke to him twenty-four hours before. But somebody had to talk to somebody. That’s the harsh reality of life. But unfortunately nobody wanted to listen. I suspect the media, whatever human rights groups, if they tried to look at this dispassionately, like normal intelligent people would, we may have gone (sic) somewhere. But people have already made up their minds. That government is guilty, period. The report, they are not interested.”

    This Joycean effusion was Babangida’s answer to the question, “What happened to Dele Giwa?

    The murder has been memorialized on every anniversary and featured betwixt. For all practical purposes, however, the matter was dead until two weeks ago, when the Incorporated Trustees of the watchdog Media Rights Agenda breathed life into it through a petition before the Federal High Court, Abuja.

    Ray Ekpu, Giwa’s colleague at Newswatch witnessed the saga first-hand and has reported it in absorbing detail in the first instalment of his reprise in The Guardian (“Dele Giwa is dead, Dele Giwa is no dead (1),” February 20, 2024, as a preface to this latest development in the case.

    The court, per Justice Inyang Ekwo, has asked the Attorney General of the Federation to bring Giwa’s killers to justice because the killing violates the right to life under the Nigerian Constitution and the African Charter on Human and People’s Rights.

    Is this, finally, the momentum the attentive public has been yearning for?

  • Neglected federal police

    Neglected federal police

    A heart-rending armed robbery experience of a professor friend led us to the police to seek for help only to discover that the police themselves need help. But before the tale about the damning neglect of the police which this column hopes would change under President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT), let me share the story of my friend’s encounter with armed robbers which should interest the governments, law enforcement agencies and the general public. 

    My friend, a university professor was mopping up funds from all possible sources to help his son meet the financial requirements to migrate to Canada as a professional. To make things a bit easier, the monies where accumulated into one of his current account which has an internet banking application. According to him, he had planned to do the transaction with the accumulated funds last Friday, but shifted the business to this week’s Monday.

    The professor after working till about midnight went to bed, hoping to rise early in the morning to tidy up his papers. Around 2am, he was rudely woken up, with a gun pointed at him and his wife, by young men most likely in their mid-twenties. They were advised to cooperate, and bring out all the dollars in the house to avoid being hurt. Speaking in his native dialect, he asked the wife lying beside him, whether she did not lock the doors, and she said she did.

    When asked by the robbers what he said to her, he replied he was asking her to calm down and cooperate with them. The robbers numbering about five took time to search through the entire rooms of their children, who have all outgrown the house. While two of the robbers were searching other places, two were in his room interrogating him and searching his room. They asked for his ATM cards, after which they asked for the pin numbers.

    The fifth person with a POS was meticulously reconfirming the pin numbers against the cards, and recording them. Using accounts of the professor’s recent transactions, the robbers made minor transfers to reconfirm the authenticity of the pin numbers. With a few hot slaps, the professor gave out all the correct pin numbers. The robbers moved to his study and after searching for dollars, carried his laptops, and most-maliciously took all the hard discs containing researches and other materials saved in the past 20 years.         

    The robbers who climbed into the compound through the barbed back fence abutting the Festac Town canal, clinically removed the window burglary irons to climb into the house. Around 5am, after a gruelling three hours forced rendezvous, the robbers went out through the back door and the gate abutting the canal, without the house security man and neighbours being aware of their visit. In addition to some cash, ATM cards, wines, wrist watches, the robbers also took along a bag of rice. By the time professor and his wife were able to reach their son few minutes after the robbers left, for him to block the accounts, six million naira had been taken from two accounts.

    Five million was wired from Access Bank which had a limit of one million per day to UBA, and from there to an Opay account. Another one million left UBA to the same UBA account that received the haul from Access. From the professor’s experience, potential victims of armed robbery do not need to have cash at home to be robbed, with the largely untraceable online bankers, without office address, as unaccountable receiver-managers. Dazed and traumatized, he proceeded to the police to lodge a report.

    At the police station, he narrated his ordeal, and a sympathetic head of division told us that the FESTAC canal has become an albatross as a number of robberies have taken place along the axis. When I enquired what the police is doing about the burgeoning axis of crime, he said he has alerted the marine police, but they are hamstrung with no boats to patrol the waters. Further enquiries later about the state of police welfare opened the Pandora box. From multiple sources, I was informed that the police buy their uniforms and other official gears.

    The stations pay their electricity bills, and for alternative power, buy their own generator and fuel it. To pursue the necessary court order for Post No Debit on the indicted accounts, costs have to be incurred, and there are no budgetary allocations. The police lamented the nefarious activities perpetrated by internet robbers with the aid of so-called banks like Opay, which are regarded as online banks. We were told of several atrocities such online banks have helped fraudsters to perpetrate without trace.

    Read Also: Southwest speakers demand state police, power devolution

    The so-called online banks are opened with phone numbers, without the rigorous requirements of personal information associated with opening of bank accounts in registered banks. The online banks operate like bees which sting and fly away. Even before making efforts which would cost the victim some costs, the police were honest that the chances of recovering the monies were slim. They said if it were the regular banks, the recipient can easily be traced, but not an online banker.

    Ruminating over the ongoing political and legislative effort to decentralize the police structure, one wonders whether the fate of the federal police would get better or worse, after. It is strange that 25 years after the return of democratic rule, the police have not fared better that their experience under military rule. Under the military, the common belief is that the police are intentionally undermined, so as to justify the military doing police work and showcasing superiority. They are also supposedly undermined so that they will not be in a position to prevent military coups.

    If there were reasons to undermine the police during the military regimes, what are the reasons for underfunding and undermining the police during the two and half decades of civilian governments, since 1999? It is absolutely ridiculous that policemen have to buy their uniforms, maintain and fuel their operational vehicles, and incur other operational costs, and yet are expected to be efficient in the discharge of their duties. It is perhaps such debasing working conditions that make the policemen prefer to work for the big-men, who give them extra pecks for doing houseboy work.

    While working to gift the nation a decentralized police, the federal government must also fund the existing police reasonably. One wonders the fate of policemen in rural areas, if those in the urban centres are suffering the listed deprivations. While funding is a major constraint, the age-long neglect appears more as a premeditated determination to gift the nation an inefficient police, to allow the criminality amongst the ruling class, whether military or civilian, to fester.

  • What says the Power minister?

    What says the Power minister?

    Whatever pitch Power Minister Adebayo Adelabu is making for the electricity value chain, he should first glimpse own ministerial report card.

    Otherwise, he might just end up as the lousy salesman that crashed the market: no matter his golden pitch.  His sales persona would fire absolutely no confidence!

    No, this is no wholesale ad hominem dismissal of the message because you have a beef with the messenger.  It’s just perception, many times, clearer than reality.

    Now, the electricity chain is a complex continuum — if not outright conundrum: from generation companies (GenCos), to the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN), and then the distribution companies (DisCos), which interface with the ever-harried consumer, even if DisCos hardly have any grip on what they hawk.

    As in any relay race, if a leg drops the baton, or strays into another lane, the entire team is cooked!  That’s a fitting metaphor for Nigeria’s ever-shambolic electricity supply system.

    Still, before Minister Adelabu took over, many households — and Ripples’ is a living witness — had at least 16 hours a day; at times, 20 hours, and — old glory! — that rare — very rare — 24 hours power paradise, for the odd day or two!

    Now, this was by no means universal.  Lagos — where  Ripples lives — is the vortex of electricity demand, to which supply must gravitate. 

    It’s also an up-market hub where Ikeja Electric Plc (I.E.) and Eko DisCo (the two that play in that business turf) are likelier to get paid, with relative ease.

    Even then, the Lagos market is segmented — with the wealthier districts that can pay higher tariffs corralling higher daily hours of electricity. 

    That situation lasted till October 2023, became fleeting by November 2023 and well neigh vanished by December!  By January 2024, it had become happy new year, sad, old darkness, with barely any electricity beyond 6 pm in many areas! 

    Worse: there is often no rime or reason to this shambolic supply.

    So, you can imagine customers’ irritation at a Power minister, without any tangible explanations for the dip, coming out to pipe the old tune of “cost-reflective tariffs”!  How insensate!

    To be sure, the push for cost-reflective tariffs is logical.  It’s all about prompt payment for power generated, transmitted, distributed and consumed, at each point on the value chain.  It’s about the only way to keep the market humming and all the traders happy.

    So, certainly the current power glitch is because traders, along the electricity value chain, are not promptly paying for “wares” — or even at all?  If that is so, is it not only a matter of time before the entire chain collapses?

    Still, how did the minister before Adelabu juggle the industry balls, to achieve the relative stability that vanished by November ending 2023? 

    By the way, that stability, against all odds, tried to build the market; and also prep the consumer — moving from utility as social service to utility as core commodity that must be paid for — that cost reflective tariffs are the logical end the power yo-yo. 

    But why did it suddenly collapse — and at the minister’s virtual arrival?

    The optics just rankled: Minister Adelabu haranguing harried consumers to pay more for electricity they were not even convinced was there!

    Yet, these are systemic challenges, which management must tax the ingenuity of any Power minister, if the government must crack the Power conundrum.

    For starters, the Nigerian Electricity Supply Industry (NESI) is a long chain, over which sits the Federal Ministry of Power. 

    The others in the chain are: Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), the industry regulators; GenCos, TCN, DisCos, Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading Plc (NBET: call it the wholesale dealer, if you will); Gas Aggregator Company of Nigeria — the gas link is critical, since most of the GenCo plants are fired by gas) — and the Nigerian Electricity Management Service Agency (NEMSA).

    Now, without conflating personal daring with deep-seated systemic challenges, how has the minister somewhat integrated these outfits into his own policy vision, knowing that without efficient and effective power, President Bola Tinubu’s ambitious re-industrialization policy — an integral part of which is agricultural processing — is as good as belching gas?

    Besides, shouldn’t all the  Adelabu public talk about the Federal Government either pronto paying the subsidy on electricity, or allowing cost-reflective tariffs, be inside stuff for inter-ministry/agency memos, in files which “keep our secrets, secret”?

    If that had been so, the minister wouldn’t have handed the foes of the government he serves the added propaganda oomph of alleged “wickedness” to remove electricity subsidy, just as it did on petrol, to further inflict pains on the people — empty, hare-brained hysteria to be sure!

    That was dissonance that grated — and grated badly.

    Aside, what efforts has the minister made to ensure NERC pressures DisCos to clean up their questionable accounting systems? 

    The other day, the Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) claimed Aso Rock Villa owed it N923. 9 million. But after “reconciliation”, the debt plummeted to N342 million — almost a third of the original claim. 

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    Now, if AEDC could slap such a flabby bill on the nation’s number 1 “household”, what other voodoo bills do other DisCos, as routine, slap on millions of other nameless Nigerian households?

    Besides, what inter-ministry/agency lobbies has the Power ministry done to rally other government outfits, including military facilities, to settle own jumbo debts to DisCos, even if you’d always put a question mark on the fidelity of DisCo billings?

    If most of these bills are defrayed, wouldn’t the DisCos have enough cash to promptly pay NBET, which can settle others in the value chain so that GenCos, for instance, can pay for gas, the prime driver of their turbines?

    The other day, “Hardball”, The Nation’s back-page column (see “I.E.: authority stealing?: February 5), reported how, citing prepaid meter No. 45702775466, I.E. “allocated” 0.9 kW — almost zero — for a N20, 000 top-up token that should have fetched no less than 371.8 kW back then?

    What has the NERC done to banish — and punish — such sharp practices, beyond spasmodic slaps on the wrist that the thieving DisCos often brush off en route to their next big steal? 

    And if NERC can’t adequately sanction sharp practices, how do you grow the market on false accounting and flabby billing, to attain that cherished threshold of cost-reflective tariffs?

    Let the Power minister do these basic industry homework before pushing for cost-reflective tariffs.  If he fails to do so, he’d only hit a brick wall. 

    Besides, in this high season of high-octane blame games, his ministerial report card would continue to seem as one of the weakest links in the Tinubu presidential chain.  That’s a nest of thorns no minister can enjoy — or even endure.