The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Matters miscellaneous

    Matters miscellaneous

    It is miscellany time again; the rubric under which I try to attend to a glut of occurrences with broad strokes and short takes, lest some major newsmakers feel ignored. If a smidgen of the pulverization which Israel’s armed forces Israel forces visited on Gaza and adjacent population centres in the name of self-defence had obtruded in the picture, I might have been led for a moment to believe that the multitude being lashed furiously by the gatekeepers in a feral scramble for bread at the rock-bottom bargain price of N100 a loaf were Palestinians whom the invaders had blitzed of house and home and hospitals and protected shelters and places of worship and even the open air and driven to abject destitution.

    But not even the most savage reprisals ever devised by an invading army with extermination on its mind have robbed them of their quiet dignity.  We see this on display every day on television as they drift amidst the rubble of the homes and structures they had spent decades coaxing out of a most unpromising environment.

    No; the picture contained not a hint of Gaza; more like a scene out of war-ravaged Somalia or South Sudan, if it is not what I suspected:  a conjuration through and through.

    A voice-over tells the audience, unspoken repugnance cutting through his smug narration, that the mayhem is on going on right in front of his shop in “central Lagos.”  It is “Yoruba people” impaling fellow Yorubas in their riotous throngs, drawn by the promise of purchasing a N100 loaf of bread.  You would not find a single Ibo in the crowd as desperate supplicant or stern enforcer, the narrator adds helpfully.

    It was all a Yoruba affair.

    The picture that I saw showed no one emerging from the riotous scene clutching anything resembling a loaf of bread.  It gave no hint of the identity of the philanthropist who had in these hard times organized the sale of bread at a discount in “central Lagos.”  Nowhere was there any indication of when the picture was taken, and when.

    Even if these elements had pervaded the picture, the tribalistic undertone of the voice-over would still have given the game the perfidious game away.   

    Yoruba scroungers and freeloaders and Yoruba enforcers paid to keep them in line and doing so with might and main; Ibos watching bemused too high-minded and too hardworking to engage in such base conduct.  That is the conclusion the narrator wishes to impart.

    How could the narrator tell that there was not a single Ibo person among the freeloaders or the enforcers?

    How could the narrator tell from the safety of his shop, not in the least concerned that the looters might descend on his shop next, tell their ethnicity?

    The rabble that thrives on the manipulability of the so-called social media to prey on the gullibility of its patrons rarely think their crackbrained schemes through.

    The average shopkeeper would have locked up the place precipitately and gone into hiding in the innermost recesses of the building.  Not so our narrator-shopkeeper. He takes it all in, minding his merchandise and conducting an ethnic audit of the crowd.

    He gives multi-tasking a whole new meaning.

    I have learned of a similar video in which an individual, at an unidentified location, is lobbing what purports to be yams into a crowd in the distance.  Can’t these internet philanthropists show a little more respect to the objects of their munificence?

    Then, last Sunday, a website that serves “breaking news” in breath-taking leads and requires you to download its app, reported that half-starved residents of the Gateway City, Ilorin, and capital of Kwara State, had “stormed” and “occupied” the Emir’s Palace and that the 83-year-old (84 on April 22) resident monarch of 23 years, Ibrahim, previously Kolapo Sulu-Gambari had fled to parts unknown.

    An odious and far-fetched comparison to be sure, but the report must have evoked in many a treasonous mind the 1917 storming of the Winter Palace in Petrograd that foreshadowed the Russian Revolution.

    I immediately called my friend going back to our secondary school days in Wusasa, Zaria, Henry Olusegun, a professor of mechanical engineering most recently of the University of Ilorin.  Dispensing with the usual preliminaries, I asked him whether it was true that the emir had fled, following the storming of the palace by starving residents.

    “Haba!” he exclaimed in astonishment.  Apparently, he had not heard.  He asked me to give him a few minutes to make some inquiries.

    Some three minutes later, Rico was back on the line:  “It is not true, Johnco,” he said.  Some residents had gathered on Saturday outside the palace to protest crippling food prices, but there was nothing more to the story.

    Next, I called the managing director and editor-in-chief of this newspaper, Victor Ifijeh, a veteran among newsroom veterans. What was he hearing from his correspondent in Ilorin?  He asked me to give him a few minutes to make sure that his information was up to the moment.

    A motley crowd had staged a protest outside the emir’s palace, Ifijeh reported.  His Royal Highness was secure in his palace.

    So, the story of his flight was another tawdry fabrication in the life of a parasitic medium governed in a perverse way like the currency by Gresham’s Law, according to which rogue currency will drive the real stuff out of circulation.

    This brings us to the subject of banking, which saturated the news last week, following the death in a helicopter in California, of a co-founder and chief executive officer of Access Bank, Nigeria’s largest, Herbert Wigwe, his wife, his son, and his personal assistant. 

    Wigwe’s itinerary included Inglewood, California, to watch Superbowl LVII, the quintessential game of brawn and bones which leaves many players so severely battered that, in every passing year, there are loud and thoughtful calls for its banning.

    He did not make it.

    Read Also: EFCC quizzes ex-Gov Ahmed over alleged diversion of N10bn

    Not unexpectedly, and yet paradoxically, his death has opened the hermetic lid of banking in Nigeria, an industry that is about as transparent as a brick wall, to the extent that it can with justice be described not just as a racket, but as the longest-running syndicated racket in the nation.

    From military president, Ibrahim Babangida’s time, they sprang up like mushrooms after the  first rains and vanished just as suddenly through mergers, takeovers, dissolutions, liquidations and what have you.  As the economy contracted, the banks expanded.  In the early 199s, you could count at least seven banking institutions with their trademark gaudy façades lying cheek by jowl along a 200 metre-stretch of the road leading to the Murtala Muhammed International Airport in Lagos, and in some cases two branches of the same bank next to each other.

    The businesses and industries they were supposed to cater to closed shop and left town, the commercial banks continued to thrive, as the sedate and astute Vanguard columnist Muyi Adetiba observed.  Not even the law of gravity could keep them grounded.

    The disgraced former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, is only the latest example of the banker as hustler and racketeer.

    It is now an open secret that the industry was sick; that most of the successes they were posting season after season, all the new frontiers they claimed they had created and were celebrating in glossy national and international publications and on international television and marking with bogus awards, were contrived.

    It remains to determine just how pervasive the rot is.

    Nothing less than a probe covering the past 25 years, followed by exemplary punishment for those found to have abused a sacred trust, can perform that task.

  • Gani talks the talk

    Gani talks the talk

    First, Gani Adams’ so-called letter to South West governors, for a mandate to “flush out” Fulani kidnappers in the region, was met with a yawn it eminently deserved. 

    Atavistic fears — or resent — hardly harbour the rigour to crack a contemporary problem, not the least a hardy security one.

    Then, the new presidential concession on state police.  That has got to be the most nimble thinking, since the military invaded the political space in January 1966. 

    Formalizing state police is the Nigerian state’s clinical riposte to the opportunistic din by non-state hustlers, craving relevance. Ignore too, the clatter of naysayers: mainly ex-police(wo)men, hung up on the old security regime, with its central near-paralysis.

    Such play up past and present fears.  In truth, such fears should be noted; and poured into the crucible of air-tight legislations that will re-federalize the Police system; but ensure state police doesn’t end up the wayward rod of cynical governors. 

    But back to Adams and co.  If your thinking flares and freezes with cross-ethnic wars, how can you be part of a security thinking for a modern, multi-ethnic, multi-faith state?

    Still, you’d be amazed at Adams’ penchant for the over-reach: the hubris that sank many Aare Ona Kakanfo — an irony totally lost on the Kakanfo latest modern mascot.

    By the way — as Ripples earlier pointed out — there’s hardly anything as Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland.  It was originally an Oyo title, imposed on Oyo’s vassal and tributary kingdoms in the Yoruba country, under the Oyo Empire.

    The Ijebu, for instance, never came under the Oyo imperial yoke.  Yet, they are no less Yoruba.  So, isn’t an “Aare Ona Kakanfo of Yorubaland” —  a Yorubaland that includes the Ijebu country — a laughable historical fallacy?

    Yet, from this presumption issued Adams’ letter seeking governors’ fiat to pacify the South West of Fulani felons.  But why would any right-thinking governor, worth his mandate, surrender his security authority to some non-state cells?

    Again, it’s an overreach, which bizarre irony again seems to escape Adams.  Yet, tragic overreaches, bordering on reckless hubris, plagued the paths, and triggered the tragic ends, of many previous Kakanfo — hence the title’s poisoned chalice.

    By the way, Adams would appear yoked in the lower rung of a neo-atavistic chain: nay-sayers thundering from newspaper columns; as TV anchors and as radio presenters, milking present angsts to proclaim past whims, as sure future catastrophes!

    That, to be sure, is not alien to a democracy, with a flower of contesting ideas. 

    Yet, emotively gloating over current challenges and pushing preferred Armageddon hardly equates thinking through policy options and proffering rigorous alternatives.  That’s what the media should do.  Unfortunately, the reverse is the case, in many cases.  The people — that crave guidance in troubled times — are the worse for it.

    That’s why a Gani Adams would proffer antediluvian solutions to a modern problem and hope to get traction.  But again, it’s voyage to nowhere.

    Back to previous Kakanfo and tragic overreaches, however.

    Ilorin’s Afonja leveraged his life-long beef with Alaafin Aole Arogangan to supplant his Oyo imperial state.  Afonja, as Kakanfo, was Oyo’s military guard(ian)-in-chief.  But for his treachery, he enlisted Alimi, his Fulani friend and his corps of quoranic teachers-cum-warriors.

    They supplanted Oyo all right but Afonja’s hitherto proud Yoruba town, founded by his great grandfather, Laderin, fell under Fulani liege.  He not only died tragically betrayed, he become a historic study in self-destruct perfidy. 

    Afonja was only the fourth Ilorin Yoruba ruler, after Laderin, Pasin and Alagbin, Afonja’s father, in that order.  After him, the Fulani, though of a mixed Yoruba-Fulani breed, took over.

    Ijaye’s Kurunmi perhaps had legitimate grouses against Alaafin Adelu.  But he too overreached himself by undermining Adelu’s authority, though Adelu’s father, Abiodun, made Kurunmi his Kakanfo.

    So, when the Ibadan army, under the Alaafin’s diktat, stormed his Ijaye redoubt, and Kurunmi’s five sons died in battle on the same day, the evocative tragedy of Kurunmi was wrought in sickening colour!

    Ibadan’s own Latoosa had decisioned Efunsetan Aniwura, the Iyalode and Ibadan native society’s opposer-in-chief to Latoosa’s not-so-hidden power grab schemes.  To him, the Olubadan, was a “woman” because the Ibadan constitution forbade the Baale from going to war.

    Yes, Efunsetan was down but the Ibadan constitution held.  So, off went Latoosa to “end all wars in the Yoruba country” simply because the intrepid Fabunmi, of Okemesi, had the temerity to behead an Ibadan viceroy, Oyepetun, for defiling Fabunmi’s wife. 

    That was September 1877.  But by 1893 when the smoke of Kiriji, the Yoruba Civil War, had cleared, the Oyo Empire, which the Ibadan opportunistic army of war spoils claimed to defend, had itself fallen — to a more ruthless British colonial army.

    Latoosa himself never died in battle.  But he fell ill and died at the tail end of the dire 16-year stalemate — a stalemate that tasted as defeat to the Ibadan army, but victory to the Ekiti Parapo battle-hardened troops; that called the bluff of the Ibadan bullies.

    Read Also: EFCC quizzes ex-Gov Ahmed over alleged diversion of N10bn

    Again, the Kakanfo and their tragic overreaches of missions impossible!

    Gani Adams appears not so different.  In his letter, he boasted of having “troops and logistics to flush out undesirable elements” — great!  But troops and logistics!  What law gives a non-state player the fiat to harbour “troops and logistics”? 

    Even assuming without conceding — as the lawyers would say — that Gani’s ancestral “army” worked this magical wonder, how sustainable will it be, if the situation remains unchanged Nigeria-wide? 

    So long for quaint and romantic solutions to all-too-real problems!  Still, you can’t blame Adams for his passion and love for his native Yorubaland. In doing that however, he should be wary of talking himself into needless trouble.

    The truth is Nigeria’s security challenge isn’t a Fulani versus Yoruba ancestral feud; or the Junkun versus the Idoma, in Ajoche: that excellent epic serial beamed on DSTV; or even Fulani versus Hausa, which a research finding has fingered as the genesis  of banditry and sundry violence in the North West.

    Fulani herders accused some Hausa criminals of cattle rustling.  Hausa farmers countered with Fulani herders wilfully destroying their crops.  Both resorted to fearsome arms to settle scores.  Enter, the current security meltdown!

    So, Nigeria’s insecurity nightmare is the criminal, of whichever ethnic hue, versus the rest of us —  not some mascots settling ancient scores, real or imagined.

    The logical answer, after a rigorous diagnosis, is re-federalizing the police for more trained numbers and spread in police cadres.  State police is it.

  • Atiku and PDP governors

    Atiku and PDP governors

    If the situation were not as serious as we have it at the moment, one would have been content to sit back to enjoy the self-serving remonstrations of an elite class for whom everything begins and ends with politics. It’s been a week of brickbats between the PDP governors and the Bola Tinubu administration on the one hand and, the perennial presidential candidate Atiku Abubakar versus the Tinubu administration on the other, with the PDP governors only wrapping up a rather tumultuous week with an encore.

    The PDP governors are obviously convinced that the Tinubu administration is not doing nearly enough. Ever sly but barely magisterial in their outings, they have availed Nigerians a surfeit of proof: The naira – against the major international currencies – doing the yoyo spectacle. Food prices – not shortages please –reaching the skies and the neighbourhood, surfeit with an army of angry youths who simply can’t find anything meaningful to lay their hands on. And so they whined on and one like school children sent to undertake the day’s business without the accompaniment of their learning tools, forgetting that the problems being complained about are theirs and theirs to solve!

    And for these they want the president – not their membership club of predatory abdicators – to resign!

    Reminds yours sincerely of those days of yore when as a young staff writer in the National Concord, I alongside other colleagues went on tour of health establishments in Lagos with the late Minister of Health, Prof Olikoye Ransome-Kuti. At a stop in one federal medical facility, the officer in charge had ranted on and on about poor funding and how that was impacting on service delivery. He even dared to draw the minister’s attention to the long stretch of overgrown weeds threatening to turn the facility into a mini jungle only for the minister at this point to ask whether the facility had a labourer on its payroll! Of course, the director could only return an incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo about lack of critical equipment to rid the place of the weeds! In effect, the minister merely stopped short of saying that the problem is not so much about lack of funds but of the critical initiatives to get the job done.

    That same spirit – of corporate abdication – is unfortunately in full bloom with the governors eyes all set upon Abuja!

    Here of course is the irony: while the same governors trading blames have been smiling to the banks, sacrificing every single initiative of the Tinubu administration aimed at providing succour through their offices to sheer incompetence or political expediency; they forget, that the twin policies of fuel subsidy removal and foreign exchange reforms, which although painful for the citizens, has actually delivered far more positive outcomes to their treasuries and potentially for real governance than most of their whining lordships could ever have imagined.

    If there is any missing element, it must be their collective failure to articulate a programme of collaboration with the federal government to mitigate the pains on the citizens and to shorten the duration of the current adjustment. For that, the governors can rightly be accused of monumental abdication in a grave moment of emergency.

    However, unlike the governors who are in pole position to do something, the case of former vice president Atiku Abubakar is different. He understandably does not think much of the president let alone the policies of his administration, two positions of which he is eminently entitled. Atiku, interestingly, does not suffer a misapprehension of the issues at stake even if appears sometimes confused. Most certainly, he believes that he understands the problems more than anyone and perhaps that he alone possess the magic wand to solve them.

    Hear him: “The wrong policies of the Tinubu administration continue to cause untold pain and distress on the economy and the rest of us cannot keep quiet when the government has demonstrated sufficient poverty of ideas to redeem the situation.

    “After a careful assessment of the state of our economy at the twilights of the last administration, I knew full well that the economy of the country was heading for the ditch and came up with a number of policy prescriptions that would rescue the country from getting into the mess that we are currently in.” 

    And so his premises/options:

    (1) A fixed exchange rate system would be out of the question…it would not be in line with [our] philosophy of running an open, private sector-friendly economy.

     (2) Operating a successful fixed-exchange rate system would require sufficient FX reserves to defend the domestic currency at all times…He agrees that Nigeria’s major challenge is the persistent FX illiquidity occasioned by limited foreign exchange inflows to the country.

     (3) He says “A managed-floating system would have been a preferred option… in such a system, the naira may fluctuate daily, but the CBN will step in to control and stabilize its value. Such control will be exercised judiciously and responsibly, especially to curb speculative activities.”

    Imagine the individual who in one breadth pledged to reform the foreign exchange market by eliminating multiple exchange rate windows, which, he claimed, only benefited opportunists, middlemen, and fraudsters, bent on retaining the very infrastructure which gave it prop.

    That is vintage Abubakar, the acclaimed author and finisher of the Obasanjo-era reforms that have berthed in the current disaster that the country is only now, beginning to slowly but painfully extricate itself.

    Read Also: Why we cannot sell cement below N7,000, by Dangote, Bua, Lafarge

    Surely, Atiku can go on theorising as many times as he wants. Just like his co-traveller, the acclaimed trader and fabulist that swears that he alone has the magic wand to move Nigeria from consumption to production, he is free to speak from both sides of the mouth. Clearly, the man Nigerians elected to solve the problem is Bola Tinubu.  While things might seem rough at the moment, the way forward surely cannot be a return to the old economy of rent and privilege but one in which level playing ground is availed to all classes of players. The two albatrosses of subsidy of fuel and multiple exchange rates belong to the ancien regime. We need to educate the throng still nursing the illusion of quick-fixes that the answer to the plummeting value of the naira is to encourage exports to boost the supply of forex.

    As for the governors, do they need Tinubu to tell them of the dire need to revive those farm settlements, the agricultural extension services of old, the site-and-service initiatives that took the drudge off the farming enterprise as a strategy only to rekindle the interests of our youths in agriculture? Come to think of it – is the job all about ‘forming’ the big man through the elite Nigerian Governors Forum?

  • Cost of governance vs cost of living

    Cost of governance vs cost of living

    Nigerians are going through harrowing times, and I believe the elected officials have taken notice. With food inflation roaring at 29.9 percent, many are predicting that the country is a tinderbox, and could descend into anarchy at the slightest ignition. My younger nephew, who has witnessed the price of basic groceries double in the past six months, asked me whether the prices would ever come down. Lacking the power of clairvoyance, I replied that I don’t know.

    But it appears that our political leaders know that there is fire on the mountain and unless drastic measures are taken, there may be no office to hold, if anarchy is loosened upon the land. One sign that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT) took notice some months ago was his directive that the number of those who travel with him should be reduced. Another sign that some federal lawmakers have taken notice is the proposal by 60 parliamentarians to return Nigeria to parliamentary system of government, arguing that the presidential system is too expensive.

    While the two indicators show a concerned political class, there is little doubt that the executive and legislative arms of government hold the key to a new Nigeria. PBAT should consider setting up a presidential economic advisory council, drawn from the best hands that are available in Nigeria and overseas, to advise the president’s economic team on measures to halt the spiralling inflation that has made a mess of the lives of Nigerians. Such group would advise the team on how to stabilize the value of naira.

    Of course, no one is projecting for a group of economic miracle workers, but obviously, those presently in charge need help. Agreeably, there are global economic challenges ravaging most economies across the world, but Nigeria’s case is peculiar, considering the gross economic misadventures of the immediate past government, especially the monetary policies of Godwin Emefiele’s era. Apart from the unprecedented exposure of the apex bank, through ways and means, the CBN became a lender of first resort, doling out trillions to any group that caught Emefiele’s fancy.

    Perhaps, if the CBN is a licensed commercial bank, and its exposures are audited, it could go into receivership. Already overexposed, under the previous regime, the bank has become too weak to intervene on behalf of the federation, which is the primary reason for its existence. So, the challenge facing our national economy requires a pooling of ideas. Furthermore, the PBAT policies on housing, roads and other physical infrastructure projects that would put monies in the hands of labourers, artisans and less skilled persons, should start without further delay.

    The state governments which have received windfalls from the removal of fuel subsidy should turn their states to construction sites, so that their citizens can be engaged in pursuits that bring income to them. All over the states, there are roads, schools, hospitals and public buildings that requires patching, rebuilding, reconstruction and improvement which would keep their citizens meaningfully engaged, as well as increase their gross domestic productivity. Local contractors who use large manpower should gain priority in this era, over sophisticated big guns.

    This is not an era for all those big ticket projects like airports that put money in the hands of big contractors, who bring in expatriates to repatriate the money paid, and who don’t employ a lot of manpower but rather engine power and imported products to build fanciful monuments. Patriotic contractors who have been awarded big road projects should be encouraged to reduce machine input, while they increase human input, even if the delivery periods would have to be extended.

    Local government administrators should replicate similar industry at the local levels. Instead of sharing local government allocations to placate party stalwarts and engaging in dismal economic activities, the monies received should be channelled to infrastructure developments which will keep the people meaningfully engaged. The executive arm can engage in needs assessment of communities, mobilize the youths to work, while the state commissioners, and local council supervisors monitor the projects, sign completion certificates and ensure disbursements from relevant ministries and finance departments.

    On their part, the federal legislators should declare austerity for themselves. This column has written severally that considering the importance of the legislature as the blood of democracy, a compromised legislature is like a cancer in the blood of the political system. Such a legislature, instead of engaging in oversight functions, seeks filthy lucre from the activities they are supposed to oversight. As the engine room of the checks and balances that strengthen democracy, a compromised legislature rather becomes a vampire that sucks life out of the political system.

    So, while awaiting debate on the proposal to return Nigeria to parliamentary democracy, the National Assembly should shave what they have appropriated to themselves in flagrant disobedience to the provision of Third Schedule Part 1N (d) of the 1999 constitution (as amended), which provides that their salaries and emoluments should be determined by the Revenue Mobilisation Allocation and Fiscal Commission. This column believes that if they can turn a new leaf, they can effectively oversight the executive arm, where the bulk of the nation’s resources are spent.

    Read Also: Economic hardship: Tinubu inherited a failed economy – Gbenga Daniel

    The same role should be applicable to the state and local government legislative authorities. While most of the state legislatures have not shown the daring courage of the federal legislature to forcefully take a chunk of the available resources for themselves, they lack the courage to oversight the executive arms, as provided by the constitution. Many of them are just docile, awaiting the directive of the governors, for which side to turn their legislative heads. The result is that most governors are tin despots, with the requisite checks and balances that breed effectiveness lacking.

    While this column trusts the capacity of PBAT and his team to turn around the debilitating economic challenges we face as a nation, it admonishes that time is of essence. The regime must know that it has many political enemies, who are eager to conflate their political interests with the economic challenges faced by the masses. If they have the opportunity they would ignite fire to burn down the country, believing they are burning down PBAT’s regime.  Hunger, desperation and hopelessness on the part of the poor and downtrodden can be exploited.

    So, the president, state governors and local government administrators must join forces to pursue developmental programs to end the spiralling poverty ravaging the land. It would be a monumental tragedy if the country is allowed to burn down in an orgy of angry protests. The debilitating pains in the street, coupled with the harsh weather condition, are a cocktail for disaster. Those who don’t care about the country must not be handed over the initiative, to turn the country upside down.

  • As CBN goes bullish

    As CBN goes bullish

    The past fortnight witnessed something of a mild stampede in the typically gravity-defying parallel forex exchange market that expectedly provoked unusually searing questions about the real intentions of the apex bank as indeed the Tinubu administration itself. Most prominent among the many questions is whether the apex bank was finally ready to do battle with the cult that have come to elevate speculation over and above value-addition and more particularly, the tiny segment believed to constitute a mere five percent but have arrogantly transmuted to be the lordly players before whom the real sector and other critical players must bow. Rather trenchantly, questions are being asked about the content of the administration’s renewed hope that seems to have chosen the wings of despair to sail.

    Surely, the news of the shutdown of Bureaux de Change (BDCs) in Abuja must have come as a surprise to Nigerians. For a segment whose staying power is not so much about how much value it delivers to the economy but one that prides itself as conduit of convenience to all manners of players, licit and illicit, the tremor was something of a revelation about its often-assumed invincibility. While the message pushed to the public in the aftermath of the shutdown was shortage of the greenback, the trigger seems to have been the CBN-orchestrated sinking of the naira to an all-time low of N1,482 at a time the parallel market remained N1,450/$.

    Talk of a desperate season; it has been, for the apex bank, a season of boundless activism. Starting with the rollout of the prudential guidelines on foreign currency assets and liabilities and with it new mandatory reporting formats; to the removal of the allowable limit of exchange rate quoted by the International Money Transfer Operators (IMTOs), such have been the rash of measures that have left many wondering where the apex bank has been all these while.

    All of these, to be sure, indicative of a new resolve to clear the mess – the old, rentier economy of arbitrage, the ruthless betting on the naira and such other derivatives which the banks and their black market allies have perfected while the monetary authorities slept. 

    Read Also; Food inflation a global phenomenon – Bwala

    Clearly, if panic and its derivative, the plunge in naira’s value best typify the current realities, the underlying message appears to be that things will get worse before they get better. How further down things might be is anyone’s guess. Surely, a lot will depend on the efficacy of the policies cobbled together by the fiscal authorities to address what is by far, a deeper, more complex structural problem.

    However, if the panic stoked by the reported shutdown of the BDCs is to be understood, it is only in the context of the apex bank’s targeted onslaught on the ungoverned spaces which the operators have claimed for themselves but which the CBN has only now chosen to impose a semblance of order. As for the other measures, particularly the payment of in-bound transfers in the domestic currency, the singular message is that the naira remains the nation’s sole, domestic legal tender!

    At issue of course is forex supply. How much do we have in the piggy bank called the foreign reserve? Is it – as the IMF says – $33.12 billion as of February 8, or – as the global financial service firm, JP Morgan once feared in its 2023 estimate –more realistically around the $3.7 billion mark after adjusting three key forex liability lines of FX forwards ($6.84 billion), securities lending ($5.5 billion) and currency swaps ($21.3 billion)?

    Here is how the bank summed up Nigeria’s situation in its Africa Emerging Markets Research dated August 17, 2023: “Net FX reserves are significantly lower than previously estimated…Based on partial information from the audited financial accounts, we estimate that CBN’s net FX reserves were around US$3.7bn at the end of last year, from US$14.0bn at the end-2021”. Has anything fundamentally changed particularly as oil exports have remained on a steady downward curve due to pervasive theft and inadequate investment in upstream infrastructure? Lest I forget, where are the forex earners aside the oil sector?

    While the above somewhat presents the harsh reality, the problem is that some Nigerians actually see the above are theirs alone to be dispensed at their pleasure.

    And to think that some people actually believe that Cardoso’s apex bank, could, with fiat, order the printing of fresh-mint notes of the greenback in the same manner that Emefiele flooded our streets and highways with those worthless wads of naira notes. It seems unlikely that anyone even heard, let alone understand, Cardoso’s treatise that many factors, so complex and variegated, most of which are outside the control of the apex monetary authority, actually determine the inflow into the forex reserves. His sin – an unforgivable one at that – is his insistence of rewriting the narrative of the only economy in the world where it is far more profitable to hawk foreign currencies than engage in truly value-adding economic activities.

    Again, I understand Nigerians’ fixation with the exchange rate. In an import-dependent economy, in it, Nigerians live and find their being! In recent days, we have seen the destruction that devaluation can wrought on a fragile economy. Never mind that cement, one of Nigeria’s supposed success stories, the bulk of whose raw materials are sourced locally, have suddenly seen prices skyrocket. Two weeks ago, a 50 kg bag sold for N5,500; last weekend, it jumped to N7,000! Now, even the neighbourhood yam seller has suddenly perfected the art of indexing his price with international currency movements.

    Surely, Nigerians being rational economists know what to do when the chips are down! It explains why the Cardoso devaluation has been so devastating with prices of everything going up. Still wondering why Nigeria is way different from say a country like South Korea that does not give a hoot about the exchange rate?

    I once wrote on this page of how the Asian country’s currency, the Won exchanged at 1311.85000 KRW/$. The country, an industrial powerhouse, has a vast array of goods and services to export – and so could afford the luxury of a severely weakened currency to boost its exports – unlike the self-acclaimed biggest economy on the continent, which, lacking any appreciable capacity to export anything, relies virtually on oil exports!

    At the very worst, Cardoso and company might be accused of performing a delicate surgery without anaesthesia; what is beyond debate is that the surgery had long been overdue! In any case, surgeries are known to require different skill-sets from anaesthetics!

    So much for the hues and cries over the devaluation: how many Nigerians actually benefitted from the regime of multiple exchange rates? Is it the genuine manufacturer, who after providing the naira cover in his account, is still made to wait endlessly while the banks fiddle with their funds? Or the students and the medical tourists that have long found a way round the pretence called banking?

    Of course we know those for whom the Cardoso pill has become something of a death knell: The highly connected for whom the margin between the official and the parallel market was once worth a pot of gold; the corporate executive for whom over-invoicing is fair game and letters of credit is no more than an instrument of capital transfer; add the bureaucrats, the banks and the bankers for whom the so-called parallel market constitute the surest pathway to unearned wealth.

    Let them suffer the same paroxysms that the rest of us have endured while we turn to the man we elected to get the job done for succour! Welcome to Cardoso’s new, equal opportunity world!

  • Labour and sundry piques

    Labour and sundry piques

    Of all the challenges Nigeria faces today, organized Labour’s brilliant intervention is its knee-jack pastime: issuing a strike notice!

    Yes, things are hard and workers — Labour’s favourite street bogey — are suffering.  Indeed, to be fair, everyone is.

    Still, can you imagine a fire tearing at a farm; yet the farm’s foreman traps the owner in a hostile ring of irate farm hands, all yelling the owner cannot save the farm, without first settling the day’s wage?

    Pray, if the farm goes up in smoke, will the foreman and irate work gang still have a job? That pretty much settles the wisdom of adversarial Labour in crisis times!

    Organized Labour appears yoked to that Yoruba quip: profit or loss, the labourer’s wage is sure! 

    Shouldn’t Labour’s thinking have morphed from just loud, bellicose hands to, in troubled times, thinking partners — thinking minds that recreate wealth, and after, insist on a fair share for their members?

    That fixation with willy-nilly demand — even with so little in the pot — has been the standard default of the factory-floor Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC), under Joe Ajaero. 

    The hitherto more tempered Festus Osifo-led Trade Union Congress (TUC) is fast losing its introspection to the Labour mob.  Ripples just hopes this duo won’t crash workers’ interests with their fashionable rashness.

    Yet, the Federal Government too must apply tact and wisdom in navigating the social bomb of its double-whammy tornado: the removal of subsidy on petroleum products and the floating of the Naira for imperfect market forces to make hay.

    Read Also: How Herbert Wigwe helped in building RCCG City of David, by Iluyomade

    The two form the basis of its tough economic reforms, with the acute inflation they have sparked; and the pain and anguish they have wreaked in the land.

    President Bola Tinubu and his economic czars should therefore ready their policy wonks to continue explaining why the present bitter pills are no hemlock to kill but rather, an elixir — very tough elixir, to be sure — to save.

    It’s the government’s duty to explain and the people’s right to know, why the bitter gulps must continue.  Aside, the government should pray — and work harder — for the reforms to soon turn a positive bend to, at least, have something less dreary to report.

    Still, that threshold might not be so far away as it seems.  For starters, pressuring hard the ready local refineries to roll out stock could well take some sting off inflation.

    Besides, forex gained from importing petroleum products — when local refining takes off — should increase the available pool of dollars; and stanch the Naira’s free bleeding, though that forex market appears a bastion of sharks and crooks.  But then again, the government must do its duty to checkmate these economic vermin.

    Until then, however, the government has no choice but to answer for its own policy choices. The snag, though is: how do you engage folks who don’t want to understand?  If you don’t understand an issue — and don’t even want to — how do you productively engage?

    Again here, Labour takes the cake. It dismissed the Tinubu administration’s twin reform pillars as “ill-conceived and ill-executed IMF/World Bank-induced hike in the price of PMS and the devaluation of the Naira.”

    That might well be.  But beyond the bogey of “IMF/World Bank”, how did the NLC showcase its own superior thinking, beyond its predictable dogma that everything Bretton Woods must be evil?  These folks just love to talk the talk!

    Even with the perceived notoriety of IMF and co, isn’t that instant dismissal more of hot dogma that treats any reasoned discourse as more or less heresy?  Pray, who mouths heresy in the open debate on public policy?

    But aside from dogma, NLC’s ultimate joker is its populist appeal to the rumbling belly! 

    “Widespread hunger,” it fumes in triumphant rage in its strike notice, “is now ravishing millions of Nigerians, with the workers’ purchasing power significantly eroded, while insecurity has assumed an increasing dimension.”

    From playing the people’s hunger tribunes, it went on to stack its cards, over unresolved union politics, simply because it likely backed the wrong horses in the sweepstakes involving National Union of Road Transport Workers (NURTW) and Road Transport Employers Association of Nigeria (RTEAN) unionists!

    Yes, union politics is the NLC/TUC turf.  But why don’t the Labour centres admit they are co-hustlers — not disinterested monitors — in those sweepstakes: the same charge they levy on others?

    Indeed, pouring vitriol on policy and traducing those in government for wilfully punishing the people, by hard policy choices, is organized Labour at its distracting worst. Such emotive play to the gallery seldom offers any plausible alternative thinking.

    Take hunger, again.  It’s true hunger stalks the land.  Still, do a content analysis of newspapers or radio/TV contents since 1999. Hunger stalking the land has been a recurrent theme.

    Even back in President Shehu Shagari’s 2nd Republic (1979-1983),  hunger and allied rumbling earned the late Alhaji Umaru Dikko, and his Essential Commodities (Essenco) outfit, deserved notoriety.

    No: the issue is not playing dumb to food insecurity, which clearly is still a challenge, despite the agricultural activism of the Muhammadu Buhari years, which saw Nigeria come from nowhere to be Africa’s No. 1 cultivator of rice.

    It’s rather the set way the media just echoes the hunger panic, without putting it in context, to better understand specific gains and losses. 

    Such uncritical echo of panic — even when there could have been in place hard and sustainable work to turn the tide — makes organized Labour and sundry lobbies to escape with emotional howlers. 

    Yet, such howlers have, so far, proffered no superior ideas.  All they do is milk people’s misery: Buhari was the old devil.  Tinubu is the new demon.  Abuse is cheap!

    The Nigerian favourite pastime, elite or masses, is to point fingers at critical times. NLC mirrors that tendency.  Yet, the critical collective ought to pool ideas in a time of crisis.

    But still again, the regime must carry own cross — absolutely no escape from that.

    A more rigourous Labour should have hustled the government to fire, pronto, the ready refineries into production.  That should be more job opportunities for its members.

    It could also query the wisdom of the government (on deep reason, not cheap dogma) to float the Naira; and its bet that the huge foreign venture capital that could draw — to invest in road, rail, power, processed agriculture and allied critical sectors — will more than compensate for the current Naira slump and its spiral of inflation.

    Instead, Labour is dreaming fond dreams of a N400, 000 minimum wage, without breaking a sweat where the cash will come from!  Such antediluvian thinking! 

    Still, the government must continue to engage citizens, irate or calm, sober or hysterical, while it fixes its sight on the ball.

    If it’s any comfort, the first two years of the Tinubu governorship in Lagos (1999-2007) was a welter and thunder of citizen abuse. Now, 27 years later, it’s a national reference. 

    That might yet be the story of the Tinubu Presidency.  But it must first manage the present storm.

  • Football feeds the soul

    Football feeds the soul

    There are many who can forgo food for football. Children especially. But as the Nigerian-South African semi-final match which Nigeria won from the valley of death showed, football not only feeds the soul, but also makes a banquet of it. One can say that the souls of four Nigerians were barbecued in the tension-soaked semi-final match. We pray for the repose of their souls in the line of duty as lovers of football and country. 

    One wonders how much the great exploits of Super Eagles may have helped to ameliorate the hunger ravaging Nigerians. While the tournament lasted, there is no doubt that the Super Eagles fed the souls of Nigerians, and one wonders what impact winning the cup would have had on Nigerians, if the Eagles had devoured the Elephants of Cote D’Ivoire? But sadly, Nigeria lost at the finals.

    With football gone, will the souls of Nigerians return to the grinding impacts of poverty and hunger ravaging the land? Luckily, President Bola Ahmed Tinubu (PBAT) has ordered the release of grains and rice to ameliorate the challenges, and one looks forward to fall in the prices of these essential commodities. With the price of rice at nearly N70,000 for 50 kg, what happened to the rice pyramid that former governor of Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele, regaled Nigerians with?

    Could it be that those bags contained pebbles, not rice? At the official launch, cynics had claimed that all the gra-gra about self-sufficiency in rice production was a fluke. But even if it wasn’t, could it be that the long years of insecurity ravaging the northern Nigeria and the abandoned rice paddies have been bearing fruits? With the insecurity not yet abating, should Nigerians brace up for longer years of hunger?

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    Surely, this writer wished that the Super Eagles had won the Nation’s Cup, considering how close they came to embracing the tape. This is despite not giving them much chance at the beginning, with their lacklustre performance in recent matches. Their poor showing during the World Cup qualifiers dampened our souls, but surprisingly it was lifted at the Nations Cup.

    The success of the Ivoirians has shown the capability of African coaches, when compared to their foreign counterparts. Interim manager of the Elephants, Emerse Fae, who replaced the sacked coach, Jean Louis Gasset, who finished third in the qualifying stage, showed what indigenous coaches can do.  Similarly, the late Nigerian coach, Steven Keshi, took over a demoralized Eagles and went ahead to win the 2013 AFCON Cup, in South Africa. So, are there special spices that African coaches know which foreign coaches don’t know when it matters?

    The story of Emerse Fae’s triumph will make a good subtitle in the Chicken Soup for the Soul Series. It is absolutely stunning. The president of Cote D’Ivoire, Alassan Quattara, was all smiles as his soul soaked in the success. The $1 million the country spent to host the tournament turned a good investment. Sharing that huge amount amongst citizens could never have fed the souls of Ivoirians, the way success at the tournament did.

    Arguably, nothing could bring such spontaneous elixir to the people as football. The joy of winning is exhilarating, and the nation’s other challenges are temporarily forgotten while the joy lasts. For a fractured country like Nigeria, football appears to be the common menu across religions, tribes and regions. There are no demands for national character or ethnic balancing. At the football banquet, no one is bounced for failing to turn in a peculiar garment.

    The national dress code is uniform and the colour is green and white. Everyone speaks in tongue, like at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, and each understand the other in his native language. Whether Hausa, Ibo, Yoruba, Ibibio, Kanuri, or Idoma, all stand wound together on one tapestry. They kick, cringe, embrace, shout, and exhale, in solidarity to one another, without remembering that tongue and tribe differ. Football turns Nigerians into one huge keg of smoothies.

    One wonders why we cannot gain such smoothness in managing the affairs of the country. Sadly, any attempt to blend a common national interest, when it comes to deciding what is best for Nigeria is waylaid by her political elites. While insecurity is ravaging every part of Nigeria, there is no agreement on what basic steps to take, to cure it. When an attack is carried out against others, some wait to hear the names of the attackers, to know whether they should be called criminals or victims.

    In the farmers and herders’ clashes, the same persons are villains who kidnap, steal, kill and destroy to some, while to others there are victims whose cattle path to pasture and water has been appropriated, and so deserves sympathy. Former president, Muhammadu Buhari called for the love of the enemies, when the issue of pastoralists is involved. He ignored those calling him ethnic irredentist in choosing those to be anointed to positions while he was president. But football is never a victim of such cleavages.

    Perhaps that is why the nation succeeds more in football than in other national endeavours. The worship of the god of football does not discriminate like in other religions. The god of football is not jealous of other gods, and no one is regarded as an infidel or unbeliever at the altar of worship. The offering for sacrifice is acceptable, as long as it would aid cooking of the banquet for the nation.

    At the start of every half of the match, the players gather and in one brotherhood offer acts of supplication. This writer wonders when the nation will learn from the players and observe the basic principles that united we stand and divided we fall. In the Nigerian political space, many are yet to accept PBAT as the chief priest. His every step is questioned. His motive is challenged. Threats are offered in place of reasoning together.

    Amidst the confusion, hunger is gnawing at our intestines. The price of basic groceries has doubled, while bread has quadrupled. Making a list before going to the market serves no purpose anymore. You will not buy all the necessaries; rather you will buy what your money can pay for. Conducting a market survey in advance is irrelevant, as the prices change twice or thrice every week. This column wonders whether the players were changing their appearance fees the way inflation was eating up the value of the fees.

    The challenges facing the nation are enormous, and many have called for restructuring as the silver bullet. One hopes such a talk shop will not be another temporal elixir like football. While football had fed our souls, we need food for the stomach. But, what will save the nation is the spirit of football.

  • After AFRICON: Getting back to basics

    After AFRICON: Getting back to basics

    Once in a rare while, there occurs, even in the life of the most fractious nation, a moment when fragmentation yields to concentration and convergence, when an entire nation rides high on the outcome of a single event or series of events that eclipses the problems and difficulties of the moment and invests that outcome with almost limitless possibilities.

    That event may be victory in a war, or in international sporting competition.

    As examples, think of the euphoria that greeted Biafra’s surrender in Nigeria’s civil war.  Think of the triumphalism that washed over Britain when it defeated Argentina in the war for the Malvinas.  Think of the explosion of joy that marked India’s winning of the World Cricket Cup.  Think of South Africa clinching the World Rugby Cup. Think of Brazil winning the World Soccer Cup time and again.

    Think, finally of the wave of joy and expectation worldwide that greeted the release of Nelson Mandela after 27 years in an apartheid South African jail.

    Nigeria came tantalizingly close to such a sublime moment in the final stages of the African Cup of Nations Competition which was concluded last Sunday.  It inched closer to that moment with each match, surviving a nerve-wracking penalty shootout with South Africa to qualify for the final. 

    Victory in that encounter was the only thing standing between the coronation and convergence, between remaining mired in self-doubt and being jolted out of it with a burst of energy and dynamism. It would signalize, however fleetingly, the end of pessimism and the birth of optimism.

    Up to that point, few things seemed possible.  From that point, everything would seem not only possible but splendidly attainable.

    Read Also; Food inflation a global phenomenon – Bwala

    But that was not to be.  In the event, the host country Cote d’Ivoire pipped Nigeria 2-1 and shattered the possibility of a convergence that Nigeria sorely needed. 

    In years past, qualifying for the final would have been greeted with, among other markers, a one-day public holiday.  The eve of the final would have been accorded a public holiday to enable Nigerians make arrangements to watch the event live on television or other platforms.

    Clinching the championship would have been accorded another public holiday during which  the team, led by the Vice President, would formally present the trophy to the President, appropriately attired in in the costume of the Super Eagles, before a national audience. 

    Each member of the team would have been given or promised a handsome present in cash or kind.   Each would have had a street named in his honour.  Since the gift of a house in the most exclusive neighbourhood in Abuja had become de rigueur on such occasions, the time to bestow an oil well on each member of the victorious team might well be judged to have arrived.

    Parades and carnivals would have been staged at state capital, at which there would have been a great deal of dining and wining and wenching.   The absorbing spectacle would have provided not a little relief, nay diversion, from the tyranny of an economy in which the currency is calibrated by how much rice it can buy in a market governed by caprice.

    In the absence of bread, nothing succeeds like a circus in difficult times. That is the wisdom of the ages, from ancient Rome to modern times.  The arena was already being readied by the media.  One newspaper proclaimed that the Africa Nations Cup was “coming home.”  Nigeria has probably won that trophy more times than any other nation, but it would be doing violence to fact and idiom to proclaim Nigeria its home.

    At that point, I began to worry for the safety of the player or players whose wild shot in a penalty shootout might be judged to have cost the nation the trophy, or the player who might flub the penalty kick that would have taken Nigeria to an unanswerable victory.  They might need protection.

    I was reminded of the sing-song of the jingoistic British press in 2021 in the run-up to the final of the European Cup of Nations tournament that the trophy was “coming home.” And can one ever forget the foul, racist abuse, to say nothing of the threat of physical violence, to which black players who courageously stepped up to take but lost penalty kicks that their white colleagues would not attempt even with one million pounds of offer?

    A second-place finish in the tournament is no mean achievement but winning is everything. And so, Nigeria was spared the excess, the flight from the facts on the ground that victory would have entailed.  That view probably belongs to a very small minority.  Nothing less than outright victory would have satisfied the yearning of Nigerians.  And that yearning was almost intoxicating while it lasted. 

    Now, victory has bequeathed to Cote d’Ivoire a sorely-needed convergence, a respite from the strains and pangs of partition into a predominantly Muslim north and a predominantly Christian south, and the third-term ambition of President Alassane Ouattara, a divisive figure of dubious legitimacy.  One must also reckon with the endemic problems of the ECOWAS, the 15-member regional group in which it ranks as the second biggest economic actor, after Nigeria.

    Nigeria must now confront the hard facts on the ground.  Among them:  the heightened wave of kidnapping across the nation, and the blood-curdling violence often deployed to that end; the pervading insecurity and national paralysis; the run-away cost of everything, and the poor functioning of the national institutions and service providers still standing,

    I have saved for last the brazen corruption that is choking the system and creating super-abundance for the few while pauperizing the many, including those who had taken for granted over the decades a lifestyle that guaranteed the basic comforts of life.

    From our grief might yet emerge a different point of convergence, one that sees every citizen as a leader in his or her own orbit; one that assigns the tack of national development and regeneration to the citizens as a collective and tasks the elected or appointed leadership with providing example and inspiration.

  • The dollar finally comes a cropper

    The dollar finally comes a cropper

    The United States dollar still has the power to make men bow and tremble, and its gravitational pull is still strong enough to make women swoon. But something tells me that its run as Nigeria’s premier medium of exchange is finally coming to an end.

    At the height of its power, the U.S. dollar was not merely a medium of exchange; it was the medium of appreciation, estimation, coercion, reckoning, seduction, speculation, and valuation. I will go so far as to say that it served as a medium of expression more comprehensive than any language in contemporary use.

    It was brutal and oppressive while it lasted.  It corroded everything it touched or was associated with it, however tangentially.  But all that is gradually coming to an end.

    It is being supplanted in every department by an unlikely commodity: rice, or any product that goes by that name. And the victims of the looming defenestration of the American dollar are the very people it had catapulted to undue prominence, if not eminence.

    Last week, one U. S. dollar translated into more than N1,400.  This is not a misprint; I looked it up.  That is a lot of re-designed Naira.  But be not deceived by the dollar’s apparent strength for, according to the best authorities, the low or no-income earner who has never set her eyes upon the greenback, the Naira is no longer what it used to be.  And while the American dollar still has its uses, the crucial issue is what it can buy. 

    And here, in the domestic economy, the decisive issue is this: How much rice on open and defiant display in the market or in clandestine trade in warehouses run by syndicated smugglers can it bring to the table?

    For the first time since the second, third and fourth windows were opened in the foreign exchange market that was the centrepiece of military president Ibrahim Babangida’s Structural Adjustment Programme, the Naira is now exerting a greater pull on the dollar than the dollar is exerting on the ragged, torn, wrinkled, crinkled, pre-Mefi banknotes

    But, to the lady who keeps a watchful eye on the pin money, it is all a conjurer’s trick, or probably the product of a conspiracy between the men in the pin-striped suits who run or  think they run the banks, and the visiting expatriate Nigerian with the swagger and a matching attitude.  Put to him the question of the day:  How much rice, to the nearest cup, does he think the dollars buy in the marketplace?  That is the ultimate test. 

    The dollar fails the test.  For, the answer is:  Not enough.  A better answer is:  Never enough.

    That same question now haunts Nigerian expatriates in the United States relentlessly.  And its answer is the full measure of the worth of the dollar in most households, and the ultimate metric of the value of the Nigerian expatriate’s contribution to the wellbeing of his folks back home.

    You can almost hear them hiss and curse under their breaths as they decode the bank alert on your latest remittance. Seventy thousand and Naira, they intone.  It will fetch only a 50-kilogram sack of shakashaka that passes for rice, if that.

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    If you really cared, Americana, if you wanted them to eat a higher grade or rice that is not a clear and present danger to their dentition and their gastronomy, you have to come up with another N20k or so to get them a sack of rice of a higher grade.  And that is all they are asking for.  Not the premium grade.

    And surely, you have not been gone so long that you have forgotten that making a pot of the thinnest soup that you could safely eat with the rice is a separate proposition altogether, its cost almost as daunting as the cost of the grain itself. 

    If you live in the United States, or what some people back home call the Dollar Zone, probably to draw indiscreet and possibly unhealthy attention to your comparatively privileged situation, you are assailed time and again by messages sent through methods so ingenuous that you could have to be a Microsoft-certified computer programmer to block them, or to make the case that they never reached you. 

    If you could take physical hold of the printout in its ethereal form, I am sure you could squeeze a cup or two of the tears that must have cascaded down the writers’ brows onto the keyboard and percolated right to the inner workings of the system.

    They are invariably stories of unremitting hard luck and bad luck.  Once in a rare while, when you are about to breathe a sigh of relief that a message with more than a hint of something to cheer has bobbed up, you encounter a dispiriting stipulation.  It would all depend on your ponying up to a scheme that had been tried, tested and perfected in Afghanistan,  Tadjikistan, Corsica, Las Vegas, and Cape Verde, among other forward-looking places.

    Rapid results guaranteed.   Send $5,000 only with completed application you can download for free.

    Only those not seized of the centrality of rice in the national economy or the domestic economy of individual homes could have worked up a wholly unnecessary fuss the other day over the disclosure that, while Nigeria was on Covid lockdown, hundreds of billions of Naira went into providing lunch Mondays through Fridays for school children in some parts of the country, of which rice of the choicest kind was the main dish.

    Transnational and cross-cultural research has shown conclusively that thousands of them went to school on empty stomachs, as a result of which they learned little and quickly forgot the little they had learned.  An incentive to get them to school and keep them there during opening hours was clearly indicated, the researchers submitted.

     They recommended unanimously in a landmark paper that, based on their findings, rice meals were far and away the most cost-effective means ever devised.

    It worked for a while.  Thereafter, researchers noticed a curious development that nothing had prepared them to expect.  The students came late in droves, usually close to lunchtime, signed in, had their meals, and trooped out of the premises quietly.  This led to the programme being called unkind names, among which was the “chop-and-quit” scheme.

    Nobody knows for certain what followed, but the belief in usually informed circles is that Covid or no Covid, instead of slackening, demand for services actually increased.  The good lady administering the programme – bless her, kind caring heart – felt obliged to keep it going until the money ran out if she could not expand it

    And instead of showering her with high praise, they have been pillorying her.

    As for the pernicious mystique of the dollar, it is ended.

    Up, up Naira. Up rice.

  • State police as panacea

    State police as panacea

    With national security on tenterhooks, the call for state police is getting more stringent. In the past few weeks, a day hardly passes without the nation being assailed by news of a heart-rending security breach. Kidnapping, banditry, arson, and killings have become the order of the day. Those engaged in the dastardly acts attack school children, traditional rulers, women, men, rural and urban folks and they make ritual, money and meat of them.

    Recently, governors elected on the platform of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) joined the call for state police. It is interesting that now the All Progressive Congress (APC) is in charge, PDP is asking for state police, but from the era of Olusegun Obasanjo to Goodluck Jonathan which spanned 16 years, the call for state police was ignored by the then ruling party. Not long ago, former president, Olusegun Obasanjo, who abused those that called for state police when he was in power, also called for state police to stem the worsening insecurity in the country.

    Of course, in the PDP era, the opposition party was in the forefront in calling for state police. Now that a coalition of some of the opposition parties under the rubric of APC is in power, the party hierarchy has not officially called for state police. So, instead of just arguing for state police, as has been done here severally in the past, this column asks, is there any reason why the party in power is usually not excited about the call for state police?

    Conversely put, is it a mere political gimmick for opposition parties to call for state police? Again put in another way, are there things those in the corridors of power know that they don’t tell the rest of us? For if there is nothing untoward with state police, now that repentant PDP has called for state police, when the former opposition coalition is now in power, a constitutional amendment to allow other layers of police structure should be a walkover.

    In the 9th National Assembly, the constitutional amendment to provide for state police was defeated. Many states in the northern part of the country stringently opposed the attempt to amend the constitution to allow state police. Yet, the Northern Governors Forum, in the twilight of Buhari’s administration in 2022, called for the amendment of the constitution to incorporate state police. The call was at the height of grave insecurity in the northwest and north-central. Interestingly, despite the support for state police by a panel set up by the ruling APC, headed by then governor, Nasir El Rufai of Kaduna State, the National Assembly controlled by his party could not pass the amendment. Of course, many PDP controlled states which are now openly clamouring for state police voted against the amendment.

    Perhaps, the call for state police comes seasonally. Arguably, with respect to the safety of lives and properties, the dry season has become a dangerous season in Nigeria. In the past decade or so, the tragic clash between farmers and herders heightens during the dry season. Especially, under the immediate past regime of President Buhari, killings, arsons, dispossession of land, cattle rustlings and kidnapping turned to a national nightmare during the season. Many have associated the tragic order of the season to the determined effort by armed herdsmen to have temporal or permanent access to pasture and water.

    In this first dry season under PBAT, perhaps with the state security agencies including the police, army, local vigilantes, and state owned security organs rediscovering their heft against the armed herdsmen, as demonstrated in Plateau State last week, there has been a reduction in outright farmers and herders clash, but an increase in kidnapping for ransom and killings. Could there be a link in the transition from clash to access pasture and water, to kidnapping for ransom or killings as punishment? To worsen the situation, urban cities, including the federal capital, Abuja, have not been spared in the new wave of kidnapping and killings.

    The past week, has been tragic for Ekiti State and Ekitis in Kwara State. Traditional rulers and school children appear to have been targeted in the new wave of killings. In the structure and hierarchy of state functionaries, the position of traditional rulers is rather pathetic, on security issues. When there is security breach in communities, the state functionaries lean on them to proffer localized solution. Many of them have been threatened with deposition, by state governors and local government authorities, over security challenges in their domain; yet they are ill-equipped structurally to offer any remedy.

    Read Also: Police investigate death of Lagos couple

    The two Ekiti monarchs murdered were reportedly returning from a security meeting when they were ambushed and murdered in cold blood. Significantly, with no personal security protection, they are soft targets unlike the other state actors at state and local government levels who are usually guarded by well-armed police. Sometimes, the traditional rulers are accused of condoning criminals in their community as if they are equipped to challenge the armed marauders. Of course, there are a few of them who either for personal gains or intimidation, succumb to the antics of the criminals.

    To stave-off the descent into anarchy, there is need for a national conversation and consensus on how to tackle the worsening insecurity in our dear country. The pre-eminent socio-cultural organizations in the southwest, southeast, south-south, and north-central have severally called for restructuring and state police. With two traditional rulers murdered and defrocked by alleged herdsmen in PBAT’s homestead, there is increased anger and frustration amongst the people. As if to give a vent to the capacity of the state or regional police, the Amotekun corps from Ondo State has reportedly routed the killer herdsmen in Ekiti.

    Eminent citizens, including Chief Wole Olanipekun, SAN, have recently lent their voice for state police. On his part, Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, has argued for wholesome constitutional amendment to incorporate state police. This column hopes the Northern Governors Forum (NGF) has not withdrawn its support for state police now that it is a possibility with PBAT in charge. If they withdraw their support, then calls for state police may be a political gimmick by state actors. Intriguingly, in the past week, Governor Hope Uzodimma of Imo State, argued against state police under the current revenue allocation formula.

    While Nigerians await the position of the 10th National Assembly, on the thorny issue of state police, and the collaborative stance of the required two-third states, to amend section 214, as provided by section 9, of the 1999 constitution (as amended), there is an urgent need for a solution to safeguard lives of Nigerians. For this column, the days ahead will show whether the political class are merely taking non-sate actors on a melancholy ride.