The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

PMB and the beast

It has been a little more than a week since the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) put out its latest fact sheet about the workers’ number one nightmare – inflation. Far from being the usual attestation of being merely alive, the unmistakeable conclusion is of a monster on sustained rampage.

According to the NBS, headline inflation rate rose in April to 22.22% as against the March rate of 22.04%. However, on a year-on-year basis, the headline inflation rate was 5.40% points higher than the April 2022 rate of 16.82%.

Not that the raw figures would mean much to the ordinary Nigerian daily savaged by the cold market forces over which he has long surrendered; and trust our officials to shrug any definitive conclusions on the trends as anything new. For while the undeniable reality is that the prices of basic goods are not only now beyond reach of the ordinary folk and the possibility of things soon getting out of hand is real, the greater tragedy is that respite seems nowhere in sight.

Suffice to state that we know what the figures say and did not say. For instance, it confirms what we already know about food inflation trending north. In March, the rate was 24.5 percent; in April went up to 24.6% – which means that Nigerians continue to cough out more and more if only to ensure the basic stuff gets to the family table.

Notably, one of the things that the report didn’t say was that the last time the country came anywhere near this rate was in September 2005 under Olusegun Obasanjo; or that the fundamental issues underlying the inflationary spiral are anything new, or better still, outside of the core of the promises that the President Buhari made when he sought his current job in 2014. As the administration prepares to exit the place of power in a week, we can say for a fact that it would be leaving the country much worse, on countless indices than it met her in 2015.

And if it seems an unflattering testimonial that an administration that inherited inflation rate of 9 per cent at take-off in 2015 would be exiting with a record 22.22 percent eight years after – a 13.22 percentage point increase – it is, with the benefit of hindsight, a revelation of how thoroughly ill-prepared and ill-equipped it was in the first place – never mind its arrogant and pretentious messiahnism.

Nigerians have been regaled with stories of how Covid-19 and other unexpected developments altered the administration’s plans; of how unmet revenue expectations thwarted its noble plans to upgrade the nation’s infrastructure across the board and how the on-going security challenges not only impinged on its capacity to deliver but also set a limit on what it could do.

Over all however, there is a basis to suggest that some of the problems that have persisted could have been substantially mitigated by a more adroit handling of the task of governing. In other words, the grim inflation goes beyond mere symptoms but rather mirror of the quality of governance.

Where decisiveness and clear-headed motion was indicated, we saw an administration that would, in the absence of concrete plans, opt for either vacillation or outright abdication. From the farmers’/herders crisis where it exhibited a stupefying complicity, to its near fatal indifference to the menace of pipeline vandalism; from an appalling cluelessness in the management of the economy, to an astounding lack of coordination; there’s just enough material to put the administration on that low-grade status as the much derided Goodluck Jonathan administration.

As they say – nature abhors vacuum; an apex bank that would ordinarily in the terrible circumstances that the nation found itself, be found playing the complementary role, thrust itself into the saddle, and soon after became the sole initiator and executor of critical policies of government. For every single problem, it found a simple and straight answer: money and more money. Today, the country has since lost count of how much the CBN under Emefiele has spent on ‘intervention’ or even how many intervention lines exist! And yet we are told one of the fundamental problems facing the economy is excess liquidity for which the ordinary citizen had to suffer the consequence of currency confiscation!

By the way – I almost forgot the whopping N22.7 trillion loans extended to the federal government by the CBN under its Ways and Means provision. If Nigerians are only now beginning to come to terms with the wayward acts of its apex banker, stranger still is that the parliament has since passed off the debt to generations unborn. And now an established tradition – the main enabler of the profligacy of the former crowning itself as the saviour from the same mess it enabled, rolling out rounds and rounds of Monetary Policy Rate hikes!

Yes, another interest rate hike is already programmed to be unleashed by Godwin Emefiele and company later today at the Monetary Policy Committee to curb inflation!

Does it really work? Has it worked? Why bother when you have an exhaustible monetary policy tool, including an unparalleled monetary confiscation measure ever undertaken by any apex bank in the history of modern banking!

What of the August 2019 closure of the country’s land borders ordered by the administration. Among the many reasons it gave was the need to curb illegal importation of drugs, arms and agricultural products into the country from neighbouring West African countries.

Today, no one is asking the basic question of whether the measure, which could pass for draconian at the time, came near achieving those lofty objectives it set out, nearly four years after. Those who claim that the measure not only exacerbated the country’s food crisis, but failed fundamentally to address one of its more-loudly pronounced objectives of food sufficiency may have their arguments, the government has since moved on to new tasks!

Today, the ports aren’t working optimally; its entire infrastructure remains derelict; the power sector remains a sad story of poor judgment. As for the roads, they still belong to the 19th century. With every single tool needed to turn things around in relapsed mode, why would the inflation rate not be north-bound?

To paraphrase the scripture – while men slept, his enemy came and sowed tares among the wheat…

As it is, the question of who – between the men who slept, and the enemy who sowed tares –is more culpable hangs in the air!

May 23, 2023
LP: Hefty cost of prostitution

The latest Labour Party (LP) hubbub is the hefty cost of partisan whoredom. A Federal High Court, sitting in Kano, just questioned the validity of Abia governor-elect, Alex Otti’s membership of LP.

Though platform prostitution has been the oxygen of LP poll life, it may yet cost it big this time.

While the Abia LP partisans are swearing nothing would stop Otti’s inauguration as governor on May 29 — nothing should: he won the election, didn’t he? — the local PDP, whose Okey Ahiwe was runner-up, is threatening to exploit the verdict to own advantage, now that the court is talking of “wasted votes”.

Would Otti lose his mandate, if further appeals were to ratify the verdict of Justice Mohammed Nasir Yunusa of the Federal High Court sitting in Kano?

Quoting Section 77 (2) (3) of the Electoral Act 2022, the court found LP to have failed to submit its membership register to INEC 30 days before its primaries.

A similar claim, over Peter Obi’s valid membership of LP, is also before the Presidential Election Petition Court (PEPC), now sitting in Abuja.

Might Otti and Obi then be “emergency” LP members, enrolled after the 30-day submission window, for sudden poll advantage? The jury is still out.

Still, the Kano verdict darkly declared, citing a breach of Section 77 (2) (3): “This being so, the votes credited to alleged candidates of the 1st Defendants [LP] are wasted votes as per the decision of the Supreme Court.”

LP partisans may be seriously praying — and maybe fasting too! — that the sword over Otti’s mandate had better stay perpetually up, like the Greek sword of Damocles that never comes down.

If it swishes down, Otti and Obi could well be toast, by some phonetically poetic Otti-Obi massacre! If that happened, Otti — and his Abia voters — would be devastated, for he was declared winner. Obi, less so — for he chases a mandate he never had.

For Otti, however, the danger might not be off, even if he was sworn in on May 29. The authority the Kano court quoted was a Supreme Court precedent that robbed APC its legit Zamfara governorship vote in 2019.

Still, the debacle could have been averted had LP grown its own candidates and not wait — as it usually does — for renegades from other parties, after they fail nomination from their original parties.

But partisan prostitution is how LP rolls — from the days of Dan Iwuanyanwu, its long-standing chairman for 10 years (2004-2014): the fedora-spotting czar that forged that platform-whoredom-as-growth strategy.

It’s doubtful if LP can now throw off that self-poisoning culture. Yet, all it has done is stunt its organic growth. After each election season, it retards — its ticket hunters, cash-for-ticket, having used it, dumped it, and moved on.

Despite the current fair-weather friends in Obi’s camp, swearing by LP’s name, mouthing some hollow “ideology” — Obi is capitalist, LP is socialist — there’s little guarantee LP won’t in 2027 resume its default empty shell: awaiting new punters, after the current din must have faded with 2023.

Still, LP might be the party most blighted, offering its platform to whoever could splash the cash, ideology be damned!

But its conduct is only the symptom of a more fundamental disease: after 24 years of democracy from 1999, the Nigerian political party system is still the flux of Heraclitus, when it ought to be firming up on the permanence of Parmenides, Heraclitus’s Greek philosophical rival.

Therefore, when Nigeria’s Big Two, APC and PDP, conduct fairer and more transparent primaries, LP and co will be starved of the sweet poison that gifts them election-season life, but long-term death.

Lado: politics of community value

Community value — that would appear the core of the public essence of Basheer Garba Mohammed, popularly known in Kano as Lado.

As a private businessman with interests in property, banking and trading, he founded the Ladon Alheri Foundation. The foundation was — and still is — his response to funding public school supplements in classroom blocks, sinking community boreholes for potable water and doing corrective eye surgeries to clear off cataract which often drive folks blind.

His mission? To find ways and means, outside the government sector, to fill the gaps in the national development chains, by supplementing public sector efforts, to make the lives of ordinary folks better and more meaningful.

In 2011, Lado was elected PDP senator for Kano Central. He spent four years in Nigeria’s upper legislative chamber (2011-2015) before defeat by APC’s Rab’iu Musa Kwankwaso, with the promised APC “Change”, after the PDP years.

But irony of ironies: Lado, a victim of the PDP federal crushing of 2015, is now an APC chieftain. Kwankwaso, hitherto an APC change agent, went back to PDP, before forming own New Nigeria People’s Party (NNPP), whose Kwankwassiya movement just won the Kano governorship, aside from Kwankwaso himself winning the presidential election in Kano.

Yet, APC or PDP, fealty to community value has remained constant in Lado’s public profile.

Indeed, as PDP senator back in 2011, Lado still glories in his facilitation, as one of his constituency projects, of the building of the Kundila Bridge, which his grateful constituents promptly dubbed Gadar Lado (Lado Bridge).

As one of the pioneer bridges that served the socio-economic interests of the local folks, not a few among them regard Gadar Lado as perhaps the “biggest constituency projects in the recent political history of Kano”, according to a Lado citation.

Lado also looks back, with utmost pride, at the dualization by the Federal Government, of the Kano-Katsina expressway — again, one of the projects he attracted home, as Kano Central senator. All politics is local — and so, the bountiful benefits!

The Lado citation crowed of that project: “The dualization … is strategic in that it is another big economic channel for the North West. It is a road that aids the transportation of goods worth billions of Naira every week from neighbouring countries through Niger Republic down to Kano State, Nigeria.”

That same logic — what philosophers would call economic determinism — must have driven the Katsina-Miradi, Niger Republic, standard gauge rail line, which the Buhari Presidency has insisted upon, but which elements in the southern media dismiss as provincial (at best) or “nepotism” (at worst).

Both can’t be correct in strict economic terms, for it’s only a modernization of the old Trans-Sahara trade route, the livelihood of many for centuries past, and continued livelihood, for centuries to come.

As APC partisan, President Muhammadu Buhari, in 2021, named Lado as director-general of the National Agency for Prohibition of Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP), where Lado has also stamped his core community value.

May 23, 2023
Spoils of war

The two officials of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) taken into custody for culpable homicide in Sokoto State, following the death of their colleague, Abel Isah Dickson, in a scuffle over items recovered from a suspect, epitomizes the ongoing war over spoils of office across Nigeria. According to the EFCC, the two suspects, Assistant Superintendent Apata Oluwaseun Odunayo and Inspector Ogbuji Titu Tochukwu and their dead colleague were fighting over the proper custody of seized medications and cash.

Just as the public were digesting the salacious allegations against the officers, Governor Bello Matawalle of Zamfara whom the EFCC stated is under its investigation for corrupt practice, charged back at the chairman of the commission, Abdulrasheed Bawa. He alleged that Bawa demanded $2 million bribe from him, to overlook his alleged corrupt practice. While he claimed that he has evidence to prove his case, the EFCC has refused to join issues with him, having earlier claimed that Matawalle’s actions represent corruption fighting back.

But Matawalle insisted that Bawa “requested a bribe of $2 million from me and I have evidence of this”. He further claimed that Bawa told him that other governors were coming to his office to settle their cases. He asked EFCC to beam their searchlight on the federal executive, for corrupt practices. Clearly the allegations and counter-allegations indicate that the ruling elites are in the last minute frenzy for spoils of office, as the current regime winds down in less than one week.

On its part, the EFCC calls the allegation from Matawalle a hoax, daring him to spell the beans if he has his facts. They called the allegation the mudslinging of a drowning man. To further confirm that a last minute bazaar is going on, EFCC “alert the public about plans by some of the alleged corrupt politically exposed persons to flee the country ahead of May 29. The commission is working in close collaboration with its international partners to frustrate these escape plans, and bring those involved to justice.”

As if to ensure they are not outdone by the executive arm that controls the treasury, the National Assembly already provided for a handsome severance pay for the members. The assembly budgeted a whopping N30.2 billion as severance allowances for senators, representatives and their aides. According to a report, the National Assembly members are to go home with their official vehicles worth about N5.5 billion, as well as some of their office equipment and consumables.

At that rate, after a four-year work already handsomely paid for, the National Assembly members will get a pay-off higher than the gratuity of many more qualified persons who spent 35 in other areas of public service. It is these excessive benefits from political office that makes politics a war contest. Apart from lawful entitlements, political office holders treat the public resources put at their disposal as spoils of war. That explains the high level of corruption pervading the entire political space, whether at the federal or state levels.

The verdict in the public space is that despite making the fight against corruption a cardinal objective of his government, the out-going President Muhammadu Buhari’s regime achieved minimal success. Unfortunately, despite his best efforts, Nigeria is 150 out of 180 countries in the Corruption Perception Index (CPI), of Transparency International’s research in 2022. It scored 24 out 100, failing to meet the 32 average for sub-Saharan Africa. From 26 in 2019 to 25 in 2020, the country dimmed to 24 in 2021 and same last year.

In its latest ranking, Nigeria is rated the second most corrupt country by the CPI in West Africa. So, the war against corruption under Buhari was increasingly less efficient; perhaps because of his style of governance. While the sound bites are good, the actions say something different. The departing Buhari’s government is reported to have cited 23 mega projects in his home state of Katsina. Of course that is in addition to his tragic record on nepotistic appointments, which this column adjudges one of his worst legacies.

One of Buhari’s poster boys, Godwin Emefiele of the Central Bank of Nigeria, also allegedly committed mind boggling corrupt practices. There is the claim that he secured the approval of the president to escape abroad on the pretext of a study leave. Amongst those who may have taken good care of themselves and their friends, the governor ranks high. He may rank as the most powerful CBN governor in history.

With a carte blanche from President Buhari, Emefiele intervened in any ministry or state that caught his fancy. His budgetary allocation was limitless, and with the printing and minting company that prints the nation’s currency under his belt, he gave order to print as much money as he needed, without recourse to the National Assembly. Few days ago, all that the federal government spent outside the budget, ranging to about N23 billion, were added up and pronto approved by the National Assembly under Ways and Means spending.

If the EFCC carries out its threat to stop the fleeing corrupt public officers, Nigerians would be assailed by the level of mismanagement of the nation’s resources in a manner akin to sharing spoils of war. Some public commentators describe Nigeria as a crime scene, and public officers as principal accomplices in the cyclic perpetration of crime. That explains why there has been minimal development in the country. The Buhari regime which was principally elected to fight the scourge of mismanagement of public resources failed woefully.

The concern of Nigerians is therefore what can the incoming administration of President-elect Bola Tinubu do differently to tame the scourge of public wastage and corruption. While Buhari relied on his persona of personal example, Tinubu should rely on structural changes to fight the cankerworm. Plugging loopholes afflicting public revenue through public-private partnership may be the way to deal with the challenge. Public finance experts have argued that if the loopholes afflicting statutory public income are plugged, Nigeria does not need to operate huge deficit budgets.

It is also true that perception of public corruption fuels the insecurity ravaging the country. While lack of resources to pay for social amenities and improve the welfare of the people causes insecurity, the feeling that those in public office are helping themselves with the common resources, also encourages non-state actors to join the fray with whatever is seen as belonging to the public. How the incoming administration will deal with the despondency that there is state capture of public resources by the elites, may be another major challenge facing it.

The Nigerian ruling elites must change their tactics, if they wish to continually have a country to govern and exploit.

May 23, 2023
Oguta-Orashi dredging and Southeast

President Muhammadu Buhari, vilified as a hater of the Southeast, may yet be the stone which the builders rejected, but which has become the cornerstone of enduring developmental projects in the region. At the twilight of his regime, he has through the vice president, Professor Yemi Osinbajo, flagged-off the hydrographic survey and dredging of Oguta Lake and Orashi River to Degema in Rivers State up to the Atlantic Ocean. The project described as a game changer by Osinbajo, is an addition to the other game changer, the Second Niger Bridge.

Clearly, President Buhari’s reputation among the majority of Ndigbo is un-flattering. Historically, despite his best efforts, he was unable to penetrate the region politically. In two attempts at winning the presidency, he ran with vice presidential candidates from the Southeast, but couldn’t make a dent. He ran with Dr Chuba Okadigbo (2003) and Chief Godwin Ume-Ezeoke (2007). For reasons which political scientists and sociologists may explain, Buhari never got the kind of support that could propel him to the presidency with the two vice presidential candidates from the Southeast.

The table however turned for Buhari when he aligned with the dominant political party in the Southwest led by the president-elect, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, and chose Professor Yemi Osinbajo as his running mate in the 2015 and 2019 presidential elections. President Buhari won on the two occasions, and is about to run out the final term in less than two weeks. What intrigues are how Buhari’s reputation in south-east, swung from lukewarm to detestation.

Could it be his political statements at the beginning of his presidency, when he described the people of the region in unpalatable words? When asked about the distribution of political patronage after winning the election, President Buhari stated that there would be a huge difference between those who gave 97 percent and those who gave mere five percent. Again, in the diatribe that ensured over his ethnocentric programmes, he dismissed the people of the region as a dot, and inconsequential.

To add salt to the injury of the region, Buhari engaged in debilitating economic programmes, which the businessmen in the region vociferously claimed were targeted at their line of business. The hated economic programmes included the closure and prohibition of importation through the borders, the drastic anti-importation monetary and fiscal policies, and banning of importation of several items, amongst others. While the national economy haemorrhaged under his ill-conceived programmes, just as it happened during his first coming as military president, many Ndigbo appropriated the public angst over the programmes.

To turn the salted injury into a gangrene, Buhari engaged in one of the worst practice of nepotism and tribalism that Nigeria may have witnessed since independence. From the armed forces to the other security agencies, Ndigbo were blatantly excluded in a most brazen exhibition. The exclusion spread across other sectors of the nation’s appointive positions, in total disregard of section 14(3) of the 1999 constitution, which provides: “The composition of the Government of the Federation or any of its agencies and the conduct of its affairs shall be carried out in such manner as to reflect the federal character of Nigeria and the need to promote national unity, and also to command national loyalty …”

The gangrene relationship was due for amputation when armed herders spread their lethal wares across the Benue river into the southeast, decapitating lives and properties, with President Buhari accused of tacit support. Those who gave Buhari the benefit of doubt over his economic and employment policies, joined the wailing wailers (apologies to Buhari’s media men), as mourners were scythed by armed herders while they were burying those killed by the same terrorist group. Even a governor wept. And never was the marauders ever caught and brought to justice.

But in the midst of these atrocious developments, Buhari and his men appear to have patched the pains with some far reaching legacy projects. One of the most enduring of the projects is the Second Niger Bridge. This column over the years has written on the exploitation of the emotional well-being of the people of southeast region by the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP)-led governments of presidents Olusegun Obasanjo, and later Goodluck Jonathan. The scandal was such that while campaigning for a second term, Jonathan confessed he has forgotten his promise to deliver the Bridge before 2015.

Between him and Obasanjo, building the Niger Bridge was a bridge too far. So, it is worth celebrating that Buhari, with his mixed bag of reputation delivered the bridge. All the cock and bull story of how the previous regimes paid in advance for the bridge, as far as this column is concerned amounts to tales by moonlight.

Another enduring intervention of the Buhari regime is the extension and rebuilding of the runway of the Akanu Ibiam Airport, Enugu, after the failed promises of the PDP government.

Again, there is the claim that between the governments of Obasanjo and Jonathan, the necessary approvals were secured for the internationalization of the airport, but it was Buhari government that extended and rebuilt the runway, to admit long range airlines. The same can be said of the Enugu-Onitsha, the Onitsha-Owerri and Port Harcourt-Enugu expressways, which though not moving at great speed have been receiving quality attention for the portions rebuilt. How soothing those projects are to the pains of the region remains to seen.

But approving the dredging of the Oguta/Orashi rivers is an interesting parting gift to Ndigbo. One of the contentious issues that agitate political analysts in the region is the claim that the southeast region is landlocked. The claim of being landlocked infuriates the people of the region, and they hold the Nigerian government over the years responsible for the economic strangulation of the region, through the denial of international airport and seaport. Arguably, the Buhari government has delivered an international airport and has given approval for a seaport.

The economic import of the Oguta/Orashi dredging if taken to a logical conclusion would be far-reaching. Governor Hope Uzodimma who deserves praise for the project, at the flag-off said: “The dredging and opening of the two rivers to the Atlantic will remove Imo State from being landlocked.” He further said: “The success of the project will bring unquantifiable employment for Imo State, the southeast and Nigeria at large.”

The project will be more than an economic behemoth for the region. It will bring pride and fulfilment to the people of the region, most of whom feel unwanted as partners in the Nigerian project. It will release a burst of economic energy which will benefit the entire country. As this column has argued over the years, the match to national economic well-being can only be realized with deliberate empowerment policies across all the geo-political regions.

May 16, 2023
Dangote: 16 years (and $19 billion) after!

Glad to be back! As the Buhari/Tinubu transition coasts finally home, one of the more comforting parallels must be the planned commissioning of the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote Refinery and Petrochemical Company on May 22 by President Muhammadu Buhari. Coming few hours to the exit of the administration, it is, arguably, one legacy for which the administration could stake some claims of achievement.

Yes, the country can hopefully, heave a sigh of relief that Africa’s leading crude producer has finally cracked the riddle of its dependence on imported refined fuel. That should be a big deal amidst claims that nearly 40 percent of our entire earnings from crude exports actually go into used for fuel importation. But just as critical are the multiple derivatives all of which are expected to provide the spring board for other ancillary industries in the petrochemical sector. Which is why it remains intriguing that the media, save one or two authoritative commentaries, have been less than upbeat and, if I may add – uncharacteristically so – perhaps borne of their experience of serial completion notices all of which came to naught! Trust the mainstream media not wanting to be accused, yet again, of not only rejoicing too soon, but going to town with speculations!

This time around however, it is authoritative. The commissioning, according to a presidential aide Bashir Ahmad, will take place on May 22. Reuters, the foreign news agency, has equally reported a spokesperson for Dangote group as confirming ‘the timing of the commissioning but did not give details’.

For Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote, the moment should ordinarily evoke a tinge of triumphalism. This after all, was an individual whose $700 million cheque for the acquisition of two of the nation’s moribund refineries in Port Harcourt and Kaduna was returned after the nation’s organised Labour put the gun to the head of the government to abort. That he has now become the headstone on which everything about refining business now turns must have come as something of a sweet ‘revenge’.

To go back a bit. President Olusegun Obasanjo had on the eve of the departure of his administration sold the two refineries to the Bluestar Consortium – promoted by the business mogul. As one would imagine of every good deed of the Obasanjo administration that must be laden with some dose of mischief, it waited until the eve of its exit to sell the two entities to Bluestar. As one might imagine in such situations, several issues were thrown up, the first being the matter of pricing – the question of whether the $700 million paid could be deemed a fair bargain given the obsolete state of the two entities; there were issues about whether or not due process were followed in the sale. All of these amidst such other puerile ideological debates on whether alienation of those worthless patrimonies was actually the way to go! With organised labour not only strident in their objection but also threatening fire and brimstone, the pliant Umaru Yar’Adua administration saw the entire thing as a most needless distraction it could ill-afford and so promptly did a somersault.

Sixteen years on and $19 billion after – a good chunk of which went for cost overruns, not to talk of the indeterminable opportunity costs, the country, far from being better, is to put it mildly, worse for it. Yes, billions of naira of taxpayers’ money has been poured into the refineries, yet, there remains no realistic basis to expect their full restoration. This writer, as indeed many other writers, recalls calling for a nominal value of N1 (yes – one naira) to be placed on the entities to be sold to any entity that could demonstrate the capacity to put them to work. That way, the nation would have been spared the billions annually expended in the name of keeping the scraps together!

Unfortunately, if the same stone that the builder once rejected has become the chief cornerstone, neither the citizens nor the government appears to have learnt anything appreciable in nearly the whole of this time. In fact, the lone issue that Nigerians could be said to be in agreement several years on is that a leading producer of crude should have no business importing its refined fuel. Simply put, none of those outmoded fixations appear to have yielded in any appreciable way to a more realistic thinking on the future of the industry.

From such basic things about pump price determination, the question of the subsidy and how to lay its ghost to rest, the role that the government vis-à-vis the private sector should play, including – wait for it – the question of quantity of fuel is currently consumed under the current dispensation. Even the so-called Petroleum Industry Act (PIA), the magic pill expected to cure the industry of its multiple malaises have had to be put in abeyance in the unfortunate situation that the government could not find the nerves to tackle the problem headlong. Not with the looming shadow of the organised labour and its allies, which appears to have been long persuaded that the government’s touted subsidy is not only a hoax but spurious.

Against this background, the lingering question is where to put the new entrant in the matrix. Let’s start with the general issues. Never mind the so-called transition, so sick is the industry that the only reason the sector is still so described is that the transparently opaque government monopoly is in charge. How much fuel does the country produce? Whereas the Nigerian National Petroleum Company (NNPC) Limited would routinely bandy its guestimate of “60 million litres of petrol daily”, Nigerian Customs Service’s Hammed Ali, in a counter-charge to the claim of widespread smuggling, has since raised the intriguing question of “why NNPC, which put the daily fuel consumption at 60 million litres, purports to pump 98 million litres into the market.

Here is how he framed the issue: “So, how did you get to 60 million litres per day? That is my question. The issue of smuggling, if you release 98 million litres in actual and 60 million litres are used; the balance should be 38 million litres. How many trucks will carry 38 million litres every day? Which road are they following and where are they carrying this thing to?”

In all, imagine this forming the basis of the over N6 trillion being earmarked for subsidy payments!

See why Aliko Dangote as indeed the ordinary Nigerian needs our prayers? Surely, the coming of Dangote refinery represents a huge milestone; but then, the main battles against the psychology of statism, the associated culture of entitlement and its in-bred corruption still lie ahead. May the good Lord deliver us from them. Can I have a resounding amen?

May 16, 2023
Obi’s many fathers

From the conclave of “Yes Daddies”, to emergency daddies on the partisan front and now the iconic literary world of our own WS, it’s the universe of Peter Gregory Obi’s many fathers!

But on one thing, you can be sure: during electioneering or strutting post-election charm offensives (whatever for?), you can trust Holy Gregory to skew the tale.

That was crystal clear from Obi’s May 7 visit to the “Ijegba”, Abeokuta, “fortress” of Prof. Wole Soyinka; and the Kongi’s rather scathing put-down of Obi’s rude and crude Obidients, the rabble WS dismissed as “a spectral emanation”.

“I do not know, and unable to relate to something known as the ‘Obedient’ or ‘Obidient Family’,” Kongi roared, “Thus, albeit in a different vein, any notion of reconciliation, or even relations — positive, negative or indifferent — with such a spectral emanation is simply gasping at empty air.”

Ouch! Yet, poor son Obi was busy spinning WS and some rapprochement with “Obidient Family”!

His exact tweet: “I cherish this Sunday visit which was intended to erase the needless misconceptions about the relationship between the great icon and the Obidient Family.”

Obidient Family! That clinical disavowal echoes the Yoruba joke about Tenant Kolawole: a name that evokes great wealth. Still, whenever ejection comes from his landlord, Kolawole would exit with his imaginary trove! Obidient Family, indeed!

No one, that saying insists, kids himself like Kolawole. So, Kolawole — at least in that saying’s context — is the quintessential metaphor for wilful deceit.

Wilful deceit aptly captures Obi’s post-poll exertions: as wilful captive to own whims; and wilful serf to Obidients’ sorry phantasy, over an election Obi couldn’t have won — even conducted a million times — given his clannish appeal and suspect structure.

A clear over-performance has pumped Obi full of the wild steroid of self-deceit, which he and his ‘Obidient Family’ somewhat hope would turn crushing defeat into stunning victory, so long as they are boisterous enough. Comic!

Still, Obi’s many fathers straddle many layers.

Pre-election: many Daddies Spiritual — Catholic, Orthodox and Pentecostal: a conclave of holy fathers and sacred vote mendicant, hush-hush in less-than-civil droning, about elections as faith wars; recruiting pulpit brain-washed Christians, into their zombie election Salvation Army, against real or imagined enemies.

To be sure, the only one caught out — no thanks to that satanic audio leak — was the “Yes Daddy” of Ota, who — Holy Moses! — instantly balked and fled.

Yet, you could finger other “Yes Daddies” crawling out of holy woodworks, well-hidden behind a finger, strutting their bits in Obi’s post-defeat pantomime: insisting honed legal precedents must be changed, for a son in whom they are well pleased!

It’s holy hush-hush that nevertheless beams blinding lights into the rot deep behind the holy-of-holies curtains, were the polity a theocracy, with all its thumping, glittering hypocrisies! But thank God, ours is still a democracy!

Yet, Obi’s daddies are not found on the straight and narrow path that leads to the spirit. Theirs is the wide and merry way that thrives on earthy lobbies and flatteries.

Which was why Obi — was he wracked by immediate post-defeat neurosis? — once declared President-elect Bola Tinubu as his brother, nay, father!

It was March 13 after the February 25 election had been lost and won; and post-poll neurosis had not quite darkened into the psychosis it now approaches.

“The APC presidential candidate is an elder brother; I can even call him a father …” he told Arise TV, his favourite media watering hole, with trademark cant. “I am only challenging the process in which he was declared winner …”

Enter another Election ’23 quip, in the quicksands of immediate electoral defeat: I challenge not the result, but the process!

Still, that challenge came with Obi cocking guns at Obi’s holy fathers — those perhaps outside the holy-of-holies of sacred electoral plots. Clearly not guided by the spirit, they had the effrontery to tell Obi to cease lusting after a lost cause, after a fair loss.

“I am very respectful to prominent Nigerians especially church leaders, traditional rulers and all that … but,” Obi screeched, “l disagree with them. What they are actually preaching is the problem of Nigeria, the problem of accepting wrongdoing, accepting what is unacceptable; that is using God’s name in vain; that’s not what God said, God said do not use my name in vain.”

The grand irony: Obi and co, hiding behind smudged cassocks, are the wrong doers, using God’s name in vain. Still, a fitting raking fire from an entitled but beloved son, in whom they were all well pleased!

WS was Obi’s latest jaunt in search of fathers.

But WS does no hush-hush. He operates behind no holy-of-holies — only in the full open of the republican space, where it’s freedom or nothing. Hence, his stark disavowal of Obi’s cant.

All, however, is again grand metaphor: Obi’s election-time dissembling and on-going post-poll pantomime. Both are holy high dramas to sell genuine fakery.

That Nigerians somewhat dodged this consecrated fakery is prime proof God is still on the throne, despite the prime conclave of “Yes Daddies” that mouth his name in vain.

It all started as grand fraud: APC and PDP are the same; Obi and LP are new; so vote the new messiahs. But that was a lie from the pit of hell which the spectral Obidients nevertheless blared.

Then Tinubu, a model of fresh ideas and revolutionary policies that shaped Lagos to a national reference, became synonymous with Olusegun Obasanjo and his Abuja PDP pests that Tinubu — and progressive forces — spared no effort to dislodge.

Open sesame: Obi, part of the old dregs, is new messiah of the youth, the Church and his clannish folks, just because loud Obidients can out-shout and out-abuse everyone, from their (anti)social media bastion.

It all fell flat. For one, Obi, no great believer in infrastructure, began regurgitating plans already put in place by the Buhari Presidency, as something esoteric and new.

For another, right-thinking Nigerians — the majority on February 25 — saw through Obi’s full emptiness, narrow clannish appeal and crass weaponization of faith and rejected him.

Yet, his fascistic minority zestfully pushed to browbeat the legitimate majority, and even pitched a military putsch, at Defence Headquarters, in vile desperation.

When all that collapsed, Obi’s Catholic fathers and cynical lawyers are pushing a stay on May 29, until Obi’s litigious electoral challenge is determined. Nice try!

As the Lord (that these fathers worship) lives and the Law (that these lawyers profess) holds, May 29 — some two weeks away — stays: and the president-elect would be inaugurated.

Not even Obi’s many fathers — and lawyers — will prevail over the supreme rule of law, which democracy epitomizes.

May 16, 2023
Retooling the EFCC

High-profile arrests by the EFCC in the investigation of official corruption in Nigeria have followed a script that has become wearisomely familiar. I need cite no specific instances. The attentive reader can doubtless come up with several that make the point unambiguously.

First, the news media are briefed comprehensively by officials familiar with the case but who cannot be identified because they were not authorized to make the damning disclosures that then go on to resonate on the front pages and in the headlines for subsequent weeks, while providing coarse entertainment in the feral media.

Even in summary, the charge sheet is a litany of crimes and misdemeanours on a scale almost beyond belief – almost, because Nigerians have come to expect nothing less than the worst of their officials. In fact, if there is one thing that unites vast segments of the Nigerian public, it is the belief, indeed the expectation, that their officials will always gravitate toward all that is ignoble and not of good report.

Then comes the arrest a few days later, staged with critical solemnity for the news media, especially television, which measures news salience by the extent to which an event translates into dramatic pictures. Looking grim and woebegone, the suspects usually are serenaded into the precincts of the EFCC by its uniformed officials.

Another layer of officials, suitably armed, keeps the rear, apparently to deter those who might be thinking of sabotaging the proceedings. Yet more officials take positions to the left and the right of the suspects, boxing them in.

The officials look sober for the most part. There is no swagger in them, no hint of the triumphalism you would expect to perfuse such a setting. It is almost as if they are labouring under a painful necessity.

But make no mistake about it: This is serious business. The EFCC officials are respectful. But you cannot overawe them with any claim to bigmanism. As if to make that point emphatically, they may often keep the suspects in custody, pending formal arraignment where an unabridged list of the crimes and misdemeanours is read out.

The charges go to confirm what many Nigerians have always believed of their officials, namely, that they are grasping, self-absorbed, larcenous to the point of obscenity, and insanely acquisitive. Even among those usually inclined to keep an open mind or show cool indifference, one could sense quiet outrage.

“Have the suspects no shame?” you could almost hear them say in pained resignation. “What will they do with all that pillage? Just how much do they need to feel contented?”

After the usual courtroom skirmishes, the trial finally starts. Soon enough, it begins to appear that what had seemed an open-and-shut case is nothing of the sort. The suspect has in his corner some of the finest legal minds that money can buy, no pun intended. The prosecution, on the other hand, is typically led by attorneys of lesser specific gravity.

And in an encounter in which seniority counts for much and opposing junior counsel as well as the presiding judge often feel obliged to defer to senior counsel, the EFCC finds itself at a disadvantage, and not just in psychological terms. Its attorneys were probably still in diapers when many of the counsel on the other side entered law practice.

As the trial gets underway, it is usually the prosecution that is seeking adjournment after adjournment, evidence that the case had been rushed to court, without the painstaking marshalling of probative evidence required for successful prosecution.

More evidence of a rush to court surfaces when the prosecution requests leave of court to withdraw the charges so as to amend them and re-file new material later. Such requests unduly prolong the court process, resulting in justice delayed.

The case wends its way through the system, and judgment day finally arrives. But it is thrown out because it was filed in the wrong court – a court that had no business entertaining it.

This verdict has been delivered so many times that it raises some troubling questions. It may well be that the officials filing the cases could not figure out the right court the first time, and still cannot do so after losing their cases on the matter of jurisdiction, hardly one of the most recondite issues in legal practice.

But that would raise the far more troubling issue of whether the cases were filed deliberately in courts with no jurisdiction, with officials subverting, for any number of reasons, the very cause they were employed to pursue. What does this say about the supervisors at the EFCC?

When corruption cases are not dismissed for want of jurisdiction, they are often set aside because the prosecution failed to prove its case beyond a reasonable doubt, usually another indication of a rush to court, or of a deficit in prosecutorial skills.

Halfway through the case, the prosecutor may settle for a bargain whereby the public official on trial pleads guilty to a lesser charge that may not involve jail term but allows him to keep much of the ill-gotten wealth that lay at the heart of the prosecution.

In the end, amidst its loud barking, the EFCC does very little biting.

This is not the way to fight official corruption.

Until the authorities can assemble, train and retain formidable prosecutors who can hold their own against the smartest defence attorneys, and until they can equipped them with the latest investigative tools in accounting, auditing and computing, the fight against official corruption will not be won.

Assembling such a team cannot be done overnight, to be sure. But the time to start is now, with our universities as the recruiting ground.

The finest products of these institutions – those graduating with First Class or Second Class Upper – in law, accounting, computer science, and foreign languages, will constitute the pioneer corps of some 1000 federal prosecution units.

After selection through a highly competitive process, they will be sent abroad for further training, including a year’s attachment to some of the finest prosecutors who have brought organised crime elements to heel in Italy, the UK, France, Germany, Spain, Japan, India, Brazil, Argentina, the United States, Mexico, Australia, and South Africa.

On their return, they will be deployed across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory. They should be placed on special salaries that take into account their prized skills as well as the risks that flow from the job, and insulated from the political pressure of any kind. They should enjoy security of tenure until age 70, subject only to good conduct and a record of successful prosecutions.

Until prosecutors have at least the same skills and a scheme of compensation comparable with or superior to that of attorneys in private practice, until they are equipped with the most advanced tools for carrying out their work, the Nigerian state, even under a new administration with the best intention will never gain the upper hand in the war on official corruption.

May 16, 2023
Whither Saraki, Dogara, Ekweremadu?

Where are Bukola Saraki, Senate President (2015-2019), Yakubu Dogara (Speaker, House of Representatives, 2015-2019) and Ike Ekweremadu (Deputy Senate President, 2007-2019?)

Their tri-travails should teach minority elements, ogling and plotting parliamentary gravy not theirs, the physical and spiritual comeuppance of political gaming: short-term gain, long-term pain.

Still, among the trio, the personal tragedies of Ike Ekweremadu must be treated with utter sensitivity and empathy.

For the love of ailing daughter, he just got a nine year-and-eight-month sentence in a British jail. His wife got four years and six months. Dr. Obinna Obeta, the midwifing medic in a kidney-transfer-turned-awry saga, got 10 years; and his licence, to practice medicine, suspended.

All these in a bid to save darling daughter, Sonia, and fix her failing kidneys. Sonia herself, docked too, escaped by the whiskers — or it would have been a complete jail sweep: father, mother and daughter!

Still, how can she escape eternal guilt, gnawing at her young soul: that she and her life-threatening ailment caused her family so much catastrophe, not forgetting the good doctor caught in the crossfire?

How also would the shame of parental conviction, coupled with own guilt, help her to battle the ailment she still lugs?

Besides, how can she secure a healthy kidney from a legit donor — with all the clouds shrouding her family; and not a few fleeing from them and theirs, as far away as the proverbial North Pole?

If after all of these you still want to gloat, just say a thunderous “amen” to this prayer: may your loving parental instinct never be tested!

Nevertheless, all these are without prejudice to whatever crime the couple and medic had committed, under the UK Modern Slavery Act 2015 — the first set of convicts under that law — to have been found guilty, after an open and transparent jury trial.

Even with all the tragedy, those that insist on railing at Ike Ekweremadu could have a legitimate point: had Ekweremadu and co — the ex-DSP had been in the Senate in the past 20 years (2003-2023) — done the needful: might his daughter have procured a safe and legitimate local kidney transfer in Nigerian public hospitals?

Were that so, and the Ekweremadus’ trial were to happen here, the judge (we seldom have jury criminal trials here) would have seen through the cock of a 21-year-old David Nwamini “crated”, in a “slave” craft, to London for his kidney to be “harvested”.

Only a British jury, bristling with own cultural condescension, would believe such bull!

At best, it was a mutual sweetheart deal gone awry — without prejudice to whatever the Ekweremadu proxies must have done to make hurt Nwamini spill the beans.

That Nwamini is now squealing, in classic opportunism, for some low-grade asylum to continue living in the UK, pleading fears for his life (which may well be) is inclination enough he wasn’t exactly averse to “japa” (Yoruba street lingo for migrate); and maybe grabbed the transplant deal as stepping stone.

If that weren’t convincing enough, the earliest fib from the case, that Nwamini was a “14-year-old”, ought to have raised a clatter of alarms on deliberate bad faith. Yet, the British media (sacred facts be damned!) milked and pushed that lie — because it fitted into preconceived notions?

Still, the Ekweremadus’ fate is sealed. Except an appeal court reverses the verdict or shortens the sentence, theirs is prolonged jail term in the immediate future.

But the UK conviction isn’t why Ike Ekweremadu is cited in this piece.

He is cited for receiving parliamentary “stolen goods”, in crass attempt to remain DSP, an office he knew morally, legally and legitimately belonged to APC: the new majority party in parliament; an office Ekweremadu’s PDP had occupied for 16 years, as the majority party, from 1999 to 2015.

That’s the crux of this piece, especially as some history vacuums, just elected into the 10th National Assembly, appear eager to replay the 2015 drama of Saraki, Dogara and Ekweremadu, the trio that now lug prolonged pain for that fleeting gain.

Ironically, Saraki’s bid for Senate President was not entirely illegitimate, given President-elect Bola Tinubu’s Emilokan account at Abeokuta, in the run-up to the explosive APC presidential primaries.

Saraki, from that Abeokuta account, had scoffed at a putative Buhari-Tinubu ticket for 2015, in those crucial moments of 2014, when the APC was still being cooked.

Saraki didn’t care a hoot about any faith balancing. But as a new-PDP (nPDP) APC legacy joiner, he knew a Buhari-Tinubu ticket would squelch another Muslim’s dream of Senate President. That virtually forced Tinubu to nominate Yemi Osinbajo, now outgoing Vice President.

But Saraki’s legitimate hankering after political spoils for his own nPDP bloc (after Buhari’s CPC and Tinubu’s ACN had grossed the first two prime offices) only birthed nothing but premeditated perfidy, which Saraki viciously pressed into service.

His two principal conspirators were Dogara (a fellow nPDP defector to APC); and Ekweremadu: a PDP loyalist that nevertheless bristled with rank opportunism — a terrible character flaw, indeed — to continue as DSP, though he knew by parliamentary logic and convention, he ought to yield that office to the new majority party.

All three (whose unholy alliance subverted critical infrastructure upgrades: the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, for one, during Buhari’s first term) have been in the doldrums ever since. Good riddance!

In 2019, Saraki had fled back to PDP, only to experience a vicious blow-out — no thanks to the “Otoge” (Yoruba for “Enough!”) Kwara voter revolution.

Otoge not only clinically guillotined Otunya (“Let’s do it again”) — Saraki’s counter mew to Otoge’s roar of 2019 — his pathetic “O su wa” (“We’re tired”) 2023 whoop against the Kwara APC order fell pathetically flat, resulting in another vote thrashing.

Saraki has thus lost the Kwara Republic of Democratic Feudalism that Baba Oloye, his illustrious father, Dr. Olusola Saraki, bequeathed him. He is now a full-blown politically displaced person (PDP — how ironic!). But again, no tears.

If Saraki has somewhat stoically resigned to his PDP fate, Dogara is busy playing the chameleon and losing value by the second. Between 2019 and now, he has been swinging — and wildly too — from PDP to APC and vice versa that only he could swear where exactly he now belongs.

Dogara neighed against Tinubu’s “Muslim-Muslim” ticket and dived into PDP. But while there, he in southern Kaduna throatily campaigned for Atiku Abubakar — a Christian?

Indeed, Dogara’s “Christian” advocacy was powered more by not making the Tinubu ticket (on faith balancing) than any core principle though, to be fair, northern Christians do face an uphill in socio-political sweepstakes, a flaw that should be corrected.

The fate of the trio — Saraki, Dogara and Ekweremadu — teaches a profound lesson: democracy is no licence for rascality. Let those who want to repeat 2015 learn this grim lesson and know peace.

May 9, 2023
Interim wetin?

The parties that lost in the recent General Election and their proxies have been cooking up yet another “June 12” subterfuge with their call for an “Interim National Government,” a term they alternate with “Government of National Consensus.

They are pursuing the quest unmindful of the circumstances that led to the setting up of the body that operated under the first title 30 years ago.

It was set up, remember, after military president Ibrahim Babangida, aided principally by the infernal Arthur Nzeribe of ghastly memory, suborned a coterie of state actors led by the Federal Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice, Clement Akpamgbo (SAN), to confect a raft of threadbare falsehoods and spin an elaborate web of intrigue to serve as a pretext for annulling the June 12, 1993, presidential election.

The SDP presidential candidate, Moshood Abiola, was set to win a landslide. The annulment torpedoed the process. But the annuller lost the plot. In the event, he was forced to beat a ragged, tearful retreat from Abuja to his hometown Minna, and to infamy.

Then, unlike now, a president-elect was never proclaimed. So, technically, there was going to be a vacuum, albeit contrived, in the governance of Nigeria. The ING was rigged up to fill that vacuum.

With the successful completion of the 2023 poll and the proclamation of a president-elect, no such vacuum now exists. To create one, the ING protagonists will have to engineer and successfully execute a coup d’état. They must know that they face overwhelming odds, the seething discontent with the election outcome in some quarters notwithstanding.

As was said of the ING, it was not national, and it was not a government. Its only redeeming grace was that it was interim through and through, doddering on for just 83 days.

It was conceived in treachery, delivered in infamy, and died in ignominy.

At the time of its inauguration, I set out to examine the law undergirding it, portentously called the Interim National Government (Basic Constitution Provisions) of 1993 All I had to go by was a photocopy that had been pulled from a photocopy.

No one among my contacts had seen a hard copy, or had been able to obtain one from the Government Printer. For one thing, Government Printer could no longer cope with the rate at which decrees were being churned out in the twilight of Babangida’s presidency. For another, it could not be trusted to circumvent the stringent procedure for vetting them.

Consequently, the presidency had farmed out to the printing of government documents to Babangida’s private commercial outfit in Abuja, Heritage Press, against the law. Pardon the digression, The Mint had likewise found itself unable to keep up with Babangida’s demand for new banknotes to buy support for the regime.

Nobody knew what version of the Interim Constitution was being followed in Abuja, assuming that they were following anything other than the divisive, dilatory and duplicitous instruments that had served the preceeding regime so well,

Senate President (as he then was) Iyorchia Ayu, not to be confused with the retread, had said that the document being touted as the Interim Constitution differed significantly from the one he was shown on the eve of Babangida’s exit. By one account, as many as four different versions of the document were in circulation.

The distinguished jurist, Dr Akinola Aguda, since departed, said that the document was signed by Babangida after he had been forced out of power, and then backdated to make it look like his final act.

Aguda, a former chief justice of Botswana and pioneer director-general of the Nigeria Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, was no flippant commentator. His charge called into question the honour of the Attorney-General in particular and the government as a whole, and their claim to being worthy custodians of the public trust. But they were too busy procuring any gesture that could be construed as support for their lawless rule to worry about such trivial matters.

To return to the version of what purported to be the Interim National Constitution that I examined: From the Preamble, we learned that the Federal Military Government decided to annul the June 12 1993 election and processes leading to it out of its abiding concern for “national security, law and order, enduring democracy and for the provision of effective economic direction for the nation,” and “because the processes had been marred by “grave electoral malpractices.”

So deep was this concern that no court of law in Nigeria was allowed to inquire into the validity of the decree, and no part of it could be varied, altered, modified by any other decree, law, or enactment.

Section 42 of the Interim Constitution was remarkable for what it concealed. It says: “The Chairman and Head of the Interim National Government shall be . . .”

Section 47, which provided for a vice chairman was just as dodgy. It stated: “The Vice Chairman of the Interim National Government shall be . . .” The intention was to fill in the names later.

Babangida the military president was keeping his options open, leaving himself ample room to morph into Chairman of the ING and for another dupe to bask in the delusion of being second-in-command.

The so-called Interim Constitution was drafted by a coterie headed by Professor Ben Nwabueze (SAN), fresh from serving as Secretary for Education in the Transition Council that was supposed to lead the nation to democratic rule but ended up being another complaisant tool in Babangida’s arsenal of duplicity.

The team also compromised the Attorney-General of the Federation, Clement Akpamgbo, aforementioned; PK Nwokedi, chair of the Law Review Commission, and two scholars from that body, Professor Egerton Uvieghara, and Dr Epiphany Azinge.

In Nwabueze’s telling, they all waited and waited for Babangida to supply the missing names. At their deadline, the names had not been furnished. So, they turned in their draft, lacunae and all.

The Constitution, was silent as to who would appoint the ING chairman and vice chairman. But it provided for the appointment of ministers, to be named by the ING chairman. In the event, Ernest Shonekan, who became chairman of the ING, functioned with “Secretaries” foisted on him by Babangida.

Section 5(c) spelled out the powers of the chair of the ING. Part of his remit was “to oversee the election to the Local Government due in December 1993 (emphasis added). Now, since the Constitution could not be altered or amended or modified in any way, this meant that the council elections could not be held before or after December 1993.

The calculation was that, by lumping the local council and presidential election together, the National Electoral Commission and the ING would be able to induce an electorate still chafing from the annulment of the June 12 poll to come out again and vote. Instead, they found themselves confronted by an impregnable obstacle where they least expected it.

The constraint on the staging of local council elections was more than compensated, however, by the fact that the ING Constitution set no limit on the Interim period.

Shonekan gave the public to believe that his interim team would complete its work and quit on March 31, 1994, But the version of the ING Constitution that I saw, said nothing of the sort.

Hardly had the ING embarked on its doomed tenure on July 26, 1993, than resonant calls for an extension of its mandate were being issued by the usual people. Just 93 days into their tenure, Shonekan and the ING were put out of their misery by Sani Abacha, acting on a clause Babangida has surreptitiously inserted in its Constitution mandating “the most senior military officer” in the outfit to take over power in the event of the resignation or incapacitation of its chairman.”

That clause was not included in the draft that Professor Nwabueze and his team had produced on demand. And for four years thereafter, Abacha presided over one of the darkest chapters in Nigeria’s history.

The ING Constitution, then, was shot through and through with bad faith. Lateef Jakande’s Lagos Daily News rightly dismissed the entire scheme in a withering editorial as “interim nonsense.”

Those calling for a reiteration of an ING can be forgiven for not knowing the treacherous history of its first coming and the sad end to which it led the country. Still, they must be careful what they wish for.

May 9, 2023
Magic ensemble

Put your ear close to the ground: what can you hear? The magic ensemble already swearing President-elect Bola Tinubu would just snap his fingers and all age-old problems would vanish?

Or heady traducers, equally priming your ears for bold but empty court tales, of some new cabal replacing the old?

Believe either and you’d believe anything!

Still, beware of a bumpy but sterile ride: the frenzy of not a few between 2015 and 2023. It was a bubble that produced a delusional echo chamber.

Yet, life outside moved on, leaving behind that bubble and captives, to bitterly bleat after losing the last polls — a grim reality check!

No sooner was President Muhamamdu Buhari elected than many proclaimed him a Titan, whose mere moral shadow would vanquish the teeming army of the corrupt.

Enter, the pious magic man!

Indeed, the new president came highly recommended — a near-ascetic with a solid reputation for honesty, dignity and integrity: traits that vaulted him over presidential rivals, intra- or inter-party, after sleaze, like ferocious termites, was gobbling Nigeria.

And the man gave it his darned best, even with the justice system playing coy; the churches and rotten clerics mouthing holy cant; and the wayward trying to paint the man in own lurid colours — nice try!

Still, after eight years, no one could accuse PMB of pinching his kobo, itself a record since 1999, despite the empty huff-and-puff of you know who.

Besides, PMB clawed back as much of the stolen funds as he could, pouring them into hard infrastructure, just to ascertain no re-loot of the recovered loot.

Proof? A term-end harvest of critical infrastructure: rail, roads, air and sea, with hardly any part of the country short-changed — itself a rare record — despite the resource-challenged times.

Indeed a document, published by NAN on May 1, titled “Buhari’s achievements from 2015 to 2023; hands over May 29 to President-elect,” made this claim: “As with legislative reform, Nigeria is also seeing, under Mr. Buhari’s watch, the biggest and most ambitious federal infrastructure programme since Nigeria’s independence.”

Don’t know of “since independence” claim — regime hyperbole perhaps? But no doubt at all: PMB has trumped all governments since 1999, in agriculture and infrastructure.

When you add its social safety net — the National Social Investment Programme (NSIP) — to tide the vulnerable over a grim economic season, then you speak of a programme never carried out on such a scale, by any Federal Government since independence.

NSIP places more than 50 million, from 12 million poor homes, spread across some 150, 000 communities, in 36 states and FCT, on the National Social Register (NSR), receiving a monthly stipend of N5, 000, by the government’s Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT) scheme.

Yet, wild propaganda, by a section of the southern media, brand Buhari as some antediluvian bloke, lost in his northern cave with his so-called cabal!

That sweeping tarring, frothing with biting ethnic profiling, is clearly unfair. But the real crime, from the societal watchdog: the reason the media penetrates public affairs, is a classic failure of reporting — a morbid fixation with the inane; a spritely disinterest in the vital.

That PMB’s APC won re-election, despite this twisted mirror, shows how the people, which the fourth estate should guide, are eons ahead of it!

That a new president is coming doesn’t trash that reckless media conduct. So, like the outgoing president, like the in-coming one.

But if PMB was a moral paragon in 2015, new President Bola Tinubu’s sheer magic would leap from his policy nimbleness and political street wisdom; and a far more cosmopolitan feel, contrasted with PMB’s northern provinciality.

No surprise: many are already swearing by all that, as if governance — in a Nigeria with all its grave challenges, many of them structural — was some magical switch to be turned on and off, by a “City Boy” that has all the keys!

Again, believe that and you’d believe anything!

Indeed, such wild fantasy the Tinubu order must tamp down, though with restrained hope. Why? Because the magic ensemble swing in utter extremes: railing as hard as they hail. If you doubt, ask PMB!

Still, there are reasons to be hopeful. As Ripples mentioned in a previous take, 1999-2007 was an informal plebiscite on how former President Olusegun Obasanjo (PDP) ran Nigeria against how Tinubu (AD, later AC) ran Lagos.

The clear answer came in 2023: Obasanjo, with new love Peter Obi, crashed; despite the infernal ploy to brand Tinubu as part of the old PDP ruin (he was not), and spin Obi as new and fresh (a lie from the pit of hell: Obi was part and parcel of the PDP rot).

Besides, the continuing PDP power Siberia is fair lesson — and trophy — to Obasanjo. It was he that laboured, body and soul, to destroy PDP that gifted him power in 1999.

Indeed, Tinubu’s solid Lagos record — and Lagos continues to be a national model —drives some hope, though there are already idle tittle-tattle about some Lagos “cabal” replacing PMB’s Daura cabal!

Again, Tinubu’s comprehensive campaign manifesto and multi-layered messaging also project a mind prepared for the daunting task. The exciting bonus comes with a man at home with driving policy as he is with driving politics.

Still, the path to Tinubu’s Nigeria success would appear to follow a Lagos rehearsal, though in some reversal.

In Lagos, Tinubu built the blocks. Babatunde Fashola pushed those foundations to soaring levels. Now, sustainable Lagos is not only national but continental reference.

Now, at Abuja, PMB has built the blocks. It’s left for Tinubu to take Nigeria to dizzying new heights.

That Fashola is crucial, visible and fecund infrastructure minister under PMB, just echoes that old paradox, by that old bard, William Wordsworth: “The child is the father of the Man”! Viva Lagos!

Tinubu would probably dazzle with policy foxtrots. Still, the stark track is clear: build on the solid infrastructure and agriculture of the PMB years. That was one reason Ripples rooted for the Tinubu/Shettima ticket.

Push agriculture from cultivation to processing. Add regular electricity to the prime infrastructure record. Consummate local refinery efforts of the past eight years to re-embed local refining of crude — and Tinubu would have achieved PMB’s lofty dreams of a vibrant local real sector, from the mirage of the SAP years.

As the economy expands, offering more sustainable employment, millions can get off the NSR and its N5, 000 monthly stipend — but not a second before.

The NSIP is a pro-poor progressive policy — though under-reported — for which PMB should well and truly be proud. The Tinubu order should continue with it as long as it takes.

May 2, 2023