The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

Emefiele’s transmutation

Who is after the Governor of Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Godwin Emefiele? Until few months ago, the beleaguered governor was so cocky that he was the beloved successor to President Muhammadu Buhari that he told Nigerians who condemned his attempt to run for the office of president of Nigeria while perched at the CBN headquarters, to go hit their heads on the rock. He was so sure-footed that he added some springs to his gait.

Tales of hundreds of branded cars and promotional articles of the great achievements of Emefiele as governor of Central Bank so filled the air that many foreswore that he was the chosen one. There were tales of conspiracy between the governor and the famed kitchen cabinet cabal running the show at Aso Rock that Emefiele had been promised the presidential ticket of All Progressive Congress (APC) and indeed the presidency of Nigeria, in exchange for the trillions of Naira that he was sharing to their cronies, by way of economic interventions in any area of the economy that caught their fancy.

Indeed, as insightful Nigerians and some members of the National Assembly have recently realised, Emefiele presided over the sharing of about this years’ federal government budget without appropriation or oversight from the legislative arm of government. A whooping N22.7 trillion from the coffers of the Central Bank was expended by the federal government without any budgetary oversight, with Godwin Emefiele as the Father Christmas. Few days after Christmas, the senate was thrown into chaos when President Buhari’s letter to the senate to normalise the abnormal expenditure was read out by the senate president in the chambers.

In his letter, the president said the expenditure was a funding option to the federal government to take care of short-term fiscal deficit or emergency finance to fund delayed government expected cash receipt. The president wrote: “I have approved the securitisation of the ways and means balances along the following terms – Amount, N23.7 trillion; Tenure 40 years; Moratorium on principal repayment, three years; Pricing interest rate, nine per cent.” Some lawmakers expressed shock at the way and manner the Way and Means fiscal policy of government have been abused by the ill-mannered CBN governor and his cohorts in the executive arm.

Expectedly, the senate could not attend to the president’s request as the chamber turned rowdy, forcing the senate president to call for a closed-door section. At the resumption, the letter was stepped down, and as a form of compromise the Senate Committee chairman on Finance, Adeola Olamilekun, asked that the N22.7 trillion of the Ways and Means advances be stepped down for further legislative action, to enable the executive provide appropriate documents. It is a surprise the senate did not immediately summon the Governor of Central Bank to appear before the committee it set up to explain CBN’s involvement in the sharing of unbudgeted funds.

Still on his hey days as a beautiful bride of the Aso Rock cabal, even after his presidential ambition had gone up in smoke, Emefiele could look at power princes and princesses in the face and tell them to go to hell. For many, it was an attempt to get at those who scuttled his presidential ambition, that Emefiele late last year announced the redesigning of the naira. With perhaps only the president taken into confidence, the sure-footed Emefiele told bewildered politicians and economic players that he was acting within his exclusive powers.

Fellow ministers and presidential advisers, leaders of the National Assembly and whoever thought he ought to be pre-informed, were told to go and hang. According to the governor, the redesigning of the naira was to address four main issues, namely: tame currency fraud; deal a blow to the growing kidnapping and ransom industry; lower the rate of inflation and control the amount of currency in circulation. While the verdict is still out on how far the redesign has dealt with the named challenges, it appears that kidnapping for ransom and inflation are still on the run-way enjoying the limelight.

Following public pressure, the governor tinkered a bit with the amount that an individual or corporate body can withdraw in a day, but the major policy of a redesigned naira was rolled out as scheduled. Going forward, the Central Bank has ominously warned that the old currency would be phased out by the end of January, and there would be no extension. Unfortunately, there has been worries about the quality of the new naira notes, with many claiming that it washes off like fake clothing.

Surprisingly, as last year drew to a close, the peacocked Emefiele was suddenly gasping for a breath to remain alive. Not just to survive as the CBN governor, but to enjoy his freedom as a free citizen. About December 19, 2022, there was news that the Department of State Services (DSS) approached a Federal High Court in Abuja for a warrant to arrest Emefiele for sponsoring terrorism. Civil society group, allegedly hired, has been fighting to save the beleaguered CBN governor, whom some reports claim has been in hiding outside the country since then.

Luckily for the embattled governor, the court refused the application for an order to arrest him. But his friends in the kitchen cabinet know that they need President Buhari to save the governor; so there are reports of power tussle in the inner sanctuary of the presidency over the faith of the CBN governor. Since it is unlike President Muhammadu Buhari to come after his appointee, in the way and manner the beleaguered Central Bank Governor is being threatened, it is legitimate to ask, who is after Godwin Emefiele?

There are conspiracy theories that those who feel threatened by the knee-jerk approach of the CBN with respect to the redesigning of the naira are after the governor. Some civil society groups fighting the cause of the governor have publicly demonstrated based on this claim, and they are asking Nigerians to rise up and save the governor and his policy reforms. Some others claim there is an agenda to force the governor out, so that a preferred candidate is put in place, with the regime of Buhari coming to an end in May.

At the height of the indiscretion of Godwin Emefiele to contest for the presidential primaries of APC, while sitting pretty as CBN governor, this column condemned that manifest abuse of his privileges and the statute establishing the CBN. This writer felt scandalised when Emefiele called those cautioning him unprintable names. But regardless of those indiscretions, President Buhari should not allow the hawks around him hound the CBN governor out of office. To allow them ride roughshod over the laws of the land is a further dent on his regime’s record on rule of law.

January 17, 2023
Obi and Obasanjo’s kiss of death

By Olakunle Abimbola

On former President Olusegun Obasanjo’s kiss, let Peter Obi and Obidients enjoy their democratic swoon. Soon, they would know it was all over a dud cheque.

Whatever happened to African Democratic Congress (ADC), Obasanjo’s “third force” of 2019?

The last time one checked, wasn’t ADC busy sacking its presidential candidate? Or the courts sacking the national executive that purportedly sacked the candidate, in a live political echo of that hilarious TV comedy, Fuji House of Commotion?

Or, to the fib he sold Atiku Abubakar (after Obasanjo junked ADC, in that same 2019) — Obasanjo, with fellow busy-bodies, temporal and spiritual: Chief Ayo Adebanjo, Catholic Bishop Matthew Hassan Kukah, Winners Bishop, David Oyedepo and Muslim cleric, Sheik Abubakar Gumi?

Were they not all crushing losers, reflective of Jamaican Reggae great, Jimmy Cliff’s great hit: “The bigger they come, the harder they fall?”

Atiku! Peripatetic as ever: is he not still howling from the wilderness, trying to lead a broken PDP — the same PDP he and Obasanjo wrecked, pushing personal glory over service to country, in their blighted presidency, from 1999 to 2007?

This year, as per his wont these past three electoral cycles starting 2015, the flighty, restless Obasanjo has moved on to Obi, his freshest mischief to scam the gullible.

Poor Obi! He is nothing but the latest faggot to keep aglow a flickering Obasanjo public flame, fated to extinction, anyway, even as the good Lord keeps the Ebora very much alive!

If Obi and co doubt, they should “go verify!” — incidentally Obidients’ strident whoop, to spur St. Peter’s fantastic stats, in their halcyon days of social media roar, when, in Achebe-speak, they danced selves lame before the real dance began! Now, the cold ash of reality is setting in!

Still, in a way, Obasanjo, Obi and Labour Party (LP) deserve one another — Obasanjo: vacuous doctrinaire; Obi: rattler of fake China stats; LP: opportunistic shell, ever whoring with the highest bidder, among the politically displaced and desperate!

What a breed! What a brood!

The great Awo — Chief Obafemi Awolowo of glorious memory — once let go a quip: only the deep can call to the deep.

But for Obasanjo and Obi, it’s the flip: only the vacuous could call to the empty. So, let both serenade and venerate each other in mutual vacuity! As for LP, it will yet bob up in 2027 for yet another highest bidder!

Still, much as Obasanjo postures and Obi floats and faints over a mirage, the so-called endorsement is not about Obi.

It’s all about a restive Obasanjo drawing attention to himself — his notorious pastime.

Still, in President Muhammadu Buhari and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, the Obasanjo antenna rightly perceives a clear and credible danger, that could trash — once and for all — the Ebora brand of public service that ogles and gobbles private gravy.

In Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra, Mark Anthony once mused why the Octavius army always belted his. Yet, when they went after Brutus and other plotters that killed Julius Caesar, the callow Octavius was but a subaltern; and Anthony, a full General.

When the Murtala military partisans went after Buka Suka Dimka and co, who brutally mowed down Head of State, Gen. Murtala Muhammed in a botched coup on 13 February 1976, Obasanjo was already a General while Buhari, as a Lieutenant-Colonel, just clambered onto the lower rungs of senior Army ranks.

Yet as President, PMB — no thanks to Obasanjo’s ceaseless vain glory, served in a seething, sparkling foam of empty sanctimony — teaches his old Army boss the ABC of unstinted public service, never blighted by grubby personal gains.

Laderin and surrounding hills and sprawl, in Abeokuta, Ogun State, offer a vivid contrast in the PMB/Obasanjo cosmos of governance.

Laderin hosts the Wole Soyinka Train Station, on the new Lagos-Ibadan standard-gauge rail corridor, itself a glittering metaphor for the most penetrating hard economic infrastructure, by any federal government, since 1999: a virtual explosion of rail, roads, airports, sea ports and bridges, even in the worst of economic seasons.

As with other stations in that corridor — which from Ibadan will terminate in Kano — none is named for PMB. Yet, future generations won’t ever forget which president emplaced that critical public asset. Not so, the Obasanjo ethos!

On the flip side of Laderin, bordering Oke Mosan (Mosan Hills), the Olusegun Obasanjo Hilltop Estate virtually hugs you, as you breeze in from Lagos, via the Shiun-Sagamu Expressway. Virtually co-joined is the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidential Library (OOPL).

So much private juice from supposed public sweat — and in your face too!

That the Land Use Decree (now Act), the legal instrument that makes such vast land access possible — for whatever purpose(s) — emanated from Gen. Obasanjo’s first coming as military Head of State, speaks to the man’s suspect public service morality.

Yet, this crass visibility, burnished by eternal self-worship, has made the old man no less jittery over his real place in history.

The other day, a pathetic Obasanjo, looking really trapped, blurted to BBC’s Hardtalk that his successors abandoned his 25-year rail modernization plan.

Even if that were true, how many kilometres of tracks did Obasanjo lay during his eight-year presidency? How many did “subaltern” PMB put together in less than eight years — and in relative adversity too?

Rail! In that, PMB has righted an epochal wrong. General Buhari scuppered the Lagos Metro Line. But President Buhari liberalized the rail corridor, even ahead of the constitutional amendments, still a work-in-progress.

As epochal reward, PMB will on January 24 inaugurate the Lagos Blue rail, with the Dangote refineries — critical twin-infrastructure beyond the ken of Obasanjo’s tenure.

Indeed, with his eternal posturing, and talking down others to look good, he grandly robs himself the nobility of self-correction.

Leaving rail, did Obasanjo’s successors also pull down the Second Niger Bridge, a phantom PDP-era vote scam, which take-off he personally launched twice? Or the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway? It’s true: a bad artisan almost always blames his tools!

But even pushing aside iron, brick and mortar, hasn’t PMB given Obasanjo fine tutorials in democracy etiquettes, as befitting a former officer and gentleman? Who is talking of “third term” now, except as a putrid puff from the Obasanjo era?

But imagine Tinubu winning the Presidency on February 25 and following that up with upscaling the Buhari-era infrastructure and agriculture thrust, fix power and not abandoning the social safety nets for the poor and vulnerable?

Whoever then would remember Obasanjo, his blatant self-worship and his narcissistic cathedral called OOPL, even if the man lives for a thousand years?

That naked fear drives the Obi endorsement noise. But for Obi, It’s a kiss of death.

Happy new year, folks

Happy new year, all — particularly Elder Saliu Ojibara from Ilorin who grabbed his copy of The Nation, only to find Ripples still missing; Prof. Clement Kolawole of UI, who sent a text, noting he missed the column last Tuesday, and many others who kept on wondering at the long, long leave! Thank you all. Happy new year as we, all over again, probe and interrogate Nigeria’s exciting landscape.

January 17, 2023
The B.A. reconsidered

Growing up in the late forties, I wanted to be a lawyer.

That was well before I first set my eyes on an actual legal practitioner. I had only the haziest idea of what Lawyer Johnson actually did, or what lawyering consisted in. He drove into town all the way from Lagos, which might as well have been on the other side of the moon.

When the car was stationary, you could not tell the front from the rear, for the one was just as embellished as the other. The tinted windows darkened the interior, making the steering wheel well-nigh invisible.

I recall how two neighbourhood boys among those who had gathered in front of dad’s palatial dwelling to behold the behemoth from Lagos actually came to blows one day on that very issue. Even when the car was in motion, you still could not tell the difference, unless it was speeding away.

Whenever Lawyer Johnson came to town, usually at six-month intervals, we suspected that it was in connection with dad’s sprawling business operations. And whenever dad journeyed to Lagos in his Ford Mercury V8 saloon, roughly every three months, chances were that a visit with Lawyer Johnson was high on his itinerary.

We, the children, saw him only from a distance poring over documents with dad. His hulking build, his exquisite tailoring, and the suavity that was stamped all over him, marked him out as a Person of Great Consequence and a most worthy role model.

Years later, in high school, my interest in law was fired by the courtroom exploits of Perry Mason, chronicled masterfully in novel after arresting novel by Erle Stanley Gardner. In criminal trial after criminal trial, Mason, and his sidekick the private detective Paul Drake, always prevailed even in the face of the most formidable odds, against the scrappy District Attorney, Hamilton Burger, and his bumbling investigators.

One suspected that Burger figured only as a deliberate and overdrawn foil, to make Mason seem all the more formidable. Still, if one could muster just a fraction of the forensic skills Gardner credited Mason with, one could legitimately aspire to success at the Bar.

Halfway through high school, a long vacation spent in Kaduna with an uncle, a middling civil servant of cultivated taste, gnawed at my career goals. Uncle MF, later accountant-general of one of the Northern States, subscribed to TIME magazine, Readers’ Digest, and The Economist. Back from work, he would curl up in bed with those journals and others of like vintage that he picked up at the newsstand of Kingsway Stores.

While he was away at work, I would steal into his room and devour as much of their riveting content as possible. I should add that he was also an avid listener of the BBC World Service, especially its 10-minute hourly news bulletin, its current-affairs programmes, as well as its Newsreel.

These pursuits opened up a vista far removed from the world of cops and robbers, a vista that could offer an opportunity to be the eyes and ears of the teeming citizens near and far who make the news, as well as those who report it. There was now a new and more insistent claimant primacy in my hierarchy of aspirations: Journalism.

Along the way, a legal career was all but eliminated by a series of accidents, or by decisions taken by others, regardless of one’s interests or inclinations. My British expatriate high school principal said with the authority that flowed from his office that there were far too many lawyers in Nigeria already. “Why not follow in the footsteps of your brother, recently graduated from the Royal College of England, and of Scotland?” he counseled,

I will never forget the comment of an influential uncle I expected to assuage my dejection on being denied a scholarship to study mass communication, for which I had more than met the requirement.

“Se B. A. ni? he asked. (It’s a B. A., isn’t it?”).

Having sensed the way his mind was working, I answered in the affirmative, but with the utmost diffidence.

“Ah, awon B.A. yen ti poju,” he said, scarcely concealing his irritation.

Something tells me he would have entered the same reply if the scholarship I was seeking was for an LL. B.

That was 50 years ago. Five hundred universities later, each of them churning out BA degrees, and with several hundred more in the pipeline, most of them churning out BA degrees, nobody is complaining that there are too many such institutions in Nigeria.

The great educator, Tai Solarin, anticipated this proliferation of universities when he spoke of that time in the not-too-distant future when the BA (Awo-Omama), the BA (Nguru), the BA (Kaura Namoda), the BA (Burutu), the BA (Okitipupa), etc, would proudly take their places beside the BA (London) being offered at the University College, Ibadan, and the BA (UNN) of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka.

We reached that point long ago.

At the time my high school principal was saying that Nigeria had too many lawyers, they numbered fewer than 300, expatriates included. The Institute of Administration, Zaria, offered the closest thing to a law programme in any higher institution in Nigeria, a diploma.

Today every Nigerian university worthy or unworthy of the title offers a degree course, and there are probably dozens more on the drawing board. But few are kvetching that Nigeria has produced too many lawyers.

As at 2022, The Nigerian Bar Association, in its own words Nigeria’s “foremost and oldest professional membership organization” and “Africa’s most influential network of lawyers,” had on its register 105, 406 lawyers in 135 branches. That year alone, it added 4,711 lawyers to its rolls. That number can only grow in the years ahead.

The finishing schools where law graduates head to learn the technicalities of legal practice can barely cope with the numbers coming out of the law faculties. Yet there has been no call to tamp down enrolment at the one time or at the other.

If there is any danger of excess, not a few would assert that it lies in the anointing of Senior Advocates. But that would not include the hundreds, perhaps, thousands, waiting in line forlornly year after year for the preferment. After they and their children will have clinched the title, they might be willing to grant that there are too many men and women in ermined robes roaming the courts.

Until then, the more the merrier.

If anything, the case is going to be made with increasing fervour that, with an alleged population of 200 million, Nigeria is, if anything, under-lawyered. The same goes for the BA degree holders: far too few of them in the population, not too many.

Why not leave that determination to market forces, as the nation has been content to do on so many overarching issues?

Ayo Olukotun (1954 – 2023)

Ayo Olukotun, one of Nigeria’s most insightful media scholars and public intellectuals, died two weeks ago, aged 69.

An exemplar of the scholar as practitioner, he combined an active research portfolio with the production of informed commentary on a wide range of national and international issues, His scholarship was all the more remarkable because it was not tethered to any particular institutional base with guaranteed support.

Rather, Olukotun went wherever it led him, wherever he felt freed to engage in cutting-edge work. Thus, he has taught at Ahmadu Bello University, Obafemi Awolowo University, Lead the University of The Netherlands, University, the University of Lagos, and his last stop, Olabisi Onabanjo University, Ago-Iwoye, where he held the Oba Sikiru Adetona Endowed Chair in Governance.

His journalism has followed a similar trajectory. He served as a columnist for a variety of Nigerian newspapers, most notably the Daily Times, the fortunes of which he helped revive in the all-too-brief renaissance it underwent under the leadership of Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, and the Punch where his commentary drew a wide, appreciative audience.

Olukotun cared more about his sprawling personal library than his wardrobe; more about ideas than about artifacts. He never earned enough to live comfortably, but he was forever willing to share what he earned, even if that meant subjecting himself to some privation.

This is the time for those whose lives he touched and enriched to reach out to his family and institutionalize his memory.

January 17, 2023
Trial of Brother Emefiele

Weeks into what the apex monetary authorities had advertised as the most robust response to the variegated monetary policy challenges facing the Nigerian economy, call it an intriguing twist that its lead author and midwife has been practically in exile in what is alleged to be a spirited manoeuvre to escape the sword of Damocles dangling over his head.

Clearly, if the reports of a soft landing being procured – as alleged – for the once beloved-boy of the Buhari administration is to believed, it must have come as a tragic turn to the racy, sensational events of the past few weeks.

By the way, Nigeria must be the only country in the world – minus Idi Amin Dada’s Uganda that is – where a sitting CBN governor could be hunted like a common felon or in this instance, forced to shelter (temporarily?) in foreign shores without as much as stoking panic in the financial markets! Add to that the other paradox – the government of the federation pretending that the circus was another typical stunt by our big men to stoke excitement and so will resolve by itself; call it the perfect dysfunction and dissonance, the stuff of which the Buhari administration is made!

Until the December 9 order by Justice John Tsoho barring the Department of State Services, DSS, from arresting and detaining the Governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria, Godwin Emefiele on allegations bordering on terrorism financing and economic crimes, most Nigerians would most likely have passed of the tale of Emefiele’s impending arrest as one of those elite mind-games meant to distract and deflect.

Now, the truth is out: the man is being accused, far beyond the typical financial malfeasances for which our public officials have become renown, to high crimes bordering on national security.

And what do we know? Nothing – of course – outside of what the DSS glibly proclaims but which two separate justices – Tsoho and Muslim Hassan of the FCT High Courts – have up till this point, deemed insufficient for any prosecutorial authority to call him in for. Yet, the man is not only on the run, he has thus far left enough room for the wildest of speculations to thrive.

In the meantime, we have seen – as one might expect – hordes of disparate groups, spring up almost on daily basis to defend both Emefiele’s honour and his supposed innocence. From amorphous civil society groups claiming that the man is being hounded for standing up to politicians and other gamers of the financial system; we even had socio-cultural groups address press conferences as if to reveal another layer of the joke that Nigeria has become; only at the weekend, a body of Senior Advocates, had to call out the DSS for what they deemed to be an institutional overreach. The list of the intervention is endless just no tool is being spared in what promises to be more than mere battle of wits between his army of supporters and opponents. And lest I forget, there are countless other groups who can’t wait to see Emefiele locked up with the keys thrown into the Atlantic!

Terrorism and economic sabotage are by no means light accusations to be levelled against the nation’s topmost banker. Like the two justices aforementioned, most reasonable Nigerians would certainly want more details beyond those earlier moved via a one-sided, ex parte motion! The DSS cannot, and should not be allowed to assume any air of infallibility particularly on a matter in which a citizen’s liberty is concerned!

Beyond all of these however, the one question that should ring out loudly and which the country must seek answers is the point where things began to go wrong between Emefiele and the administration in which he was only too eager to play the marionette.

Let us just say that the man until recently could do no wrong!

For a powerful, unelected individual, Emefiele certainly knows how to deploy the power of the purse! Indeed, Emefiele at a point not only believed that he had the answers to every sectoral quest but the power even outside of the mandate of his institution to make the difference! Yes; that is how powerful he thought he was.

As at the last time I checked, Emefiele’s CBN is said to have some 37-odd “purpose-driven interventions that are functionally based, well-thought-out and born out of the critical issues within the economic space”. Those are the words of Osita Nwanisobi, the apex bank’s director, Corporate Communications. Suffice to state that no questions are being asked, or perhaps will ever be, on the impact of the multiple programmes – benchmarked against their stated objectives. Talk of a new day and age in apex bank developmentalism where money is simply thrown at a problem!”

I guess Emefiele’s relationship with the Buhari’s federal government is already public record. The principle appears to be – whatever the Buhari administration needed; Emefiele’s CBN supplied; no questions are asked even when laws are broken as many were indeed broken. The most notable of this was the criminal abuse of the so-called ways and means under which the country is currently burdened with a staggering N23.7trn advances. This is what President Buhari now wants to pass to our children, to be spread over 40 years, with three years moratorium on repayment, and an interest rate of nine per cent – all of this thanks to Emefiele.

How much of the current inflationary spiral could be put to Emefiele’s crude monetarism? Those who should know actually say that the man’s ideas are not only dated but astoundingly contradictory! They also say of his management of the exchange rate as lacking depth given current realities.

No doubt, Emefiele may have done well by his friends, the same special groups that wanted him propelled to the nation’s topmost job. It is certainly not his fault that he began to think and act as if our dear country belong to him and so he could do as he pleased.

Again, imagine a governor without the restraint of parliament; whose control of the purse knows no limits; an individual who could, in a fit of unbridled activism and assumed opportunistic exigency, collapse the dividing walls of monetary and fiscal management without a restraining voice; a player whose ego and sense of entitlement not only reckons him among the gods but also above the deep state. I couldn’t think of an individual more powerful under Buhari’s outsourced presidency.

And the sad part? He wanted more! Now he must learn the lessons of those who before him were consumed by hubris!

January 17, 2023
Kogi in the news

If they have not taken them down, you can see the billboards rudely sneaking up here and there, ugly intrusions undermining the raw pristine beauty of the countryside as you drive through the highway linking the Kogi State capital, Lokoja, and the national capital, Abuja,

They are the ugly reminders of Governor Yahaya Bello’s misbegotten campaign for the APC’s ticket for next month’s presidential ticket. Two of those billboards cling in my memory for the sheer brazenness of their claims.

One billboard projected Bello as “God’s plan” for fixing Nigeria.

His handlers forgot that Nigerians, given their proclivity for self-help, rarely leave matters to God; certainly not when it comes to choosing their leaders.

Another featured Bello in military camouflage, his head just visible above the surrounding shrubbery, assuring the attentive audience that, with him in the saddle, their investments and interests in Kogi are safe and inviolable.

Not being the commander of a federal division bivouacked in Kogi, how did he intend to contain the rampaging bandits and marauders and jihadists?

One of the more knowledgeable consultants to the campaign planning committee should have riffed on the question Josef Stalin posed in Yalta where the victorious allied powers gathered to discuss how to share the spoils of World War II:

“How many divisions does the Pope have?”, the Soviet strongman quipped.

Stalin was responding to a warning that the Pope was likely to view with strong disapproval one of the measures being considered.

As they laid out the advert copy for Bello’s billboard well might one of the more enlightened consultants have demanded: “How many battalions can Yahaya Bello order into battle?”

Bello was of course posturing as usual. He could not protect so obvious a target as the highly visible visiting president any more than he could checkmate those who might want to hack into your banking records and filch information that could ruin you.

Thus, it came to pass that, despite Yahaya Bello’s bluster about his security credentials on the billboards aforementioned, a bomb went off on December 29, 2022, within hailing distance from where Buhari was scheduled, minutes later, to commission the Reference Hospital in Bello’s hometown, Okene, a facility that will go down a major legacy of his tenure.

Four persons were killed in the blast.

An unfazed Buhari went on to commission the facility as scheduled, and all that his host could do was to fume and rave and threaten the direst consequences – after the event.

The bombing was not the first such incident in Kogi in recent times, nor was it the second.

Read Also: Kogi govt/Ebira monarch crisis deepens

It was the third on Kogi soil, and a week later, the Department of State Services (DSS) announced the arrest of an indigene of the area, Abdulmumin Otaru, whom they identified as a field operative of the Islamic State of West Africa Province (ISWAP), and as a mastermind behind the explosions.

The DSS has also linked him to an explosion at the Nigeria Police Area Command in Okehi Local Government of Kogi on June 24, 2022, during which a police inspector was killed.

Some six weeks later, on July 3, 2022, Otaru and his confederates in terror struck at the West African Ceramic plant, in Ajaokuta LGA, where they kidnapped three expatriate Indians and left a policeman and a driver dead.

The DSS has also pinned on Otaru and his collaborators the July 5, 2022 attack on the Medium Security Custodial Centre Kuje District of the Abuja Federal Capital Territory, in which several officials were killed and more than a dozen detainees were freed.

Otaru, the DSS said, coordinated or was directly involved in the execution of the Kogi explosions and, together with his collaborators, operated a number of terrorist cells in Kogi.

Yet, the state governor pitched his campaign for the APC’s presidential ticket on his public safety and security credentials.

The Kogi blasts have exposed the alleged credentials as a sham, like so many other claims Yahaya Bello has been touting. And in the face of all this, he has been taking a victory lap.

Hear his Commissioner for Information, Kingsley Fanwo, who is for all practical purposes also the deputy state governor and state commissioner of police.

“The arrest of the principal characters has justified our position that enemies of the state are again breeding terror cells that have been crushed by the indomitable security architecture of the present administration.

“If not for the master class security architecture of this government, the state would have been turned into a terror zone by its enemies.

For good measure, the commissioner reminded the doubters that Kogi, under the leadership of Governor Yahaya Bello, “had already re-calibrated the security architecture to deal with all forms of crimes and criminality.”

“If the criminals come in their numbers,” he warned darkly, waxing poetic, “they will return in their zeros because Kogi as a state will remain inhabitable for cowards masquerading as criminals.”

No hiding place for them in Kogi, where they had in fact been hiding in plain sight – in the vicinity of Yahaya Bello’s hometown – to stage their terrorist operations.

You would think that Yahaya Bello and his team had actually forestalled the terrorist bombings.

Curiously, the Ohinoyi and paramount traditional ruler of Ebiraland, Alhaji Ado Ibrahim, was not in the receiving line for the visiting president when the latest bomb went off. At first blush, his absence would appear to be a serious breach of protocol. He may well have a plausible excuse.

But in keeping with the hysterical manner in which he governs Kogi, Yahaya Bello has turned the matter into something sinister.

In a query to the Ohinoyi, the state government said his absence constituted an act of insubordination and disloyalty to t the president and commander-in-chief, the executive governor of Kogi, and the Ebirra nation as a whole.

It was worse, he said; it portended grave danger to the security of the state and created a bad precedence (sic) for the state’s traditional institutions.

The query directed the Ohinoyi to explain in writing within 48 hours why “disciplinary action” should not be taken against him. They are still phrasing government queries the way Lord Lugard phrased them more than a century ago.

By way of a helpful hint, the query added that an oral explanation may also be required “when a panel is set up to study the case.”

Something tells me the Ohinoyi is going to be kept so busy answering questions that he will hardly know whether he is coming or going.

One other matter: Against the state government’s denial, serving and retired civil servants in Kogi are insistent that the state government owes them a colossal amount by way of arrears of salary and pension payments.

Why not institute a forensic audit to settle the matter once and for all?

And to forestall the ugly rumours circulating, why can’t the Kogi government be proactive for once and disclose how much it has received in the first tranche of payments on its being recognized as an oil-producing state?

January 10, 2023
Hope renewed

These days, it is hard to get into the discussions on the state of the Nigerian Union not to talk of the future of our country without running into this ubiquitous tribe that have long resolved that her problems unsolvable or at least requires a messiah to solve. From vendor stands to the motor parks, right down to the market square – not excluding the boisterous warrior tribe on the cyber-sphere, there is perhaps more than ever before, a creeping feeling that the famed Nigerian spirit said to defy the odds is finally beginning to give.

Those dreary stats being daily churned out are certainly bad enough. I am here referring to the intolerably high unemployment especially of youth that speaks to the nation’s astounding lack of capacity to renew itself; the soar-away inflation and the unbearable cost of living – not excluding the naira’s free-fall and such other dreary indices that seeks to put a context into the Nigerian reality. While all of the above have since become the constitutive metrics of failure and unparalleled mismanagement, the current tragedy would seem far beyond what any metrics can fully capture.

Add to these the activities of the marauding bands whose franchise of terror have finally driven fear into everyone. Yes, the Nigerian society as an organised entity has become so utterly broken just as the government, supposedly the expression of the peoples’ sovereign will, have shown neither the will nor the capacity to take on the devils on the prowl. Whether in the creeks where the reign of outlawry looms large to the point of becoming a huge constant in the determination of what is available to the exchequer; or the fringe northern forests where humans are battered for cash while the government plays the victim, we have seen the notion of sovereignty suffer denudation to the point of being reduced to a joke.

Now, the story is that it is everyone unto self and God for us all. The elders, with nowhere to run, have like the praying mantis, taken to the ritual of cant and supplication while our youths, ever so impatient and desperate, seek an escape from the hell-hole that Nigeria has become. From the monastery to the madrassa, the same lesson is apparently passed across that Nigeria is irredeemably a failed state and so like the voyagers on the RMS Titanic, everyone should seek an escape one way or the other.

Call it the ultimate paradox; this is a country whose millennials and their successor generation – the so-called Gen Z the entire world have long resolved, could no longer be ignored. Whether it is in music where the representatives of their tribe have taken the entire universe by storm, or in arts and other spheres of entertainment where they have dared to be different with their unique offerings in Nollywood and other expressive forms, and now content creation where countless of their numbers have excelled against all odds, our much despised country, thanks to their growing numbers, is proving to be unbeatable at least where it matters most.

The other day, I came across a video where the claim was made – and I believe it is no exaggeration – that ‘for the first time ever in markets like Nigeria and South Africa, African content creation, particularly in music with the Afro beats movement has generated more export revenue than cotton, cocoa and coffee put together’. And that is supposed to be a tiny fraction of their revenue potentials given what is currently, an unfair, inequitable and lopsided relationship between the creators of the content and telecommunications companies, but which the perennially absentee government has nary understanding not to talk of being primed to act.

And all of these in the same country where nothing works or are expected to work.

Given the above, it shouldn’t be difficult to understand where the current anger and frustrations about the current state of the country is coming from. The youths in particular are understandably angry about the depth into which their country has sunk; its antediluvian institutions, obsolete laws and the bureaucratic dysfunctions and its astounding, stupefying mediocratic bent in a global milieu where information technology and their digital correlates rule; and then of course a society that neither understands the trend nor ready to permit itself the understanding of the global movement, and, a leadership so utterly disconnected to their day to day realities that the only thing they can see on the horizon is frustration. In short, they see a country moving in reverse gear at a time other serious countries are on a jet speed.

Read Also: Tinubu: we’ll banish hunger

Yes, it is hard enough as it is. With neither access to cheap credit nor infrastructure to support their arts, many continue to trudge on in the hope that the African giant might yet wake up to its assigned destiny. As they say –dreams die first; remember Nollywood without those state-of-art studios and cameras? Of course, for every success story, countless scores would have dropped by the way, their dreams aborted in the harsh weather foisted by the benighted leadership of an uncaring nation.

That is why the months of February and March matters. You already know why. Nigerians will be going to the polls in what promises to be one of the most consequential elections in the nation’s developmental journey. Interestingly, the choice presented to Nigerians doesn’t pretend to be any tough call in the event that the front-runners are as dissimilar as they can be. Three of them, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressives Congress, Peter Gregory Obi of the Labour Party and Musa Rabiu Kwankwaso of the New Nigeria Peoples Party have all held fort as governors in the current republic. The fourth, Atiku Abubakar was once vice president of the republic. Their records are available to the public.

Clearly, if we accept that only in the tough, unbiased scrutiny of their stewardship while they held office could any reasonable measure of their current promises be evaluated, it should not be difficult for Nigerians to know which of the candidates is truly made of the sterner stuff.

In other words, the current imperative goes beyond the charade of presiding over a botched privatisation programme; or the specious conservatism under which developmental funds are warehoused in the guise of saving for the rainy day; or the leadership of a mass, populist movement of a Kwankwasiyya; rather, it is about bold imaginative thinking, the daring-do stuff that would see the almighty Atlantic Ocean beat a forced retreat. Call it ambitious, futuristic thinking. This is where Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu towers above the rest.

January 10, 2023
Five fish bones

Sartorial designers are making it big in the New Year. Thanks particularly to the five semi-break-away PDP governors, otherwise called the G5 governors led by Governor Nyesom Wike of Rivers State; fancy dresses have become another way of peppering political opponents. Perhaps, another stanza in the Wike’s musical hit would be – ‘as we dey dress fine, it dey pain dem, and as it dey pain dem, we dey dress fine.’ Unarguably, the five governors have become like five fish bones that left the oesophagus and lodged in the thoracic spine.

Ordinarily, a fish bone lodged in the oesophagus can give a great discomfort. But as we were taught back in the days, one heavy mould of garri without soup could force the bone down the abdomen, even if it causes severe pain going down. Again, licking salt or gulping large quantity of water can also deal with that terrible discomfort. Of course, mothers would give doses of soft blows at the back to aid the descent of the bones.

Any of the above methods would see tears roll down the cheeks, and the pain accompanying the exercise would be a constant reminder for one to be careful the next time one is licking Ogbono soup, with pieces of bony fresh fish. There is little doubt that Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, has turned the PDP to his private estate which he returns every election cycle to lick the Ogbono soup, by way of a presidential contest. Unfortunately for him this time, he was careless with the fish bones in the soup.

As part of their unity pact, Governors Nyesom Wike (Rivers), Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi (Enugu), Seyi Makinde (Oyo), Okezie Ikpeazu (Abia) and Samuel Ortom (Benue), have become the five fish bones that left the oesophagus and lodged in the thoracic spine of Atiku Abubakar and his PDP. A thoracic pain is a dull, aching pain. It is sharp, stabbing and intermittent. And since the cause of the pain is difficult to access, it is also difficult to self-diagnose and determine how to deal a blow to the source.

To aggravate the sensational pain, the governors now deck-out in fanciful uniformed attires to dance on the political grave of the PDP’s presidential candidate, Alhaji Atiku Abubakar. The dressing antics of the five fish bones reminds one of the youthful days when ‘dressing to kill’ was every child’s dream at Christmas and the New Year. To add salt to injury, the governors, fully robed gyrate in the opposite direction of Atiku’s presidential campaign train.

But the governors’ gambit is beyond sensational dressing. Apologies to Lanny Wolfe’s “dancing on the graves of my enemies” lyrics; at the end of the election cycle, will the five fish bones be rescued as the Israelites were from Egypt? Will they on February 25, cross over on dry ground and look back to see their political enemy drowned in the presidential election tsunami? Will they after the election be dancing on the troubles that have been troubling their political life since the PPD presidential election was hijacked by the Atiku forces?

Read Also: PDP refutes report on Atiku’s health

This column believes they will, even if they miss their mark on who to support for the presidential race. No doubt, making a group choice of the presidential candidate to support may become an albatross for the G5 governors, especially for Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi, Okezie Ikpeazu and Samuel Ortom. With Atiku Abubakar of their party thrown under the bus, the group is left with supporting either Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progressive Congress (APC) or Peter Obi (Okwute) of the Labour Party (LP).

In Enugu, Abia and Benue states, there are many potential voters who may desert any of the governors who openly canvass for any other presidential candidate other than Peter Obi of the LP, regardless of whether he is likely to win or not. The backlash against Governor Chukwuma Soludo of Anambra State, when he said that Peter Obi has little chance of winning the presidential election would be a pointer for them. The same abuse has been the lot of Arthur Eze, for openly denigrating the ambition of Peter Obi and canvassing for Atiku Abubakar.

But inevitably, all the music lyrics, the dances, the dressing to kill, the junketing and holidaying and partying, indeed all the scheming and trade-ins would amount to political disaster and waste of public funds if the G5 are unable to ensure that Atiku Abubakar fails at the presidential poll. They would also be in a damp squalid political situation if they support a presidential candidate that is unable to win at the polls. As the chickens come home to roost, the G5 is therefore in a political dilemma.

Interestingly, the leader of the group has boasted that the governors are in strong positions to determine the choices of the majority of electorates in their respective states, and would direct them on their presidential choice. How true that boast is would be tested at the polls. But from some indicators, Rivers State appears to be more politically cohesive than Abia, Enugu and Benue. However, Wike’s control of Rivers State politics and state choice about the 2023 presidential election will soon be tested at the polls.

Enugu State which would have been a walk-over for Governor Ugwuayi who is contesting a senatorial seat, and the PDP, has one of its leading gubernatorial aspirant now heading the Labour Party threat. While Ugwuanyi may have done enough to secure an easy passage to the red chambers, can he afford to support the potential emergence of Asiwaju Tinubu, damn the political backlash? Interestingly, his filial relation and political associate Chijioke Edeoga, is the governorship candidate of the state LP.

On his part, Governor Ortom of Benue State will have to deal with the fog of contesting for a senate seat in PDP, having sympathy for Peter Obi of Labour Party, and having political heavy weights like David Mark and Gabriel Suswan canvassing for PDP. Making a dispassionate decision may even be more difficult for Governor Ikpeazu of Abia State, a senatorial aspirant also, as the state is even more volatile than Benue and Enugu states, with the pro-separatist groups operating heavily in that axis.

Governor Seyi Makinde of Oyo State has lesser stress, with making a decision. With Atiku out of the way, he can easily align with Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of the All Progress Congress (APC), who has the brightest chance of winning the presidential election, and not suffer much backlash like his brother governors of Abia, Enugu and Benue. No doubt, Wike and his brother governors have so far taught Atiku Abubakar some political lessons, about political betrayal and the law of Karma. But will a disagreement over the choice of a common presidential candidate not dissolve the five fish bones lodged in Atiku’s thoracic spine?

January 10, 2023
The home stretch

A Happy New Year – dare we hope?”

That was the opening line of Professor Wole Soyinka’s response to an email I had sent him to wish him and his family all the best for 1998.

To hope that 1998 would be any happier than the preceding years of horror was indeed an act of great daring. The infernal Sani Abacha was firmly in the saddle, consolidating his brutal dictatorship and expanding its constricting reach with each passing day.

No obstacle seemed to stand in his path. Not even considerations of the instability of human greatness. For all practical purposes, he took his own immortality for granted.

The Nobelist added in the email that, in whatever case, 1998 would be an epochal year that would shape the content and direction of the struggle for the restoration of democracy, in which he was a principal leader, and in consequence of which Abacha had placed a price on his head.

That was prophetic.

Abacha expired in an orgy of concupiscence. Civil society regained its organizing power and voice. If Abacha’s successor, Abdulsalami Abubakar nursed anything like Abacha’s ambition, he lacked the power to mobilize boots on the ground to consummate it. Having no mind of his own on what to do with the detained president-elect, Moshood Abiola, he dithered and dithered until Abiola was conveniently murdered in his custody, if not with the regime’s connivance.

Thereafter the regime, whose sole selling point was a promise to hand over power to an elected government, was reduced to devising the quickest exit possible, employing a constitution deemed a forgery by the best authorities. Forgery or no forgery, that document constitutes perhaps the greatest impediment to the possibility of federalism and good government in Nigeria.

Since then, Nigeria has carried on for the most part like a stalled caterpillar, its antennae probing furiously one day and timidly the next, but always ineffectually. Its body has remained inert.

This week, Nigeria enters the home stretch in the transition to of government that will be heralded by a General Election, the first installment of which is scheduled for February 25 and culminate in the election of a President and members of the National Assembly. Governorship and State Assembly elections are slated for March 11.

A new president, as well as federal and state lawmakers will be inaugurated in May. To invoke Soyinka’s 1998 query: Dare we hope?

The road ahead is long and treacherous, and many things can and will go awry in a country so accident-prone as Nigeria.

The country is going through all the motions but as I see it, optimism, for sweeping change that might be mandated by the General election does not run deep. One cannot blame the contestants for not trying. What became of the optimism, nay enthusiasm, the appetite for change generated in previous election cycles, most notably in 2015?

I know not a few serious-minded and thoughtful Nigerians who believe tenaciously that the elections will prove no point and solve no problem; that the foundation of the present structure is so defective that it cannot endure without radical architecture, and that to ignore this basic truth is to privilege hope over experience.

I do not include in this group the Rev Kris Okotie, pastor of HouseHold of God giga-church and habitual presidential hopeful of FRESH Democratic Party. Like them, he regards all that has happened since the primaries as a waste of time and precious resources, a journey to nowhere. But he believes it can still be salvaged.

Following the primaries, the logical thing was for all the putative candidates for the elections to hand over their political assets to him, to enable him to form a government based on “aboriginal democracy,” which will then prepare the ground for the kind of rule that would lead Nigeria to peace and prosperity.

Even within his fold, few share this crackbrained prescription. But he hasn’t given up waiting.

In the larger community, there are many who hold that nothing is wrong with the existing order that cannot be remedied with an incremental measure here and some tweaking there; that the system will take care of all such matters as it evolves.

Hard as it may be to believe, there are also those who believe that nothing whatsoever is wrong with the present order; that there is always room for improvement but that the system is the best it can be. If the elections serve only to perpetuate the status quo, that would be good enough.

Then there are those who hold that the present order is so corrupt and inept that it must be supplanted by affiliates and proxies of the Islamic State of West Africa and administered as a theocracy, and that it does not deserve to survive in any other form or by any other name.

In the attentive audience, many also doubt whether the election will mark an inflection point in Nigeria’s journey toward building a democratic polity that will serve the best interests of all citizens. Former President Olusegun Obasanjo is only the latest and the most outspoken personage to cast grave doubt on the potential of all but one of the contending major political parties to lead Nigeria out of the morass, despite his exertions in mentoring a new generation.

That is the Labour Party, distinguished thus far by mass following in social media and consistently good showing in dodgy opinion polls.

The PDP used to be Africa’s most effective vote-harvesting machine. But until the combative governor of Rivers State Nyesom Wike, who is effectively the G5, or Group of 5, lifts its chokehold on its presidential candidate, Abubakar Atiku, the Wazirin Adamawa’s campaign will resemble nothing like his earlier slick, well-oiled runs.

In the PDP primaries, Wike had polled second to Atiku and had good reasons, not least his generous financing of the entire effort, to expect to be named Atiku’s running mate. The party’s hierarchy demurred, saying Wike was too combustible to play second fiddle. Instead, they settled on Delta State’s governor, the genial Dr Ifeanyi Okowa.

Ironically, it is that very combustibility, plus the petrodollars pouring into the state’s Exchequer faster than even a person of his restless energy can spend them, that Wike has been deploying to exact his revenge.

The usually suave former Vice President now looks somewhat distraught. But Wike says the chokehold will remain in place until Iyorchia Ayu ceases to be the PDP’s National Chairman.

Those who know the terrain very well are saying that the APC is not as united behind Asiwaju Bola Tinubu’s candidacy as well as appearances would seem to suggest. Certain tendencies within the party, it is being said, would readily ditch him and file behind another they perceive as having a good chance of winning the race, and who promises to guarantee their standing in the scheme of things – the Moshood Abiola Treatment, you understand.

Add to the foregoing pervasive apathy and fear of electoral violence.

Such discontinuities gained ground as Tinubu stumbled literally and figuratively on the hustings, bereft of his accustomed surefootedness, to the point that anyone who can work a computer mouse or a smartphone became an instant authority on neurological condition. Questions were asked insistently about his past.

Who is Tinubu?

He is of course a man, who has lived among other men. As such, he is flawed.

But if all you see are the flaws after he has served two meritorious terms as Governor of Lagos State, and before that as an exiled chieftain of the democratic coalition that helped terminate military rule in Nigeria, and thereafter as a constant striver for a better country – if that is all you can see in Tinubu, please, do not vote for him if and when the time comes.

January 3, 2023
IKJDC: Ponzi as game!

Happy New Year! Like one of my friends is wont to say, it takes grace to survive the entity called Nigeria. Just imagine the array of forces massed to do the citizens in; from businesses that are a little more than glorified ‘ponzis’, the hordes of complicit if not entirely conniving regulators whose instinct is to look the other way, right up to an uncaring and utterly indifferent government that watches on as Nigerians are being mauled by so-called service providers.

You will certainly agree that survival in Nigeria in recent time require far more the famed Nigerian resilience; nothing short of the five-letter word – GRACE – is required to beat the odds.

Call it an unusual way to start year 2023 – and I will agree 100 percent. But then, when you have endured a month-long ill-treatment in the hands of an irresponsible service provider like Ikeja Disco, you are left with no choice. The real shame here is that my story – like those of countless other Nigerians marooned on the island of indifference – doesn’t even pretend to be extraordinary; talk of the living reality daily forced on Nigerians by the conniving tag team of crooked institutions and corporate brigands!

Let me cut straight to the chase.

First week in December, my wife had gone to the neighbourhood office of Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company (IKJDC) to top up our pre-paid meter. Although she wanted N20,000 loaded on the card, she ended up being charged twice, no thanks to the glitches routinely suffered by Nigerians on the erratic payment platform. Not to worry; she was assured that the first transaction, which the official had assumed did not sail through, would be reversed in due time. Days of waiting for a reversal that didn’t happen, she went to the bank to lodge a formal complaint. Only then was she told that the two transactions actually went through and that the IKJDC account had been duly credited with N40,000 for which she was supplied proof!

At this point, the matter looked quite simple and straight-forward: She would get IKJDC to transfer same to the card in the unlikelihood that they would want to refund the money.

Soon after, we realised that our nightmares had only just begun. At the IKJDC headquarters in Ikeja where she went to lodge a formal complaint, the customer relations staff on duty, after perusing her documents including the bank statement admitted that the fund in question (N20,000) was in their account alright, only that this could not be loaded because the card – yes, the same card on which the earlier credit was loaded days before – was no longer supported on their company’s payment platform!

She was then availed two options: pay for a new meter which attracts a free of N115,000; never mind the interminable waiting time for installation during which we would be thrown back to the old estimated billing system; or in the interim, do another top up on the same old card and by that forfeit the N20,000 already into their piggy bank!

Just like that!

I took over at this point. I told the officials that neither of the options made any sense. In the first place, I had absolutely no problem with the current pre-paid meter to warrant my coughing out N115,000 for a new one under the current difficult economic climate. Second, to the extent that any technical/operational issues that have rendered the old meter obsolete had nothing to do with me, the consumer, (need I also remind that the same meter in question was duly paid for), the cost of any proposed upgrade ought to be borne by IKJDC, not me the hapless consumer! Third and most intriguing suggestion- that I could actually load new units on the old card but that would mean forfeiting the N20,000 that was the subject of the original complaint. And all of these in the raging background on what to do when the already purchased units run out considering that Christmas and New Year celebrations were only few weeks away!

Convinced that I could at least pull some levers to get the problem sorted out, I called everyone I knew. From their field staff to the customer relations personnel right up to some supposedly top guns in the public relations department; none, as one would imagine, could offer any practical help. Even at that, what I could never have bargained for was being taken through the lecture circuit; the customer relations officers with their standard, icy templates that left no accommodation for common-sense, fairness or equitable dealing; the antediluvian public relations directorate that suffered no pretences about being either ‘public’ or ‘relational’. In all, you are told that the system has been long on this process of upgrade, only that the electricity consumer opted to remain light years behind by neglecting to pay for the modern digitised meters!

Summary: Either it is the ways of IKJDC or hell’s highway!

In the meantime, I was expected to ‘comfortably’ endure the agony of spending the holidays without public electricity supply! And that’s exactly how the holidays went! And all of these for the sole prize of running from IKJDC’s pillars to their outposts!

Well, this is my story a la Ikeja Disco. I guess it captures the agonies of millions of electricity consumers in the hands of the clueless, shylock operator.

I must say that the story has only just begun. I have since paid the N115,000 for their ‘digitised meter’ just as the discussions on my N20,000 ‘overpayment’ is currently on hold. As for their promissory note of ‘direct connection’ following the intervention of officials, this has remained undelivered although a friend has assured that a timely delivery of an estimated bill covering the period is more than guaranteed! And this is supposed to be a 21st century service provider.

Meanwhile, the gospel out there, according to the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) is that installation of electrical assets remains the responsibility of Electricity Distribution Companies (Discos). At least, this was what we heard as one of the outcomes of the three-day NERC/Abuja Electricity Distribution Company (AEDC) Customer Complaint Resolution Meeting held in Abuja last week.

Here is how NERC’s Commissioner Consumers Affairs Aisha Mahmud puts it: “It is not the responsibility of the consumers to buy meters, poles or any assets for the Discos because we have already provided for that in the tariff of the utilities”.

Well I just did.

She didn’t even stop there. In the circumstances that you have to purchase these items and you cannot wait for the Discos to make that investment, it has to be done through an agreement. The consumer, she emphasised, has to sign an agreement with the DisCos stating when and how the consumer will be refunded.

“The agreement should contain a dispute resolution clause and all other items that are expected of a standard agreement”.

My question – what options are available to the electricity consumer literally forced at gun point to pay for a meter in place of another which the service provider has deemed obsolete, and who must in addition, be denied service at the sole pleasure of a most irresponsible corporate like the Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company?

Over to you NERC. Happy new year folks!

January 3, 2023
Matters Miscellaneous

In this season of goodwill to all persons, permit me to indulge in some chest-beating. It is no small achievement when you no longer have to introduce or justify your creation, when that creation has taken on a life, an identity of its own, and is widely copied.

So it is with Matters Miscellaneous, a feature of the column I have been writing under different signatures for three different newspapers beginning in the mid-980s.

PMB@80

President Muhammadu Buhari turned 80 last week.

So unremitting, and so categorical were the bulletins on his health about eight years ago that not a few were led to believe that, even if he won the election, he would be dead within a year or two of taking office, assuming that he would be alive to witness the Inauguration.

While he was on a long medical trip to the UK, it was bruited that he had in fact died. They put it about that a gangling creature who had supplanted him in the Presidential Villa was a         Sudanese layabout called Jibril Al-Sudan, who had been surgically reconstructed and re-repurposed.

So faithful to the original was the creature that no one could tell the difference, they said. The old Mafia rule kicked in: Those who know don’t tell, and those who tell don’t know.

And so we arrived at this past weekend, in the twilight of Buhari’s second presidential term and on his reaching the sobering actuarial milestone of age 80. And there was the Birthday Boy himself amidst family, friends and associates, loose, relaxed and exuding good health, watching a commissioned documentary on his life and times.

It says something about Buhari’s essential modesty and sense of proportion that the occasion was not proclaimed a national holiday, with elite corps of the armed forces marching, tanks rolling jauntily across the parade arcade in Abuja, and hypersonic fighter planes of the air force streaking across the skies in ceremonial salute to the President and Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

When you dedicate the occasion to “Celebrating a Patriot, a Leader and an Elder Statesman,” when you frame the occasion and the Man of the Moment in such epochal terms, you preempt those who might seek to characterize them in quotidian terms.

If you have a trumpet and know how to blow it, blow it, man. Blow that horn, and blow it hard. If you leave it to others, take it from me that they will not blow it as hard or as melodiously.

You don’t take a chance in legacy projects.

It would have been a surprise and a major production flaw if the matter of Jibril al-Sudan, aforementioned, did not come up in Buhari’s reminiscences. He dismissed those who confected or peddled the tale as “cheeky.”   Their aim, he said, was to distract (sic) attention from “the main issue.”

In a homily heard around the world, one of them, a bishop and grand overseer of lesser clerics heading a global network of churches and proprietor of a string of universities had cited “one Olatunji Dare” as his authoritative source, based on Dare’s transparently satirical fragment on the subject.

And yet, they say Buhari is not gracious.

Haba!

Shades of Mobutu

The story bears re-telling.

Half-starved government troops in Zaire, as the Democratic Republic of Congo was then known, had mutinied over unpaid salaries stretching back many months. When the news reached President Mobutu Sese Seko, he ordered a detachment from their ranks to be marched to his palace in Gbadolite.

“You, ” he said, pointing to one of the soldiers lined up before him. What is that you are holding?”

“A rifle, sir,” the tremulous soldier replied.

“And you,” Mobutu demanded as he turned to the next soldier on the line.

“A rifle, sir.”

“What kind of rifle?” the president pursued.

“An AK 47 Assault Rifle,” a soldier volunteered.

Mobutu shook his head in disbelief and disappointment. “I have given each of you an assault rifle and you are complaining about unpaid salaries. What salary is more assured than the rifle       in your hand?”

Whereupon he dismissed them with a scornful hiss.

I was reminded of this story last week by allegations that elements of Mobutism had crept into the practice of journalism in Nigeria. The allegations merely confirmed reports that have been circulating for years that the deadly virus had found its way into the bloodstream of Nigerian journalism.

What can be said with certainty is that all is not well with Nigeria’s Fourth Estate, especially in the department of probity. It has been infiltrated by racketeers, obtainers, blackmailers, low-rent opinion writers and columnists, extortionists, union officials with their eyes on the main chance, and reporters who are in the business because they can’t find anything else to do

There is so much unedifying example in the senior ranks that one can hardly blame junior reporters who demand “transport money” from the source they have just interviewed, or who get paid to report the news from the source’s perspective, as would stenographers.

A publishing house, I gather, once arranged a seminar on ethics as part of its in-house education programme. “Ethics, of all things!” the staffers scoffed. The edifice was resting on a shaky ethical mooring, and the staffers saw this every passing day. The sponsors of the seminar found no takers.

Mobutism comes in many guises and disguises.

It is Mobutism when media workers seldom receive their earned pay or receive it only in bits and snatches. It is Mobutism compounded when a media organization is running a profitable ship but its leaders fritter the gains away in vainglorious projects and parades of false affluence.

It is Mobutism when reporters covering specialized beats confer meaningless titles on their sources in for valuable consideration. It is Mobutism when editors and publishers corral state governors into sponsoring their periodical meetings and convention.

Mobutism is publishing with reckless disregard for the truth or falsity of a statement. Mobutism is operating without remorse or discomfiture in a news organization erected on Mobutism; in other words, it is Mobutism to help normalize or perpetuate Mobutism.

We must keep the spotlight on Mobutism. It is subversive not merely of journalism’s core values, but of its central mission.

Whose Constitution?

If the Executive and the Legislative branches want to be faithful to the American constitutional model that Nigeria operates, they should not be undertaking major new projects or programs, nor making major new appointments.

They have entered or are poised on the threshold of the lame-duck mode, when they should leave uncompleted projects to their successors, who may well have different concerns, different priorities, and different strategies.

There is therefore no sympathy on this page for lawmakers who have been lamenting that, as things stand, they will not be able to bequeath a new Constitution to their compatriots before the 9th National Assembly is prorogued.

That task was misbegotten anyway, regardless of the fact that the National Assembly was vested with it by the extant Constitution, Remember, however that the legitimacy of that document is not merely suspect but widely disputed. It was drawn up by handpicked nominees of a Nigerian military that had exhausted, if not betrayed, its reformist possibilities, and foisted on the public without discussion or debate.

The reviewers this time allowed one day of consultation in each state, the better portion of which was spent dining and wining and doing out cash to the attendees, who had for the most part gathered there precisely for such freebies.

The National Assembly has reported that 22 of the 36 State Assemblies had approved 42 of 44 provisions of the1999 Constitution it had identified for review and to which it has proposed           Amendments.

Progress, it might seem. But at bottom, this is bureaucratic progress that serves no purpose.

A Constitution marked for 44 Amendments that for the most part only tinker around the edges calls for much more than a review. It demands comprehensive re-writing.

Finally

The next time this column appears will be the third day of the New Year. Wishing you all the most abundant blessings of 2023.

December 27, 2022