Category: Tuesday

Whenever I felt like raising my wife’s hackles, I usually had recourse to an expedient that never failed.

Apropos of nothing in particular, or as the coda to a television news story on the British monarchy, I would ask, with calculated insouciance, “When is that woman going to abdicate and make way for her eldest son?”

“Oh no, she shouldn’t,” she would fire back.

My task was done, bar the occasional interjections.  It remained to sit back and listen, in feigned bemusement, as she laid out why the British Crown must not go to Prince Charles in the event of the Queen abdicating; rather, it should pass to her grandson William, Prince Charles’s oldest son.

The father was unworthy of the Crown; not after his cruel treatment of Diana, the innocent, guileless woman whom he had trapped in a loveless marriage, only to return to a former lover who had married somebody else in the interval. . .”

“You don’t know the back story,” I would interject diffidently.  “It is somewhat more complicated.”

“I don’t care,” she would say. “He should not be king.”

Sometimes, it was almost as if she had a personal stake in the matter.

“It is not entirely up to the Queen, you know.  There are rules to the succession. . .”

“I don’t care,” she would maintain.  “He should not be king.  And I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

We were at that conjuncture again after news broke two weeks ago that Queen Elizabeth’s health had caused her physicians more than a little concern.  Then followed a rapid migration of the royal family to Balmoral Castle, her summer vacation retreat in Scotland.   Scarcely three days later, it was announced that the monarch had died.

Within hours of her passing Prince Charles had translated to King Charles the Third.

I am not claiming this outcome as a victory in my habitual jousts with my wife over Queen Elisabeth’s sit-tightism.  On the contrary, I count myself the loser.  Whenever I feel like raising her hackles, I will now have to find a new foil.  But he or she is unlikely as worthy of attention as the Her Britannic Majesty, aforementioned.

The jousting I have described is not unique to my family, I gather.  It is a familiar pastime in many homes and follows a predictable pattern.   The man of the house seems inclined to cut the future king some slack, whereas the woman of the house seems to be on a mission to avenge Diana if not to project on her own husband, the notorious peccadillos of the former Prince of Wales.

In such homes, the men must be hugely relieved that there is a truce, at least for the time being, in this intricate game, which was always freighted with innuendo.

I should add that my wife has softened her stance on the former Prince of Wales on learning that his consort Camilla and I share the same birthday of July 17.  Take note, Buckingham Palace.

There is one important aspect of my life for which I will always remember the late Queen Elisabeth.   It is to her that I owe my first trip outside my place of birth, Kabba, in Kogi State, and it wasn’t just to the nearest big town — Okene, Ikare, in Western Nigeria, nor for that matter to the more distant Lokoja, the provincial capital, only 54 miles away.

It was to Kaduna, the capital of Northern Nigeria, no less, some 400 miles away.

Stuck in town as usual during the Christmas holidays in 1955, I was recruited as one of six pupils from my primary school to travel to Kaduna to do the flag-waving and cheering at the impending royal visit of the Queen and her husband Prince Phillip, the Duke of Edinburg.

They trotted us to the Native Administration (N.A) dispensary and inoculated us against any contingencies.  From there they marched us to the Native Authority Treasury close by where were each handed the princely sum of six shillings, our pocket money for the trip.

My excitement was boundless.

Together with pupils from area schools and local dignitaries, we were conveyed in three trucks, one harmattan morn to Lokoja, where I saw, for the first time, the majestic River Niger, an awe-inspiring body of water that seemed to stretch to the horizon.  The trucks were loaded onto the ferry to convey them and their passengers to Shintaku, on the other side of the river across from Lokoja

From Shintaku, we journeyed to Dekina, Ankpa, and Ayangba, arriving at Oturkpo the next day. From there we boarded a designated train on the Eastern Line to Kadina North station. The train ride was another first for me. You did not have to show any ticket to board the rain. So many freeloaders took advantage, but those were innocent days and there were no incidents.

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Disembarking at Kaduna North, the boys were bused to the campus of Government Technical School and lodged in a cavernous hall where “iron” beds had been laid out with just enough room to go from one row to the next in any direction.  This was to be our home for the next two weeks. The girls were bused to the campus of the Queen of Apostles College in the Kakuri section of the city.

They issued each of us a pair of white drill uniforms and miniature British flags and medallions commemorating the royal visit, showed us the dining hall and the clinic, and where to seek help.  The next day they bused us to the parade ground, the staging ground for the royal visit, for rehearsals.

It was an expansive terrain, a mini-city actually, showcasing virtually every aspect of the cultures of the people of Northern Nigeria – their architecture, arts, crafts, institutions, leisure, lifestyles, cuisines, and so on.  The royal visit culminated in a grand durbar, a spectacular display of mastery of massed horsemanship, synchronicity, and control.

The closest we got to the royal visitors was when they rode in an open Land Rover through row after row of flag-waving students, members of the paramilitary services, Boy Scouts, Girl Guides, and townsfolk drawn from every stratum of society.

One Saturday afternoon, I ventured into town on my own.  Destination:  Kingsway Stores, which looked like a fairyland each time our bus drove past it.   I marvelled at the sheer variety and quality of goods displayed arrestingly and fed my eyes for the better part of a day, treading warily in case they decided I had no business being there and threw me out, or worse, called the police.

As a memento of my visit, I bought a roll of toffee for sixpence.  It was all I could afford.  But I could at least boast that I had shopped at Kingsway.

All too soon, it was time to head back home.  I had packed into three exciting weeks the kind of experience my peers who were always teasing me about my being rooted to the home soil – I had packed into three weeks a richer experience than they could boast of in their cumulative travel to spend school vacation with parents or relations.

I had travelled by land, by water, and by rail.  I had seen her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II and her consort, the Duke of Edinburgh, not forgetting the Northern Premier Sir Ahmadu Bello, the Sultan of Sokoto, and the cohort of Northern leaders.

Memories of that visit flooded back in 1976 when, on a visit to Scotland, I was given a tour of the Holyrood Palace in Edinburg, which featured prominently in the recent burial ceremonies, for Queen Elizabeth, walked the Royal Mile, and resided for two weeks at the Royal Horse Guards Hotel, within walking distance of Buckingham Palace, courtesy of a bequest from the Daily Times of Babatunde Jose’s era,

Throughout the mourning for Queen Elizabeth, the British tabloids’ which never saw a spectacle they could not parlay into a scandal nor a slip they could not cast as a monumental blunder, sheathed their swords, and will now strive to regain lost ground.

A starting point might well be the Profumo Affair of the early 60s, which rocked the Establishment, involving as it did the Secretary of State for War, call girls, British high society and Soviet diplomats, and was tinged with intimations of espionage.

To this day, the identity of the personage implicated in the scandal and characterized tersely as “a member of the royal family” has been kept a closely-guarded secret.

They knew his identity all right but were bound by the rules of the D-4 Notice by which the media voluntarily eschewed publication of material the government did not want reported.

Those were simpler, more decent days, eons literally before ravenous social media, so-called, polluted cyberspace and poisoned the wellsprings of amity.

Two weeks ago, they buried the corporeal remains of Ladipo Akinlawon Mabogunje (or L. Akin Mabogunje as he always signed off), a scholar of global renown, in Ijebu Ode, Ogun State, in the Yoruba country, following a week of mourning and stirring tributes by a grateful community that he served with his great intellect, granite integrity, and unexampled devotion.

By osmosis, as it were, I had acquired some familiarity with his name and accomplishments well before I read his devastating critique of the Report of the Coker Commission of Inquiry, which was set up by the Tafawa Balewa Administration in the wake of the crisis convulsing Western Nigeria and invested with sweeping powers to probe that Region’s finances and other aspects of its governance under the Action Group.

That critique, and others by Sam Aluko, Hezekiah Oluwasanmi, and Victor Oyenuga, fellow senior academics at the University of Ibadan, unmasked the Report of the Coker Commission as the hatchet job that it was.

It would come to light later that if these towering intellectuals were not also card-carrying members of Chief Obafemi Awolowo/s Action Group, they were members of his Brains Trust who helped shape the party’s policies and programmes.

Thereafter my colleague at a secondary school where I was teaching in the late 60s, Oyebanji Ajagbe (of blessed memory), who had been Mabogunje’s student at the University of Ibadan, kept him in my consciousness.  He invoked the great man’s name frequently and talked about him in the most reverential terms.

He cited perhaps as the most challenging – and most intellectually stimulating — task he was assigned in his three years as a Geography major at Ibadan an essay titled “Duality in Geography.”  And who else but Mabogunje could have given his students such a task, emblematic of the critical-intellectual framework in which he carried out his work?

I would finally meet the legend himself some two decades later, in1986, at the Fourth of July reception, on the expansive grounds of the residence of the United States Ambassador to Nigeria.  I was introduced to him by Dr Yemi Ogunbiyi, a senior executive at Guardian Newspapers, where I was writing a weekly column that was mostly satirical.

Mabogunje shook my hand warmly and complimented me on the column.  Then added, in that slow and deliberate manner that was his trademark, “But you are getting too political, my friend.”

That remark captured the essential character of Mabogunje’s career after the tumultuous 60s.  He abjured the overtly or even mildly political, and focused his brilliant scholarship on how to make our rural areas and cities more liveable and how to raise the living standards of Nigerians through means grounded on tested social research.

His focus on urbanism and urbanization may not have been entirely fortuitous.  For one thing, he had excelled in Geography in secondary school.  For another, his people the Yoruba, have long been ranked in scholarly literature as one of the world’s most urbanized peoples.

That realisation may well have inclined him to make the phenomenon his object of life-long study.

I would get to know Mabogunje up close later at various fora, most unforgettably at the Obasanjo Farmhouse Dialogues held, as the name indicates at General Olusegun Obasanjo’s farm in Ota, Ogun State.  Each session was an intensive weekend affair, involving policy-makers, practitioners, academics, and media people, and the attentive audience for a specific subject.  The agenda was adopted at an after-dinner session on Friday.

It was then examined in all its ramifications in a Saturday discourse that lasted all day and far into the night. A designated Rapporteur presented his report.  It was discussed by the House, which then debated and formally adopted a Communiqué.  The Proceedings were published and distributed widely.

One compendium of the Dialogues listed Obasanjo, Mabogunje, and me as its editors.  I count it as a great honour to be mentioned in the same phrase as the quintessential scholar, and I will always treasure that volume.

As an honorary consultant to the Farmhouse Dialogue, frequent participant and occasional Rapporteur, I am in a position to assert that despite the welcoming ambience in which they were staged, the Dialogues were no picnics.

Mabogunje was a fixture at the Dialogues, listening intently, taking notes, and intervening judiciously, always making helpful observations, the object being to help clarify issues rather than to overawe the audience with his great learning.

I would get to observe him closely on a much larger canvas, about 1986, at a weeklong national workshop held at Zaranda Hotel in Bauchi, Bauchi State on, the strategy and tactics of the National Directorate of Foods, Roads and Rural Infrastructures (DIFFRI), one of the more productive of the myriads of interventionist agencies created by military president Ibrahim Babangida as part of his programme of transition from military to democratic rule.

Mabogunje’s presence as vice chair of the Directorate, retired Air Vice Marshal Larry Koinyan presiding, gave DIFFRI much of its credibility.  The same can be said for the People’s Bank, another Babangida creation on which he served as a director.  He may well have privately entertained some doubts concerning Babangida’s sincerity on the transition, but he never publicly expressed them.

Obasanjo had told me at the time that he had three friends who always took Babangida’s pronouncements and declarations with a large pinch of salt.  The first was Chief Simeon Adebo, the distinguished international civil servant and Nigeria’s first Permanent Representative to the United Nations and an occasional guest at the Farm House Dialogues.  The third was me.

Weren’t we vindicated for the most part, if not always?

It says something of Mabogunje’s sense of duty that, amidst his doubts, he served diligently and to the best of his great ability on the boards of the many agencies to which he was appointed by the administration. If the agencies failed, they did so despite his best effort

I last met Mabogunje eight some eight years ago, in 2014, at the inaugural Annual Birthday Lecture for his great contemporary, the distinguished historian and university administrator, Professor Jacob Festus Ade. Ajayi, which it was my honour to present.

I recall how Mabogunje walked across from the far end of the University of Ibadan Conference Hall where he was seated with his wife and inseparable companion, retired Justice Titi Mabogunje, congratulated me warmly and asked for a copy of the paper.

Though well into his eighties, he was sprightly as ever, marked out by his mop of grey hair, which sat on his head like a crown on the countless laurels he had won at home and abroad for his scholarship, academic stewardship, and public service, including the Vautrin Lud Prize, widely regarded as the equivalent of a Nobel Prize in Geography

It remains to add that Mabogunje was unobtrusive through and through, unpretentious, urbane, this gentle giant who, despite a time of unremitting engagement, lived to a ripe old age of 91. He always made you feel that the occasion was important not because he was there, but because you were there.

He will live on as a model and a monument.

 

It has gone down as one of the testiest encounters in recent memory of an overbearing legislature and an unyielding public servant.

Sometime in March 2017. The Comptroller General of the Nigerian Customs Service, Hameed Ali, a retired army colonel, issued a directive giving motorists who had somehow managed to take possession of their imported cars without paying the obligatory customs duties to do so no later than April 12 or face consequences.

Ever so mindful of its oversight duties, the Senate, pursuant to a “motion of national importance,” issued a counter-directive to the Customs Service:  Perish the thought. Dino Melaiye, the National Assembly’s poster boy for bombast and delinquency, whose fleet of cars include a Lamborghini and a Bentley, to mention only some of his more exclusive sedans, went ballistic.

The Comptroller General’s directive, he said, was “anti-people” and would bring more hardship at a time the public was groaning under a “recessed economy.”

Senate President Bukola Saraki, who was widely reported to be engaged at the time in a cat-and-mouse game with the Customs Service over duties on an imported special edition Range Rover, weighed in.  The Comptroller-General had to be stopped.

From there, it was but a short step to summoning its comptroller general, Hameed Ali. aforementioned to appear before the Senate to explain his contumely.

To cut the story short, after some prefatory skirmishes, Ali complied, decked in his accustomed mufti.  The Senate took this manner of dress as a fresh offence, refused to treat with him, and ordered him to return at a later date in the full regalia of comptroller general.

Ali reported on the appointed date, but still clad in mufti.  This time they sent him back at the threshold, warning that he could not disobey the Senate with impunity and go unpunished.

Whereupon Ali headed to court to seek injunctive relief.

The whole thing, it is necessary to insist, had nothing to do with public policy or holding a public official to the code of conduct.  It is all in keeping with the Senate’s proclivity for indulging its proclivity for self-dealing under cover of “oversight.”

But in Hameed Ali, it met its match.

This past week. Ali was back before a chastened Senate that took no notice of his apparel but paid attention to his insight on the refining, consumption, and importation of products in Nigeria, in the context of a colossal subsidy the government says it can no longer sustain and must cut.

Public debate on the matter has been one of the longest-running in Nigeria’s history.  It first surfaced in 1985, when the International Monetary Fund stipulated a raft of conditionalities for granting an insolvent Federal Government a loan of $2.8 billion, including abolishing subsidies on fuel, electricity, and fertilizers.

A wilful lack of clarity has bedevilled the issue since it came under discussion. The framing asserted the existence of a subsidy, relieving its protagonists of the obligation to prove it.

At some point, they said the difference between what a barrel of oil would have fetched in Europe vis-a-vis the same quantity and quality in Nigeria represented a subsidy.

Was that not what economists call an opportunity cost?

They said the subsidy had to be cut because petroleum products were being wasted or consumed irresponsibly.

But how would cutting the subsidy conduce to more responsible consumption, howsoever defined?

Then, they said the petroleum products were so cheap they were being adulterated, resulting in all manner of domestic and even industrial accidents.

Would making the products more expensive not increase the propensity to adulterate?

Then again, they said cutting the subsidy would free up funds for building new, more efficient refineries that would produce for the export market.

But when windfall revenues piled up on windfall oil revenues, they built no new refineries.  Instead, they patched up the decrepit ones and instituted turn-around- maintenance operations that turned around only the fortunes and pockets of military personnel, political officials, and their proxies.

They said petroleum profits were being hoarded, to create artificial shortages and reap windfall profits.  But does the capacity exist for hoarding on such a scale?  Besides does it make sense for the smuggler to hoard instead of selling off his loot on the hot market and arranging his next shipment?  And the next?

Now, oil smuggling is not like drug smuggling.  You cannot stuff it in your luggage and or conceal it.  It has to be transported on vessels that ply the high seas, or in motorized tankers that travel on paved roads across international frontiers patrolled by multinational security personnel.

Why is it that these vessels are rarely apprehended and even less rarely prosecuted?

Instead, officials exult in song and dance on the few occasions they manage to apprehend some woebegone stragglers ferrying perhaps one hundred four-litre cans of petroleum products in false-bottomed dugout canoes across the waters into a neighbouring country.

As justification for cutting the oil subsidy, they even said a bottle of soda or milk costs much more than a gallon of gasoline.

And so on, and so forth, in what has been over the decades an exercise in circumlocution.

Now we are back at that familiar conjuncture, only that they are not trotting out those threadbare arguments and rationalizations.

The economic outlook is grim, but Nigeria cannot meet its OPEC export quota that would have eased its balance-of-payments woes.  Government officials now admit that forty percent of daily production, conservatively valued at N4 billion, is lost to theft.

Their epiphany, if epiphany it is, has come several decades too late. Back in 2006, a British All-Party Parliamentary Group issued a report on the Nigerian oil industry that exposed the essential falsity of the claim by a long line of Nigerian leaders from 1995 to the present that the government had been paying out colossal sums of money to oil companies to shield Nigerians from the real cost of their prodigal consumption of petroleum products.

In a report prepared for the Blair Commission, the Parliamentary Group reported that some N625 billion was lost every year through “organized pilfering” from the sprawling pipeline network and from bunkering on the high seas. The team said it gathered that “senior military personnel and political officials” were involved in the theft, as well as collaborators in the neighbouring countries.  It said it learned that “no serious attempt” was being made to prevent stolen oil from being transferred from sea to land and traded in international waters.

It should have added that no serious attempt was also being made to prevent refined petroleum headed for foreign markets from being rerouted back from international waters and sold in the Nigerian market as imported products.

Finally, fundamental questions are being asked even within government circles about the industry.  Without forthright answers to such questions, no meaningful debate on the oil subsidy can be held.

They are asking:  How much oil is lifted daily?  How much of it is refined locally?  How much of the refined product is injected daily into the Nigerian market?  What is the average daily consumption of petroleum products in Nigeria?  How much of the precious combustible has to be imported to bridge the shortfall between consumption and production?

Nobody within the industry knows how much oil is lifted daily to the nearest 500,000 barrels, it is necessary to insist.  They have probably stopped operating with a barrel that was four gallons larger than the standard international barrel, but abuses are rampant.

One of the officials questioning the data presented by the NNPC on the floor of the Senate with an incisiveness rarely seen in that cohort is our old friend Hameed Ali, the comptroller general of Customs, whose famous encounter at that same forum in 2017, provided the springboard for this his submission.

The NNPC says with a confidence not warranted by its notoriously sloppy record-keeping that it injects 98 million litres of petrol into the domestic market every day.  Local consumption, it adds, accounts for 60 million litres.

What happens to the surplus of 38 million litres?

More crucially, Ali is asking:  Why inject 98 million litres of fuel into the domestic market when you know that only 60 litres will be consumed?

Presidential spokesperson Garba Shehu says the government knows the men behind the syndicated oil theft and will soon unmask them.  The NNPC says it is prepared to submit to a forensic audit.

Let them bring it on.  This is the best time for decisive action on the pesky oil subsidy.  The Presidency should unmask the denizens of the syndicate, and the NNPC should institute a forensic audit.