The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • “No-work-no-pay” conundrum

    “No-work-no-pay” conundrum

    Last week, this column intervened in the ongoing ASUU strike under the rubric of ASUU’S Stroke, in which it called on ASUU to call off the strike in the interest of the health of the public universities which have tragically been under lock for more than six months, and ASUU members, who have not been paid their salaries for months. Since that intervention, the new buzz is that the federal government will implement the law on “no work, no pay,” hence another immediate intervention.

    The “no work no pay” law is provided by Section 43(1)(a) of the Trade Disputes Act, 1976. It provides: “Notwithstanding anything contained in this Act or in any other law-(a) where any worker takes part in a strike, he shall not be entitled to any wages or other remuneration for the period of the strike, and any such period shall not count for the purpose of reckoning the period of continuous employment and all rights dependent on continuity of employment shall be prejudicially affected accordingly.”

    If the above law is strictly applied, members of ASUU would not be entitled to salaries for the more than six months they have been on strike, and the period would be discountenanced from the period of service, with so many other consequences, almost ad infinitum. As a countermeasure, ASUU has also given notice that if the “no work no pay” policy is implemented, they would also not deal with any outstanding academic work arising during the period of strike.

    By implication, ASUU said they would ignore pending students’ work for that period, including outstanding examinations and unmarked scripts. They would also discountenance teaching outstanding courses, and doubling down on lectures, to make up for the lost time. ASUU members would also discountenance the pending admissions, even as another batch of students would sit for the Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination (UTME), early next year. In fact, they threatened that final year students who are on the verge of graduation would suffer the consequences of the policy, as well.

    The diatribe has developed into a ‘tit for tat,’ and like the proverbial statement, ‘where two elephants fight, the grass suffers.’ In this instance, while the nation is paying a huge cost for the dislocation of the academic year of majority of her public universities, it is students that are suffering immeasurably in the fight between the federal government and ASUU. It is better imagined what would happen to the thousands of students who would be further dislocated by ASUU’s recent threat, and many of them could derail permanently.

    In the contest for public sympathy, the federal government seems to be having an upper hand. Many have erroneously believed the false tale by the Minister of Education Mallam Adamu Adamu that all the demands of ASUU have been met, and the only outstanding issue is the payment of outstanding salary for the strike period. It has since come out that what the federal government offered were mere promissory notes that it would implement the demands next year, which ASUU has said is no different from what has been happening since the 2019 agreement was reached.

    Just like his predecessors, the Buhari government has refused to implement the Memorandum of Agreement reached with ASUU. Prior to the 2019 agreement, there were those of 2009 and 2017, and the 2013 Memorandum of Understanding. Each of them never translated to terms of contract of employment, and as such remain unenforceable, except as it pleases the federal government. As stated by the Court of Appeal in Nigeria Deposit Insurance Corporation vs Obaende (2002) F.W.L.R. Pt. 116, pg. 944: “The enforceability of collective agreement is by agreement. Collective agreements, except where they have been adopted as forming part of the terms of employment, are not enforceable. The enforcement of such an agreement is by negotiation between the parties.”

    According to ASUU, the federal government has even refused to sign any formal binding agreement with the union, beyond the Memorandum of Understanding, which is unenforceable. Again, in U.M.T.H.M.B vs Dawa (2002) F.W.L.R. Pt. 108, pg. 1419, the Court of Appeal held: “Where there is a written contract, it is to it the court must look for its terms and status of the parties. The duty of the court is to confine itself to the clear provisions and give effect to contracts freely entered into by parties.”

    The present government, just like their predecessors, treats the collective agreement with ASUU with levity. While giving the impression to members of the public that negotiations are going on between her officials and ASUU, the refusal of the officials to sign such an agreement when negotiations end, shows that the federal government’s representatives merely use the negotiations to buy time. Yet collective agreement is fundamental in labour laws. As explicitly stated by learned author E. E. Uvieghara in his book, Labour Law in Nigeria: “Collective agreement constitutes a very important source of the terms and conditions of employment. Many important terms and conditions of employment are today determined by collective bargaining and reflected in collective agreements.”

    Unfortunately, for ASUU, and the groaning students and their parents, they are dealing with lackadaisical government officials, who do not give a damn about the consequences of the long strike. On her part, ASUU is miscalculating that if they keep the strike on, public pressure would make the federal government buckle. To compound the matter for ASUU, the officials of President Mohammadu Buhari’s administration, like their predecessors, have reduced the crisis to a media war with ASUU, an area they have the upper hand.

    The officials now seem to believe that what the federal government needs to do is win public sympathy against ASUU, and the blame will shift to ASUU. So, instead of getting alarmed about the threat from ASUU, to engage in a tit for tat, the federal government officials are using the threats by ASUU as an instrument of blackmail. And while the tango between ASUU and the federal government goes on, the clock on Buhari’s government slowly winds down.

    Again, this column advises ASUU that it cannot get what they deserve from the departing government of Buhari.

    While this column has sympathy for ASUU, the effects of the strike on the students are far-reaching. ASUU must also bear in mind that with the prevailing economic adversity and the contradictory proliferation of federal universities, what her members, particularly the upper echelon deserve, is presently unsustainable. Perhaps, a decentralised university system, with each employing and paying what it can afford, instead of a unitary unrealistic salary structure may be the way forward. The strike conundrum cannot be solved by the “no-work-no-pay” scarecrow, and definitely not by an unending strike.

  • Their Lordships v The State

    Their Lordships v The State

    When justices of the Supreme Court unanimously served notice the other day in the manner of shop-floor trade unionists that they would have no alternative but to embark on an industrial action unless their grievances centring on pay and conditions were addressed to their satisfaction, even those who thought that no development in Nigeria’s political firmament could surprise them had to concede that this was altogether a singular event.

    Even those who allowed that “anything can happen” in Nigeria’s public sphere: this, surely was not the kind of thing they had in mind.  They would have dismissed the mere thought of it as a joke taken too far.

    The only thing the justices left out, probably for strategic calculations, was the date the action would commence.  Its duration would of course depend on how the authorities responded.

    The public imagination went astir with images, on the one hand, of their bewigged lordships in their ermined raiments, picketing the courts like actual trade unionists, and on the other, of the police standing ready to prevent a breakdown of law and order.  And, of course, television cameras capturing the spectacle, live.

    In this electronic age, they still had to take down depositions in longhand.  Their access to the internet so vital for instant research and acquiring facts and data at the touch of a button or a screen was not guaranteed beyond office hours.  The electricity supply was epileptic even during office hours.

    Some of the justices live in official accommodations that do not reflect their status and dignity.  They go about their official duties in vehicles that often break down and expose them to ridicule and danger.  Funds earmarked for hiring bright minds from the universities to do legal research and draft opinions have been swallowed up in the maws of the bureaucracy or disbursed improperly.  The medicine chests in their Clinic were empty.

    And so on and so forth.

    Their petition has great merit, even without relating it to what obtains in other institutions of the public service.  If you compare it to what obtains, say, in the National Assembly, you have to commend their lordships for their restraint.

    Officially, it is the Revenue Mobilization Allocation and Fiscal Commission that determines the compensation of public officers.  But every ministry, department, or agency tweaks the scheme, oftentimes in ways that distort it beyond recognition.

    The National Assembly has turned this practice into an art.  It is the only institution of its kind in the world that regards law-making as a hardship that must be handsomely compensated.  Its reward scheme is so padded with “allowances” that you wonder what they need salaries for.  In the absence of verifiable audits, guesstimates of what a lawmaker takes home every month range between N30 million and N50 million.

    So steeped in this practice is the National Assembly that it is often seen more in caricature than in perspective.  According to the caricature, it even gives its members cash allowances for sleeping or staying awake during debates and for everything in between; for breakfast, lunch, dinner, snacks, and for newspapers.  One account has it that members are even recompensed for belching, which one of its eminent members once characterized approvingly on the floor as “evidence of good living.”

    It can thus be said without exaggeration and without doing violence to the facts that, in Nigeria, no business succeeds like law-making.  The rewards are instant, overwhelming, and guaranteed by the Exchequer.

    On the other hand, justices of the Supreme Court, beg your pardon, the Apex Court, seem to have been denied sufficiency while less consequential officials in other arms of the public service are basking in superfluity.

    Amici curiae who are concerned that it will be infra dignitatem for their lordships to resort to the tactics of shop-floor trade unionists to press their case for better pay and conditions have vowed that they will never let will let it come to that.

    And they are taking no chances.

    Several weeks ago, the well-known senior advocate, Sebastine Hon, urged the National Industrial Court of Nigeria, the Honourable Justice Osatohanmwen Obaseki-Osaghae presiding, petitioned the courts, locus standi be damned, to raise the salary of justices of the Supreme Court from a measly N3.7 million a month to N7 million, and that of the chief justice to N10 million a month, with corresponding raises across all levels of the court system.

    And in double quick time, the court obliged.

    The judges were victims of “great injustice,” and their pay and conditions, which had not been reviewed since 2008, were “a national shame, shame,” Mr Justice Obaseki-Osaghae held

    Those who want to keep their lordships in acute deprivation are saying that the court has made a mockery of the hallowed doctrine of nemo judex in causa sua; that the ruling is at bottom an exercise in self-dealing, not an instance of judicial activism.  For, sooner or later, the judge stands to profit from his own ruling.

    Those given to aridly legalistic disputations will debate and discuss the court’s ruling till the end of time.   What really counts is that the court has introduced a dynamic new element into our system of jurisprudence in general, and our system of conflict resolution in particular.

    Shop around for a court or judge whose sympathy you can count on, press your claim, and have it translated into an injunctive relief that cannot be readily secured through negotiation or arbitration.

    The process is quick, simple, and inexpensive.

    Under such a system, could the strike begun six months ago by university lecturers have metastasized into the bottomless mess it has become?

    It will be objected that such proceedings will result in judicial anarchy. What would happen, they demand, if two or three courts of co-ordinate jurisdiction were to hand down different rulings on the same matter?

    The pat retort is this:  Would the result be any more anarchic than what obtains now, where lawsuits on significant issues can get mired in technical minutiae for decades, and where the system is so susceptible to gaming?

    It will be objected further that the remuneration of judges or public servants for that matter is   a political matter and therefore not justiciable.  In reality, only a thin line separates the one from the other today.

    Those who find the present system too stuffy and burdensome are saying that it would profit society much more if it is made more elastic, and more responsive to the demands of justice.

    Meanwhile, learned articles for submission to the most reputable law journals must be shaping up in the minds and heads of those law teachers and graduate students who are not too weighed down by the acute existential issues spawned by the ASUU strike to think of such things.

    To them, I humbly proffer the following suggestions.

    A research essay titled “Locus standi:  Adesanya revisited” could bring new perspectives to that important and timeless subject.

    In his monumental “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville noted that every political issue or problem in that country soon morphed into a legal one.

    Following the French savant, a researcher seeking an assured standing in the community of scholars can examine anew the whole question of justiciability in a world in which the political and the social – not forgetting the cultural as well as the spiritual — have become almost inseparable.

  • Kaleidoscope: an artist’s rite of passage

    Kaleidoscope: an artist’s rite of passage

    July 27.  Like a general being pulled out after eons on the battle front, Toni Anthony Ogunde began the first stage of his exit from the Yaba Art front, at 65, in 2023.

    The curators dubbed the show “Kaleidoscope: An exhibition and discourse on the practice of Toni Anthony Ogunde”.   It was at the Yusuf Grillo Art Gallery, Yaba College of Technology (Yabatech), Nigeria’s first-ever tertiary institution.

    Kaleidoscope was, indeed, an art exhibition of history, trends, culture, evolution and well, deep and punishing thinking, though expressed in strokes of all moods: colourful and bright; dark and dank.

    But on the day, another epic irony played out: a regal custodian of African tradition was a victim of “African time” — a contemporary vice, though blamed on Africa’s past.

    Indeed, in Camara Laye’s The Raddiance of the King, the author tried to romanticize the flexible African concept of time, in the Euro-African culture clash of that novel.

    But here, an African King, real life, chaffed at that notoriety of non-punctuality, which the modern elite nevertheless blithely blame on their “African” past.  On that, they expect everyone to understand.

    Well, Oba Adebisi Okubanjo, the Obiri of Ayepe-Ijebu, in Ogun State, didn’t — and he showed it with dignified royal unease.  To honour the celebrator, a boyhood friend and classmate at the Odogbolu Grammar School, Odogbolu (OGS), he had left his kingdom at around 6:30 am, for an event slated for 11 am.

    When Ripples breezed into the venue, roughly around 11 am, the Kabiyesi was already seated.  Light music was on; and guests were already filling up the space.  Yet, the event was nowhere near starting — the lateness blamed on some clash of meetings.

    Oba Okubanjo was billed to attend a 1 pm meeting at the palace of the Awujale of Ijebu Ode, the paramount ruler of the Ijebu. But to accommodate his Lagos Kaleidoscope engagement, he had asked that the meeting be pushed to 3 pm.

    Yet, it was well-neigh 1 pm — almost two hours late — and the Kabiyesi still patiently waited.  Meanwhile, Alaba Olusoga and Ripples, made up the OGS early birds.  Deji Cole, another old mate, would breeze in much later.

    Mercifully, the event started around 1 pm, after Obafemi Omokungbe, an engineer and Yabatech Rector, strode in.  It was the sole dark patch on an otherwise glorious day.

    But even as the wait wore on, a video clip served the guests what would pass for Toni Anthony’s answer to James Joyce’s alter-ego biography: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

    As soft music played, the clips beamed the many landmarks, personal and career, of the artist and dress non-conformist — the bohemian ethos of the artists’ commune.

    Even then, one clip stood out: the artist’s meeting with the Great Alhaji Lateef Jakande, iconic journalist and visionary 2nd Republic Lagos Governor.

    It was ode to glorious symbiosis — the artist impacting his environment as much as the environment had impacted him.  That, of course, was the “meat” of the rich visual exhibition to shortly follow.

    From the starting point, though late, Kaleidoscope offered nothing but sumptuous and filling visual feast.

    For starters, the exhibitor’s many monikers were as kaleidoscopic as his bewildering oeuvre of cross-media art: Ogunde.  Otunba. Comrade.  King of boys. Toni Anthony.  Salt of the soil … all endearing terms.

    To be sure, Ogunde is no alias.  That’s his real name: Anthony Bandele Ogunde.  But perhaps only the Oko-Oke boys, his old classmates, would call him that: just Ogunde.

    Not Dele, his first name.  Never Anthony, his baptismal — who even knew that, at the bloom of boyhood; at the cusp of teens: the age of questioning and experimentation; the epoch of rebellion?

    The monikers belonged to a latter era: the Yaba years.  Ogunde’s elder brother testified at the event that “King of Boys” might have dated back to his sibling’s student days, when he lived in the boys’ quarters of an uncle’s official quarters, on the Yabatech campus — a facility the free and feisty soul threw open to all and sundry.

    Otunba.  Salt of the soil.  Toni Anthony would later segue into the artist’s large presence, on Yaba Art’s very wide canvas, in the unending dialogue between the Gown, from where Toni Anthony’s strokes jutted out; and the Town, the community that the painter moulded into endless experimentations and improvisations, as decreed by his creative muse, in bouts after bouts of creative perspiration.

    That much was clear from the pieces of audacious art on display.

    The very first, “Kuru pa kuru”, beams ram fighting, a sporty yet dangerous treat on the Lagos landscape — cultural kaleidoscope? — each time the Ileya Muslim festival was in the air.

    Now, that could be lethal sports!  Many a youth preened and crowed over their champion ram, which somehow had out-butted and subdued others.  But other youths sometimes turned their festive homes into grief when it all turned fatal — and their ill-fated ram, near-fatally butted, is rushed to the slaughter, with life seeping out of it!

    The artist captured that grim, bitter-sweet drama in simple black-and-white strokes.

    But perhaps the most densely poetic, yet ultra-simple in colourful strokes, is “Dele-Cases” — the tragedy of three “Deles”, as creatively captured by another Dele, from his artistic observatory.

    He pushed the linguistic pun of: “Dele” for “daily”, to tell a grim but simple tale: many of Nigeria’s daily tragedies need not happen!  That remarkable piece of telling symbolism birthed in 1989.

    In “Dele-Cases”, the academic cap symbolized the late Prof. Dele Awojobi, the University of Lagos mechanical engineering whiz, who practically cut short his illustrious life, by “over-thinking” the Nigerian quagmire, during the 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

    The fountain pen symbolized that avant-garde journalist, Dele Giwa, among the quad that introduced weekly newsmagazine journalism into the Nigerian market, with the flagship Newswatch, now defunct.  Dele Giwa was parcel-bombed, during the Ibrahim Babaginda junta (1985-1993) — a brazen murder yet to be resolved.

    The third symbol, an athlete’s spike shoe, sunk in blood-stained grass, belonged to Dele Udoh, a patriot and star athlete, cut short by rogue police bullets!

    The three were yoked together in common but avoidable tragedy!  But they were lucky to have another “Dele” sketch out their odyssey in sombre yet brilliant art — “Dele-Cases”!

    “Otunba’s flair for crowdedness is brought to bear in the harvest brush strokes of colours,” wrote Pius Ehita Egiolamhen, PhD, Dean, School of Art Design and Printing, Yabatech, in a special commemorative brochure, “which are composed into a visual language to provoke, instigate and inspire …”

    Kaleidoscope delivered on all these fronts — and more.  Toni Anthony proved that he indeed learnt at the feet of Prof. Yusuf Grillo, Dr. Kolade Oshinowo and the very best of Yaba School of Art.  But Gown or Town, the artistic feast goes on.

  • ASUU’s stroke

    ASUU’s stroke

    This column had waited on the outcome of the meeting of the National Executive Council (NEC) of the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU), held on Sunday night. As it was being concluded Monday morning, the news filtered out that the prolonged strike by federal and some state universities had been further extended, as ASUU rejected the terms offered by the federal government. Unfortunately, that decision will further exacerbate the impact of the strike on the health of the university community and parents of university students.

    Of course, members of the federal executive and their media howitzers whose wards are unaffected by the strike and who care less about the academic trajectory of the nation’s universities, make mockery of the monumental crisis afflicting our university education. Some are not perturbed by the fundamental issues that ASUU raises preceding each strike. Such commentators are indifferent when ASUU compares funding for universities with other sectors and the salaries earned by their contemporaries in other climes.

    This column had thought that the government of President Muhammadu Buhari, which at its beginning was projected as a disciplined and firm administration, would tackle the ASUU crisis once and for all times. But like its predecessors, ASUU strikes have remained a regular decimal of its tenure. According to some accounts, in 23 years (1999-2022), ASUU has cumulatively been on strike for nearly four years. The present strike has clocked six months, and would be journeying into the seventh.

    What a tragedy for a nation whose development index is amongst the most afflicted laggards of the world. According to some accounts, our country has taken either gold or silver as the poverty capital of the world since 2016, and those who should know are not making any connection between our development trajectory and the maltreatment of our education sector. According to the World Poverty Clock, over 70 million Nigerians are currently living in extreme poverty, which is about 33 percent of the country’s estimated population at 215,353,968.

    If those in power at various levels of government care about the basic essence of governance, they would use education to help Nigerians escape extreme poverty. They would also understand the intricate connection between education and insecurity, which explains why the Boko Haram’s protagonists are doing everything they can to make education a haram. For the radical theology of such a group can only thrive where the people are ignorant. So, if those in power care, their strategy should be to use education to chase away poverty and insecurity.

    The national discourse on university education should therefore be the quantum of resources the nation needs to pour into it, and where will such resources come from? Furthermore, what value should the nation gain from such investment, and what needs to be done to ensure a higher yield or return on investment for the country, amongst other interests? Since all are agreed the universities are poorly funded, the federal government, since 1999, should have negotiated implementable solutions to the challenge.

    So, on the first point, the national discourse should be how much percentage of the national budget should be earmarked for education, and where would the balance of the resources needed come from? By every standard, the budgetary allocation to the universities by their owners are inadequate, whether for research, salaries and emoluments or infrastructure development. Unfortunately, while the federal government claims that it doesn’t have enough resources, there is clear evidence of waste, particularly in the direction of corrupt practices.

    Even more unfortunately, the Buhari government, against expectations, has glaringly not curbed corruption in the application of public finances. So, while truly the nation may not have enough resources to meet all the ASUU demands, ASUU is belligerent because, like the rest of other Nigerians outside the government, it sees corruption and waste everywhere. It also sees insensitivity and dishonesty on the part of those given the mandate by the president to negotiate with them.

    To assuage ASUU, the federal and state governments should empanel trusted Nigerians to broker the way forward for our universities. One of the issues for public discussion should be the introduction of enhanced fees for university education. The ongoing pretence that federal university education is free needs a robust review. While this column does not advocate payment of full- fledged fees for university education, free tuition fee university education is unrealistic with the current state of the national economy.

    But to gain the support of Nigerians, university administrators would have to learn or be compelled to be more transparent in managing the available resources. The clamour by striking members of ASUU for the federal government to empanel Visitation Panels for universities is because of perceived corruption by the administrators. Again, if there is transparency, the clamour for autonomy would gain more traction, and even the use of the disputed UTAS payment system would be less acrimonious.

    Unfortunately, with corruption permissive within the government circles and university administration, ASUU operates precariously between the devil and the deep sea. But the solution to the quagmire lies with the federal government, and until they rein in corruption in government and in the universities, its little effort would be dissipated. If the federal government deals with corrupt practices in the universities, and pushes more resources into the sector, a lot of the factors underpinning the perennial crisis will disappear.

    Another issue that should worry both the government and members of ASUU is whether the curriculum of the universities is for 21st century learning. The present emphasis on teaching theories instead of application of theories is at the root of the minimal impact of university education in the development trajectory of the country. Going forward, Nigerian universities should be structured to solve developmental challenges of the country, instead of handing out certificates to graduates who queue up for the unavailable white-collar jobs.

    Should university education produce more productive graduates, the GDP of the country would increase, and unemployment will reduce. Universities should, therefore, be incubators of ideas, programmes, projects and products, for the betterment of Nigeria. Research grants and funding from private sectors would also increase if the universities become incubation centres for entrepreneurship. The federal and state governments should also be more interested in competence in the selection of university administrators, rather than the trending ‘man know man syndrome.’

    In the meantime, the six-month-old strike should be called off by ASUU, regardless of the terms on offer from the federal government, and ASUU’s gunpowder kept dry for the incoming administration. To continue the strike under an indifferent outgoing government, is to transmute the ASUU strike to ASUU stroke, that tragic health challenge that could become the lot of the unpaid ASUU members, and some parents whose wards have become perennial undergraduates.

  • Call ASUU’s bluff

    Call ASUU’s bluff

    The glove is off. But naked cant remains to scam the unwary.

    Still, the strike-loving Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) continues to play the tortoise which thought it had gamed everyone, but later found it only gamed itself.

    The tortoise once declared itself not only the all-wise, but the sole path to all reason.  Why?  Because, it preened, it had captured all human gumption in a sole magic gourd.

    Yet, a mere palm wine tapper schooled the cocky fellow in basic gumption: you can’t climb a palm tree with a gourd — magic or no — dangling on your belly, as the tortoise had attempted!

    That was folkloric grand metaphor for grand hubris.

    ASUU has entered its own grand hubris, though it appears too deluded to realize it.  In a huff, it is threatening more strike if its members are not paid for the six months that they have so far paralyzed public universities.

    For six months now, it’s been patriotic huffing-and-puffing, by the glorious unionists, on the imperative to adequately fund universities — no crime.

    Indeed, ASUU president, Prof. Emmanuel Osodeke, celebrated champion of the masses’ right to solid university education, once bragged ASUU could stay off duty for two years, just to make that patriotic point — and no threat, of no salary, could deter it.  Bravo!

    But after “just” six months, it’s all down to the belly — for which ASUU will literally kill, given its violent growl at the government’s decision of no-work-no-pay!

    Might ASUU have assured its members that no matter how long they were on strike, it would always muscle the government to pay them?  That decision — anchored on sound law, not on executive whims — seems to have burst that costly delusion!

    Yet, but for acquired academic terrorism, how can scholars so-called, worth their names in academic rigour, shun their jobs for six months, and all illogic, push the near-divine right to be paid, or heavens would fall?

    Indeed, how do you stay off your work for six months and still kid yourself you have a job?  But for the wanton abuse of public goodwill, which private sector employer would tolerate such worker rascality — replicated year in, year out, without wielding the big stick?

    Read Also: ASUU: now the real strike begins

    Where is the ASUU sense of value, even if its members’ conscience appears long lost to arid groupthink and empty Aluta sloganeering?  Where is their sense of critical reason, long abandoned to the sweet allure of cheap threats?

    How about this caustic threat from the supposed Palladium of reason? “If government says no work, no pay, ASUU members will also begin lectures from the 2022/2023 session and forego unfinished academic sessions during the strike,” the ASUU president just told Channels TV!

    Just like that!  And what happens to the poor youths from poor homes, whose cause ASUU has boisterously championed in its endless strikes?  They don’t matter again?

    Indeed, folks’ true character oozes forth in times of crisis!  Here, ASUU’s crisis of the pocket is throwing up its dirty underbelly!  That snap view isn’t pretty!

    Might this then be some ASUU Samson’s syndrome, that would crash everything, on everyone including itself, just because this time it might not get its way?

    How do these peculiar scholars relate to peers elsewhere, who teach, research and do community service to boot, while our own ASUU luxuriates in strikes but whips up “research and community service” as rogue blackmail to corral salary for work not done?

    The ever-colourful Chuba Wilberforce Okadigbo (God bless his soul!) once taunted the power-drunk Nigerian political military as “coup heroes”!

    Okadigbo-speak: Does the Nigerian academia then teem with “strike heroes” (more of villains), under ASUU’s bizarre banners, when they ought to be garlanded with ground-breaking research, for the glory of their immediate environment, as any sane academia ought to be?  Strike heroes!

    The Congress of University Academics (CONUA), a rival academic union, just released damning stats on ASUU’s strike spree.  ”Between 1999 and 2021, Nigerian public universities experienced strikes for 1, 417 days, which translates to over five years”!

    Actually, the math translates to almost four years — 3. 9 years.  Even then, going on strike for a cumulative four years, in 22 academic years, is quite some catastrophe!

    How many youths’ lives were ruined during such strikes?  How many did drop out of school because their little funding ran out? Talk of endless strikes as academic villainy!

    That the government allowed itself to be bullied, and ASUU members got paid for those years of creative idleness, led to rich reward for bad conduct.  That has fuelled ASUU’s present brazen demand.  Not again!

    Still, to be fair, it takes two to tango.  The ASUU-Federal Government macho match-up has been the stuff of titanic wars, dating back to the military era.

    But it had always ended in a stalemate: with ASUU hiding its own excesses behind patriotic pretensions, while roasting the government on the altar of adverse public sentiments.

    The government itself is hardly innocent.  For one, it has over the years lugged brazen notoriety as chronic non-covenant keeper.  For another, the government appears plagued by general opacity, lack of transparency and a perception crisis.

    ASUU has seized all three, with both hands, to go on its favourite pastime, expecting thunderous cheers for its foxtrots; and hectoring to be paid for its high drama in premium man-hour wanton wastes.

    In all of this macabre drama, no one bothers to ask: was the government wilful and wayward in breaking those agreements, as ASUU alleges and as many verily believe?

    Or were the ruptures due to honest inability: too many government programmes chasing too little available funds? Plagued by mutual distrust across the isle, everyone is too busy screaming at themselves to hold a reasoned exchange.

    Yet, clinical interrogation would appear the sane point to start, if solution to the problem must be found.

    Core to the university crisis is funding.  How do legitimate agitations get out this critical funding, without paralyzing strikes?  That’s one area the two sides, the media and the general public must work out.

    ASUU strikes have become a journey to nowhere.  But since ASUU has proved itself incapable of plotting a less wasteful path, the National Assembly should come up with emergency law, voiding any strike that exceeds two weeks in the tertiary education sub-sector.

    To put an end to those wild years of wild strikes, the federal government must call ASUU’s bluff: no work, no pay.  If ASUU demurs, it can take its case to court and seek remedy there, while it swallows its pride, claws its wins, and return to work.

    Such is far more civilized than the Samson’s syndrome ASUU now waves, to bury everyone, including its members, for facing no pay for no work done.

  • Police extortion as robbery

    Police extortion as robbery

    In choosing the above title, I had to be extra careful, to save my scalp, considering the recent experience of the gifted columnist, Sam Omatseye, the Chairman of the Editorial Board of this paper, when he wrote a piece titled Obi-tuary, poking fun at the presidential candidacy of Mr Peter Obi (Okwute) of the Labour Party. The piece drew the umbrage of those who call themselves Obidients, some of whom are intolerant of opposing views.

    A few acquaintances who know that I am on the editorial board that Sam chairs, sought to draw my blood in lieu of Sam’s, and my attempt to explain the write-up as an exercise of poetic licence, was dismissed in a most derisive and scurrilous language. For whatever it is worth, having worked with Sam on The Nation newspaper’s editorial board for about 15 years, I do not agree that Sam is afflicted with Igbophobia. He is also not a closet irredentist, but perhaps a rambunctious literary enthusiast.

    But this piece is not about Sam. It is about the profound statement by the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Usman Baba that: “Any policeman holding a gun and extorting people on the road is no different from an armed robber and we cannot be glorified armed robbers.” The IGP made the statement at the Police Headquarters in Gombe State. He noted that discipline is the bedrock of policing, and warned that the service will not condone corruption and indiscipline.

    The IGP commended policemen who are working hard to ensure security in Gombe State and other parts of the country. He noted that: “Discipline is the bedrock of the police and the bedrock of other organisations; that is why your hand is up when you see someone higher shoulder-wise not age. I’m not the oldest policeman here but I’m the number one policeman.” This columnist wishes that the admonition of the IGP should be carved on marble and placed in every police station.

    No doubt, the gravest undoing of the Nigeria Police is extortion, most times at gunpoint. The extortion happens at roadblocks on the highways, within cities, in unmarked buses, in private offices, and even in police stations.

    Everywhere the opportunity presents itself, the policemen referred to by Usman Baba, use the gun assigned to protect the citizens to coerce the same citizens to part with a valuable. The unfortunate misapplication of the official arms, for personal criminal aggrandisement is at the root of the public repulsion for police.

    So, if IGP Usman Baba can make the police have a change of attitude, as to the use of the arms in their possession, then he would leave a great legacy.  The challenge though is how he can make his men turn over a new leaf, when a substantial number of them joined the police because of the opportunity to extort. Indeed, many of those clamouring to join the police would not, if the IGP can stop extortion.

    Read Also: Obi-tuary

    Even many of those who are already in the police would leave if armed robbery, sorry armed extortion, is effectively banned by the IGP. How to make the serving officers turn over a new leaf, would be a big problem for the IGP, considering that such criminal benefit is already ingrained in them. It is like wishing that the present government can be encouraged to stop asking the Central Bank to print more money for their use, under duplicitous ways and means.

    As an African adage says, “One does not learn how to use the left hand at old age.” But again, for whatever it is worth, let us help the IGP educate his men that what some of them have been doing with relish is actually no different from armed robbery. According to Section 401 of the Criminal Code: “Any person who steals anything, and, at or immediately before or immediately after the time of stealing it, uses or threatens to use actual violence to any person or property in order to obtain or retain the thing stolen or to prevent or overcome resistance to its being stolen or retained, is said to be guilty of robbery.”

    According to Section 1 of the Robbery and Firearms Act, the offence of robbery is punishable with imprisonment for not less than 21 years. Of note, there is a difference between the offence of robbery and armed robbery. Robbery is the use of violence immediately before or after the theft, but armed robbery is the use of specific weapons as provided by the law. According to S. 1(2) of the Robbery and Firearms Act, armed robbery would occur “if the accused, while carrying out robbery, was armed with a firearm or any other offensive weapon or was in company with a person so armed.”

    So, armed robbery can be referred to as aggravated robbery. The punishment for armed robbery is a sentence of death, either by hanging or firing squad, as may be determined by the governor of a state. In the judgment of the Supreme Court in the case of Demo Oseni vs The State, delivered on Friday, the 17th of February, 2012, the apex court per Olukayode Ariwoola, JSC, enunciated the ingredients of armed robbery as follows: that there was a robbery; that the robbery was an armed robbery; and that the accused person was the robber.

    In the above case, the accused person in his statement said: “I am not an Armed Robber. I only decided to kill because of his evil deeds.” The Supreme Court in a unanimous judgment convicted the accused person based on his confessional statement, and compelling circumstantial evidence, despite the efforts of his counsel at the appeal court to make the court discountenance same. It is important to note that despite the opening remarks of the accused that he was not an armed robber, and had killed for other motives, the courts went ahead to convict him.

    Such a claim and disposition can be juxtaposed with the intention of the police on the highways. Many of them would claim that they are on the highways to ensure the safety of travellers. Of course, they would rightly claim that they are not armed robbers, by the mere fact that they are in police uniform and authorised to do the lawful acts they are engaged in. But would such lawfulness cover their misdeeds, as to when they rob people while carrying arms, or even using it to effect such nefarious acts?

    If IGP Usman Baba can take steps to weed out extortionists, who are no better than armed robbers on the highway, the police would become a better and friendlier organisation, for the good of all Nigerians.

  • IBB: A bequest so baleful

    IBB: A bequest so baleful

    Former military president, General Ibrahim Babangida, vacated office hugely discredited. As he turned 81 last week, his one-time acolytes and confederates sought to portray him as a great statesman and his tenure as Nigeria’s golden age. I remember it differently. What follows is how I memorialized that era for The Guardian (September 14, 1993).
    *

    Within 24 hours of seizing power on August 27, 1985, General Ibrahim Babangida unwittingly provided two ominous indications of what his rule would be like.

    First, he chose the title of “president.”  This was a clear signal of a will to dominate, to lord it over everyone else, including his colleagues in the military.  He was not going to be merely first among equals, he was going to be the undisputed boss.

    Second, when asked why he chose the title of president, he said it was because the Constitution of Nigeria required it.

    Now, this was the Constitution he had just overthrown, a Constitution which stipulated that power shall be exercised only in the manner provided by the fundamental law.  A coup was not one of the means sanctioned by that law.  So, here was Babangida using the Constitution to justify an unconstitutional act.

    I knew then that this was a person to watch.  And, for the next eight years, everything he did fell into this pattern.

    It was entirely in character that he chose to stage his exit on August 27, 1993, the eighth anniversary of the coup that brought him to power.  Since his coming, the State House historians have invested that day, as well as his birthday, with far greater significance than October 1, the National Day.  The projected August 27, not merely as the anniversary of a Glorious Revolution but more fundamentally as the beginning of Nigeria itself.

    His official birthday of August 27 was made to rank just as high in the national consciousness. It quickly grew into a date on which news was squeezed out of the newspapers by congratulatory messages from grateful contractors, fawning courtiers, supplicants, influence peddlers and all manner of persons.  In retrospect, it is surprising that October 1 was not annulled and August 27 decreed to replace it as the National Day.

    When juxtaposed with his record at the end of his tenure, Babangida’s maiden broadcast contained within it the seeds of his own damnation

    He had said that, unlike his predecessor, Major-General Muhammadu Buhari, he would not rule by force.  Again, unlike Buhari, he would be sensitive to individual and cultural differences.  And he would not arrogate to himself “absolute knowledge of problems and solutions.

    He would not act “in accordance with what was convenient” only to himself,” using the machinery of government as his tool.   He repealed the obnoxious Decree 4 saying he did not intend to lead a country where individuals are “under the fear of expressing themselves.”

    But he spent his entire period in office repudiating those vows, sometimes subtly, sometimes brazenly, but always without remorse or twinge of conscience.  For the most part, he carried on as if he regarded inconstancy as the greatest virtue.

    Decree Four was repealed all right, only to be replaced by the no less obnoxious Decree 2.  Politicians were banned, only to be unbanned, re-banned, and banned all over again, in a manner that defied all reason.  Political associations seeking official recognition were dissolved only to be replaced by formations that were for all practical purposes government parastatals.

    The nation was turned into one vast political laboratory for crackbrained experiments, all in the name of a “learning process,” masterminded by the Great Teacher who knows it all.

    Shadowy organizations playing to the basest instincts of the populace sprang up all over the place, their subversive work to do.  The Ministry of Justice became a factory for manufacturing and promoting tyrannous and unjust schemes.  A propaganda machine was set up to proclaim even the most incoherent intent as a solid accomplishment and to advertise a house of cards as a fortress.

    Babangida and his State House professors left nothing to chance.  They never missed any opportunity to declare that they would be content to be judged by history. Yet they sought to write that history themselves in books, or rather, compilations, the titles of which are a testament to the delusion of greatness with which the master and his minions were afflicted.

    In Babangida’s farewell broadcast on August 26, the official chroniclers, obviously with his approval, sought to capture all over, lest we forgot, the most recondite of his monumental achievements. including the creation by decree of states, local government areas and all manner of bureaucracies and institutions that are financial sinkholes.  They even recorded it as a feat that they were able to pay government employees regularly.

    In the beginning, the teaching hospitals were mere “consulting clinics.” Today, they are just clinics, the consultants having gone to Saudi Arabia and elsewhere.  Then there were long queues for scarce consumer goods.  Now, the goods exist in superabundance, but only a few consumers can afford them.

    Then, they unleashed a messianic drive to root out corruption.  Later, corruption, to quote Femi Falana, became “a fundamental objective and directive principle of state policy.”  Then, the universities and other institutions of further learning were thriving, even if not blossoming.  Now they stand on the edge of ruin.  Then, the Naira was said to be overvalued.  Now it is almost worthless.  Then you could still afford to buy brand-new goods.  Today, the Tokunbo culture reigns supreme.

    Then, there was no pretense that a democratic culture was a desirable goal.  Now, eight years later, we have in place what the distinguished political scientist and author of a seminal work on Nigeria’s Second Republic, Dr Richard Joseph, has called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited upon a people.”

    When their new breed politicians are not fighting pitched battles on the floor of the legislature, they are selling their votes like so many shares on the Stock Exchange, without the least regard to the sensibilities of their constituencies. And between then and now, a collapse of values so comprehensive and destruction of the sense of community so complete as to be virtually irreversible.

    This, alas, is the baleful bequest of a man who proclaimed himself a “visionary relist.” Could the nation have been worse off under a leader who could not see beyond his nose?

    One of the volumes of Babangida’s collected speeches is titled For their Tomorrow, we gave our Today.  It is probably truer and certainly more fitting to say of the man and his Administration that, for their today, they annulled our tomorrow.  For reasons borne of fear and guilt, they turned what should have been the nation’s finest hour into its darkest, employing the most desperate tactics that a street mugger’s imagination ever devised.

    When leaving office on the eve of the inauguration of the Second Republic in 1979, General Olusegun said it was his hope that, within the next ten years, Nigeria would be ranked as one of the ten leading democracies in the world.  A tall dream, to be sure.  But what is heaven for if you cannot strive for more than you can grasp?

    On the eve of his own departure in far less glorious circumstances, Babangida made a great point of stressing that only 25 countries in the entire world practiced anything that could be called democracy, the implication being that, if Nigeria does not belong in that group, it is in excellent company all the same.

    So much for his vision.

    May his like never come this way again.

     

  • At the passport office

    At the passport office

    Visit any passport-issuing office in Nigeria and you will find a seething, murmuring crowd of applicants who had been on the scene every working day during the previous week, the week before that, and in all likelihood, the week preceding that, and are yet no closer to obtaining the prized document than they were the day they first set foot on the precincts.

    It is not a task for the faint of heart, or the go-it-alone individual, no matter his or her dexterity in navigating all the bureaucratic hoops. Nor does it matter how diligent he or she is in filling out the application form.

    It helps if you have a powerful sponsor, know, or can relate to, a key official in the chain who can see the matter through.  If you don’t, the next best thing is to hire a consultant – pardon this necessary dignification – a riff on James Thurber, by the way —who knows the territory inside out:  how the place works, who reports to whom, which palms to grease and how to grease them without leaving fingerprints, and whom the officials trust to deliver without fuss and without ceremony.

    You are virtually guaranteed to obtain your passport within the week.

    If you don’t have a powerful sponsor and cannot hire a consultant, then you will need luck of the rarest kind or spiritual intervention from on high or both to obtain a passport months after filing.

    Your application may be unexceptionable in every material particular, but what if the official who should handle it is perpetually not “on seat,” or is on leave of absence for the next three months and nobody else in the house can handle your application, since it belongs in a very special category and only an officer who belongs in that rarefied rank can handle it.

    Unfortunate indeed, but the application cannot move until the officer returns.  You understand, Madam?

    Another scenario:  Everything is shipshape, Madam, as shipshape as can be. There is just one little problem.  Fewer than 100 passport booklets are available at this time, and the office has to practice extreme rationing until a new consignment arrives.  It may happen tomorrow or next year, we just don’t know.  These days, nothing is certain anymore.

    Contemplating these prospects, delivered with critical solemnity by the contractor, the applicant reduced to asking rather diffidently whether it meant that nothing would avail.

    But contractor and applicant know deep that in Nigeria, something always avails.  They strike a bargain, and the passport that had at some point seemed like a forlorn quest becomes a splendid possibility, just a tad short of an actuality, to the satisfaction of all the parties.

    To return to my theme:  Obtaining a Nigerian passport on foreign shores is just as fraught.  The process is clean – antiseptically so.  There is almost no human contact until you are required to appear for the “interview” for “biometric capture.” Filing is electronic.  In the United States, they seem to have farmed it out to an Indian-owned entrepreneur who apparently runs some other business or businesses on the side.

    You wish they had contracted such a sensitive matter to a Nigerian, and that the site was not so eager to lure you to some dodgy sites to purchase some junk merchandise or service.  But that is a small matter compared to the unhelpfulness of the Chancery in Atlanta, Georgia.  But no matter.

    For a passport application filed in January against a trip to Nigeria in March, they give you an interview date for April at the earliest.   They say you can ask for another date, but when you do so on a dedicated email platform, they tell you only that your request has been received.

    You follow up and call a number indicated on the Chancery website.  The phone rings and rings and rings, until a recorded voice tells you that the official you want to talk with is not available and that you should please leave a message.  But before you can do so, the same recorded voice tells you that the mailbox is full and is accepting no new messages.

    You call every day for one week running: same result.

    When I found myself thus circumstanced some two years ago, I took a chance.  I wrote a courteous letter to a senior official at the Chancery introducing myself and asking if he could kindly help sort things out.  He did not accord me the courtesy of an acknowledgment.

    The only human contact I made at the Chancery was with a clerk at another service unit.  He told me courteously that I had called the wrong number, but seemed eager to help.  Then, he launched into a long lecture on how the Mission was overwhelmed and why the waiting time was so long, and how an appointment date could be changed only in the event of a death in the family, which, kindly added, God forbid.

    But in that event, a death certificate backed by a sworn affidavit and duly authenticated by a designated authority had to accompany a request for the change.

    Seriously.  I am not making this up.

    Previously, to obtain a passport, you only needed to attach two copies of your picture to the application form and sign on the dotted lines.  They said the arrangement made it all too easy for persons engaged in syndicated crime to obtain multiple passports and to give Nigeria a bad name.

    By requiring applicants to appear in person for “data capture” at the point of issuance, the authorities could be sure that the passport belonged to the person whose name and picture appear on it and to no other, the authorities claimed.

    Nigeria is the only country I know that insists on this arrangement.  In this electronic age, it makes no sense.  It serves no useful purpose.  It only inflicts needless financial, physical and emotional pain on applicants.  That is reason enough for discontinuing the policy.

    But there is more.  The stipulation does not work.  You can still have as many Nigerian passports as you can pay for, and under as many names as you fancy if you went by well-trod unofficial routes.  And these routes are well known to those patrolling the issuance of official passports.

    It is at the appointment for interviews and data capture that applicants suffer wanton abuse.  Nigerians who have left their far-away homes in the early hours of the day or booked hotel rooms for the previous night just to keep the appointed hour are kept waiting for hours outside, their presence barely acknowledged.

    In summer or winter, the Consulate makes no effort to shield them from the harsh elements, or even to keep their exposure as brief as possible.

    Three women I know were given this unholy baptism in the depth of last winter when they went to Atlanta to renew their passports. Their father, a retired career diplomat, had served as Nigeria’s ambassador at key posts in Asia and South America, with stints in between.  They were kept waiting outside the Consulate for hours before the officials inside deigned to attend to them.

    The women said after their ordeal that they almost felt ashamed to be Nigerians. Over the years, thousands of Nigerians must have come away from that chancery feeling like that.

    Next perhaps to the $20 bill, the United States passport is the most widely confected document in the world.  Yet, you need only supply two pictures with your completed application and sign on the dotted lines before an official at the local post office to obtain a passport. You are not required to travel outside your place of residence.  And the document is mailed to your home within weeks.

    Our level of organization, I grant, is not cohesive enough to permit that kind of arrangement.  But an arrangement that inflicts wanton financial, physical and emotional pain on passport seekers is a cruel abuse of Nigerians and their citizen rights.

    The quest for a document designed to affirm one’s Nigerian identity need not be so alienating,

    Comment: 08111813080

  • Wike whacks Atiku

    Wike whacks Atiku

    The tango between the presidential candidate of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), former Vice President Atiku Abubakar, and the party’s erstwhile henchman, Governor Nyesom Wike, is proving a rumble in the Creeks, and many are hoping to gain a ringside seat. Considering that Atiku is a tested political war general, and that Wike in the past few years has shown great braggadocio, are we going to see a replication of the ongoing contest between President Vladimir Putin of Russia and President Volodymyr Zelenskyy of Ukraine?

    We recall that Putin at the invasion of Ukraine boasted that Russia, a major world power, was going into a three-day special operation in Ukraine. Accordingly, Russia’s intention was to flush out Zelenskyy from office, “demilitarise and de- Nazify Ukraine” and ensure that Ukraine does not join the Western defensive alliance, NATO. The western media are now mocking Putin that after nearly six months, Zelenskyy is entrenched in office, and Ukraine is now heavily armed and closer to joining NATO than it was at the onset of Russian invasion.

    There is no doubt that the scheming Atiku is gathering the arsenal to assault Wike’s political stronghold on PDP in Rivers State and his overall influence in the southern part of the country. But are there chances that like Zelenskyy, Wike has enduring sympathy amongst the PDP leaders across the country, especially in the south, to counter Atiku’s game plan? In the run up to the PDP presidential primary, and even after, there is no doubt that the majority of the decent members of the party in the southern and middle part of the country craved for Wike as their preferred candidate.

    And their reason is substantially because when Atiku and his company betrayed the PDP, and ran to the opposition to feather their nest, Wike stayed back and nurtured PDP back to life. Using the enormous resources at his disposal, as governor of oil-bearing Rivers state, Wike became the rallying point for the starved PDP national secretariat. The governor even went ahead to financially bail struggling states like Benue, and claimed Edo for the party, when Governor Godwin Obaseki lost out in the power struggle for re-election on the platform of the All Progressive Congress (APC).

    Again, like Zelenskyy who has successfully resisted the bullying by Putin, and is presently luxuriating in the protection of western powers, will Wike cross over, to embrace the APC to provide him a shield from the bullying tactics of Atiku? The chances are high that he will, considering the flurry of activities involving him and major APC stalwarts in the past week. Should that embrace happen, the APC’s chances of winning the presidential election becomes even more likely, while Atiku’s presidential plan crumbles further just like Putin’s war plans.

    While politics is a game of interest, it does not diminish the need to wear the armour of honour in the sweepstakes. This column does not perceive Atiku Abubakar as ever being interested in wearing the badge of honour in the game of politics. As the vice president to Gen Olusegun Obasanjo, Atiku obtrusively tried to torpedo his principal’s second term ambition, and it took extra-ordinary craftiness on the part of Obasanjo to outwit him. To gain Atiku’s support President Obasanjo reportedly prostrated before him, and Atiku has been paying a heavy price for that indiscretion.

    When PDP became too hot for Atiku, he sought refuge in Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s party, the Action Congress of Nigeria (ACN). Interestingly, in Atiku’s recent confession, after gaining the presidential ticket of the party, he betrayed his benefactor Tinubu, by denying him the vice-presidential ticket, in purported deference to religious balancing. Again, when he thought that the PDP might provide him another chance to realise his presidential ambition, he returned to contest the presidential election in 2011, which he lost.

    When he saw that President Goodluck Jonathan, as an incumbent, was determined to contest again in 2015, Atiku turned a renegade and joined forces with other disgruntled party men to kick his party to the dust, as he worked with the emerging behemoth, the APC. Joining the new party with only a limp of PDP, and without gaining the trust of the main components of the new party, he lost out in the presidential primary to President Muhammadu Buhari, who went ahead to win the election.

    Without any worry about the badge of honour, Atiku again returned to the PDP, claiming that it was his natural habitat. In fairness to him, he seems to be right. Otherwise, if the party leaders like Governor Aminu Tambuwal were honest, how could they agree to jettison the earlier consensus to allow the presidency go to the southern part of the country, and rather support Atiku to emerge the presidential candidate of the party. The gentlemen within the PDP, who supported Wike at the primary, turned out as minorities, as some southern governors were also moles.

    As if to say that was not enough abuse, Atiku further dishonoured Wike, by rejecting his selection as his vice-presidential candidate, by a selecting committee set up by the party with the alleged concurrence of Atiku. To sprinkle salt on the festering injury, Atiku said he chose Governor Ifeanyi Okowa, of Delta State over Wike, because he is stable and someone he can leave the affairs of governance for at a short notice. Since the multiple assaults, Wike has been plotting how to pay Atiku back in his own coins.

    Last week, at the flurry of the commission of projects executed by Governor Wike, by APC stalwarts and the political enemies of Wike’s political enemies, led by APC leader in Sokoto State, Senator Aliyu Wamakko, Wike engaged in a sort of peremptorily macabre dance at the graveside of his political enemies. Like President Zelenskyy of Ukraine, who gains confidence after each visit by the leaders of the western powers, Wike after each interaction with the APC chieftains, gains more bounce to confront Atiku.

    Will the contest between Wike and Atiku bear uncanny resemblance to that between Zelenskyy and Putin, where a battle many thought would be a short one has turned into a long-drawn battle, with several surrogates throwing in homemade ogbunigwe to help the weaker party? One thing is clear, Atiku has the pride of Putin, and the arrogance of a veteran, while Wike is succinctly acting the victim, and gaining a lot of sympathy.

    How PDP’s internal wrangling will shape the 2023 presidential election will be seen in the days ahead. Will Atiku show cluelessness like Putin, after his initial bluster that Wike has only one vote, and allow the crisis degenerate into a debacle for his presidential ambition, which has become a permanent feature of every election cycle?

  • Book of understanding?

    Book of understanding?

    Book review

    Title: Understanding Retirement Planning

    Author: Olakunle Abiona Ogunbameru

    Publisher: Obafemi Awolowo Univesity Press, Ile-Ife.

    Year of publication: 2022

     

    This book’s dedication to Senator Kashim Shettima is instructive: “This book is dedicated to the Distinguished Senator Alhaji Kashim Shettima, the immediate past executive governor of Borno State, Nigeria,” the book’s short Dedication opened.  ”Senator Shettima was a worker-friendly governor for a full term of eight years with remarkable legacies …”

    What’s instructive here is the focus on value.  It had nothing to do with tribe: Shettima is Kanuri from the North East.  The author is Yoruba from the South West — two extreme ends of Nigeria.

    Neither, with faith.  Shettima is Muslim while the author is Christian.  Yet, on value delivery, both find perfect harmony: the author offering ringing praise of the former governor’s worker-friendly policies.

    In an election season where informed voters look out for past deeds, good or bad, to shape their minds and sway their votes, it is more than a thousand adverts.

    Of course, the book has a title: Understanding Retirement Planning.  But for its trove of penetrating facts on its core focus — retirement planning — it could also have borne other equally valid titles.

    One: “Retiring retirement”?  The author himself, in the rather detailed back-of-the-book (BOB) blurb, hinted at helping the potential reader to “retire retirement itself before you retire”.

    How?  By filling the knowledge void to banish sundry fears that often plague a retiree: post-work long life without income, possible ill health without cash to buy treatment and care, a shambolic social security system, loneliness, loss of work-enabled social contacts, and phobia for irrelevance, among others.

    Two: “Book of Understanding”? All of its eight chapters start with Understanding: concepts of retirement planning, overcoming the fears and risks of retirement, planning for retirement, informal sector retirement planning, living a healthy life in retirement, couples and blissful retirement, writing your own will before retirement and finally winning titbits to spend and enjoy retirement.

    Three: “Primer of Life”? With forays into the medical nitty-gritty to confront old age ailments (Chapter 5), legal tutorials in will-writing (Chapter 7), a rich lecture in the dos-and-don’ts of retirement planning for the informal sector (Chapter 4), the sheer trove of vocations and new hobbies, in gardening and other areas (Chapter 8), and an informal treatise in spousal glow and warmth after retirement (Chapter 6), the book may well pass for a life primer, though told from the prism of a retiree.

    Four: “Retirement: financial planning and security not enough”?  All through, the book stressed the primacy of sound financial planning, suggesting that such planning could — indeed, should — start very early in a future retiree’s working life.

    But while sound financial planning, epitomized by sundry investments with the help of an investment advisor if necessary, it’s only the main frame of retirement comfort.  That frame must be nourished by what the author called “retirement emotional planning”.

    This is a clarion call to well-rounded retirement planning, balancing the material with emotional anchor.  That paves the way for retirement bliss, even with old age ailments, the wear-and-tear of long life, always knocking, rather insistently, on the door.

    This work is the quintessential teacher at work: crisp, clear and compact mind.  Each chapter starts with an opening quote and ends with a parting précis — the very epitome of the ultra-organized mind.

    But in that strength also comes its psychological drawback: a clear bibliophile presuming everyone is “condemned” to reading — and pleasurably so!  Otherwise, the author ought to have impressed on his artists/book designers to make the body text bigger, since a mighty chunk of the readers might be seniors, though the book’s appeal is designed across the ages.

    Prof. Olakunle Abiona Ogunbameru, 70, himself just retired from the Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife — a personal epoch that his colleagues marked with a festschrift on August 8, with a book, Social Sciences and National Development: Perspectives in Contemporary Nigeria Society, launched in his honour.

    The professor at the OAU Department of Sociology and Anthropology, with special professional interest in gerontology, helped to design a pin-point survey to capture some 114, 000 needy Osun seniors, who received N10, 000 monthly stipends under Governor Rauf Aregbesola, from January 2012 to November 2018, when that government exited, under the Agba Osun (Osun Elders) scheme.

    In Understanding Retirement Planning, the professor showcased his seasoned scholarship in retirement studies, a specialized area in “worker” gerontology.   Indeed, the professor is, to quote directly from the book’s preliminary pages, “a pioneer scholar in the empirical study of retirement and a retirement counsellor”.  Understanding Retirement Planning shows why.

    From an excellent grasp of investment instruments to bolster retirement planning, the psycho-social demands of retirement, its wellness rigours, not to forget spousal and marital health and old-age hobbies and exercises, the author provides a trove of empirical studies, across sundry academic disciplines, all tied to retirement planning.

    Indeed, with this rich mine, the reader faces the virtual financial advisor, marriage counsellor, old age aerobics coach, gardening and sundry hobbies instructor — all of them dishing out research-based facts, all from the prism of old age and retirement.

    This is a wonderful book that should capture all grades of workers, including those in the informal sector.  Old age is a blessing.  But its flip side could also be a burden, without adequate after-work financial, health and emotional plans.

    This should be standard handbook for anyone hoping for happy retirement.  But the crux is: the planning must start now — even for those receiving their first pay cheques!

     

    Return of the native

    On New Year’s Day 2021, Otunba Kunle Kalejaye, SAN, aka KK, invited friends to his native Ilese, to commission the Adetunmbi Adebanjo Hall, a multi-purpose auditorium he donated to the Ogun State College of Health Technology, Ilese-Ijebu, Ogun State.  The facility was to honour his elder sister, Madam Adebanjo, who just turned 72.

    Less than two years on, August 12, on the virtual eve of the climax of the town’s yearly Ilese Day community festival, the Ogun government announced KK as the new pro-chancellor and chairman of council of that same college.

    Given the eminent lawyer’s passion for developing his home town, the latest being the siting of a private radio, Eagle FM 102.5, it’s the return of the native to double down on what he does best — immense community value.

    Here’s wishing KK the best of luck — and pluck — in his new assignment.