The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Anomie all the way

    Anomie all the way

    If the report of the arrest of three youngsters alleged to have killed their girlfriend, severed her head and burnt same for money ritual has not finally driven home the message about the depth of anomie already threatening to torpedo the already diseased social order, it seems unlikely that the nation will ever learn its lessons let alone profit from such ugly developments.

    Were the details not so gory and tragic, it would seem the perfect Nollywood stuff.  Crime scene was somewhere in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital; featuring the quartet of Wariz Oladeinde (17), Abdulgafar Lukman (19), Mustakeem Balogun and another individual named Soliu said to be the boyfriend of the victim whose name was given as Rofiat. The chief protagonist, Soliu was said to have lured the girl to his room, where he held her down and asked one of his friends to slaughter her with a knife.

    Thanks to a rather vigilant community security guard, one Segun Adewusi; he was said to have raised the alarm on observing four boys burning something suspected to be human head in a local pot. Three of the boys were subsequently picked up by the police who swung into action as the fourth had escaped before they arrived. Mercifully, the lone suspect said to be on the run has since been picked up by the police.

    In the video clip that has since gone viral, one of them, Balogun, was heard in a chilling, unnerving tone of about their motivation: “We wanted to use just her head alone for money ritual. Soliu strangled her and he told me to assist him and we cut off her head.” End of story – or destiny!

    Familiar? You bet. Of course, stories like these abound everywhere across the country. They only vary in minor details. Recall that last week, I wrote about the Bayelsa’s trio of Emomotimi Magbisa, Perebi Aweke and Eke Prince. As if drawing from the same playbook, the three, all of them said to be 15 years of age, were said to have accosted one 13-year old Endeley Comfort, hypnotised her, and subsequently got her to follow them to the apartment of Emomotimi Magbisa in Sagbama community. There they cut her finger and sprinkled the blood on a mirror for ritual purposes.

    Trust Nigerians to pour out their indignations about the anarchy finally let loose on our world. However, like I hinted also in the piece on the five-year old Hanifa last week, killings for money – whether through ransom or for ritual – may have only become the new norm; truth is, it has merely morphed from the ages. To those in wonder about where our famed craze for the filthy lucre and its underlying philosophy of wealth without work would lead, our youngsters have not only handed themselves the baton in furtherance of the disease, they seem in their desperation to join the big league, resolve to teach the rest of us new lessons in un imaginable savagery.

    And talking of the myth of so-called blood money and its associated ritual in particular, it is, like several other dysfunctions or derivatives of our intensely religious and profoundly superstitious, pre-industrial society, a phenomenon that has actually endured through all ages. Ever heard of saying of the fear of the gbomogbomo being the beginning of wisdom in the late 60 and 70s? Our rural and not so rural folks left out of the Nigerian gravy, have merely dusted the books; after the long hiatus of the oil boom, they have taken off from where their father left things a short while ago in the cold business of blood money. For the latter-day gbomogbo in his new, fulsome mutation, it is no more than a return to the old craft with all its associated cannibal fiesta.

    Read Also: Of ritual money and superstition

    Yet, as abhorrent as the cannibal fiesta appears, it is, in fact a summation of the Nigerian society in its many grotesque manifestations.

    The other day, I was in company of some fellows, who actually believed that ‘miracle money’ was not only real but divinely sanctioned. The background of course was the controversy which broke after a popular preacher claimed to have conjured those miracle bank alerts and of which many actually testified took place! Never mind that no one has yet successfully explained the origin of the supposed transfers; one is supposed to believe in the existence of the imaginary vaults somewhere minting and dispensing hard currencies for the benefits of the Nigerian believer! Trust the two audiences in Canada and Nigeria where these reported miracles took place: they are almost exclusively Nigeriana!

    Back to those fellows; they were quick to remind yours truly of the feeding of the five thousand in the Bible as proof of the infinite possibilities in divine provision and the sometimes unknowable ways that the Divine Hand can choose to get things done. Trust me, I countered with the Biblical story of the Christian avatar, Jesus Christ Himself, when prompted to pay tax thought nothing of invoking the miracle to pay Caesar. Could He not have simply decreed wads and wads of the Roman currency without the need to re-draft Peter from his long-abandoned fishing trade just in time to get the Roman tax authorities off their backs?

    Here is what He did: cause Peter to temporarily suspend the new-found vocation of fishing for men’s soul for the gruelling task of going after those troublesome fishes with those rusty nets! Meaning, the Master knew that anything else would amount to conjuring fake or juju money – not backed with the authority of the Roman treasury; suspect currency unlikely to be acceptable to the tax authorities of the time.

    As we all know, such delicate care for the rule of process or similar niceties seems unlikely to impress the new money men: not the misguided theologians for whom such things as propriety mean nothing; or the puerile capitalists without the encumbrances of the tough protestant ethic; the con-men yahoo-yahoo or the yahoo-plus boys; the politicians and the bureaucrat who must prey on the public till to make it big. I guess the above will also apply to the head-hunters for whom the human cranium has become the latter day piggy bank where fresh notes (naira or it dollars) are minted. All share in the same sustaining myth – not faith – that sees the end as sufficient to justify the mean-ness! (Apologies to the revered Tatalo Alamu)

    Welcome to the new age where money and money alone answereth all things.

  • Shonekan: The collapse of a tragic delusion (2)

    Shonekan: The collapse of a tragic delusion (2)

    In the first part this submission, I set out to demonstrate that Ernest Shonekan and the Transition Council were little more than deluded baubles in military president Ibrahim Babangida’s programme of democratization that the noted scholar Richard Joseph, author of a seminal work on Nigeria’s Second Republic, called “one of the most sustained exercises in political chicanery ever visited on a people.”

    Professor Ben Nwabueze who, even while serving as Education Secretary on the TC mandated to supervise the terminal phase of Babangida’s transition programme and ensure a smooth transfer  of power to a democratically-elected government, morphed into a legal strategist for eviscerating it, has made the point more tellingly.

    Apart from two or three exceptions, Nwabueze has written, none of the 106 Decrees enacted during the tenure of the TC (Jan- Aug 1993), including the controversial decree that annulled the June 12 election and decrees designed to fustigate the news media ever passed through the TC for discussion, comments or even for its information.  The TC members, Nwabueze said, “learnt about them from the pages of the newspapers or from other sources, just like the rest of the Nigerian citizenry.”

    He concluded:  “The sidelining of the TC in the process of law-making reduced its role in government to almost total irrelevance and insignificance.”

    The TC was the deus ex machina that Babangida conjured up to shore up his tottering transition programme.  With the annulment of the presidential election and the dismantling of the institutions that had undergirded it from its inception, the programme was for all practical purposes dead.

    But Babangida had to keep up the pretence of desiring to vacate power.  He corralled the two official political parties – the Social Democratic Party (SDP) and the National Republican Convention (NRC) into agreeing to the formation of an Interim National Government to hold power until democratic elections could be held three months down the line, or in March 1994 as was later proposed.

    He needed a public figure of some gravitas to front as Head of the Interim National Government – they later added Head of State.  He did not need to look far and wide.  Shonekan was only too willing.  His acceptance reeked of careerism in its rawest form.  Moshood Abiola, winner of the annulled election, came from the same town as Shonekan, and was a friend to boot, but such considerations did not trouble Shonekan.

    In his acceptance speech, Shonekan gushed with gratitude to Babangida.  Amidst the carnage on the streets, the protests and the strikes and the boycotts that paralyzed many cities, he declared that Babangida was the one Nigerian leader who was leaving the country in a better shape than he had found it.  Shonekan evinced nary a hint of those characteristics that had for decades projected him as an iconic figure in corporate Nigeria.

    At his swearing in, he could have been mistaken for just another hustler.

    He was no puppet, Shonekan said.  He had accepted the position, not out of a desire to kill anyone’s joy, but as “a personal sacrifice” and to avert bloodshed.  The ING was “a child of necessity.”  The annulled election,” he said with breathtaking insensitivity, should be accepted as having passed into “the dustbin of history.”  Nigerians must put June 12 firmly behind them and work with him “to move the country forward.”

    His reward was a booby-trapped perch.  In the version I sighted of one several draft decree purporting to set up the ING (several were in circulation!), there was a blank where the name of the head of the ING should have been entered. The deputy head of the ING was unnamed.  The appointing officer was unnamed.  The names were penciled in later.

    The draft contained the curious provision that if the head of the ING resigned or could not continue in office for one reason or another, the most senior military officer would take over.  This was an open invitation to General Sani Abacha to move to unseat Shonekan whenever he pleased.

    Even more curious was a provision that no part of the law could be challenged, varied, altered or modified, by any other law.  Shonekan’s hands were not only tied; he was trussed up, blindfolded, gagged and deafened. He did not see the ING’s enabling decree before he took office.  He did not know what powers he would be able to exercise, and apparently did not care. To him, the position was everything.

    The draft was above all a damning indictment of Shonekan.  It said that the Federal Military Government decided to annul the June 12 election and processes leading to it out of “an abiding concern for national security, law and order, enduring democracy, and the provision of effective economic direction” for the nation and “because the processes had been marked by “grave electoral malpractices.”

    In short, Shonekan had brought it upon the nation, himself, and the TC.

    The indictment was gratuitous.  In the scheme of things, the TC was not even a consultative arm of the government.  It had no legislative or executive power.  But Shonekan took the indictment in his stride, moved on to the ING, and to his final humiliation.

    Shonekan was hobbled by problems of legitimacy from the outset, not least on account of his rather ambiguous title. What manner of animal is that, many were left to wonder?

    The concept was novel, to be sure; not all Nigerians literate in English grasped its essence.  In Nigeria’s indigenous languages, it was unfathomable.

    In the Yoruba-language media, it translated into a government perched precariously on the edge, one that could be dislodged with the slightest shove. `The government promptly banned the term.

    To generate a semblance of legitimacy, Shonekan embarked on a trip to the northernmost parts of the country the week after he took office.  He went, first, to Sokoto, to greet the Sultan, Ibrahim Dasuki, on the occasion of Prophet Mohammmed’s birthday and to express a hope that Allah would intervene mercifully in Nigeria’s troubled affairs.  From there, he flew to Kano to greet the Emir, Ado Bayero.  Finally, he headed to Maiduguri to pay homage to the Shehu of Borno.

    The motive and the geopolitics of this excursion were puzzling.

    First, the motive:  was it confidence building, or was it appeasement? Then, the geopolitics.  Whatever the motive, why concentrate the effort in that particular zone?

    It was only weeks later that Shonekan sneaked into Ondo State in the dead of night on an official visit lasting several hours in a state where, under normal circumstances, he should by right have expected a rousing welcome.  But he was taking no chances.

    At the palace of the Oba of Lagos, he got a frosty reception. The palace handed him a letter containing a message that would have been considered indelicate had it emanated from the royal father’s mouth.

    Shonekan willingly served as head of a government in a regime that issued decrees which formally and deliberately denied Nigerians the protections of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and the African Charter of Human and Peoples Rights.  If he was not part and parcel of a conspiracy to annul the sovereignty of the Nigerian electorate, he was incontestably one of its prime beneficiaries.

    Yet in an act of perjury heard and seen around the world, he told the United Nations with a straight face that his government subscribed unambiguously to the Universal Declaration Human Rights.  Four of the nation’s most vibrant newspapers were banned; yet he claimed that the news media in Nigeria enjoyed unfettered press freedom.

    Even after the Lagos High Court declared the ING illegal and the instrument setting it up an inept forgery, Shonekan soldiered on for 83 days, putting up with the kind of rejection that would have discomfited a hippo.

    Until Sani Abacha terminated his misbegotten errand and put him out of his misery.

    The story line was that Shonekan had resigned.  But he was not even accorded the courtesy of reading his letter of resignation in real time.  He could never shed the label of quisling that a great many of his kin in the Yoruba country pinned on him.

  • Aspirants beware

    Aspirants beware

    With the 2023 general elections in Nigeria, in sight, the season of make-believe is upon us again, and many aspirants who fail to win the ballot, would go under psychologically and financially. For some of the aspirants, the dénouement would be permanent, while    the inimitable ones will rise from the ashes like a phoenix. But as lawyers would advise, I magnanimously put forward a general notice to all aspirants: Beware.

    In the history of political chicanery at the highest level, perhaps former military president, Ibrahim Badamosi Babangida has the gold. I have heard from people who know, how IBB as he was fondly called, led a lot of distinguished Nigerians to their psychological and financial waterloo, on the premise that they were his preferred presidential candidate. A particular gentleman and boardroom general from Delta State, was lured into the unending circus of a presidential hopeful, and the end was not funny.

    As IBB reshuffled the transition cards, from banning of old politicians from participating in the elections to encouraging the emergence of new generation politicians, he ruined many lives on the altar of aspiration. A more recent example is what happened in Imo State under the government of Senator Rochas Okorocha. In the eight years that Okorocha was governor, those who aspired to contest the local government elections paid very dearly, psychologically and financially.

    Like IBB, Okorocha kept shifting the goal post, making new demands and promoting different sets of aspirants. At a stage he ordered aspirants to enrol in a training programme and they sheepishly did, at additional cost to their aspiration budget. Needless to say that after the training, no elections were held. Apart from the powerful office holders who are courted, there are the smaller ones lurking on the side lines. They could be the aide of the big office-holder, an associate or relations who pretend to be in a position to influence the choice.

    Again, there are powerful politicians who are treated as political gods, and many aspirants believe they have the power to make or mar. The late strongman of Ibadan, Chief Lamidi Adedibu, was one such man. While he lived, and while President Olusegun Obasanjo held sway as president, he was imbued with so much power in Oyo State. When Governor Rashidi Ladoja refused to offer adequate sacrifices at the Alaafin Molete’s shrine, Adedibu set off a chain of actions that bruised the governor very badly.

    Across the country, they are persons who project such influence, and who would demand that unless you first appease them, the aspiration would die prematurely. Just as we have warlords controlling turfs in war-torn countries, they are pretenders all over the stratified political turfs across the country. And the situation is similar, whether we are talking of the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), or the main opposition party, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), or even smaller parties.

    Read Also: Okorocha’s blackmail will no longer work in Imo, says Uzodimma

    All aspirants must also be careful about those down the ladder, the cheerleaders who egg them on, even when they truthfully know that they lack the capacity to achieve their aspiration. The aspirants should wonder why whenever any person declares for any position, even when they have no chance of getting elected, there will still be people telling them, go ahead, you have already won! These cheerleaders have led to the ruination of many aspirants, as their only interest is in what they would gain, while the circus lasted.

    Once an aspirant makes the pronouncement that he/she has an interest in an elective post, these group will set up store in his/her house, and they will make a habit of trouping in daily to feast and praise the aspirant to high heavens. One local government chairmanship aspirant, who was a victim of the unwinding road to the local government election in Imo State that never held, told me how his followers were slaughtering his goats and making banquet in his house daily for years.

    One can juxtapose that with those who have uttered the intention to vie for governorship election in any part of the country, not to talk of those aspiring to become the next president of our dear country. To aspire to become a governor under any party with a mile chance of winning the election would require expending millions of naira in preparation for the elections. In my penultimate piece, I referred to this upcoming season as a season of a peculiar political economy, using the word, figuratively and literally.

    With what is in the open about what becomes the life of the winner of a gubernatorial election, his extended family, his friends and the friends of these persons, most cheerleaders to any gubernatorial project, go for a kill, right from the preparatory stage. Apart from appointing ward coordinators across the state who will be placed on salary for months, there are several altars to be appeased in the state, for one to emerge the flag bearer of a major party that has the remotest chance of winning the election.

    In our peculiar political environment, throwing a hat into the ring to vie for the governorship election is not for the lily-livered, and aspiring to run for the presidency could ruin very successful persons, psychologically and financially, if they fail. To aspire to vie for the presidency is a totally different kettle of fish. The list of those who have declared interest to run in the APC and the PDP shows that only money bags, or those supported by money bags have a remote chance.

    The front runners for the primaries, so far, include Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, Governor Dave Umahi of Ebonyi State, and perhaps Vice President Yemi Osibanjo of the APC. While in PDP, you have Alhaji Atiku Abubakar, Senator Bukola Saraki and Senator Anyim Pius Ayim. Of course, a few more would still declare before the dates for the primary, but already the houses of the interested parties have become centres of political economy.

    In the days ahead, and as boys are separated from the men, this column will examine the potentials of a few of the presidential aspirants. Until then, it is fair to say that the public declaration of interest by Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu has raised the bar for presidential aspirants, whether in the PDP or APC. Some analysts have even said that Asiwaju would not dare if cannot win, but of course they are a few who have sworn that unless they die, the Jagaban of Borgu, would not smell the presidency.

    With the 2023 general election in sight, perhaps it is already too late to demand for less expensive elections, so that aspirants who are not money bags can come forward. For now, this column warns: aspirants beware.

     

  • Shonekan’s unforced tragedy

    Shonekan’s unforced tragedy

    Tennis aficionados call it unforced error — that penchant to ram the ball into the net, or hit it flying into the stands, or just make sundry defaults, absolutely under no pressure!

    But the Greeks, in their mythology, have a somewhat creepy and more eerie explanation.

    Only the dead, they deadpan, can be well and truly happy — and why?  Because malevolent gods were always on the prowl, clutching their clubs at the ready, sardonically happy to conk the mere mortal, frail and luckless!

    You could have lived a hundred years.  But if those rods come swooshing down, even 100 seconds before you breathe your last, then all is undone!

    Only the dead are well and truly happy!

    That captures the unforced tragedy of Chief Ernest Adegunle Oladeinde Shonekan (9 May 1936 – 11 January 2022), the Abese of Egbaland, who died at 85, on January 11.

    Chief Shonekan was cruising through life, fated to exit as the glittering gold of Business Nigeria: loved by all, nailed by none.

    Yet, he died at 85 as dull tinsel of Political Nigeria — no thanks to 83 fatal days, as head of an Interim National Government (ING), conjured up by the hastily exiting Gen. Ibrahim Babangida!

    Eighty-three short days (26 August – 17 November 1993) plaguing 85 otherwise illustrious years?  Only the dead are well and truly happy!

    Between 17 November 1993 (when Abacha shoved him from power) and 11 January 2022 (when he died) — 28 long years — Shonekan endured a long purgatory: a Roman Catholic concept for grilling sinners in a crucible, to somewhat escape the real hell.

    Did the Egba high chief do enough to expiate his political sin, before exiting these shores?  Not easy to say.

    But he bore his fate with stoic equanimity, which could have been so adorable under different circumstances.  That can’t be said of the jackboot hustlers that snared Shonekan in it all; the power ruffians that sealed his fate.

    The Yoruba, ever bristling against treachery, savaged Shonekan with vicious taunts. They christened his ING as “Ijoba Fidihe” — provocatively cynical, yet acutely picturesque for an interim government. You could picture the officials: so nervy and sweaty they perch at the edge of their seats — fi-di-he!

    Indeed, the fidihe tag proved most prophetic: Shonekan and co only “fidihe-d” for 83 days — short in days, but very, very long in piled-up taunts and equal opportunity insults, before the Evil and Goggled One put Shonekan out of his misery!

    Post-power, Shonekan calmly downed his hemlock and virtually laid low for the grim reaper. That nobly contrasted to the ever-yakking, never-sorry, ensemble that lured him into his misery; but left him, all alone, in the lurch.

    Yet, the charge of treachery, if not outright perfidy, was well and fairly heaped on the Egba high chief, on both political and ethnic fronts.

    Chief MKO Abiola had resoundingly won the presidential election of June 12, 1993.  Gen. Babangida, who didn’t like the face of the winner (since he didn’t want to quit power anyway), annulled the election.

    But faced with the thunder of public anger, he whipped out Chief Shonekan and his ING from his bag of tricks.  Shonekan would preside and organize fresh presidential elections in six months, while IBB, challenged and harassed, would “step aside”.

    Read Also: Shonekan: The making of a tragic illusion

    It was unclear which was more roiling: that a self-named “military president” would say no, while 14 million Nigerian voters said yes?  That reckless act was high hubris, which  smashed the perceived invincibility of Nigeria’s political military, though IBB and co didn’t quite know it back then.

    Or that by military fiat, IBB could juggle, like a yo-yo, two eminent Yoruba men: one duly elected by Nigerians; the other rashly imposed by IBB.

    That monumental insult drove the civil society up in arms, goaded the electorate nationwide into a fury, made the progressive media seethe with rage, and drove the huffing Yoruba hopping mad.

    Even among the Egba, IBB’s wayward power game made Shonekan an instant pariah — among the masses, if not entirely with the elite.

    It was a virtual kiss of communal death that Chief Shonekan would grimly bear, for the last 28 years of his life. Both MKO and Shonekan were Egba high chiefs. But for Shonekan, it was morning yet, on a long, long day of woe! On 10 November 1993, a Lagos high court, under Justice Dolapo Akinsanya (now dead), declared the ING illegal. On 17 November 1993, Gen. Sani Abacha, secretary of Defence in that same ING, overthrew his chairman and interim head of state. Ijoba Fidihe had come a sad cropper!

    But for Abacha making a military decree that reaffirmed his sorry tenure, the Lagos court verdict would have erased, from the eye of the law, Shonekan’s 83-day rule.

    Not only that.  Chief Shonekan would live long enough to witness President Muhammadu Buhari, on 6 June 2018, declare June 12 Nigeria’s new Democracy Day with effect from 2019. That was based on MKO’s epochal presidential win of 1993, which IBB contrived the ING to subvert.

    Still, perhaps all would have ended happily ever after for Shonekan, had the Egba chief not left his chairman/CEO job at UACN Plc, for Gen. Babangida’s military government as chairman of the Transition Council, from January 1993.

    Chidi Amuta wrote Prince of the Niger, to toast the Babangida power years.  But for that fatal blundering into military power politics, Shonekan could have died a more credible Prince of the Niger, if you trace UACN’s deep roots in the Royal Niger Company (RNC).

    Formed in 1879 as the United African Company (UAC), it became the National African Company (NAC) in 1881 but was renamed RNC in 1886, when the British Government granted it a commercial charter, to trade along the River Niger.

    After losing its trade charter, the old RNC became part of the new UAC in 1929, under the British Unilever company.  UAC was the forerunner of British subjugation, and clearly the business face of the British colonization machine of Nigeria.

    Since Chief Shonekan, ace corporate lawyer became UACN chairman/CEO in 1980, it is doubtful if any star ever shone brighter, in the UACN Galaxy, than Shonekan — a scion in whom his Unilever bosses were well pleased!

    From that pedestal, he morphed into an economic royal of the military years, giving budget analysis tutorials; and midwifing business lobby groups as the Nigeria Economic Summit Group (NESG) and the Vision 2010 template of the Sani Abacha era.

    At the felling of Caesar, in Shakespeare’s  Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony, quipped: “The evil that men do lives after them.  The good is oft interred with their bones.”

    Anthony could well have had Shonekan in mind.  For 83 days of rotten politics, he traded away the putative glory of 85 years!

    Only the dead are well and truly happy!

  • Baby Hanifa and other matters

    Baby Hanifa and other matters

    To much for social Darwinists and their discredited theory; even now the world must be wondering if indeed, there is nothing wrong with the specie of Homo sapiens who inhabit the vast space called Nigeria. I refer here not to the familiar retardation across the broad developmental indices, or the never-ending statistics that tells the story of profligacy and missed opportunities; or even the crisis of a deluded leadership and a country needlessly consumed by things other more discerning countries have taken for granted – all of which sums up to the tragedy of a country that has finally lost its way.

    Today, I choose to dwell on the sickening and – if we may call it for what it is – a most frightening regression the stuff of which Charles Darwin and company would be hard pressed to figure out let alone explain on the evolutionary schema.

    By this I mean the other war going on, silent and undeclared, yet a more insidious one threatening to become the new normal: the war on our future – our children!

    By now, most Nigerians would probably have read the story of baby Hanifa Abubakar – the five-year-old girl kidnapped by her school proprietor, Abdulmalik Muhammad Tanko, on her way home from school on December 4, 2021. The account of how she was killed and her body parts dumped within the premises of her Noble Kids Academy, at Kwanar Dakata, Nassarawa Local Government Area, Kano State, by a man she recognised and trusted to take her safely home is no ordinary tragedy. It is an epic story of betrayal, a grand one.

    Talk of some tears that will take years to dry; surely, this one would count among the lot. Being one murder of an unusual kind, the murderer, and his accomplices, surely deserves the swiftest kind of justice that society can mete out. And one hopes the government of Kano State will move very quickly to ensure that justice is served.

    Sad as the Hanifa Abubakar matter is, truth, however is that this war on our children did not start with her. Nor did it begin with the Chibok Girls or even the Buni Yadi Boys any more than the variegated forms of the collective failures which birthed the millions of the almajirs and their terrible blights on the city-scape could be said to have chanced upon the nation overnight. In the Northwest and the North-central, the battle is fully engaged by elements sworn to ensure that society, particularly its children are denied sleep.

    In their different ways, they represent the societal collateral for the crime of the political society – the underlying symptoms of a society that has long lost its moral compass, a war in which different parts of the country – from the north to the south, now have different tales to tell.

    Yes, down south, we hear, with each passing day, reports of murders by some dark forces ostensibly by, or at the behest of, aspiring money-men, power brokers and for other hedonistic causes that equally tells a story of a society’s mores in free-fall. We read daily, the news of innocent citizens killed and body parts harvested for money rituals and whatever; boys, girls, men and women; no one is spared in the underworld economy that spins voodoo; and promises the kind of cash and in the currency that no one has ever been able to explain with some certainty – but which if true is bound to give Godwin Emefiele and his Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members far more headache than they can only imagine.

    Read Also: Court remands three for alleged murder of 5-year- old Hanifa

    Meanwhile, there is the fledgling but all-too familiar Yahoo Yahoo, the army of deviants using their laptops and the internet, and whose victims, are mostly foreigners, said to freely deploy romance scams, email phishing, business email compromise fraud, identity theft and impersonation to con their target. And their kith, the ‘Yahoo Plus’ boys or ‘G-boys’ whose victims, once hypnotised with the assistance of herbalists are said to be game; not forgetting the One Million Boys, The Awawa Boys, all in Lagos that speaks to a counter-culture of crime and rebellion and for whom the notion of the orderly society is pure fiction.

    Talk of the Nigerian crime morphology ever in constant motion and with it the bubbling factory where crimes and delinquencies are manufactured and delivered.

    Only few days back, I came across the story of three boys nabbed by some youths in the Sagbama Local Government Area of Rivers State. The trio – Emomotimi Magbisa, Perebi Aweke and Eke Prince, all of them said to be 15 years of age, who “allegedly accosted one Endeley Comfort ‘female’ 13 years, hypnotised her to follow them to the apartment of Emomotimi Magbisa in Sagbama community, cut her finger and sprinkled the blood on a mirror for ritual purposes”, according to the police bulletin. Apparently, the vigilant youths, already familiar with the practice, raised the alarm after which they were subsequently arrested and some substance suspected to be charms were recovered from them.

    Different methods but the same basic motivation: money, power, control and anything in between; together with the presumed privileges these are supposed to confer.

    Sometimes, yours truly couldn’t but wonder about the possible links between our excessive religiosity and the industry of fetish and superstition that has been on the ascendance, particularly in a clime where opportunities for the rational choice are rather narrow and in between.  Thanks to new age preachers of capitalism, our young ones are implicitly taught that money are all that matters while the process is said to count for far less.  And thanks to the social media, they have just enough lessons on how everything that glitters equals gold – and to a society not only lacking moral anchor, but one that has long lost the will to provide the basic nurture for the future to thrive.

    So, let’s hang Abdulmalik Muhammad Tanko as many as times as we can. It is the way of the sanctimonious society. Hopefully, there’ll still be enough time to look in the mirror to see how complicit everyone is.

  • Shonekan: The making of a tragic illusion

    Shonekan: The making of a tragic illusion

    As 1992 drew to a close, it had become clear that military president, Ibrahim Babangida’s political transition programme had lost its momentum, and with it much of the credibility it once possessed.  It needed a new face and fresh voices.

    A Transitional Council (TC) was the answer Babangida conjured up.  Its remit was to supervise what remained of the much-revised transition design and ensure a smooth handover of power to a democratically-elected government in August 1993.  In its many emendations, the transition blueprint had given no hint of this innovation.

    The TC was made up entirely of civilians, most of them technocrats and distinguished professionals, though two of them, Matthew Mbu and Dr Christopher G. Okojie, were figures from the from the late colonial and immediate post-colonial era.  Ernest Shonekan, most recently chairman of the United Africa Company of Nigeria (UACN), a component of the British multinational Unilever, was named chair of the Council and “Head of Government.”

    That designation was intended to create the impression that the military and Babangida were disengaging and that the Federal Government was now being run by civilians.  But it was a false label. The Armed Forces Ruling Council made all the laws, controlled the armed and security services, and its appointees ran the federal bureaucracy.

    In a speech at the opening session of a Conference on Federalism and Nation-Building, in Abuja in January 1993, Shonekan came in sixth in Babangida’s order of precedence, behind members of the Armed Forces Ruling Council, former head of state, General Yakubu Gowon, members of the Diplomatic Corps and behind Dr Iyorchia Ayu, president of a senate that had virtually no lawmaking powers.

    Nor did Shonekan in office play the part of “head of government.”

    Uche Chukwumerije, Secretary for Information in the TC, told me that, in its early days, members sent memos meant for Babangida’s attention to Shonekan.  But on discovering that Shonekan merely initialed the memos and forwarded them without comment, they bypassed Shonekan and sent their memos directly to Babangida.

    But Shonekan, who died last Tuesday aged 85, was content to live a lie. And not just once, as I will argue in this column and the follow-up.

    Rumours of the coming of the TC had been circulating for months.  Babangida, so went the rumours, would name the head of the TC from a shortlist of five prospects – Dr Pius Okigbo, the distinguished economist and public intellectual; Bashorun Moshood Abiola, publisher of Concord newspapers and business mogul; Joseph Wayas, Second Republic senate president; Cornelius Adebayo, Second Republic senator and executive governor of Kwara State, and Shonekan.

    I saw it as a thinly-veiled scheme to extend Babangida’s tenure for as long as possible.  Whoever   agreed to serve in that post, I felt certain, would come to grief and that I had a duty as a public affairs analyst of the “participant-media” school to point out the dangers ahead.  Back then, whenever I felt I was embarking on an errand that was too big for my shoes, I usually turned to General Olusegun Obasanjo, respected statesman-at-large and chairman of the African Leadership Forum for help and advice.

    I knew Okigbo and Adebayo well enough to conclude that they would reject Babangida’s proposal    on the threshold.  Something told me Wayas would get no such offer.  That left Abiola and Shonekan. Could Obasanjo, for the reasons I had advanced at a private meeting at his Otta Farm House, dissuade Abiola and Shonekan from consenting?

    A week later, Obasanjo told me that Abiola needed no dissuading.  Abola had indeed been offered the position but had garnished his rejection with a judicious Yoruba proverb.

    “What of Shonekan?” I asked.

    Obasanjo said Shonekan told him he had accepted the offer based on Unilever’s assurance that it would use its influence with the British Government to ensure that Shonekan made a success of it.

    Did Obasanjo warn Shonekan that he might unwittingly be lending his name and reputation to the  prosecution of a dark agenda?”

    Obasanjo said he did, and that Shonekan had assured him that if Babangida sought to prolong his tenure beyond June 27, 1993, Babangida would get know the stuff Shonekan was made of.

    Did Obasanjo believe Shonekan?

    “Let us just say that Ernest is naïve or ambitious or both,” he said.

    During the week Shonekan took office, I reached out to his Special Adviser, Isaac Aluko-Olokun, who had served as UACN’s chief economist when Shonekan was chairman. The whisper in UACN’s corridors was that Aluko-Olokun was Shonekan’s “brain” and that not even an inter-office memo could emanate from the chairman’s office unless the chief economist had cleared it, assuming that the chief economist was not its author.

    I had met Aluko-Olokun not infrequently in media circles and on public discussion forums, and I felt I could take a chance on him.  I told him I was sure his boss had got himself into a situation he had not bargained for and from which he was unlikely to emerge undamaged, but that all was not lost.

    If it ever occurred to Aluko-Olokun that his boss had been recruited merely to serve as cover for a hidden agenda, I would gladly serve as a backchannel through which he could communicate his fears to the public under deep cover and protect his reputation.

    “You would do that?” Aluko-Olokun asked excitedly.

    I assured him that I would.

    One week passed, but no word came from him.  Then, two weeks, and three.  So I called Aluko-Olokun again.  He apologized profusely, saying that he had been tied up in Abuja.  He said he was about to leave for the airport to board a flight to Lagos and would definitely see me that weekend.

    He never did.  And I never raised the matter again.

    Even as Election Day June 12, 1993 approached, there were few indications that the nation was about to reach, finally, the culmination of a transition that had been eight years in the making.  In contravention of decrees stipulating stiff penalties, all manner of persons, many of them widely believed to have been sponsored by the government, called for the scrapping of the transition programme, and for Babangida to continue in office.

    The TC seemed helpless.  It could not even warn that such advocacy was subversive of the transition and stood to be punished by fine and imprisonment.  And yet it was squarely on the shoulders of the TC that Babangida had placed the responsibility for completing the programme.

    Yet, at some point, it was almost as if Clement Akpamgbo was chief counsel and strategist to those elements bent on scuttling the transition programme, and not the nation’s chief law officer.

    A week to the poll, I learned from Information Secretary Uche Chukwumerije on deep background that the election was unlikely to hold.

    In the end, what forced the military authorities to go ahead with the election was a statement by the United States Embassy in Lagos on the eve of the poll that its postponement would be unacceptable to the U.S. Government.

    They went ahead with the election, only to annul it.  Shonekan and the TC were not privy to the annulment.  None of the members demanded an explanation.  None felt that they owed the public an explanation. None resigned.

    They stood by, unquestioning, as Babangida scrambled to confect another duplicitous formula to continue the aborted mission of the TC:  a so-called Interim National Government, with the obliging Ernest Shonekan cast again in the fictional role of “Head of the Interim National Government” for 83 days that even he must have counted among the most miserable in his long and eventful life.

    • The second and concluding part, to be published in this space next Tuesday, will review Shonekan’s tenure as “Head of the Interim National Government.”
  • Akande’s hurtful truths

    Akande’s hurtful truths

    Blunt truth, the Yoruba declare, is as bitter as gall — ooto oro koro!

    That’s the recurring theme of Chief Bisi Akande’s book, My Participations, which has set many a tooth on edge since its release.

    Take these three portraitures — so spot on in their brutal frankness; so nettling in their scorching truth:

    Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo, PhD: “… I have seen through the pretences of Obasanjo, his fake nationalism, his pretentious patriotism and his vaulting ambition to be the centre of our universe.”

    Chief Ayo Adebanjo: “Chief Adebanjo … is a blank politically minded leader who recognizes readily and always that he never has what it takes to aspire for high political positions.  He constantly harbours lumps of yellow hate-bile in his heart for any co-political leader with brighter chances …”

    Prof. Yemi Osinbajo: “Osinbajo is one of our brightest boys … Modest, cerebral, perspicacious, courageous and decent in every sense …”

    Obasanjo, ace media letter writer and jazzy mounter of the bully pulpit for routine preachments and hustle has, since the Akande thunder, been struck dumb!  True, he tried to float a fresh controversy — to divert attention? — over the insecurity question.  But failing to draw much traction, he has kept his peace.

    That loud silence from the Obasanjo corner is all wonder.  Akande not only accused Obasanjo of subversive admiration, he also savaged him with alleged attempt at a stifling, if not diabolical embrace: the likes that led to the Bola Ige tragedy — aside from mercilessly rolling him in the mud for swashbuckling presidential hubris, that thought little, if at all, of a post-power tomorrow!

    Unlike Obasanjo’s strange quiet, Chief Adebanjo blundered into a television bluster, brimming with anger, bordering on the vulgar, and certainly the abusive.  Later, he would sing like a canary, at an impassioned, hurriedly summoned press conference, over a certain allegation of building by proxy!

    Yet, the more he belched fire, the more he looked like Chief Olu Falae, after the Goodluck Jonathan Afenifere “obtainment” scandal of 2015.  Some damning, uncomfortable truth is out there!

    Beyond initial huff and bluff, the severe majesty of that truth just sheared the garrulous of their tongue; the preachy of their sermons; the preening of their gait!  It wasn’t Baba Adebanjo’s finest hour!

    Yet, between the new taciturn Obasanjo and a Chief Adebanjo that made a hash of his no-retreat-no-surrender customary huff, you could see the self-thrusting similarity between these two champions of the conservative and progressive blocs; and their penchant for because-I-have-said-it-it-must-be-right!

    My Participations dealt a near-fatal blow to such cheap crowing and flowery grandstanding.  Welcome to the age of new humility — but only for the wise!

    Vice President Osinbajo emerged the most unscathed from the Akande clinical banger.  But even that — no thanks to emerging sweepstakes from Presidency 2023 — might soon birth a row of ill temper and needless controversies.

    The media cowboys, particularly of the progressive hue, never take prisoners in their combats; are never nuanced in their strafing, and fight as if there was no yesterday, no tomorrow, not even today but only this instant!

    Still, Osinbajo’s rave review from Baba Akande is well earned.  No turbulence of the moment can deny Osinbajo his basic decency, anymore than it can deny President Muhammadu Buhari his ascetic probity and integrity, Chief Akande his brutal honesty and frankness and, for that matter, Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, from culling in the nation-wide alliances he has built, way back from 1992, for his newly declared presidential dream.

    The truth is that about everyone got barbed in My Participation — President Buhari for chickening out of his gentleman’s promise to name Tinubu his running mate; Asiwaju Tinubu for his naïveté — or is it boundless optimism? — that whatever worked in cosmopolitan Lagos could work in the hinterland; Olagunsoye Oyinlola for being an alleged merry pun in Obasanjo’s anti-Akande dirty games; and Iyiola Omisore, who the author mauled with the heady triumph of blind Justice following the putrescence of harsh evidence!

    To fend off his own heavy cross, Prince Oyinlola unleashed the classic Obasanjo-esque bluster: that he beat Akande black-and-blue at the 2003 election — the same he would have said of Rauf Aregbesola in 2007, had the courts not put a stop to the charade: but only after Oyinlola’s three-and-a-half years illegal rule, out of a four-year term!

    Comically, Oyinlola even tried to tar Akande with sleaze!  Now, that was rich — wasn’t it? — if not from the avuncular Oyinlola himself, then from the venal political military bloc that threw up the retired brigadier-general!  For once, the medium was the excellent message — and it wasn’t pretty!

    Still, Buhari reneging was a blessing in disguise.  First, it gave Prof. Osinbajo the wings to fly and unleash his brilliance and decency on the national front.  Governance has been the richer for it.

    More importantly, a Buhari-Tinubu ticket would have been a recipe for disaster, the two being rather strong characters.  The pair appear the political equivalent of the “war lord”, in the political street of their core areas.

    The ensuing hoopla could well have brought back, all over again, the Obasanjo-Atiku presidential dysfunction — which Nigeria sure did not need, given the near-collapse the defeated order left behind.

    If Osinbajo guns for president, that decision won’t cancel his trademark brilliance and decency.  But it would rupture his bloom in the Tinubu progressives garden, the political nursery that planted and nurtured him, even if he himself has proved a good seed.

    Besides, is vice-presidential exposure enough to earn Osinbajo his party’s ultimate ticket, any more than the Governors’ Forum could deliver a Kayode Fayemi that diadem? Time will tell.  Still, a classic clash between starchy, formal authority and fizzy, informal influence that would be!

    But beyond skewed and straight personages, My Participations exposed a Nigerian polity with pretty unchanging ecology.  In 1955, communities cooked up books to attract Awo’s free primary education schools, as folks in 2021 manufactured stuff to corral Buhari’s conditional cash transfer, meant for the poorest of the poor!

    Now, also: compare the corrupt, insufferable councillors of Akande’s youth in his native Ila-Orogun with the venal, bully politicians of today?

    But in all of these, Chief Akande who turned 83 on January 16, picked his straight and narrow path and stuck to it.  That is one personal glory worth crowing about — and worth recommending to others.

    Happy new year

    A happy new year to all readers of this column.  In a Nigeria ever tumbling with stuff, it’s almost criminal to leave the trenches!  Yet, rest calls and you can’t but obey!  It’s nice to be back.

  • Unvaccinated Southeast

    Unvaccinated Southeast

    The news item last week that 10 states in Nigeria are laggards in the vaccination race that has convoluted the world, following the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic, elicited a sense of pity in this writer. As with other developmental challenges that bestride Nigeria like colossus, I took it for granted that all the affected 10 states would be in the beleaguered northern part of the country.

    But alas, five out of the 10 states are in south-eastern Nigeria. Since I read the headline, I have been wondering what could make the entire south-eastern states become laggards on such an important public health issue. I have asked myself, whether it is the burgeoning insecurity in the region that is to blame for the low number of the vaccinated, as reported by the National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC)?

    If not the insecurity, could be that the southeast is suffering marginalisation in the supply of vaccines by the federal government, as is the region’s experience in political appointments under President Muhammadu Buhari’s government? If it is not marginalisation in the supply side, could it be that the governments of the region are not as aggressive as their colleagues elsewhere, in pushing for vaccination amongst the people they govern?

    If the problem is within the states, could it be that majority of the people are not convinced about the need for the vaccine, and are therefore contemptuous of the efforts of both the federal and state governments? If they are unconvinced about taking the jab, could it be that those concerned are predominately ignorant of the advantages of the vaccine, or they are just sceptical like the argumentative anti-vaccine lobby scattered across the world?

    For this writer, it is important for the governments in the southeast states and even the relevant federal authorities to investigate the reason or reasons for this seeming anomaly. Understanding the psychology of the people is important in mobilizing them, and consequently delivering the dividends of democracy, as our leaders usually frame such benefits. For if the World Health Organisation (WHO) has adjudged a disease a pandemic, not to talk of the massive disruption of lives across the world, and went ahead to recommend mass vaccination, it should worry leaders that some people do not heed the grim statistics.

    Of significance is that all the states in the southeast are amongst the laggards, not some, but all. If it is a coincidence, then it is an intriguing one. If on the other hand the slackness is contrived, then those responsible should be known, and be treated as enemies of the region. And if it is self-inflicted, then it is tragic, particularly if it is as a result of poor governance. But if it is the people that are denying the obvious, then it should be a case study on group psychology.

    It is also important to note that Nigeria as a country is amongst the least vaccinated countries in the world, and even within the sub region. According to data from the Multilateral Leaders Task Force on COVID-19; as at January 10, only about 2.2% of Nigerians are fully vaccinated. Comparatively, most advanced countries have vaccinated about 80% of their population. Of course, the vaccine sceptics would argue that despite the high percentage, the fourth wave still predominates in their countries.

    For this column, those arguments are puerile, because before the advent of COVID-19 vaccines, people were dying in thousands daily across America and Europe. So, if the argument is that vaccination has not fully stopped the spread of the disease, the simple answer is that thousands are alive today because of the vaccines. Again, while it is likely that our weather and local medication may have saved the poor continent of Africa from annihilation as feared, it will be unfortunate to treat such a scientific development with contempt of an ignoramus.

    So while Nigeria, nay Africa and other third world countries worry about the causes of the low level of vaccination in their countries, the governments of southeast should understudy why the region contributed so much to this development. That worry should be regardless of whether or not, they belong to the anti-vaccine lobby. I push for that study, as it would help the governments know the causes of the failure of the people of the region to vaccinate, and what they can do to ameliorate the situation going forward.

    But since the challenge cuts across all states in southeast, it requires a common confrontation by all concerned states. Such common challenge underscores the need for a South East Development Agency (SEDA), which would act as a think-tank for the governments and peoples of the region. It is such an organ that can follow through on the issues raised here, and come forward with reliable data of what went wrong. Of course, such an organ would also provide intellectual power for other developmental challenges facing the region.

    As I have argued here on other occasions, the southeast governments should be planning ahead of the current dissonance in our federal system of government, and be ready when federalism returns. To only live in the present and remain reactionary to the reactionary forces that have seized our country by the jugular since 1967, is to be unstatesmanlike. Even the blind can see that the quasi-federalism we are practising is unsustainable, and would surely give way to a workable practice of federalism, if the nation is to survive.

    So, the region needs to keep putting in place the building blocks for a regional development agenda. After all, before the military intervention in Nigeria’s governance, the entire eastern Nigeria was governed from Enugu, and one could see the organisational structure of developmental programmes across the region. There was a synergy between the agricultural, industrial, technological and commercial belts. Who says that an effective intellectual organ cannot provide knowledge driven collaboration opportunities between the states?

    What simply needs to be done is for each state to rely on the comparative advantage it has, and link that to other member states’ advantage. That is the way to the future of the region, and our governors should see such collaborative endeavour as a legacy project. They should work to gift the southeast such a development think-tank, to put in place a blueprint for collaborative development. And such a body will gain funding from local and international organisations, and could even link the universities in the region to research on some regional challenges.

    If such a body existed, it would have told us why the southeast is lagging behind in the vaccination programme. The governments of the southeast must not brush aside the NCDC data on COVID-19 vaccination.

  • The rice pyramids of Abuja

    The rice pyramids of Abuja

    If you have not seen the trending video of the vast rice pyramids of Abuja, there is just a chance that you might have stumbled on the news of Nigeria’s Rice Mountain about to be unveiled in the nation’s capital later today by President Muhammadu Buhari. In a country where good news have become rather rare and in between; where the daily fest of bloodletting has become so routine as to be the new normal, the showbiz event of what is supposed to be the signature achievement of the Buhari administration, should understandably be big deal, and even more so an event already touted by the promoters as qualifying for a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

    Call it a festival of sorts; and you’ll be right; the project, a collaboration between the CBN and the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN), seeks to pool together the assortment of rice said to be largest of its kind in the world.

    And talking about the trending video, the narration is itself something of a blast. Between the extravagant waohs and eehs of the narrator, the ‘lucky’ viewer is at once seduced into beholding what is supposed to be the eighth wonder of the universe: the sprawling Abuja Rice pyramids. And guess the voice behind the narration: the president’s point-lady, the supremely confident and trenchantly controversial Lauretta Onochie, who only recently missed the powerful INEC appointment by whiskers. Waltzing lyrical as she walked through the endless rows of rice neatly stacked in pyramidal shapes as if primed to kiss the gates of heaven, she kept muttering in wonder: –look at it … see rice… Sai Baba, Sai Buhari… millions and millions of them…this government is working…thank you to Anchor Borrowers etc.

    So much for the optics, if we discount the extravagant high praise, there is, admittedly, a lot to say of the vast progress that has been made in the last few years in the rice sector – for which all the thanks must surely go to Godwin Emefiele and his crew of the inexhaustible piggy bank.

    Yes, money – and lots of it – continues to be spent by the Central Bank of Nigeria like it would soon run out of fashion. From agriculture to industry, running through the whole gamut of the economy, an assortment of strategic sectors known to have run into bad weather in recent time continues to draw cash aplenty; no longer is any pretence about the dividing line between the fiscal and monetary realm. On virtually every policy challenge, the apex bank has been more than willing to help – meaning dole out cash – which is not necessarily a bad thing considering what is supposed to be its broad developmental role.

    Unfortunately, as it has happened all too often in recent time, whereas the activist apex bank appears to have been all fired up, rolling out one initiative after another – the elected political authorities have been too willing to tag along – most of the time unquestioningly – with the rest of the distraught society too flummoxed to bother about the systemic aberration going on!

    Now, don’t get me wrong. Both of course are supposed to play complementary roles. But the idea of the monetary authority – the lender of last resort – eclipsing the fiscal authority not just in the traditional realm of credit creation but also in the breadth of ideas and policy would seem more like an aberration turned abdication – a Nigerian novelty.

    Truly, Godwin Emefiele, the erstwhile commercial banker-turned-central banker might well be the man of the moment; the real bother is what happens should a Pharaoh in the apex bank emerge that is not as well disposed to the many Josephs of our sprawling countryside? Where will the complementary policies to ensure its sustenance come without the deliberate strengthening of the governance systems, the ancillary agencies like the Bank of Agriculture, (which at the moment, is already pronounced dead) without the hard questions being demanded of the Federal Government in particular?

    Yes; there is a lot to showcase. Again, thanks to the deliberate, targeted interventions, the country now boasts of some 20 million farmers engaged in rice cultivation, and this barely from 1.5 million farmers some six years ago. And this is not limited to cultivation alone. In the area of processing, the intervention has led to a surge from less than 10 rice mills in 2015 to 100,000 and 200,000 medium and small scale mills respectively – again, these are supposed to be verifiable. Surely, that our officials could for once, claim to have surpassed, or better still, surprise, themselves must be deserving of celebration.

    In all, however, the string of achievements cannot be anything but one half of the rice revolution story. And this is not necessarily about the throng out there for whom such avant-garde spectacle of the emptying of the various warehouses across the country is both a distraction and a disservice at a time the nation’s food import bills continue to rise. Rather, it is more about a proper evaluation of the role of the CBN itself in the business of financing the sector; the hard question of why, despite the varied incentives granted the local rice farmer and the processor – the price of the commodity still goes for between N24,000 to N28,000 (depending on the quality) in the local market and this in a country where the least paid worker only gets to take home N30,000 monthly wage.

    And then the question of why the outlandish Abuja showbiz is such a big deal at a time the local rice market continues to be swarmed with imported but smuggled rice; questions about the nature and extent of the incentives available to the farmer and how these could be enhanced; the adequacy or otherwise of the existing framework of extension services in the light of modern demands; and finally, the issue of whether or not a mechanism for price support actually exists for farmers to take advantage of – a critical matter on which the programme’s long-term sustainability depends.

    Trust me; I know a tribe out there who would insist that all of these questions do not matter since the nation is already on to an impressive start. Certainly not now with the titillating photo-Ops waiting to be harvested by officials while the Abuja mock show lasts.

  • The president has spoken

    The president has spoken

    For an administration that have, all too often, preferred the bubble of exaggerated self-assessment to the living reality that have come to define the lot of the ordinary citizen, it must have come something of a relief for its army of critics that Channel Television’s Seun Okinbaloye reeled out the stats that a somewhat startled President Muhammadu Buhari could only muffle a feeble dissension.

    And so it went:

    Okinbaloye:  “When you took over in 2015, our debt stock at the time was about 12 trillion, now it’s about 32 trillion…Inflation rate was about 9%, it’s now sitting at about 15%; unemployment rate was about 9.2%, it’s now at about 32.2%; exchange (rate) was about N197 to a dollar, now it’s way over 400 naira to a dollar. Now people would look back and say before you took over some of these indicators were fair, and now the figures are not friendly at all.”

    PMB: “Well, I am not sure how correct your calculations are, but all I know is that we have to allow people have access to the farm. We just have to go back to the land.”

    As they say – facts can prove stubborn sometimes. Which is it must have come to those expecting a robust rebuttal from the president – the same man who in another breathe tagged the opposition PDP as ‘failure’, as something of a disappointment – or an anti-climax!  So much for reeling off tangent on a subject that, among others, constitute the main issue of the moment and one that would willy-nilly define this presidency.

    Of course, it might sound somewhat ‘extremist’ to describe the number one citizen as the administration’s de-marketer-in-chief; there is no doubt, a lot that could be said of his grasp of the fundaments of policy that cannot but leave the ordinary folk bewildered.

    And that is not to say that most Nigerians do not already know where the president stands on major issues of the day.  Or his capacity, which for good measure, has proven to be somewhat overrated. Whether it is pastoralism where the presidents insists on the rights of the herders to open grazing or the good old enterprise of tilling the soil which his administration continues to push for the same old antediluvian tools of the trade, or the security arena where the president, a brass hat, is fixated on the unilineal model of command and control, what Nigerians have come to see is a leader stuck on models utterly mechanistic and outmoded; a model so unsuited to the nation’s constantly evolving dynamics that one could not but wonder about a presidency caught in some time warp.

    One often pities our dear president though if not entirely his administration for a chunk of the mess that is not entirely of their making. Picture of the Jonathan years as the years of the locust; surely, Nigerians remember an administration that had so much money it could indulge in all manner of frivolities that added nothing of real value to their lives; an era when more revenue inflow meant net zero savings, less accretion and more debts to pay. As if one needed reminding of the so-called ‘strategic alliance’ – that barely-disguised Ponzi scheme supervised by the national oil corporation under which some juicy oil blocs were alienated to private interests under some dubious partnership. Recall a country so utterly bled that even votes meant for the military in war-time went into the private accounts of officials the consequence of which the ordinarily formidable Nigerian military was reduced by to a platoon of cowboys by the Boko Haram.

    Read Also: Buhari: Journey so far

    An electricity sector parceled out to friends and cronies in the guise of privatization; a petroleum sector so crippled, hobbled and deliberated subverted until it became a joke to describe it as an industry. Of course, the less that is said of the nation’s four refineries the better; here, successive PDP administrations seems to have done far better in making them deliver tonnes of money to the pockets of corrupt officials than they have of white products.

    Well, it’s been nearly seven years since! The years of supposed broom revolution whose drum majors although promised a different course but which has since turned out to be more of the same.

    Where do we begin from? The refineries? Surely, if we concede to the president, his typically statist predilection; in other words, his desire to retain the control of the refineries in government hands, that the same president, a former (or current) petroleum minister that once pooh-poohed the idea of subsidy did practically nothing to push in the direction in the whole of a whole term and a half can only be described in the realm of the stasis for which the administration is renown.

    And the consequence – a continuing regime of fuel import bill and its subsidy correlate under which the economy reels.

    Or the power sector where the country continues to punch far below its weight? Could the administration claim to have done anything differently to excite Nigerians? What about unemployment – that is easily the corollary to the current insecurity? It is simply scary!

    And the state of insecurity?  Today, if the traditional centre of insurgency, the Northeast is less of a nut to crack, it is only because the war has not only mutated, but has found a new theatre in the Northwest and North-central. For while Nigeria might not have the flag of the Boko Haram foisted in part of the country, were Nigerians asked to choose between the sheer carnage routinely unleased by terrorists in the Northwest and North-central from their various forest bases where they are camped and those of the Boko Haram, it seems highly unlikely that they will have any to choose from. Of course, as it is in the Southeast where anarchy – from the reign of the unknown gunmen – reigns; so it is to a lesser extent in the Southwest with menace of criminal herders and kidnappers.

    All of the above is hardly about denying the administration credit where it is due. Surely, there can be no denying those visible achievements either in the road or the railway sector even if the constant refrain about doing more with less is, to put it mildly, debatable. In any case, the obverse side of the equation is the humongous debt that the administration has contracted of which increasing number of Nigerians have expressed not a little worry. As many have reasoned and rightly in my view; what Nigeria has is not so much a debt problem as it is a revenue one. Defining the problem as one of debt, I will add, misses the point in a country where the tax to GDP ratio is among the lowest in the world.

    Here is the deal: had those officials in the administration spent a fraction of their energy, or better still, applied their minds, to addressing the tax to GDP gap as they have done in their endless shuttles across the globe in the name of shopping for loans, we might in fact be talking not only of a fundamentally new approach to doing things but a sustainable public finance strategy in the long run. In all, it is in a sense, more of the same.

    But what do I know since the president apparently thinks that all of these do not matter.