The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • A haven for scammers

    A haven for scammers

    My account of how Durojaiye Amos Gabriel Olukato, an electrical engineer and kinsman I thought I knew well enough to entrust with the purchase of a heavy-duty electric generator with a sticker price of N3.1 million, less incidentals, scammed me with a brazenness that almost took my breath away (“Scammer on the Lam,” The NATION, October 10, 2021, back page) drew many sympathetic reactions from readers – friends, acquaintances and total strangers who have been swindled in like manner and suffered far greater loss.

    A story I have told on this page before leapt to my mind when one of Nigeria’s most accomplished diplomats and technocrats now in retirement called to commiserate with my recent experience.

    At its centre is an eminent Nigerian, a person of great consequence and enormous wealth withal, who had just entered or was about to enter the eighth decade of his illustrious life.

    He fell suddenly ill, and was ferried abroad on an air ambulance.  News of his incapacitation spread far and wide.  Treated by some of the best doctors in some of the finest medical facilities in Europe, he was slow to mend. In the absence of a bulletin of his condition, folks back home feared the worst.  If he returned at all, they were saying, it would be in a horizontal posture.

    Return he did, his bearing as erect as ever.  After a period of rest and recuperation in, he decided to pay a visit to his sprawling upcountry estate, the custody of which he had entrusted to his protégé, a young man of scholarly promise whom he had sponsored for advanced study culminating in a doctorate from a well-regarded university in the UK.

    He called his protégé and told him of his impending visit.

    “But where would you sleep, sir?” the discombobulated protégé blurted out after a long pause.

    While his patron was fighting for his life in foreign hospitals, the protégé not only believed that the worst   had happened, he actually acted out his belief on a wide canvas, starting with the patron’s baronial home.  He had stripped it of everything except the drapes, reducing it to an unsightly construction site.

    The ambassador who had called to commiserate with me then told me his own story.  It is a story, pardon my anticipation, that must take the cake for sheer audacity and brazenness combined.

    Because of the hazards of road travel and the infestation of the countryside by bandits and kidnappers, the ambassador’s visits to his home upcountry were few and far between.  He had hired a maiguard to look after it.   Once in a while, he would send a friend or relation to go look over the premises.  About      the only thing they reported was that the grass needed to be cut.

    Then, one day, he sent a friend to go and inspect the house.

    As the emissary made to unlock the door and enter the house, the maiguard fled.

    The house had been stripped bare.  Everything – well, almost everything, had been carted away – furniture and fittings and fixtures and artifacts he had acquired during his diplomatic career.  Not even the sanitary ware was spared.  Each such item was ripped off the concrete.

    But they spared his books.  There they were, strewn all over the floor in dusty, disorderly heaps, prised from the book cases that had housed them for decades.

    One day, months after the looting of the house was discovered, the ambassador got a phone call from somebody in one of the Northern states.  It was his old maiguard.  He said he would be glad to come down to explain what had happened to all the stuff in the house if the ambassador would be so kind as to             advance him N2,000 for transportation.

    The ambassador also told me a similar story that had a tragic ending.  It was about an accomplished professional resident in Lagos who had not visited his country home for quite a while because of the state of the nation.

    One weekend, the gentleman set out for the place, venue of many a magical evening spent in the delightful company of family and friends and professional colleagues and business partners, hoping the memories would come flooding back and lift him out the pervading malaise.

    He found only a vast, dusty, empty space; nothing that evoked the beautiful memories he was hoping to recapture, only the opposite.

    Utterly dejected, he entered his car and headed back to Lagos.  Not until they got destination did the driver realize that his boss had died, most likely from shock.

    Many correspondents told stories of how the recipients of funds Nigerians abroad sent to trusted friends and relations on ground to help build or buy homes to which the plan to retire had used such assets to build or buy homes for themselves.  One of them told me I should consider myself fortunate that I did fall victim to that kind of heist, which had led many to foreswear returning to Nigeria.

    “We were never like this,” the ambassador said in a funereal tone.

    Not that folks never helped themselves to stuff that belonged to others, it is necessary to make clear.  They never did so in this “in your face” manner.  For the most part they helped themselves to stuff belonging to the government, which they regarded as a remote, alien and unfriendly institution.  In that sense, they did not consider that taking stuff judged to belong to the government was not stealing.  Such conduct did not evoke powerfully the moral sanctions that helping oneself to community assets did.

    Back then, the common wisdom was that the best way to protect your money and prized belongings was        to entrust them to a friend or relation for safekeeping.  The glue that that held society together; trust in the basic goodness and decency of those in your circle, the belief that there were certain things they simply not do.

    That was before rapid urbanization, politics, easy money and the commodification of culture in its widest sense destroyed the system of values so comprehensively that today, there is no longer a sense that some things are intrinsically wrong and should not be done or tolerated.  If you can get away with it, it must be right, or at least permissible.

    Think of how many politicians against whom prima facie evidence of what Fela called “original stealing”     or ojukoroju stealing” has been established, nevertheless having the time of their lives in the National  Assembly “making laws for the good governance” of Nigeria, clinging to high office or even seeking higher positions.

    Back then, their persons, names and company would have been anathema.

    Right now, amidst the banditry and kidnapping and sectarian bloodletting, amidst all the uncertainty about what lies ahead, the country is convulsed with scheming as to which geographical area the next president will “emerge” from, whether he – there is no talk of a “she” even in the ranks of those who have given “progressives” a bad name -what competencies he will have demonstrated or accomplishments he will have chalked up.

    Nor is there concern about the collapse of the system of values, and how to begin the difficult task of rebuilding it.

    It is in this void that one 47-year-old local despot who can conjure up no stronger selling point for his presidential quest than his vaunted youthfulness, to which he has lately added his “agility,” that is surely not of the mental kind, has been advertising himself in sophomoric billboard campaigns as “God’s plan for Nigeria.”

    His God does not love Nigeria.

     

     

  • Shylocks on the prowl?

    Shylocks on the prowl?

    Nigeria, it’s been said over and over again, is where stuff happens. If you live in these parts and have not received a rather strange, anonymous call from a lender alerting you about a certain debtor that you stood for as guarantor being on the run; and for whom you are not only presumed liable but faces imminent retribution in the event the debt not being made good within the hour, you are probably one of those lucky ones insulated from the humdrum that have come to define Nigerians’ existence.

    The first time I got the strange call which I initially considered a big joke, was some three weeks back. According to the caller, I stood surety for a debtor who has failed to pay as at when due. The call, according to caller, was to alert me of the consequences of further default. Before I could wrap my head around what the caller was saying, he cut the phone.

    I simply told myself that the call was not for me. Except the referenced transaction was done in the course of sleep!

    It wasn’t that one was unfamiliar with unsolicited calls of the kind routinely received from cable TV service providers as if one needed reminders about subscription nearly due; this one, a one-way monologue was different, meant to rattle.

    Some three weeks on and nearly a dozen calls after, so mentally dismissive of the endless rambling, or rather inured that the calls had become, to me, another variant of Nigeria’s all-too-familiar but nonetheless unending pathologies.

    And the calls simply kept coming. By Sunday night, the new merchant-lenders knew enough to raise their game not just to unnerve the supposedly recalcitrant ‘guarantor’ but apparently, to seek to bend his will.

    Reproduced hereunder is the message sent to my Whatsapp Sunday afternoon by the obviously agitated but emboldened creditor. For obvious reasons, I chose to leave out the real name of the debtor and the location.

    DEBTOR: -XYZ HYJX- whose BVN ends with (011) and phone number 0815099… collected loan from AIMLOAN Residential address: ABCD Avenue, ORANG UTANG, CITY and she has been acting STRANGE. She has refused to pay back the loan she collected and She dropped your number as one of her emergency contacts meaning she has involved you.

    Kindly inform HER to make payment in the next an Hour or Report her before she puts you in trouble. This will be sent to all your contacts if that payment doesn’t drop in the next an Hour. WE ARE YET TO SEE THE PAYMENT… KINDLY WARN HER SO THAT SHE WONT REGRET HER ACTION AND ALSO PUT YOU INTO TROUBLE LATER.

    Me, an emergency contact in the case of inability of the debtor to repay her loan? Don’t ask me if I knew the amount involved, the time the transactions took place, the terms of the offer and other such considerations which the two parties agreed.  It was sufficient that my name featured, perhaps among many, on the contact list of the debtor for which I must necessarily assume vicarious liability!

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    Trust me, I did a few checks. Do I know any of the debtors named? The answer of course is yes! One of them, a distant cousin I last saw some four years ago at a family function during which we exchanged contacts. Since then, we have barely spoken outside of the typical Nigerian pleasantries of “How you dey” and this often lasting no more than a minute or two. The other, I recall came my way during her undergraduate days at the University of Ibadan where she was apparently the team leader in a group assignment in her class. A friend had referred her to me for possible assistance following which I facilitated her access to the company library. That must have been some six or seven years ago! Since then, we have probably met a few times and only in the context of a young lady and extending the usual courtesies to ‘daddy’.

    These are supposed to be the debtors on the run for which I am deemed liable!

    As anyone would imagine, I simply placed a call to the subjects of interest – the debtors. Both of course did confirm that the transactions took place. Interestingly, both would almost swear that nothing in the process alluded to a third party let alone someone like me whom, both agreed, could easily have been notified were that to be found necessary. The closest, one admitted, was a pop up question on the company website –requiring permission to access to contacts which she had, almost without thinking, obliged! And then, she also let out one other element as if to help resolve the puzzle: some half-dozen names on her telephone contacts have also been contacted and harassed over the issue loan!

    Surely, one needn’t be a student of cultural anthropology to appreciate where this is coming from. Call it an attempt, though misbegotten, to fit an old debt-collection tactic into modern financialism; the inherent logic – ‘name and shame’ – which ordinarily underlies it would seem hard to beat. The problem isn’t just that the creditors opted to sink into the time-warp that is absolutely their making, in their seduction to communalism, they failed to read the signs correctly to appreciate how much things have changed in the age of BVN and other such tools and in the environment where such things as privacy and data protection have come to matter. For while the sometimes twisted psychology of the creditor and their resort, sometimes, to the crude tactic not unlike that of Shylock, the fictional character in William Shakespeare’s play – Merchant of Venice – would seem the natural order where the weak and the strong are involved, the truth is that a lot has changed.

    Now it would appear that the small fry has come of age. In a country where the big man can borrow billions of naira from the financial system with neither the plan to pay nor the consequence to bother about; where the lenders and their agents in exquisite suits charged with duty to ensure that the system is not fleeced choose to act delinquent, comfortable enough to pass off the fruits of their fatal indiscretions to the bad bank – AMCON, our new club of players – lenders and borrowers alike – by their latest ignoble conducts have not only shown how much they have learnt, but how ingrained the disorder is in the polity.

    Back to the shylocks currently on the prowl. Nigerians have seen banks – big and small – rise and fall as a result of those borrowing failing to pay back. It’s bad for business – not just for banks but any business for that matter. Unfortunately, if yours truly understands their dilemma, I have very little appreciation for their self-inflicted pain of abdication, stemming from the simple failure to do due diligence and to properly secure their loans. While they have every right to collect every kobo owed them, the idea of making me a collecting agent, going as far as issuing threats for a transaction that I was neither privy to let alone endorse is simply criminal. Although, I have not spoken to lawyers, there is a sense in which the companies could be held liable for the misuse of data harvested from the phones of their debtors.

    Messrs AIMLOAN and others disturbing my peace should take note.

     

     

  • Roads on strike

    Roads on strike

    Few weeks ago, the Nigeria Union of Petroleum and Natural Gas Workers (NUPENG), threatened a nation-wide strike yet again, over the deplorable state of roads in our country and extortion of their members on the highway. The union leaders argued that their members where intermittently making the supreme sacrifice because of bad roads, while trying to ensure uninterrupted supply of fuel and gas across the country, and yet are extorted by the security men dotting the check-point on the highways.

    While this column is sympathetic to their cause, as this writer’s legal firm had stoutly fought the cause of a relation (a NUPENG member) who almost became an invalid following an accident on the deplorable Port-Harcourt-Enugu expressway, it wondered how the trade dispute can be resolved in the short run. Well, whether by government magic (apologies to Fela) or by a mutual agreement as to when the roads would be fixed, the strike was called off, to the relief of Nigerians.

    But a personal experience on two significant roads in different parts of the country in the past few weeks showed that the roads were determined to strike at the users, if NUPENG won’t strike to get them repaired. The first horrible experience I had was driving on the roughly one kilometre road, from Alakija on the Lagos-Badagry expressway to the sprawling Navy Hospital in Ojo, Satellite town, for the COVID-19 vaccine. Driving to the hospital to take the free vaccine has turned an economic nightmare for this writer.

    If not for my latter experience last week, I would have considered the road to the Navy Hospital Ojo, the worst in the country. I had the misfortune of going to the Navy Hospital on a rainy day, and after spending more than three hours on the bad road, I have spent over N200,000 and still counting to repair my vehicle which was in good condition before I made the ill-fated trip. A combination of plying that very bad road and staying in water for hours, had decapitated the legs of my vehicle.

    The second experience was travelling on the Awka to Umumba axis of what used to be Awka-Enugu expressway. Without gainsaying, that should be the worst road in the country. Riding in what used to be regarded as a pleasure car around 7pm, before the driver meandered back to the old road, en-route to Enugu, I had the most traumatic experience in recent times.

    Of course, what we passed through cannot be regarded as a road, but an open bush part in a jungle. The closest sign of civilisation were the two army check-points we met on the abandoned road, manned by no-nonsense heavily armed military personnel in a macabre resemblance of a war-zone. As I wondered aloud the state of the roads, the driver murmured that it shows how the Igbos are badly treated in Nigeria, and yet asked to call the country their own.

    Because the entire Southeast is in a war mood, and you don’t know who you are riding with, I had to be careful what I say and how I said it. I merely agreed with him that the state of the road is an embarrassment to the federal government. While the Navy Hospital Road in the city of excellence, Lagos, is a crying shame, for all Nigerians who throng the sprawling Naval Base, and the surrounding Satellite Town, the Awka-Umunba part of the Awka to Enugu expressway, is regarded by many as emblematic of the famed marginalisation of the southeast by the federal government.

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    It is such level of abandonment of physical infrastructure in southeast that those primed to fight the separatist cause point at, to justify their demand for dismemberment of the country. Moving around Enugu and surrounding towns, as I visited more than six surrounding local governments the past weekend, I could feel the palpable tension everywhere I went. The scariest signature is the presence of heavily armed soldiers, with the tell-tale sign of long stretching tail lights announcing their pendency ahead as one moves around.

    While personally I never had any unruly encounter with the security personnel at the several roadblocks, it was obvious that some others are not that lucky. On a number of occasions I saw frantic searching of persons and vehicles whose occupants were standing distraught. An unpainted taxi-driver who took me to one of the several places I visited, spoke so disconsolately about how the soldiers were brought to disgrace and exploit the people of the region.

    He claimed that the soldiers have become soldiers of fortune in the southeast, and by his estimate millions of naira are being harvested by them daily. He however expressed happiness that the banned separatist group IPOB had struck at the heart of the economy of their oppressors by the planned ban of what is considered ‘Fulani cows’ in the region. Of course, my interjections were weighed carefully as I have been warned that it may be dangerous to criticize the activities of IPOB in the region.

    Indeed, when I told one of my senior friends from the southeast that I was in Enugu to attend to a number of engagements, he was surprised that I could still visit home, considering the state of insecurity in the region. No doubt the southeast has become a place of serious security concern, especially after the gruesome killing of Dr Akunyili, and the condemnable targeted arson of the country home of an APC chieftain Joe Igbokwe. Admittedly, despite the challenges, the irrepressible people of the region are going about their daily chores.

    But surely the economy of the region is paying a huge price. With restrictions on movement after 9pm in the cities many businesses have to close by 7pm to enable the owners get home safely before the curfew kicks-off. The ghost Mondays remain what they are called as even providers of essential services are afraid to venture outside. A look around offices like banks also showed that the Nigerian flags which were removed on October 1, following the directive of IPOB, have not been returned to the masts. One other regrettable fallout is the closure of many rural police posts, for fear of sudden attacks.

    While this write is licking his wounds from the strike at his economy and his health by the two terrible roads he plied in the past few weeks, there are many who ply those roads regularly, and one can better imagine the cost to their health, and their private economy. This columnist appeals to the Minister of Works, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, to go to the rescue of the users of those two roads, amongst other roads striking at fellow Nigerians.

  • Obadiah Mailafia (1956 – 2021)

    Obadiah Mailafia (1956 – 2021)

    I first encountered Obadiah Mailafia’s writings in the now defunct newspaper NEXT that I once described (“What next for NEXT,” The NATION, February 21, 2012) as “the boldest and most ambitious experiment in Nigerian journalism since the founding of The Guardian in 1983.”

    Shortly after its launch, the journal was parading some of the finest writing in contemporary Nigerian journalism.  It soared like a rocket at its debut in December 2008 but fell like the stick after a run of almost three years that was for the most part enchanting.

    Mailafia’s column was one of its captivating staples.

    I fell in love with it at first reading. It was lively, witty, urbane, and unfailingly engaging, and I looked forward eagerly to the next instalment. You always learned something new from it – some illumining fact or factoid that you did not know previously, a new word or expression, or a familiar term used in a refreshingly different way.

    “In between diverting accounts of his peregrinations,” I wrote of the column on the paper’s demise, “Obadiah Mailafia drew on his prodigious learning to provide first-rate analysis on global politics and economics and society.”

    It came as no surprise, then, that of the many columns that endeared NEXT to the attentive audience, Mailafia’s was among the few that found a new berth in extant publications when the paper folded up.  It flourished. So wide and appreciative was its audience that it had the singular distinction of being syndicated to five newspapers across the length and breadth of Nigeria.

    Not bad for a man who was reared in the bucolic communities North Central Nigeria.  He showed early scholarly promise, leading his elementary and secondary school classes and  graduating at the top of his class in the highly regarded politics, economics and sociology Tripos at the Ahmadu Bello University, in Zaria.

    The Sorbonne and Oxford followed almost as a matter of course. Fluent in English and French, he once wrote that he was never so much at his element as when ensconced in his  vast library reputed to hold more volumes than the libraries of some institutions that pass for universities in Nigeria and communing with some of the finest minds that ever lived, classical  music wafting from the sound system.

    All in all, a cultivated and refined person.

    Had he belonged in the core North, or had the core North embraced him however grudgingly as one of its own, his life story would probably have been different.

    It is indeed a standing rebuke that in his country, this accomplished scholar and policy wonk who had served as chef du cabinet of the Brussels-based 79 member-nation African, Caribbean and Pacific Group and chief economist at the African Development Bank with responsibility for strategic planning and corporate reporting rose no higher than deputy governor of the Central Bank, and was not pressed into service thereafter.

    Nigeria lost that clear, steady, confident and conscientious  and patriotic voice when Dr Obadiah Mailafia, died three weeks ago, not from his political activism championing the cause of his much-neglected people as he had expected or feared, but from a Covid-related conditions, according to the authorities.

    He would have been 65 years old on December 24.

    Mailafia’s compelling analysis of ethnic relations in the North, in particular relations between the dominant Hausa-Fulani and minority groups, especially in Kaduna State where he hailed from, and the corrosive influence of religion and sectarianism laced him in conflict with the Establishment.

    Mailafia had grown up seeing his people, Christians and animists, incorporated into the emirate system, the territory they called southern Zaria.  They were loath to grant it any other identity. The arrangement was a byword for internal colonialism.

    He lived most of his adult life seeing that system consolidated and his people entrenched             as permanent, disadvantaged minorities even when the political space in the domain  was supposedly widened with the creation of Kaduna State.

    Boko Haram’s depredations, and the unending campaigns of murder and mayhem perpetrated in the area by marauding herders and bandits stirred to their depths the nationalist, the man of conscience, in Mailafia.  But that made him increasingly a target of the North’s pushback.

    Mailafia was not the first nor the last person of note to state that he had learned that some serving military officers were enlisted with Boko Haram, providing logistic support and leading field operations.

    But when he gave voice to that allegation, they almost issued a fatwah on him.  State security officials detained him three times, subjecting him on each occasion to long, adversarial interrogations.  The custodians of Northern hegemony denounced and derided him. Colleagues who had cultivated him for his great learning set out to disparage his intellect.

    His situation seemed fraught.

    It was at that point that I urged General TY Danjuma in a text message, followed by a phone call, to use his immense influence and connections to ensure that Mailafia came to no harm.

    The harassment continued and Mailafia’s voice grew increasingly strident, culminating in the widely discussed statement he issued on September 11, in which he seemed to be anticipating his own death.

    I regret that I never met him; that I never had a chance to compare notes with him on Chief Obafemi Awolowo whom he admired enormously, the future of the African Union, and Nigeria without restructuring, among other matters.

    On one issue I would have remonstrated with him:  his unrestrained support for Israel and what seemed like a lack of empathy for the Palestinian cause.  It seemed so out of character.

    The Nigeria of Obadiah Mailafia’s dream was a country that served as a beacon to black humanity, a land where justice and humaneness would reign.  The nation he served so brilliantly and committedly owes it to his memory to embrace that dream.

     

    Scammer on the Lam

    To readers who may construe this publication as an abuse of forum, I plead guilty.  But the character involved, Durojaiye Amos Gabriel Olukato, left me no other choice.

    It is the substance of a two-part complaint I filed through my attorney, Dr Mike Obamero, with the Nigeria Police Area Command and Office, in Kabba, Kogi State, on August 23, 2021.

    I engaged Duro Olukato, an electrical engineer and native of Kabba based in Abuja, to advise me on the purchase of a diesel engine generator for my residence in Kabba.  I did so based on his excellent professional work in wiring the house in the final stage of its construction some ten years ago, and on the impression he created that he was an official of Julius Berger.

    I was counting on him to guide me to secure the best generator for the amount I was willing to spend.

    Olukato later informed me that he had sighted a decommissioned 24 KVA Caterpillar generator that would serve my purpose very well.  It had been used only briefly; it was as good as new, sound-proofed, and would come with a one-year vendor’s guarantee, plus a personal guarantee of one year as an indication of his good faith.

    He said he had pleaded with the chief sales manager at Julius Berger, from where he was making the purchase, that he was buying it for a person who was like a father to him, and that they had as a result agreed to sell it to me heavily discounted for N3.1 million.  Transportation to Kabba from Abuja would cost N60, 000.  To allow for contingencies, I wrote him a cheque for N3.2 million.

    On August 17, a truck ferrying a cargo of tomatoes and pepper to Lagos dropped off the generator in my compound in the dead of night.  It was accompanied by one of Olukato’s assistants, who had taken my cheque to him in Abuja.

    The paint had not fully dried on the generator.  It had no ignition and no kick-starter.  The fuel tank had no cover. Far from being sound-proofed, it was noisier than my 6 KVA petrol engine generator when we finally got it to run.  One problem surfaced after another, necessitating purchase after purchase and fix after fix.

    The set came with no invoice, no purchase receipt, no guarantee, no documentation of any description, and no manual.  Fuel had to be siphoned to the tank from a jerry can.

    As at this moment, Olukato is yet to deliver those materials.  He has not even deemed it fit to come and see the generator and attend to its deficiencies.  What he had done, I have reason to believe, was to salvage a generator from Berger’s junkyard in Abuja, retouch it here and there, and rush it to me as the genuine article.

    After a great deal of pressure and charges of betrayal of trust, he offered via text message to come to pick up the junk engine and refund my money.

     

    At this writing, he has done neither

    And now, the gravamen of my second complaint:  A threat to my life.

    When Olukato was not forthcoming, I served him notice via text message that I would have to report the matter to law enforcement unless he committed within 72 hours to a firm deadline for refunding my money.

    His verbal response, on August 16, 2021, was that he would advise me not to follow that route because no one could tell where it might lead.  He said he knew the kind of people he was working with and what they were capable of doing.

    Given the current wave of banditry and kidnapping in the country, I perceive his response as an unsubtle threat to my person and my well-being,

    Until that moment, Olukato had never told me that there were any third parties to the transaction.   The cheque I wrote was in his name.  He was the one who cashed it.  And now, he is warning me about what third parties might do if I reported the matter to the police.

    I am writing to bring this threat to the attention of law enforcement and to request to be accorded every protection under the law.  I would also like Olukato to be warned that he stands to be held personally responsible for any harm that might befall me.

     

    Update:

    The police have been on his trail, but there has been no significant movement on the matter.

    Durojaiye Amos Gabriel Olukato is on the lam, incommunicado.  I should add that, in law enforcement records, he is profiled as a serial scammer.

  • No Mr AGF!

    No Mr AGF!

    The report that President Muhammadu Buhari has repudiated the threat by the Attorney General of the Federation (AGF), Abubakar Mallami, SAN, that the federal government may proclaim a state of emergency in Anambra State over the killings in the state, which this column wrote about, last week, is reassuring. For clearly, while the state governors reputedly answer the chief security officers of their states, in reality, it is the federal authorities that control the security apparatus of every inch of the federation.

    So, it would be most disingenuous for the AGF to threaten the state government, Willy Obiano, to either rein in the killers, or the federal government would proclaim a state of emergency, in the state. And the AGF apparently hopes that as former President Olusegun Obasanjo did in Plateau State, the federal government would appoint an illegal sole administrator, to run the affairs of the state. If that is the intention of the AGF for making the threat, then he must be ready to be held accountable, should the tenuous peace in the state snap into anarchy.

    Indeed, for the AGF to contemplate such an action, literally on the eve of a gubernatorial election, that his party has been accused by the state government, and the main national opposition party, the PDP of choreographing to its advantage, using the instruments of state including the judiciary, may be an invitation to anarchy. Thankfully, Governor Obiano has reported that the president repudiated the AGF’s threats. If that report is correct, I commend President Buhari for disassociating his government from the AGF’s clearly political interpretation of the 1999 constitution (as amended).

    This writer believes that it is in the interest of President Buhari’s legacy that a free and fair election is conducted in Anambra State, rather than that the president being seen as choreographing the election for his party to win at all cost. While winning the state may help his party advance the desire of winning the 2023 presidential election, the consequences if the election is seen as stolen, may even torpedo the entire democratic order, and eternally President Buhari will bear the responsibility for that.

    Of note, while former President Olusegun Obasanjo could get away with such shenanigan, President Buhari may not, in a state governed by an opposition party, more so in an election period, and unfortunately when significant population of the state may be sympathetic to the IPOB separatist agenda. It must be noted that on the face of it, there is no clear front runner in the gubernatorial election in Anambra State. Informal interactions with some residents in the state indicate that in a free and fair contest any of the three big parties in the state, APGA, APC or PDP can win.

    So, the AGF instead of proposing the muddling of the electoral process with a politically motivated state of emergency should encourage a free and fair election. He cannot pretend not to know the clear provisions of the 1999 constitution (as amended) on the proclamation of state of emergency. Clearly section 305(4) & (5) of the constitution, is presumptuous that for the proclamation of state of emergency in a state, the governor and the state House of Assembly should be given the chance to demand for it.

    The provision of sub-section (5) is that the president acts, when the governor fails within a reasonable time to make the request. But even more important is the provision of section 305(3) which lists the condition precedent for the proclamation of state of emergency, whether suo moto by the president, or on the prompting of the state governor after two-third majority approval by the state legislators. I dare say that while Anambra State has come under the spell of malevolent attacks, there is no such breakdown of law and order, as contemplated by those provisions of the constitution.

    Section 305 (1) provides that through the instrumentality of official gazette of the government of the federation, the president may proclaim a state of emergency in the federation or any part thereof. Sub-section (2) provides that upon doing that, the president should transmit copies of the official gazette to the president of the senate and the speaker of the House of Representatives, each of which shall convene or arrange for the meeting of the House they preside over to either approve or disapprove the proclamation.

    Section 305(3) listed the conditions for the president to proclaim a state of emergency, to include the following. That the federation is at war, the federation is in imminent danger of invasion or involvement in war, there is actual breakdown of public order and public safety in the federation or any part thereof to such extent as to require extraordinary measures to restore peace or there is clear and present danger of that happening, or there is occurrence or immediate danger of a disaster or natural calamity.

    Section 305(3)(e) & (4) contemplates a request from the governor subject to the resolution of two-thirds majority of the House of Assembly requesting the president to issue a proclamation of a state of emergency. Sub-section (5) provides that the president shall not issue a proclamation of a state of emergency in any case to which the provisions of subsection (4) of this section apply unless the governor of the state fails within reasonable time to make a request to the president to issue such proclamation.

    It is the humble view of this writer that subsection (5) tampers the powers of the president to proclaim the state of emergency in states, and contemplates that the president allow the governor time to act if there is breakdown of law and order in a state. But even if the general view is that the president has overriding powers, section 305(3)(c)&(d) contemplates the actual or potential breakdown of such nature “requiring extraordinary measures….”

    Is the AGF saying that the federal government which controls the security apparatuses have become overwhelmed as to require powers to exercise extraordinary measures to restore normalcy?

    This column while conceding that innocent lives and properties have been wasted in Anambra State does not agree that it is of such a nature as to require extraordinary measures, which will include the suspension of the rights of citizens guaranteed by the constitution. Again, the 1999 constitution does not contemplate the removal of governor by any other means than impeachment, as provided in section 188 or the state House of Assembly, except by dissolution at the end of their tenure, as contemplated by section 105(1).

    If the AGF was flying a kite to test the waters, he must refrain from such, unless he does not give a damn about the state of our democracy. The health of our democracy should upend partisan considerations.

  • Racing against time

    Racing against time

    For the Buhari administration, yesterday’s event, coming barely four days after the presentation of the 2022 federal government budget, couldn’t have been anything than a landmark event. I am referring here to the high octane affair of the on-going Mid-Term Ministerial Performance Review retreat taking place in Abuja. The two events obviously offer more than mere symbolism. Being the last full budget of the Buhari administration as it races to the exit line on May 29, 2023, the former comes with the expectation that it would at least refocus on those critical areas which the government had promised to make a difference to the lives of Nigerians but which it had somewhat under-delivered, while the other is expected to provide a window, or if you like, an overview, into the various initiatives and programmes of the administration and how these impact on the lives of the people with a keen eye on areas needing improvement.

    Both could not have been more timely. But then, that is as far as it goes.

    As for the budget, it is perhaps trite to say that the fiscal statement didn’t disappoint – a case of the same old stories of assumptions and unrealisable parameters garnished with optimism. Of course, the lines are by now all too familiar: For the coming year, it is the old fangled phrases – ‘conservative oil price benchmark of US$57 per barrel; projected daily oil output of 1.88 million barrels (inclusive of condensates of 300,000 to 400,000 barrels per day); exchange rate of four N410.15 to the US dollar; projected GDP growth rate of 4.2 per cent and 13 per cent inflation rate’ and all of that.

    But then, who cares as in the end, we are told that the federal government only gets to spend N16.39 trillion in 2022 of which the capital spend (which affects me and you) gets only N5.35 trillion (compare this with N5.01 trillion to be borrowed)?

    The rest, as you might imagine, goes into statutory transfers N 768.28 billion; non-debt recurrent costs N6.83 trillion; the traditional elephant in the room – personnel costs N 4.11 trillion; pensions, gratuities and retirees’ benefits N577.0 billion and overheads N792.39 billion.

    As it was in 2015, so it was in 2016 till date – the pattern, that is. For nation said to be racing against time of which the annual fiscal instrument is supposed to offer some elixir, Nigerians have apparently long succumbed to its disappointing outcomes to pay any serious attention.

    Such was for yours truly the dilemma of explaining to ordinary folks who, beyond losing interest in the budget ritual, have come to see it as an instrument of provocation!

    At home somewhere in Kogi State at the weekend, I got into some animated discussion with some folks that left yours truly agape at how cynical the people have become of their government and its ways and means. The discussion had begun on the state of the Ilorin – Kabba – Lokoja highway – a contract which the federal government had long announced to the world had been awarded! To the folks, the fiction didn’t stop at the so-called contract; the artful deception by officials using the budget as alibi have over time presented the government itself as only a little more than a farce!

    And that was moments before Bisi Kazeem, the Federal Road Safety Corps alerted motorists travelling to and from the Southwest through Kabba-Omuo Ekiti highway of a failed section of the road at Iyamoye, Kogi State.

    Trust me; these are actually no more than minor plays in the charade that public finance in our clime has become. Today, few Nigerians remember that this same federal government signed a power project deal (PPI) with Siemens AG with the aim of increasing Nigeria’s electricity generation to 25,000 megawatts (MW) within six years. That deal signed by Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany and President Muhammadu Buhari tagged the Presidential Power Initiative (PPI), began on August 31 2018, when Merkel and her business delegation, including Siemens AG CEO Joe Kaeser, visited Nigeria.

    The first leg, expected to be completed in 2021 included – the upgrade and expansion of transmission and distribution infrastructure – the Transmission Company of Nigeria (TCN) and Distribution Companies (Discos).

    To be sure, that was supposed to come under a government-to-government agreement.

    Well, this is 2021. Presently, no-one in the federal government seems to know what is going on beyond nebulous claims about disagreement bordering on local content! Thanks to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, we now know that whole agreement was mere dinner talk! Interested readers should visit the YouTube to watch her encounter with the German leader Angela Markel where the so-called Siemens/FG deal came up! The German leader could not even remember if ever there was such an agreement!

    What of the Mambilla Hydro-power project on which billions of naira have reportedly been spent?

    At inception in 1982 under the Shagari administration, the project was designed to generate 2,600MW electricity. In 2012, the capacity was increased to 3,050MW due to the expansion of the former Gembu dam now Nya dam. In 2017, this federal government would approve the construction of the project by a Chinese firm at a cost of $5.8bn. Under the agreement, China’s Export-Import Bank would provide 85 per cent in financing while the federal government was expected to provide the balance 15 per cent.

    Thereafter, the Nigerian factor would set in. The initial 3,050MW would be revised downwards to 1,500 megawatts, ‘to make it bankable and acceptable to the lenders’.

    In the words of former Minister of Power, Saleh Mamman, “We discovered that the 3050 megawatts is not feasible. We sent officials to China to review the project and the memo is on the table of Mr President waiting for approval”.

    That was long after the project was supposed to have kicked off, and after which public funds had been sunk. The revised cost was later put at $4 billion.

    Yet, if the BBC report on same is to be believed, no single block could be sighted to show that the multi-billion naira power project is on course, the exception being the houses built by the President Olusegun Obasanjo government for the engineers and other staff.

    Need one bring up Ajaokuta, or even the four moribund refineries on which billions of dollars continues to be spent without delivering value to the people of this country?

    And now the other aspect of this piece – the on-going Mid-Term Ministerial Performance Review retreat. I watched Vice President Yemi Osinbajo present the work of his committee tasked with the creation of the Economic Sustainability Plan (ESP). Few Nigerians will not be enthralled by the digital-savvy VP as he flipped through the presentations on PowerPoint. But then, the issue is whether the Nigerian reality came near the glowing colours as presented by Prof Osinbajo. That is not to suggest that things are all gloom. And talking of giving credit where it is due, the administration obviously deserves plaudits on a number of areas not least of which is the five per cent growth in the GDP (year-on-year) in the second quarter of 2021.

    The point that got me – which yours truly had long expressed fears – is what the Vice President admitted as the apparent lack of synergy between the fiscal side of governance and the monetary side.

    While both parties have just enough time to sort things out as the administration races to the finish line, it is even now doubly apparent that the real work is in the streets. After all, the street is where poverty, unemployment, crime and destitution walk on four legs!

  • IPOB: take responsibility!

    IPOB: take responsibility!

    Curious — isn’t it?  — how top South East voices gloss over an existential threat.

    Even if the South East morphs into Biafra, that can’t be antidote to routine violence and galloping outlawry, can it?

    Yet, instead of brutal frankness with selves, all we hear and see is sickening rationalization; and pathetic stunts to whitewash IPOB and its excesses.

    The other day, Eyinnaya Abaribe, Abia senator and Senate minority leader, wowed the media with his world exclusive: no less than 30 separatist groups dart and dash with patriotic mayhem in the South East.  So folks, don’t you ever rush to blame IPOB for all the outrage out there!

    That was news as a bomb — and the headlines responded with predictable gusto!

    But when folks hinted maybe security agencies should probe Abaribe’s intimacy with separatists and allied matters, it turned out a claim, pushed with senatorial fizz and dash, was no more than colourful tales from the IPOB grapevine!

    Sure, those hardy folks could be earnest — impostors indeed could be cloning IPOB. But IPOB itself could be hiding behind a finger, in brave cowardice, to escape harsh censure, deservedly earned.

    Whichever way, it’s bad enough a senator of the Federal Republic would own and flash such rumours.  But after hugging media headlines, the questions after, probing and pointed, came like a hangover, after an uproarious bash.

    Suddenly, the senator appears less giddy, as original and definitive source of his earlier claim.  It’s a classic case of not taking responsibility!

    Much earlier, the respected Dr. Chukwuemeka Ezeife, Anambra State governor in the still-birth 3rd Republic, suggested the security agencies might be setting up IPOB for proxy crimes.

    Well, in high pitched power plays, that can’t be completely ruled out.  Still, whispering campaigns that the security agencies — never saintly and holy IPOB — murdered Dr. Chike Akunyili, harmless, accomplished and debonair, sound rather rich and comic.  No spin can sweeten that brutish assassination.

    While still on pro-IPOB conspiracy theories, perhaps the likes of Joe Igbokwe should rejoice that those who torched his Nnewi country home, with his treasured study, are shadowy criminals, luxuriating among Abaribe’s 30 separatist groups, and not IPOB — even after IPOB had savaged Igbokwe with a slew of threats! Some fib.

    But even if there were any substance to that fib, who really is to blame?  The insane messages Nnamdi Kanu spewed before he was caged?  The Igbo elders’ conspiracy of silence over Kanu’s explosive threats? Or those now allegedly trying to hang IPOB, for own crimes, because of its notoriety?

    In the mealy-mouthed, perennial IPOB white-wash, the concept of “hell is other people” — in the sense of the famous popular misinterpretation of John-Paul Sarte’s even more famous play — comes handy.  That grand misinterpretation is we are good; others are bad — hell is other people!

    Faced with the gruesome Akunyili murder, and free-wheeling mayhem in his state these last two weeks, Governor Willy Obiano’s own theory is that some murderous ruffian “imports”, not Anambra natives, were to blame.

    No proof to say that’s gubernatorial untruth; just as there is no evidence it’s the truth.

    But if it were the truth, where might those ruffians come from?  Neighbouring Igbo states?  Or outside?  Critical questions waiting for urgent answers!

    Months earlier when Adamawa’s Ahmed Gulak was bumped off, in cold blood, on Imo streets, a putative theory bobbed.  Whodunnit?  Outsiders beyond Igboland!

    Now that a Gulak has morphed into an Akunyili, the tragedy hits home; and “unknown gunmen” are replacing “known” Fulani herdsmen, in racy newspaper headlines!  In a land seized by own violence, sundry blood soaks the barn, just as a rash of others celebrate near-escapes!

    Yet, our Eastern siblings still live in sweet denial!

    Somewhat, the “unlettered” North (not without its own lunatics in geo-political matters) — not the preening Igbo nor the hyper-educated Yoruba — seems generally more conscious (and restrained) that bad history won’t repeat itself.

    After the January 1966 coup and the skewed killings that rocked the old North and the old West, the North soaked its hands in blood, with revenge killings of Easterners in the North, in what history has chalked as the northern pogroms, from 29 May 1966. That climaxed in the revenge coup of July 1966; and plumbed into Biafra 1 — the Civil War (1967-1970).

    Will there be Biafra 2?  And maybe, a side Armageddon on the Oodua front?  Our triumphant folks on either side, gorged on sweet Fulani hate, with cheerleaders in Nnamdi Kanu and Sunday Igboho (both now caged), don’t seem to particularly care!

    Now, don’t mix stuff up.  Pushing self-determination, in a skewed federation like Nigeria’s, isn’t bad per se.  But if you do that with minds addled with incandescent hate, how do you even think straight?  If you can’t think straight, how do you marshal winsome tactics and strategies?

    A bubble of passion greeted Justice Minister Abubakar Malami’s hint at putative state of emergency, should the mayhem at Awka threaten the Anambra November election.  That echoes the lack of strategy, on that front, beyond cheap grandstanding.

    Predictably, that “threat” was met with a clatter of false equivalences — Nigerians’ favourite fallacy when the chips are down and facts run painfully short.  Why impose an emergency in Anambra with the killing of a few, and not at Zamfara, Kaduna and Niger, where bandits slaughter the multitude?

    Appealing?  Sure.  But only in beer parlours, where liqueur has killed the brain’s capacity to think clearly!

    Well, breaking news!  The facts of northern bandits and Anambra — and by extension, South East “unknown gunmen” — are not the same.  But those who think they are can luxuriate in their sweet delusions.  While still on delusion, perhaps those who claim the two are the same should invite, to the South East, planes that daily strafe those northern bandits!

    Neither will any historical scarecrow even cut it.  Yes, Prime Minister Abubakar Tafawa Balewa (a northern head of government) imposed the tragic state of emergency that marked the beginning of the end for the 1st Republic.

    But then, President Olusegun Obasanjo (a southern president) had twice in this republic imposed two state of emergencies, on Ekiti and Plateau states, for situations far less dire, than the present Anambra bind.

    So, those who bait the legal and legitimate order had better brace for dire consequences.  Like citizens, states have rights too!  Besides, when you romanticize rising anarchy, you force the government’s hands to return normalcy.

    Let the Igbo elite put their house in order, instead of railing at others and making curious excuses for IPOB.  If the emergency threat spurs a shock therapy, which forces folks out there  to take responsibility — at last! — it would be better late than ever.

    It’s too late — and rich — to whitewash IPOB and the evil placed at its doors.

     

  • Killings in southeast

    Killings in southeast

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The mass killings that has been the lot of major parts of the northern Nigeria in the last few years is spreading to the south-eastern part of the country with malevolent alacrity. Last week, the widower of the much beloved late Professor Dora Akunyili, the former Director General of NAFDAC and Minister of Information, who stood up against the shenanigans of the anti-constitutional elements in the dying days of late President Umaru Yar’Adua’s government, Dr Chike Akunyili, was gunned down in most brutal manner in Anambra State.

    As in every other thing concerning the Igbos, Anambra State has become the epicentre of the brewing insurgency or is it attacks on the Igbo race, in the southeast. Perhaps even more because Anambra State is getting ready for the gubernatorial election next month, an election the separatist group, the Independent People of Biafra (IPOB) has vowed will not take place, life in the state is increasingly becoming nasty, short and brutish. Of course, Anambra remains the mirror of the best and worst of the Igbo race.

    If the accounts in the media are reliable, those who murdered Dr Akunyili, mistook him for a politician, as he was reportedly riding with his orderly, who was also murdered along with his driver, in a manner suggestive of political killing. On its part, IPOB has disassociated itself from the murder, claiming that the respected physician was murdered by state security agents, while the state security service has denied any such act of wanton criminality. Of note, many other souls have been wasted the same way Dr Akuyili was gruesomely killed.

    Indeed, it has become extremely dangerous to drive around with police escorts or in convoys suggestive of political campaigns in the state. To confirm how serious the situation has become, the planned gubernatorial election campaign flag-off of the All Progressive Congress (APC) and that of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) have been called off. The candidates of all parties in the state, save for the All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) candidate Professor Chukwuma Soludo, are reportedly engaged in stealth public political campaign.

    Maybe Professor Soludo, who was a victim of attack by gunmen in his community, few months ago, in which a commissioner was kidnapped, and policemen killed, has become emboldened by experience, to engage in campaign, despite the huge risk involved. To ensure that other Nigerians get a fair share of the unfolding nightmare, the ubiquitous amateur cameramen hanging around with their smart phones, capture and share to the world real time the tragedy of a failing nation.

    As a classical confirmation of a failing state, the federal authorities which control the security agencies, including the police, are contented to throw darts at IPOB as being responsible for the brutal killings, while generally the mass murders are attributed to unknown gunmen. Except for instances of extra judicial killings of the alleged members of the killer gang, in Imo State, following the murder of APC chieftain Ahmed Gulak, few months ago, there is yet no instance of arresting or publicly trying those responsible for the killings across Igbo land.

    So, when state officials say it is IPOB that is killing the people they claim to be seeking their liberation, IPOB in turn claims that it is agents of the state and the oppressive oligarchy that has captured power that is killing the people in the region, to give IPOB a bad name. While the diatribe goes on, the carnage goes unabated. For this column, those elected or selected to govern the states and the country, must show capacity to deal with the killings by mass murderers in Igbo land, whoever they maybe, otherwise in no distant future they will be completely de-legitimatized.

    Read Also: Killings: Army launches ‘Exercise Golden Dawn’ in Anambra

    In their campaign to completely de-legitimize the elected officials, IPOB has increasingly called for sit-at-home campaigns, and for good or bad reasons, such calls have been successful. While the majority claim they obey IPOB’s directive out of fear of the consequences of disobedience, there are those who are sympathetic to the directive, as a legitimate way of protesting the marginalization of the Igbo by the present government at the centre.  With Monday originally set out as the day for the sit-at-home protest, the observance days are increasing with alacrity.

    While many parts of the states now work from Tuesday to Friday, last Friday, October 1, and a day in the previous week that the leader of IPOB Mazi Nnamdi Kanu appeared in court, were also declared sit-at-home days. Even when the touted spokesman of IPOB, Emma Power, clarified that Mondays should revert to workdays, the sit-at-home which affected even students who were billed to take the WAEC examinations, continued, with some renegade members of IPOB insisting that people should sit-at-home all the Mondays.

    As a development economist, Professor Chukwuma Soludo has warned that every day, Ndi Anambra, sit-at-home, in obedience to the directive, the state losses N19.6 billion. Joined with the other four Igbo states, where the sit-at-home is observed, the losses are substantial to the nation’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP), every Monday of the week. Reports from Anambra indicate that the October 1 sit-at-home was particularly obeyed, for good or for bad reason. While that day was a national holiday, it is instructive that the usual Independence Day celebrations were shunned completely in the state.

    The success of the sit-at-home is a premonition that the planned November 6, gubernatorial election, in Anambra State may not take place. And if does, it may note reflect the will of the majority of those who are willing to vote, were the security situation to be normal. To ensure that the election, even if it holds does not represent the will of the people, IPOB has reportedly ensured that no one allows his building to be used as campaign office, or have any poster pasted on it.

    With the elected and selected government officials from the region suffering legitimacy challenges in the eyes of members of IPOB and their supporters, the apex socio-cultural organisation of ndi-igbo, the Ohaneze Ndigbo, have been struggling to rouse the people to weigh their options wisely. Again, for some members of IPOB, the Ohaneze leadership is a sell-out and should also be ignored. The import is that increasingly unless there is a reversal in the obedience to the IPOB agenda, the political and cultural leaders in the zone would be completely de-legitimized.

    While this column has railed against the glaring marginalization of the southeast by the present federal government, and the security mayhem caused by the armed herdsmen, it does not think that making the southeast ungovernable will benefit the political advancement of the region. Those who have the clout must reach out to IPOB to weigh the options most beneficial to the southeast.

  • Our nightmare’s far from over

    Our nightmare’s far from over

    By Sanya Oni

    For those hounds there baying for the blood of Godwin Emefiele, I must confess that they do have a number of things going for them not least of which is the fact that our beloved naira has, finally, fatally succumbed to a degenerative disease from which it seems unlikely to recover. When the rate initially crossed the psychological threshold of the N500 to the dollar mark, yours truly was probably one among many ready to bet that the plunge was only but a temporary thing. Then, it was so easy to recall that the naira actually suffered the same fate in 2016 when the economy first took a plunge under the Buhari administration.

    But the naira at N580-something to the dollar with no signs of respite anytime soon?

    Whereas the Good Shepherd spoke of faith of the size of the tiny mustard as sufficient to move mountains, in our case, we may have arrived at such moments where even the best of our faiths and piety combined will simply not suffice!

    As it appears, the nightmare, far from being a passing phase, seems likely to endure the whole of the long night.

    True, Nigeria is said to be a country of many paradoxes – or incongruities. Consider for instance that our economy, has, officially been on a steady cruise in the positive territory since the year began; the National Bureau of Statistics actually found that the economy grew by 5.01 per cent in the second quarter — the strongest growth since fourth quarter 2014. If one imagined that the development would somehow reflect on the performance of the national currency, the very opposite has been the case with the naira on a precipitous decline for reasons that are neither hard to explain nor difficult to understand: we are a consuming rather than a producing nation. And an import-dependent one too!

    The oil sector, despite the noise about diversification, still accounts for 85 per cent of our foreign exchange earnings. Currently, that sector has remained virtually in limbo. In January for instance, production actually averaged 1.1 million barrels per day despite the budget’s projection of two million bpd. But that is not nearly half of the trouble in the circumstance that the nation’s appetite for forex continues to grow in leaps and bounds. Yes in leaps and bounds – from such invisibles as school fees to medical bills in foreign hospices to personal travel allowances for leisure and business to the usual visible of trade accounts for raw materials imports, to spares and other industrial goods.

    And then of course the other paradox – the surge in oil prices which should ordinarily benefit the economy but instead leaves the federation account with more and more subsidy bill to pay!

    Read Also: Emefiele: Non-oil sector leading Nigeria’s economic recovery

    Although these factors are way beyond Emefiele and his team, it suffices that some heads will need to be served on the platter simply because things are not going the way they should. That the condemning mobs have not only found their voice, but are literally screaming blue murder should therefore be quite easy to understand!

    However, only if the baying mob will hesitate to cast the proverbial stone will they, hopefully, realise, just like in the famous Bible example of the adulterous woman, that the real culprit is not just at large, they, the judgmental mob no less sinning than the quarry sought to summarily despatch.

    Of course, the real story out there is that Emefiele and co at the apex bank have never truly been in charge of anything; not in the arena of interest rate where the banks are only too eager to play the Shylock; not in inflation management despite all the noise about ‘inflation targeting’. Nigerians surely know where the real power lies. As for the humdrum of activities that have characterised the Monetary Policy Committee meetings where those increasingly boring statements are parcelled out, they are certainly no more than empty motions that the nation needs to assure itself that some things are going on.

    The same goes for forex management; never mind the pious decrees routinely issued by the apex bank; they are merely for the books; the real lever actually resides in the back alleys from where the shadowy the players call the shots.

    In other words, between Nigerians variegated cults – those of the wayward bankers, the bureaucrat with far more money than can lawfully be put in a financial institution, the shady contractor for whom the rule of process means nothing and so needs hauls of cash to push things; the politician with endless troves of cash but whose sources are neither visible nor explainable, Nigerians only need to understand how this confederacy works to appreciate why things are not working! Which is why it remains intriguing that the judgment about the current fate of the naira continues to be put solely on Emefiele’s head.

    But even more intriguing is how the activities of their enablers, the hordes of Bureaux de Change (BDCs) and their cousins-in-infamy, the parallel market, have continued to escape the radar. At least, that was the case until July when the apex bank drew blood! It didn’t stop at shooing them off the forex arena; it slapped a moratorium on new entrants.

    And the charge against them: the BDCs had defeated their purpose of existence to provide forex to retail user, but instead, had become wholesale and illegal dealers!

    Of course, that their numbers grew alarmingly, from a mere 74 in 2005 to 2,700 in 2016 and then 5,500 in the space of six years under the Buhari administration itself says a lot more than the CBN would care to admit; certainly a lot more than what is presented in the quantum of the money to be made by merely hawking foreign currencies in street corners!  That they are increasingly linked to other subversive activities ranging from money laundering to terrorism financing couldn’t be anything but a measure of their clout in the nation’s cult of power as indeed the global network of terror in which Nigeria has long been sucked.

    This is what those after Emefiele are not telling. The $10,000 sold to each BDC twice a week before the forex supply cut, which inevitably ends in the parallel market, though a minor part is nonetheless a crusher. The word for Emefiele should be – BEWARE – as the battle has not even started yet!

  • Election-eve pastimes

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Since 2002/2006, three agenda had always dominated newspaper headlines whenever elections peeped:

    — alleged term extension plot by the incumbent president;

    — a sovereign national conference (SNC) push for an interim “government of national unity” (GNU), in lieu of frozen elections, while the “bastard” Constitution is re-made along federal lines;

    —  the perennial bedlam over “power shift”.

    It’s the crusading rights lobby; and the ever-plotting and oft-scheming politicians pushing their favorite election-eve pastimes — hardly undemocratic!

    What appears civic slavery — and so, hardly democratic — is the people’s routine submission to these rituals; and the media, the all-knowing Fourth Estate that should jog collective memory, diving into the fray: no yesterday, just today and never tomorrow!

    It’s routine bedlam that generates more noise than news; and from which everyone gets merrily intoxicated and short-changed.

    That it might yet happen by 2026 is real — except, of course, there is a conscious and deliberate change in media mindset and focus.  That would be a historic game-changer, if it happens.

    To be sure, the election-cycle hysteria of “hidden agenda” is a sad legacy of the Ibrahim Babangida power days, when the self-named military president and Army general took everyone on a bumpy ride, in a futile bid at perpetual stay in power.

    By 2006, former President Olusegun Obasanjo did his image and reputation no shine, when he attempted — but failed — to amend the 1999 Constitution, to stay on as president after two terms, in the notorious “third term” gambit.

    That was defeated, of course.  But from 2006, no election eve had come without the rights lobby throwing their favourite scarecrow of “third term”, or “hidden agenda”, leveraging the deep people-government mistrust to sound credible.

    All too true, barely a year after the 2019 elections, this band of “human rights” lawyers chimed their usual chartered rumours, which they nevertheless served as some definitive gospel.

    Muhammadu Buhari, they swore, indeed nurses a “third term” agenda!  But for once, that scarecrow didn’t fly; and since, it’s been quiet and placid on that usually bubbly front.

    If “hidden agenda” and ”third term”, its post-military rule mutation, had roots deep in the best-forgotten military era, GNU, in lieu of democratic elections, was rooted in Gen. Abdulsalami Abubakar’s snappy transition, after the long-winding cant and deceit of the IBB-Sani Abacha years.

    In truth, GNU was just but bubbling foam over the split in the ranks of the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO), among other pro-democracy forces.

    NADECO was the heroic pressure group that boxed the military into a stalemate; and forced the return to democracy.  But it has, of late, coalesced into a lobby agitating for a brand new constitution, forged from restructuring.  It also pushes that a new Constitution be built on regions and “ethnic nationalities”, as new federating units.

    That, it must be said, came from the 1998/1999 take by NADECO puritans that every material condition must be right before transiting from military to civil rule.  Otherwise, they had warned, all might end in a fiasco as earlier republics.  ”Restructuring” was core to that demand.

    But the more pragmatic NADECO elements counter-swore that democracy was always work-in-progress; and that its Nigerian hue would inch towards a better federal union, as it self-corrects, in the long, long process.  Otherwise?  Sterile military rule, which neither offers practice nor guarantees perfection.

    The less finicky, conservative or centrist, whose idea of politics is just power by whatever means, aligned with the pragmatic NADECO bloc, backing Gen. Abubakar’s snappy transition.  Therefore, many dashing NADECO heroes ended in the lurch!

    So, each time elections approached, the GNU lobby always saw chaos; and railed at the 1999 Constitution as a fraud; and called for a freeze in some GNU, while the “bastard” constitution got fixed.

    The latest manifestation of that is the NADECO Independence anniversary call for a new Constitution before 2023, speaking through Ayo Opadokun, its secretary.

    So far, however, these contrasting views have fetched mixed results.

    Between 1999 and 2021, “restructuring” has gained more traction, as the country faces rising insecurity and tension — clear peril, NADECO and co gloat, of Nigeria’s awry “unitary federalism”.

    Still, that hardly equates a complete bragging right.  Indeed, the pragmatic blocs could claim some credit too: amendments-by-instalment to the 1999 Constitution.

    True, gradual amendments have not birthed the democratic utopia NADECO craves. But neither has it forced the crash its vatic political prophesy thundered.

    Unlike the 1st Republic (five years), 2nd Republic (four), the still-birth 3rd (a diarchy that aborted after less than two years), the current 4th Republic is 22 years — and counting!

    No, the federalists’ sworn apocalypse has not quite come — nor, as some wager, ever come!  The thing is beyond mutual baiting, neither side seems cocksure.

    Still, the latest tension — real or contrived — gifts the federalists’ warnings fresh urgency.  But the rebuff, by the other side, reminds you of the Soothsayer-Caesar exchange, in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar:

    “The Ides of March are come,” taunted Caesar, en route to the Capitol. “Aye, Caesar, but not gone”, returned the Soothsayer.  Before the day’s exit, Caesar was history!

    Two valid, if opposing questions, therefore: could the troubled democracy of the last 22 years be no more than a long, long road to perdition, without urgent and radical constitutional tinkering?

    Or are the crises the normal teething problems and painful evolution, en route to incrementally building a great country?

    Indeed, the perennial bedlam over “power shift”, which now predictably rages on (as it did in the past on virtual election eves) is no more than a mere symptom, from these two fundamental questions.

    What is needed — and urgently too — is some elite consensus on the winning political formula for Nigeria.  But that consensus cannot come, if the opposing sides yell at, instead of talk with, each other.

    To reset mutual exchange, the Fourth Estate should moderate on high reason and earned trust — both, sadly now deficient.  It can’t afford to be captive voices of the two gladiators.

    Pushing for workable compromises is the media’s historic duty to the coming generation.