The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Not an evil servant

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

     

    Amos Oludiran Fashesin, who exits as permanent secretary from the Osun civil service on Thursday, is not your run-of-the-mill evil — sorry,  civil — servant; whose ubiquitous venality blights the public space.

    Rather, he is the quintessential public servant, imbued with tact, devotion to duty and clear loyalty; and without whose bureaucratic nous the government cannot drive public policy, ensure sane governance and leave indelible legacies.

    That pristine tribe, of transparent and devoted bureaucrats, were feared extinct, after the civil service reforms — that turned deforms — of the Babangida years.

    Even then, the IBB-era shocks, that bred latter-year bureaucratic venality, graft and sleaze, only climaxed the “with-immediate-effect” retirement gales, of the Murtala-Obasanjo regime (1975-1979).

    That pre-purge tribe drove the great Western Region bureaucracy.  Under the great Chief Simeon Adebo, that civil service helped Chief Obafemi Awolowo to deliver his life-changing human development policies. That gave the West a decisive head start, among the original three federating regions.

    Fashesin and O’YES (Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme) are a throwback to that classical era and temper: a missionary bureaucrat tap into a visionary policy.  But more on O’YES presently.

    The loyal bureaucrat, helping to drive a key developmental policy, with a passion that goes beyond the call of duty, might mark the peak of Fashesin’s career; as he retires as permanent secretary, Osun Government House and Protocol.

    But the beginning was much humbler.  Fashesin had, in 1986, earned a second class upper in Agricultural Economics, from the University of Ibadan (UI).

    Yet, in 1990, he joined the Oyo State Primary School Management Board (PSMB), as a lowly level 4 clerical officer!  But that wasn’t even his dream job.  With his degree, he had hoped to make a glittering career in banking.  Still, thespians talk of small actors, never small roles.

    Indeed, Fashesin proved a zestful and consummate clerk, in his lowly position, though he had transferred to the Osun civil service, at the state’s creation in 1991.

    In 1993, Elder Femi Adelowokan, who later became head of service and secretary to the Osun State Government (SSG), felt piqued enough, by Fashesin’s humble post, to take his file to Governor Isiaka Adeleke (aka Serubawon) for higher conversion.

    With that, Fashesin got pole-vaulted from clerical officer on Grade Level 04 to higher executive officer (HEO) on Grade Level 08.  But he would not be admitted into the administrative cadre — the policy-shaping arm of the civil service where he rightly belonged, by virtue of his qualifications — until April 1995.

    But whatever Fashesin lost during his early career trough, he got compensated by those he called “destiny helpers” — his seniors, pleading the case of their cherished and trusted subordinate.  That helped to propel him to the peak of his career, despite the odds.

    In 1993, Adelowokan, then his boss at Planning and Budget, facilitated Fashesin’s conversion, from the clerical to the executive cadre.

    In 2010, new Governor Rauf Aregbesola, in a hurry to drive his core development policies, had asked Elder Segun Akinwusi, then the head of service, to make out a three-name shortlist to pick from.  But Akinwusi told the governor he had his dream candidate: Fashesin!  That led to the O’YES career-crowning glory.

    On 31 March 2021, under Governor Gboyega Oyetola, 22 days to Fashesin’s retirement date, the ace bureaucrat got romped from coordinating director, Government House and Protocol, to substantive permanent secretary, bossing that department.

    It was a glorious career photo-finish that doesn’t get more dramatic!

    Besides, that career peak speaks to the life tenacity of a man that read primary six thrice, not because he was a dullard but because the elder Gabriel and Funmilayo Fashesin, his late parents, could not fund secondary education, for their brilliant son.

    And to the steady hands of fate, that blessed him with Joseph and Alice Awe (of cherished and blessed memory), his kind uncle and wife, who took him in, funded his education between 1974 and 1992, and pushed him to fulfil his manifest destiny.

    Now, o yes — the O’YES story!

    Ripples crossed Fashesin’s path, on field research to Osun, for a book in the works, on the Aregbesola governorship years.

    Of course, the Osun Youth Empowerment Scheme (O’YES), a novel youth volunteer, training and empowerment scheme, was the flagship, among the slew of other human developmental programmes of that era (2010-2018).

    It grabbed the attention of the World Bank and birthed a nationwide, World Bank-powered variant called Youth Empowerment Support Services Operation (YESSO), which Osun integrated with O’YES, to develop its youth.

    But with the progressive take-over of the Federal Government in 2015, O’YES also inspired the Buhari Presidency’s N-Power job volunteer scheme.

    The O’YES implementing committee members were Femi Ifaturoti (chairman), Mrs. Folake Adegboyega, then commissioner for Women Affairs and later, Youth Engagement and Empowerment (O’YES mother ministries back then), Kola Omotunde-Young, Gbenga Odulaja and Femi Oyedele.  Col. Enibukun Oyewole (rtd) was — and still is — the O’YES Commandante, taking care of the cadets’ para-military drills and character building.

    Fashesin, as O’YES state coordinator, was the most senior career civil servant on the implementation committee.   But he would own O’YES with zest and rare verve, which went beyond the call of duty.

    He would take the “gospel” of O’YES to the senior executive course (SEC) 41 (2019), of the National Institute of Policy and Strategic Studies (NIPSS), where he earned the prestigious mni (member, National Institute).  That alone, with his illustrious service record, could have cemented his status as a civil servant of class and dash.

    On O’YES, at NIPSS, he would produce illuminating literature and exhilarating discourse.  That brilliant outing, aside from peer awe, earned him recommendation as putative directing staff, for NIPSS — which could come handy, post-retirement from the Osun service.

    Fashesin, in the eye of Osun’s last two governors: the one approved his NIPSS training; the other made him permanent secretary, 22 days to his retirement date.

    Aregbesola: “Fashesin was very cerebral, efficient and effective in assigned duties.”

    Oyetola: “The appointment [as permanent secretary] was in recognition of his long-standing commitment to duty, hard work, competence and loyalty.”

    By Fashesin’s own expression: the service was fair to him, just as he too was fair to the service.  That could well be a refreshing remake of J.F. Kennedy’s famous quip: ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.

    That mutually beneficial code, steeped in the best tradition of patriotism, should fire younger career officers to excellence.  Fashesin’s glorious trail clearly shows the way.

  • Matawalle: Now, the ‘North’ is angry!

    Matawalle: Now, the ‘North’ is angry!

    By Sanya Oni

    Sadly, if one had thought that the nation had reached that point where voices of moderation would drown the babel calling not just for a showdown but baying for blood, recent events would seem to have reduced such to mere illusions. In other words, if we thought that we had had enough of the conflict entrepreneurs stoking the fires across the board; it is only because we are yet to reckon with their co-travellers on the other side of the opportunistic train: the ethnic champions with their galling exceptionalism, and whose sense of justice is as warped as their psychology of entitlement is egregious.

    These are interesting times no doubt. The other day it was Bala Mohammed, the Bauchi governor with a rather strange doctrine of extra-territoriality as touching the Fulani nationality. The Fulani, he said, could not be restricted to any part of the sub region. They are, according to him, citizens of the world and so are free to move to anywhere of their choosing in the promotion of their trade of pastoralism. Then, he did say also that simply because the Fulani “has been exposed to cattle rustlers who carry a gun, kill him and take away his cows, he has no option to carry AK 47 because the government and the society are not protecting him”.

    By the way, that is supposed to preclude the other victims – the farmers who in recent time, have had to bear the brunt of the intransigence of the pastoralist Fulanis.

    And talking of the ownership of the forest ranges, he would aver, in reaction to the eviction notice served on illegal occupants of the state’s forest reserves by Arakunrin Rotimi Akeredolu, the Ondo State governor based on security reports on the untoward activities of some criminal herders residing there that:  “Nobody owns any forests in Nigeria, it’s owned by Nigeria. Under section 23, 24 and 25 of the constitution, every Nigerian is free to stay anywhere”.

    Those provisions, at least in the opinion of the governor, would suffice to extinguish the rights of other Nigerians to acquire property – and that to a brother governor, a learned Silk! A case of the rights of those herders to reside albeit illegally in the state reserves being superior to the rights of others including to the security of the generality of the people of the state!

    That was Bala Mohammed, some months past.

    Now, a former Chief of Army Staff, Lt-Gen. Abdulrahamah Dambazau (rtd), has since picked up from there. Addressing participants of Course 5 of the War College last week, the former army top brass puts the activity of the proscribed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) and Oodua Peoples Congress (OPC) on the same pedestal as the Boko Haram’s bloody campaign in the northeast!

    Take note of his clever (opportunistic) choice of words: “The two groups have been making efforts to ignite nationwide inter-ethnic conflicts through their violent attacks on northerners resident or transacting businesses in the south as a quick way to realise their dream for a divided Nigeria”.

    “We” – I guess he could not have meant any other group other than his beloved North – “see parallels between Boko Haram, a religious extreme (sic) group, and the IPOB and OPC, both ethnic extremist groups. All the three groups operate on the platform of extremism.”

    The army chief is no doubt entitled to his views. Not so however, his deliberate mischaracterisation of the different groups. That is not only opportunistic but is patently disingenuous. The truth of course is that the three groups are different in their stated missions and objectives as indeed their modus operandi. If there is anything that unites them, it would seem in their common rejection of the way the country is currently constituted.

    Interestingly, he has not a word for the other source of terror – the activities of the criminal herders known to give vent to the simmering tensions between tribes and regions – and of which the entire world – save the leadership of the north – has long acknowledged as posing the most existential threat to all!

    That takes us to the latest offering by Bello Mohammed Matawalle, the Zamfara governor. Again, this is typical. Here is a man whose domain is not only besieged but seems set to be overrun by the bandits but is nonetheless convinced that the source of his headache lies elsewhere.

    Imagine such an individual thrusting himself forward as the champion of the northern interest! These are strange times indeed.

    To Matawalle, the time for fine preachments is long past; the north, his beloved region, is not only aggrieved, but is prepared to reply in kind to provocations from any quarters, especially those he claimed has made his people ‘target sport’.  Northerners, he claims are facing unsearchable conditions in many parts of the Southwest and Southeast in particular. He was particularly miffed by the clashes in Sasha Market, Ibadan, Oyo State and the reported killings of northerners in Imo State.

    “We have seen the destruction, the killings and the devastation recently at Sasha Market against northerners and their economic interests.

    “Properties worth billions of Naira were lost in addition to human lives, yet some leaders in the Southwest are downplaying the atrocities committed or, worst (sic) still, justifying it”, he claimed.

    He wondered why northern leaders and elites have remained silent while they are supposed to stand firm, in the manner in which other leaders of the south are doing “even when they know that their people are at fault”.

    On the alleged killing of northerners in Imo State last Saturday, he called on all leaders with conscience and fear of God to speak out “against this continued barbarism and hatred.”

    “We will not take that any longer as no human life is worthier than another,”

    He then followed with a dire warning – no community or region has the monopoly of violence.

    Said he: “If northerners and their means of livelihood will not be protected, accommodated and be dignified anywhere they choose to stay in any part of the south, southerners should not expect protection from the north as the north has more than what it takes to respond to any kind of aggression and hatred.”

    We must of course be clear about the general meltdown in the security situation in the country. Whether it is in Ibarapa area in Oyo State where non-state actors are having a free reign in the clear vacuum created by the absentee national government that insists on holding on to the security apparatus even when things are falling apart, or in Imo as elsewhere where criminal elements continue to unleash mayhem for the same reasons; these are unfortunate as they are condemnable.

    But then, the tragedy must be seen in the low grade leadership foisted on the country at all levels. One refers here to a leadership class which sees problems through the blinkers of ethnicity and religion and has no shame about pushing noxious notions of unequal citizenship. And yet would say in another breadth that Nigeria belongs to all!

  • A matter of character

    A matter of character

    By Olatunji Dare

    Given Dr Goodluck Jonathan’s improbable path to power, his unremarkable performance in office and the tentativeness that was his trademark, his life out of power seemed guaranteed a rapid descent into the obscurity from which he had been thrust into celebrity.

    But time, it seems, was preparing him for a wholly redemptive second act, stripped of the starchy diffidence of the preceding act, the lexical infelicities, and the delicious locutions that a leading scholar has called “Jonathanisms.”

    The Jonathan in this second act is new, contemplative and vastly improved.  He is also liberated, freed from the sharp politicos and the hard men from the creeks whose shabby company he was constrained to keep back then, and in whose false adulation he was forced to bask during drinking orgies that continued far into the night, not in some seedy guest house, mark you, but right there on site.  Or so they said, who claimed to know the habit of the house.

    Nor did Mama “Dearis God o” Peace help matters.

    Today you are more likely to find the new Jonathan in the exalted company of seasoned statesmen, authentic celebrities, top executives of corporations, think-tanks and foundations with a global reach, men and women who shape the policies that influence the course of events listening attentively to his every word and nodding appreciatively as petals of wisdom drop from his lips.

    You are more likely to find him adjudicating in election disputes, chosen because of his reputation for fairness and even-handedness.  Whether that reputation was earned or merely ascribed is of little moment.  What counts is that his ls credited with that reputation, and that he has been deploying it in ways that confirm it.

    Some of the old starchiness lingers, but on the whole, he is more relaxed, even jaunty on occasion.  His delivery is crisp.  In vain do you scour it for traces of the false equivalencies and analogies, and the breathtaking leaps of logic with which his speeches were strewn back then.

    No wonder they want him to return to power for a third term that eluded his predecessor, President Olusegun Obasanjo and doubtless lies far beyond the reach of his successor, Muhammadu Buhari.

    The transition from the old Jonathan to the new one was far from seamless, however.  He experienced the kind of loneliness that only those who have held and lost high office in Nigeria know.  It can be brutal and disorienting.

    The phone that used to ring nonstop now sputters only intermittently.  After a while, it goes silent for days on end.  A ghostly silence pervades the house.  The visitors who once thronged the living room and even the family quarters have all found better use for their time.

    Invitations to all kinds of ceremonies dry up.  Full-page congratulatory adverts  that used to crowd out news content in the better newspapers on birthdays and wedding anniversaries all but vanish.  Unsolicited gifts no longer arrive at the gate by the truckload.

    For old times’ sake of just to kill boredom, you call up a former supplicant who would have stopped whatever he was doing back then and report immediately if you summoned him.  Now he will not even take your call, or take it and without even pretending to be the steward or a guest and tell you that he is not at home.  If he is in a foul mood, he might actually tell you gruffly that you have the wrong number and must never dial it again.

    Ingrates, all.

    Jonathan has been there; he knows the special loneliness that comes with being not just an ex-this or an ex-that, but of being an ex-president. From the way he narrated his experience the other day, loneliness after the Aso Rock years, is almost sepulchral.

    His speech recently in Bauchi, as the special guest of Governor Bala Mohammed, at the commissioning of the governor’s first legacy project, the 6.25 km. Sabon Kaura-Jos bypass, was only too evocative of that experience

    Hear him:

    “I have been in government for a reasonable time, I have attained a number of levels starting from deputy governor and most of our experience is that after leaving office, some of the people you think that if they don’t see you will not eat, will just forget that you even exist.”

    He could have said of such people that they would give you impression that they would have no intimacy even with their wives unless you approved it.  But once you leave office, they forget that you exist.  Liars, and bootlickers

    His host, Governor Bala Mohammed, was not that kind of person, Jonathan told his audience.  Unlike those aides and allies who had deserted him after he left office, the Bauchi governor was a trusted “son” and a person of unparalleled loyalty

    “Today,” Jonathan went on, “is a very big day for me, and you know why, because it is not easy for somebody to work with you in Nigeria then, even after leaving office, that person still continues with that kind of strong relationship with you.”

    Governor Mohammed, who once served in Jonathan’s Administration as a minister from the ranks of the Opposition was even more effusive. He gratefully acknowledged Jonathan as his mentor, and as a person who had made a great impact on his life.

    Jonathan had every right to regard that day as one he would never forget.  To immortalise the guest, the new bypass was named the Goodluck Jonathan Road.  It was also perhaps the first time anyone would in public acknowledge the much vilified former president as a mentor.

    All in all a fine outing for Dr Jonathan,

    There is a larger point that I would like to make here about the sociology of leadership and followership in Nigeria.  Dr Jonathan spoke of Governor Mohammed’s unparalleled loyalty. He would seem to imply that those who deserted him after he left office were deficit in loyalty.

    Loyalty is not a one-way affair.  There are those who would be disloyal, no matter what.  But as a rule, loyalty begets loyalty. How many of Jonathan’s aides and allies could count on his support when they needed it?  How many of them count on his standing by them?

    The relationship between boss and subordinate In Nigeria seems for the most part transactional.  It endures so long as it is profitable to either party. Or so long as there is a reasonable expectation of profit.  If no profit is guaranteed, each goes his or her separate way.

    This formulation seems to break down when applied to the APC National Leader Asiwaju Bola Tinubu and his associates.  Most of those who marched on the streets with him during the June 12 protests or waged the struggle from exile in the United States or immersed themselves in the progressive cause he has been championing have not deserted him, even though they have little to show for their steadfastness.

    Officials from the time he was governor of Lagos can be seen or heard today representing him and speaking for him at events in Nigeria and abroad.  His  concerns have largely remained their concerns.

    His legendary munificence helps, to be sure, but it does not explain everything.

    On both sides, it is a matter of character.  I suspect that it also has much to do with Tinubu’s large-heartedness, his willingness to forgive wrongs for the sake of a larger cause and move on.  We saw that large-heartedess on display during his visit to the home of the departed Afenifere spokesperson, Yinka Odumakin, to condole with his widow.

    Odumakin’s unprovoked, full-bore tirade last year against Tinubu, his one-time patron, has gone down even by Nigeria’s tawdry history as something of a milestone in political obscenity.

    And yet, it is from Tinubu that the most eloquent tribute to Odumakin has come.  This large-heartedness I believe, is a major source of Tinubu’s teeming and enduring followership.

     

  • Unlucky Imo

    Unlucky Imo

    By Gabriel Amalu

    Who are the criminals trying to set Imo State up for collateral damages by attacking police stations and correctional facilities? Obviously, they want the armed forces to vent their frustrations elsewhere on the common folks, who have no hand in the attacks. Of course, this column does not buy the street talk that the police and other security agencies have been overawed by the hoodlums who wish to see the state descend into anarchy.

    While the sacked IGP Mohammed Adamu pointed an accusing finger at the outlawed IPOB, the group has disassociated itself from the mayhem that has become the lot of the state. There is a joke in the social media that while the police are accusing IPOB for burning police headquarters and Correctional Centre in Imo State, a crime they have denied, the army is exonerating the Boko Haram from being responsible for the disappeared military fighter jet, even when the group has claimed responsibility.

    On its part, the government of Imo State has pointedly accused the former governor of Imo State, Owelle Rochas Okorocha, of orchestrating the mayhem in order to make the federal government declare a state of emergency in the state. In his response, the former governor asked the state government not to politicise the attacks, but instead has advised his successor, Senator Hope Uzodinma, to consult him for lessons on how to ensure the safety of the state and her citizens.

    Of course, Imo State has not been lucky with the quality of political leadership at the state level and that has affected the succession plans since 2003. The result is that the state has been exposed to persons whose pedigree and sources of wealth are shrouded in mystery. And wealth without work, has thrown up a desperate cache of political ragamuffins, who will not bat an eyelid to sell the state for lucre.

    On the present crisis, both the present and immediate former administrations have agreed that it is political ragamuffins that maybe holding the state by the jugular. In an interview with Channels Television, Governor Uzodinma claimed that the mayhem in the state is the handiwork of aggrieved politicians. His Commissioner for Information, Declan Emelumba, accused Rochas of attempting to use the violence “to repossess property government had sealed.”

    On his part, Rochas stated: “During my time as governor, Imo State was very peaceful and these security issues and agitations were on. We applied wisdom in the sense that we talked with the traditional rulers, the youth leaders and made them see reasons.” He went on: “as long as young men wake up in the morning and no job and poverty is ravaging the system, there is nothing the armed forces can do … the young men are coming out of schools, they are not getting jobs.”

    So while the present administration is pointing accusing finger at her immediate predecessor for organising the idle hands that are terrorising the state, the former administration is saying that the idle men are in abundance, even when they were in power. If we go by Rochas’s account, while he found a way to contain the ragamuffins, Uzodinma is incapable of doing that. According to him, when he was the governor “we collected more than 100 AK-47 rifles from the youths who came for exchange willingly, just by taking to them.”

    Of course, nobody will deny that Rochas has the gift of gab. As a governor, some of his greatest moments were behind the microphone, but I believe he was talking euphemistically when he said the ragamuffins surrendered their rifles “just by talking to them.” So, instead of “just talking to them”, the present administration has resorted to strong arm-tactics, and Rochas counsels: “engaging them with issues rather than this idea of bringing in air force and army as a first measure.”

    There is no doubt that Rochas should know what he is talking about, considering that he was at the helm of affairs for eight years. What he has not come clean is the kind of issues the governor needs to engage the army of jobless youths with. To gain that knowledge, he has asked Governor Hope Uzodinma to consult widely. In particular, the governor should consult him to learn how he handled IPOB, how he handled kidnapping, and how he handled agitators?

    But I doubt if Governor Hope Uzodinma will accept the Greek offer from his predecessor, considering the ongoing battle to repossess the assets former Governor Rochas Okorocha, allegedly gained corruptly in office, which has been seized by the state. While he was in office, this column wrote a number of articles, advising the then Governor Okorocha, to resist the temptation to turn the state to a private fiefdom, considering the information about the involvement of his family members in controlling every sector of the state economy.

    This column also strongly advised him not to succumb to the temptation to field his son-in-law as APC’s flag bearer, in the last gubernatorial elections, even when the ragamuffins around him were egging on. But, of course, he ignored us. Unfortunately, the carpetbaggers who surrounded him lied to him that he was a king, whose word was law, and he swallowed the bait. But when the house collapsed, the erstwhile praise singers scattered in different directions.

    Now that the state is buffeted by organised crime, the present administration is pointing fingers at those erstwhile carpetbaggers, who were living large without work, as the source of the mayhem. While it is left for the law enforcement agencies to unravel the criminals trying to foist a state of lawlessness on the poor citizens of Imo State, who are no less victims in the unlucky trajectory of governance in the state, the present administration must do all in its power to change the culture of poor governance in the state.

    Of note, Imo State is reputed to have the largest concentration of professors in the country, but unfortunately those who govern the state prefer to surround themselves with charlatans. There is also the intriguing fact that instead of setting up industries, the indigenes prefer to build hotels in the state. Perhaps, the governance models in the state, needs to change in other to change the orientation of the elite of the state. If this assertion is correct, then the solution to the challenges facing the state would have to come from the leadership in the state.

    The government of Senator Hope Uzodinma, would therefore need to change the philosophy of governance in the state. Even when his opponents deride him because of his emergence, through the controversial Supreme Court judgment, against Emeka Ihedioha, he can surprise the state indigenes with a superior performance in office.

  • Hijab

    Hijab

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    The Hijab, and the excessive love or hate it evokes, underscores the tricky cohabitation the colonial Brits left Nigeria’s public space.

    The colonial bureaucracy was basically Western — and Christian: days of work, dress of work and the entire panoply of colonial officialdom.

    Yet, the British successors, in the new Nigerian order after independence, were Muslim-led, northern politicians.

    Prime Minister, Alhaji Tafawa Balewa, adroitly navigated that delicate balance: Muslims working within a Christian frame.  But Muslim rights activists, down the years, were bound to challenge that status quo — skewed in their view.

    That is the root of the present Hijab “activism”.  But contrary to impassioned Christian-leaning media commentaries, there is nothing sinister about it. It’s just a manifestation of citizen rights, though in the religious sphere.

    But back to the fundament of a Christian-leaning public order.  Its most obvious pointer, now nevertheless “normal”, is simple: you rest on Sunday; work on other days.

    Sunday is the official Christian worship day (though Saturday is the Seventh-Day Adventists’, a Christian sect).  How Saturday got freed, as extended “weekend”, is another testimony, to the powerful Christian lobby, in Nigeria’s public space.

    In contrast, Friday is the Muslim worship day.  Yes, the public sector and businesses have somewhat squeezed out the Jumat worship time, from work hours on Fridays.  But that is nothing compared to Sundays, which Christians have all to themselves, to do as they please.

    Yet, challenging that skew gets the questioner tagged as “Muslim fanatic”.  That is systemic bullying — and is hardly fair, in a multi-religious democracy that claims to be secular.

    Yet, that is the illiberal temper Christian-leaning commentators tap into, when the Hijab question crops up: branding themselves sweet saints, up against repellant sinners.

    The holy Father Matthew Kukah just did his seasonal tirade, linking Hijab to the “political” Shariah that swept through the North, from Zamfara State; from 27 October 1999, though Zamfara’s criminal Shariah came into force on 27 January 2000.

    True, the mischief of “political shariah”, while a southern Christian was elected president, was clear.  But how does that vitiate the fundamental right of the Muslim girl to wear the Hijab, if she so desires, as part of her innate identity, and projection of her faith?

    Of course, the Holy Kukah, well adept at muddying the waters, virtually decreed both are one and the same; sure his “speaking truth to power” zealots would swallow his polemic without thinking.  It’s such a ringing abuse of pulpit and public platforms!

    Then, celebrated columnist and revered voice of print journalism, Ray Ekpu, penned a one-sided piece on the Kwara Hijab controversy.

    Aside from misreporting the Court of Appeal verdict (endorsing a Kwara High Court decision on the matter), Mr. Ekpu would have been absolutely blameless, had he front-loaded his Christian bias — legitimate and understandable, being a Christian himself.

    But he made it out as if his view — a Christian partisan’s view: again, hardly illegitimate — was the view: correct, universal, commonsensical and cosmopolitan; making the Muslims’ equally legitimate, but contrary position, crude, backward, outdated and savage.  That’s not true.

    But that is the grand pretence, laced with conceit, that the Christian-leaning lobby always push, on the Hijab, which they don’t understand; or even bother to, just because they boast formidable media penetration.

    That hypocrisy comes with an additional fraud: an illiberal lobby, baiting the reasonable and the unprejudiced, in the best of liberal traditions, to impose their skewed, hardly liberal view, as the received wisdom of high and polite society.

    To be clear: on the Hijab, there is no saint or sinner.  Each partisan only hustles for own faith, in the gullible market of public opinion; each belching to the converted, during seasons of inter-faith disputes.

    But that doesn’t mean folks should not push for basic fairness, even as the partisans exchange fierce and sporadic fire.  That can’t be done unless you penetrate the genesis of it all.  That is why this fore-backgrounding is vital.

    So, drained of any religious bias either way, the Kwara Hijab controversy is not as complex as it appears.  But that is if you eliminate the basic misconceptions that skew the discourse and poison the exchange.

    First, there is nothing “secular” about any school uniforms.  Christian missionaries were pioneers in founding schools.  But that deal came with proselytizing the Christian faith.  So, if Christians founded those schools, their uniforms couldn’t have been “secular”.

    That logic applies to every mission school, Christian, Muslim or neither — neither because in Lagos, Gaskiya College (founded 1962), balked at the conventional uniform and essayed something different.

    But back to Kwara.  Those schools, which now claim to be “Christian”, are so because the government was gracious enough to retain their original names, in honour of their founding missionaries, after pumping public cash into running them.

    That was the crux of the Court of Appeal verdict on the matter.  But that they are public schools, in a secular state, doesn’t cancel the religious rights of the multi-religious citizens, that people the schools.

    Still, constitutional rights are an equal opportunity business.  They cover the crow of the Christians — over the school’s name, history and evolution — without swallowing the right of the Muslims, now part of the school’s evolutionary tapestry, being now a public school, open to all.

    That is where the Muslim girl’s right to wear the Hijab, if she so desires, fits pat.  Yes, the optics might be disturbing, to the deeply religious.  But mutual respect and sensitivity would blunt all that. But alas! Tolerance is no great strength of either side!

    Still, before folks duel to the death, what really is the difference between the Hijab and the hood worn by the Catholic nun — or even by the local Aladura zealot?  All came from a common Semitic tradition, which here translates to either Christian or Muslim.

    But that the Aladura sect — among the first wave of African Pentecostals, during the intra-church African nationalism blitz of the 1880s — adopted the practice, speaks to its resonance with the native population.

    Five years after Amasa Firdaus insisted on her hijab, and caused a storm delaying her call to Bar by one year, Britain which legal system Nigeria copies, just trashed the wig for hijab-wearing female barristers and judges.

    “Hijab-wearing barristers are exempt from wearing the traditional wig in court,” said a BBC report of March 30, “but there isn’t any guidance on what this should look like.”

    The hijab is no threat to anyone.  It only projects the religious identity of its wearer — hardly a crime.  Enough of Christian illiberalism in the Nigerian public space.

  • Bogus subsidies and junk refineries

    Bogus subsidies and junk refineries

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    Just a little more than 15 years ago, the British All-Party Parliamentary Group, issued a report on the Nigerian oil industry that exposed the essential falsity of the claim by a long line of Nigerian rulers from 1985 to the present that the government has been paying out colossal sums of money to shield Nigerians from having to pay the real cost of their prodigal consumption of petroleum products.

    Quoting documents supplied by Shell, the British All-Party Parliamentary Group stated in a report prepared for the Blair Commission (Guardian, January 23, 2006) put the “technical costs” of extracting a barrel of crude at $ 4.00, and the “industry margin” at $1.87.  The balance, the report  said, went to the government in equity and taxes.

    This meant, the report added, that if crude sold for $30 a barrel, the government was taking $24:13, or 80 percent of the total cost.  At the $50 dollar per barrel that ruled the market at the time of the report, the government was hiving off $44.13, or 88 percent, of the total.

    With crude selling at an average of $120 per barrel thereafter for the better part of two years until the price fell by more than one-third, the government had literally been gorging itself on cascading oil revenues.  Even when the cost of refining and distribution ws factored into the equation, oil revenues accruing to the government could be reckoned only in stratospheric figures.  And the more the government earned, the more it sought to appropriate.

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

    It was “impossible,” the report said, “to be certain how much the government actually receives and where the money is spent.” It should have added that it is also almost impossible to be certain how much oil is actually lifted or sold.

    Yet, another round of “subsidy” removal or reduction was to have been instituted in June 1998

    But President Musa Yar’Adua had “graciously consented” to hold off the measure, the Minister of State for Petroleum, Odein Ajumogobia, assured his anxious compatriots.

    After decades of denial, deception and obfuscation, the Federal Government in a statement finally confirmed the damning report of the British All Party Parliamentary Group.  The statement painted a picture of racketeering, incompetence, inefficiency and sabotage almost beyond belief.  It spoke of refined petroleum products being shipped from local refineries, emptied into other tankers at sea and then returned to shore as imported stuff qualifying for hefty subsidies

    Yet, the Federal Government would claim the following year that, in the face of the global economic recession, it could no longer afford to underwrite the “subsidies” to the tune of N640 billion a year.   Was it pure coincidence that the alleged subsidy was just N15 billion higher than the amount lost to the Nigerian oil industry through fraud every year, according to the British All-Party Parliamentary Group?

    That was then.

    A study researched by Professor Gbenga Oduntan of Kent University for the anti-corruption group Human and Environmental Development Agency HEDA, and published in this newspaper yesterday, found that Nigeria’s oil and gas sector accounted for roughly 93 per cent of Nigeria’s illicit financial flows.

    Between 2011 and 2014, $12 billion of the flows went to the United States, $3 billion to our arch- creditor China, and some $800 million to Norway – yes, Norway, the poster-nation for international best behavior.

    The study also confirmed anew a notorious fact of the industry — under-reporting of oil lifting of production and lifting volumes by the NNPC and the Department of Petroleum Resources.

    Once again, as happens whenever the government is experiencing balance-of-payments difficulties, the first expedient it can conjure up is abrogating or reducing alleged subsidy on petroleum products.  Now, as before, the existence of the ‘subsidy’ is merely asserted, never demonstrated.

    They had begun the campaign to end the alleged subsidy in 1985 by declaring that a situation in which a gallon of petrol cost far less than a bottle of soda was pernicious and unsustainable. But     so did the cost of a daily newspaper at that time as well as a family-size loaf of bread, to continue the false comparison.

    When this line did not work, they came up with the argument that if they sold the products in Europe or the United States, they stood to get higher prices than they were getting in Nigeria. The difference, they said, was a ‘subsidy’ that had to be eliminated if the oil industry was to be saved from imminent collapse.

    Opponents countered that the difference being claimed as a ‘subsidy’ was really an opportunity cost, and that a subsidy would be operative only when a product sells for less than its cost.

    How much did it really cost to produce to gallon of petrol and deliver it at the pump, then?

    The unspoken answer of the authorities was that the question was irrelevant, because even if crude oil was delivered to the refinery free, the retail price of petrol would still fall far below the production cost.  The situation was that dire. Nor was the question any longer merely a eliminating a subsidy on petroleum products; it was now a matter of subjecting them to “correct pricing.”

    Higher prices, they said against all human experience, would curb adulteration and hence end the explosions that resulted from using such doctored products in kerosene lamps and stoves and the horrific, oftentimes fatal, injuries they inflicted on innocent consumes.   It would also serve they said, as a disincentive to cross-border smuggling into neighbouring countries where they were traded for windfall profits.

    The smuggling was real, to be sure.  But as the Yar’Adua Administration was moved to admit, it was an inside job, carried out by persons within the system, who were in turn protected by the system. That explains why no big-time smuggler has ever been caught or prosecuted.

    Eliminating the subsidies now reckoned in the trillions, they said further, would generate revenues that would be more productively invested in refurbishing the obsolescent oil refineries, expand their capacities and even build new ones to produce for export.  Everyone would be a winner.

    Yet, as they stripped away the alleged subsidy and reaped enormous revenues, they never built a single refinery.  Year after year, they spent fortunes carrying out Turn-Around Maintenance (TAM) on the broken refineries.  Nothing was turned around except the pockets and fortunes of officials and their proxies.

    Today, it is the same old, tawdry game, with the Federal Government set to spend billions of dollars on refurbishing those same refineries again, when it could build several state-of-the-art facilities for the same amount.  Given the rot, the pervasive corruption in the system, it is a bet that in another year or two, we would be refurbishing the refurbished refineries again.

    There is no longer any question that what successive governments since 1985 have claimed to be subsidising has never been the consumption of petroleum products but racketeering, fraud, sabotage, inefficiency and incompetence on a scale beyond belief.  The entire industry is as transparent as a black hole.

    It is almost as if a malignant hypnotist has, since the discovery of oil in Oloibiri in 1956, cast a spell on Nigeria’s  industry policy-makers and rendered them impervious to all that is decent and honourable.

    It is time to break it.

     

  • Lucky Anambra

    Lucky Anambra

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    The people of Anambra State were lucky last week. But for providence, some miscreants tried to put a permanent blot on the state canvas. They attempted to murder one of Nigeria’s best and brightest sons, Professor Chukwuma Soludo, a former Central Bank of Nigeria governor. His crime? May be for daring to express interest to contest the upcoming state governorship election later in the year. If it is, then the plotters did not want to take a chance, that the man could be defeated at the polls; rather, they wanted to be in charge of who should contest. What a shame.

    Yet, by some accounts, Anambra State, is the homestead of Gad, acclaimed as one of the 12 sons of Israel, which by biblical account, is God’s chosen race. Could it then be that in a poor imitation of the Jews on Good Friday, persons from Anambra State, wanted to murder one of their most successful sons, just like the Jews, murdered Jesus around the same period, 2,000 years ago? As I wrote on this page, some time ago, Anambra State is blessed with the best the Igbo race can offer, as well as some of the worst dregs of the proud race.

    They boast of the highest concentration of intellectuals, as well as the highest concentration of billionaires any state in the country can boast of. Amongst these money-men, are some of the most productive Nigerians; whether as industrialists, entrepreneurs or traders. Conversely, the state also boasts of many billionaires whose source of income are shrouded in mystery. Those who believe that having tons of billions in their bank account is an end in itself, even if they gave the devil their soul in exchange.

    It is this last group of conscienceless billionaires that the good Lord has somehow saved the state from their hands, since 1999, as they become exceedingly dangerous when they join politics. Since the birth of this republic, such billionaire-politicians have approached every gubernatorial election as a do-or-die affair. With the billions they acquired dubiously as their only credential, they treat election as a bandit enterprise. Indeed, should the major political parties in the state sell nomination forms for a billion naira, there would still be several aspirants on the ballots at party-primaries.

    But somehow starting from the start of the 4th republic in 1999, the state has managed to outwit the bandit-billionaires in the political chess game. In 1999, former vice-president, Dr Alex Ekwueme was able to ensure the emergence of Dr Chinwoke Mbadinuju, who was not a money bag. Mbadinuju who managed to survive for a term, could not however survive the political hurricane engineered by the late Ikemba Nnewi, Chief Odumegwu Ojukwu in 2003.

    Luckily for the state, Ikemba engineered the birth of All Progressive Grand Alliance (APGA) which again snatched the state from the hands of the desperate billionaires who were ready to buy the governorship off the shelf, regardless of the price tag. Peter Obi, the APGA candidate though a billionaire, was hewed from a different wood from the desperadoes angling for a kill. While he changed the paradigm of governance with his gentle disposition, the tumultuous money-men pounced at the state at the next election.

    After swearing Dr Chris Ngige to a fetish oath, in other to tie the state’s treasury to their private bank accounts, they handed over to him a stolen governorship seat. To their chagrin, Ngige, ignored his oath and governed like a free born. To the consternation of Nigerians, the desperate billionaires bribed federal government officials, at the highest level, to allow them teach the governor a lesson. Again, Anambra was lucky, as the governor who had already signed his resignation letter under the force of arms was saved from a forced resignation.

    The state’s luck became permanent when Peter Obi was returned following his victory at the Supreme Court, against Ngige. Again, the desperadoes bided their time, as Peter Obi went about governing the state with a frugality that even his supporters considered strong handed. After completing his second term, to forestall the purchase of the state by the billionaire desperadoes, Peter Obi started an ingenious campaign that Ikemba Nnewi, had asked Anambrarians to do him the last favour of electing Willie Obiano the APGA candidate, as state governor.

    Somehow the gimmick worked, and Willie as governor worked hard to earn himself a deserved second term, even after falling apart with his benefactor, Peter Obi. Now that Willie’s second term is about to end, the nightmare of the state being hijacked by the bandit-billionaires has returned. Somehow, Governor Obiano appears to be angling for the former CBN governor, Soludo, and many believe he could become the APGA candidate and perhaps eventual winner of the governorship election.

    Many believe last week’s attempt to murder the former CBN governor was a desperate attempt to kill the project at its embryo. So, the police must find those involved in the dastardly act that snuffed life out of three policemen. Hopefully, the kidnapped state commissioner would be rescued alive. The security agencies should thoroughly drill those arrested, so that they can reveal their true sponsors, who should be treated as the law provides.

    For this column, all those involved in the attempt to murder Professor Soludo should be ashamed of themselves, for the needless calamity they wanted to foist on the family of Soludo, the people of Anambra and Nigerians in general. In an Easter period, when chastity should be the watch word, the bandits, whoever they are, have no qualms about the consequences of spilling an innocent blood.

    Yet, if there was a person eminently qualified to govern any state or even any country, Professor Soludo is that person. As Emeka Agbayi and I wrote in: Service Above Self (2008), Soludo studied Economics at the University of Nigeria, Nsukkka, and graduated with First Class Honours degree in 1984, as best graduating student. He was also best graduating student in the M.Sc. class of 1987. He crowned these with the Faculty Prize for the best graduating PhD candidate in 1988/89 academic year.

    This prodigious intellectual, became a full professor at the age of 38. Instead of praying for the Soludo solution, apologies to: service above self, some miscreants wanted Nigeria, and Anambra state in particular, to go into mourning. Luckily, God said no to their evil machinations. While there is a presumption that it could be those who harbour ill-will against the political aspiration of the former Central Bank Governor that had wanted to kill him, the police should as well look beyond them in their search. This column hopes that Anambra State’s luck will shine again at the next governorship election.

  • That 23-million-man army

    That 23-million-man army

    By Sanya Oni

     

    The other day, the National Bureau of Statistics released, what ordinarily would have passed as a ‘sobering’ statistic on the unemployment situation in the country. In an environment where nothing shocks anymore, where the most outrageous have become routine, it would seem part of the new normal that the revelations merely passed off as one of those things – something that the federal government could afford feign indifference and the legislature couldn’t be bothered with.

    Now, much as it could be argued that no cold dreary stats could adequately capture the intricate and complex dimensions of the unemployment crisis, suffice to say that the figures in some way provide a window into not just the depth of the crisis facing us but offer a sort of prognosis into a malaise that poses grave threats to the fabrics of national cohesion with serious implications for national security and stability. Clearly, if the figures are any revealing, it is of a country literally sitting on a keg of gunpowder!

    Did I hear someone say we’ve heard that before? Very true, at least in part. Nothing in the broad finding is actually any new. If there is anything new, it is that the situation, far from improving, is actually getting worse. Take for instance this one: That the unemployment rate not only increased from the 27.1% in the second quarter of 2020 to 33.3%. Or even more specifically, that some 23,187,389 Nigerians out there have either nothing to do or worked for less than 20 hours a week. Or still, that some 1,422,772 persons were added to the labour market between the second quarter of the past year right up to the time the economy slipped into recession.

    These indices must be seen as frightening; frightening because the trend continues to surge despite the administration’s claims to have tried every trick in the rule-book to tame the monster. Thanks to Godwin Emefiele, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), we have just enough ‘interventionist’ programmes for every activity under the sun and for all the problems identified. From agriculture to agro-business; micro, small and medium scale enterprises; just name it.  On each, billions of naira have been poured, not just in the expectation of a stated goal of self-sufficiency in the intervention area, but also to create jobs across their value chains while taking as many as possible out of the loop. Yet, these seems to have made little difference.

    As for the federal government, it has also not been sleeping easy. In this, Nigerians would recall the N-Power initiative launched by President Muhammadu Buhari in 2016 aimed at addressing youth unemployment. The scheme, which initially targeted 500,000 Nigerians in three batches is said to have gulped some N279 billion in the three years running from 2016-2019. Not forgetting the administration’s brainwave – the Special Public Works (SPW) programme– a three-month programme initiated by the Ministry of Labour, designed to engage some 774,000 mostly artisans across the 774 local governments in the country for public works. The latter, unfortunately seems to have been thrown into the jeopardy as one might expect of a project conceived, not necessarily to address the problem in any fundamental sense, but something as a scheme to ‘keep the boys happy’.

    Whereas in their conception, the initiatives might not be lacking in good intentions, none can be said to aspire to the level of creative thinking in the context of the so-called problem.

    Talk of a country with a penchant to grope in the dark even when a tiny spark of light would do a world of good – little of course is known of the profile of this mass and for which the government seeks the targeted intervention. Clearly, if the NBS stats gave little away about the character of this huge army, their skill sets, level of education or what some prefer to call ‘employability’, it is more often than not, treated like the other army – the 13 million out-of-school kids many of whose destinies has long been determined as “irrecoverable”. In other words, the dense figures about the mass are only brought up when some high officials want to impress about their grasp of the Nigerian reality!

    Yet, they are a force we can neither ignore, nor would they allow us some peace. At least not when they are known to supply the bulk of the other army in the counter-culture of crime and social maladjustment and deviance, providing as it were, the recruitment grounds for the other lumpen: the bandits; the local terrorists with a mission to kill for anything and nothing; cultists out to exact revenge from society for whatever; the drug abuser that mirrors a society that prefers the fancy world of escape; among these number the ladies of the night; the ethnic agitators and cyber-criminals.

    Meanwhile, we shudder about what the future holds, not just for the mass but for the rest of the country, even when we have neither been able to find the means nor seem to be able fashion a creative response to the challenge they pose, both in the context of the rapidly changing world of work, and also in the context of the imperative of social adjustment.

    Which is why yours truly is not exactly surprised at the reaction of some Nigerians to the suggestion by the National Leader of the All Progressives’ Congress, APC, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu  at the colloquium marking his birthday on Monday last week. As against some of the ad hoc measures being pushed out all of which have had little impact, his prescription, rather than being outlandish as some appear to suggest, actually came across as bold and daring: some five million youths to be recruited into the security services to help tackle the variegated security challenges facing the country. For while those eager to pick issues prefer to dwell on the mechanics, the real substance, which is that the country needs a completely new approach to the unemployment crisis can hardly be faulted. Of course, it begins with the recognition that the nation has already lost a generation to the planlessness of the past; and that the country would somehow have to the will to bring back the displaced army into the economic fold. And that this requires something of a New Deal.

     

  • Sixty-nine

    Sixty-nine

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Twenty-one out of 69 years, and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu is somewhat what Gen. Ibrahim Babangida (IBB) called the great Chief Obafemi Awolowo, at Awo’s death in 1987: the issue in Nigerian politics.

    Well, 21 years is counting from 29 May 1999, when this 4th Republic dawned.

    But the fundament of Tinubu-in-Nigerian politics goes right back to the stillbirth 3rd Republic (January 1992 to November 1993), when Tinubu was an elected senator, in IBB’s troubled diarchy.

    That was an era!

    The IBB “new breed” dummy; the June 12 reclamation storm; the National Democratic Coalition (NADECO) exile, as part of the MKO Abiola mandate revalidation strategies; the pro-/anti-June 12 bifurcation of the Dapo Sarumi-led young Turks of Lagos; the IBB defeat and scurry out of power; the Abacha menace; and the eventual triumph of democratic forces in 1999: the progressives might have won the war; but the conservatives grabbed power and its spoils!

    What an era!

    The IBB “new breed” could well have been a clever fob, by a cunning political soldier.  But the clash between the old and the new may well define Tinubu’s political odyssey.

    Tinubu and other young professionals-in-politics, arrayed under Dapo Sarumi’s PRIMROSE tent, grabbed Babangida’s “new breed” offer to challenge the late Alhaji Lateef Jakande’s “Baba sope” (Baba has decreed) Lagos progressive order.

    But at 69, rumoured on the cusp of the highest political prize of his garlanded career, Tinubu, the dashing young Turk of yore, but now somewhat “Baba sope” himself, faces challenges — twin challenges, in fact.

    One, from the younger elements, as Sarumi and co, did to LKJ in 1991, forcing a hideous stalemate that gifted the conservative National Republican Convention’s Sir Michael Otedola (may God bless his soul) the Lagos governorship.

    Two, in intra-Yoruba politics, from elders with suspect electoral value, who nevertheless aren’t quitting — and won’t quit — just because Tinubu is making hay.

    That priestly gadfly, Pastor Tunde Bakare, just dubbed that gerontocratic bloc the “Shakabula” ensemble.

    But back to LKJ.  The LKJ setback had to do with change and grace.  In Greek mythology, the Titans yielded with grace, though ringed with pains, to the more nimble Olympian set of gods — the supreme metaphor for how to quit with class.

    LKJ did — both after his “Ase” (diktat) stalemate with Sarumi’s PRIMROSE forces; and later, his Abacha ministerial meltdown, at the high noon of the NADECO June 12 war.

    At both times, not a few among his own generation of Awo-era Titans, leered and jeered as his fall.  But they forgot: even with his one-term Lagos governorship, LKJ’s place in history was assured — beyond, for life, mere parasitizing on the Awo name.

    On this score, Tinubu shares a lot in common with LKJ.  With a two-term Lagos governorship then, might Tinubu’s place in history be secure?  The jury is still out.

    But it’s hardly a hyperbole to say this 4th Republic, in which Lagos continues to be a national showcase, is an explosion of Bola Tinubu and his ideas, under the rubrics of Awolowo-school progressive ethos.

    On the Lagos front, that puts Tinubu in a class of only two others: the revered Brigadier Mobolaji Johnson (BMG, of blessed memory), Lagos first-ever governor at the state’s creation in 1967; and of course, the iconic and near-incomparable LKJ, its first elected governor, welfarist czar and classic man of the people.

    BMJ laid Lagos’ solid foundation of excellence.  LKJ made welfarism the anchor of Lagos policy.  Tinubu reengineered resources to make Lagos a formidable player, in Nigeria’s skewed federalism — men of history, that three-some, at critical junctures, of Lagos storied evolution.

    On the national progressive front, Tinubu is no less storied.

    As Lagos governor, he further integrated Awolowo’s welfare progressive policies, much entrenched in the Yoruba South West.  He pioneered the payment of pupils’ WAEC examination fees, a youth-friendly education policy other governors would later copy.

    He would also battle, to a standstill, the conservative bully tactics of imperial President Olusegun Obasanjo, in the core areas of states’ rights in a skewed federation; the sanctity of the vote; aside from duelling on fiscal federalism, in a democracy emerging from eons of military rule, but still dominated by military men, with a centralist mindset.

    For these early battles, fought at the courts, Tinubu had, as his legal GOC, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, now sitting Vice President but back then the Lagos Attorney-General and commissioner for Justice.

    By their nimble triumphs, in these constitutional matters, both ran rings round the bully though awkward federal Leviathan.

    But for those sweet victories, Tinubu and Lagos paid stiff political prices: the most heinous, perhaps, being the brazen seizure of Lagos council funds, in a fit of Obasanjo presidential outlawry, despite a clear and loud Supreme Court verdict.

    Besides, the trajectory of Nigeria’s present democracy would have been utterly different, had Tinubu’s Lagos allowed itself to be “captured”, in the PDP Obasanjo South West electoral(?) blitzkrieg of 2003.

    From the lone survivor, after the summary despatch of all AD progressive governors of the South West, Tinubu pulled off the most sensational political comeback in Nigerian history: first Edo (though in the South-South), then Ondo, then Ekiti, then Osun.  By the 2011 election, Oyo and Ogun were back in the progressive fold.

    By 2015, the PDP conservative Leviathan had sunk, not unlike the Titanic: yielding federal power to progressive forces — again with Tinubu’s imprimatur — for the first time in Nigeria’s electoral history.

    Now, how could the driver-in-chief, of all of these momentous pushes, in a spade of 21 short years, be traduced, by some, as villain-in-chief of Nigerian democracy?

    If conservative losers grouch, understandably from extremely sour grapes, how hollow and shallow do griping Tinubu’s fellow progressives sound — even to themselves?

    Or the coterie of the bilious Yoruba, pushing the bluster of Yoruba self-determination, to hide a blather of hate; and using peer envy as partisan slaughter, tarring one of their very best as the people’s arch-enemy, when objective facts, in the public space, point to the contrary?

    Might that be the umpteenth manifestation of the Yoruba “curse”, that seasonally dooms the Yoruba to prey on their very best, at crucial junctures of Nigerian history?

    The Jagaban at 69, prime revelation of Nigeria’s 4th Republic, also epitomizes the classic clash between futuristic and atavistic forces, not the least in his rambunctious Yoruba home front, in the fierce contest to shape evolving Nigeria.

    Let that contest be settled on the high altar of cutting-edge ideas, in the best tradition of developmental democracy; not at the smelly dump of base hatred and envy.

    Wishing the Asiwaju of Lagos the very best at 69.

     

  • Dem herder-bandits, sef

    Dem herder-bandits, sef

    By  Olatunji Dare

     

    These herders sef, or should we better them herder-bandits since, at least in the popular imagination, they manifest these days as one and the same dreaded entity, and since fairness demands that we  separate herders who are not bandits from bandits who are not herders, lest we rush into judgement and into error?

    An antiseptic severance between the twain is increasingly hard to make these days in Nigeria I gather.  But what is the task, the duty of a public affairs analyst, a public intellectual no less, if it is not to make   a fine discrimination between and among categories, lest they be treated as the same thing, as is the custom of our policy-makers?

    What distinguishes these herder-bandits, it can be said at the outset, is that they combine overweening audacity with preternatural brutality. They respect no persons, no powers, no principalities, no codes of behaviour known to anyone outside their spectral ranks.   No man, woman, child or person of indeterminate gender is too big or too small for their infernal visitation; no object is too sacred or profane for their mindless wrath.

    There is no rhyme or reason to their brigandage, which it is often wanton and always brutal.  Their record of despoliation is almost beyond belief, and almost beyond imagining, even.

    Only the other day, their murderous gaze settled on His Excellency the Executive Governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom.  That kind of attention would have been discomfiting any day.  It was particularly  unwelcome and an absolute dampener that day, March 20, 2021.

    Ortom was basking in the rarest of political endorsements: a full and complete retraction of defamatory statements credited to his combative erstwhile colleague and former governor of Edo State, Comrade Adams Oshiomhole, and a fulsome apology for same. To wring that kind of gesture from the Comrade, even in his beleaguered condition, is no mean achievement.  And Ortom was perfectly justified to rejoice in it.

    Only his expansive farm in Tyomu, near the State capital, Makurdi, could have contained his joy that   day as he contemplated his maturing crops and contented livestock, surrounded by nature in all its providence and freed from a battalion of persons bivouacked on the grounds of State House, their mission being to importune him for one favour or another.

    And who should ruin that day but the killjoy herder-bandits aforementioned, who had lain in wait for him, tipped off by their formidable intelligence network powered by a secret technology that the best authorities have so far been unable to fathom.

    They took their time contemplating their quarry while their ravenous herd feasted on his crops with pitiless voracity.  Then, with murder on their minds, they made for Ortom, believing that he was a softie they could subdue and chastise, or worse, kidnap and put up for the highest ransom.

    They had miscalculated big-time.

    Ortom is as fit and agile as they come.  Five years and counting in the pampered ambience of the Executive Mansion have not vitiated, however minutely, the physical prowess and the athleticism for which he was well known in his schooldays.

    He was known to have competed against the best and emerged with flying colours in the 400 metres and 880 metres and anchored the mile-medley relay to victory all in one afternoon.  Withal, he was no pushover in the high jump, the long jump, and the triple jump.

    As soon as he espied them, he darted to a bush path and made raced to safety, the cloud of dust that trailed him the only indication to his pursuers of where he might be.

    As the gap between His Excellency and his pursuers widened, they gave up.  A farm worker who took cover behind a silo said he heard them shout “Shege dan munchi” as they retreated.

    Ortom is one of few who have not allowed the suffocating comforts of office to turn him into whimpering softies who talk tough and denounces the bandit-herders, their allies in terror and their enablers in the daytime, only to coddle and beg and bribe them at night.

    Whether they agree with his principled refusal to cede the Benue landscape to herder-bandits and allied terrorists, Ortom’s colleagues and all who hold the levers of power and authority in Nigeria, will do well to cultivate his excellent physical culture, his agility, and his quickness in entering into a productive dialogue with his feet, to borrow the Nobelist’s phrasing.

    As things stand, they are going to need those faculties one day, probably much sooner than later.

    I should be the last person to say this, sorely remiss I have been attaining and maintaining the healthy body/mass index my doctor is forever counseling.  Losing weight, I have come to conclude, is easy, as Mark Twain said of smoking: I have done it a thousand times.

    But, seriously, I hate to contemplate what might happen to Ortom’s gubernatorial colleagues and a majority of the members of the National Assembly and state assemblies if they had been as circumstanced as he was that day.

    A great many of them can no longer bend down to put on their socks and shoes, except with the greatest discomfort.  Just as many have had to increase their collar size by one inch for every year they have spent in office, and their cap by a quarter of an inch over the same period.

    Following the barbarous ambush on Ortom, I gather that many of them have since installed exercise rooms fitted with the latest gadgets in their executive mansions and country homes, and not just to keep up appearances.

    A good many of them, I can report, have hired personal fitness trainers.  Their designations ranging from senior special assistant to executive programme adviser in-residence is indicative of the importance attached to the first wave of appointments.   Some have earnest and made impressive gains.

    A source close to government in one of the South-South state capitals tells me that, once the day’s session has commenced, not even the most pertinacious contractor can be allowed to interrupt it, however influential he or she may be.

    A much more significant upside to the barbarous ambush on Governor Ortom lies in the extent to which it has galvanized as never before the forces of law and order in Nigeria and united them in a firm resolve to quash the herder-bandit menace.

    I am here talking of the Special Investigation Task that has since been dispatched to Makurdi by the Inspector-General of Police, Mohammed Adamu.

    Though the police are formally designating the matter an allegation, this does not in any way vitiate the seriousness they are according it. Nor does it make the least difference whether Mohammed Adamu is a substantive police inspector-general, a mere caretaker, or even a moonlighter.

    What really counts is that the Task Force he has assembled consists of crack operatives of the Tactical Investigation Units of the Force Intelligence Bureau and other sleuths with “specialized competencies                in crime scene investigation and reconstruction, ballistics, fingerprint analysis” and other core areas of forensics.

    Its remit goes beyond merely overseeing investigations into the incident.  More crucially, it is to “investigate all angles of the reported attack with a view to ensuring that all persons empirically linked to the incident are apprehended and brought to book.”

    The notice is out that the days of herder-bandits are numbered.   Not even the Sambisa jungles not yet the Idanre and the Jangebe forests will save them,

    Better late than never.

    But why did it take the authorities this long to press the Tactical Task Force and the larger security outfit of which it is a component into service against herder-bandits and their fellow travelers who have been kidnapping and maiming and terrorising and murdering innocent Nigerians all these years?