The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Tinubu as potentate

    Tinubu as potentate

    By Gabriel  Amalu

     

    Yesterday, the former governor of Lagos State, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu, turned 69 years, and as expected, his expansive political associates celebrated him, while his opponents vilified him. On both sides is a great multitude and they live happily in their divergent worlds.  While his associates consider him the greatest leader in the present political dispensation, his adversarial opponents consider him an enemy of democracy.

    But interestingly, even his opponents acknowledge him as the most influential non-public office holder in the country today. And with some of his supporters promoting him as a presidential candidate in the 2023 general election, it is fair to interrogate the arguments in his favour for public office which is the centre-piece of this column. Indeed, as the acclaimed national leader of the All Progressive Congress (APC), in power at the centre and in many states, he influences public power.

    Tinubu’s trajectory shows that as late as 1990, he was a top executive, as Treasurer, at Mobil Oil. His foray into politics started as a senator in the aborted third republic, and he was reputed to be one of the stringent opponents of the military president, Ibrahim Babangida, in his schemes, to commandeer the republic for his selfish benefits. Some records, say that at a time many of his colleagues were circumspect, he openly opposed the schemes of the military president.

    Eventually, his contributions to the June 12 struggle, eventuated his political rise in the Southwest. He was reputed to have supported the struggle financially, intellectually and physically, while in exile. His immense contribution endeared him to the leading lights of the Obafemi Awolowo’s school of political thought, who had influence and organisational capacity at the resumption of politics in 1999. Some believe that he was rewarded with the governorship ticket of the Alliance for Democracy, and he went on to win the governorship election that followed.

    Of note, while he may be considered as a beneficiary of the benevolence of the Awoists in 1999, he must be given credit for making the right choice to support the June 12 struggle, which endeared him to the group. Unless he had the power clairvoyance, at the time he invested his resources in the struggle, it would be far-fetched to contemplate any benefits. So the choice he made in the struggle could only have arisen from his firm belief in the pursuit of truth and justice.

    Having become the governor of Lagos State, it is important to interrogate what he used the power to achieve. He is reputed to have gifted the state with financial autonomy, by using his intellectual skills as a professional accountant, to raise the revenue base of the state from a paltry N600 million to over N8.5 billion monthly, 70% of which was internally generated within the state, by the time he left office.

    With the parameter he set in place, his successors have built on the revenue legacy to gift the state financial autonomy. Of note, while in office, Tinubu weathered the political blitzkrieg by the regime of President Olusegun Obasanjo when he sought to bring the state to its knees over the creation of local government councils, which the federal government refused to acknowledge. Of course, the state would have crumbled, under the weight of the crisis, if not for the financial acuity of Tinubu as the helmsman.

    His promoters for the office of the president, would of course rely on this capacity, to push his candidacy for the 2023 presidential election. For clearly, one of the major challenges facing the nation, is the dearth of financial expertise in managing the nation’s resources. Another selling point for the promoters of the Tinubu presidential contest is his disposition to federalist principles. According to some records, in the second and third republics, there were only two court challenges of the limit of the federal government’s power, vis-à-vis, state, up to the Supreme Court.

    But during the regime of Tinubu as governor of Lagos State, there were 13 cases concerning federalist principles which went to the Supreme Court for adjudication arising from Lagos State challenges. Beyond doubt, such disposition confirms the inviolable belief by the former governor on the need to lawfully disentangle the centralist principles in the 1999 constitution. This writer believes that unless there is economic and political diffusion of power as practiced in the first republic, even a Tinubu presidency would achieve little.

    The promoters of the Tinubu presidency also argue that as governor, he set the stage for the exponential development of Lagos State’s social and physical infrastructure. He is reputed to have developed a master plan which has become the beacon for the high achievements of his successors, from Babatunde Fashola SAN, to Akinwunmi Ambode, and presently Babajide Sanwo-Olu. Such agencies like LASTMA, LAWMA, BRT, LAMATA, LASIMRA and several others came from the master plan. That again places Tinubu in the vantage position, when discussing his potentials as president.

    Clearly, Asiwaju Tinubu, has proved himself one of the most astute political mentor and developer of men. By a combination of foresight and luck, his political family stretches to the presidency, the leadership of the National Assembly, several state government houses, federal ministries, local governments and party offices. With one of the most intriguing recruitment and promotion schemes, he has his mentees in far flung political offices across the country. And interestingly, he has helped Nigerians of varied backgrounds, tribes and religion, even as his Yoruba people naturally are the greatest beneficiaries.

    So, fundamentally, Tinubu stands shoulder high, as a sagacious political leader, and even his opponents would acknowledge that. Perhaps, but for Obafemi Awolowo, who gave the Yorubas a head start in education and infrastructure development in the country, Asiwaju Tinubu may have done more for the Yoruba race than any other person in history. Even with the turbulence under the presidency of the All Progressive Congress, which he eminently championed its emergence, the southwest region has fared better than others.

    On the other hand, as we match towards 2023, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s sagacious intellect would be tasked to explain the level of insecurity in the country, under the presidency of his party, the APC. His wits will be tasked to explain the grand failures of the party, in handling the national security. Should he throw his hat into the ring, Nigerians would want to know what he would do differently, to stem the security mess, plaguing our country.

    As the Asiwaju of Lagos and the Jagaban of Borgu, celebrates his 69th birthday, this writer wishes him many happy returns. The column joins his wife, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, as she is reputed to always pray that Asiwaju ends well.

  • Aketi’s challenge

    Aketi’s challenge

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    With just one challenge, Ondo Governor, Rotimi Akeredolu, aka Aketi, just sent the Yoruba secessionists and allied camps scampering into a tizzy — a tizzy near-equating the Biblical Tower of Babel.

    So, what do the agitators really want; and which Yoruba mandate delivered that decision?

    O, self-determination for the Yoruba nation, crowed Prof. Banji Akintoye’s Yoruba World Congress (YWC), and — torrents of vulgar abuse later, spiced with crude name-calling, as response to the Aketi challenge — a fierce bluster that its goal would be attained by legal and peaceful means.

    “What we declared is the sovereignty of Yoruba nation from Nigeria,” Ilana Omo Oodua, a hardly known group linked to Prof. Akintoye swore.  ”… Our agitation shall be bloodless, intellectually rooted and legally grounded.”

    Sovereignty from Nigeria — an ode to sophistry, as face-saving bluff?

    It “is not that of a plot for secession as erroneously branded by Akeredolu, but a struggle for self-determination.”  Yeah right!

    Yet, the same Prof. Akintoye beamed, with near-supreme ethnic beatitude, as Sunday Igboho — stark, tragic, deluded bloke — birthed a “Yoruba nation” out of his frenzied dreams; and uttered his rash and insane threats to go yank open “Yoruba borders”, just to walk the talk of his whimsical, nay, comical secession!

    No, let’s restructure, chimed in Chief Ayo Adebanjo, new leader of the Afenifere rump.

    “My reaction is clear,” Baba Adebanjo quipped.  ”We don’t want Nigeria to break.  But we don’t want to be oppressed.  We don’t want a situation that is giving rise to Igboho or Kanu.  The youths in Yorubaland and Middle Belt and other ethnic groups are restless.  We should do restructuring to avoid break up,” The Nation quoted him as saying.

    Fair enough.  At the zenith of its influence in 2001 — and well back into its evolution from the Awolowo federalist struggles — restructuring had always been the Afenifere pitch.  On that, given how things are panning out, that pitch could hardly be faulted.

    Still, over the years, “restructuring” had soaked in so much dross: an immaculate idea blighted by abrasive personal over-reach.  That only put off converts elsewhere, beyond the blissful corps of the converted, within the South West, because the messenger had dwarfed the message.

    It also bred that arrogant, all-wise penchant: a near-tragic presumption, which powered a tiny cabal to make sweeping claims for the Yoruba — mandate be damned! — simply because that cabal enjoys high media visibility.

    But that delusion, over the years, also cost Afenifere dear: a steep loss of influence, as an aggregation of Yoruba interest, in the normal elite struggle with other ethnics, in a supposed federal Nigeria.

    Yes, Afenifere has been faithful to its age-long restructuring credo.  Yet, if Baba Adebanjo didn’t approve of Igboho’s rash tactics, why that photo rally, at Baba Adebanjo’s Lagos home, sweetly circulated for propaganda effect?

    So, the Igboho photo hero just turned zero at the slightest whiff of the Aketi challenge?   Disposable fellow!

    Why, even Gani Adams is playing newfound political historian-cum-philosopher, in Nigeria’s evolving crisis of nationhood!  ”The only thing that can stop the agitation,” he told The Nation, “is restructuring through regionalism.”  The Aare has spoken!

    But if regionalism was that excellent, why did the 1st Republic collapse?

    Meanwhile, the Igboho push-and-pull, abuse-and-traduce, antics endure!  In that crude crusade, the “Yoruba rights activist” (his sweet new media label) has traduced the Ooni of Ife, and threatened to invade and raze the palace of the Alake of Egbaland, two eminent Yoruba monarchs, in an agitation for the Yoruba!

    In truth, the Alake threat was a bit complicated.  Igboho denied ever making it.  But Olayomi Koiki, Igboho’s official spokesperson did — the voice of Jacob but not the hand of Esau!  What a Babel: a spokesman is not his principal’s media alter ego!

    Meanwhile, Koiki appears another jetsam from Prof. Akintoye’s YWC, that seems to hold, in thrall, a lot of the Yoruba Diaspora.  Sometime last year, Koiki released a video, in which he banged his chest, bragged-a-million, and threatened to end it all, should anything happen to “Baba Ekiti”.

    It was after another futile launch of “Oodua Republic”.  Little wonder: Koiki re-found his groove in the Igboho push-and-shove universe!

    Babel of YWC, Afenifere, Gani Adams and Igboho — what do the Yoruba really want?

    From Aketi, however, it’s a welcome reality check, which the elected order ought to have pressed much earlier, instead of yielding space to the Yoruba equivalent of the Roman rabble.

    Aketi, while throwing the gauntlet: Warning against “unthinking rabble rousing” — a point that can never be overstated — the Ondo Governor declared: “We will not be led to assured annihilation by anyone or a group of people, still smarting from the electoral defeats of recent times; and presumed exclusion from the process of decision-making.”

    That was spot on.  If you want to crow about the Yoruba, secure their mandate first.  That is one line the South West elected order must vigorously push.

    A mushrooming concert of the unelected, goading the unwary against the civil order, baiting needless catastrophe with unvarnished hate, can only end in tears.

    A few days later on Channels TV, Akeredolu raised even more telling posers on rights, mandate, and the secession question.

    “A few people cannot just stand up one day and say to us: ‘Yes, we want Yoruba nation,” he told the channel.  ”How?  Where did we sit down to discuss this?  With who and who?  At what point in time?  So, if you do not carry everybody along, you cannot be representing us.”

    That is the crux — and it’s no surprise the other side has no clear answer, though it tries to bluster its way out of the jam.   They have no answer because it was all giddy presumption — which could turn costly, nay fatal, for the impassioned crowd they goad and push to the brink, on ethnic pride and cross-ethnic hate.  That can only lead to perdition.

    To be sure, Aketi himself has no known mandate to dismiss “secession” — or whatever excitement the other side is all about.  But as elected governor, he bears responsibility to protect his people from any wild misadventure.  He just pressed that democratic right, nay duty — and so should other South West governors.

    Which is why they must mount a contrary, vigorous narrative, other than brinkmanship, powered by, in Aketi’s words again, “unthinking rabble rousing.”

    Everyone is bothered about the South West security question.  But the logical solution is not reckless excitability, pushing the people into more, if avoidable, danger.

  • Kogi and the COVID Task Force

    Kogi and the COVID Task Force

    By Olatunji Dare

    If I had chanced upon the document without the benefit of its heading and the identity of the issuing authority, I would have sworn that it came straight out of the National Publicity Bureau of the PDP.   It seems to have been forged in the combative, sledge-hammer tradition of political pamphleteering that is the hallmark of the former largest political party in Africa.

    Like almost everything else in Nigeria, the Civil Service is no longer what it used to be.  But I thought you could still look up to that institution as an exemplar of bureaucratic good manners in style if not in substance, and of linguistic restraint even when matters that lie at the very core of national existence are at issue.

    Not anymore, I fear, going by the Kogi State Government’s widely distributed advertorial which appeared in major newspapers several weeks ago, and signed by the Secretary to the State Government.

    Its very title, “Kogi State Government’s Response to the Reckless Comments credited to the Presidential Task Force (PTF) on COVID in Respect to Kogi State” gives the game away on the threshold.  No fancy footwork, no fake modesty or courtesy, no pretence that the scene is being set for a parliamentary discourse.  From there, the language gets only more unseemly, more scurrilous even.

    The PTF, whose National Incident Manager the advertorial dismissed contemptuously as “one Dr Mukhtar Mohammed”, had reported on February 1 that Kogi stood atop the high-risk states for COVID because it was not testing for the virus, because it had built no isolation facilities and because it does not even  acknowledge it that the virus exists.  Therefore, said the PTF, give Kogi a wide berth.

    Its report, it is necessary to state, was based largely on the evasiveness, dilatoriness and outright dissembling of the Kogi State Government on all matters COVID.

    The PTF report, rejoins the advertorial is “callous” and based on “fabrication,” and qualifies that body for “immediate dismemberment.”  Kogi had done everything expected of it, only for the PTF to cast aspersions on it.  Kogi had never denied the existence of COVID.  What it had “resisted and vehemently opposed” was “the early ascription of fictitious cases to Kogi,” suggestive of an agenda to chalk up bogus casualties in the state “by all means possible.”

    Far from being indifferent to the fact of COVID, Kogi had taken immediate measures to sensitize residents to the scourge and was one of the earliest states to order a             lockdown; it had also set up a 29-member “Squadron” to ensure prevention or containment not just COVID but Lassa fever as well.

    According to the advertorial, the Kogi State Government also purchased Rapid Test Kits and conducted “thousands” of tests and provided “testing services” to persons recommended by health professionals.

    More concretely, said the advertorial, the Kogi built “fully equipped isolation centres” in “strategic locations” – not just anywhere in the state, please note — ready for use, not forgetting a molecular lab for COVID testing and treatment at the Kogi State Specialist Hospital in Lokoja.

    But rather than ask to see those facilities, the PTF was more interested in “unilaterally manipulating the entire process to suit its sinister purposes.”

    Kogi’s strategy, explained the advertorial, was based on an “admixture of science, common sense, medicine and governance,” and constituted a call on government at all levels to prevent citizens from being “plunged into extreme poverty”  and the economy from being damaged by “implementation of imported strategies.”

    And whereas Kogi developed COVID protocols suited to its “uniqueness and peculiarities,” the PTF adopted “foreign protocols” that “backfired.”

    In any case, said the advertorial, why the “mad rush” to squander one billion Naira to procure vaccines when COVID could be treated with zinc, Vitamins A and D, hydroxychloroquine and non-pharmacological measure?

    Besides, it was not as if COVID posed a clear and present danger to the national population. It posed no threat whatsoever to people aged 45 and under.  For persons aged 60 and above with no co-morbidities, the threat was “close to zero.”  And, based on the PTF’s own claim, 96 per cent of COVID patients survived.  So, why the panic?

    The funds budgeted for COVID could have been spent more profitably on preventive health care.  But then, there would be no “quick cash” for the boys.

    And so on and so forth.

    After a cursory reading of the advertorial, anyone unfamiliar with Kogi’s record of obfuscation on COVID might judge the state the wronged party, victim of bullying by the malicious agency of the Federal Government

    But a contextual reading would suggest otherwise.

    The advertorial was silent, fatally silent, on some key issues.

    Why would the PTF set out to fabricate COVID data on Kogi alone among the 36 states of the country and the Abuja Federal Capital Territory?  Is it not on record that Bello ordered the deportation of  PTF officials on an inspection visit, claiming that they had come to plant the virus in his domain?

    The advertorial claimed that thousands of COVID tests were conducted.  Since it harped again and again on matters of transparency, it may well be asked:  Where were the tests conducted, when, by whom, and with what results?  The Rapid Test Kits allegedly used for the tests:  Who supplied them, when, through what process, and at what cost?  Where is the surplus stored?

    The Kogi State Government, the advertorial said, purchased and distributed face masks to residents of the State “free of charge.” Not one among some 20 Kogi residents I interviewed for this piece, recalls being given a face mask.  In any case, when was the exercise conducted? How were the face masks acquired, and at what cost?  By what mechanism were they distributed?

    And where precisely in the state are Bello’s “fully equipped isolation centres” located?  What is their operational record?  Why were PTF officials not taken to the facilities?

    There is no mention in the advertorial of the premier medical institution in Kogi — the Federal Medical Centre, Lokoja – the omission was not accidental.  The Centre was raided in broad daylight and vandalised by hoodlums on a mission to obliterate records of COVID treatments administered there, for the sole purpose of sustaining the official fiction that the disease does not exist in Kogi.

    It is instructive that no arrests and no prosecutions followed this wanton destruction of federal property. And yet Bello continues to parade himself as a law-and-order governor whose record in ensuring security is unequalled in the annals of the state.

    If, as claimed, Kogi’s vaccine storage facility in Lokoja was destroyed during the #EndSARS protests, why has another one not been built?  How have the vaunted “intensive care facilities” been functioning without it?

    While the controversy raged, the public has been permitted to hear only from Governor Bello,  and occasionally his Commissioner for Information.  The Commissioner for Health has been missing in action. So have Kogi’s top medical officials.

    Where are they? Where are the accomplished professionals who can speak with the authority of expertise and with the credibility that can inspire public trust and confidence?  They should be the public face of the war on COVID.  Can it be that they have been sworn to a code of silence?

    Though a medical scientist in the broadest sense of the term, the official who signed the advertorial did so not in that capacity, but by virtue of holding the office of Secretary to the State Government.

    In sum:  the advertorial is not a credible response to the PTF’s charges and the facts on the ground in Kogi.  It is at bottom an excellent instance of repeating the offence instead of refuting the charge.

    Yahaya Bello must understand that COVID cannot be wished away with tawdry stunts, nor contained by treading the ruinous path of the execrable former guy, Donald Trump.

    •For comments, send SMS to 08111813080

  • A fool and his money

    A fool and his money

    By Sanya Oni

     

    Early January, yours truly had stumbled on a report by Reuters on an on-going move by the NNPC to raise $1 billion in prepayment with trading firms to refurbish the Port Harcourt refinery. Quoting unnamed sources, the report stated that the money would be repaid over seven years through deliveries of Nigerian crude and products from the refinery once the refurbishment is complete.

    More, it named Afreximbank, the Cairo-based financial powerhouse as leading the financing. Trust the officialdom to keep mum in such matters, a terse statement from the spokesman of the bank did confirm the development: “Afreximbank is looking into a facility for the refurbishment of the Port Harcourt Refinery. However, the borrower is yet to be determined”.

    Now, it is official – Not only is Nigeria plodding on the matter of rehabilitation of the dead entities, it will be pouring in some $1.5 billion to bring one of them to life! More than that, an Italian firm, Maire Tecnimont has already been selected by the government to undertake the repair work at the refinery.

    “We are happy to announce that the rehabilitation of productivity refinery will commence in three phases…” said Minister of State for Petroleum Timipre Sylva of the 210,000bpd. The first phase of the refinery overhaul project, he said, is scheduled to complete in 18 months. The idea is to bring the refinery’s production to 90% of its nameplate capacity.

    For a project that has gone through countless twists and turns, Nigerians will certainly be more than interested, first in the the basic outlines of the business case made to justify the patent misadventure, and why those behind it think that the current time is momentous.

    Unfortunately, given that ours is a country where the most basic documents relating to routine matters of governance have the official seal of “classified” affixed to them, trust the masters of the subterfuge to keep the rest of us guessing on the details of a deal that would probably pass as one of the most egregious decisions of all time. Indeed, like every single item of public policy in these parts, we are supposed to see it as something of a de ja vu – subsumed under the nebulous doctrine of ‘national interest’ even when it is apparent such are neither nationalistic nor of beneficial interest!

    We have no doubt, come a long way from when the Multi-Purpose-Vehicle (MPV) Bluestar Consortium put up by the billionaire industrialist, Aliko Dangote staked some $ $721 million to acquire Port Harcourt and Kaduna refineries. Like Grandpa’s Oldsmobile that ought to have been retired into the scrapyard but which must be retained at all costs so as not to be seen as suffering alienation of a beloved patrimony, so badly did some Nigerians want the two refineries back after the sale to Bluestar that the then President Umaru Yar’Adua was forced to succumb to the forces of populism. Well, that choice has not only turned extremely expensive in all its ramifications, it has revealed the sheer folly of allowing emotions to rule when reason is dictated.  Now, nearly a decade and half since that administration handed back to Dangote his cheque and two presidencies in between, we have merely dipped a notch further in the national trajectory of decline.

    By the way, it should not surprise that none in the administration would dare to present a business case that is outside of the statist mindset of the Buhari administration. That was one lesson the former Minister of State for Petroleum, Dr Ibe Kachikwu was forced to learn the hard way.  Like Samuel Finer’s man on the horseback, he rode into town like one consumed by a certain streak of messianism. When he announced to the whole world that, as far as he was concerned, those refineries were beyond salvage, he spoke to the rationality of the moment; the need to permanently fix the massive holes that the refineries had become by simply getting rid of them! That was in 2015. By the way, that view actually aligned with those of experts who had come to see the refineries not only as a bottomless pit, but their sale as surest way out of the refining quagmire.

    Of course, he hadn’t reckoned with the ‘body language’ of the big man, or if he did, he probably used the wrong visors. Later, like St Paul after this Damascus U-turn, he would recant, not once but serially; putting the long-suffering but then weary and frustrated public through his countless timelines, without a sense of accountability or integrity.

    Here, Nigerians will recall his infamous encounter with BBC’s Stephen Sackur on HardTalk: “Our target is 2019… don’t worry, I put the date, I’ll work it…”

    Don’t ask me if he made good his threat to take a “walk” if that target was not achieved. His self-awarded testimonial says it all: “If there is one area where I feel sad, it’s the refineries because there is a huge gulf between my pronouncements and where I’d like it to be and what we’ve been able to achieve.”

    But that’s not all there was to it of the self-indictment rendered in flowery language. Said he: “The reality today is that we are still below 15% of utilisation of those refineries because they need to maintained, reworked, they almost need to be shut down and completely refurbished”.

    That was after billions of naira of taxpayers had been poured into them over a four-year period!

    Today, we are back on that same old path of astounding opacity and mindless profligacy. Only that this time, no one is making pretences to due process.

    So here we go. Minister Timipre Sylva says Nigerians need not be apprehensive about where the cash is coming from. Nigerians, he said, should read his lips: No debts – or if any at all, it is only peripheral – next to nothing!

    I believe him. Better still, I should. Nonetheless, it will still help to take a good look at where he says the money is coming from. Never mind that this is a season when public officials on record turn around to claim being misquoted, yours truly still considers it worthwhile to quote the minister.

    “The NNPC is going to spend about $200 million from its internally generating revenue sources, while the federal appropriation will put in about $800 million and it is already broken down into three parts.

    This, according to the minister, are to be broken into tranches of $350 million each for the 2020 and 2021 appropriation cycles with the balance of $100 million charged on the 2022 budget. The balance of $500 million, he says will come from Afreximbank.

    On the $500 million coming from Afreximbank, the terms and conditions remain unknown at least at this time. Could it be, as earlier reported by Reuters, crude swap?

    It is – I guess – taken that the petroleum ministry will, by fiat, corral another $200 million from the NNPC subsidiary, the National Petroleum Development Company, NPDC – without recourse to appropriation!

    In all however, none is more intriguing than the federal government’s share of $800 million said to be tucked into the budgets.

    Think of charging $350 million on 2020 budget that itself was debt-financed to the tune of N6.1 trillion; imagine the current budget with an in-built deficit of N5.16 trillion already padded with Sylva’s $350 million refinery bill; and then another $100 million from a 2022 budget that in all likelihood will also be partly debt-financed.  And all of these to revive a contraption whose book value tends to zero and for whose outcome is not guaranteed!

    Like Minister Timipre Sylva, I verily believe in the miracle of resurrection. But a $1.6 billion bill to wake up a contraption soon to be sold by the government, the same government supposedly set for the deregulation of the sector; that’s hardly a wise way to spend public money? Even in our typically laissez faire, incoherent environment of public policy, that will still be a tough one to swallow. Believe me, it stinks!

  • Stain of Wasimi

    Stain of Wasimi

    By Olakunle Abimbola

     

    The cold-blooded slaying of the Wasimi 6 — a three-generation family, from doomed grandfather to slain grandchildren, and in a mosque at that! — signals the descent of contemporary Yoruba society, into bestiality hardly ever imagined.

    But no one ever seems to notice, since folks’ attention appears riveted elsewhere, by accident or by design.

    The “herds media”, so-called because it conjures “Fulani herdsmen” to spice every crime in the land, suddenly got funereally quiet about this one.

    Why, a particularly comic online platform even blamed “Fulani herdsmen” for its own video reportage, which nevertheless showed the wailing Fulani victims!

    Other more serious media duly reported the tragedy.  But they were quiet on the sensational whodunnit — that fashionable garnish of ethnic profiling, for avid bigoted minds.

    Why that quiet?  Because, as the “hated” Fulani, they were the “right” victims, though the outrage was in Wasimi, near Ikire, Osun, in the heart of Yorubaland?

    Or because the killers were the “wrong” ones the media would rather not crow about, as they do of “Fulani herdsmen”?

    By the way, who were these Fulani of Wasimi?  Folks, from Kwara, that spoke Oyo Yoruba like natives; wept and mourned in Yoruba, not Fulfude, to express their innermost anguish; and betrayed sheer impotence: despite the catastrophe that befell them, they have nowhere else to go, except Wasimi, their home and world, all-life long!

    That, by the way, is the reality of millions of Nigerians — Yoruba, Hausa, Igbo, Edo, Ijaw, Tiv, Idoma, etc — scattered outside their native areas, all over Nigeria.

    This natural value-added (of settling and thriving far away from home), inside a sprawling country, is what the hate-belching elite, with their loud, crass and reckless enforcers, now take for granted!

    It’s such a moment of mass madness!

    Still, when trouble bursts (to parody Peter Tosh, the late Jamaican reggae great), where would these folks run to, even if they are no “oppressors”, as in Tosh’s memorable riff?

    So long for tragedy-baiting folks; and a media self-condemned for surrendering to the herd (that word again!), instead of calmly leading the people, through a period of crisis!  Pray what did Zik say of his West African Pilot, with its famous torch?  Show the light and the people will find the way?  Not any more!

    Besides, the Yoruba credo of justice-before-kith-or-kin, for which that ethnic group is much admired, appears in grave danger here.

    The Yoruba society, over the ages, would have bristled at the Wasimi killings; root for the killers to be nabbed, even if it’s their next-of-kin; and see, in that execrable crime, a great peril to their age-long liberality and famed accommodation of others.

    Again, not any more!  That omoluabi ethos now risks being gutted by a fiery Yoruba nativism, that pushes Fulani hatred as core imperative; and sickening mind-poisoning of the unwary, as bounded — nay, desperate — ethnic duty.

    In such sweet, scalding hate, the Yoruba risk being diminished — except, of course, good sense prevails.

    Still, does this push for sanity, in a moment of crisis, excuse violent crimes against law-abiding travellers, farmers and their spouses, who have fallen victims of kidnap, murder and rape, by elements suspected to be criminal herdsmen?

    Never!  Everyone, nationwide, has a right to safety and security.  Everyone has a right to travel in peace, on secure roads, free of killer-kidnappers and bandits.

    So, while it is provocative that defenceless Yoruba are fatal victims of herdsmen criminality, a more clinical analysis shows this crime is no monopoly of any region.

    Indeed, if the much hated “Fulani herdsmen” harbour a sole Yoruba  — or even combined anti-South murderous agenda — why are these same criminals (also profiled as “Fulani”), as bandits, kidnap, kill, loot and rape all over the North West (particularly Zamfara and Kaduna), and parts of the North Central (Niger)?

    Are these “Fulani herdsmen” then sworn to wiping out everyone, including their own kind?  And for what purpose?

    The cold fact is that the worsening security situation marks the grand collapse of Nigeria’s central policing system.  That offers an epochal opportunity to re-federalize the Police and create state police — now that almost every geo-political zone has bought into the idea, hitherto a near-exclusive South West push.

    That means more police personnel, more materiel to fight crime, more employment for youths in police recruits, more local motivation to fight crime.

    On this score, the Federal Government must take the lead.  It’s its historic duty to do so.  Even the arch-centralists in-there can see the hard facts for re-federalization. You can even convert the furious ethnic militia nationwide, to vibrant, crime-busting intelligence corps, to boost the new policing order.

    But instead of grabbing this rare opportunity to settle a core federal question, folks have regressed into sweet atavism and dangerous nativism, as if the best of the future lay buried in the past.

    Among the Yoruba, suffused with ethnic crowing, it’s a near-consensus that Amotekun, the pan-regional security support corps, scaled down to state outfits by panicky central authorities, can adequately secure the South West.  It can, even where the central Police flail and fail, because it has intimate knowledge of its locality.

    But so could equivalent zonal outfits, in South East, South-South, North Central, North East and North West.  So, if you can gain the ocean, in improved security nationwide, tapping into respective local resources, why settle for a mere pond, squeezing yourself into an ethnic cocoon?

    Besides, who hankers after Amotekun (with its throwback to local hunters with Dane guns) or Oodua People’s Congress, OPC (which cadres are accused of alleged arson and murder, while helping to haul in an alleged kidnapper), when you could gun for a full-fledged state police, that could harness the native intelligence of both bodies?

    But that flawed thinking is hardly shocking, when you ethnicize crime, make a general malaise appear an exclusive problem, and profile an entire ethnic group for the crime of a few; mistaking common criminals as a hideous army of a looming culture war.  Still, the security challenge is a national problem.  It cries for a national solution.

    By the way, in 2021, a Nigerian woman, Dr. Shola Mos-Shogbamimu, a female activist in the United Kingdom, took out the Queen, on British TV, over the Harry-Meghan affair.  But that very year, her own Yoruba homeland touts unbridled nativism, for a nationwide security meltdown they would rather not think through!

    Awo, great thinker, thought Nigeria and pushed federalism.  His noise-some children think Nigeria, but scamper into Oodua Republic.  Interesting times!

  • Running for life

    Running for life

    Gabriel Amalu

     

    The attack on the Governor of Benue State, Samuel Ortom, last week, by suspected armed herdsmen has brought a new dimension to the insecurity plaguing the country. While thousands of ordinary Nigerians have been dispatched to their grave, by the ubiquitous armed herdsmen who have made life miserable for many Nigerians, especially farmers in the rural areas, the audacious attack on one of the few most guarded Nigerians gives cause for serious worry.

    According to the governor, who has been in a running battle with the leaders of the Miyetti Allah Kautal Hore, and their patrons like the governor of Bauchi State, Bala Muhammad, he ran one and a half kilometres on foot to escape death at the hands of the attackers. The governor, who parked his official car on the Makurdi-Gboko road, had walked that distance into the bush to tend his farm, only to be waylaid by the armed bandits.

    Thankfully, the governor escaped unhurt, for an assassination of the governor could trigger a major cataclysm for Nigeria, already divided along ethnic lines. Like the assassination of the Austria-Hungary’s Archduke Franz Ferdinand triggered the First World War, a killing of the Benue governor could lead to a second civil war in Nigeria, as warned by the governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike. While Wike is garrulous, with the way the security architecture of the country stands, conspiracy theorists would have had a field day.

    With the commander-in-chief of the nation’s armed forces, and most heads of the nation’s military and paramilitary agencies manned by persons of a particular ethnic stock, how can the people of Benue State and Tivs in particular, not believe that such assassination was planned from the top? So, this column joins Governor Nyesom Wike, to advise the federal government to find the armed bandits involved in the attack, and punish them, to serve as a deterrent to their cohorts, who may have such evil plans.

    While all lives are indeed precious, and the 1999 constitution enjoins governments to protect all, there is no doubt that the lives of political office holders have greater value, which is why state apparatus is deployed to protect such lives. Unfortunately, because the Buhari presidency has concentrated majority of the leadership of the nation’s military and para-military agencies in the hands of a section, there is the notion of a hegemonic plans.

    So, with the crisis rocking several parts of Nigeria, particularly Benue State, predominantly a result of the farmers-herders clash, if any harm had come to Governor Ortom, the people of Benue will easily swallow every conspiracy theory that puts the blame on the patrons of the herders in government. As this column has argued severally, it is dangerous to skew the headship of the security agencies in favour an ethnic group.

    The 1999 constitution forbade such insularity, and common sense abhors such tendency in a heterogeneous country like Nigeria. So thank God, Governor Ortom ran for his life, and was able to outrun the attackers. But again, those who attacked him, and those who are in the know, need to be apprehended and made to account. Also, the federal government must wake up and curtail the insecurity facing the country.

    Like Governor Ortom, running for life, has become a way of life for many school children in the northern part of the country. According to some records, in the past few months, more than 600 pupils have been victims of kidnap by armed gangsters. What started as an isolated case when President Goodluck Jonathan was president has become a pastime under President Muhammadu Buhari. From Niger State, to Kastina and Kaduna states, kidnaping of school children have become a vogue, and the cost on those children, can only be imagined.

    Tragically, those who are in charge of the states where the children were kidnapped have not shown an understanding of the traumatic impact on the children. After the children are returned, one gets the feeling that public officials are more interested in the photo sessions with the rescued children than a therapeutic rehabilitation for the children. The officials behave as if they are not apprehensive of the horrific experience on the children’s mental physiognomy, as far as the quest for education is concerned.

    The shoot at sight order, allegedly issued by President Buhari, has not yet affected the insurgency and may not deliver Nigeria from the hands of the criminals working so hard to torpedo our country. Therefore a greater effort needs to be made by the federal government to stymie the descent into anarchy. This column wonders why the federal executive council has not proposed an amendment to the Police Act, and the 1999 constitution, to gift the country a decentralized police, when all zones in the country claim to be interested in that.

    Why we prefer a knee-jerk instead of holistic approach to governance of our country is worrisome. An intelligent approach to some of the issues could reduce the tension in the country, yet those in charge prefer the panel-beating that has only brought misery to Nigeria. Just like his predecessors, the Buhari presidency is uninterested in restructuring, and like presidents Olusegun Obasanjo and Goodluck Jonathan, may become wiser after he leaves office.

    This column urges him to engineer the restructuring of our country, for greater efficiency, instead of waiting until he leaves office. While Obasanjo was president, he treated any mention of decentralisation of the security agencies or even the national economy as an abomination. President Buhari now has every chance to make a difference by taking steps to decentralise the nation’s economy and police architecture, to gift our country the opportunity to prosper.

    Sometimes, I wonder what type of advisers the president has; whether they ever advise the president at all, or they are just there to waste our nation’s resources. Or is it possible that they are the ones misleading the president to make skewed appointments to the military and para-military agencies, such that majority of Nigerians have lost confidence in President Buhari’s sense of fairness as a national leader? Sometimes, when you see the preponderance of people from his ethnic stock getting nearly every position available, you wonder the future of our country.

    Those who pretend that all is well with our nation or that what is happening is normal should worry now that a governor had to run a kilometre and half to stay alive. One wonders what would have become of our country, if Governor Orton is not physically fit, and had succumbed to fatigue, and was murdered by the armed herdsmen. If that happened, those claiming hegemonic agenda would have proffered that tragedy as a conclusive proof.

     

     

  • Insecurity: beyond finger-pointing and ethnic profiling

    Insecurity: beyond finger-pointing and ethnic profiling

    By Azubike Nass

    This writer had many times argued that the problem is governance failure at all levels (federal, state and local), since Nigeria became independent in 1960.

    In the 1940s, the British colonial government gazetted Cattle Routes and Rural Grazing Areas (RUGA), as well as established the first cattle ranch at Obudu (in present-day Cross River State).  All were designed to forestall clashes between herders and farmers, which were already showing signs.

    From 1960, no realistic indigenous efforts were made to improve on what we inherited, even when so many things, including demographics, were rapidly changing.

    Exception: Chief Obafemi Awolowo started a modern ranch project in present-day Ekiti State, with imported special-breed cows and infrastructural layout for dairy business, beef production and marketing.

    His overall plan was to make open grazing out of fashion, while the Western Region would become self-sufficient in cow meat demand.  When Awolowo left office as Premier of Western Region, that project died a natural death.

    What has any other government, at whatever level, done since then?  What did the long years of military government do about that?  What did Presdent Olusegun Obasanjo’s civilian government (1999-2007) do to address the problem?  Virtually nothing — and the problem kept festering and intensifying.

    President Goodluck Jonathan initiated a solution that was not practicalized: N100 million was pronounced to support state governments willing to build cattle ranches/farms, by whatever name called.  It was later reported that only a small fraction of the money was released in 2014; and the state governors that collected it applied the money for political campaign of the season.

    It was also revealed that the old gazetted grazing areas and other routes had been appropriated by highly placed political and traditional leaders across the states.  The herders continued to roam the forests and grasslands, uncared for; and their trade unregulated — and often clashing with farming communities.

    Present President Muhammadu Buhari’s government came up with its own Livestock Transformation Agenda, designed to end open grazing and boost livestock production and its value chain.

    The team that produced the programme was headed by then opposition party Governor of Ebonyi State, Engr. Dave Umahi.  Participating state governments were to be given incentives and support by the Federal Government.

    At the moment, some states (mostly in the northern part of the country, where cattle rearing is predominant) are keyed into the programme, making slow progress in building ranches.  About 90 per cent of herders are of Fulani ethnic group.  There are Fulani in other North and West African countries.

    None of the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) consume less than 2, 500 cows a week.  That is 10, 000 cows a month minimum consumption.  Lagos State  alone is recorded to consume 10, 000 cows per week.

    That means even the southern states that don’t have indigenous herders and may not be interested in building ranches, would still require some arrangements for transporting and holding cows brought into the states for sale and consumption (including veterinary care).  So, it is not enough to pronounce ban on open grazing without the government making a realistic alternative plan.

    Read Also: Ortom and insecurity conundrum in Nigeria

    This huge cow market (demand and supply) in Nigeria is a major attraction for marauding cross-border herdsmen (mostly of Fulani stock).  Some (not all) of these guys are seasoned ex-fighters from many internecine conflicts that ravage North African countries.

    Bestial brutality is fun to them.  Their temperament and emotions are as dry as the vast North African Sahara Desert.  They are seasoned arms smugglers.

    Nigeria has about the highest prevalence of cattle rustling.  It is a diverse and syndicated business.  The herders are often shot dead and their cows led away.  They have virtually no form of institutional protection.

    Because Nigerian cattle market and value chain (if any) had long remained archaic and unregulated, it has remained a conducive ground for free-floating criminal herdsmen.

    Global statistics on proliferation of small arms and light weapons put Africa as a flashpoint; and Nigeria as a worse case.

    So, illegal arms are all over, in the hands of sundry criminals, cult groups, anarchist gangs, and highly placed people in positions of authority and influence.  In fact, many Nigerian politicians are well practised in mobilizing and arming violence-prone youths, as thugs to fight election wars.

    These are the arms usually not carried openly but kept in hidden places until needed.  So, how do you disarm all — and not only the herdsmen?

    In the protracted conflict, the farming communities are victims because because cows graze on their farmlands.  The herdsmen are also victims because they are not provided where to graze and they don’t hold lands.

    They are only a minority and easily chased away from where they live; and their cattle (their life investment) easily stolen.  They, therefore, resort to living deep in the forests, from where they mount reprisal attacks in a cycle of unending conflicts with farming communities.

    This is the root cause of banditry situation in many places.  Reprisal attacks go on between both sides.  But in terms of achieving publicity for their victimhood narrative, the herdsmen are disadvantaged.  They are generally not savvy in packaging their victimhood for public sympathy.

    Easy resort to hate speech, ethnic profiling and denigrating name-calling, can never offer solution to the problem.

    President Jonathan was there yesterday.  President Buhari is there today.  Tomorrow, it could be someone from the South East or South West.  As long as the problem is not realistically and methodically addressed by the stakeholders, so long will it continue to fester and intensify.

    Those who refuse or reject efforts to holistically address the problem, and rather threaten hellfire and doom, should be sure that they are well prepared for a complex war, with no fixed frontline.

    I rest my case.

    • Nass, a retired colonel from the Nigerian Army, writes from Enugu.

    Promise of Kebbi

    In its rice pyramids, Kebbi rises. Yet, around that state and its rise of rice, its North West neighbours are secu-
    rity-challenged: Zamfara, Kaduna; and to a less extent, Sokoto.

    Not so faraway, in the North Central belt, is Niger, also making ugly headlines, in kidnapping-for-ransom, of helpless school children; and innocent travelling folks.

    Nasarawa, Niger’s zonal kin, may yet join renewed insecurity chain, given squeals by its governor, that fleeing Boko Haram terrorists are regrouping in three Nasarawa local governments, bordering the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) of Abuja.

    That Kebbi can thrive in rice, despite the serious security challenges plaguing its neighbours, is a pointer to two conflicting visions: one points to doom; the other, to success.

    Ripples thinks either could be a deliberate choice — if folks howl less; and think more.

  • Now that the vaccines are here

    Now that the vaccines are here

    By Olatunji Dare

     

    Finally, the vaccines are here.  We can now begin to look forward to a return to the way we lived before with guarded optimism.

    Hooray to science and to the scientists who produced the vaccines in record time.  Not even the former guy, the twice-impeached Donald Trump, is calling them fake. To be absolutely sure, he secretly took a dose before sulking out of the White House, his crackbrained plan to sit tight there with the aid of home-bred terrorists and White supremacists having collapsed ignominiously.

    Trust The Donald.  He dissembled right down to his very last act in office.

    Developing and producing the vaccines was probably the easy part, however. The return to normality will be gradual, slow even.  For tens of thousands of persons stricken with the disease, help has probably arrived too late, given the sheer scale of the pestilence, and the fraught logistics of distribution and administration.

    Even in the long term, there may not be enough vaccines to go round.  But everyone, except  those who want nothing to do with the vaccines, for all kinds of reasons ranging from the genuinely skeptical to the downright superstitious, nevertheless considers himself or herself a prime candidate for a jab.

    Now that the vaccines have landed in Nigeria, who will get a jab, when, and how will they be selected?  Debate and discussion on these overarching questions, I suspect, are going to be as impassioned, rancorous and divisive as the debate on the nature and essence of the Covid-19 itself.

    Even now, in my home state of Kogi, they are not done debating whether the virus is fake or real¸ or whether what is being peddled as the antidote is not at bottom a scheme by the evil duo of Bill and Melinda Gates to reconfigure the DNA of the national population to satiate their craving for conquest and control.

    And what, pray, if the whole Covid thing turned out in the end to be nothing but the manifestation, at long last, of the The Beast, the infernal creature with 666 stamped all over it, the one foretold by Holy Scripture?  And how do you fight a raging monster of Biblical provenance with vaccines devised by ordinary humans?

    Better to leave all that for now to the conspiracy theorists, whom we shall always have amongst us, and far more productive to address forthrightly the problem of allocation.

    The vaccines are here, as I was saying.  They are here whether some people like it or not. They are here for everyone, including those who have fashioned political or ecclesiastic careers on Covid-19 denial or raked in fortunes from peddling fake remedies.

    Many distributive strategies have been canvassed, of which pricing – market forces – is the most efficient, according to the best authorities.  After all, that is why the nation’s entire economic thinking is premised on market forces?  Some fine-tuning may well be required, but this is what it would mean in practical terms:  The vaccines should go to those who can pay for them.

    The same outcome, it has been suggested, can be achieved through competitive bids or auctions.  Those who can pay the premium price get the commodity on offer first, if not exclusively

    Read Also: AstraZeneca vaccine safe for Nigerians, FG insists

     

    And those who can’t?

    Their friends, relations, philanthropic organisations, maybe even the government, will pony up.  They will carry on as they have always done and live on in sufficient numbers to tell their stories.  Isn’t that what they have always done anyway?

    What about allocation by algorithms?  These days, they allocate all manner of scarce products by algorithms.  Why can’t they do the same thing with vaccines?

    Some have countered that the scheme can be rigged to favour relations and friends and those willing to offer heavy inducements to the programmers who, whatever their mental magnitude and cybernetic endowments, are just as human as the rest of us. That is no trifling objection.

    Allocation by the Federal Character principle, state of origin, ethnic quota, gender, residence,  occupation, or religious affiliation, has also been suggested.   It is just as fraught. And we have with us those whom nothing will satisfy.

    In the end, each country will have to devise a system of allocation that accords with its priorities, system of values and culture.  That seems to be precisely the approach the Federal Government has followed in the first phase of the rollout of the vaccines.  It would have been scandalous in the extreme if Nigeria followed any other formula.

    According to the vaccine donors and the World Health Organisation, medical workers at the frontline of the war on Covid, and the elderly who are most vulnerable to disease, should be the first to be vaccinated.

    What do they know about our traditions and our culture?

    Why should we listen to them when our culture and traditions are different, and when we have our own time-tested system of values?

    In that tradition, whatever touches the Authority, the “strategic leaders” as they are now called under the vaccine rollout protocol, must come first. It goes without saying, therefore, that the President and the First Family and their entire household, followed by all functionaries in the Presidency and its tributaries, should be the first set of candidates for the vaccines.

    The reason is plain.  Unless and until the President and his household and aides are protected from Covid-19, no one is safe from its ravages.

    The Vice President, his family, and his suite, follow as a matter of course.  Next come the heads of the armed services and the judiciary.  The head of the apex bank obviously belongs in this group.  Sooner or later, Authority will need the money.

    Members of the Federal Executive Council and their households should follow closely. Who else should follow if not state governors, state lawmakers, and their large retinues of special advisers, special assistants and other aides who defy classification even under the most comprehensive organogram ever devised?

    And after them, members of the National Assembly.  But I gather that the lawmakers were contending that they could get the vaccines immediately after the Presidency, if not before it.  They argued that since laws have to be made before they can be executed, they should have primacy.

    These grasping lawmakers sef!  Must it always be about them?

    The royal fathers, the custodians of our most cherished traditions, should follow, not forgetting their sprawling households.  By any reckoning, these monarchs belong in the frontline of the war on Covid, along with our ecclesiastic and spiritual leaders, not forgetting the prayer warriors.

    Troops fighting off the menace of Boko Haram and allied terrorist outfits could do with a morale booster.  They and their families, plus serving members of the police force should be considered next for the vaccine.  Care will be taken to ensure that those listed as policemen and women can execute a proper salute or a parade-ground command.

    Doctors, nurses, other health workers will come next. Resilience is their middle name.  So, why make them primary candidates for vaccination when far more vulnerable groups are waiting desperately? The same goes for teachers.

    Our traditional reverence for the elderly in society enjoins us to protect them from the ravages of disease, but only if they still qualify as “strategic leaders.”  Those we refer to for better or worse as “elder statesmen” are statesmen all right but are not “strategic leaders” in the sense of the vaccine rollout.

    But we will always need them.  They will be accorded their places in the scheme, but only after all the strategic imperatives have been met.

    Rest easy, those left out of the foregoing schema. It is but the first draft of a tentative rolling plan designed to meet the exigencies of the moment, while supplies last.

    A special electronic register has been opened for them.

  • Eastern rail corridor

    Eastern rail corridor

    By Gabriel Amalu

     

    The claim by the Governor of Rivers State, Nyesom Wike, that the federal government is planning to build a narrow gauge, instead of a modern standard gauge, in the eastern rail corridor, that runs from Port Harcourt through several cities to Maiduguri, should be investigated by the Senate and the House of Representatives. If the allegation is true then the government of President Muhammadu Buhari would legitimately be accused of discriminatory practices against the concerned parts of the country, and I urge the president to quickly order a reversal of such a plan.

    On his part, the minister of transport, Rotimi Amaechi, should be embarrassed and taunted as a political lickspittle, despite his achievements in other parts of the country, if the claim is true. As far as this column is concerned, the minister should be worried that while he justifies the building of a standard gauge rail line from Kastina to Niger Republic, and a Railway University in Kastina State, to court the president who appointed him, he is unable to secure a standard gauge rail line for his home state.

    Indeed, if the allegation is true, it would be a classic case of use and dump. And the child-like tantrums between the minister and Governor Wike over who has served longer in higher positions would merely beg the issue. In a newspaper report of the interview he granted Arise television, Amaechi did not confirm or deny the governor’s allegation that the federal government is planning a narrow gauge in the eastern corridor.

    Instead, Amaechi talked about using railway development to create jobs, as if the standard gauge on the western corridor has not created jobs. So, the minister who has shown a single mindedness in his assignment to revitalise the railway in Nigeria should speak up on the allegation. Indeed, if he fails to clear the air on the allegation, then the governors of the states through which the rail line would pass, should band together and resist the discriminatory practice, which is clearly forbidden by the 1999 constitution (as amended).

    No doubt, it is the clear intention of the makers of our constitution, which the president swore to uphold, as provided in section 16(b) of the constitution that such discriminatory economic practice should be avoided. It provides: “The state shall within the context of the ideals and objectives for which the provisions are made in this constitution: control the national economy in such manner as to secure the maximum welfare, freedom and happiness of every citizen on the basis of social justice and equality of status and opportunity.”

    Without gainsaying, there would be no worse discriminatory practice should the president use our national resources to build a modern railway line in the part of the country he comes from, but chooses to foist an archaic and outmoded railway line on another part of the country. This argument is more succinct, if the contribution of his home state to the national gross domestic product is considered side by side with a state like Rivers, whose governor is crying foul.

    Read Also: Wike was my staff, I can’t bring myself low, says Amaechi

     

    There is no doubt that resources from the Niger Delta form a sizeable chunk of the nation’s GDP and even higher percentage of the nation’s income from which the budget for railway lines will be offset. Beyond the oil producing region which stretches up to Abia State, that railway corridor runs from the Niger Delta through the southeast, to the north-central and finally terminates at the northeast. What explanation will the federal government offer for building a narrow gauge on that part, while a standard gauge is built in the other parts of the country?

    As I have argued in a piece I titled ‘Half of Nigeria’ on this page some time ago, the eastern half of the country, under which the proposed railway corridor falls is poorer compared to the other half, in which the southwest, western part of north-central and northwest falls into. The poverty in the eastern half is more evident in the northern part of the region, and I urged the federal government to ameliorate the situation.

    I have no doubt that a long term solution to the activities of the Boko Haram and similar insurgency in the northeast lies in improved economic activities in the region. With the Lake Chad drying slowly, the country must begin to look at other forms of economic activities to resuscitate the region’s economy. With the possibility that the lake could be re-watered, a modern standard gauge railway corridor would be key to agro-allied industries that could spring up from such a huge capital investment.

    Further down the eastern corridor, the Benue-Plateau axis and the south-eastern part are potential economic power houses, which a modernised railway line would boost. While the middle-belt part have strong agricultural potentials, the some cities in the southeast part of the corridor if gifted a modernized railway line, could become similar to renowned major trade centres of the world. So those in charge should allow economic sense to prevail in in rebuilding the eastern railway corridor, instead of jejune political considerations, of misguided power juntas.

    If the eastern railway corridor is adequately rebuilt as is happening on the western corridor, the debilitating exertion on the Lagos ports, and by extension other infrastructure in the state of excellence will minimise. The ports in the Port Harcourt would feed the businesses on that corridor, and the nation will be better for it, as new economic centres are created in other parts of the country. Even the expansion and growth of Lagos would become more orderly, instead of being overburdened by the dearth of economic activities in other parts of the country.

    Again, since rail engines and coaches cannot be interchanged between a standard gauge and a narrow gauge, where is the economic sense in such a misadventure? Clearly, such decision would be a disservice to the Nigerian Railway Corporation. While there is no justification to start building a railway line from Kastina to Niger Republic, when railway lines within the country have not been rebuilt, this column thinks is better not to start the eastern corridor, instead of building the archaic narrow gauge as governor Wike alleged.

    If those who are championing the discriminatory practice don’t stop, I urge the states affected to use all legitimate measures to resist the decision. It is better everyone knows that the region’s railway line has not been built, that to gift them a useless railway line and claim that they have what others have. I earnestly hope Wike is lying against Amaechi. But, should it be true that Amaechi is playing politics as Wike claimed, history would be unkind to him, and his masters.

  • Cryptocurrencies: The real issues

    Cryptocurrencies: The real issues

    By Sanya Oni

    In a country where avenues for legitimate business is akin to ramming the proverbial horse through the eye of the needle, I can understand the anger if not the frustration of those who saw the so-called ban on cryptocurrency as another instance of the regulatory overkill for which our dear country has long acquired continental, if not global, notoriety. That some have actually equated the CBN hammer to withdrawing the operating licence of an entity and at such an inauspicious moment that reeks of bad faith is therefore no surprise! Indeed, as far as many among our fledgling tribe of techies are concerned, Nigeria has only again lived to its reputation as killer of dreams, a graveyard for talents and dreams to boot – with the CBN merely acting as a not-too-sympathetic undertaker!

    So much for the purported ban; whereas only a few can claim to know how the “digital or virtual currencies issued by largely anonymous entities actually work, suffice to say that its growing popularity – never mind its opacity –has since made the endeavour a little more than one of idle curiosity.

    At a church forum some two years back, we had a speaker talk to us on the business. Trust me, my primary instinct was to raise the issue of regulation. Trust the old-fashioned investor in me, I needed more than the cold assurances offered by some shadowy, invisible players – far beyond the alluring promises of hefty returns on investment –to take a plunge! Yes, you guessed right – I never did precisely because there was no such thing as regulation!

    Yet for those who remains persuaded, the crypto business is supposed to be the stuff of which the next big dreams are made, ranking perhaps topmost in the league of the drivers of the next fintech revolution. Merely by the portfolio size – some $500 million by the last account, it has become something of a force too difficult to ignore. And while not necessarily exclusive to the Z-Generation, it is increasingly touted as an investors’ delight both for the returns on investment and as a veritable store of value. Which explains why not a few actually see it as the next big thing after oil!

    To describe the CBN directive as a “ban” would certainly be an overstatement of the matter. For contrary to what is being peddled around about the measure, the apex bank merely directed those under its regulatory orbit to close the accounts of cryptocurrency exchanges. In other words, whereas the latter are free to carry on their activities, these can only be done outside of the CBN’s remit – the mainstream financial system. Rather than the talk of killing the business therefore, those familiar with how the business works have since pointed at nearly a dozen outlets through which the business could be carried out.

    Which takes us to the ratio presented by the CBN to justify the drastic measure. The first is that “their use in Nigeria goes against the key mandates of the CBN, as enshrined in the CBN Act (2007), as the issuer of legal tender in Nigeria. Simply put, the use of cryptocurrencies is a direct contravention of existing law. On this, there is pretty little to add. Second, that the very name and nature of “cryptocurrencies” suggests that its patrons and users value anonymity, obscurity, and concealment. Which of course begs the question: why would any entity seek to disguise their transactions if they are legal? “Cryptocurrencies”, the CBN would equally aver, “have become well-suited for conducting many illegal activities including money laundering, terrorism financing, purchase of small arms and light weapons, and tax evasion”. Again, no one has yet denied the charge as lacking some grains of truth. And finally, that some cryptocurrencies have become more widely used as speculative assets rather than as means of payment, thus explaining the significant volatility and variability in their prices – something against the grain of monetary system stability which the CBN sees as the core of its many but variegated functions.

    If one had thought the well-reasoned positions have moderated the rage directed at the apex bank, the contrary turned out to be the case – a fact that would underlie why public policy is such an impossible undertaking in these parts.

    That was before Vice President Yemi Osinbajo weighed in. With his powerful interjection, it is hard to know how far things have since changed. Far beyond providing validation to what some among the army of critics of the CBN measure have put out, he actually sought to press the apex bank on the need for a rethink. His premise is as simple as it is persuasive: “Rather than adopt a policy that prohibits cryptocurrency operations in the Nigerian banking sector, we must act with knowledge and not fear and develop a robust regulatory regime that is thoughtful and knowledge-based”.

    He said more: “There is no question that blockchain technology generally and cryptocurrencies, in particular, will in the coming years challenge traditional banking, including reserve (central) banking, in ways that we cannot yet imagine.”

    And then: “We need to be prepared for that seismic shift. And it may come sooner than later”.

    And finally: “There is a role for regulation here, and it is in the place of both our monetary authorities and SEC to provide a robust regulatory regime that addresses these serious concerns without killing the goose that might lay the golden eggs.”

    Good observations, no doubt. I understand where the VP is coming from. As a lawyer, everything comes basically to the sacrament of the printed word –using the instrumentality of the text to envision the future – the province of learned men!

    In this, the erudite professor appears to have overlooked two crucial matters: the first is that the apex bank, under the current strictures have neither the depth of understanding of the cryptocurrency environment nor the sophistication in terms of the instrument required to regulate the business, which by its nature, is not only supranational but one whose network is as complex as it is incomprehensible! At this time, the quest is not so much about our aspirations to the global orbit; rather, it is whether a country that cannot properly identify its citizens could afford to launch into a world where a mild trigger can send the entire framework of global finance crashing on everyone’s heads.

    If I understood the CBN and SEC’s positions, it is that the financial sector is far from ready to assume such risks at this time!

    The other worry is the challenge that cryptocurrencies present to the ethos of work! Nigerians are understandably adventurous lots. It explains their ubiquity – in medicine, finance, ICT, name it. But then, we have also seen another growing counter-culture – the appetite for risks of a most heinous kind –from gambling to the endless craving for wealth without work – an inversion – if you like –of the protestant ethic by a ruthless band for whom money and more money is the driving force!

    Think it doesn’t matter? You only need to remember how, for the delinquency of a few bankers, the treasury in 2008 was nearly emptied to save the financial services sector from ruin.