The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • Trial of AGF Malami

    Trial of AGF Malami

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The Minister of Justice and Attorney General of the federation, Abubakar Malami, SAN, is on trial in many fronts. With respect to the knotty issue of the Process & Industrial Development Ltd (P&ID) scam against Nigeria, the learned silk has distinguished himself creditably in his capacity as the chief law officer of Nigeria. With respect to his fight with the suspended chairman of EFCC, Ibrahim Magu, the jury is still out as to whether he was accentuated by ill-motive in his petition indicting the erstwhile corruption czar.

    The learned AGF is also at odds with the Nigerian Bar Association, (NBA) of which he is a prominent member, for allegedly acting mala fide, ultra vires and in bad faith in his purported unilateral amendment of the Rules of Professional Conduct (RPC). Unfortunately for the learned silk, the din associated with the purported amendment of the RPC, has overshadowed the success recorded by Nigeria in successfully raising a prima facie case of fraud with regards to the arbitral award, in favour of P&ID.

    While the EFCC is also laying claim to the success story, the AGF clearly deserves kudos for his dogged fight against those who wanted to scam Nigeria of over $10 billion, a significant portion of our national budget. As the judgement of the English Court showed, it was Nigerian government officials and lawyers retained to defend Nigerian that were in bed with P&ID and their collaborators in what perhaps could have been one of the greatest heist against the country, in recent time.

    In his essay, in Thisday Newspaper, titled: P&ID and its Nigerian Conspirators, Shaka Momodu, wrote a damning indictment of senior officials of the NNPC, Ministry of Petroleum Resources and a learned silk and former Attorney General of Lagos State, Olasupo Shasore, SAN. Quoting from the judgment, he x-rayed a judicial indictment of Mr Oguine and Ms Taiga of the NNPC, and Ms Adelore of the Ministry of Petroleum Resources, all of whom became alleged collaborators, instead of defenders of the Nigerian interest, they work for.

    Of note, the alleged actions of the senior lawyers which amounts to professional misconduct, took place while Mohammed Bello Adoke, SAN, who is standing trial for financial crimes against Nigeria, was the Attorney General of the Federation. Again, in the matter for which Adoke is standing trial, AGF Malami has stood resolute, and ignored the plea of his predecessor that he was being unfairly targeted by the foreign lawyer acting for Nigeria. For standing up against those who betrayed their fatherland, the AGF deserves to be commended.

    Like I said earlier, the jury is not out with regards to the counter-accusations levelled against the AGF, by the former boss of EFCC, Ibrahim Magu. As I wrote on this page, not long ago, what is good for the goose is good for the gander. Since it was Malami’s petition that led to the suspension of Magu, and Magu has alleged similar malfeasance against Malami, it is only fair that those allegations be scrutinized. My position on that has not changed.

    But, since many Nigerian have trust in the panel of enquiry set up by the president, under the leadership of retired Justice Ayo Salami, to do a comprehensive job, it is fair we await the outcome of the enquiry to know, between Magi and Malami, the one who betrayed the trust of President Muhammadu Buhari. This column only hopes that the tribunal would conduct its enquiry in a judicial manner, so that the outcome can withstand a judicial review.

    The third issue on which the AGF has received criticism is his purported amendment of the RPC, over which some lawyers have threatened a lawsuit, with the aim of stripping the AGF of title of senior advocate of Nigeria. The NBA led by a new executive has also protested against the unilateral amendment of the RPC, a responsibility reserved for the General Bar Council, which the AGF heads. Apart from the AGF, the attorneys generals of all the states, and 20 representatives of the Nigerian Bar Association, make up the council.

    The power to amend the RPC is provided by section 12(4) of the Legal Practitioners Act, as amended by law No 21 of 1994, and it is clearly reserved for the council. So, unless the council met and made the recent amendment, a unilateral action by the AGF is ultra vires, null and void. While the AGF has kept mum since the controversy broke, senior lawyers have taken sides depending on their interests, clearly beyond the issue at stake.

    Of course, the NBA is afflicted by many ills, including the alleged subjugation of the electoral process, to achieve preconceived outcomes. A clear evidence of that is that the immediate three past elections have been the subject of controversy, including in one instance allegation of criminal misconduct, arising from the conduct of the elections. So a number of lawyers are unhappy with the process, and some of them see the interference from the AGF as a deserved comeuppance for these electoral manipulations, by some members.

    While this writer is unhappy with the electoral process, and has canvassed for an improvement, such disenchantment is not enough to support the AGF to usurp the powers of the bar council. Those whose anger have beclouded their position on the issue should retrace their steps in the interest of rule of law, the fundament of the legal profession, which they profess. Again, no doubt, the huge revenue accruing from annual dues and cost of stamp that the NBA generates have become a sauce for those who have made membership of the executive body their own law practice.

    These group would do everything and anything to gain a position in the bar, and once they have gotten there, they become careerist in the executive body or its extended bodies. That is the anger of some others who don’t give a damn if the body implodes. Again, such disposition will not aid the profession in the long run, everything considered. Furthermore, a number of the aggrieved have personal issues with their colleagues who have fed fat from their time in the executive.

    Many of them have used their membership of the bar executive, as the ladder to higher privileges, even when they have not distinguished themselves in the profession. To save the NBA, the new executive body at the national level, should do what it can to purge itself and state executives of the avarice and ills that is trying to upend the association. Unless there is internal healing, those working to divide the bar, would gain from these discontentment.

    In conclusion, I urge the AGF, Mr Abubakar Malami, SAN, to acquit himself creditably, while he has the powers of the office vested in him. Sooner than later, the office will leave him willy-nilly.

  • Fallen, failing or failed state?

    Fallen, failing or failed state?

    By Sanya Oni

    If the Buhari administration had somewhat harboured the expectation that the irritations from Nigeria’s foremost letter writer will at some point peter out, or at least lose traction to be taken any seriously, the pointless overdrive by the administration’s hierarchs which followed can only be a measure of how the famed Ota-farmer’s testimonials means more to it than it is willing to admit.  For far beyond the lexical exertions about whether the country has failed, is failing or has fallen, and who is more culpable, the real matter – which is whether the current administration has lived to its promise since 2015 when it took over the coveted mantle of leadership – would appear to have been conveniently buried in the rubble.

    But then, as they say, the stats – or if you prefer, the unflattering indices, has like the open sore– has not only refused to go away despite the administration’s growing irritation just as the haunting has become too much to ignore. In this as indeed many theatres of the nation’s life on which majority of Nigerians have sought to remind the administration of its promise of change but which has disappeared like the smoke, reminding of how bad things are have become – quite frankly – superfluous.

    Which is not to say that Obasanjo will not rather be Obasanjo in hypocrisy; which means that those expecting him to hold his peace or even use such routes said to ordinarily avail men that have occupied the lofty office of president either pretend to be oblivious of his character, or like the same OBJ of whom they love to hate, are just as insufferable!

    Let’s begin with the pot shot which ignited this latest fire of the presidency:

    “I do appreciate that you all feel sad and embarrassed as most of us feel as Nigerians with the situation we find ourselves in. Today, Nigeria is fast drifting to a failed and badly divided state; economically our country is becoming a basket case and poverty capital of the world, and socially, we are firming up as an unwholesome and insecure country.

    “And these manifestations are the products of recent mismanagement of diversity and socio-economic development of our country. Old fault lines that were disappearing have opened up in greater fissures and with drums of hatred, disintegration and separation and accompanying choruses being heard loud and clear almost everywhere.”

    Like our own Nobel Laureate Prof Wole Soyinka would say of the OBJ jibe, the statement will certainly be true in every material particular – excepting that in the opinion of our big men at the presidency and their hired hands – the imprint of a certain St Mathew domiciled in Ota – makes it false in its entirety!

    I don’t know of your take: I personally need to validation from OBJ to know how bad things are. Neither do I need the perennially unending reference to the Failed States Index of which Nigeria is said to sit pretty 14th place among the countries with potentials to sunder. Why should that big deal? Wasn’t Nigeria in 2009, some 11 years back, ranked 15th on the same index out of a total of 177 countries?

    Guess the same could be said of our crowning of as the poverty capital of the universe which some Nigerians now tout as evidence that things have gone bad. Really? What could be new or even novel about that in a country where, in the last decade and half, some 12+ million kids are perennially out of school? And this does not even include the Almajiri caste, the luckless group of pre-teens who only recently came into the radar, when our northern governors, in some feigned concerns about public health, imagined that the best way to deal with the menace is to either ship them in truckloads into their states of origin.

    The same could also be said of OBJ’s other charge – the so-called mismanagement of diversity and how this has hampered our socio-economic development.  Again, nothing in the charge can be said to be new. What would be new is if the administration suddenly shed its signature insularity and clannish predilections to harness our diversity for the common good.

    Currently, the joke out there is that President Buhari promised to bring the naira and the United States dollar into parity. That the then aspirant, one-time petroleum minister once said that nothing of the so-called fuel subsidy exists; that a serious government could fix the refineries and the power sector in a matter of months! And those are on the records. Did I hear someone say memories are powerful!

    I return to the regular, day to day, testimonies of Nigerians who, suffering the scourge of incompetent state apparatus, are least prepared to suffer the semantic indulgence as in making the distinction between “failing or failed” states.

    I am not sure the name Modupe Oyetoso will ring any bell. Ordinarily, it should, at least in a different sense were things to be as they should be. Her story aptly captures the Hobbesian state into which Nigeria has descended. On her way to her farm in Lanlate, Ibarapa East Local Government of Oyo State, some hoodlums waylaid her car, snuffed out the life of her fiancé who was on the wheel at the point, after which they took her into the bush until the distraught family was able to raise a hefty ransom for her freedom.

    We are talking here of a young lady who ordinarily deserved to be celebrated for trying to make good on her passion – farming unlike many youths of her age pounding the streets in our cities for non-existent jobs. And that was some few months back!

    Let’s consider another testimony from the half of the world since long surrendered to the hoodlums, the north-western state of Zamfara. As captured by an online medium TRTWORLD –Citizen Muhammed Usman had boarded a bus from Gusau, the Zamfara State capital en route to see his family in Dangulbi, a small farming community said to be about 50 kilometres away only for the bus to be confronted with an 18-man fully armed gang who shot sporadically at it. Instinctively grabbing the child who sat next to him and covering him with his body, he discovered only after gunfire stopped that the child had died in his arms. There were other casualties including the child’s mother. Still, that did not stop the hoodlums from taking the 50-year-old primary school teacher into captivity in the woods. He would be released 18 days after but only after a ransom of N1.5 million was delivered.

    These are typical, day to day realities that Nigerians face. Now, if that is not a symptom of a failing state, the widespread offer concession to terrorists and other terrorist elements cannot be anything but be pointers to the declining capacity of the state. Describing the situation as failed, failing or failure would therefore seem a matter of opinion. Too bad that an administration that once described the Jonathan administration as incompetent when the Boko Haram not only sacked 17 local government headquarters in Borno but hoisted its flag there has suffered a strange form of paralysis in dealing with the monstrosity of banditry and kidnapping!

    That to me is hardly the way to be in charge!

  • Deja vu

    Deja vu

    Among the lobby rumbling with President Muhammadu Buhari over the current state of Nigeria, perhaps only Prof. Wole Soyinka, our own WS, is worth any serious mention.

    Government to government, season to season, constant is the word, in  the critical essence of WS.  And he is certainly no grandstanding rascal, seeking cheap attention.

    Even then, WS has had his own rumble with the Buhari government.  Indeed, from his latest fire, “Garbled megaphone” (for Garba Shehu — and you need no especial acuity to figure that out!), is relic from the last WS-Buhari government exchange, over COVID-19 restrictions!  Still, hard as WS punches, you hardly can accuse him of mischief.

    That cannot be said of much of this swarming crowd, and the goal here is not to commit an ad hominem fallacy.

    Take Chief Olusegun Obasanjo.  You can trust the old fox, plotting some post-letter-writing bounce, to pop up with fresh mischief, after the disastrous collapse of that pre-2019 election pastime.

    The piqued Presidency gored the often meddlesome Obasanjo as divider-in-chief, from the great heights of commander-in-chief, hinting at a former president, who also rebuffed “restructuring”, claiming back then, like every president before and after him, that Nigeria’s unity was settled and non-negotiable.

    At the ethnic lobbies’ Abuja show, which elicited that presidential put down, the Ebora Owu postured as voice-of-reason-in-chief, among a not-so-restrained band of putative secessionists.  When he went laying a wreath at the Benue grave, to roast the entire Fulani, for the crimes of “Fulani herdsmen”, he was crowing and unfazed mischief-maker-in-chief.

    The Ebora fairly fits all of these descriptions, like some ever-changing chameleon.  The former president must make others look bad for him to look good.  That is how the old fox rolls.  Absolutely no surprise there.

    Nor is there any, about the neo-restructuring ensemble — Afenifere, Ohanaeze, Middle Belt Forum (MBF) and Pan-Niger Delta Forum (PANDEF) — that somewhat clutched Obasanjo to chair their Abuja parley.  They mean well for a better structured Nigeria, no doubt.

    But even their most fawning friends would concede a common bond: the “hateful” Fulani as crusade battering ram — simply because a Fulani man is president?

    Perhaps when a Yoruba or Igbo person becomes one, and “restructuring” is still undelivered, perhaps this regime-demonization-in-ethnic-garb would logically — or more appropriately, emotively — go round!  What goes around comes around, doesn’t it?

    Afenifere, at the apex of its glory, made restructuring its constant battle cry.  Now, plagued by existential peril, the rump of that once-upon-a-time supreme socio-cultural-political lobby of the Yoruba, is clutching at that same battle axe, to survive.

    Just like WS, you can’t accuse Afenifere of inconstancy on restructuring, though its strident screeches of late, in inverse proportion to its present far diminished legitimacy, in contrast to its high glory days, make not a few accuse it of blatant self-help, under the pretext of its age-old restructuring rumble.

    Ohanaeze Ndigbo, the Igbo Afenifere equivalent, is a latter-day restructuring convert.

    But just as Afenifere appears to have impacted Ohanaeze on restructuring, IPOB, the rogue arm of the Igbo crusade, appears to be inspiring a more reckless Yoruba secessionist lobby, filled with dangerous ethnic hubris, and even reportedly pulling stunts like flags, coat of arms and — wait for it — alleged currency, of their darling Oodua Republic!  Hitherto, these stunts were IPOB monopolies.

    Between MBF and the so-called “Hausa-Fulani”, there has been no love lost over the ages — no thanks to the North’s Muslim-led political configuration, while non-Muslims out there cry hard for group identity.

    With the advent of Buhari, however, the “Hausa” appear to have got a break, with the Sten gun of MBF anger seemingly aimed at the Fulani.

    Of all the lobbies, however, PANDEF makes you puke the most.  With Goodluck Jonathan, the minority of minorities of the Ijaw nation, chancing on the Presidency, “restructuring” assumed a loud quiet; and swashbuckling pitch for Ijaw domination took centre stage, even if the Ijaw, with the rest of the Niger Delta, which PANDEF represents, are themselves minorities!

    Now, PANDEF storms back as radical “restructuring” crusaders!  What cant!  But then, there is an Obasanjo in many of these lobbies!  Still, they thrive because Nigeria lacks institutional memory.

    So, there is a sense of deja vu about it all — haven’t we see all of this before?

    Indeed!  The opposition would lunch Armageddon-like hysterics to push its case: Nigeria will collapse this very next second!  The sitting government would counter: away with your alarmist screeches!  Nigeria’s unity is settled and cemented!

    Both lobbies are wrong in their grandstanding, though the concept of restructuring, to making Nigeria more efficiently and effectively structured, is spot on.

    For the government — and this is true of the present Buhari Presidency, as it was of Obasanjo’s — Nigeria’s unity is not settled.  Indeed, no country’s unity is permanently settled.

    That is why the United Kingdom, even after 700 years, still has Scotland and Irish tension.  That is why Donald Trump’s United States is near-unravelling, under President Trump’s gung-ho racist behaviour.

    But wired into the Nigerian Presidency is a centralist DNA.  That is why Obasanjo would defend “settled unity” as president but howl as hyena for “restructuring” after his power years.

    Perhaps a post-power Buhari too would turn a latter-day convert one day?  You never know!  But even if he did, the taciturn PMB would be far more tolerable than the ever grating OBJ — and all in the service of cant!

    Restructuring is effective counterpoise, peaceful, tolerable and sustainable, to that harmful presidential centralist DNA; and it can gift Nigeria new life in organic, as opposed to mechanical, unity.

    But as desirable and reasonable as restructuring is, perpetual hectoring and explosive threats are no way to push it.  That is the opposition’s worst strategic gambit, in pushing restructuring.

    By hectoring and threatening, our people are more adept at raising their voices, instead of raising their logic.  That is why we seem to go round and round in circles, instead of attaining any national consensus.

    That must change if we hope to sell restructuring, and allay the fears of those scared stiff by it.

  • African Observers for the U.S. election

    African Observers for the U.S. election

    By Olatunji Dare

    There was a time in recent memory when the United States was the ultimate, the final arbiter on the worth of elections held in countries in Africa, Latin America, Asia, Central Europe, and the Soviet Union.

    Were they free and fair?  Did the results accord with the wishes of the electorate?  Were they vitiated by coercion, corruption, ballot-stuffing and by other malpractices small and large that cast a shadow of doubt on the outcome and thus bring into question the legitimacy of the government that derives its power from such a poll?  Were the contending parties afforded equal media access?  Were all persons eligible and willing to vote afforded every opportunity to do so?  And so on and so forth.

    Generously-funded Election Observers and monitors from leading public and private institutions are parachuted into the country weeks before the poll to seeking answers to these and other questions.  Usually, the teams are led by persons of consequence.

    It is a gamble, this visitation by international election observers and monitors.    They flock in not just from the United States, but also from the European Union, the United Kingdom, the African Union, and other state and non-state actors.  Their reports vary in tone and substance and even nuance, but they carry some weight.  That of the United States is usually the most consequential.

    If the United States is persuaded that the poll was by and large free and fair, and the outcome credible, that becomes in effect the view of the State Department and helps shape U.S. policy toward the country concerned.

    If on the other hand the election observers and monitors reported that the poll left much to be desired, the governing authorities know that they would have to work hard to win the good graces of the United States.

    Now that Donald Trump has devalued every canon of political practice and engagement in the United States, it is the United States that needs a visitation by international observers, especially from the African Union, to monitor and report on its presidential elections scheduled for November 3 and determine just how much faith the rest of world should invest in it.

    Fresh from its successful supervision of the gubernatorial conduct in Edo State this past weekend, not forgetting its acclaimed handling of the 2019 presidential election, Nigeria’s highly regarded election umpire, the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) seems to me best placed to provide the nucleus of a powerful team that will monitor the U.S. Presidential race on behalf the African Union.

    Its point of departure will have to be the American election machinery.  That machinery is desperately and comprehensively broken.  It did not start with Trump.   But under him, the system has in operation been corrupted to the point that it has ceased to keep faith with its remit and with the Constitution of the United States.  Today, it serves mainly as a bad example for the world.

    Voting, the fundamental act and affirmation of citizenship, has been turned into a formidable race in the United States.  Thousands of Americans were killed on home soil in their struggle to claim that right; thousands of them died in wars fought to confer that right on peoples in other lands.  But that right is now gravely and constantly threatened by various acts of voter suppression.

    Registering to vote has been made contingent on showing various forms of identification that many citizens cannot easily obtain.  Voter rolls are purged routinely, to eliminate persons who may have changed residence or relocated altogether.  For those thus eliminated, getting back on the voters register is not easy.  In many a jurisdiction, convicted offenders are not permitted to vote, even though they have served their prison terms.

    But voter suppression does not end there.

    Polling centres are often not assigned in sufficient numbers, or are located far away from residential areas.  The consequence in the one case is that there is much crowding around the few centres, and a long waiting period.  In the time of COVID-19 and social distancing, such crowding is dangerous.

    Voting by mail is a long-established alternative to spending the better part of a day at a the polling centre, especially for persons who cannot afford to lose their wages for the day, but Trump now says, without a shred of evidence, that it is a proven recipe for fraud on a monumental scale.

    The consequence in the other case is that those who have no personal transportation may be discouraged from going outside their neighbourhood to vote.  The combined effect of both instances is to keep thousands of eligible voters away from the polls by design.

    And just in case some voters still have enough faith in the postal system to cast their ballots by mail, the Trump Administration has set out to constrain its capacity to deliver. His proxy at the United States Postal Service (USPS) has culled the number of postal boxes brutally nationwide and taken out of commission thousands of sorting machines that speed up delivery.  To ensure that they cannot be restored, he has smash up the machines.  And his Administration has filed dozens of lawsuits seeking injunctions against voting by mail.

    The stubborn voter hacks his or her way through all the contrived odds, but will the ballot count? That is far from guaranteed. For, discounting the ballot is yet another method by which the Trump Administration is planning to suppress the vote.

    Deliberately sending misleading information to Black and other minority voters is another method of voter suppression.  On Election Day, automated calls go out saying that the election has been postponed, or that the polling centre where one was supposed to cast one’s ballot has been moved to the edge of town, if not scrapped altogether.

    Or dark hints are broadcast on the eve of the election and throughout the following day that the police were standing by at voting centres with instructions to arrest and take to the nearest jailhouse so-called “deadbeat dads,” absentee parents who have not been keeping up with financial support for the child or children left in the care of their estranged spouses.

    Blacks belong disproportionately in this group and need no further disincentive from voting.  Call it voter intimidation.

    How much electoral advantage did any candidate gain by lying – by telling outright falsehoods of the most brazen kind about the other candidate or their party or their policy, and about what to expect should the other side prevail, and telling lies not occasionally but in one constant, reckless, uninhibited stream?

    Should it be allowed to become an acceptable feature of the electioneering, the plebiscitary equivalent of real politik?

    Donald Trump has said for the record that the only way he can lose the election is if it is massively rigged by the combined Opposition (ha!), and that he would not yield office under that circumstance. Fortunately for the AU’s Election Observer and Monitoring Team, it will be embarking on its task fully cognizant of the  stratagems by which incumbents back home seek to cling to power and office even after suffering an electoral rout.

    How that possibility can be averted will be one of the team’s main challenges.

    Nigeria, I insist, is uniquely qualified to supply the officials that will constitute the nucleus of the AU’s team to observe, monitor and report on the U.S. Presidential election.  And it has a surfeit of leading characters to choose from.

    I humbly nominate as chair of the team former President Olusegun Obasanjo, who can look Donald Trump in the face and tell him that he is a loudmouth and a reprobate with no redeeming grace, and Humphrey Nwosu, former chair of the National Elections Commission, who can sniff the merest whiff of electoral magomago or wuruwuru from a galaxy away.

  • Felled: Benue’s Fulani herdsman!

    Felled: Benue’s Fulani herdsman!

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    The controversial felling of Terwase Akwaza Agbadu, aka Gana, the dreaded Benue-Nasarawa-Taraba axis terrorist-in-chief, has come with gallows humour.

    Gana’s wife, Wantor Akwaza, reportedly No. 2 in a harem of six, has staked a N5 billion compensation, for the despatch of her darling hubby, who nevertheless killed other women’s husbands, children, uncles, nieces, nephews, et al, even before you could mutter “Gana!”, his dreaded moniker.

    Indeed, terrorists’ lives too do matter!

    But the humour, grim and dark, that really takes the cake, is the one from the military, pushing for a N50 million bounty, which Benue Governor Samuel Ortom had placed on the head of the felled arch-terrorist — mind you, for information leading to his arrest, not for his summary despatch.

    Between capture and elimination, however, would appear mere semantics to the dare-devil military, that summarily despatched the dare-devil Gana, prompting the dare-devil bounty demand!

    “…The Nigerian Army deserves to be paid the N50 million ransom, having killed Gana,” The Nation of September 11 quoted an unnamed spokesperson of the Nigerian Army Special Forces Command, in Doma, Nasarawa State, that flatly declared.  ”The assignment has been completed, the Army should be paid” — no story!

    A felled terrorist’s life may matter.  But so too, it would appear, the sweat of the Army braves that erased the menace, going one up from hoped-for capture, to summary rupture!  It never gets more sardonically roiling!

    No surprise, though: a controversy just broke out on Gana’s death.  The Army claimed he was killed after troops returned fire in self-defence, against Gana’s gang; and indeed displayed, as proof, some captured impressive array of small arms.

    But others have countered, claiming Gana was killed in cold blood after capture, en route to meeting Benue Governor Ortom in Makurdi, to consummate the amnesty deal that drew him out of his native Gbitse lair and jungle.

    That deal, broken-hearted wifey Wantor had sworn, would have catapulted Gana from devil-in-chief in the bush, to soul-winner-in-chief for Christ in the city, in a 21st century Nigerian relive of the Saul-to-Paul conversion!

    Both Governor Ortom, and former governor but now sitting Senator Gabriel Suswam, appear leaning towards the non-Army account; decrying any extra-judicial killing, if indeed that allegation was true.  That calls for a commission of inquiry to tease out the facts, and apportion blames.

    Either way, however, no tears from this end.  He who lives by the sword, dies by the sword.  Now, that was no law of Moses, staking an eye for an eye.  Rather, it was divine logic handed down by the Christ himself, pacific and long-suffering, even at the height of his passion.

    Both Ortom and Suswam may well be moved to rue Gana’s grim end, by their sheer and shared humanity.  Besides, both share identity as Benue governors, present and past, and should be seen as no-nonsense due process apostles.

    But the Ortom/Suswam Gana sympathy could also have come from Benue’s rotten local politics of identity, with its dirty and smelly underbelly, to which many allege the late Gana — and other Benue terrorists moonlighting as “Fulani herdsmen” — might have been central.

    Flashback, 2018.  It was the great slaughter, by “Fulani herdsmen”, of the Benue 73, whose mass burial drew scalding emotions and frothing sympathies, nationwide.

    On ground to commiserate, with the Benue mourner-in-chief, then APC Governor Ortom, were PDP governors, Rivers’ Nyesom Wike and Ekiti’s Ayo Fayose, who even donated cash, to help Benue deal with its grief — even if viewed cynical by many.

    Why?  Even Olusegun Obasanjo, former president of the Federal Republic, made a whistle-stop Benue sortie, to lay a wreath, at the mass graves!

    But that brilliant piece of political necromancy would come unstuck at the felling of another Benue 17.  Ironically after, all talks of mass graves vanished.

    Again, “Fulani herdsmen” had on 24 April 2018, attacked the St. Ignatius’ Catholic Church, in Ayer-Mbalom, in Benue’s Gwer East local government, killing two priests, Joseph Gor and Felix Tyolaha, aside from 15 others.

    But the snag, this time round: the culprits were neither Fulani nor herders but Benue militiamen, led by Aminu Yaminu aka Tashaku, born Tiv Christian but Muslim convert, and pristine disciple of Mohammed Yusuf, the Boko Haram leader killed in police custody, whose cold murder triggered the Boko Haram insurrection.

    Indeed, Tashaku was detained with Yusuf; and was part of the first wave of terror, in Boko Haram earliest days.   But more damning: Tashaku, then nabbed by the military, was head of a wing of the Benue militia, enforcing the state’s anti-open grazing law.

    Also, a 24 July 2017 petition, by the Shitile community, in Benue’s Katsina Ala local government, fingered Tashaku as a ruthless enforcer of a Benue Civilian Joint Task Force (CJTF), accused of ethnic cleansing and sundry abuses in that locality.

    The petition claimed the CJTF was “supervised and armed with sophisticated automatic firearms through the office of the [Benue] Security Adviser, Edwin Jando and commanded by one Aliyu Tashaku, who enjoys the ignoble fame of having been an operative of the Boko Haram terrorist group.”

    The Katsina Ala link here is rather instructive. Katsina Ala sits at the hub of Gana’s terror, as part of the Sankera geo-political zone, consisting of Ukum, Logo and Katsina Ala local government areas.

    From this core, Gana struck terror, in banditry, cattle rustling, and kidnapping-for-ransom, in travellers and denizens of Taraba, Benue, Kogi and Nasarawa states.  Especially vulnerable were travellers on the Katsina-Ala/Jalingo road axis.  Most of these crimes were hanged on the ubiquitous “Fulani killer herdsmen”.

    Indeed, a Gana criminal disciple, identified as Aondehemba aka Major, boasted to The Nation of September 13 that Gana left behind some 200 “well-trained gang members”, spread out in the forests of Benue North East and neighbouring Taraba State.  When those ones strike too, they would be “Fulani helmsmen” minted in Benue!

    Gana, who “Major” claimed buried alive his 12-year-old daughter in his Gbitse village, for an invincible charm that couldn’t save him from eventual doom, is the latest sickly metaphor for rogue politicians arming violent criminals to fix elections.

    Those who shed crocodile tears for Gana are entitled to their due process ducts.  But Boko Haram, Niger Delta militancy and Benue enforcers moonlighting as Fulani herdsmen, stream from a common source: thugs armed to muscle elections, but left high and dry after.

    To root out future Ganas, therefore, the political elite must break this execrable link.a

  • Lexical and other matters arising

    Lexical and other matters arising

    Olatunji Dare

     

    IN the three decades that have passed since the William Keeling incident, public commentators and indeed the general public may have forgotten how much trouble can result from the casual use of a word that in other contexts seem not only appropriate but perfectly innocuous.

    This realisation came as a jolt, following the verbal pummeling the South-south correspondent for Daily Trust, Eyo Charles, suffered the other day, at the hands of Femi Fani-Kayode, the unavoidable public figure with a brittle temperament and a reputation for bad manners.

    But first, a refresher on the Keeling Incident.

    William Keeling was a Lagos-based correspondent for the Financial Times (UK).  Analyzing data from the Central Bank and other financial institutions, he calculated that Nigeria hauled in $5 billion over and above budgeted expectations from oil export receipts following the disruption in global oil supplies arising from the 1991 Gulf war.

    Keeling called this surplus a “windfall.”  One-half of the amount, he wrote, went into sustaining ECOMOG’s misbegotten intervention in Liberia’s civil war, staging a lavish – even by Nigeria’s standards — OAU Summit in Abuja, and making a down payment on an aluminium smelting plant that was sure to end up as a monument to folly, as the best authorities had warned.

    Who remembers ECOMOG today, apart from the families and comrades of fallen soldiers whose bodies  were ferried home in the dead of night and buried secretly?  Nobody knows their names or their numbers.  No monument stands in their memory.   The aluminium smelting plant sputtered back to life last year after lying comatose for some ten years.  As for Abuja Summit, it remains to be said of the OAU leaders and their spouses that they came, they ate, they departed, and they savoured the experience long thereafter.

    But I digress.

    The Federal Government forcefully denied Keeling’s report.  But the matter did not end there.  Security agents seized him in his office several days later and put him on the next plane to London, ending his Nigerian assignment.

    The Minister of Information, Chief Alex Akinyele, since deceased, said the Administration would at the appropriate time provide facts and figures that would refute Keeling’s charges.  Soon thereafter, Akinyele was reassigned to the National Sports Commission as executive chairman.  And the matter went cold.

    But “windfall,” in any language, and in any connotation or denotation, became the most treacherous word in the lexicon of public commentators, mentioned only in whispers among trusted friends and colleagues but never invoked nor implied.  The term was not banned, but who wanted to be given a local variant of the Keeling Treatment that was certain to be far less benign?

    Even today, you will not find that term in news or editorial copy.  From a healthy instinct for self-preservation, journalists and the media have had to cultivate a long memory.

    Some 30 years later, “bankroll” now nestles beside “windfall” on forbidden ground.

    Daily Trust correspondent Eyo Charles did  not get the Keeling Treatment  for asking Femi Fani-Kayode who  is “bankrolling” his new pastime of gallivanting all over the country in confected grandeur “inspecting” development projects and grading government performance in PDP-controlled states, amidst the wining  and dining and wenching that often go with that kind of enterprise.

    What Charles got instead was a litany of threats and a torrent of abuse interspersed with a gratuitous tutorial on the genealogy of the Fani-Kayode clan, a lecture that served only to underscore his own boorishness.   But that is only because Fani-Kayode wields no power of any kind today. It will be a different matter of course when he becomes President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, per the auguries of the high priests of Archbishop Benson Idahosa’s Church of God Mission International

    Still, I doubt whether any journalist will in the near future ask who is bankrolling whatever errand Fani-Kayode or any person of greater consequence might  be running.  That would be a pity indeed, for that question goes to the heart of the matter. Fani-Kayode still has not deigned to answer it. But it will not go away.

    Watch this column for occasional updates of the glossary of treacherous words – words you employ in media work at your own peril.

    This column also takes lexical notice of many abuses with which news reporting is riddled.  Not treacherous, but irritating to the cognoscenti.

    In many a profile, we often read that Chief Ajayi A. Ajayi “joined” politics when he was barely out of his teens. No, he did not.  And he could not have.  He joined a political party, or entered party politics.

    In an age of deregulation and privatisation and globalisation, it is perhaps inevitable that managerial skills and functions have come to count more than vision and imagination.  In many a sphere, the manager/managing director now towers above almost everyone in the firm.  “Management” is what makes the organisation tick, and virtually every institution has been reduced to a firm more or less, with a manager at the helm.

    And so, we read of how “the Management” of the beleaguered University of Lagos, has done this or failed       to do that; how it has decided on a certain course of action or put off a decision.  But the university is not a firm, not even in a sociological sense.   It is fundamentally an academic institution rooted in collegiality and shared governance, with members enjoying a high degree of autonomy in their work.  It is headed by a vice chancellor as chief academic and chief executive officer.

    The Registrar is the chief administrative officer.  That office in itself or together with the Office of the Vice chancellor does not constitute “the Management” of the university.  It serves mainly to provide bureaucratic support for the university to carry out its main functions of research, teaching, and public service.   You may have designated managers in service units of a university, such as the bookshop or Guest House.  But at the institutional level, there are no managers.

    Any action taken by a university, any statement it issues, emanates from the university, not from a phantom Management.  That term only stultifies the institution.  You cannot talk of a university’s Management.

    “Palliative” is not a word you encounter often in news copy.  Editors of the old school shun it because of its polysyllabic structure.  You cannot fit it easily into a headline where short, action words are preferred. Back then, the average reader would have had to look up its meaning in a dictionary. Even today, the average reader in societies we consider advanced cannot tell you its meaning with confidence.

    But is has long entered into common usage here to signify a gesture designed to provide short-term relief from some hardship or inconvenience

    A palliative is no small-bore intervention in Nigeria, however, and you don’t have to be in distress to qualify. You have only to be a person of consequence, and you can assign yourself as large a palliative as public funds at your disposal can support.  In fact, I offer it as a testable hypothesis that, for persons of consequence, the smaller the actual distress, the larger the palliative.

    I can already offer empirical, albeit anecdotal, support for that hypothesis.  At the Niger Delta Development Commission, the top man took N10 million home as COVID-19 palliative, the next two in the hierarchy took N7 million.  So it went down the line, the amount varying according to rank and seniority.

    But give them full marks for keeping in mind the wisdom of our people that those who eat alone are doomed to fight alone. The least person in the organisation bagged a COVID-19 palliative of N600, 000.

    The National Assembly says it cannot disclose how it handled that challenge within its ranks without gravely undermining the peace and security of the nation.

     

     

    • For comments, send SMS to 08111813080

  • Luxury in adversity

    Luxury in adversity

    Gabriel Amalu

     

    The recent hike in tariffs, of electricity and petrol, has added to the adversity wrought by the coronavirus pandemic upon Nigerians. As expected, the cost of food, transportation, and other social needs have gone up. For instance, the price of a loaf of bread has increased by more than 10 percent since the hike, from a price many could hardly afford before the increase.

    To make matters worse, before the increase in the cost of bread, many breadwinners have lost their jobs. The costs of other staple food items have also gone up, so, many Nigerians go to bed without food. History reminds us that it was the increase in the cost of bread that led to the storming of the Bastille, which triggered the French revolution, in 1789.

    Before the new hike, many small scale businesses have closed shop, while those still operating run at half capacity. Now, with many of them running on generator, a number of the survivors will close shop. The businesses that took loans from finance houses may not be able to repay and that will affect the liquidity of the finance houses. The financial squeeze could spiral up to the banks, which finance the finance houses.

    So, it is a tale of woes for the ordinary Nigerians and businesses. But there are no signs that the luxurious lifestyles of those in power have been affected by the economic and social hardship their misrule has plugged Nigerians into. One can say that the impact of their failure in governance have only affected the ordinary Nigerians, and without feeling the heat, there is the likelihood that the ruling elite may continue to cause the ordinary people greater hardship.

    So far, short of expanding the tax nets, those in government appear clueless. Yet, the federal government officials keep talking about the ease of doing business. Not long ago, the federal government taunted the new Companies and Allied Matters Act, 2020, as the best thing that has happened to businesses in Nigeria. While the new law may have improved the legal regime, what can be achieved when the economic environment is most excruciating?

    It is unfortunate, that despite promises, the federal government has failed to either build new refineries or repair the old ones, after five years of being in power. Like their predecessors, the officials are defending the price hike in fuel and electricity, as the best thing to happen to Nigeria. Yet there is no government roadmap to get Nigeria out of the shameful cycle of importation of fuel, while we export crude oil.

    The federal government’s claim that Nigerians enjoyed the low cost of fuel, during the lockdown, is hogwash, and Nigerians are not buying it. In the social media, the joke is on the sympathizers of this government, as they are constantly reminded of the promises the ruling party made, before they won the election. One of the most disarming video is that of the campaign against fuel hike, now trending in the social media.

    In one of the videos, many pro-democracy activists are shown telling Nigerians to resist the fuel hike, under President Goodluck Jonathan. One of the videos has President Buhari, Ogbonnaya Onu, John Odigie-Oyegun, and a host of other party leaders, campaign against the hike in fuel price, amongst other punishing programmes. In several of the trending videos, candidate Buhari made promises that fuel import will stop, Boko Haram will be defeated, presidential fleet will be reduced, if he wins the presidency.

    With the stirring failures, the legitimate question the Buhari government and indeed the ruling party should ask introspectively is why has the government been unable to deliver on many of their patriotic promises? There was no doubt that the government of Goodluck Jonathan was on the wrong path in terms of the corruption laden fuel importation regime, and the handling of the Boko Haram, amongst other malaises then plaguing the nation.

    So, it was legitimate for Nigerians to seek an alternative government, which an austere and ascetic candidate Buhari represented. But after five years of the alternative regime, it is legitimate to measure the success level of the change agenda. Since, things appears to remain the same, even as the government works hard to change things, perhaps the challenge is more fundamental and structural than our leaders are willing to accept.

    For instance, why is it that the much advertised Petroleum Industry Bill, which all the regimes touts as a sector game changer, have not be passed, while it is easy to agree to remove the fuel subsidy? Also, what is the cause of the apparent failure of the privatisation of the electricity sector, despite the potential economic gains?

    Again, despite the huge resources expended in the maintenance of the refineries, how come the refineries are still as moribund as they were under the former regime, which many describe as corrupt and inefficient? What could be responsible for getting the same result, from what is touted as different measures, or are we in a flux, not knowing what we are doing or what we are seeing?

    The failure of the electricity sector should worry Nigerians, despite the promises to do things differently, by the Buhari regime. Of note, we recall that under President Olusegun Obasanjo, the late Bola Ige, boasted that he would conquer the sector, but failed abysmally. Again, under President Buhari, Babatunde Fashola, who boasted that any serious government can solve the electricity problem in six months, failed woefully when he was saddled with the responsibility to walk his talk.

    Could it be that as presently structured, it is nigh impossible to gift Nigerians adequate electricity? Could it be that maintaining a national grid, instead of regional grids, amongst other reasons, makes stable electricity impossible? While we lack the capacity to generate enough, we are incapable of transmitting efficiently what has been generated. To show how incoherent the management of the sector has become, it is President Buhari that is ordering for mass metering after the obnoxious increase in tariffs.

    Perhaps it is becoming increasingly obvious that Nigeria as presently configured cannot make any meaningful progress, even with the best intentions. Perhaps there is too much concentration of powers in the centre, and the absence of incentive to strive, amongst the federating units. So, can the nation make progress without confronting these structural challenges?

    To make matters worse, the nation is already in a debt peonage, while it is facing an expanding war against Islamic fundamentalists, plus internal security challenges. Are we applying the same unworkable formula, and expecting a better result? Unfortunately, we are at the mercy of those who are luxuriating in our adversity.

  • NBA: cost of throwing the first stone

    NBA: cost of throwing the first stone

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    On Nasir El-Rufai, the tempestuous Kaduna governor, the Paul Usoro-led Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) executive threw the first stone.

    Flush with holy anger, it had hoped to earn full plaudits, from its moral high horse: a bristling, no-nonsense crusader corps of southern Kaduna lives matter (SKLM), to borrow from that current global rave: Black Lives Matter (BLM) .

    It probably did, from the lobby that goaded it to act.  That lobby, and their media allies, gloated over El-Rufai’s dis-invitation to speak at NBA’s 60th annual conference show.

    But from a counter lobby, what it got was a vicious pelt of smelly eggs, as a segment of its northern stakeholders fumed.  Enter, the New Nigerian Bar Association (NNBA).

    Alas!  NBA found it was no less corporately flawed as El-Rufai allegedly is, judging from the strafing anti-El-Rufai memo, signed by Silas Joseph Onu and Chidi Anslem Odinkalu, two top lawyers but no especial friend of the governor, that sparked it all.

    Talk of rashly throwing the first stone!

    But the NNBA threat could just be fore-cat’s paw, in the severe, prolonged intra-NBA hurricane to come; with many angered at the electoral process that shot Paul Usoro (SAN) to power — a subject of legal dispute still, even after the silk has served out his term.

    Poor Olumide Akpata!  The SAN-giant slayer’s own election controversies, coupled with Usoro’s office-parting El-Rufai storm, have gifted Akpata a poisoned chalice!

    Now, aside from NNBA, there are also whispers of a South West Bar break-away faction, which not a few have sardonically dubbed Amotekun Bar Association (ABA)! Perhaps, when a putative Bar Association of Nigeria (BAN) dawns, Akpata’s NBA would realize BAN could well ban its monopoly — every pun intended!

    To be sure, jumping to El-Rufai’s defence is no pleasure, given his divisive persona.  Yet, his fate can’t be tied to the near-eternal cauldron that has been southern Kaduna.

    To do that is to continue the flawed strategy of scapegoating extant leaders of that troubled clime, of which El-Rufai is latest.  But if that didn’t extinguish the cauldron in the past, it won’t do it now.

    So, what is needed is radical re-thinking, on the southern Kaduna question.  But more on that presently.  Now, back to the governor.

    Nasir El-Rufai hails and nails himself, in one total package: his brilliance hails him, his petulance nails him.

    His friends beam at his brilliance, particularly in El-Rufai’s unfazed duels with uppity southerners, spiritual and temporal: sectional snobs and ethnic chauvinists, who tend to posture, with a final swagger, that every northerner is a dummy.  His foes bark at his petulance, particularly irate southerners, and their southern Kaduna kith-and-kin in faith, who bristle at why the mercurial Hell (sorry, El)-Rufai won’t lay down to be bullied and slaughtered by anyone.

    Still, both El-Rufai traits show the human in the man, though the jury is out, as on any controversial figure, on how the man mainly weighs on society — good or bad.

    Talking of controversy and divisiveness, even with the ringing denunciation of the Onu/ Odinkalu memo, little separates El-Rufai from Rivers’ Governor Nyesom Wike, who most times speaks, not with the air of projecting superior logic, but as a gubernatorial braggart that damn well loves the sound of his voice!

    Indeed, the gory harvest of lives and limbs at election seasons, since Wike became an active player in Rivers, should make the governor (even if for vicarious liability) an eternal pariah in NBA and allied human rights business, though Wike is himself a lawyer, and a member of the Body of Benchers.

    That Wike cut the Usoro NBA mustard, and El-Rufai did not, has left the Olumide Akpata NBA fending off not-so-illegitimate charges of first, hypocrisy;  and then, southern domination, simply because the southern lawyers lobby boast tremendous media savvy, that could bully, intimidate and subdue.

    That is about the long-and-short of the NNBA cause.  That poor Akpata had gathered NBA northern hierarchs, to re-pledge allegiance, does not take away that slur.

    Ironically, that media domination — or lack of it — appears a crucial link, that has continued to fuel the southern Kaduna tragedy.

    For eons in southern Kaduna, the Fulani (“voiceless” in the dominant southern media) have clashed with the area’s non-Muslim, Christian or African faith adherents (“voiceless” in the Muslim-dominant northern order).

    The result has been the serious seasonal spurt of needless blood.  That is not about to stop, unless backers, of both blocs, think less as antagonists, and more as community.

    The grim fact is that on both sides, there are no saints.  But aplenty, there are victims, tragic mutual canon-fodders, seasonally despatched by mutual drivers of mayhem, to teach the other side stiff, gory lessons.

    Besides, the mutual hate and loathing, across the murderous aisle, have erected a cynical cover for free-wheeling, vicious crimes, pouncing on the vulnerable, cocksure all would be blamed on the Fulani-natives crises.

    No doubt: the southern media, taking the southern Kaduna non-Muslim natives as hopeless underdogs, has always clambered to their cause.  That fits pat into Christian vs Muslim/indigene vs settler narratives, that rather resonate with the South.

    But both narratives are galvanized by thick conspiracy theories of brutal rogue deep state players, allegedly arming the Fulani; and goading them to alleged southern Kaduna genocide, who the southern lobbies make it their bounden duty to stop.

    So, each time they clash, the Fulani quietly cry to their alleged high rogue backers, while the other side cock sympathetic ears for the sure southern media thunderclap, and legal activists’ bellow to follow; no matter who the aggressor is.

    After, both sides lick their wounds and build up to fight another day — and the mutual loathing and destruction continue.

    Breaking this bloody cycle needs taking out the enforcers on both sides.  Sadly, that appears beyond the ken of about everyone, as every partisan-supporter appears viscerally wired to the conflict.  The umpteenth victims? The folks that live in the area.

    Once upon a time, Kaduna State appeared a roaring inferno: a permanent hot bed of northern host vs southern settler riots. But then came Ahmed Markarfi (Kaduna governor, 1999-2007) who fixed the problem and left lasting peace.

    Governor El-Rufai should ponder his own legacy, and essay a similar deal for southern Kaduna.  That would be tough.  But it would be a fantastic legacy.

    Olumide Akpata, new NBA president, has a no less pressing chore: to re-make whole, the poisoned chalice Paul Usoro handed him.

    But clearly it’s high time El-Rufai, NBA, the media and other stakeholders banded together on southern Kaduna: to save precious lives, across the warring divide.

    That is how all southern Kaduna lives can really matter.

  • Subsidy? Not again!

    Subsidy? Not again!

    By Sanya Oni

    Times without number in the course of the past week, I got drawn into this debate as to whether the Buhari administration has not only finally lost its humanity but its touch with reality merely by its timing of the ‘twin evils’ of ‘punitive fuel price hike’ and ‘iniquitous cost-reflective’ electricity tariff. While public anger may not necessarily be nearing the boiling point; there is certainly a lot to say of current moods to suggest a growing irritation with an administration that came with a bag of promise but has delivered very little. Imagine yours truly in the midst of all of that, trying to remind some fellows that the deregulation train actually set out a while back. Refer them to the new pricing dynamics which saw the fuel price regulatory body bring down the price from N133.29/litre to N113.28 in March and then to N108 in May as presaging the long awaited dawn of the market forces era in fuel price determination, and get branded an administration apologist – whatever that means; then you are told that the so-called cost recovery nonsense should be the last thing on the government’s mind in the season of Covid-19.  So much about winning arguments; that is how dangerous the current time can be!

    Whether it is the question of the contentious fuel subsidy or the other long-running squabble over the so-called cost-reflective tariff, I do understand why the government, even with the best of arguments, declarations and pious intentions, is unlikely to win the heart of the common folk on the matter. To begin with, if the irony of the economic argument seems long lost to the government itself whose best case has been that the local gasoline price should take its cue from Rotterdam prices which it sets as standard, and insists that the luxury of paying for the cost/price differentials which are in large part derivatives of the current folly of wholesale fuel importation – now belongs in the past; why should the citizen not also insist that the government also set local wages along the same international parameters if only to make all things whole?

    Talk of the other business of electricity tariff, which if you ask for my opinion, would seem a lost cause in the hands of the current bunch of clueless operators. It’s the same story of the government, which, long after it shirked its responsibility of delivering the public good, seeks some magical remediation through a one-sided, inequitable pricing mechanism! Precisely the reason we are back to the wearisome debate about subsidies and all of that; or even more appropriately, the question of whether the government, in the current atmosphere of poor and inequitable standards of service delivery should, in fact be talking about hiking charges!

    But then, these, if I may borrow the language of former Emir of Kano, Lamido Sanusi, these are at best moral – not economic – arguments.

    I have followed the arguments of those who accuse the government of choosing a wrong time to administer the latest potion. They are right – at least in a sense. This is an impossible season.  Today, we know that Covid-19 has taken everything out of joint. The economy in particular, has been terribly hit. The nation’s GDP, once projected to grow at 2.6 in the current year is now expected to shrink by some six per cent. As for, unemployment, National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), puts the rate at the end of the second quarter at an unprecedented 27.1 per cent. If you add those described in street lingo as ‘managers’ but who are more appropriately under-employed representing another 28.6 per cent, you get a more representative figure of 55.7 per cent of able bodied Nigerians who can’t find something productive to do! And then of course the other reality – of biting inflation, exampled by the fact that 50kg bag of rice, which at this time last year sold for N18,000 now goes for anything between N25,000 to N30,000; the latest hikes could in fact pass as measures of an uncaring government.

    But fuel subsidy as elixir at this time? And for how long? And where will the funds come from? From the underperforming oil revenue or taxes? Can we begin to talk of new taxes at this time? Let somebody educate me how a government currently pressed for cash can be expected to take on the additional burden of fuel subsidy. By the way, I assume here that the debate on under-recovery is now somewhat settled, and that Nigerians have seen through the lies of denial of the differentials of the landing cost and the price of fuel at the pump and by extension the rent economy and not least the associated corruption which became its derivative. Or is someone still living in denial of the differential?

    Let’s talk about the electricity sector. I believe that Nigerians have sufficiently made the point to the operators. As it is, I am not aware of anyone being in denial of the need to review tariffs; the sticking points have always been the twin issues of service delivery and value for money! This is where Nigerians expect the government to drive the bargain with the operators hard – through firm and effective regulation. In any case, the government has done well to assure that there will be no change in tariff for the most vulnerable especially those consuming 50KW or less and those receiving less than 12 hours of supply.

    Now, let’s put the focus where it matters most. Too many Nigerians are suffering. Too many are out of work. The numbers of the poor are growing in uncontrollable numbers. Our industries need all the help they can get to keep jobs. The federal government needs to prioritise its spending to ensure that Nigerians get the value for every kobo of public funds spent. Our infrastructure needs continuous upgrades. It’s time to take a hard look at the structure of the bureaucracy, the compensation for public office holders particularly those disguised perks which come to a huge chunk in the expenditure outlay. It may yet find in them elements that are just as toxic as the subsidy on fuel.

  • Desperate days in Washington

    Desperate days in Washington

    By Olatunji Dare

    Yesterday (September 7) was celebrated in the United States as a public holiday to mark Labour Day, previously the capitalist world’s answer to May Day to honour and celebrate the working people whose exertions built and sustained that mode of production.

    With the triumph of Capital, and with it the evisceration of trade unions and union right in the United States, Labour Day signifies, for the most part, the end of the summer holiday season and the official start of the Presidential election campaign.

    I can almost hear the reader ask with more than a hint of incredulity:  What of the re-election campaign blitz Donald Trump launched the day after he took office, and the frenetic tempo of which he had maintained even in the face of a raging coronavirus pandemic?

    His opponent Joe Biden entered the fray much later and has been much more deferential to the Covid-19 protocols but are his sallies from the basement of his home in Wilmington, Delaware, not also the stuff of electioneering campaigns?

    All that was just the scrimmage, the sizing up and the probing for the opponent’s vulnerabilities, the testing of attack lines and slogans and political advertisements in preparation for the real engagement that will go on for some 55 days (ha!) before the election.  Remember that in America, politics is a contact sport that has much more in common with mixed martial arts than with the art of persuasion.

    Trump has been rhapsodizing so much about all the great, wonderful, amazing, unprecedented things he would do if re-elected, as against the carnage he said Biden would bring upon America if Biden prevailed.  But elements of that carnage, which Trump had described as the hallmark of the preceding Obama/Biden  Administration, are strewn all over the four years of Trump’s presidency.

    So are the shards of broken promises, in the face of which his riffs on his campaign slogan, “Promises made, promises kept,” like every Trump assertion, cannot stand close scrutiny.

    To grasp the essential malignancy of his campaign, you only need to go back to his acceptance speech before the 2016 Republican National Convention and his Inaugural Address on January 20, 2017, and compare them to his declamations at every stop in the on-going campaign.

    Hear him, accepting the Republican ticket on July 12, 2016:  “I have a message for all of you. The crime and violence that today afflicts (sic) our nation will soon—and I mean very soon, come to an end.  Beginning on January 20, 2017, safety will be restored.”

    And this, from the same speech:  “The first task for our new administration will be to liberate our citizens from the crime and terrorism and lawlessness that threatens (sic) their existence.  When I take the oath of office next year I will restore law and order to our country.”

    Four years on, and without any mental constipation, he has been repeating that vow at every opportunity.  It is as if someone else has been President during those four years.

    Guess who is talking here:

    “I have embraced crying mothers who have lost their children because our politicians put their personal agenda before the national good.  I have no patience for injustice. No tolerance for government incompetence.   When innocent people suffer, because our political system lacks the will, or the courage, or the basic decency to enforce our laws, or worse still, sold out to some corporate lobby for cash, I am not able to look the other way.  And I won’t look the other way.”

    Bernard Sanders?  Trump’s opponent in the 2016 presidential race, Hilary Clinton?  His opponent in the 2020 race, Joseph Biden?

    It is Trump himself, no less, a character so schizoid that he can’t even fake empathy.  And he is not talking about those Americans who have died from Covid-19, 189, 000 at this writing – a scourge he first dismissed as a hoax, later as an irritant that would vanish in days, and later still in a macabre joke, turned into the ailment that could be flushed out the system with just about any disinfectant.

    He was talking about white people who had died from street violence, and white law and law-enforcement officials who had fallen in the line of duty – not the Black victims of rampant police brutality.  They are legion, but Trump cannot even bring himself to mention those among them done to death with brutishness that horrified the world.  To him, the Black-Lives-Matter response is the really hateful thing.

    Rather than confront it as he has been claiming, Trump sabotaged the war on the pandemic by not providing the requisite facilities and equipment, by openly and defiantly flouting the Covid-19 protocols, by constantly denigrating the leading experts in the field, by mocking the science, and by bullying cities and states into ending the lockdowns prematurely for the sake of his reelection primarily, and the economy secondarily.

    It is for the same reason he is now dangling before a weary populace an October Surprise in the form of a safe and effective COVID-19 vaccine that would be administered all over the country to put an end to all the misery, starting from the week before Election Day, if not earlier.

    The best authorities say that this is wholly improbable.  But who is to say that Trump does not know more about vaccines than the most accomplished epidemiologists?

    Trump’s 2017 Inaugural Address is of the same vintage.  That day, he said, would be remembered as “the day the people became the rulers again.”  Proclaiming an end to “the American carnage,” saying of Americans traumatized by it:  “We are one nation and their pain is our pain.  The dreams are our dreams and their successes will be our success.  We share one heart, one home, and one glorious destiny.”

    He even made a paean to solidarity and to honesty.  “We must speak our minds openly, debate our disagreements honestly, but always pursue solidarity,” he declared.

    One more quiz and I am done.  Who spoke these evocative words:

    “And whether a child is born in the urban sprawl of Detroit or the windswept plains of Nebraska, they look up at the same night sky they fill their hearts with the same dreams, and they are infused with the breath of life by the same almighty Creator.”

    The Rev Dr Martin Luther King, Jr.?  Jessie Jackson?  Al Sharpton? Barrack Obama?

    Hard to believe, but they were spoken by Donald Trump, the birther high priest, with no sense of irony or shame, at his Inaugural, with Obama whom he had almost ran out of town with false claims that he is a  foreign-born impostor right at his side.

    I have saved for last this priceless gem, a classic instance of what psychologists call projection, whereby a person attributes to another his or her own unedifying impulses.  It is from Trump’s 2016 Acceptance Speech:

    “The irresponsible rhetoric of our president who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than, frankly, I have seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seeing (sic).”

    Don’t be surprised if he says that again tomorrow with no sense of irony and with no shame, this man who has resorted to the most blatant form of racial demagoguery to keep his campaign afloat, now that his pandering to patriotism and his frequent invocation of the honour and sacrifice of the military have been shown to flow from rank insincerity, if not studied mockery.

    Trump no longer makes the pretence of campaigning to be president for all Americanns  His is the most tribalistic presidential campaign in recent memory, with the tribalism masked as dedication to law and order, and everything else be damned.

    Meanwhile, seeing his chances of winning receding, he is doing everything he can to delegitimise the election and to ensure that it ends in confusion.

    These are indeed desperate days in Washington.