The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • COVID-19: Executive denialists at work

    COVID-19: Executive denialists at work

    By Olatunji Dare

    In the time of virtual reality, alternative facts and a raging pandemic fueled by an infodemic of like intensity, it is no surprise that denialism is also on the ascent.

    Not skepticism, which is a healthy antidote to dogmatism, but flat-out rejection of evidence and experience, of probability and possibility, and of the manifestation of things.  Skepticism is often rooted in superior knowledge.  The denialist disdains knowledge and mocks expertise.

    According to a recent survey of some 20,000 subject across Africa conducted by a public-private outfit, one of every 25 respondents stated categorically that the coronavirus could not touch them. There is doubtless a hint of denialism in this, but I would rather put it down to fatalism and superstition, or sheer conceit.

    I am here reminded of the fellow who used to be my driver.  He never tired of declaring that “disease no dey kill African man.” Not once did I hear him say “disease no dey land African man for hospital,” though I always had to pay his medical bills.

    For the sign of these times, look no farther than the on-going coronavirus epidemic.

    The denialist-in-chief is of course Donald Trump, president of the United States.  With the coronavirus claiming more than more than 2,000 lives every single day in the United States and counting, and with hardly any let-up in the rate of transmission, Trump has all but proclaimed victory and moved on, with all the instrumentalities of his mighty office, to his reelection campaign.

    Now, the really compelling task is to make America greater still and to build in place of the depredations wrought by the coronavirus the greatest economy the world has ever seen and will ever know, far surpassing the one he had built in just three years in office – two years actually, allowing for the distractions of the bogus Russian election interference probe, and the impeachment farce, and much more.

    There is also the challenge of getting the numbers up again for the stock market that its envious detractors call a casino.  They say it is driven, as all casinos are, by fear and greed.  They are welcome to their ignorance, but what would America be without a super-heated stock market and a runaway Dow Jones index?

    Trump has not been peddling quack remedies lately, nor has he been trumpeting the imminence arrival on the scene of a vaccine that will cure coronavirus disease or protect people from its insidious trajectory.  The malignant disease, he has assured us, will vanish even without a vaccine.

    This, however, is not another excoriation of Trump whose response to the epidemic was characterized this past weekend by his predecessor, the unfailingly even-tempered Barack Obama, as “absolute chaotic disaster.”

    Rather, I am thinking of his Nigerian executive disciples in denialism.  I am thinking of Kogi State Governor, Yahaya Bello, and the Cross River State Governor, Ben Ayade.  I was going to join to the duo the hysterical Rivers State Governor, Nyesom Wike.

    But I see that he has since lurched to the other extreme, chasing out of town persons he suspects to be potential transmitters of the disease and personally leading a wrecking crew tear down any dwelling in which such persons may have spent some time.

    Wike is a class act in perversity.

    To be fair, Bello and Ayade are probably not the only coronavirus denialists in Nigeria’s executive ranks. There are those who acknowledge that some “mysterious” deaths are occurring in their domains all right  —Bauchi, Yobe, Zamfara and Kano come to mind — but are loath to accept that the deaths resulted or could have resulted from coronavirus disease.

    But Bello and Ayade are different.  Both are frank, matter-of-fact, denialists. But Ayade, a former university professor (microbiology, just imagine!) manages to come across as someone with whom you could have a polite conversation about the virus.  Not so, Bello, his Kogi counterpart, a trained accountant.

    And although each is unyielding that the coronavirus has no business sneaking into or being detected in any form or shape or manifestation in his domain, Bello’s denialism is the more arresting.  It is in-your-face, militant and uncompromising, as officials of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and Prevention discovered during an inspection visit to Kogi last week.

    In the state capital, Lokoja, the team’s leader, Dr Andrew Noah, had allowed professional courtesies to prevail over strict compliance by shaking hands with the state’s protocol chief who had welcomed the team and passed on the microphone to him after a brief welcome address.

    That slip sent Bello into a rage.  He ordered Noah to be quarantined for 14 days, failing which Noah and his team should depart the state immediately and head back to their base.  And to make sure that they did not further compromise Kogi’s environmental immunity, he detailed security officials to escort them into the territory of state across the boundary.

    The quarantine order did not apply to the state protocol chief since he, being a Kogi resident and an official of the state’s government to boot, could not possibly harbor the coronavirus or be susceptible to it.

    Bello explained that he was taking that step to ensure that “the laid down procedure for checkmating the scourge” was strictly followed.  Kogi did not want to be accounted among the states that have corona cases when it had none.  Those states that wanted the benefits accruing from that status were welcome to their harvests of death and misery, but please count Kogi and its executive governor out.  They have nobler ambitions.

    But why would the virus that spares not princes, prime ministers, emirs, nor yet principalities and powers:  why would it exempt Cross River State and Kogi?  This is no idle question. For the answer may well point the way forward and help avert a recrudescence.

    What is it, then, about Cross River State, it is necessary to ask, that has made it impervious to the virus?  Is it Tinapa?  Or the Calabar Carnival?  Or the Obudu Ranch Resort, the retreat in the skies? Or Mary Slessor’s long shadow?  Or Calabar’s storied place in Nigeria’s colonial history and politics.   Or its famed cuisine (think edikan ikong).  Or its languid clime? Or the spirit of the ancestors?

    What has kept the ravenous, equal-opportunity predator at bay in Kogi State?  Mount Pate?  Frederick Lugard’s long shadow? Echoes of Samuel Ajayi Crowther’s benedictions?  The confluence of the Niger and Benue rivers? The ghost of the Royal Niger Company determined to keep Kogi safe for commerce and investment?  Or the Ajaokuta steel plant rearing to go into production after so many sputtering starts?

    It may well be that the virus has decided to stay severely away from Kogi, knowing that it has no chance against the fortifications the dynamic and far-seeing authorities have erected, and that the testing centres, isolation wards, containment rooms, and the stockpiles of ventilators and personal protection gear already in place, will render it dead on arrival if it has the temerity to even sniff the Kogi environment.  I say nothing, of course, of the most formidable array of medical expertise ever assembled in one place.

    But if, despite all this, and despite Bello’s grandstanding the coronavirus, being no respecter of persons, systems or structures, were to insinuate itself into Kogi, dealing death and misery in its wake, Governor Yahaya Bello will have a great deal to answer for.

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  • Government unusual

    Government unusual

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    Government unusual” was somewhat patented by former Osun Governor, Rauf Aregbesola (now Interior minister), to capture a willy-nilly push for development, of a state, stagnant for far too long.

    Somewhat, that phrase captured it all: the high and the low; the whoop of victory and the moo of defeat; the abuse and the praise; the honest truths and hare-brained lies — all spread over an eight-year roller-coaster!

    That left everyone winded — government unusual!

    Yet pre-COVID-19, that idea came slightly before its time, given the near-paralysis that virus has infected governance, business and the general economy.

    Banks, supposedly awash with cash, are pressing the early panic buttons, with retrenchments and rumours of retrenchments.

    The government too whimpers.  But unlike the Mexican soap, The Rich Also Cry, it can’t wail.  Yet, it lugs a crushing emergency burden!

    The banking woe captures the general business throes: from trading to manufacturing; from insurance to sundry sectors.  Even agriculture: some Enugu farmers were, the other day, lamenting COVID-19 lockdowns were stifling yam planting.

    Why, even the media, that with holy scorn mocked the Aregbesola-era “afsa” (half-salary), thundering with white rage, seem set for similar COVID-19 grill and grist!

    The media front howls with tales of virtual business model collapse; and ripples with a revenue free fall, less than two months into the Coronavirus blitz.  Yet, it’s early days!

    And the churches?  Some growling holy fathers appear progressively unimpressed!

    Though the majority grimly keep faith, pious shrieks, from holy hunger, are tearing through critical quarters: some churches might be no more than sacred marts!  So, denied of worshipper market traffic (as it has been these six weeks past), they could well gasp and wilt — Holy Moses!

    Still, tax or tithe, the season calls for fresh and radical thinking.  Government unusual!

    That takes the discourse back to the Osun genesis.

    Osun, by 2010, was the classical “civil service state”, a euphemism for structural — and perpetual — under-development.  So long as Abuja takings paid the civil servants; and their salaries drove regular low-key commerce, everyone was happy.

    But then came Aregbesola and his braves — including current Governor, Gboyega Oyetola, then gubernatorial chief of staff — that wanted much more.

    Their new policy activism hungered for a much more diversified investment in  infrastructure (physical and social): roads and bridges, rural and urban; and even glittering new schools, with requisite learning tools, on a scale Osun had never seen.

    It also thirsted for a much more varied direct people-investment: the school feeding programme (for the government to bond with the future generation, from the majority poor and vulnerable, perhaps?), ramping up health facilities, and willy-nilly job creations, driven by the volunteer ethos, for jobless graduates and allied youths.

    But the snag was there wasn’t enough cash to drive these new programmes.  Yet, those investments, particularly in ambitious road networks, and other key physical infrastructure to open up the state’s economy, could not wait, if the state were to secure a vibrant future tax base.  The resort was the debt market.

    But again, the snag: public debts (no thanks to past abuses) are easy tinder for popular hysteria.  The cheaper Sukuk (Islamic bond), on the other hand, are easy grist for counter-Christian thunder, merrily amplified by media confederates.

    Yet, those were the two areas Aregbesola was compelled to play, thus causing quite a bedlam!

    Now, link the Osun 2010 story to the national front in 2015, and you’d be surprised at the rich parallels.

    Governor Aregbesola took over a structurally stunted Osun economy.  President Muhammadu Buhari inherited a self-clobbered economy — no thanks to free-wheeling rent, flamboyant sleaze and reckless imports of what could be produced at home.

    Rice is the classical example.  But it’s no more than a sick metaphor for a deluded people, that proudly ceded their food security to foreign hands.  Yet, Nigeria boasts hectares of arable but uncultivated land — people unusual!

    True, there had been days of plenty, under former President Olusegun Obasanjo, when oil revenue virtually shot through the sky.

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    Yet, all that cream vanished, in six short years under President Goodluck Jonathan, in a galloping reign of preening sleaze, even if it is only fair to say Jonathan was no more than a fall guy undertaker, on whose head the frenetic heist of the previous 16 years miserably collapsed.

    So Buhari, faced with a near-empty till, had to resort to hard choices.  But that would send the ample beneficiaries, from the structural mirage that was the import-economy, with their media associates in tow, screaming, screeching and wailing!

    Enter, the cliche “incompetence”, to dismiss Buhari’s economic policies, simply because it faced down the produce-nothing-import-everything mentality of the post-structural adjustment programme (SAP) years since 1986; and replaced it with a new war cry: “grow what you eat; eat what you grow”!

    Like Osun too, Buhari attacked the deficit infrastructure with rare venom: with Babatunde Fashola, his first-term “triple” minister of Works, Power and Housing, and Rotimi Amaechi, Transport minister, throwing themselves into the job like maniacs.

    But again, little cash to back the new vision, hence a resort to the debt market — and little wonder: just like Osun, the media hysterics on Sukuk-powered “Islamization”!

    Despite the social safety nets, as the national schools feeding programme, N-Power job volunteer scheme, the Market-moni loans to the lowliest of trades, and even direct cash transfer to the poorest and most vulnerable nationwide (the first such pan-Nigeria intervention by any federal government since independence), the growl of “incompetence” and screech of “hunger in the land” hit fresh decibels.

    Sure, there is hunger in the land, a recurring grumble, if you scour the newspapers since 1999.  Yet, with the COVID-19 devastation, and without Nigerian rice (metaphor for post-2015 record farm output) what would have been Nigeria’s hunger status today?

    With closed borders all over, where will those foreign rice come from — and at what stupendous cost?

    Back to Osun: without the painful developmental push, of 2010 to 2018, how could that state have faced this virulent COVID-19 challenge?

    The pains and gains of government unusual, in a country of people-unusual!

    On the ecclesiastical front, though many a mega-assembly screams and screeches, the Buhari era temper only cautions churches to be wary of those hefty tithes and plum offerings. Most could well be thick fat of corruption!

    COVID-19 reinforces that caution, given the shameless poverty of the spirit many a cleric has exhibited, because of a temporary halt in church traffic, to save the flock, that ooze the fat, from rampaging COVID-19!

    For the gasping media?  Replace herd emotion with hard thinking.  Serve what the people need, not necessarily what they want.  Utility journalism, rather than herd sensationalism, stands a better chance to secure an all-season market bond.

    So, President Buhari should stick to his strategic vision of the economy. Government unusual, from the old West under Awolowo, Lagos under Bola Tinubu and Osun under Aregbesola, is seldom popular with anyone.

    Yet, the pains of yore secured the gains for the present — and will, the future.

  • Kogi contrarian and Covid-19

    Kogi contrarian and Covid-19

    Sanya Oni

     

    It is not often that one agrees with a governor whose sometimes brash and abrasive style makes nonsense of the Not too young to run law.

    But then just like the old admonition which enjoins one not to judge a book by the cover, I found myself really chewing upon last week’s encounter between the team of the Nigeria Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) and the Kogi State governor, Yahaya Adoza Bello.

    That encounter, the climax in the battle of wits between the state government and NCDC on the Covid-19 pandemic, finally ended on Thursday with the governor telling the visiting NCDC team to either accept to go on a 14-day isolation or leave the state immediately.

    Unfortunately, while Nigerians may have focused on the comical dimensions which eventuated in the dramatic return of the team to their Abuja base – all of which would prove to be mere shadows in the face of the gross mismanagement of the infodemic and the ensuing psychological terrorism that has inescapably become its correlate, most Nigerians, it would appear, have succumbed to the one-size-fits-all approach being adopted by NCDC.

    For while it is not necessarily the fault of the PTF that the country now literally sleeps, dreams, wakes, eats and farts on Covid-19, it certainly speaks to the gross miscommunication of the crisis that the country’s thoughts and imagination if not the entire machinery of governance have since succumbed fatally to the infodemic.

    Here, if we may borrow from the justice system where an accused is deemed innocent at least until the law says so; under Covid-19 no one qualifies for the benefit of the doubt; all it takes to be dubbed a suspect Covid-19 case is to show symptoms of the mildest of flu for anarchy to be let loose on the household who must now herd the victim to the quarantine!

    Now, pregnant women can’t be attended to without due certification of their coronavirus-free status just as those of us – the over 50s – with so-called pre-existing conditions have long been passed off as high-priority suspects.

    Last week, my young cousin, a senior doctor told me of a case of a pregnant woman in Lokoja forced to cough out an extra N120,000 – all because the team of doctors who needed to perform a gynae procedure on her insisted on personal protective equipment for each member of the team – thanks to the Covid-19 hype.

    Now, you can’t conceive of a routine follow-up with your doctor without suffering suspicious glances and certainly not without the trauma of morbid imaginations all because a tiny virus has intruded upon our lives.

    Now, you venture to go the infirmary at your peril.

    Which reminds me of the controversy that surrounded Oyo State’s first recorded COVID-19 victim – the case of the Kano-based Assistant Comptroller at Customs.

    Like most Nigerians, I actually swallowed the official line regarding his death: how the patient hid his travel history; hid his testing by the NCDC and subsequently flouted isolation instructions etc. etc.

    In all of the accounts, not only was the poor chap deemed guilty as charged; for travelling to Ibadan where his family live – and inevitably made contacts with a whole range of family members including the doctors and nurses who attended to him, he was passed off as selfish and inconsiderate – at least, so goes several of the accounts that reported his demise.

    Little did I know that the subject in question was an old school junior who I knew very well. As I will later find out, the truth was actually in between. Yes, he was unwell – diabetic and hypertensive – both of which he had managed to a reasonable degree.

    But then, he died before the result of the Covid-19 test ever came out – and so could not have knowingly spread the virus! More than that, he actually reported to the NCDC at the onset of the familiar symptoms. And the latter took his samples for tests subsequent to which he was required to self-isolate.

    Imagine a sick man living hundreds of kilometres away from his family being required to wait for 14 days before any definitive treatment could commence! Rather than await an uncertain fate in his bedroom, he did what a desperate man would do in the circumstance: head for Ibadan to see the doctors all of whom already the details of his medical conditions on their fingertips.

    In fact, he was said to have told the doctors that he’d already had his samples taken by the NCDC and so awaiting the result which although positive only came out after his passing!

    Today, I have read of dozen-plus cases where people with severe symptoms have had to make frantic calls to NCDC to no avail; meanwhile, they have neither the option of private testing facilities nor the choice of private treatment since Covid-19 management is deemed a no-go area.

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    I am also familiar with cases in which doctors actually requested that their patients stay away until the current tide blows over.

    In other words, to hope and pray that the worst does not happen while the wave lasts! In our efforts to keep Nigerians free of the coronavirus, are we not unwittingly telling those with medical conditions to, at least for now, put up with their afflictions even when this can come at the pain of an avoidable death?

    For patients with moderate to severe medical cases, it is an unenviable situation to be in. As it is, we may never know how many Nigerians have succumbed to avoidable deaths – particularly those unrelated to the corona virus – on account of the prevalent moods both in our public hospitals and at the level of the government.

    Now, don’t get me wrong. I do of course differ with the Kogi governor on his broad characterisation of the pandemic as something of a hoax; or his more ridiculously laughable reference to a so-called app which, he claims his administration developed to ensure that citizens of the state could determine their virus-status at the touch of a button.

    If such claims seem a necessary offering in a world needlessly starved of mirth, certainly his opposition to a lockdown of the state based on mere conjectures and at a time the nation’s testing capacity remains at best wobbly cannot be said to be without some merit.

    Even at that, we are here talking of a disease whose case fatality rate (ratio between confirmed deaths and confirmed cases) as at May 10 stands at 3.08 per cent as against UK’s 14.67 percent and United States’ 6.02 percent.

    And this is a country where malaria, the more visible enemy is known to afflict a record 100 million annually of which over 300,000 fatalities are recorded annually.

    By the way, who am I to judge when the governor maintains that Lassa fever whose case fatality rate  of 44.4 per cent and which has claimed four deaths out of the nine cases reported in the state since January is by far more troubling than Covid-19 and which he insists is yet to show up on the state’s epidemiological radar?

    The Presidential Task Force (PTF) on Coronavirus Disease says “Kogi is at the risk of COVID-19 because it is a melting point for inter-state travellers and it shares borders with 12 states (about one-third of the states in the federation) which had recorded infections”.

    Moreover, that “Kogi has only conducted two tests despite the increasing rate of community spread”. Governor Yahaya Bello on his part says the problem is with the “merchants now marketing COVID-19 as if that is our priority”. Between the duo the nation is torn on who to believe.

    As sure as daylight, the truth like the pregnancy, cannot be hid for long.

     

  • Supreme irony

    Supreme irony

    Gabriel Amalu

     

    The Supreme Court’s judgement, which quashed the conviction of the former governor of Abia State, Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, has drawn the ire of eminent lawyers, and ordinary Nigerians.

    While some attacked the judgment as lacking in merit, others argued that the court has promoted technicality over merit.

    Conversely, other no less eminent lawyers, have argued that the judgment is sound in law, drawing their inspiration from the provisions of the 1999 constitution (as amended).

    Of note, the prosecuting agency, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), which got a conviction at the trial court, called the judgment of the apex court, an ambush.

    For this writer, it is a supreme irony that the judgments of the Supreme Court of the land, is increasingly becoming so controversial that senior lawyers, now throw decorum to the dogs, in attacking it.

    Not long ago, the subjects of such scurrilous attacks, were the judgments in the election petition appeals from the Imo and Bayelsa gubernatorial elections.

    With the darts now thrown freely at the apex court over its judgments, are we approaching what the inimitable columnist of this paper, Tatalo Alamu, calls the end game; this time, for our judiciary? Perhaps, there could still be a saving grace, if our nation would dispassionately examine the utility of our legal system as constituted and make changes were appropriate.

    After all, the basic expectation from a legal system, in a criminal matter, is to offer justice to the accused, the accuser and the state.

    Bearing that in mind, after examining the effectiveness of our present legal system, this writer has argued severally that our adversarial legal system is untenable for a third world country like ours.

    That is against a more participatory inquisitorial legal system, where the judge is allowed to examine the issues at stake by himself; instead of sitting aloof, and allowing the adversaries to win or lose the case, depending on the arguments they marshal before the judge or the technical issues raised.

    Of course, while the judge should legally be secured enough to act independently of all the parties in a criminal justice system, he should be constituted in such a manner to be able to probe the issues raised, in other to gift the three parties, what substantially approximates to justice for all of them.

    I use the word approximation, advisedly, knowing that it may be impossible to gain the satisfaction of all parties, in all cases.

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    In the Orji Uzor Kalu’s case, if the facts in the public domain are true, is it not ironical that while the counsel to the accused person successfully moved the President of the Court of Appeal to grant a fiat to the elevated Honourable Justice Mohammed Idris to return to the Federal High Court to conclude the part-heard case at the High Court, another counsel to the accused again successfully moved the Supreme Court, to come to the conclusion that it is unconstitutional for a judge who has been elevated to a higher court, to return to his former court, to conclude a criminal matter partly-heard, before he was elevated?

    A classic case of eating your cake, and still having it, perhaps? That is so, even though the EFCC has vowed to swiftly subject the former governor and now a senator to another trial, as ordered by the apex court.

    But what are the issues raised in the judgment of the apex court that drowned the judgement of the Hon. Justice Idris of the federal high court?

    The thrust of the argument of the Supreme Court is that the judgment against Senator Orji Uzor Kalu was a nullity, because the judge who heard the case of the prosecution, and the one who heard the case of the defence and gave the judgment, even though the same biological person, is not the same juridical person, as the first was a judge of the high court, and the latter a justice of the appeal court. For this column, while the judgment is defensible in law, it is irrational, in social justice.

    Section 396(7) of the Administration of Criminal Justice Act (ACJA), which the President of the Court of Appeal, relied upon to grant a fiat to Justice Idris, to return to the federal high court, to conclude the hearing of the case and deliver judgment, after he was elevated and sworn in as a justice of the appeal court, is incongruous with the clear intendment of the 1999 constitution (as amended).

    This is without prejudice to the inherent law-making powers of the courts, which the Supreme Court has to interpret a law so as not to defeat the clear purpose of the lawmaker.

    A combined reading of sections 1, 6(5), 230-284, show that the clear intention of the constitution is to have hierarchies of court, which cannot be subjugated by an inferior law.

    So, when a person is appointed to any of the courts, he becomes a judicial officer of that court, with the authority to exercise the powers conferred by the constitution, and other extant laws.

    Such a person appointed to one of the hierarchies of the court, cannot be embedded with the authority to exercise the powers of another hierarchy of the courts, by virtue of an act of the National Assembly.

    Those against the judgment of the Supreme Court, rely on the clear intendments of section 396(7) of the ACJA, which provides: “Notwithstanding the provision of any other law to the contrary, a judge of the High Court who has been elevated to the Court of Appeal shall have dispensation to continue to sit as a High Court Judge, only for the purposes of concluding any part-heard criminal matter, pending before him at the time of his elevation and shall be concluded within reasonable time, provided that this section shall not prevent him from assuming duty as a Justice of the Court of Appeal.”

    No doubt, the above provision is to stymie the frustrations associated with the criminal trials, especially of politically exposed persons, which the elevation of trial judges accentuate.

    It must therefore been borne in mind that the essence of the ACJA is to salvage the tragedy that has befallen our criminal justice system, with matters lasting in the courts for decades.

    The Senator Orji Uzor Kalu, is a case in point, considering that the matter has been on and off, since the end of Kalu’s gubernatorial rule in 2007.

    Perhaps, if the Supreme Court was mindful to act radically, it would have upheld the provision of section 396(7), bearing in mind its social justice destination. But it choose to act conservatively, which has exposed it to accusation of supreme incompetence.

     

  • Kano boils

    Kano boils

    By Gabriel Amalu

    The ancient city of Kano has been afflicted by boils and may soon boil if not well managed. The image of Kano residents, hiding behind motorcycles and rams, loaded in trailers, fleeing Kano State, depicts the desperation of Africans riding the Mediterranean Sea in dingy boats, fleeing from Africa. To add salt to the sore, Kaduna State government soon announced that 30 Almajiris, who returned to Kaduna from Kano, has tested positive to the corona virus pandemic.

    Again, the other northern states sharing border with Kano, have also turned back desperate residents of Kano fleeing from what looks like a cancerous boil. Within Kano State, tens of residents have died. Some, from so-called mysterious ailments. In one instance, a dozen eminent personalities died within 10 hours, some admittedly from COVID-19.  While Kano State claims the deaths are from strange diseases, it has become evident that Kano State has become an epicentre of the pandemic.

    From the reactions of its officials, Kano State did not show capacity to deal with any serious infectious diseases, how much more a pandemic like COVID-19. That is a shame for a cosmopolitan state like Kano, which receives one of the highest allocations from the federal revenue, and with a huge capacity for internally generated revenue. Within the initial two weeks lockdown of the federal capital, Abuja, Lagos and Ogun states, Kano State governor, Abdullahi Ganduje, was shown on television, inspecting a so-called isolation centre set up with money donated by Aliko Dangote.

    Even without being medical personnel, the so-called isolation centre looked laughable, as it had only a cluster of dressed bed, with nothing else to show for an Intensive Care Unit (ICU). While Aliko Dangote, who provided the fund may be cringing at the so-called ICU, Governor Ganduje, in his usual boisterous manner, said the state was prepared for any outbreak. Regrettably, COVID-19 became a pandemic within Kano state, before the state government, knew the pandemic has berthed in the state.

    Now the state is helplessly calling on the federal government to come to its aid. Of course, the federal authority should help Kano; but the helplessness of Kano is a crying shame on those who ruled the state over the years. The present regime should hide its head in shame for the apparent mismanagement of the huge resources of the state, over the years. It is an embarrassment to answer an ancient city, with rich long history, and yet have no infrastructure to show for it. But Kano is not alone.

    While it is inconceivable that the entire northern Nigeria, had no federal medical institution with a laboratory to test an infectious disease like COVID19 at the outbreak of the pandemic, it is a wringing shame on the state governments in the region that none of the states, including Kano had such a laboratory facility. Let me digress. In fairness to the northern states, the entire southeast was in similar quandary at the outbreak of the disease, as even the test for Lassa fever in the region, were done in Irrua Specialist Hospital in Edo State.

    So, like the states in the northern Nigeria, like their counterparts in southeast. Perhaps because the infectious diseases which afflicted the peoples of the regions, until COVID19, discriminated against the poor, the states’ governments in the regions did not bother to build laboratories with such capacities, until now. On this page, last year, I had lampooned the federal and Ebonyi State governments for the absence of a laboratory to test for Lassa fever, without knowing the situation was similar in the northern states, despite their advantages in hosting federal facilities.

    I had urged the states in southeast to take their destinies in their hand and provide high-tech laboratory to serve their people; without any inkling that a far more deadly disease like COVID19 was on its way. Commendably, Ebonyi State, has equipped one of its health facilities with the necessary laboratory equipment while the federal authorities complemented with the necessary consumables to test for COVID19.

    Still on this digress: I advise the Enugu State governor, Hon. Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi (Gburugburu), to sit down and negotiate with the striking doctors in the state, so that they can go back to work. While it is regrettable that doctors would proceed on strike at this inauspicious time, I urge him to ensure that the working condition of doctors in the state is as competitive as what is obtainable in other comparable states. That will ensure the state is not disadvantaged in the long run; with doctors in the state, migrating to places where there are better working conditions.

    The Kano experience should be a warning to every state in Nigeria, especially the states in the northern part of our country that they must all gird their loins, since no one knows what tomorrow portends. Clearly, COVID-19 has shown that humanity is one regardless of wealth or privilege. It stole into the world and many nations, including the technologically advanced countries of the world, were caught unawares. So, the blame for Kano is not that it was caught unawares, but that it was caught pants down.

    That is why the pandemic is having a field day in the state, and the government is clearly helpless. Unfortunately, the state has performed below par, compared to other states. While like most other states, Kano had no laboratory to test for COVID19 at the beginning of the pandemic, several weeks after, it still has none. Lagos State which Kano State likes to compare itself with, was even more prepared than the federal government, and that is what it takes to be a megalopolis. Otherwise, it will be legitimate to be called ‘Big for nothing’.

    So, while many states have quickly gained traction in their reaction to the ravaging pandemic, Kano State government continues to show cluelessness. On the lighter side, the majority leader of the House of Representatives, Alhassan Ado Doguwa, who recently called himself, the strong man of Kano, because he married four wives and has 27 children, was shown crying like a wimp on television, begging the federal government to save Kano. By that, he shamelessly admitted that without resources from the federal government, he is a weak man of a very weak state.

    There is no doubt that the corona virus pandemic, otherwise called COVID-19, exposed the wretchedness of our country’s medical infrastructure. But if I may parody George Orwell’s: ‘Animal Farm’, while all states are wretched, some are more wretched than others. Kano State stands tall among the wretched of the states, apologies this time to Franz Fanon, who titled his book on the evils of colonization: ‘The Wretched of the Earth’.

  • Economics of folly

    Economics of folly

    Sanya Oni

    Trust most Nigerians to treat the news of Nigeria’s stranded crude cargoes as just another phase of the current crisis that would sooner pass given what we know of the instability in global world prices. As in previous occasions when the country has had to endure the pang of low oil prices for as long as it lasted, again trust Nigerians to resort to doing what they do best in such circumstances – mount supplications at heaven’s gate until recovery happens! This time, even without Mele Kyari, the NNPC helmsman breaking the news about some 50 cargoes of Nigeria’s Light Bonny said to be stranded on the high seas since last month, Nigerians already suspect that the answers to the prayers won’t come easy; not only is the country headed for a long dark night but a future truly pregnant with uncertainties particularly with countries still reeling from the wave of the Covid-19 pandemic.

    Nigeria optimistic of price rebound after crude sold for $12’. That was the headline in Nigeria’s online medium Premium Times of April 19 soon after the price of Nigeria’s Bonny Light hit the rock bottom at $12 a barrel – a price said to be well below the cost of production put at about $22 a barrel and most certainly below $30 –the newly adjusted reference price for the 2020 budget.

    Optimism? And at this time? The medium quoted Kyari as premising his optimism of oil price rebound on the intervention by OPEC and its allies. We are here talking of a time when leading industrial economies are yet to figure out a way to re-open their economies? Talk of bringing the old worn template underlain by fixations with prices and the perennial tinkering with production all in the name of keeping oil prices stable; the likes of Kyari will sooner learn that the global economy would, just like the typical patient after suffering serious bout of anaemia would require careful nourishment to get back on her feet, require far more than routine doses of production cutbacks to recover!

    Which is why I believe that the country, at this time, needs a refresher of sorts on the humongous costs of the road not taken. Here, most Nigerians would probably consider the $12 price of our crude a disaster. Fewer unfortunately, suffer the indulgence of examining the so-called prices of the crude vis-à-vis its value at the end of the product chain! Had they bothered to undertake the exercise, they would most likely have considered the current regime of crude trade as nothing short of treasonable!

    Let me illustrate. At N420 to the United States’ dollar, $12 for Nigeria’s Bonny Light comes to N5,040 per barrel!

    But really, how much is a barrel of crude worth? To answer to the question, I borrow from an article – In a Barrel of Oil from energyeducation.ca, an online publication of the University of Calgary.

    Permit me to quote extensively from the article if only to illustrate the humongous costs of the folly by an indulgent nation: “A single barrel of crude oil – once it has been refined – can yield a large number of different, useful petroleum products. The ability to obtain products like gasoline, asphalt, and propane from a single product is part of what makes refining such a vital process. The refining process separates these different hydrocarbons in a number of different ways, one major way being separation by boiling point in a fractional distillation tower”.

    Hardly a rocket – you say. I agree. But then, the economics is even more illuminating.

    The publication goes on to say: ‘When crude oil is input into a fractional distillation tower, there is an overall increase in volume of product. If a single barrel of crude oil – equal to about 159 litres – were refined, the volume of the final products is actually greater than the volume of the initial crude oil. In fact, 170 litres of refined petroleum products can be obtained from 159 litres of crude oil. There is an increase in volume through the refining process as a result of an effect known as processing gain. Processing gain simply refers to the volume by which output increases compared to input that occurs as a result of processed petroleum products having a lower specific gravity than the initial crude oil. This results in the final products “taking up more space” than the initial crude oil.”

    The publication breaks down the economics in finer detail. From a single barrel, gasoline yield is put at 73 litres; for Automotive Gas Oil – it is 40 litres, while kerosene-type jet fuels make up about 15.5 litres. And that is aside other derivatives like petrochemical feedstock used for a variety of different products from pharmaceuticals to plastics which also make up 4.2 litres.

    Yet, there are still  other products, like still gas, petroleum coke, heavy fuel oil, asphalt, lubricants, aviation gasoline, naphthas, and waxes, which although make up a fairly small amount of the final product, are nonetheless widely useful in a number of different applications.

    Now you know why America will not flinch when oil prices goes minus zero? Not only are there enough of white products to make up for lost revenue; the endless flow of other ancillary products to other critical sectors are such that would provide mitigation for the slump in oil prices!

    In our case, we routinely trade off the crude for a morsel of a few dollars.  In the end, we deploy a huge chunk of it to import refined products! And when oil prices collapses as it cyclically does, we resort to measures that are revealing of how little thinking is going on! As if by careful programming, all the elements needed for the uptake and sustenance of a truly integrated economy are not only denied us, we are expected to count on the mercy of our “friends” both for fuel and vital industrial raw materials!

    By the way, the same trade template is true of cocoa, timber, cassava – name it! Ever heard of a country so obsessed with the present that the thoughts of a future comes so distant place?

    That is our own dear Nigeria; a classic case of multiple whammies!

    Unfortunately, that is how things have been and perhaps will remain in the foreseeable future – Covid-19 or not!

     

     

     

  • Akinjide: Death of an enigma

    Akinjide: Death of an enigma

    Olakunle Abimbola

    In 1979, the Senate ministerial confirmatory chambers, then at Parliament Building, Tafawa Balewa Square, Lagos, broke into virtual civil war.

    Arrayed at one end of “battle” were the ruling National Party of Nigeria (NPN) senators. Though with a slight (but no working) majority, their mandate was to push President Shehu Shagari’s nominee for Justice minister and Attorney-General of the Federation.

    Arrayed, at the other end, were senators of the Unity Party of Nigeria (UPN), of Chief Obafemi Awolowo; and Nigeria People’s Party (NPP), of Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe.  Both caucuses were equally determined to block that nomination.

    The UPN senators, mainly Yoruba, were bent on fobbing a “traitor” to the Yoruba cause, off the ministerial saddle.

    The NPP caucus, mainly Igbo, were equally gung-ho about shooing  a “Yoruba tribalist”, off the ministerial dais of the Federal Republic.

    Both “traitor” to the Yoruba cause, and “tribalist” on account of the Yoruba, was Chief Richard Abimbola Osuolale Akinjide, SAN (4 November 1931 – 21 April 2020).

    But how can outsiders lampoon you as a “Yoruba tribalist”, yet the Yoruba political mainstream dismiss you as a “traitor to the Yoruba cause”?  That was the enigma of Richard Akinjide.

    The UPN/NPP gang-up against Akinjide’s nomination had specific throw-backs: into the 1st Republic (1960-1966); and the then approaching 2nd Republic (1979-1983).

    Before the 2nd Republic’s 1 October 1979 handover date, Akinjide had scuttled Awo’s bid for the presidency, with his (in)famous twelve-two-thirds judicial joker.

    That legal legerdemain, bought by the Supreme Court, all but put paid to Awo’s hope, to stretch the 1979 presidential race to the Electoral College.  NPN’s Shagari had the clear majority vote.  But he didn’t have the spread (12, instead of 13, out of 19 states.  Awo’s own spread was six out of 19 states).

    Even then, since the 1979 Constitution was clear, on both the vote and the spread, the election ought to have been settled at the Electoral College.  That was the law.

    But the Akinjide trickery, that fobbed off that twin provision of the law, gifted the 2nd Republic a legitimacy kiss of death, from which it never really recovered.

    That Akinjide, a fellow Yoruba, provided the joker to scuttle the looming Electoral College, thus gaming the Awo camp, made him a “traitor to the Yoruba cause”.

    But the NPP senatorial angst went back to the 1st Republic, with its hegemony politics, dripping with ethnic pork.

    Akinjide took over as federal Education minister (1965-1966), only to find that Aja Nwachukwu (1918-2001), Nigeria’s first federal Education minister (1958-1965), had spiked the federal scholarship roll with fellow Easterners.

    Akinjide, who would have none of that nonsense, cried blue murder, and proceeded to correct the lopsidedness, with a more ethnically balanced list.

    The weeded Easterners railed, screamed and growled.  But the new beneficiaries, most of them Westerners, preened: new sheriff, old roguery, new winners, full stop!

    Enter Richard Akinjide, the new and unfazed “Yoruba tribalist”, in the Eastern mind!

    A similar ethnic row broke out when, under Akinjide’s watch, the University of Lagos (Unilag) appointed Prof. Saburi Biobaku, to replace its first vice chancellor, Prof. Eni Njoku (1962-1965).

    Aja Nwachukwu, had mid-wifed Unilag, Nigeria’s first post-independence federal university, and appointed Njoku as its first VC.  Earlier, he had also appointed Kenneth Dike, as first Nigerian VC of the University of Ibadan, Nigeria’s first-ever university, thus laying himself open to charges of ethnic favouritism, if not outright nepotism.

    So, what Akinjide did was no more than tweak the good, old Aja doctrine, to benefit his own Yoruba; as Nwachukwu did, all through his long ministerial tour, to benefit his Igbo folks — hegemony politics, dripping with ethnic pork!

    Still, neither the Nwachuckwu nominees nor the Akinjide appointees, were unqualified for the positions.  What played out was simply the elite, as ethnics, scrambling for limited spaces, in emergent Nigeria.

    So, those that today screech and scream “nepotism!”, at the sight of any appointive list, should know these things date back.  As the Akinjide-Nwachukwu row showed, the beneficiaries change in tune with the regnant realpolitik.

    Indeed, the political manoeuvres, of 1965 and 1979, got resolved as historical parallels: Eni Njoku would move East to become VC of University of Nigeria, Nsukka (UNN); just as Zik did to become Eastern Premier, after his failed bid as Western Premier.

    Also, the 1979 UPN/NPP anti-Akinjide gang-up would peter off, just as the latter-day NCNC/AG UPGA alliance, which could not stop the “victory” of NPC/NNDP-led Nigerian National Alliance (NNA), in the fatally flawed 1964 Nigeria general elections.

    Still, the federal scholarship/Unilag rumpus revealed yet another side of the Akinjide puzzle.  He was as cosmopolitan as they came: intellectual, brilliant, well-travelled, suave and polished.  But if it took raw atavism to claw, and cut a fair share of the Nigerian cake for own folks, so be it!

    But if Akinjide was that hung-ho over Yoruba interest, how come he died almost a pariah, to the Yoruba cause?  How come, even in his native Ibadan, he boasted little or no community value?  Fair and legitimate questions!

    For starters, Akinjide’s ministerial activism flowered at the vortex of 1st Republic Yoruba resent.  Awolowo was in gaol.  Samuel Ladoke Akintola (SLA), embattled Western Premier, was in the throes of the “wet-ie” (douse and blaze) anarchy.

    So, the Action Groupers and sympathizers, in the clear majority, sneered at Akinjide’s Yoruba activism, as nothing but empty fop to buy legitimacy.

    But that further opened the vista into complex intra-Yoruba realpolitik, skewed against Akinjide’s conservative political temper, to which he stubbornly stuck all his life.

    Akinjide’s Ibadan, post-Oyo Empire, was the Oyo-Yoruba metropole.  The Oyo-Yoruba area is the bastion of Yoruba political conservatism.

    Yet, same Ibadan was the glorious Awo capital, from where he unleashed his unparalleled progressive developmental agenda that, in less than 10 years (1951-1959), vaulted the Yoruba masses above others in emergent Nigeria.

    Awo’s developmental agenda, and brilliant advocacy for federalism, won over a great many Ibadan-Oyo elite.  But the epicentre of Awo’s social democracy was clearly elsewhere: the Ekiti/Ondo axis, and Awo’s native Ijebu/Remo axis, especially in the rural areas.

    Akinjide was never won over — no crime: indeed, a rare strength; in an era of political chameleons.

    But at every juncture, he appeared the ever-merry anti-Awo spoiler.  Just as he conjured “twelve-two-thirds”, he was part of SLA’s Demo, notorious for soulless election fixing and sundry brazen tactics.  Hence the tag: Yoruba “traitor”.

    Yet, that sweet-sour Demo ticket earned him the club to clobber Aja Nwachukwu’s ethnic loading of federal privileges.  But as Akinjide pulled all stops to strike for the Yoruba against other ethnics, he scurried back into his Ibadan-Oyo cocoon, in intra-Yoruba affairs!  That deepened the Akintola conundrum.

    Still, the Ibadan near-zero community value?  Margaret Thatcher (the “milk-snatcher”), latterly British Prime Minister, sensationally once declared there was nothing like “community”!  You took responsibility; and rose or fell by the sweat of your brow!

    Akinjide would appear a Thatcher kindred spirit.  Beyond his immediate family, the late legal Titan seldom ventured, with harsh frugality to boot!

    The community also would progressively ignore him — which explains why, after entering Parliament (1959-1966), he never won any other partisan election, all through his long life.

  • As Trump muddies the waters of COVID-19

    As Trump muddies the waters of COVID-19

    Olatunji Dare

    As if the coronavirus pandemic that has virtually turned the world upside down with the grisly daily bulletin of deaths and more deaths and misery and suffering of Biblical proportions was not unsettling enough, United States President Donald Trump has by his denials, his obfuscations, his dizzying somersaults and his frenzied revisions, turned the whole thing into a waking nightmare.

    His gyrations now command almost as much attention as the pandemic itself.  Instead of leading the global effort to contain and ultimately suppress the pandemic, he is subverting it with daily rants suffused with rhyme and reason of the darkest hue.

    Well before the outbreak of the pandemic, U.S. Senator Bernie Sanders, most recently a presidential contender from the Democratic Party, has called Donald Trump “the most dangerous president” in American history.  In the unfolding cataclysm, Trump will have to be adjudged “the most dangerous man on the planet,” period.

    As the coronavirus was threatening to wipe out the population of the Chinese city of Wuhan, and even as his intelligence officials warned again and again of its pandemic potential, Trump casually dismissed it as nothing more bothersome than the seasonal ‘flu,  It would vanish, “wash away” as suddenly as it had appeared, he said.

    Why would he or any discerning American endorse anything that could panic the investing class and threaten the roaring stock market and the good economic news that was sure to guarantee his election? The whole thing, he said, was a “hoax” ginned up by the Democrats in a fresh attempt to undermine his re-election chances, their earlier attempt to achieve that end with a hoax about Russian intervention in the 2016 election having exploded on their faces, wretched losers.

    Soon, the virus was making headline news in the United States and other countries, ravaging cities that were, like the Federal Government, not in the least prepared.  Meanwhile, in contrast, as it grappled with the pandemic, China was demonstrating on the world stage a mastery and sure-footedness that won respect and acclaim. In America, deaths from Covid-19 mounted from coast to coast.

    That rankled.

    The bumbling Federal response contrasted sharply with of New York Mario Cuomo’s daily demonstration of a firm grasp of the situation.  At every outing, Cuomo came across as an exemplar of leadership in crisis, to the extent that the admiring media called him “America’s Governor” and not a few influential voices wished he was available to run for president on the Democratic ticket.

    That rankled, too.

    Meanwhile, the performance of the stock market became less and less the electoral trump card Trump was counting (pun intended) and more and more a liability. The chink in the armour widened.  Denial was no longer possible; so, switch gears.

    Deflect.

    At the behest of China – the “Chinese Communist Party” as the Trump White House now called the government it has earlier praised for its robust and effective response to the outbreak — it  was the fault of the World Health Organisation no less, aided by its Ethiopian Director-General, Dr Tedros Ghebreyesus, had withheld vital facts from the international community, and thus wittingly abetted the viral conflagration.

    Deflect WHO from the compelling task at hand by all manner of insinuation; announce an investigation into its proceedings, and threaten to cut annual payments amounting to one billion dollars to the world body.

    Deflect the international community of experts from a concentrated search for a cure by promoting all matter of quack and frankly laughable remedies, forgetting that your word, the word of the Leader of the Free World, has consequences.

    First, it was the anti-malarial drug chloroquine.  Desperate Nigerians rushed to obtain and ingest the drug in such quantities that treatment of overdose cases almost overwhelmed emergency rooms in the hospitals.  Then, Trump located the cure in something far more accessible: the household detergent or disinfectant, atop your kitchen sink or the wash basin in your bathroom.

    Since the merest contact with soap on the human skin eviscerates the virus, consider what it could do on the inside if injected into the bloodstream.  Does it not stand to reason that it would just flush the malignant invader out, just like that?  A disinfectant – think Lysol, or Dettol, or good old bleach similarly applied, would act even more rapidly and decisively.

    I could almost visualize the equivalent in every Nigerian home of Mama Igosun, columnist Tatalo “Snooper” Alamu’s hilarious creation, darting to wherever they keep the junk, rummaging through the abandoned pile and emerging triumphantly with a rusty, half-empty can of good old IZAL Sanitas (Táníyá) that will do the job at least as effectively as any of the products advertised on television, and from her experience, far more assuredly.

    Or, according to Dr. Trump, drawing on his famed pharmacopoeia, just leave it to the Sun, now that its rays are coming on stronger and warming things up.  Finding ho hiding place, the virus will just vanish.  But the sun may be sluggish in some areas; so, zap a patient’s thoracic area with ultraviolet rays from a hand-held device obtainable at your nearest hardware store.

    But the Cofid-19 does not cower before junk science, Fox News, and its affiliates in Trump’s consortium of enabling media, unlike some sections of the political opposition.  Grimly, impassively, with goodwill to none and malice toward all, it carries on its ruinous march.

    The one thing that appears to have slowed its advance is social distancing, the culmination of which is the lockdown that has been clamped on entire cities across the world in last-ditch effort at containment.

    But why lockdown businesses, why hold the economy hostage to the fortunes of people, the majority of whom are on their last legs anyway, as a commentator on FOX mused? Or, as Dan Patrick, the 70-year-old lieutenant governor of Texas said the other day, “There are more important things than living, and that’s saving this country for my children and my grandchildren and saving this country for all of us.”

    To leave no one in doubt about your impatience with the whole thing, make it clear that you intend to “open up” the country, beginning with packed churches at Easter, a time-tested sop to the misnamed Evangelicals.

    So, inveigh against the lockdowns.  Cast them as assaults on the freedom of movement of citizens and more fundamentally on their right to bear arms.   Rouse them to “liberate” their towns and cities from those seeking to abridge those freedoms under the pretext of containing the corona virus.

    And when they turn out in multitudes brandishing the most lethal weapons of war and sporting Nazi and other racist insignia and shouting imprecations, hail them as “good people” who just happen to be angry.

    Meanwhile, not even a word of regret at more than 60, 000 deaths and counting in the United States from Covid-19; not the merest hint of empathy or solidarity with those who have lost loved ones, or for medical professionals and adjuncts who died while ministering unto the afflicted; none, until a few days ago, when a report detailing Trump’s cold-hearted nonresponse in the matter wrung from his lips an expression of remorse that was as grudging as it was fleeting.

    Even so, Trump can hardly wait to resume his boisterous, raucous election campaign rallies in Republican-held states, where he enjoys the status of a cult figure, social distancing be damned. That would be the perfect forum for telling Americans that he bore not an iota of responsibility for the depredations of Covid-19, and that it was the central plank in China’s plot to undermine America’s supremacy in the world and thus supplant the Land the Free and the Home of the Brave.

    It would also be the perfect occasion to assure his teeming supporters that China would pay dearly for its wickedness – just as Mexico had paid for The Wall — and that the way to guarantee that outcome is to give him four more years in The White House.

    Who knows?

    Even when it has subsided, the pandemic will have snuffed out more than 100 000 Americans, as current projections suggest, and multiples of that figure worldwide, a greater number of them directly or indirectly from Trump’s inaction, indifference and bad example.

  • ROA Akinjide: What legacy?

    ROA Akinjide: What legacy?

    Olatunji Dare

     

    FROM time to time, this page offers a retrospective (“Where are they now?”) on persons who were once prominent and frequent newsmakers, but about whom one now scours the news media almost in vain.

    The last instalment (October 8, 2019) featured, among other lapsed newsmakers, the legal titan, Chief Richard Osuolale Abimbola Akinjide.  He belonged in the second set of attorneys conferred with the rank of Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN) and was one of a dozen or so who held the prestigious rank of QC (Queen’s Counsel), a colonial-era preferment that the indigenous distinction of SAN supplanted.

    In the colonial and postcolonial policy dialogue, Akinjide’s contribution was unfailingly informed and incisive, a product of his fecund mind and omnivorous reading.   Even when you disagreed with his point of view, you could not but admire his eloquence, his mastery of the material, and the cut and thrust of his argumentation.  You always learned something new from his submissions.

    Shortly after President Goodluck Jonathan’s misbegotten National Conference in which Akinjide was a delegate, his interventions in debates on national issues became few and far between, then ceased altogether.

    Nothing called attention to his withdrawal from the public sphere more poignantly than his daughter-politician Jumoke Akinjide’s misfortunes.  A former Minister for the Abuja Federal Capital Territory during the Jonathan Administration, she had been having a running battle with the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission over an alleged misappropriation of some N650 million, little more than pocket change to minor functionaries in some federal establishments.

    She paid back the sum at issue, but the prosecutors would not drop the charge.  And yet, when it seemed to matter most, her father, the legal colossus, did not come up with some recondite forensic doctrine to put an end to all that nonsense.  Where was he, I had asked in the column under reference?

    A relation of his by marriage told me on reading the piece that Akinjide was too frail to engage in such theatrics anymore.  Akinjide died last week, aged 88 years.

    A lawyer’s lawyer, Akinjide was perhaps best known for the disingenuous formula which moved the Federal Electoral Commission to hold that by, winning the most votes in 12 of the 19 states and in one-half of two-thirds of a 13th State, the NPN candidate, Shehu Shagari, had won a majority “in each of at least two-thirds of the states of the federation” as stipulated by the Constitution, and thus the 1979 presidential election outright.

    The Supreme Court affirmed, and the joke was on those who had dismissed Akinjide’s formula as crack-brained.   In the legal battles that pitted the Federal Government against the states controlled by the Opposition in the Second Republic, Akinjide was a constant figure as Minister of Justice and Attorney-General, smirking as the courts did the government’s bidding in case after case.

    The calculus that a faction of the Oyo State legislature employed to impeach Governor Rasheed Ladoja in January 2006 called to mind Akinjide’s “Twelve two-thirds” formula that had clinched the Presidency for Shehu Shagari in 1979.  Like that formula, the Oyo calculus was so contrived that one was almost certain that the courts would dismiss it as a brazen assault not merely on the law but on common sense.

    The most senior judge in Oyo thought nothing of playing major enabler in a so-called  impeachment produced by, among sundry illegalities, disobeying a court injunction, and gratuitously stripping elected members of the State Assembly of their rights and privileges.

    Akinjide nevertheless endorsed the arrangement stoutly and gibed that it was a fait accompli the courts would be loath to reverse if precedent and the “doctrine of efficacy” still counted for anything.  The courts were not impressed.

    Some commentators went so far as to insist that the Oyo calculus, represented Akinjide’s investment in a scheme that would have seen his son installed deputy governor of Oyo State after the purported impeachment, with the blessing of the area godfather himself, Lamidi Adedibu.

    I prefer to believe that Akinjide was just being Akinjide, and would have gladly served, if asked, as a legal strategist for Christopher Alao-Akala, the new governor thrown up by the impeachment, or entered an amicus curiae brief.  It was all so troubling in a figure who should by right be numbered unequivocally among Nigeria’s pre-eminent statesmen.

    Akinjide was elected into the House of Representative during the First Republic at the relatively tender age of 28, on the platform of the NCNC and quickly attracted notice as

    one of its ablest parliamentary debaters.  When the ruling federal coalition partners, the NPC and the NCNC, took advantage of a rift in the Opposition Action Group to smash it and take over Western Nigeria where it was firmly entrenched, Akinjide was in the vanguard.

    The union collapsed under the weight of its own contradictions. Chief S. L.Akintola’s UPP morphed into the NNDP with none other than Akinjide as its general secretary, kicked out the NCNC, appropriated the spoils unto itself, and nailed its sail to the NPC’s mast.

    This arrangement redounded mightily to Akinjide’s benefit.  He was appointed Federal Minister of Education. But it ended all too soon.  Within a year, the military struck and toppled the government.

    Akinjide returned to his law practice and was doing so well that when military governor Adeyinka Adebayo named him commissioner of finance for the former Western Nigeria, apparently without first consulting him, he declined on the threshold, to the admiration of  Nigerians already chafing at the brusque ways of the military, this writer included.

    They thought that he was in effect saying a farewell to all the self-inflicted injuries that were part and parcel of politics and governance.  That, alas, was a misreading of the man and the moment.  Akinjide re-entered the fray as soon as the ban on party politics was lifted in 1978 and ran for governor of Oyo State the following year on the platform of the NPN, now home to his former NNDP associates.

    In a desultory and ill-tempered campaign, he berated the “free education” policy of the Action Group that had transformed Western Nigeria, village for village, into perhaps the most literate territory in Africa south of the Sahara.  That policy, he snickered in a television debate with his UPN opponent Chief Bola Ige, had produced only “letter writers” and armed robbers.

    Ige, a master or repartee, thereupon challenged Akinjide to identify for the public benefit those members of the Akinjide family who, having profited from the “free education” policy of the Action Group, subsequently became armed robbers.

    Enraged, Akinjide demanded that Ige withdraw the imputation. Ever so sedately, Ige repeated the challenge.

    Akinjide stomped out of the studio, knowing that he had done lasting damage to his person and to his chances of winning the election, which were never more than slim. He would take his revenge several months later when, as chief legal strategist for the NPN, he deployed the deus ex machina that clinched the presidential election for Shehu Shagari on the first ballot.

    That contrivance, I have it on good authority, was not fashioned from a sudden flash of inspiration, nor from a serendipitous moment. Akinjide, as was his wont, had for months x-rayed the electoral laws, probed their interstices for any weak spots, and detected every lacuna.  His labours were rewarded by the discovery of what he called “a joker,” an ace that he kept up his sleeve until the right moment, and then used it to stunning effect.

    Akinjide’s accustomed forensic legerdemain failed him in the Shugaba case, however.  The case centred on the kidnapping and deportation to Chad, in the dead of night, of the Majority Leader in the Borno House of Assembly, Shugaba Abdurahman Darman, based on a claim that he was Chadian, as was his father.  They produced as their star witness a woman who claimed that she was Shugaba’s mother and was, like Shugaba’s father, Chadian.

    For the Federal Government, Akinjide cited to no avail a dazzling array of foreign authorities, leaving out, as Shugaba’s leading counsel, the sedate GOK Ajayi (SAN) reminded the court again and again, the only document that really mattered in the case: the Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    In a lawyer concerned merely to win cases, such conduct is unexceptionable, admirable even.  But law is not just about winning cases. Nor is it principally about manipulating technicalities to gain forensic advantage.  When the letter of the law is wrenched from its spirit, when the desire to win cases supplants the need to do justice, the law becomes a mere tool, bereft of any redeeming social purpose.

    That is the context in which Akinjide’s 1979 “joker,” his advocacy in Shugaba’s case, his intervention in the Oyo debacle and in other contentious issues of Nigeria’s political history must be weighed. And the question that follows is this: What is the legacy?

    I suspect that, by and large, it will be judged as a legacy of artfulness; that Akinjide will be remembered more for being clever for brief, shining, opportunistic moments than for seeking to make his society wiser and more just.

  • The new normal

    The new normal

    Gabriel  Amalu

     

    The term, ‘new normal’ has gained traction in the international media. It is used to depict what would become: the new normal way of living, because of the corona virus pandemic, otherwise known as COVID-19. The experts who use the terminology try to explain to the rest of us that life as we lived it would not return to its normal, for some time to come.

    I guess these experts are correct, in talking about ‘new normal’ time. So, it may be right to refer to ‘the old normal’ and ‘the new normal’, to distinguish between the two different epochs of ‘normality’.

    This is more so, as the wave of the pandemic shows no sign of abatement, in our country. In other places, the warning is that there could be a new wave of the pandemic, unless a permanent solution is found.

    Thankfully, on the bright side, there is the potential that a vaccine could be found, sooner than later, to deal with the dreaded enemy. But until then, the challenge is how our country’s men and women can be able to adjust to this ‘new normal’. Let’s examine a few instances.

    By this time in the old normal, a new school term has just started. Being the third term for the primary and secondary school students, when promotional exams are done, both parents and pupils would be on their toes, to ensure that necessary preparations are in place to secure promotion.

    The new normal, is that lessons and classes are going to be by virtual means, for some time to come. Some schools are already taking steps to start classes through the social media platforms, and other online learning applications.

    For the affluent schools, they may adopt personalised online applications. Of course, the new normal may not be as effective, as the old normal, but regardless, this means that online studying is going to be the new normal for some time to come.

    For the parents, the challenge would be how to get the resources to acquire the necessary gadgets, and of course buy the data, for their wards to participate in the online learning programs.

    The parents who are not internet savvy, or are usually put off, by these gadgets, may have to adjust to the new normal, by joining the bandwagon, to learn the new technologies and its applications.

    Unless, a miracle happens, and a vaccine against COVID-19 is discovered, and made available worldwide expeditiously, pupils may end up undergoing most of the third term’s lessons, tests and examinations via the virtual media.

    So, how can our government help to reduce the burden of the students and parents, who are locked down, and unable to fend for themselves, talk less of spending their scarce resources to buy the necessary gadgets, including data?

    Unfortunately, data is very expensive in our country, unlike in most developed countries, where data is cheap or even free. So, is there a way the government can help reduce the cost of data, so as to reduce the burden on parents and their wards?

    That would be a big challenge, especially with most of the state governments likely to go into recessions, as the monthly revenue from Abuja, is already in jeopardy, with oil prices going into negative overdrive.

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    But the job of the government is to find answers to difficult challenges, and so making data cheap add to the list of their challenges. It goes without saying that the above scenario also applies to the post-secondary students, whose demand for data and appliances would even be higher than their juniors in lower levels of education.

    Perhaps, in addition to making cheaper data available, the ministries of education in the states may have to collaborate, to teach the primary and secondary classes, using television and radio.

    Another ‘new normal’ of general importance, particularly for a developing economy like ours, would be the loss of jobs. Yes, that daily chore from which people earn their living, pay bills and solve other problems, is seriously in jeopardy.

    Most likely, what most people engage in as work may go into coma, for some time to come. Even the news medium is threatened. While there is a massive reduction in advertisement, the daily activities of government and the actions and inactions that generate news, have all slowed down.

    Those that will be hardest hit are the small businesses, which cannot afford to transit to the new normal of rendering businesses through the virtual means.

    The small scale law firms, hospitals, laboratories and similar businesses may face the challenge of transiting to the new normal. Of course, these small scale businesses are also employers of labour, and as they go down, their employees would also go down with them.

    So, many people are going to be unemployed soon, and so parents may not be in a position to pay their bills. That means that hospital bills, school fees, food bills, and several other bills would be threatened going forward.

    In planning to bail out the big businesses like the airlines, hotels, construction giants, government should also plan to help the small businesses. Amongst the unemployed, the hard hit, are the daily wage earners. Many of them are already in terrible condition because of the stay-at-home order.

    This writer is afraid that the ingredients for the long feared “revolution” are now at our doorsteps. The core-northern states that have, over the years, allowed the ill-fated almajiri system to fester, are now facing the challenge of containing the offspring of that duplicitous system.

    The privileged few, especially those in government, who earn humongous income and outlandish allowances must come to terms that all the indices indicate that such earnings in the face of the huge deprivations for the greater majority, is now untenable.

    Unless the new normal, gives way to the old normal quickly, the future does not portend good for many, in the midst of economic challenges faced by the majority of citizens. Clearly, the private sector leaders see the dangers ahead, and they have been helping out the way they can.

    The Lagos state government wisely started the open kitchen for the youths, and other state governments may have to imitate such programme to starve the challengers faced, especially by those who rely on their daily income to feed.

    Of note, COVID-19 has forced everyone to stay within the country, when the social superstructure may give in, to the economic, social and political mismanagement spanning several decades. Should there be a slip in managing the challenges, and there is a breakdown of law and order; legislators, professionals, billionaires, and many Nigerians, may end up as refugees.