The Nation Newspaper

Category: Tuesday

  • The world post-Covid-19

    The world post-Covid-19

    Sanya Oni

     

    Most Nigerians have probably heard it said, again and again, that the world will not remain the same after the current pandemic.

    Indeed, such has been the vast destruction and disruption wrought by the tiny virus said to measure some twenty-something kilobases in length that even the advanced industrial economies have not in any realistic sense begun to figure out a fitting response to its varied challenges.

    With the miracle vaccine still very much far from the horizon amidst the fog created by the obsession with serendipities by the likes of Donald Trump (with his hydroxychloroquine and disinfectant therapies), matched by an equally aggressive pushback by the scientific community; those dubbing our home-grown efforts as “cut and paste” would appear not only uncharitable but unfair in their characterisation the heroic efforts of Covid-19 managers at a difficult time.

    However, with the lockdown now in the fourth week, and with no meaningful signs of the curve flattening, there has, naturally begun, the debate as to whether the recommended therapy isn’t in fact proving to be worse than the ailment.

    For if the whole of idea of lockdown is to prevent the spread of the virus, Nigerians’ overall understanding of the need for compliance, as indeed of the other elements such as the need for social distancing to limit the spread, the requirement for isolation where infections have already taken place, treatment and the management of the entire gamut, has been to put it mildly, suspect.

    What do we now know?

    As they say, we know only in part. That part of course includes the 981 Nigerians tested in a country of 200 million; the 1000 patients confirmed positive of which some 31 have died by weekend. And just when Nigerians, merely by the slow pace of testing after the month-long lockdown, have begun to wonder aloud whether the folks at the NCDC may have been administering a wrong therapy, we are finally hearing – thanks to the private sector task force, Coalition Against Covid-19 (CACOVID) – that things are about to change.

    That some 250,000 test kits, 10 new PCR machines and 150,000 extractor kits are either in or already on the way!

    Which means that the country might, in the coming weeks, be able to ramp up testing in the final push to flatten the infection curve while waiting like the rest of the world, for the miracle vaccine which even the leading experts in the field have long concluded won’t even happen until mid-next year!

    So, what happens in between?

    That of course is the big question.

    First, it seems unlikely that Nigerians would stomach any further extension of the lockdown – which is a shame really considering that the infection rate is yet to hit the so-called plateau, which means that the worse is still far from being behind us.

    Call the situation one of a Catch -22; the few that are appreciative of the dilemma facing the government have grown weary of being kept behind the shutters when very little testing is actually going on; the other –  the majority –  mostly the urban poor, hemmed in by the biting hunger occasioned by the lockdown, have long framed their situation as one of an unenviable choice between death by corona virus or by hunger!

    For the Buhari administration, getting Nigerians back to work – and urgently too – has since become a task that must be done!

    Secondly, the scope and complexities of the current problems are such that require fresh thinking –away from the narrow prescriptive policies which although comes highly recommended by our so-called development partners and global financiers, have little practical relevance to our current situation.

    Already, we are seeing changes in the world of work on a scale that would have been deemed inconceivable only a few months ago.

    The same with the traditional webs of social relations as we knew it; these are being altered on a confounding scale. And all of these in addition to the unprecedented disruption of the global logistics and supply chain that has now thrown the global economy into turmoil.

    From the raw materials or manufactured goods (including critical goods like pharmaceuticals and medicines) that cannot be delivered as a result of the lockdowns, to restrictions or outright stoppage of international air travel, the global shipping sector forced to cut back as a result of vessels being placed under quarantine before being allowed sail into the dock.

    Imagine in our case – the lethal combination – a country already in the throes of multiple underlying conditions now caught up in the wave of Covid-19 global infestation!

    Today, perhaps more than ever is the need to address in a comprehensive sense, those disparate elements which over time have not only compounded our vulnerabilities but have revealed our policy wonks as thinking less than strategically!

    Has anybody bothered to think through the implications of another month-long global lockdown on domestic supplies, say for instance, of vital medicines or even industrial spares?

    Since we are in a season of ‘cut and paste’, why not borrow from the example of the United States where the appointment of Navy Rear Admiral John Polowczyk, Pentagon’s top brass as logistics czar is not only making a world of difference to the work of the task force on corona virus pandemic, but also underscoring the imperative of harnessing supply chain a time the world has to contend with global shortages in vital raw materials and critical goods.

    Again, has anyone yet figured out the potential crisis lying ahead in the event of failure to take urgent steps in this regard? And if I may ask, what would it take to come up with broad, multi-sectoral but coherent strategies to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the economy?

    The issue, to be sure, goes beyond the perennial song of acknowledging the difficulties; it is about clear-headed initiatives to clear the wreck and to get the economy up and running in the aftermath.

    Finally, my colleague, Segun Ayobolu had in his column on Saturday addressed the matter quite succinctly.  While pressing the case for the relevance for Keynesianism at this time, he quoted the South African political scientist, Lwazi Siyabomga Lushba as making the point that “in stagnant economies afflicted by low levels of aggregate demand, governments can trigger the economy through expansionary economic, particularly fiscal and monetary policies.

    This they can do by increasing government expenditure, cutting taxes or lowering interest rates, thus leaving consumers with more disposable income and encouraging borrowing for investment”.

    Of course, the logic is simple: while heavy spending offers no guarantee that the country will sooner be out of trouble; not doing so will guarantee her a dark long night in recession.

    You ask where the money will come from?

    Since when has sovereignty meant anything less than the full right and power of a governing body over itself, without any interference from outside sources or bodies?

  • China mocks Africa

    China mocks Africa

    By Gabriel Amalu

    Is the recent treatment meted to Africans, in Guangzhou, China, a foretaste of the type of subjugation, peoples of African continent will experience in the hands of the Chinese in the years to come? In a classical instance of a friendly enemy, China, few days, after sending its medical experts and supplies to help Nigeria fight the COVID-19 pandemic is also maltreating Nigerian citizens in her cities under the guise of fighting the spread of the pandemic.

    The muted responses of the governments of African countries, shows clearly that they are ill-equipped and indisposed to defend their interests, when confronted by the emerging Chinese hegemony. But for the initial insistence of the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Hon. Femi Gbajabiamila, to confront the Chinese envoy in Nigeria, our country’s political leadership appeared prepared to play the ostrich, over the disturbing videos of the maltreatment of Africans across the Chinese cities.

    One may ask, can President Muhammadu Buhari, whose secretary, Boss Mustapha, was flustered with gratitude, recently, while receiving the Chinese medical experts, who came to fill the yawning gap in Nigeria’s medical infrastructure, few days after, summon the Chinese envoy, to warn his country, to desist from maltreating Nigerian citizens?

    How can Nigeria, for instance, threaten to break diplomatic relationship with China, if the envoy is unapologetic, when within the government circles, there is palpable hunger for Chinese medical experts in the absence of the local expertise to fight COVID-19 pandemic?

    Of course, China has billions of dollars contract, in nearly every African country, but can afford to play coy with the Africans, knowing that most of the contracts are on credit. And the common saying that ‘he who goes borrowing, goes sorrowing’ would apply to Africans in the circumstance. Going forward, African leaders must wakeup from their leadership slumber, if Africa is to survive the coming Chinese hegemony, even when it is under the weight of the yoke of European and American neo-colonisation.

    Nigeria, which is expected to lead the African renaissance, is still a tottering giant. While the Minister of Foreign Affairs, Geoffrey Onyeama has summoned the Chinese ambassador to express Nigeria’s displeasure over the maltreatment of her citizens in China, there is not much he can do thereafter. Not when his brother Minister for Transportation, Chibuike Amaechi, is expectantly awaiting the end of COVID-19 lockdown, for the return of the Chinese nationals, to continue the infrastructure flagship of the Buhari administration, the railways.

    With over US$10 billion in infrastructure-contract exposure, most of which are on credit, how can Nigeria have the diplomatic chutzpah to confront the emerging Chinese hegemony? According to China Africa Research Initiative (CARI) of John Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, the gross annual revenues of Chinese companies’ engineering and construction projects in Africa in 2018, totalled US$48.84 billion, down from about US$55 billion in 2015.

    Interestingly, the trade relationship is even much bigger than the construction and engineering industry. According to CARI, the value of China-Africa trade, in 2018, was US$185 billion, up from US$155 billion in 2017; while the direct foreign investment stands at US$5.4 from a paltry US$75 million in 2003. On its part, the foreign aid expenditure, grew from US$631 in 2003 to US$3.3 billion in 2018, with occasional dips in between.

    The above data, shows that Africa is deeply tied to China in the new world order. But even more precariously for Africa in the unbalanced trade set-up between the two, while China is exporting to the continent, services, industrial expertise and machineries, Africa only exports commodities and unrefined petroleum products to the Chinese. In essence, Africa is overtly tied to the apron strings of the Chinese behemoth, and under such circumstance, the African leaders can hardly look China in the face, and call it to order.

    To make matters worse for Africa, most of her leaders are yet to wake up to the ringing need for urgent development in the continent. And unless countries in the continent develop, these nations cannot square up to the challenges of the overt and covert economic, social and trade wars, between the nations of the world. How many African leaders has a clear vision, and plan of action for their country’s development?

    In his book: My Vision, Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum, captured his vision in the race for excellence thus: “with every new day in Africa, a gazelle wakes up knowing he must outrun the fastest lion or perish. At the same time, a lion stirs and stretches, knowing he must outrun the fastest gazelle or starve. It is no different for the human race. Whether you consider yourself a gazelle or a lion, you simply have to run faster than others to survive.”

    Does African leaders, realise that the benevolence of the lion to the gazelle, if I may borrow from the Al Maktoum analogy, is merely a strategy to lure the gazelle into false security, before he becomes food when the lion gets hungry? While this author, acknowledges the African dilemma, in choosing between the age-long western neo-colonialists and the emerging Chinese hegemony, he urges the leaders to wake up to the challenges ahead.

    The challenges predisposes that Africa must take its destiny in its hand, if the recent maltreatment of her citizens in China cities, will not be a foretaste of the greater humiliations to come. According to Al Maktoum, vice president and prime minister of the United Arab Emirate and ruler of Dubai, on Development and optimism: “only people can make development happen. The secret of successful development lies in reaching an ideal formula that can efficiently use the skills of people along with, in Dubai’s case, the existence of the creek, sunny skies, desert, sandy beaches and sea, to put in place a uniquely successful metropolis.”

    Al Maktoum, went on: “The context of this formula is the right vision and the key to its success is the leader, who combines his goals and determination to see them through to fruition, despite all obstacles.” Had African leaders shown this level of clarity of thinking, perhaps the continent would not be so challenged that her citizens are treated with disrespect because of their colour, without any consequences.

    But regardless, of how indebted, Nigeria, and other African countries are to China, President Buhari and his brother presidents should call the Chinese to order. Also, the benumbing lack of vision, within the continent, has to end for Africa to be taken serious in the committee of nations. Furthermore, the shackles of tribalism, prebendalism and corruption must be broken, for there is no way, the clarity of vision that is urgently needed, can sprout from such idiosyncrasies.

  • An apex bank for all purposes

    An apex bank for all purposes

    By Sanya Oni

    If you are any confounded at the degree to which Godwin Emefiele has transformed the landscape of the central banking to the point of becoming a gbogbonse bank, you are probably not alone. In fact, if the depth of activism of the traditional conservative apex banking institution could be said to be troubling in the last four years or thereabout, dear reader, like yours truly, probably want to put it to the unusualness of the times. Like the gbogbonse potion which in Yoruba refers to a multi-therapy, multi-purpose, cure-all medicine designed for all and any ailment under the sun, such has been Emefiele’s daring in pushing the frontiers of developmentalism to limits that the typically conservative brood have since become breathless!

    I say this, not in the pejorative sense but in the context of the challenging role that the apex bank is routinely called to play at a time like this. Again, I make this point in the sense of the age-long, or if you like, traditional complementarity between the monetary policy side of governance and fiscal policy side of things as against the current tide under which the fiscal authorities appear to have gone AWOL!

    And if I may refresh my old textbook reference to monetary policy as involving matters of interest rate and, money supply and fiscal measures as involving matters of taxation and government spending to influence aggregate demand, the imperative of their working together to deliver the public good stands out among the early lessons we were taught to imbibe.

    Now, think of a twin-engine aircraft with one of the engines effectively out of action and yet must fly in troubled weather; or if you may, recall the late MKO Abiola’s analogy of a man clapping with one hand? Only in those contexts do you get a sense of the troubling inertia that has been the lot of the vital segment that should ordinarily take the lead at a difficult time like this.

    Anchor Borrowers programme. Nigeria Textile Intervention Fund. Nigeria Electricity Market Stabilisation Fund (NEMSF).  Commercial Agriculture Credit Scheme. Real Sector Support Facility (RSSF). SME Credit Guarantee Scheme (SMECGS). SME Re-structuring and Refinancing Fund (SMERRF). Nigeria Incentive-based Risk Sharing System for Agricultural Lending (NIRSAL). Non-oil Export Stimulation Facility; Youth Innovative Entrepreneurship Development Programme (YIEDP). Export Credit Rediscounting and Refinancing Facility. There are in fact many more! As if each passing day and hence the ensuing challenge must come with a matching initiative, our CBN has over time grown to become a jack of all trades and – who knows- master of none or all!

    And all of these supposedly in a financial market environment that is said to have come of age!

    However, say what you may of each or any of them, not only are they well-meaning, they were conceived with specific purposes in mind. Never mind their fancy appellations which sometimes leaves one wondering whether the programmes were christened at some party headquarters, they have somehow managed to fill the void created by what is increasingly proving to be the absentee government! And as far as taking territories go, the apex bank, via the initiatives, has moved from being a passive banker to being an active promoter of the public good!

    Still think the CBN is taking on too many tasks for its own good? That itself is open to debate. Or think the interventions are irrelevant? Think of the alternative given the lack-lustre economic management team that superintendent over the economy in the Buhari administration’s first term; imagine how pretty little has changed in the depth of the thinking in terms of the things that truly matter to the ordinary Nigerian even in the current term. In all, think of the snail-paced delivery in the context of the mounting problems of development.

    Governance, surely cannot be merely about moaning and whining about problems, about what could have been but moving gingerly to solve them.

    I don’t know where the original idea came from; it seems to me that Emefiele’s CBN has again stolen the thunder with its proposed $39 billion (N15 trillion) InfraCo fund, said to be a world-class infrastructure development vehicle, focused on Nigeria, to be managed by an independent infrastructure fund manager.

    This newspaper reports that the fund, expected to take off in a year’s time, will support the federal government in building the transport infrastructure required to move agriculture products to processors, raw materials to factories, and finished goods to markets. In a country said to require investment of between $33 billion to $35 billion yearly over the next five years to close its infrastructure gap, it’s certainly a worthy step in the long journey to turn the infrastructure tide.

    Don’t ask me whose business it is to “harness domestic and external resources to finance projects and ventures that may otherwise not be possible or profitable for the private sector to undertake…. or to channel state resources into projects and programmes that make the greatest contribution towards the realisation of long-term growth and development objectives….”

    What I do know is that nature abhors vacuum. Indeed, to expect the CBN not to mount the driver’s seat when the federal executive council would rather play the coy mistress in the face of national stasis would ordinarily seem a dumb thing to do!

    In any case, as they say in my village, it doesn’t matter who, between a man and woman, gets to kill a dangerous snake, what matters is that the snake gets killed in the end.

    Even that itself raises the legitimate question of the legal basis of the CBN’s many interventions.

    To be sure, I have no problems with the ‘independence’ of the apex bank when matters of monetary policy management is concerned. Indeed, they are not expected to be subject to any supervening authority in those areas. Or when some banks, for some reason or the other, require massive financial support to stay afloat. However, much as those spheres of independence are not open to debate, far less settled is the situation in which an unelected banker to the government, could with the stroke of the pen, cause billions of naira to be spent from its vaults to address issues outside of the scope of monetary system management.

    To be sure, neither the president nor the governors are invested with powers to spend without authorisation; such powers being vested in the parliament and executed through the instrument of the appropriation law. Neither should apex bank governors be allowed such awesome powers without some form of institutional control. Not even the spectre of abdication can justify such routine exhibition of power without control!

  • Death of compassion

    Death of compassion

    By Olakunle Abimbola

    Compassion, not Abba Kyari, presidential chief of staff, died on April 17 — and it is distressing how children of hate, offspring of spite with unfazed bile, are celebrating its demise.

    Hardly had Mallam Kyari’s passage hit the waves than a Facebook friend blitzed with a post:  “I am not mourning,” he crowed, “I will not pretend to mourn.  I will not mourn [a] man who held my country hostage till his death.”

    “Unfazed heart of darkness!” Ripples riposted, the first to do so, but only to earn a gruff counter: “Pretence is worse evil,” to which Ripples returned, much more alarmed: “Evil presumptiveness is even more damning. Not every heart is dark!”

    Along these exchanges, another friend chipped in, with what appears gentle reason.

    “You don’t have to mourn,” he cautioned.  “[But] don’t gloat and talk about it,” to which our friend roared, perhaps nervously defensive: “Don’t tell me what to talk about!”

    Of course, it was early days!  Soon, our friend got bolstered by fellow offspring of hate, even as many alarmed others queried his humanity.  The post grossed three shares and 48 non-verbal reactions.

    Our friend won’t be denied his democratic right to rabid hate on Facebook, even as he, in holy anger, dubbed those who disagreed “hypocrites”, for rejoicing at Sani Abacha’s death in 1998 but demurred to roll out the drums at Abba Kyari’s in 2020!  Some morbid unreason, driven by even more reckless presumption!

    Another — not a friend but whose post was splashed on another FB friend’s wall — even composed a full-length article, bearing his full name and “copyright”.

    He took licence for bucking the traditional injunction of not “speaking evil of the dead”, and thoroughly ridiculed the late Kyari — don’t the dead stay dumb? — and triumphantly dismissed the Buhari Presidency as a band of criminals!

    And what did this immaculate crusader, burning with holy ire, offer as irrefutable proof?  Stock anti-Kyari conspiracy theories; and an MTN bribery allegation, on which he offered no further proof, than the media romours already in the public space.

    That anyone, not to talk of a sophisticated adult (rippling with “copyright”!), would affix his name to that crap beggars belief.  But then it was FB, with its limitless and gullible rumour-crunching millions!

    Still, first thing first: beyond basic fairness and humanity, Ripples has no dog in the Abba Kyari fight.  So, the idea is to rigorously interrogate the issues, for or against.

    First, the emotive Abba-Abacha comparison, with which these bristling blokes try to draw — and snare — the naive.

    Fact: Abacha’s was a killer regime.  Fact: Abacha was a thief, whose humongous sleaze led to the indirect death of many (no thanks to poor physical and social infrastructure), or consigned them to avoidable poverty, which remains a plague till this day.

    Fact: Abacha not only sustained the “killing” of the popular will, as borne out of the June 12, 1993 presidential election annulment crisis; he clamped the winner, Basorun MKO Abiola in gaol, where he spent his entire “presidential term”, and thereafter died in suspicious circumstances, a month after Abacha himself had passed on.

    President Muhammadu Buhari, in 2018, tried to put a closure to that tragedy by rehabilitating MKO and naming, effective 2019, June 12 as the yearly National Democracy Day, as against the Olusegun Obasanjo-era May 29.

    Now, what are the allegations against Mallam Abba?  That Kyari was a consummate  power player who allegedly hijacked the presidency and made himself the ruthless locus of power.

    On that, he appears fairly charged.  Wife of the President, Mrs Aisha Buhari, had cause to rail against him for alleged over-bearing influence on hubby, as part of an alleged cabal.

    Kaduna Governor, Nasir El-Rufai, not one to take prisoners, also nailed him for allegedly shutting out ruling party apparatchiks, who though spilled blood during electioneering, were allegedly blocked from the pork of victory.

    Sympathizers to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo also alleged the late chief of staff had elbowed the No. 2 from the vortex of power and influence.

    Besides, there was this spat, over an alleged power grab, in which National Security Adviser (NSA) Babagana Monguno alleged the late Kyari was dealing directly with the Defence top brass, sans the NSA interface.

    Abba Kyari, to all of these allegations, kept mum.  From the taciturn president too was deafening silence.  So, as the allegations went undefended, it’s perhaps safe to assume, other things being equal, there was no smoke without fire.

    Already partly mentioned: Kyari was linked to the alleged N500 million bribe, to ensure MTN got a lower fine, from US$ 5 billion imposed on the telco, for SIM registration irregularities that bordered on dire national security. But beyond media rumours, no concrete proof got proffered.

    Incidentally, it’s rather interesting how these dire third-party allegations, measure against glowing tributes, by those Kyari directly worked with.

    “My loyal friend and compatriot for the last 42 years — and latterly my chief-of-staff -” the president enthused, “never wavered in his commitment to the betterment of everyone of us.”  His tribute was titled: “He was the very best of us.”

    In friendship and loyalty, Abba Kyari epitomized the Buhari strength and weakness. Buhari nicked presidential glory because he kept himself from the elite decadence, nay debauchery, of his contemporaries.  So, at a paralyzing national juncture, his integrity shone through and earned him the top job.

    But that same self-restraint limited his network: in his native North and Nigeria-wide.  Thus, sundry adversaries and media confederates have framed him as a narrow northern irredentist — especially those wide-and-merry hustlers and ethnic supremacists, who can’t cudgel his integrity.

    It’s doubtful, therefore, if a Buhari straight-and-narrow, could cohabit with a Kyari wide-and-merry, for nearly five years (not mentioning a 45-year friendship) — except, of course, all through, Kyari had hoodwinked the president!

    But even if you pour cold water on this presidential serenade, Femi Fani-Kayode, arch-enemy of PMB and his alleged Fulani “cabal”, is singing a surprise tune on this one.

    Then, Foreign Minister, Geoffrey Onyeama.  He spoke of a loyal friend of 43 years; a Kanuri Muslim as Best-Man to an Igbo Catholic, wedding a Yoruba Anglican, at Ido-Ani, Ondo State; a fellow scholar at both Warwick and Cambridge universities in the UK; and a quiet but conscientious fellow, nonplussed by allegations of sleaze.  “Abba” Onyeama wrote, “was a man of unimpeachable integrity.  Absolutely incorruptible!” That “incorruptibility” seems to explain the Buhari bond.

    An over-generous tribute to a fallen friend?  Maybe.  Still, Onyeama’s tribute bucked Kyari’s media “cabal” portraiture, as some operator in the darkest pit of Plato’s Allegory of the Cave; a sorry northern irredentist that hated every soul outside his dark and ultra-narrow power cabal!

    Besides, his Warwick, Cambridge and Harvard resume busted another southern stereotype: the northern “Aboki” as slothful, uneducated, and uncompetitive.  Brainless bigotry we impose on ourselves!

    Still, do all these clear Kyari of all the allegations?  No.  But they teach us not to bow to utter demonization from third parties, who have mutual axes to grind; and not to fall for media stereotypes, particularly ones driven by ethnic bigotry.

    That would appear the lot of Abba Kyari.  May Allah forgive his sins and comfort the family he left behind.

  • Abba Kyari: Encounters

    Abba Kyari: Encounters

     Olatunji Dare

    To him, I was always “Senior Dare.”

    President Muhamadu Buhari’s powerful chief of staff, Malam Abba Kyari, who died of the coronavirus             last week aged 67, imbibed this mode of address from our alma mater, St Paul’s College, Wusasa, in Zaria.

    Departing upper classmen rarely retain lasting memories of the freshmen or sophomores they left behind, unless these juniors were particularly troublesome.  Two decades went by, and my path and Abba Kyari’s did not cross until sometime in the late 1980s when my colleague Sully Abu and his contemporary at the New Nigerian brought him to my office in Rutam House for an “introduction” or, more appropriately, a re-connection.

    Since then, Abba Kyari and I have maintained a relationship that was more pragmatic than close. Whenever he thought I might have some insights he could profit from, and wherever I happened to be, he reached out to me.  In turn, I reached out from time to time with suggestions on how he might best pursue some broad as well as specific goals he often shared with me.

    These goals were never about him.  They always centred on how Nigeria could achieve the greatness he believed was her destiny, and on his unshakeable belief that the project could be realized under – perhaps only under — a Buhari Presidency.

    He outlined his thoughts on this project in a paper he sent to me for comment and criticism, and published subsequently in on ThisDay on October 1, 2012.

    Nigeria, the paper began, was the only country on the African continent  (I would add South Africa) with all the attributes of a great power – size, population, arable land, water, forests, hard minerals, tourism potential  — indeed everything required for a major modern economy.  “Yet . . . here we are!” it said plaintively.

    Nigeria’s “all-powerful Centre,” it continued, was weak and confused; the periphery was doing all the running.  Separatists, secessionists, nihilist, anarchists and even bandits were having a field day.   The majority were just “onlookers,” despairing and even losing hope and faith in Nigeria as a federation and        in its existence as a nation.  Pessimism about its future was pervasive, deep.

    As a result of current difficulties, the paper went on, Nigeria tended to forget its wider responsibility to  the African continent – the only continent, the majority of which was stricken with poverty. That responsibility was to “knock Africa into shape.”

    But first, Nigeria had to get its act together, solve its local difficulties and face its wider responsibilities. “The future prosperity of Africa,” it declared, “is directly linked to the prosperity and stability of Nigeria.”

    The immediate challenge, as Kyari saw it, was to integrate Nigeria’s plural society at the political level where more than 90 percent to the population was already socializing, integrating and living in peace; lift the entire population out of poverty into relative prosperity, and create conditions for true representative and accountable governance.”

    These reflections could only have stemmed from a patriotic and cosmopolitan mind, not from the parochial provincial mindset that Abba Kyari’s critics thought he represented.

    The rest of the 14-page paper is a blueprint of how these objectives might be realized, illustrated with theoretical underpinnings and empirical evidence.

    The ingredients were already in place.  What remained was the man who would bring them together, create the spark that would light the flame and set Nigeria off on it mission to greatness and prosperity not just for its citizens but for all of Africa

    Abba Kyari apparently saw that man in Muhammad Buhari.

    In his marathon election quest, Buhari had much going for him. His Spartan discipline, his asceticism, his steadfastness in pursuit of his goals, and his perceived integrity had seemed to be what Nigeria needed to arrest the drift and decay of the Shagari era.  Some two decades later, those same qualities appeared to be what Nigeria needed to get out of the cluelessness and the unfettered corruption driving Nigeria into a ditch, with Goodluck Jonathan at the steering wheel.

    But Buhari’s terrible human rights record constituted a major obstacle. Kyari woo had been at his side through thick thin, went to work.  Drawing on his cosmopolitan credentials, and aided by hundreds of Nigerians who had suffered harsh penalties under Buhari’s military regime, helped cultivate a more nuanced perception of Buhari.  They persuaded some of Buhari’s most implacable adversaries in the civil society to look more at the man’s strengths than his weaknesses.  Together, they helped widen Buhari’s narrow circle of friends and sympathisers.

    Few of them expected any reward or preferment.   It just seemed the right thing to do.

    Finally, on his fourth quest for the top job, Buhari’s perceived strengths conflated with the public yearning for change to deliver the Presidency to Buhari and the APC.  To hardly any surprise, he named Abba Kyari his chief of staff, in the first round of appointments Buhari made.

    The Administration took off to a ponderous start, not on the swift, sure-footed note sketched in the manifesto of the winning APC coalition.  As it unfolded, its agenda showed little in common with the progressive blueprint Abba Kyari had set out in the 2012 paper cited earlier.

    Instead of taking full advantage of its sweeping majority to launch its agenda of change, Buhari declared that he belonged to no one and to everyone, even as a faction of the APC hijacked the National Assembly and deployed its powers to subvert rather than advance the government’s agenda.

    Charges that public appointments were made with scant regard to the federal character principle pervaded the news.  Lassitude thrived at the top, and the Presidency often seemed like a house divided against itself.  Nigeria could not “knock itself into shape,” any more than knock Africa into shape, as Abba Kyari had proposed in his visionary paper.

    At the time Buhari took office in 2015, the defeated PDP had all but ceased to be an effective political party.  Having been beaten comprehensively, it seemed marked for terminal collapse.  At a point, it could not even pay the salaries of its headquarters staff.

    But at the next election four short years later, the PDP had bounced back.   Not because it came up with superior programmes and policies, nor because it had mended its calamitous ways; it was enjoying a revival of sorts because, in the public perception, there was little to choose between the APC and the PDP.

    The close outcome of the presidential race reflected that perception.  Few of the ideas and projects Kyari advocated in his paper gained traction.  And the remaining tenure of the administration promises more of the same, even without the hobbling impact of the coronavirus pandemic and the economic meltdown, the tempo of which it quickened.

    In the end, it will probably be said that Kyari’s strictures against the “all powerful” but “weak and confused Centre,” the frenetic but directionless running in the periphery, and about the majority that has been reduced to onlookers in a system that is neither representative nor accountable; it will probably be said that they apply with almost equal force to the Buhari Presidency.

    It will be said that concern for these and other issues remained largely unaddressed by an administration of which Aba Kyari was perceived to be the driving force, the agenda-setter.

    It will be said, finally, that few among those whose two reel who have strong feelings about governance and the public good have Abba Kyari’s golden opportunity to operate at the very intersection of policy and execution, with access to resources and other assets to help translate vision into actuality.

    It is no disrespect to Abba Kyari’s memory and legacy to state that he did not succeed on these scores.

    The question for us, then, and especially the other Abba Kyaris among us is:  Why not?  What forces were at work?

    May his patriotic soul rest in peace.

  • On the trail of the coronavirus

    On the trail of the coronavirus

     

    Olatunji Dare

     

     

    THE coronavirus is a historic phenomenon.

    So thoroughly has it upended the world as we knew it, our comforting verities, that barely two months into its outbreak, the usual people are dividing History into two distinct epochs.  Everything that came prior to that global conflagration belonged in the “Before the Coronavirus Era” (BCE).  Everything that came with or after it belongs in the “Coronavirus Era” (CE).   By that reckoning, last year was 1999 BCE, and this year is 1 CE.

    This division is arbitrary, to be sure; fragrantly impractical even.

    Upheavals came in spasms, shook large portions of the world to the roots, and ran their destructive courses; the world adjusted and returned to functioning more or less as before.  In this respect, the corona virus shall pass, too.  And there is no reason to call these disarticulated times the Coronavirus Era.

    But the coronavirus is different.  It is more ravenous and more intractable; it is spread by the most reflexive of gestures, such as touching one’s face or sneezing, and by the most innocuous, such as touching surfaces we encounter all the time – tabletops, doorknobs, elevator buttons, light switches, computer keyboards, cell phones, or telephone receivers.  Even the ubiquitous paper or plastic bag, we have learned lately, can transmit the virus.

    It is not a death sentence.  Most of those it afflicts survive it.

    It has been called a “boomer remover,” because it has proved especially deadly for the elderly, those born in the post-World War II baby boom.  And the black columnist Charles Blow has called it a “brother killer” because, although blacks constitute only 13 per cent of the United States population, they account nationally for more than 30 per cent of the coronavirus fatalities.

    By now, practically everyone can recite its symptoms – the fever, weakness, headaches, the wracking body aches and pains, shortness of breath, and loss of the sensation of taste or smell, all of which may dissipate within a week of isolation, or lead rapidly to organ failure and agonising death even in the face of the most attentive medical treatment.

    And now we learn that it can enter the system not only through the mouth and nostrils, but through the eyes as well.  Who knows whether a later mutation may be able to enter the body through exposed skin, in which case a body tent maybe the best precaution.

    Testing positive is a sure sign that you have the coronavirus.  Only a definitive test can determine that. The frightfully insidious aspect of the matter is that you may carry the virus and yet not manifest the symptoms of the disease, and go merrily about business transmitting it unwittingly to unsuspecting persons in the briefest of encounters.

    When it first broke in Wuhan, China, some three months or so ago, it was thought to be a local affliction.  U.S. President Donald Trump, in whom inheres a noxious combination of ignorance and arrogance, dismissed it as hoax that would “wash over” and end just as suddenly as it had begun.

    Give the dozen or so instances reported in the United States then just one week, and they would be down to zero, said Trump; the great economy emblematised by the stock market would roar back, breaking all records and securing for the American people the kind of prosperity that only his genius could have wrought and sustained.

    He even threatened to end the ongoing lockdown to enable Americans fill the churches at Easter, a transparent sop to the complaisant evangelicals from someone in whose life religion plays no part as precept or practice.

    Scarcely six weeks later, the coronavirus was winning big-time.  Hospitals were running out of vital supplies that were never stockpiled in sufficient quantities for a start.  Medical personnel managing daunting caseloads raced against the clock in crowded rooms, clad in assortment of apparels that guaranteed little protection against lethal infection.

    Chastened, but still somewhat in denial,  Trump would later ask Americans to brace for bulletins even more grim than those that were coming out daily from Italy, Spain and Iran – chronicles  of hundreds who had died overnight from the coronavirus.

    But that was well before the grim harvest from New York matched, then topped those from Europe and even China, from where the pandemic had originated. That was before the hospitals ran out of body bags, before the morgues filled up and had to be supplemented with refrigerated trucks, and before fatigued hospital personnel were dying in alarming numbers.

    And now, for the better part of a week, some 2,000 persons have been dying every day in the United States from the coronavirus.  Each morning, residents hold their collective breaths as they scour media outlets for the overnight death totals, hoping for some respite, however slight.

    Behind those frightful numbers are men and women and children – fathers, mothers, husbands, wives, lovers, sons and daughters who, only a few weeks or a few days earlier, nursed hopes, loved and yearned to be loved, and made plans for themselves, their loved ones, and their communities.

    They died in lonely agony, without the comforting farewell of loved ones.    Too risky to allow relations within viewing distance of the figure battling for his or her life strapped to a hospital bed, or to take a last  peep at the face of the shrouded figure being wheeled to the refrigerated truck.

    And yet, the coronavirus has not even run its course in what they say is only its first wave, with the Southern Hemisphere set to experience its own visitation as it enters winter, and the Northern Hemisphere, still reeling from the first wave, braces for a fresh visitation.   So fraught and uncertain           has the coronavirus rendered living and communing that the whole thing leaves you exhausted.

    Amidst the uncertainty, all kinds of conspiracy theories are thriving. Donald Trump calls it the Chinese virus, but only in retaliation, he says, for the Chinese claiming that it was developed by the U. S. military.

    Shamans peddling all manner of quack remedies, among them garlic, bitter kola, lemon, ewuro (bitter leaf) in various preparations, steam inhalation, etc., etc., are doing brisk business. An American family rigged up a  roadside clinic to administer bogus coronavirus tests at $400 per crack and moved to another location when dislodged.

    Chloroquin, abandoned long as a malaria fever medication when Nigerian mosquitoes neutralised it, has come roaring back on the strength of Donald Trump’s advertised belief that it the sure-fire answer to the coronavirus.

    One American woman who took a quinine product used for cleaning out fish pond believing that it was the stuff prescribed by Dr Trump, died from the ingestion. In Nigeria, those who dosed copiously on chloroquin ended up in Emergency Room.

    The engineers sold 5G to the world as the next generation of mobile internet connection that will offer much faster data download and upload speeds and make more devices compatible with the mobile internet though greater use of the radio spectrum.  Don’t believe it for a minute, say the peddlers of conspiracy theories.   By the time the engineers are done, the world would be a barren wasteland.

    And the quarantine is just a convenient device for authoritarian regimes and tyrants to put away their opponents without having to entertain pesky questions about the rule of law and all that mush.   Sooner or later, they will revert to its original meaning of a 40-day sequestration, renewable.

    Yet, in this calendar of woe, there is something heartening.  It is almost an article of faith in our age that compassion and solidarity are passé.  I am heartened to report that accounts of the death of compassion and solidarity was vastly exaggerated.

    Nothing was more ennobling than watching hospital staff high and low casting aside personal fear and and danger and thoughts of family and fortune to work round the clock, in the most enervating conditions, to try to save those who could be saved, nor to see those who had long enjoyed the comfort of retirement voluntarily put their lives at risk to tend the afflicted.

    I include in this group hundreds of thousands of ordinary citizens who ran crucial errands for, or otherwise attended to the needs of the quarantined and the infirm.

    It is solidarity, an organic sense of community, that can see society and indeed humankind through looming perils.  Not greed.  Not tribalism. Long live solidarity.

  • Fearlessly corrupt

    Fearlessly corrupt

    By  Gabriel Amalu

     

    If it is true that anyone entrusted with the resources earmarked to fight the scourge of coronavirus pandemic, also known as COVID 19, is stealing from it, then such a person is fearlessly corrupt.

    Otherwise, how else can one explain the courage to steal, when the fear of death from the ravaging pandemic has gripped every reasonable person in the world? Even those who ordinarily think of God, as a fantasy, trusting in the power of their material wealth, are beginning to have a rethink, now that money has failed to buy anyone immunity from the pandemic.

    So, to think that any of our public officials can tell us tales by moonlight, over how much has been released from the monies earmarked to fight the scourge, and who have benefited, confirms that such person does not fear God. Of course, only those who do not fear God, can still think of stealing at a time like this.

    With the virus attacking both the rich and the poor, with no known cure yet, and with thousands dying daily from the infirmity, every sane person should be reconciling with his/her maker, just in case.

    In our dear country, according to National Centre for Disease Control (NCDC) as at April 12, there are 323 confirmed cases, 85 discharged persons, and 10 deaths resulting from COVID-19.

    While we hope it remains so, there is the likelihood that the number would go up, and yet our country’s capacity to test or treat the disease remains very low. So, common sense dictates that all resources available, both human and material, should be mobilized, to fight the disease and stall its spread.

    But instead, we are hearing tales that some persons may be stealing the resources put in their care, to fight the pandemic. If that is true, those involved should at least fear death and the judgment of God.

    But if they don’t, they should not cause the death of others, from the neglect that the monies they are stealing will cause.

    More so, with our governments owning up that the medical facilities across the country are in terrible shape, we need to put every kobo made available to fight COVID 19, to proper use to save our lives.

    After all, nobody knows who may need the facilities sooner than later. So, the earlier those in charge of our common resources realise that we are all in this boat together, the better for them. Who could have contemplated that a day would come when those who have stashed money abroad, would be afraid of travelling to their safe haven for medical checks?

    Who could have contemplated that after spending huge resources to buy summer houses in major capitals of the world for annual holidays, a day would come, when it will become impossible or even suicidal to plan a summer holiday outside Nigeria.

    Who could imagine that with huge balances in dollars and pounds, a season would happen on us suddenly, when getting access to foreign accounts is nigh impossible?

    If we are to believe our ears, the Secretary to the Government of the Federation and head of Presidential Task Force on COVID-19, Boss Mustapha, reportedly admitted that he was shocked at the state of disrepair of the medical facilities across the country.

    Read Also: Trump demands sack of COVID-19 expert Dr Fauci

     

    Well, unless he is suffering from amnesia, he would remember that one of the reasons President Muhammadu Buhari, as a military officer, overthrew the government of President Shehu Shagari in 1983, was the state of the hospitals.

    It is also one of the reasons, President Buhari was elected in 2015, and re-elected in 2019. Whether in 1983 or 2015, it was our lot that after so much resources have been purportedly expended, the state of our social infrastructure remained desolate.

    So, if after six years of being in power, the hospitals are still in the same state, then Boss Mustapha must remind President Buhari, that he has not fulfilled the expectations of his ardent supporters. After a full term in power, and in the second term, our social infrastructure should begin to reflect what the present government wants, not the image of its predecessors again.

    While the years of the locust stretches back, there is no doubt that if incremental progress have been made, Boss Mustapha would not be lamenting as he did, after touring the medical facilities across the country.

    Clearly, while there are laws in our books to deal with stealing of public funds, they have not deterred our public officials from feasting on our common patrimony. Between 1958 and June 2016, Nigeria has earned about N96.212 trillion from crude oil exploitation alone, according to the Vanguard newspaper.

    Of course, since the civil war era, when we abandoned other sources of revenue, crude oil represents about 80 percent of the total source of income for the governments. Ninety-six trillion naira, is a huge amount by any standard. Enough to transform our country, if our leaders had been conscientious in governance.

    The present effort to shift away from that dangerous paradigm has then remained a pipe dream, if after six years of change, our hospitals are still mere consulting clinics, as in the past. Unfortunately, the COVID-19 pandemic has come to mock the comatose state of our health facilities.

    Perhaps, it is a call for Nigeria, to review her budget in favour of the health sector. In the 2020 budget, the total expected revenue stood at N10.33 trillion, out of which mere N46 billion was earmarked for health. Well, that was before the COVID 19 pandemic.

    Now that COVID-19 has negated all the parameters of the budget, it would be a miracle if the sector would get up to 50 percent of that budget. Of course, it is a common phenomenon of our fiscal policy, for the budget releases to be much lower that the projected.

    So, with a low budget, coupled with the ravaging impact of corruption, is there any chance that we would start the difficult but necessary steps to build a health infrastructure that would be robust enough to cater for all Nigerians, regardless of status?

    The experience of the British Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, is a pointer to the road our country should follow. Falling ill from the impact of the pandemic, the PM was treated in a hospital open to every British person.

    In his speech after getting well, he thanked the British National Health Service, and proudly declared it, the greatest asset of his dear country.

    With Nigeria’s National Hospital, Abuja, incapable of treating our president and the governors, we must hearken to the warning signals from COVID-19, and stop those who are fearlessly corrupt, by any means.

     

  • Battle for the soul of AfDB

    Battle for the soul of AfDB

    Sanya Oni

     

    When World Bank President David Malpass, earlier in the year, chided a trio of development banks for lending too quickly to heavily indebted countries, not a few would have mistaken the typically imperial ‘advisory’ for a friendly fire.

    “We have a situation where other international financial institutions and to some extent development finance institutions as a whole, certainly the official export credit agencies, have a tendency to lend too quickly and to add to the debt problem of the countries.”

    The Asian Development Bank, he said was “pushing billions of dollars” into a fiscally challenging situation in Pakistan while the African Development Bank was doing the same in Nigeria and South Africa.

    Talk of the hegemon-undertaker’s penchant to swallow the analgesic for someone else’s migraine: “We have a very real problem of the IFIs themselves adding to the debt burden and, and there’s pressure then I think on the IMF to sort through it and look at the best interest for the country.”

    That was in February. But then, that would not be the first time Africa’s premier development-finance power-house would be harangued by those who insist on carving the global financial architecture in their own image to do things their way or risk have the spanner thrown into its works!

    It started sometime last year with a little matter of the board’s decision to increase the bank’ share capital which, the big powers – the so-called non-regionals would have none of– or in the very worst case, only on terms they consider agreeable.

    And as if the proposal was not too audacious for their liking, Malabo, the Equatorial Guinea’s capital of all places, was chosen to host the annual meeting; and most ludicrously, if the baseless charge of Nigerianisation wouldn’t stick, why the bank’s bold and assertive president, Akinwumi Adesina, up for re-election, would seek to push to get this done before his re-election this year!

    Of course, the bank has since moved on. First, it has since finalized on its capital increase, the largest in the its history with a capital base of $208 billion. As for Adesina’s second term, although not due until September, things appear to be very much on course, thanks to the endorsement of ECOWAS leaders at the 56th ordinary session of Heads of States and the African Union leadership.

    In between, a petition penned by some disgruntled staff alleging sundry infractions by the AfDB president not only blazed forth, it was given voice by a French newspaper Le Monde.

    This newspaper’s report titled Rumblings in Africa’s financial power-house published last Friday aptly captured the depth of the power play that threatens to turn the financial institution into a house of intrigue. And now thanks to the online newspaper The Cable, we now know of the dramatic U-turn by the same group that co-wrote the petition against Adesina.

    To quote a portion of the group’s explosive letter: “We were members of the group called Group of Concerned Staff Members until we understood that we were being manipulated by a group of non-regional executive directors; not for the good governance of the African Development Bank but to discredit the candidacy of the current president for his re-election.”

    Can there still be prize for guessing that the forces behind it are those who insist that the bank could only have peace on their terms?

    Fortunately, those are not the kind of things to define the Adesina legacy at the bank. Rather, the real arena of battle is the development space where he’s increasingly proving to be light years ahead of his critics.

    Here is a continent already in dire straits even before the Covid-19 pandemic. No thanks to the familiar plagues of weak industrial capacity and antediluvian infrastructure, a continent which is only beginning to play catchup in the most rudimentary elements of modernity, one whose polling is right down the line on social development indices is being asked to wait interminably for the masters of the coy game to perfect their game of dubiety. Think of a continent where basic items of manufacture are imported and where exports consist of basic raw materials being asked to wait until the others have had their fill before setting out.

    Read Also: BREAKING news from Aso Villa, by Femi Adesina

    Now with Covid-19 pandemic, experts reckon that Sub-Saharan Africa will be in the hole of between $35 billion to $100 billion from output decline and steep fall in commodity prices, especially oil. That certainly is a big hole to fix – in a continent where extant infrastructure gaps are already at record high levels.

    Africans, nay Nigerians can therefore appreciate why the battle for the soul of the continental development bank led by Nigeria’s Adesina would be fierce. Malpass’ charge that Adesina’s AfDB has been “pushing billions of dollars” into fiscally challenging situations could therefore be seen in the context of that age-long but familiarly patronizing mindset that sees Africa’s gigantic challenges as neither serious nor particularly urgent.

    It does explains why the global bank will deem a paltry $8.8 billion in loans and other assistance for the entire sub-Saharan Africa, a region of one billion people as inherently problematic while finding nothing amiss with the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB)’s lending of $13.5 billion to the Latin America and the Caribbean region of 644 million people.

    But then, talk of of delinquency not being necessarily domiciled in Africa; consider for instance that the $475bn voted under the 2018 United States Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) to purchase “trouble assets” from banks that had made stupid and reckless purchases is several multiples of the $8.8 billion loans voted for sub-Saharan Africa.

    Consider also that the same US, the global economy powerhouse has no problem authorizing a $2 trillion lifeline to steady the economy in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic; yet some retrograde elements with the bank, notably, the non-regional members would baulk at COVID19 support facilities and the lifting of partial sanctions for countries such as Zimbabwe and Sudan in the wake of the on-going pandemic!

    Thanks to the bold thinking at AfDB, we are finally beginning to see that the old-time fixation with corruption, debt and endless structural reforms are at best unhelpful minus a deliberate effort at upscaling national capacities. If anything, this is where Adesina and his AfDB team can, and have been making a world of difference.

    The $10 billion facility support for African countries in the wake of the pandemic is certainly a good step in this direction; so also, is the $3 billion COVID19 social bond on the London Stock Exchange to help Africa deal with the economic and financial fallouts of the pandemic.

    But then, these are only a tip of the iceberg of the battle on the continent’s underdevelopment still ahead. Surely, the bank under Adesina has demonstrated unmistakeably that it has so much to offer the continent; and now thanks to his focused leadership, we have better appreciation of the nuances of development finance.

  • Corona Easter

    Corona Easter

    Olakunle Abimbola

     

    “Through plagues and wars, even through upheaval and revolution, there has never been an Easter like this one” — Mark Edington, Bishop of Episcopal Church in Europe, American Cathedral, Paris, France.

     

    Easter 2020!

    No palm-fraught street parade, on Palm Sunday, to replicate the Christ’s Jericho-to-Jerusalem triumphant ride, on a donkey’s back.

    No Good Friday replica of Jesus’ painful stagger, from Pontus Pilate’s court, to nailed death, at Golgotha.

    No drumming, singing and dancing at dawn on Easter Sunday, as some Aladura (Cherubim and Seraphim) sects are wont, to “announce” the glad tidings, of the glorious Resurrection.

    No mass happy-go-merry picnicking in “Galilee”, on beaches and other open relaxation hubs, to mark Easter Monday.

    All is quiet on the global front.  It’s the making of Corona Easter, 2020!

    Easter symbolizes the Resurrection: the Christian spiritual triumph of life over death.  But the dark mood of Easter 2020 suggests the gripping fear, of putative triumph of death over life.

    Yes, the highest COVID-19 death ratio hovers just above six per cent of the infected.  The CNN global figure of 109, 691 (deaths) to 1, 787, 766 cases, as at April 12, gives a ratio of 6.1 per cent.  Nigeria’s 10 deaths to 323 cases (as at April 12) is three per cent.

    But for acutely pain-intolerant humans, that is absolute catastrophe, bordering on nemesis.

    That most of the dead have come from the more developed 1st World of Europe and 2nd World of America, even with their glittering state-of-the-art hospitals and fearsome scientific accomplishments, hallmarks the hubris — and humbling — of science.

    With such grim stalker and global cleanser — 2, 000 dying within 24 hours, in New York, USA, on April 11 — science appears not potent enough a god to worship; the physical interaction of elements, and their cause-and-effect scientific rigueur, no angels to beatify.

    As science buckles, providing no snappy vaccine answers to a pandemic that ravages the globe, spirituality soars.

    So for now, it’s good old prayer to the rescue!  Hope, however, reigns eternal that science, sooner than later, would get it right; and the world would wrestle back its soul — and life!

    Still, it is doubtful if that world would ever be the same again.

    For starters, all-mighty America arrives this definitive epoch with clearly its weakest leadership in eons, with the tweeting and bumbling Donald Trump.

    But in an April 9 letter, from the 116th Congress of the United States, Uncle Sam appears pouncing on Dr. Tedros Ghebreyesus and his Geneva, Switzerland-headquartered World Health Organization (WHO), for allegedly hailing China, instead of nailing it (all Easter pun intended!), over COVID-19.

    What exactly is Uncle Sam’s grouse?  That China has sorted out its COVID-19 headache, while America’s is peaking in a hideous migraine, despite America’s cutting-edge scientific feats?

    And how does WHO fit into that mess — beyond the Achebe-speak of a bully that hungers for a fight, only after sighting a weakling he can trounce?

    Is COVID-19 and its handling — or mishandling — signifying a putative shift in global hegemony, such that whereas the 20th was clearly American, the 21st could well end as the Chinese Century?

    But as America reels in Trump-etizing alarm, of presidential befuddlement in its COVID-19 response, and the best of British blue bloods, royal and political, walk under the valley and shadow of Coronavirus, help comes from the most unexpected of quarters — China, no more than a big and sprawling joke 60 years ago; and Cuba, that speck of an island, off all-mighty America’s Florida coast.

    Enter, Cuban doctors, many of them offspring of African slaves shipped to the Caribbean by the cruel 1st World in capitalist greed, nobly come to save Europe, old nemesis, in dire existential need!

    It is Easter, at its most profound, in humility and humiliation!

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    Christ, the Divine, humbled self to save the world but earned utmost humiliation.  But all that birthed soaring Christianity, which rules the global roost, much more than Judaism, its Jewish elder cousin, ever could.

    On the other hand, COVID-19 came, from virtual nowhere, to confound the capitalist haughty and wise; humble the military big and mighty.   But it relatively spares much of the Africa weak and crushed!

    It’s early days though, and Belinda Gates, with the paternalistic shrill of a worried do-gooder, still dreams Africa, choking with deaths from COVID-19.

    Right now, however, that apocalyptic vision appears far-off, even as COVID-19 scythes the rest of the globe.  Whether Mrs Gates’s fear would come to pass depends on our own attitude, to this clear and present danger.

    That brings Easter 2020, and its local COVID-19 sundry follies, under the harsh radar.

    Nothing, on this score, trumps Bauchi Governor, Bala Mohammed.  No sooner was he declared free of COVID-19 did he scuttle and slither, hand glove, face mask, et al, to a crowded Jumat service!

    What the hell was His Excellency doing?  Pressing his democratic right to re-infection?  And with what thinking does he lead his people?  Blind faith that calls the Ummah to Jumat, when strict advisory warns they could all be in wilful danger of cropping COVID-19?

    And what does the governor have in place, to cope with possible community transmission, the type blitzing Europe and America, even with their top-grade hospitals and top-notch medics?

    Or Rivers Governor, Nyesom Wike, risking an Easter mass convocation of the faith, when he knew COVID-19 lurked?

    Thank God, the Rivers led, calm and wise, seized the initiative from their leader, rash and reckless.  A similar acute followers, arresting sloppy leaders, played out in Rotimi Akeredolu’s Ondo.

    Saved by the virtual bell, that two-some! Otherwise, we may now all be bracing up for crowd-induced, putative post-Easter COVID-19 crisis in both states.

    Kogi, however, lacked that luck, as the faithful trooped out: Muslims for Jumat; Christians for Easter, with Jumat and Good Friday, fair potentials for double trouble!

    Yet, Governor Yahya Bello, rumoured to possibly have contracted COVID-19 from Abba Kyari, presidential chief of staff, rushed out a keep-fit video, where he snorted, at a gym session: “I ain’t got no Coronavirus!  I ain’t got no Coronavirus!”  Could he, with his Easter grandstanding, have endangered his people?  Time will tell.

    “On this disorienting Easter,” Bishop Edington, whose quote opened this piece, from his article, ‘The Easter of empty churches’, in www.theatlantic.com, “the moral claim of loving our neighbours, by slowing the spread of an eager and evil disease, takes precedence over the imperative to gather and celebrate.”

    That common sense, in a season of global health peril, appears beyond the ken of many a Nigerian state governor.

     

  • Obahiagbon writes back

    Obahiagbon writes back

    Olatunji Dare

    First, a preface to the epistle.

    Four columns ago, I dispatched from this platform an open letter to my aburo and kindred soul, (Patrick)  Osahon Obahiagbon, Esquire, attorney-at-law, former federal lawmaker and most recently Chief of Staff to the former Comrade Governor of Edo State, Adams Oshiomhole, desirous of communing with him after a prolonged intermission that had eventuated against my best will, no less against his.

    Because of the constraints of space and time, and even taking into account his capacious mind, his fecund imagination and his capacity for throwing up the most penetrating insights, to say nothing of  the amplitude of the lexical arsenal with which he expounds his thoughts, one can go only so far in wantonly inflicting one’s reminiscences on him, though I must hasten to insist that even at that conjuncture, you will find no one more accommodating, more obliging than Himself the Igodomigodo.

    Challenges bring out the best in him, as his reply to the dispatch aforementioned, issued under his own hand within 48 hours of receiving it, not through an amanuensis, indicates powerfully.  He never disappoints.

    I have not sought his permission to share it with the public.  Something tells me that he will welcome my doing so, in the hope that it might generate some mirth that could dispel, however slightly and fleetingly, the foreboding loosed on the land by the malignant novel coronavirus.

    It is certainly to be preferred to the inane conspiracy theories and the quack remedies being peddled by shamans decked out in various guises and disguises.

    It is especially gratifying that no one has invited the researcher Professor Maurice Iwu to the miracle drug he claimed to have devised many years before the virus even had a name.

    Better to allow him to prepare his legal defence against sweeping allegations by the EFCC that he misallocated billions of Naira in public funds during his last outing as chair of the Independent National Electoral Commission.

    Over.

    *

    My Big Brother:

    I must pontificate with humility, abovo, that your usual generous coruscating panegyrics as to my humdinger abilities where I senatorially perched, this time got me inebriated in an aqua of salubrious narcissism and thanks for it, because emanating from your very fastidious, critical philosophical and encyclopedic observatory, it was indeed a refreshing anodyne from the epicaricacy that malodorously swamps the political atmospherics.

    But rest assured that we are consensus ad idem with Professor Wole Soyinka when he asseverated that “man shall achieve his authentic being through confrontation with the vicissitudes of life.”

    Is it not bewildering that at the time of your excogitation arising itself from your seminal and ceaseless lucubrations, Muhammadu Sanusi 11, may have been skedaddled out of the throne of his forebears and that is because Nigeria unravels de die in diem?

    I certainly didn’t find comfort in his alleged luxuriating in partisan ensconcement, but he has my imprimatur in his feisty and quixotic reformatory and sometimes revolutionary temper in speaking truth to power over time in spite of his own hedonistic and epicurean privileges. No doubt he exhibited some traits of intellectual and ideological megalomania but it always found anchorage in a genuine utilitarian

    And transformational desire.

    What rankles is that if he was dethroned for his “bad verses” and because the system could not be latitudinarian enough to accommodate his gadfly proclivities, must he be banished against the backdrop of section 35 of our Constitution that guarantees personal liberty and in view of the Court of Appeal’s sacrosanct position in the case of Attorney General Kebbi State versus Alhaji Al Mustapha Jokolo, in which the court unequivocally affirmed the illegality and unconstitutionality  of such archaic practices?

    My verdict is that citizen Muhammadu Sanusi should be accorded all his constitutional rights and privileges going forward.

    I continue to remain an advocate for true federalism as a passe-partout in part resolution of our National Question. It is indubitable that the National Question has gnawed at Nigeria’s solar plexus and threatened its existence at various times. It was not hyperbolic when Suberu and Agbaje stigmatized Nigeria’s federalism as being plagued with “paradoxes, pathologies and irregularities.”  I only need to add that we are a “federation without federalism,” apologies to Jan Erk.

    The Nigeria federal system exhibits a high ossifying and asphyxiating degree of centralization that has occasioned eschewable roforofo between the component units and the Centre and among the component units themselves that we can do with some restructuring that broadly accommodates the creation of a federation which efficaciously enhances our collective identity and distributive political economy and addresses a system that promotes equity, justice and equality amongst the multinational and ethnic groups.

    It is within this context that I perceive the audacious and laudable attempt by the Southwest state governors to berth AMOTEKUN under the auspices of the Western Nigeria Security Network and also the initial furore it generated. What gives me the heebie jeebies, I must admit just now, is the fact of the political class now deploying the fight for restructuring as a smokescreen for elite politics and objectives.

    My joy was boundless when 29 new words that were either borrowed from Nigerian languages or are “unique Nigerian coinages” that have been in circulation for a period of aeons got cosmopolitan canonization in the trusted bible of the English language, the OXFORD ENGLISH DICTIONARY.

    If etching some of our colloquialisms in the Oxford English Dictionary invests upon us some positive world attention of which we are in humongous deficit, then we can pro tempore bask in the sunshine of Nigerian colloquialisms but not without observing that they did not get it right in my opinion with the meaning ascribed to chop chop.

    I am also to add that I will invite you my Senior Brother to a bacchanalian party if someday the Oxford English Dictionary decides to smile on me by also adding my own special coinage of the type of government we have run in Nigeria since independence which I stigmatized elsewhere as KAKISTOMOBOPLUTOCRACY.

    My worry about our electoral jurisprudence in caboodle which gives me mental pabulum is the judicial coup d’état of if you like call it coup de grace where the judiciary can by sheer judicial deus ex machina foist willy-nilly an electoral state of affairs violently antipodal to the electoral verdict of the people as we have seen in Zamfara, Bayelsa and some other states in all the categories of elections without limiting it to the governorship elections.

    The extant laws and our Constitution need a rejiging to accommodate this anti-democratic gorgon medusa.

    The concatenation of events both in the national level and in Edo State that has brought the APC National Chairman under bold relief is a combination of our prebendal politics, crass perfidy, impunity and revanchism which must be deprecated.

    Whereas certain political power centres are fighting back the intrepid and pertinacious iron-will determination of Comrade Adams Oshiomhole to stop the reign of impunity and thus restore party discipline and supremacy which are the hallmark of party democracy no matter whose ox is gored, and substantially removing the party levers from the suzerainty of strong individuals back to the rank and  file of party members, others are also apprehensive  of the fact that the  APC National Chairman may not lend himself to malleable manipulations of 2023 presidential and power calculations.

    There was no way Oshiomhole was not going to have obstreperous, raucous and riveting resistance from the power behemoth steeped in the reign of party capture before he became National Chairman of the APC. What is happening in the Edo home front is regrettable, opprobrious and sardonic because there is no basis for it at all.

    All Comrade Oshiomhole said, advised and insisted on was the need to run an all-inclusive government capable of delivering the dividends of democracy to the people and at the same time strengthening the party. How this position became anathematous to the extent of subjecting him and his loyalists to state terrorism, political pugilism, obscurantism and pariahism leaves a caustic taste in the buccal cavity of any objective bystander.

    Let me again thank you immensely from the bottom of my heart for finding time to tickle my sensibilities and sensitivities, in spite of your crowded intellectual engagements. You make me feel important even when I’am conscious of the fact that I am just a student.

     

    Thanks Sir, and best.

     

    Sincerely

    Osahon Obahiagbon