The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • A prayer for the season

    A prayer for the season

    When all is said and done, Nigeria must consider itself lucky that there are still a few voices left to speak truth to power. Talk of the timing, relevance and of course the impact at a time the nation is adrift; it is certainly not a small thing that two clerics, from two different altars would come to the same grim conclusions on the state of the union while offering candid thoughts on the dangers lying ahead and the need for those entrusted with the task of governance to wake up to their responsibilities.

    Between Pastor Enoch Adejare Adeboye, the General Overseer of the Christian Church of God, and Abuja’s celebrated Digital Imam, Sheikh Muhammad Nuru Khalid, who was until recently the Chief Imam of Apo Legislative Quarters Juma’at Mosque in Federal Capital Territory, just about enough must have been said on the issues agitating the minds of the ordinary Nigerian, as indeed the underlying matters currently pushing the nation perilously towards the abyss.

    From the free-wheeling, industrial scale theft of the nation’s crude, the astronomic rise in debts vis-à-vis the unbearable burden of servicing them, the collapse of national institutions across the board and with it the gross devaluation in the quality of lives of the citizen, right up to the failures by government to secure the lives and properties of Nigerians; the duo has since served notice that the days of indifference are finally over!

    Of course, the sweetness in their message – if it could be so described – did not just consist in their timeliness; it is in the call out of an administration that has squandered a national will and has reduced governance to banality.

    But then, as this newspaper’s revered Sunday columnist, Tatalo Alamu has long warned of the cost of speaking out – whereas freedom of speech is something that one might find in the statutes, the notion of freedom after speech is entirely bunkum!  Thanks to those who believe they hold the yam and the knife and so could do as they please, it is perhaps not enough that our Digital Imam has been served the bitter pill of separation from his clerical position; those of his ilk – and this includes the administration’s growing army of critics – who see no good in the regime but ‘only talk of how you can’t travel by road, by rail, by air, and how nobody is safe anywhere in the country… and how federal government is allegedly overwhelmed by security challenges. …(and who) trumpet only the things that give the impression of total anarchy” – theirs is perhaps just as intolerable as the terrorists currently tearing the country apart – and so had better be warned of dire consequences lying in wait!

    You know who the ‘enemy’ is and their motives.

    “These instigators cut across all class of people. Former leaders, current political actors, pastors, imams, social commentators, talk show hosts (and hostesses), so-called human rights activists, socio-political groups, and many others. All they want is to give a sense of anomie in the land, and divert attention from whatever is going right…”

    That was Femi Adesina – the president’s spokesman. In his eyes, Nigerians are not only impossible; in failing to regularly count their blessings even for the tiniest, incremental mercies, they are also a most ungrateful people!

    Thanks to the administration, many are the wonders in the African Sun delivered under its watch. From the self-proclaimed showpieces – the Abuja-Kaduna rail, the Lagos-Ibadan rail, the Second Niger Bridge; there is of course the on-going work on the 150-kilometre Lagos–Ibadan expressway – never mind that the project is far from completed after nearly seven years of being in charge; the so-called progress in the power sector – again, never mind that this has since become an optical illusion; Nigerians are supposed to be eternally grateful that activities – which in other climes are mere routines –  are at least taking place.

    In all, the cry is that the administration has done far more with less – in comparison with the Goodluck Jonathan administration before it. However, the idea of benchmarking current ignoble performance with the low grade offering by an administration which Nigerians soundly rejected is entirely its making; it is not only self-serving but mischievous.

    And while we are at it; the claim to be doing more with less is itself debatable; for while the administration could truly claim to have had less accruals from the crude oil account, this it has since made up for in the trillions of naira loans for which present and future Nigerians are already burdened.

    And then of course the security sector which the administration is increasingly proving a monumental failure. For an administration that once boasted that it had technically defeated Boko Haram; that no inch of the Nigerian territory is under the control of the terror group, what exactly is the situation today?

    Bandits are not only holding vast territories across the Northwest and North-central, taxes and all manners of charges are levied by warlords on hapless farmers if only to be able to carry out their trade. As for the highways, they have since been rendered unsafe by terrorists with their free reign of kidnappings and abductions.

    Imagine; barracks, the sacred precincts of our practitioners of warfare are routinely violated just as rail and air transportation have since been added to those valleys of death to be dreaded by citizens as the terrorists leave no unmistakeable message about those truly in charge. And all of these at a time a veteran, supposedly battle-tested, retired two-star General is in charge.

    And to add to these woes the current record of daily theft of the nation’s crude. How much is stolen daily? Truth is – the figures being bandied are mere conjectures. However, if we accept the figure of an estimated 200,000 barrels from Bonny Terminal alone, we are talking of a conservative loss of $4 billion to the heist in 2021 alone. And this is in a country that is already short by some 300,000 of its OPEC daily allocation. Whereas that quantum of oil, were it to be stolen in other climes, would have called for a declaration of war, here in Nigeria, the same fellows who not only failed in curbing the massive theft but are complicit in the brazen rape on the economy would rather embark on the lecture circuit to educate other Nigerians on patriotism and the need to venerate those same leaders who failed them.

    So, between those who have chosen to warn about the dangers ahead and those who would rather have the dirty linens of the administration kept from the public view, we know who between them is serving the public purpose. May Nigeria not happen to us – is the prayer currently trending out there. For me, it is the wrong prayer for the season.  Our problem is the blight of inept leadership. It is that class that we must pray out of our lives.

  • Pathetic leadership

    Pathetic leadership

    To those who have maintained the position about those in charge of our affairs at the highest levels of government being overrated, the spectacles across the political spectrum in the last few weeks must have provided, in addition to iron-clad proofs, volumes of literature on the tragedy that the benighted leadership of the so-called African Giant has come to represent.

    In a week of serial tragedies that began with the invasion of the sacred precincts of the Kaduna airport and the killing of one aviation personnel, spilling right through to the bombing of the Abuja-Kaduna railway leading to the death of nine and the abduction of scores of other passengers, and then the bombing of the Gidan train station along the Abuja-Kaduna rail track, capped with the siege on the Kaduna –Abuja highway and, of course the less reported incident of the gruesome killing of six soldiers from Zuma barracks, in Suleja, Niger State, Nigerians must have watched in horror as those charged with the business of governance done have done little else than switch from the lamentation mode to the blame game, from heinous rationalisations to solutions so hare-brained as to leave them in wonder on some people found their ways into government.

    So, what have we not heard? From Nasir El-Rufai, the Kaduna State governor, we have heard, for the umpteenth time, that the camps of those marauding bandits are not unknown just as their telephone communications are routinely monitored by the government. Why, he asked, should the security agencies not simply move in to bomb the fellows out of existence?

    Now apparently at his wits end, he says –  “I have complained to Mr. President and I swear to God, if action is not taken we, as governors, will take actions to protect the lives of our people…If it means deploying foreign mercenaries to come and do the work, we will do it to address these challenges.”

    Coming from a governor sworn to uphold the laws and the constitution of the republic, could this have come as something out of character given that the governor once paid hefty sums to buy the peace of some Fulani tribes, in what was supposed to be part of a frenzied search for home-grown solution?

    And where will the mercenaries come from – Futa Jallon, Libya or wherever?

    These are interesting times, no doubt.

    Back to last weekend tragedies at the railways. We have heard that the tragedies were not only predictable, but that the nation’s intelligence community actually saw them coming – (they did nothing to thwart them)? Of repeated intelligence which suggested that attacks were imminent but which the Nigerian Railway Corporation, NRC, ignored. And finally, how the bureaucracy and some powerful but unseen actors should be held responsible for frustrating the efforts by the transportation ministry to procure the enabling security infrastructure!

    One would ordinarily have dismissed the latter as a sick joke except that it came from the mouth of the Minister of Transportation, Rotimi Amaechi. To say that some things are better not said is to evaluate the weight of the minister’s reported submissions. Being the supervising minister in charge of the railways, he has, in the opinion of many Nigerians, come to personify the entire railway modernisation project and so his views are expected to count for something. Unfortunately, like a loose cannon that he’s wont to be, he has merely opened a can of worms whose overriding effect is to further savage what is left of the reputation of the administration that he serves as much as to call to question his stewardship in the transportation ministry.

    Merely by the extracts of the FEC deliberations that surfaced at the weekend, it would seem most uncharitable to describe the Minister Amaechi as being clever by a quarter! Sloppy would have been more fitting!

    So poor, inelegant and utterly lacking in the rigour of detail was that so-called presentation by the minister to the council; which obviously explains why he couldn’t to persuade his colleagues to budge. Now, some say that those who rejected it knew what they were doing…certainly not for altruistic reasons whatever that means!

    By the way, did the minister take steps to address the concerns of his colleagues as raised in council? If he did, he would to an extent be right – like Pontius Pilate – to wash his hands of guilt; if he did not, well… there is the verdict of history! Note that the deliberations in reference actually took place more than a whole year before last week’s incident and the ensuing blame game.

    Nigerians had better brace up for fireworks as more memos on the happenings in government get leaked in the coming days!

    One other tough question on the railway modernisation project: Why was the project not treated as turnkey since the package from start to finish are wholly Chinese? Given all that has happened in a short while since the latest cycle of modernisation under the Buhari administration began, from the deliberate gaps in the entire implementation process right up to the latest but embarrassing incident of faulty fuel gauge in the Lagos- Ibadan rail service as a result of which rail passengers were stranded in the bush, can anyone truly say that Nigerians are getting values for every kobo spent on their behalf?

    Finally, the attack on Kaduna Airport attack. The attack, by official accounts was supposed to be a minor ‘skirmish’ between bandits passing through the back of the Airport towards Riyawa village and the security personnel engaged by the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency, NAMA to keep watch over metrological equipment.

    Here is what Brigadier-General Uriah Opuene, Garrison Commander, 1 Division Nigerian Army, and Air Commodore, Ademuyiwa Adedoyin, the Air Force Base Commander told newshounds on the reported breach:  “As you can see, this place is about six kilometres away from the Airport terminal. The bandits were only passing behind the airport perimeter fence when they saw the security man engaged by NAMA and they fired at him. There are several layers of security at the Airport, this is the first layer. Even this first layer was not breached, because from the moment of hearing that shot, it took our men just about three minutes to get here from the next layer of security”.

    The NAF Base Commander would add that security around the airport general area had been beefed up since the security of the nation’s elite military training institution – the Nigerian Defence Academy NDA, was breached last year.  Said he: “The bandits don’t have the audacity to attack Kaduna Airport.”

    In other words, what happened was no more than a storm in a teacup! And that was moments after the death of the NAMA security official and the subsequent scrambling of a fighter helicopter at the end of which 12 of the fleeing bandits were taken out.  Never mind that the aviation community considers the situation serious enough to halt subsequent flights into Kaduna.

    Poor NAF Base Commander; he obviously spoke too soon. The bandits – or terrorists – have since proclaimed their ‘audacity’ in no unmistakeable terms. Monday, they went for the Abuja – Kaduna train; Tuesday, it was the turn of Gidan train station; Wednesday, six soldiers at Zuma barracks in Suleja were felled. Thursday, former lawmaker, Shehu Sani, would report on the blocking of the Abuja-Kaduna highway – although the Kaduna State government would claim that the terrorists merely attempted to cross the highway but were engaged by security forces. And now Nigerians are asking – where’s next?

  • Living on borrowed time

    Living on borrowed time

    To those who have long given up on the numbing mathematics of the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, and its principal, the federal government, the latest lecture circuit mounted by the minister of state for petroleum, Timipre Sylva, to sell a concocted a ‘strange alibi’ as this paper puts it in its editorial of yesterday must have presented a riveting epitaph of sorts. For while Nigerians may have been battered, pummelled and flummoxed beyond shockability – to borrow some of the typically extravagant phrases often deployed by one of the men of power to press their points home; and whereas the nation’s critical voices may have been dulled in the years of duelling with mediocre, egoistic personages running the affairs of state; there is mercifully enough left to suggest that the nation’s capacity to think have not been totally obliterated.

    Here’s the story – or shall we say the story behind the story. The Organisation of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, OPEC, plus Russia, had, at its 25th OPEC and non-OPEC Ministerial Meeting last month, increased Nigeria’s oil production quota from 1.70 million bpd in February to 1.72 million bpd for March. By the way, the quota for January was pegged at 1.68 million bpd.

    As always, the cartel may well have spared their ink – and valuable time: Nigeria’s quota, simply put, was unrealisable. In fact, the nation’s total output has averaged 1.4mbpd over the course of the past 11 months.

    If you considered that a big deal in a country said to run on a tight shoe-string budget and, at a time when every nth kobo of the capital spend is borrowed, Minister Sylva, rather than see the emergency for what it is, has been in the wild goose chase for alibis. To him, not only are the international oil companies (IOCs) not doing enough, they are in fact, leaving too quickly for the nation’s health!!!

    And so for solution, he insists that we need to look – not at the enemy within, which the evidence leads, but at those without, for the source of our massive troubles in a sector that is fast fading. By the enemies without, he of course, meant the oil majors, who, apparently fed up with our oily ways, and hung on the new fad of green energy, are already looking far beyond our shores –beyond the allures of our once-upon-a-time sweet Light Bonny – for greener pastures!

    Now, thanks to Messrs. Tony Elumelu and Austin Avuru, the part, long denied is finally being discussed in the public square. The reality facing the country, they aver, is more nuanced, and certainly far more complex than painted by the minister or the government that he represents. In fact, the duo may well have said that the minister, in claiming that under-investment as against the brazen theft going on in the sector, not only told a lie but somewhat betrayed the nation’s hope in its struggle to break with an ugly past.

    Let’s look at what the duo said – starting with Elumelu: “How can we be losing over 95% of oil production to thieves? Look at the Bonny Terminal that should be receiving over 200k barrels of crude oil daily, instead, it receives less than 3,000 barrels, leading the operator Shell to declare force majeure… It is clear that the reason Nigeria is unable to meet its OPEC production quota is not because of low investment but because of theft, pure and simple!”

    True or false? Surely, Nigerians are not in doubt as to who, between the minister and the businessman, chose to bandy untruths!

    To return to Avuru. He on his part admitted that the IOCs have not made any meaningful investments in the last 15 years. But then, he also noted that this was merely a symptom of a bigger ailment – the crisis of governance – something more particularly renowned in the corrupt, rent-prone oil sector. He spoke of an entire export pipeline network surrendered to vandals and illegal bunkerers while observing that the phrase “crude theft” which crept into the industry about 2010 has since taken on a new meaning with “some pipeline systems now (particularly in the East), where 80% (eighty percent) of production injected therein does not make it to the terminal!”

    The result – every producer is now cooking up “alternative evacuation” schemes that cost four to five times what pipeline export would normally cost!”

    This stifling environment, says Minister Sylva, makes no difference. In his opinion, not only does IOCs owe Nigerians a living, they have no reasons to be leaving in droves as they are doing since the oil has not yet dried up. Trust the IOCs; they know better.

    For the Nigerian government, why bother with the activities of criminal gangs busting crude-bearing pipelines when officials could easily to take to the airwaves to deplore ‘incessant vandalisation of crude pipelines and theft’; when it costs nothing to make the right noises about the damage to the environment?

    In any case, who cares about the anarchy inadvertently loosed by a clueless administration with nary understanding of the national imperatives – in a clime where the government sees itself as a benefactor as against being answerable to the people? Who is talking about repositioning the African Giant in the fast-changing energy dynamics when there’s just enough gravy left to go round?

    It’s been nearly a year since the Auditor General of the Federation released its rather damning verdict on the NNPC’s creative accounting and its corollary, the massive heist reckoned in billions of unexplained and unexplainable discrepancies in account receivables. The report of the AUGF for 2019 specifically mentioned some 107,239,436 barrels of crude oil lifted for domestic consumption that could not be accounted for; PMS worth N7.06 billion claimed to have been pumped to the two depots (Ibadan-Ilorin and Aba-Enugu) between June and July 2019 not received by them as indeed other countless under-remittances by the corporation to the federation account. While no one has been called to account; and while the sector lies adrift; absent still are the hard, strategic thinking required to catalyse the sector, the fierce urgency that should ordinarily attend to them.

    Today, our un-leaders have reduced a once proud people to a joke – a terrible embarrassment to themselves and to the world.  A so-called giant daily revealed as one standing on the feet of clay. From railways running out of diesel as a result of faulty gauges, a perennially collapsing power grid with citizens left to duel on semantics of whether to treat the phenomenon as collapse or whatever.

    Sad how the midwives of incompetence – the same fellows – that not too long ago held the nation under the thrall of   ‘body language’ and change – have done little else than mouth rationalisations to explain away the current stasis after nearly seven years of being in the saddle.

    So where does all these lead? The answer is obvious – nowhere. Soon enough, Nigerians would get to know the difference between stasis and full-blown crisis. The signs already are palpable. There’s not enough oil export to cover our import bills; yet our non-export business are still very much at the most elementary levels. Our tax-to GDP revenues at 6.5 percent is a no-no. Inflation has hit the roofs while our manufacturers are gasping for breath. Unemployment, particularly of the youth has become something of a nightmare. Yet, the government is faced with a situation in which it has less and less to spend.

    The saying is true after all –you cannot give what you do not have. Hopefully, this season will somehow pass – not so much for the work done – but as Nigerians are wont to say – on the wheels of faith. Someone said the other day that we have seen worse. Really?

  • Finally, the meltdown…

    Finally, the meltdown…

    To those who once touted the magical body language of our dear president, the current inertia both in the polity and governance as a whole must have come as hard lesson in the danger of overselling a product, the folly of proclaiming heroism when the battle is yet to be engaged, and the tragic reluctance to confront the truth when it matters most.

    With barely a year and half to the end of the two-term tenure of President Muhammadu Buhari, state-wide atrophy is now beyond denial – certainly not with the full and untrammelled anarchy loosed on the landscape. Three weeks after some crooks and their enablers in the high places decided to bring in cargoes of adulterated fuel into the country, not only are spasms unleashed on the economy and on the people yet to abate; the administration’s pretences to virtue and performance are being blown on all fronts.

    As at the weekend, there were still no suggestions as to when the latest nightmare would end. By this I refer the long queues of motorists waiting for fuel to buy with reports in parts of the country showing that a litre of petrol goes for as high as N400! Now add to these the anguish of our hordes of manufacturers and those in the heavy haulage sector who must now cough out N500 for a litre diesel –the same critical actors forced to endure the latest pangs of grid failure, we are talking of a nation being corralled precipitously towards the slope.

    True, Nigerians may have started out with a ‘petrol problem’; what have become apparent in the last few weeks are  far more complex than the usual regulatory lapses could explain. For while the symptoms are manifest in the daily pains that Nigerians suffer, their roots lay buried in the pretentious but definitely overrated leadership on which they invested their hopes.

    And so to those who once regaled us with the famed body language of Mai Gaskiya  – at some point daring to poke the fun on the rest of us – the so-called unbelieving, the joke tragically is on them – a mocking and dramatic twist at that. From a season where forms are glorified over substance, when inanities are allowed to supplant prudence; theirs is now era where the most heinous and intolerable are rationalised since, apparently, their supposed hero have no guile. For the typically questioning and assertive society, suddenly feigning ‘deaf and dumb’ in the face of the hell that living in Buhari’s country has become must have come at a cost of painful adjustment.

    Anyone still in doubt as to how bad things are?  Take two sectors – the electricity and petroleum sectors which the administration could easily have staked its honour for instance. By now, Nigerians know the story of the refineries only too well – same of the same – or worse. From the familiar statist arguments about retaining control to privatisation and now back to the same point where we started from, the country has been made to go full cycle by an administration that does not seem to know what it wants. Suddenly, the same inept national oil corporation under whose watch the edifices were ran aground, is posturing as their latter-day salvagers with no hard questions asked! And because Nigerians are said to want their refineries back and running –the costs are not supposed to matter –thanks to Buhari’s school of leadership by abdication – we can recline, hope and pray that things turn out right in the hand of the certified undertakers!

    Same with the subsidy story; the administration started off with a denial of the obvious; and when the truth sank in, it took some half-hearted measures to address it and soon after relapsed into its familiar inertia. The latest official line is that the burden of the subsidy – as against the baffling inertness of the administration; an administration that had seven years to think through a comprehensive programme to address the situation – is intolerable!  Talk of a government that popped champagne on the signing of a Petroleum Industry Act waking up the very next to discover that the very basis of the law does not even exist!  How about that for the record?

    Last week, Nigerians were finally reminded that they still have a minister in charge of the power sector. If before September last year, they thought they had Mr. Anonymous in charge of the critical sector, the incumbent, Abubakar Aliyu, would seem to have been cut of the same cloth.

    Only last week, the minister claimed that the country’s total installed electricity capacity currently stands at 18, 000 megawatts of which 8,000 megawatts is generated daily for consumers’ consumption.

    His words: “I’d like you also to take away that we deliver 8,000mw of electricity daily through a combination of Grid, Embedded and Industrial Captive supply of Electricity (not 4,000MW as is frequently reported), much of this capacity added during the life of this administration. These are not my figures; this was an industry study conducted by KPMG recently.”

    Well Mr. Minister, the story out there is that things have fallen tragically apart under your watch. Entreating the ill-served electricity consumer to the boring power semantics did nothing to assuage their pains any more than Obasanjo’s revolutionary Power Sector Reform Act has changed the power landscape in any tangible way. Expecting the long-suffering consumers to figure out the meaning of generated power, installed capacity and perhaps what it means to have stranded power in a sector where more darkness subsists than light would seem one additional pain they could do without. All they want is power – from wherever they can get it – stranded or not!

    Interestingly, it was the same week that the minister would declare without shame that the erratic power supply currently being experienced in Abuja and other parts of the country is caused by low water level in the hydro dams. Thank God he did not say that some farmers encroached on the water route somewhere in Futa Jallon! After all, stories of serial shortage of gas to fire the power plants in a world leading gas producer have become not only commonplace but routine. One can only hope Nigerians will not be treated to another bizarre tale of snakes taking over the turbines as we once had in the past.

    And someone tells me that the administration is not on the lame-duck mode yet. Good heavens!

     

  • A joke taken too far

    A joke taken too far

    Show me an unelected official with countless trillions of naira and perhaps billions of dollars to play around with; a so-called number one banker without a bothersome manifesto yet insists on plodding on with the most ambitious development blueprint that has left the elected so-called change government gasping for breath; think of that lone, but nonetheless consequential player without the encumbrances of parliamentary controls being presented as Nigeria’s long-expected messiah and I’ll show you the pathway to the making of a grand delusion.

    Nigeria’s political delinquency obviously runs deeper than many would care to admit. This, after all is the season of delinquency – and this in full bloom. Year 2023 is around the corner, and like the proverbial reign of knives of various hues and shape on the death of an elephant, all manners of characters have since emerged in the race to the presidential spot as if to suffer the ordinary Nigerian to their chants of distraction.

    The other day, it was the gubernatorial upstart from the north-central, an individual who’s probably more tolerated for his amusement or more appropriately, nuisance value, than anything else informing Nigerians that he is destined to be the next president! Here is an absentee governor whose state capital not only reeks of filth but seems to have regressed from where Lugard left it more than 100 years ago and whose sojourn in the government house in more than six years has, far from adding value to the state and its people, has taken just about everything in the negative direction.

    Nigerians surely will get to hear more, not just about the anti-democratic practices of this accidental governor or his reduction of governance to banality, but also of the locust years that he foisted, in due course.

    Back to Godwin Emefiele. Today, the matter of  is no longer a question of ‘if’ but when the Central Bank of Nigeria, (CBN) governor will finally step out of from the shadows to claim the trophy that those dark forces pushing him believes he’s eminently entitled. Not that it would have mattered had the man himself stepped out of the comfort zone of the cushy job to pursue an ambition which he apparently has long nursed but which if Nigerians had long suspected, have more or less been treated as a kind of joke.  As it appears, the joke may have been on us!

    Yes; Emefiele wants to run. No problem with that. What is problematic is when he prefers to hide behind the fingers- and some dark – forces to proclaim or quite predictably, deny an ambition that bears every hallmark carry of opportunism and greed! Or when as he seems set to do, wilfully converts an office held in trust to further a personal ambition.

    As an individual that has dispensed not a few favours in the last few years as the number one banker, the man, more than anyone obviously know the best time to cash in on those. There are obviously legions of contractors as indeed other hordes of vested interests already lined up to underwrite the man’s bills whenever he finally makes up his mind. Not forgetting the big boys who have done little else than prey in the foreign exchange market. So, money will not be a problem. If anything, expect Emefiele’s apex bank to have one more problem in unmanageable liquidity.

    By the way, why should it surprise anyone that Emefiele is being corralled into running? Nature, it said, abhors vacuum. Next to the president and commander-in-chief of the republic, Emefiele of the CBN is probably the most powerful individual in the land today. That he holds the singular distinction of being an unelected governor is not even the issue; think of a single officer holder that could, with a single stroke of the pen, authorise the disbursement of billions of naira of intervention funds without the strictures of a parliament; not even our governors with their exaggerated sense of worth possess such powers.

    Never mind those high sounding programmes of the Buhari administration, the man, Emefiele – in the absence of an effective fiscal counter-foil from the executive branch – has quite easily become the author and finisher of all developmental activities of the current government.  From the rice revolution via the anchor programme to its other derivative – the Abuja rice pyramids; right up to other sundry interventions in industry, health or Covid-19, the man has long assumed the status of being the brain box of a terrifically inert federal government.

    I do understand the rule that requires the apex bank to be independent more so in a relatively volatile monetary environment such as ours. Once upon a time, it was possible to conceive of the apex bank’s independence in terms of the deployment of monetary policy tools to control inflation and to manage money supply. Not any longer. The CBN under Emefiele has not only become a jack of all trades, it has in a twist of role reversal become a lender of first and the last resort! Thanks to the anaemic financial system since fostered under the current climate, Emefiele as the nation’s topmost banker has since become the new god under whom every knee must bow. So, what is new if an individual who apparently thinks he has seen it all decides to add the number one office in the land to a role he has so artfully acted albeit in an unofficial capacity? He should by all means run!

    One more thing though. Emefiele should grant Nigerians the courtesy of an early exit from his current job so he can concentrate on his critical next call. That done, he would have less of the rice fields and the harvests to worry about; or even still, the thankless loan recovery jobs as he would about the harvest of those crucial votes needed to propel him to the plum office.

  • Subsidy? Not a laughing matter

    Subsidy? Not a laughing matter

    Merely by the ululations and the backslappings that have greeted the ‘suspension’ of the removal of the controversial fuel subsidy, one would be forgiven to think that the brouhaha has finally been laid to rest. Thanks to the mother-of-all-strikes threatened by labour cheered on by the hordes of emergency ‘experts’ who have done little else that trade in the familiar fixations, another great opportunity to fully and exhaustively interrogate the options that the country faced such that it could emerge a win-win for all may have unfortunately again been missed.

    In a clime where populism thrives, I perfectly understand the familiar labelling of contrarian viewpoints as being somewhat ‘treasonable’.  It does not help when those who ordinarily should know would conveniently frame issues around clichés, the run-of-the mill polar continuums of ‘we versus them’ or ‘masses versus the government’ while issues are conveniently stripped of context in its broadest sense for better appreciation of the governance issues involved. The refrain -by now familiar – it is the government’s mess and so it must find the money to clear the mess!

    So much for the problem-solving-savvy activists of our time, that mess, it turns out, will cost, not the obtuse government, but you and me – the ordinary tax paying folks – a whopping N3 trillion in the current year! Did I hear someone suggest that the government go ahead to print new notes to cover the difference? And that from a government that is already borrowed to a hilt? That’s how banal sometimes things can get!

    So much for a reprieve – a case of an uneasy peace of the graveyard; the removal now off, is supposed to deserve celebration, never mind that the embedded folly of a nation that would rather cut its nose to spite its face would soon be revealed in the course of time. Imagine the same puritan activists to whom borrowing is also an anathema now chanting the hallelujah chorus since apparently the devil of subsidy has been put to shame!

    Sorry to disillusion them; this devil is going nowhere. In fact, it is not about to be exorcized. Make all the right noises about the poor choices of the past; add to it the sermon on the mount on the subject of the road not taken and with it, anecdotes on the delinquency – or if you like – the criminal predilection of the political elite; it does nothing to alter the cold reality of the mess we are in!

    Like they say, when you are in a hole; you quit digging! Some Nigerians, it would appear, not only insist that we continue digging, but pray that with some tough luck we might somehow drill our ways out! Part of that is living in the denial that we are not down and out yet; and that should the inevitable happen, the world will somehow show understanding until things calm down. And now that the nation is already on the election mode, everything else – save politics – should also be pause mode!  Most regrettable.

    Too bad that the rest of the world have chosen to see the tell-tale signs of a metastasizing malignancy hence their unwillingness to entreat a financially delinquent nation to a fancy profligacy course of petrol subsidy after ratcheting up a staggering public debt of N38 trillion ($92.626bn). Ask the Chinese who have suddenly grown cold to our insatiable appetite for loans. If in doubt, call Rotimi Amaechi, the administration’s point-man in everything Chinese for corroboration; Nigeria, it is increasingly apparent, is fast becoming a creditor’s nightmare! Now, let’s not talk about our familiar sparring partners – the Breton Woods Institutions and their satanic tales. Their concerns, although of a different kind, boils down to the same point: our country is on the verge of bankruptcy.

    Funny how some people still pretend otherwise. Some compare us with Saudi Arabia, a country that could afford the luxury of a stupendous life of luxury without the daily grind of work. Imagine the incongruity of comparing a country of 210 million people with foreign reserve of $35 billion with another of some 35 million people with a $501.8 billion in foreign reserves. Truth is Nigeria is actually in good company with the other oil-producing basket case country of Venezuela!

    Eighteen months, we are told will soon be here (really) – and with it the Eldorado. By this they mean the arrival of the 650,000 barrels per day Dangote Refinery without as much a thought to how that transition to the liberal regime will take place.  In any case, would it matter, if between now and then, some N4.5 trillion gets blown away on the subsidy? Do we have the funds? Where will it come from?

    I wish the answer is that straightforward. A respected friend and colleague, who I prefer not to name, holds strongly to the view that the current conundrum actually serves this particular government right! Moreover, that no single administration exists to solve all problems.

    He’s probably right – although in a different kind of way. The first count would be on the administration’s rather cynical reading of the subsidy economics and which underlay its initial public posturing, and more crucially, its failure to wash its hands off fuel trade shortly after taking office!

    Isn’t it ironic that the same government which is the number one problem of the sector is now being sought after to help clear the mess it created – a nigh impossibility? Surely, the problem did not start yesterday. It started when the power drunk federal government took the first refinery built by Shell under its wings and thereafter rolled out other decrees – the most notable of which is the Petroleum Equalisation Fund Decree – and with it the gross distortions from which the nation has not been able to escape.

    See why fundamental changes have become nigh impossible? The states of the refineries are at best a symptom of a more organic ailment. Those who had the money and technology apparently knew better than to help Nigeria out. It didn’t happen under Babangida; Not under Sani Abacha when things actually hit the nadir. Obasanjo is today better remembered as the leader who made the tough call of selling two of the refineries to a consortium led by Dangote which sadly Yar’Adua reversed. Today, many with the benefit of hindsight, believe it was the best course to take. With Goodluck Jonathan came the prospect of the refineries being handed over to their original builders but even that soon fell apart before it could come to fruition. To those who had expected things to be different under President Buhari, it has been a tragic lesson in wishful thinking. Of course, it would take more than the clichés or even the measured sound-bites of a Mai Gaskiya to get those contraptions back into action! The current TAM, like those before it, is money down the drain!

    Expect nothing to change anytime soon or even in the future -until that time when government decides it’s time to let go of the refineries. A return to status quo ante, as against stale and utterly unhelpful effusions by labour and their allies, may not necessary be the perfect route to the Eldorado we so desire; it seems in the current circumstances, a path informed by wisdom. With good bargain strategy in place, we might just be able to hive off a huge chunk of the N3 trillion subsidy-gate in a public scrap auction.

     

  • Anomie all the way

    Anomie all the way

    If the report of the arrest of three youngsters alleged to have killed their girlfriend, severed her head and burnt same for money ritual has not finally driven home the message about the depth of anomie already threatening to torpedo the already diseased social order, it seems unlikely that the nation will ever learn its lessons let alone profit from such ugly developments.

    Were the details not so gory and tragic, it would seem the perfect Nollywood stuff.  Crime scene was somewhere in Abeokuta, the Ogun State capital; featuring the quartet of Wariz Oladeinde (17), Abdulgafar Lukman (19), Mustakeem Balogun and another individual named Soliu said to be the boyfriend of the victim whose name was given as Rofiat. The chief protagonist, Soliu was said to have lured the girl to his room, where he held her down and asked one of his friends to slaughter her with a knife.

    Thanks to a rather vigilant community security guard, one Segun Adewusi; he was said to have raised the alarm on observing four boys burning something suspected to be human head in a local pot. Three of the boys were subsequently picked up by the police who swung into action as the fourth had escaped before they arrived. Mercifully, the lone suspect said to be on the run has since been picked up by the police.

    In the video clip that has since gone viral, one of them, Balogun, was heard in a chilling, unnerving tone of about their motivation: “We wanted to use just her head alone for money ritual. Soliu strangled her and he told me to assist him and we cut off her head.” End of story – or destiny!

    Familiar? You bet. Of course, stories like these abound everywhere across the country. They only vary in minor details. Recall that last week, I wrote about the Bayelsa’s trio of Emomotimi Magbisa, Perebi Aweke and Eke Prince. As if drawing from the same playbook, the three, all of them said to be 15 years of age, were said to have accosted one 13-year old Endeley Comfort, hypnotised her, and subsequently got her to follow them to the apartment of Emomotimi Magbisa in Sagbama community. There they cut her finger and sprinkled the blood on a mirror for ritual purposes.

    Trust Nigerians to pour out their indignations about the anarchy finally let loose on our world. However, like I hinted also in the piece on the five-year old Hanifa last week, killings for money – whether through ransom or for ritual – may have only become the new norm; truth is, it has merely morphed from the ages. To those in wonder about where our famed craze for the filthy lucre and its underlying philosophy of wealth without work would lead, our youngsters have not only handed themselves the baton in furtherance of the disease, they seem in their desperation to join the big league, resolve to teach the rest of us new lessons in un imaginable savagery.

    And talking of the myth of so-called blood money and its associated ritual in particular, it is, like several other dysfunctions or derivatives of our intensely religious and profoundly superstitious, pre-industrial society, a phenomenon that has actually endured through all ages. Ever heard of saying of the fear of the gbomogbomo being the beginning of wisdom in the late 60 and 70s? Our rural and not so rural folks left out of the Nigerian gravy, have merely dusted the books; after the long hiatus of the oil boom, they have taken off from where their father left things a short while ago in the cold business of blood money. For the latter-day gbomogbo in his new, fulsome mutation, it is no more than a return to the old craft with all its associated cannibal fiesta.

    Read Also: Of ritual money and superstition

    Yet, as abhorrent as the cannibal fiesta appears, it is, in fact a summation of the Nigerian society in its many grotesque manifestations.

    The other day, I was in company of some fellows, who actually believed that ‘miracle money’ was not only real but divinely sanctioned. The background of course was the controversy which broke after a popular preacher claimed to have conjured those miracle bank alerts and of which many actually testified took place! Never mind that no one has yet successfully explained the origin of the supposed transfers; one is supposed to believe in the existence of the imaginary vaults somewhere minting and dispensing hard currencies for the benefits of the Nigerian believer! Trust the two audiences in Canada and Nigeria where these reported miracles took place: they are almost exclusively Nigeriana!

    Back to those fellows; they were quick to remind yours truly of the feeding of the five thousand in the Bible as proof of the infinite possibilities in divine provision and the sometimes unknowable ways that the Divine Hand can choose to get things done. Trust me, I countered with the Biblical story of the Christian avatar, Jesus Christ Himself, when prompted to pay tax thought nothing of invoking the miracle to pay Caesar. Could He not have simply decreed wads and wads of the Roman currency without the need to re-draft Peter from his long-abandoned fishing trade just in time to get the Roman tax authorities off their backs?

    Here is what He did: cause Peter to temporarily suspend the new-found vocation of fishing for men’s soul for the gruelling task of going after those troublesome fishes with those rusty nets! Meaning, the Master knew that anything else would amount to conjuring fake or juju money – not backed with the authority of the Roman treasury; suspect currency unlikely to be acceptable to the tax authorities of the time.

    As we all know, such delicate care for the rule of process or similar niceties seems unlikely to impress the new money men: not the misguided theologians for whom such things as propriety mean nothing; or the puerile capitalists without the encumbrances of the tough protestant ethic; the con-men yahoo-yahoo or the yahoo-plus boys; the politicians and the bureaucrat who must prey on the public till to make it big. I guess the above will also apply to the head-hunters for whom the human cranium has become the latter day piggy bank where fresh notes (naira or it dollars) are minted. All share in the same sustaining myth – not faith – that sees the end as sufficient to justify the mean-ness! (Apologies to the revered Tatalo Alamu)

    Welcome to the new age where money and money alone answereth all things.

  • Baby Hanifa and other matters

    Baby Hanifa and other matters

    To much for social Darwinists and their discredited theory; even now the world must be wondering if indeed, there is nothing wrong with the specie of Homo sapiens who inhabit the vast space called Nigeria. I refer here not to the familiar retardation across the broad developmental indices, or the never-ending statistics that tells the story of profligacy and missed opportunities; or even the crisis of a deluded leadership and a country needlessly consumed by things other more discerning countries have taken for granted – all of which sums up to the tragedy of a country that has finally lost its way.

    Today, I choose to dwell on the sickening and – if we may call it for what it is – a most frightening regression the stuff of which Charles Darwin and company would be hard pressed to figure out let alone explain on the evolutionary schema.

    By this I mean the other war going on, silent and undeclared, yet a more insidious one threatening to become the new normal: the war on our future – our children!

    By now, most Nigerians would probably have read the story of baby Hanifa Abubakar – the five-year-old girl kidnapped by her school proprietor, Abdulmalik Muhammad Tanko, on her way home from school on December 4, 2021. The account of how she was killed and her body parts dumped within the premises of her Noble Kids Academy, at Kwanar Dakata, Nassarawa Local Government Area, Kano State, by a man she recognised and trusted to take her safely home is no ordinary tragedy. It is an epic story of betrayal, a grand one.

    Talk of some tears that will take years to dry; surely, this one would count among the lot. Being one murder of an unusual kind, the murderer, and his accomplices, surely deserves the swiftest kind of justice that society can mete out. And one hopes the government of Kano State will move very quickly to ensure that justice is served.

    Sad as the Hanifa Abubakar matter is, truth, however is that this war on our children did not start with her. Nor did it begin with the Chibok Girls or even the Buni Yadi Boys any more than the variegated forms of the collective failures which birthed the millions of the almajirs and their terrible blights on the city-scape could be said to have chanced upon the nation overnight. In the Northwest and the North-central, the battle is fully engaged by elements sworn to ensure that society, particularly its children are denied sleep.

    In their different ways, they represent the societal collateral for the crime of the political society – the underlying symptoms of a society that has long lost its moral compass, a war in which different parts of the country – from the north to the south, now have different tales to tell.

    Yes, down south, we hear, with each passing day, reports of murders by some dark forces ostensibly by, or at the behest of, aspiring money-men, power brokers and for other hedonistic causes that equally tells a story of a society’s mores in free-fall. We read daily, the news of innocent citizens killed and body parts harvested for money rituals and whatever; boys, girls, men and women; no one is spared in the underworld economy that spins voodoo; and promises the kind of cash and in the currency that no one has ever been able to explain with some certainty – but which if true is bound to give Godwin Emefiele and his Monetary Policy Committee (MPC) members far more headache than they can only imagine.

    Read Also: Court remands three for alleged murder of 5-year- old Hanifa

    Meanwhile, there is the fledgling but all-too familiar Yahoo Yahoo, the army of deviants using their laptops and the internet, and whose victims, are mostly foreigners, said to freely deploy romance scams, email phishing, business email compromise fraud, identity theft and impersonation to con their target. And their kith, the ‘Yahoo Plus’ boys or ‘G-boys’ whose victims, once hypnotised with the assistance of herbalists are said to be game; not forgetting the One Million Boys, The Awawa Boys, all in Lagos that speaks to a counter-culture of crime and rebellion and for whom the notion of the orderly society is pure fiction.

    Talk of the Nigerian crime morphology ever in constant motion and with it the bubbling factory where crimes and delinquencies are manufactured and delivered.

    Only few days back, I came across the story of three boys nabbed by some youths in the Sagbama Local Government Area of Rivers State. The trio – Emomotimi Magbisa, Perebi Aweke and Eke Prince, all of them said to be 15 years of age, who “allegedly accosted one Endeley Comfort ‘female’ 13 years, hypnotised her to follow them to the apartment of Emomotimi Magbisa in Sagbama community, cut her finger and sprinkled the blood on a mirror for ritual purposes”, according to the police bulletin. Apparently, the vigilant youths, already familiar with the practice, raised the alarm after which they were subsequently arrested and some substance suspected to be charms were recovered from them.

    Different methods but the same basic motivation: money, power, control and anything in between; together with the presumed privileges these are supposed to confer.

    Sometimes, yours truly couldn’t but wonder about the possible links between our excessive religiosity and the industry of fetish and superstition that has been on the ascendance, particularly in a clime where opportunities for the rational choice are rather narrow and in between.  Thanks to new age preachers of capitalism, our young ones are implicitly taught that money are all that matters while the process is said to count for far less.  And thanks to the social media, they have just enough lessons on how everything that glitters equals gold – and to a society not only lacking moral anchor, but one that has long lost the will to provide the basic nurture for the future to thrive.

    So, let’s hang Abdulmalik Muhammad Tanko as many as times as we can. It is the way of the sanctimonious society. Hopefully, there’ll still be enough time to look in the mirror to see how complicit everyone is.

  • The rice pyramids of Abuja

    The rice pyramids of Abuja

    If you have not seen the trending video of the vast rice pyramids of Abuja, there is just a chance that you might have stumbled on the news of Nigeria’s Rice Mountain about to be unveiled in the nation’s capital later today by President Muhammadu Buhari. In a country where good news have become rather rare and in between; where the daily fest of bloodletting has become so routine as to be the new normal, the showbiz event of what is supposed to be the signature achievement of the Buhari administration, should understandably be big deal, and even more so an event already touted by the promoters as qualifying for a place in the Guinness Book of Records.

    Call it a festival of sorts; and you’ll be right; the project, a collaboration between the CBN and the Rice Farmers Association of Nigeria (RIFAN), seeks to pool together the assortment of rice said to be largest of its kind in the world.

    And talking about the trending video, the narration is itself something of a blast. Between the extravagant waohs and eehs of the narrator, the ‘lucky’ viewer is at once seduced into beholding what is supposed to be the eighth wonder of the universe: the sprawling Abuja Rice pyramids. And guess the voice behind the narration: the president’s point-lady, the supremely confident and trenchantly controversial Lauretta Onochie, who only recently missed the powerful INEC appointment by whiskers. Waltzing lyrical as she walked through the endless rows of rice neatly stacked in pyramidal shapes as if primed to kiss the gates of heaven, she kept muttering in wonder: –look at it … see rice… Sai Baba, Sai Buhari… millions and millions of them…this government is working…thank you to Anchor Borrowers etc.

    So much for the optics, if we discount the extravagant high praise, there is, admittedly, a lot to say of the vast progress that has been made in the last few years in the rice sector – for which all the thanks must surely go to Godwin Emefiele and his crew of the inexhaustible piggy bank.

    Yes, money – and lots of it – continues to be spent by the Central Bank of Nigeria like it would soon run out of fashion. From agriculture to industry, running through the whole gamut of the economy, an assortment of strategic sectors known to have run into bad weather in recent time continues to draw cash aplenty; no longer is any pretence about the dividing line between the fiscal and monetary realm. On virtually every policy challenge, the apex bank has been more than willing to help – meaning dole out cash – which is not necessarily a bad thing considering what is supposed to be its broad developmental role.

    Unfortunately, as it has happened all too often in recent time, whereas the activist apex bank appears to have been all fired up, rolling out one initiative after another – the elected political authorities have been too willing to tag along – most of the time unquestioningly – with the rest of the distraught society too flummoxed to bother about the systemic aberration going on!

    Now, don’t get me wrong. Both of course are supposed to play complementary roles. But the idea of the monetary authority – the lender of last resort – eclipsing the fiscal authority not just in the traditional realm of credit creation but also in the breadth of ideas and policy would seem more like an aberration turned abdication – a Nigerian novelty.

    Truly, Godwin Emefiele, the erstwhile commercial banker-turned-central banker might well be the man of the moment; the real bother is what happens should a Pharaoh in the apex bank emerge that is not as well disposed to the many Josephs of our sprawling countryside? Where will the complementary policies to ensure its sustenance come without the deliberate strengthening of the governance systems, the ancillary agencies like the Bank of Agriculture, (which at the moment, is already pronounced dead) without the hard questions being demanded of the Federal Government in particular?

    Yes; there is a lot to showcase. Again, thanks to the deliberate, targeted interventions, the country now boasts of some 20 million farmers engaged in rice cultivation, and this barely from 1.5 million farmers some six years ago. And this is not limited to cultivation alone. In the area of processing, the intervention has led to a surge from less than 10 rice mills in 2015 to 100,000 and 200,000 medium and small scale mills respectively – again, these are supposed to be verifiable. Surely, that our officials could for once, claim to have surpassed, or better still, surprise, themselves must be deserving of celebration.

    In all, however, the string of achievements cannot be anything but one half of the rice revolution story. And this is not necessarily about the throng out there for whom such avant-garde spectacle of the emptying of the various warehouses across the country is both a distraction and a disservice at a time the nation’s food import bills continue to rise. Rather, it is more about a proper evaluation of the role of the CBN itself in the business of financing the sector; the hard question of why, despite the varied incentives granted the local rice farmer and the processor – the price of the commodity still goes for between N24,000 to N28,000 (depending on the quality) in the local market and this in a country where the least paid worker only gets to take home N30,000 monthly wage.

    And then the question of why the outlandish Abuja showbiz is such a big deal at a time the local rice market continues to be swarmed with imported but smuggled rice; questions about the nature and extent of the incentives available to the farmer and how these could be enhanced; the adequacy or otherwise of the existing framework of extension services in the light of modern demands; and finally, the issue of whether or not a mechanism for price support actually exists for farmers to take advantage of – a critical matter on which the programme’s long-term sustainability depends.

    Trust me; I know a tribe out there who would insist that all of these questions do not matter since the nation is already on to an impressive start. Certainly not now with the titillating photo-Ops waiting to be harvested by officials while the Abuja mock show lasts.

  • The president has spoken

    The president has spoken

    For an administration that have, all too often, preferred the bubble of exaggerated self-assessment to the living reality that have come to define the lot of the ordinary citizen, it must have come something of a relief for its army of critics that Channel Television’s Seun Okinbaloye reeled out the stats that a somewhat startled President Muhammadu Buhari could only muffle a feeble dissension.

    And so it went:

    Okinbaloye:  “When you took over in 2015, our debt stock at the time was about 12 trillion, now it’s about 32 trillion…Inflation rate was about 9%, it’s now sitting at about 15%; unemployment rate was about 9.2%, it’s now at about 32.2%; exchange (rate) was about N197 to a dollar, now it’s way over 400 naira to a dollar. Now people would look back and say before you took over some of these indicators were fair, and now the figures are not friendly at all.”

    PMB: “Well, I am not sure how correct your calculations are, but all I know is that we have to allow people have access to the farm. We just have to go back to the land.”

    As they say – facts can prove stubborn sometimes. Which is it must have come to those expecting a robust rebuttal from the president – the same man who in another breathe tagged the opposition PDP as ‘failure’, as something of a disappointment – or an anti-climax!  So much for reeling off tangent on a subject that, among others, constitute the main issue of the moment and one that would willy-nilly define this presidency.

    Of course, it might sound somewhat ‘extremist’ to describe the number one citizen as the administration’s de-marketer-in-chief; there is no doubt, a lot that could be said of his grasp of the fundaments of policy that cannot but leave the ordinary folk bewildered.

    And that is not to say that most Nigerians do not already know where the president stands on major issues of the day.  Or his capacity, which for good measure, has proven to be somewhat overrated. Whether it is pastoralism where the presidents insists on the rights of the herders to open grazing or the good old enterprise of tilling the soil which his administration continues to push for the same old antediluvian tools of the trade, or the security arena where the president, a brass hat, is fixated on the unilineal model of command and control, what Nigerians have come to see is a leader stuck on models utterly mechanistic and outmoded; a model so unsuited to the nation’s constantly evolving dynamics that one could not but wonder about a presidency caught in some time warp.

    One often pities our dear president though if not entirely his administration for a chunk of the mess that is not entirely of their making. Picture of the Jonathan years as the years of the locust; surely, Nigerians remember an administration that had so much money it could indulge in all manner of frivolities that added nothing of real value to their lives; an era when more revenue inflow meant net zero savings, less accretion and more debts to pay. As if one needed reminding of the so-called ‘strategic alliance’ – that barely-disguised Ponzi scheme supervised by the national oil corporation under which some juicy oil blocs were alienated to private interests under some dubious partnership. Recall a country so utterly bled that even votes meant for the military in war-time went into the private accounts of officials the consequence of which the ordinarily formidable Nigerian military was reduced by to a platoon of cowboys by the Boko Haram.

    Read Also: Buhari: Journey so far

    An electricity sector parceled out to friends and cronies in the guise of privatization; a petroleum sector so crippled, hobbled and deliberated subverted until it became a joke to describe it as an industry. Of course, the less that is said of the nation’s four refineries the better; here, successive PDP administrations seems to have done far better in making them deliver tonnes of money to the pockets of corrupt officials than they have of white products.

    Well, it’s been nearly seven years since! The years of supposed broom revolution whose drum majors although promised a different course but which has since turned out to be more of the same.

    Where do we begin from? The refineries? Surely, if we concede to the president, his typically statist predilection; in other words, his desire to retain the control of the refineries in government hands, that the same president, a former (or current) petroleum minister that once pooh-poohed the idea of subsidy did practically nothing to push in the direction in the whole of a whole term and a half can only be described in the realm of the stasis for which the administration is renown.

    And the consequence – a continuing regime of fuel import bill and its subsidy correlate under which the economy reels.

    Or the power sector where the country continues to punch far below its weight? Could the administration claim to have done anything differently to excite Nigerians? What about unemployment – that is easily the corollary to the current insecurity? It is simply scary!

    And the state of insecurity?  Today, if the traditional centre of insurgency, the Northeast is less of a nut to crack, it is only because the war has not only mutated, but has found a new theatre in the Northwest and North-central. For while Nigeria might not have the flag of the Boko Haram foisted in part of the country, were Nigerians asked to choose between the sheer carnage routinely unleased by terrorists in the Northwest and North-central from their various forest bases where they are camped and those of the Boko Haram, it seems highly unlikely that they will have any to choose from. Of course, as it is in the Southeast where anarchy – from the reign of the unknown gunmen – reigns; so it is to a lesser extent in the Southwest with menace of criminal herders and kidnappers.

    All of the above is hardly about denying the administration credit where it is due. Surely, there can be no denying those visible achievements either in the road or the railway sector even if the constant refrain about doing more with less is, to put it mildly, debatable. In any case, the obverse side of the equation is the humongous debt that the administration has contracted of which increasing number of Nigerians have expressed not a little worry. As many have reasoned and rightly in my view; what Nigeria has is not so much a debt problem as it is a revenue one. Defining the problem as one of debt, I will add, misses the point in a country where the tax to GDP ratio is among the lowest in the world.

    Here is the deal: had those officials in the administration spent a fraction of their energy, or better still, applied their minds, to addressing the tax to GDP gap as they have done in their endless shuttles across the globe in the name of shopping for loans, we might in fact be talking not only of a fundamentally new approach to doing things but a sustainable public finance strategy in the long run. In all, it is in a sense, more of the same.

    But what do I know since the president apparently thinks that all of these do not matter.