Category: Sanya Oni

A not-so-little ‘drama’ took place in my otherwise sleepy Yagba West Local Government Area of Kogi State the other week, which although did not make the headlines of major newspapers, yet might provide a template for a nation at war on how to engage those terrorists within, and a validation for the clamour for multi-level policing in Nigeria’s diverse polity.

Some few days to Christmas, some hoodlums, said to number more than two dozens, armed with all manners of weapons, including explosives, had swooped on the two communities of Egbe and Odo-Ere along the Ilorin-Kabba federal highway with the three banks in the two next-door communities apparently as their target. In the operation said to have lasted nearly an hour and half, three innocent citizens lay dead even as the dare-devil robbers in the ensuing lockdown, carted whatever caught their fancy as booty.

End of story? Not quite. In fact, that was merely the first in an extended two-part play that would take a week to run the full course. For as the dare-devil operation went on, the local vigilante, on realising that they were no match for the armed-to-teeth criminals, had a carefully worked out counter strategy of ambush, shock and awe, with apparently the primary goal of pinning down the fleeing robbers and, ultimately, to frustrate their carefully laid out get-away plans.

And so for a bunch of hoodlums that could have, moments before, declared their mission as unqualified success, what followed was a dramatic twist in the tale as the fleeing party was successfully demobilised by the hunters who shot and wounded the driver of the fleeing convoy. Subsequently, the robbers would be engaged on all fronts – by the local hunters/vigilantes, including those of the adjoining local governments; the Oodua Peoples Congress volunteers, the Agbekoyas, who, according to reports, also came in their numbers.

Even the police, which initial reports claimed had started off as bystanders, would later join in the efforts; and then the soldiers too from a local detachment in the state capital – Lokoja. By this time, the robbers, now overwhelmed, had fled to the Oroke Agere –the impregnable redoubt of the valiant Okun warriors in the 19th century wars with the Nupe – in what could only be explained by their loss of bearing. And then of course the police authorities, which by this time had brought in two helicopters, for reconnaissance and attack, would seek to finish the job by unleashing lethal fire on the gang.

Well, yours truly can report that the job was not even nearly finished – days after the police helicopters returned to base. In fact, a mop up is still on-going as this is being written.  As to the number of those killed, no one claims to know as the mountain remains a no-go area. Or even the number killed in the encounter with the vigilante. But, Nigerians must have seen trending videos of stragglers picked up by villagers after they came down looking for food to buy after enduring for days without food on the mountain. Or the interesting story of two gang members caught in Isanlu, headquarters of Yagba East with N2 million cash with the wrappers said to be from one of the freshly looted banks! As at the last count, some 10 (or is it 12?) suspects are said to have been taken in from a robbery, which, had it succeeded, would have, in addition to further ruining the economic activities of the area, would have done incalculable damage to their psyche.

A lot of course has been said about both the anger and frustration of the people as catalysing the heroic pushback that saw the people literally take their destinies in their hands. Flashback to June 2020 when some robbers, numbering 20, swooped on the First Bank branch in Isanlu, the headquarters of Yagba West, Kogi.  Nine people – eight policemen and one civilian – were killed in an operation that reverberated across the Nigerian federation. Aside the scars of the gory incident remaining fresh with the bank shutters still firmly in place since, the serial incidents of bank robberies, including an earlier one at another bank in the same Odo-Ere would appear to have emboldened the hoodlums who apparently see the community as ‘meat’ to be raped and vanquished at will.

Well that era seems to have come to an end – at least in the immediate, foreseeable future.  Indeed, I have spoken to one or two of the community leaders who swore – never again – to such brazen terror and that the past week’s incident would be the last of such for a long time to come. This is because, I’m told, of a new sense of understanding – call it awareness – by the young and the old in the communities of Okun land, that whereas the police or state agents truly have their space and place in securing the people, the duty and ultimately, all that goes with it actually lies with the people themselves.

And so the myth about a people so docile that they would endure just anything – in the hands of bandits, kidnappers, criminal herdsmen or other execrable deviants– just to stay alive – would seem to have been shattered, permanently, at least in Okunland.

That– far more than the sterile debates on the constantly-morphing security challenges of which a most unyielding Buhari administration has betrayed not only a pathetic un-leadership but unexampled abdication –could only mean progress. As for the empty boastfulness of that presidential minion, the gubernatorial pretender ever too eager to claim credit for mere shadows, perhaps the less is said of his showboat governance, the better.

And so to those who still conceive of the idea of “a well-regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed” – to borrow the lingo of United States’ Second Amendment – as not only utopian, but still far-fetched, surely the events under narration can only but invite a rethink.

Here is wishing my dear readers a happy and most prosperous Year 2022.

The drumbeats are thundering all over again. For those to whom the impression had all along been created that the Petroleum Industry Act is some last epistle to set the hydrocarbon industry in order, the uproar over the latest push to remove the subsidy on petrol must have come as a disappointing anti-climax. Although it says a lot about who we are as a people of whom nothing is ever really settled, (some would argue that it is pointless since the law already anticipated the moment), nonetheless, the return of activism over the pricing of petrol is perhaps to be expected.

So, here we go – again!

I do of course understand why the issue of the subsidy removal would remain touchy. The economy has been down in years; unemployment and inflation have hit the roofs. Today, we are said to be the poverty capital of the world. In all, the indices, even with the most expansive budget by any government since the end of the civil war, have neither inspired the hope on which the citizen can hang on, nor are any pointers to any new, fundamental direction to suggest the hard lessons learnt. And while we are quite frankly, on a journey sustained more by blind faith that we’ll somehow navigate our ways out of the morass in spite of ourselves, a government that claims to seek the good of all, has like those before it, succumbed to the subsidy removal bug.

But then, one wishes that the subject, like the other equally controversial one – foreign debts – which Nigerians are also enamoured, would be driven more by rational economics or even ideology as against the seductions to raw emotions and entitlement. Today, ask any Citizen Joe about his views of the spiralling national debt and you are likely to be told that a country so rich has no business shopping for foreign loans save for the debilitating large scale corruption and the humongous cost of governance.

Dare to challenge with facts and figures – the size of the national budget, the abysmally low tax-GDP ratio of six per cent which ranks among the lowest in the entire world, and the yawning infrastructure gap and the pressing imperative to bridge them if only to give the economy a fair shot at competitiveness; you are told that these things matter only a little and that Nigerians can get by, as if, the use of camel for transportation could be defended in the age of supersonic jets!

And as if to reinforce a season marked by scaremongering, the story currently making the headlines of how Uganda’s Entebbe International Airport is about to fall into the hands of China’s Export-Import Bank of China over a 2015 loan borrowed by the President Yoweri Museveni-led administration has since come handy!

Back to the issue of subsidy and the raw emotion it has stoked. I understand the feeling of anger and of betrayal; government’s tardiness, inaction, bad faith and all of that. But then, truth is that none of these would obviate the current exigencies or sooth our pains. Before now, few actually believe that subsidy exists. The few that believe insist that simply because the government has failed to revamp its ailing refineries, it has no business selling the bogey of subsidy.

To imagine that the people are no less complicit given that the great opportunity to slay the dragon of subsidy was actually blown by the people themselves some 14 years ago! Just in case anyone has forgotten, a consortium, led by foremost industrialist Aliko Dangote had, in the in the dying days of the administration of President Olusegun Obasanjo, bought two of the nation’s refineries –Port Harcourt – 210,000 barrels per day (bpd), and Kaduna -110,000 (bpd) for a princely sum of $721 million. As it later emerged, Nigerians would rather have the NNPC continue to sink billions of naira into interminable but fruitless turn around maintenances (TAMs) than suffer the alienation of a moribund patrimony to a local business entity!

Read Also: After subsidy removal, what next?

In the aftermath of the public outcry that greeted the sale, the Umaru Yar’Adua administration was left with no choice but to abrogate a deal that could have saved the treasury billions of naira while heralding that promising first step towards private sector investment after Shell’s pioneering investment was truncated by government’s compulsory acquisition in the seventies.

Talk of a people yet to unlearn let alone dismantle the mind-set that brought us to this very spot!

Fourteen years after that unmitigated folly, the nation is literally on its knees get the same Dangote to rescue her. And while everyone is savouring the promises of the 650,000 refinery complex, particularly the savings from the the vast range of crude oil derivatives from fertiliser to petrochemical products and of course white products, conveniently glossed over is the role of international finance in the coming of the project and how this will inevitable impact on the lower end of the business.

This is where those counting on a regime low fuel price will be disappointed. They will find for instance that product price, rather than being determined by crude prices, would in fact defer to other exogenous factors as the running costs of servicing of the humongous foreign loans as indeed other countless foreign inputs in the abundance of diverse technologies involved.

Which explains not just the government’s dilemma but the difficult choice it is called to make at this time. Does the government continue to shell out nearly two trillion naira annually to subsidise the consumption of one product – while risking a potential fiscal disequilibrium? Here, even its most ardent critics appear to accept that the current situation is not only unsustainable but wasteful. Even more important from the point of view of the government is how long it could suffer a further delay in what is evidently an inevitable trajectory to price deregulation at a time new entrants are supposed to be warming up.

Unfortunately, while the government appears to have long resolved the route to take, not a few Nigerians actually suggest that the government take a pause – at least until such a time the local players come on board. This, one knows, is inherently problematic. In the first place, there will never be a good time to get Nigerians to bite the bullet. Indeed, it’s hard to see Nigerians suddenly embrace a new regime of fuel pricing without a deliberate psychological preparation for it.  Second, the treasury can no longer afford it even if the government wanted to continue along that path. Third, while Nigerians as a whole might find the idea utterly loathsome, the pressure from the global financial institutions like the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which the nation must necessarily defer in making such decisions makes any options increasingly narrow indeed.

So, we can blame the government as much as we can; only we must accept that there are too many things that the government knows, but which try as we may, our collective indignation, could do nothing to change.

While dealing with the mind-set that is rooted in the past, we just might in the final count, retain just enough energy and creativity to engage our government in the more pressing problem of tending to the poor among us! And I am not referring to the N5,000 dole that the government promised. About time we began the preparation for the dawn of a new era that is set upon us!

One of the correlates of public discourse is that constant peril of being swept off in the battering waves of mindless emotion.  In a clime where fidelity to facts – that long tested rule that undergirds fairness and objectivity – are not only freely dispensed with, but those who dared to express dissent are put to vile retributions by a mob that sees ‘truth’ from their own prejudiced but jaundiced positions, it requires little imagination to understand why the country has bitten such ethical/moral and professional dust to a point that nothing is now held as sacrosanct.

Unlike the hounds out there who swear that they have not only read the two-volume report, but have so thoroughly digested the 300-plus page to the point of becoming leading authority of sorts, this writer claims no such privilege. In any event, he couldn’t have on a document that was only released days back. And that is not even without the benefit of a reminder by those who should know, that the so-called document, already in circulation, could not have been authentic by the mere spectacle of public presentation until the government actually pushes out a white paper on it!

And even that in itself could still be challenged in the court of law!

So, here we are – with the government not only being hounded but accused of ‘bad faith’ on a matter that is at this point, ‘sub judice’; while a section of the media, the law profession, an emergency activists are already daggers drawn as if to re-enact, if not exploit, the associated tragedies of an event that should ordinarily present a teachable moment for all.

Those who finger the media as culprit for running to town with a ‘suspect’ document while going as far as to draw some wild conclusions obviously have a point. It is sadly the case that a section of the media has long thrown professionalism to the dogs in matters that ordinarily call for circumspection and good judgment. We are today at a point where hard facts needed to illuminate the events and to aid the understanding of the reader are supplanted with raw ignorance laced with activism and then served as alternative facts. And now the greatest tragedy of all time is that our leading broadcast stations are a little more than echo chambers of CNN and their prejudices!

I watched one spectacle – in which the counsel to the Lagos State government, a learned Silk, sparred with two anchors on prime time television. The former, with utmost reluctance had insisted on not being drawn into validating a leaked document. Citing the applicable law, he insisted that the so-called report in circulation, may well be a minority report in the circumstance that a number of the ‘findings’ did not match the evidence presented at the tribunal. Told by one of the anchors that a member of the panel was actually in the studio a day before to give wings to the findings which suggested that the leaked document was authentic, the learned Silk, coerced into putting the report to sword, described it as shoddy, amidst infantile protestations by the anchor who apparently mistook his duty of truth-finding for badgering!

Talk of how dirty things can sometimes get!

Nothing however compares with the gun literally held to the head of the Lagos State government by a conflicted panel member, who ironically also believes that the administration which set up the panel and at whose behest he served, could not be trusted to do justice to the report as submitted, with it the threat to release own copy should things not go as expected. That was for yours truly the turning point in what is now the needless drama that offers no serious pathway to either establishing the truth or drawing any meaningful closure to the terrible tragedy.

How many fell victim to the EndSARS carnage? Whereas Lagosians and the entire country are supposed to wait for two weeks, it seems clear that some interested parties couldn’t stand the luxury of a fortnight to sell their version of narratives. Hence we are back to the immediate post-October 20, 2020 moments going by how the matter has been going back and forth.  Needless to state that the answer to that question continues to depend on the orientation of the individual doing the body count as in ‘we versus them’ – the class of hyperactive netizens versus the old, conservative school!

Trust our fire-brand netizens and their network of NGO allies not to suffer the indignities of an inconvenient truth. It is after all, their world in which righteous indignation need not pass the muster of sifting the facts from the fiction. They can rest easy as the panel, by its strange conclusion that “the manner of the assault and killing could in context be described as a massacre”, has given validation to their quest.

To be sure, this writer is certainly not interested the wearisome debate or even the semantics of whether or not the tragic incident at the Lekki toll gate was a massacre or a military/police action gone awry. Sure it was bad enough that lives were tragically lost. Suffice to say that it seems unlikely that the police victims at the other end of town, which actually number in scores, would feature among the lot of victims, which is tragic really given the extent of the carnage visited on the institution, the reports surely, cannot come close to being accepted as a credible, historic document.

And to think that all lives are supposed to matter!

In other words, if it seems ordinarily inexcusable that the terms of reference of the two tribunals were rather narrow and limited to one of securing restitution for the victims of police brutality including those allegedly felled by the military bullets at the Lekki toll gate; that media on its part failed to insist on a proper tracking of the series of events that took place if only to have a hang of how things turned awry despite the early promises of the EndSARS protest is not only tragic, it sure qualifies as a monumental abdication of public duty. Surely, a set-out of the timeline of events would have put paid to any doubts.

And now as if to compound the abdication, such have been the denials and obfuscation as if the events right up to the late afternoon when the governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu, imposed the curfew and the even-time event October 20, 2020 are disparate and unrelated. It certainly will be interesting to see how the two-volume reports managed to navigate the challenge.

Blaming the governor for how the events later turned out is certainly understandable.  After all, the buck stops at this desk. For now, no one is even talking about the extensive damages to public property. What no one has yet put out are the options left for the chief security after those goons not only sacked dozens of police stations but took the heads of dozen plus security personnel caught in their rage home for dinner. Apparently, those belong in Nigeria’s tribe of expendables, aren’t they!

Now that the Lagos State government is apparently done with the removal of the debris of the collapsed 21-storey structure at Ikoyi’s Gerrard Road and the no less gruesome task of labelling/identification of the victims, it seems about time to get into the other matter that has been largely ignored. From such systemic failings from physical planning to development control, from environmental assessment to engineering and other regulatory mishaps, we ought to by now be able to appreciate not just the depth of the rot, but the antediluvian states of the agencies put in place to regulate the way we do things.

Next is how to ensure justice and adequate restitution for the two scores plus two victims.

As it’s always the case when things happen; everyone’s been talking – from the layman to the journeyman; the emergency commentariat with their hare-brained analysis; the emergency experts brought in from the cold; suddenly, everyone claims to know a thing or two that ought to have been – but were never in place. There is even now a swirling religious angle about the chief promoter; never mind that this was at a time the man in question still laid under the pile of rubble. There have since emerged new angles – call it theories on the matter with which the building came down – whether by bomb or explosives – and with it insinuations of sabotage!

In other words, we have had enough time chasing the structural dimensions of the tragedy while the human components of the disaster have been largely obscured. Chairman of this newspaper’s editorial board, Sam Omatseye first put up the question last week – although in a different context, when at the meeting, he broached upon the issue of compensation to the subscribers to the Fourscore Towers Project. He was of the view that the subscribers deserve compensation, since, according to him, nothing in the disaster could be traced to negligence on their part. It was, as he said, inequitable for the state government to compulsory acquire the property without addressing the issue of compensation to the innocent subscribers.

Fair point, no doubt. If I understood the premise of his argument, it stems from the same logic that underlies the compensation of innocent depositors of failed banks. Picture a group of barely a dozen wayward bankers, plunging the entire financial system into distress the result of which the regulator had to pump some N1 trillion in rescue package to keep the system from tipping over.

Of course, my reading of the affair is somewhat different: the apex didn’t bail out the investors but rather, the innocent depositors, whose savings in the entities were under threat.

In fact, yours truly would argue that the case of the lot that died or suffered great injuries in the disaster is vastly different from that of the investors. The victims – not the investors – deserve the maximum compensation as would ordinarily attach had the promoter the good sense to comply with the relevant statutes. Whereas the investors merely put in their money in which case they could either win or lose; these individuals were in the building to render service; others for different purposes for which the law already mandates broad range of protection in case of injuries or death related to their activities.

Thanks to this newspaper, we have just about enough information to suggest that statutory protections, which exist on paper, were not in place at the time of the accident. One refers specifically to the Insurance Act 2003, particularly Sections 64 and 65 which mandate existing buildings and those under construction with more than two floors must be insured against construction risks caused by negligence!

Read Also: Lagos and building collapse challenge

Indeed, both the Nigerian Insurers Association and the Nigerian Council of Registered Insurance Brokers (NCRIB), the umbrella body of insurers and brokers, have stated categorically that they have no record of insurance policy on the building!

But even more revealing: the now suspended General Manager of the Lagos State Building Control Agency (LASBCA), Gbolahan Oki, according to this newspaper, only called for a meeting with some insurance brokers to discuss insurance of public buildings in the state days before the Ikoyi structure caved in!

Now, that’s as huge as the implication is frightening. We are not talking here of a motorist refusing to take a third party insurance against potential liabilities of a third-party nature in the event of an accident – which is itself bad enough, but rather, of an investor in a multiple billion-naira project neglecting to observe a statutory requirement under the law, while those meant to enforce the law, look the other way.

Some would of course argue that we’ve seen worse. That this will not be the first time such terrible neglect, which border on the criminality, will be happening on the nation. They cite the infamous example of Sosoliso Airline, whose aircraft crashed at Port Harcourt International Airport on December 10, 2005 but which at the time had no valid insurance cover; yet was allowed to fly the nation’s airspace. The story then was that the original owners of the MD-83 plane, Yugoslavia JAT Airlines, was in the process of renewing the aircraft’s insurance when Sosoliso took it on a lease.  At the time it was leased, JAT had only paid a paltry sum out of the premium to its insurer while the Nigerian carrier, was to complete the process after. Well, that never happened – until the crash that dissolved some 103 precious lives in a terrible ball of fire.

You and I know what happened after. Instead of the mandatory compensation of $100,000 to the beneficiaries as required under the international aviation regulations, beneficiaries would later be coerced into a backroom settlement with a non-disclosure proviso attached! Talk of disaster-mitigation and settlement the Nigerian way!

Talk of a vast crime scene of a country; how many buildings have collapsed in the last decade? I came across a study by Olasunkanmi Habeeb Okunola, a scholar based in South Africa that in Lagos alone, some 152 buildings collapsed between 2005 and 2020.  Of the lot, 76.6% were residential buildings, while commercial buildings accounted for 13.0%, the remaining 9.4% being institutional buildings. Nigerians would recall the most ‘notable one of September 12, 2014, in which a guesthouse located within the Synagogue Church of All Nations premises came down during which 115 people, mostly foreigners died.

Again, talk of a country where risk-management systems are virtually non-existent; one whose 22 listed insurance companies have 16 still struggling to meet the required capital threshold as it pertains to their line of business.  The last time I checked, the industry had been locked in protracted recapitalization that has taken the most of the past three years with no stability yet in sight. And that was before Covid-19 happened. And that was after the earlier capitalisation round of 2007.

Talk of a confederacy in infamy – the unholy triad starring an anaemic insurance sector, a predatory investor class and negligent state institutions; what you have is a perfect tag-team in the making of Nigeria’s legendary man-made disasters with innocent citizens more often than not their collateral victims.

While we focus attention on how the disaster in that high-rise building in the highbrow Ikoyi managed to be, pressing for appropriate restitution for the luckless victims – which ironically include the investor himself, seems the next logical step. In other words, time for our public interest lawyers and activists to commence a class action suit that seeks exemplary damages on behalf of the victims.

Although it’s still some six weeks to Christmas, a lot of excitement is already in the air. For this, all thanks must go to Godwin Emefiele and crew for giving Nigerians something to chew upon. Never mind the initial false start, the long-awaited digital currency finally arrived Monday 25 – although not without a bout of glitches here and there and – wait for it – a most unwarranted disclaimer by the issuer!

Talk of excitement; yours truly has yet to figure out what the excitement is all about. I watched President Muhammadu Buhari speak at the launch. He spoke of Nigeria being ‘the first country in Africa, and one of the first in the world to introduce a digital currency to her citizens’.

What I didn’t hear was that the naira – let alone the eNaira on which it is inextricably indexed – has suddenly become the currency of choice in the sub region not to talk of the continent. Trust a leadership that has long perfected the art of counting the chicks before they are hatched, we are told to gobble the flat, home-made fiction that ‘the adoption of CBDC and its underlying technology, called blockchain, can increase Nigeria’s GDP by US$29 billion over the next 10 years’!

Unfortunately, if the eNaira launch had sought to presage an era in which central banks seek to go global – via the Central Bank Digital Currency (CBDC) – the apex bank seems to have done a lot of muddling up to leave Nigerians more bewildered than informed.

Indeed, merely by the way the eNaira has been hyped and sold, you’d be right to put the eNaira on the pedestal of those tradeable instruments that those bright chaps on the stock exchange floor would not be found without. I mean the kind of instrument that shrewd investors would rather have for keeps.

Interestingly, I have heard not one or two people refer to it as Emefiele’s cryptocurrency – which although amusing, is not necessarily off the mark.

Of course, they are partly wrong and, right!

Right – because cryptocurrencies actually foreshadowed the eNaira as a digital financial instrument.

Few months ago, a good number of Nigerians could have sworn that cryptocurrencies came closest to the idea of ‘digital currency’. Not only were they freely traded at the crypto exchanges, they were actually transactional instruments of choice among the class of the so-called big boys who preferred to operate in the shadows. That was the case until February, when Emefiele decided that the cups of the operators were full. He did not only shut them out of the financial system, he went as far as ordering the closure of their accounts.

Read Also: BREAKING: Why e-Naira went missing on Google playstore, by CBN

They are also wrong to have described it as such because, while the coming of the eNaira could be linked to that development, it is simply not a case of one replacing the other! Although Emefiele had then made clear that the sins of the crypto exchanges – which included their lack of regulation, being a playground of sorts to shadowy investors and speculators and so open to all manners of illicit financial transactions, which meant that it was only a matter of time before bad money flooded and ultimately destroy the financial system under his watch – the best he could do was what he’s already done – which is to keep them at bay!

In other words, the eNaira didn’t come to replace them. The eNaira for all the noise and excitement was not even designed to be an antidote to the cryptocurrency challenge! Although deriving from the same blockchain technology, the objectives are clearly different.  As for the eNaira, not in anyone’s wild imagination could it be described as a game-changer in any shape or form more so in a country with countless other platforms for digital transactions.

Which is why many still wonder – what difference would the eNaira make, when, with the touch of a few buttons on my smartphone, I could send tens of thousands of naira to my mum in the village all within seconds?

Let me attempt an answer this way – it is like asking why anyone would bother with say Telegram in a world where the WhatsApp and other messaging applications already rule?

To the extent that today’s world is driven by innovation, such derivatives are only to be expected.

I do understand that the CBN e-wallet comes with a number of attractions. Said to be fast and safe – offering simple trading and transactional opportunities to customers and end-users, it comes as the apex bank’s introduction to the game! While it doesn’t pretend to be anything more than being an additional channel to those already in the business, it does offers multiple values which those countless other platforms could only but dream. In other words, the CBDC idea, of which the eNaira is an early comer, it is one whose time has come, although not in any sense revolutionary as one might imagine it to be!

For our banks that have long mastered the art of making fortunes from doing little, with their multiple charges on transactions, the eNaira platforms means real competition hence tough times ahead. In perhaps a year or two, Nigerians should be able to measure its impacts on their bottom-line. So much for their penchant for unearned wealth.

This takes me to the final point – which is the tragedy of a country which continues to soar on the financial technology (fin-tech) plane, but which for whatever reasons has not been able to get the basic things right. No doubt, innovation is good. It is the way of the world. As it is, if progress were to be measured by mere offerings on the fin-tech arena, Nigeria would certainly be a clear leader on the global front. In the same way, if there are any lessons to draw from the surfeit of the countless innovations which offer no more than platforms to shuffle currencies – whether virtual or physical – around and among the citizens of different cadres in the society, it is their limitation in engendering real wealth.

I watched Malam Jafaar Jafaar, publisher of Nigerian Daily provide some interesting context moments after his medium broke the news of the blast on the Kaduna bound rail by some bands of terrorists on Arise Television mid- last week. That was even at a time when the debate still raged as to whether there was any blasts at all, let alone on the Kaduna-Abuja rail network. As I would learn later, the former senator representing the Kaduna Central district, Shehu Sani, had actually reported this on his Facebook page.  He said the bandits planted an explosive that damaged the rail track and shattered the windshield of the train’s engine on Wednesday evening.

The Nigerian Railway Corporation had, as if to compound the confusion, initially denied only to concede later that an incident did in fact, take place.  A terse statement from Fidet Okhiria, said that the explosives damaged the rail track at a spot between Dutse and Rijana, and that the corporation was making efforts to restore train services on the route.

“Efforts are currently ongoing to ensure that the train services along the Kaduna-Abuja route are fully restored,” he said.

The meat of Jafaar’s intervention was that the Nigerian security agencies actually received some intel alerting them to the imminence of the blast. He alluded to some specific targets mentioned in the report which he claimed the agencies had; efforts to reach the police and perhaps other agencies – all to no avail. In the end, the Nigerian Daily publisher gave valuable clues as to why some officials should be called in for questioning for what amounts to acts of gross dereliction of their duties, while also calling for serious interrogation and possible overhaul of the extant reporting structure under which egregious failures bordering on breaches of national security could take place!

Talk of the tragedy merely echoing the typical Nigerian tragedy: one bored official on getting the intel quips – what of it – convinced that the big man on the reporting line probably has better things to do with his time. That one passes on to the next in line, who although convinced of its actionable contents, does not care a hoot.  Indeed, he merely assumes it’s a trophy of sorts for a day’s exertion, as against setting the trigger to scupper a looming conflagration. And when it then happens…trust the grandmasters of the lecture circuit holding a world press conference to rationalise/deny/vilify and, ultimately to exculpate themselves!

Talk of the Nigerian version of intelligence utilisation!

Well, it’s been more than 144 hours since. No one has yet to be called in for questioning.  Indeed, mum has remained the word between then and now from the police, the Department of State Security and other agencies.

Is it a case of being too embarrassed to admit the obvious? Or perhaps that they do not think Nigerians deserve explanations on why the blast could not have been aborted despite the prior intel received?

Guess matters of security are for the closet even if citizens are daily reminded that security is everyone’s business. In the meantime, the locomotives have since Saturday returned to active duty belching their smoke through the thick Abuja-Kaduna forests – never mind that the distraught passengers are still in states of shock or suspended animation!

Left to Rotimi Amaechi, our minister of railways (or is it transportation?) the incident, if it happened at all, is probably just one of those countless but minor footnotes in the nation’s calendars of catastrophe. The minister is since back on his desk with a new energy and resolution: to talk some sense into those fellows in the Federal Executive Council who before now could not be convinced that the railway corridors needed to be protected!

To yours truly, that itself is some revelation! I mean the minister’s implicit admission that the Federal Executive Council, right up till now, could not have envisaged the possibility of the rail tracks constituting soft targets to local vandals and their unscrupulous foreign cohorts?

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Not after the stories daily told of some unscrupulous Nigerians and their Chinese counterparts making brisk business from harvesting rail tracks and sleepers only now being fairly common! One such haul, apparently headed for a steel factory somewhere in Ogun State was intercepted by the Anti-Kidnapping Unit of the Nasarawa State Police Command. That was in May – some four months ago. Among those reportedly taken in was a Chinese national, Marra Thai and an aide of Nasarawa’s Governor Abdullahi Sule and 13 others. Also in the same month, this time in the coal city of Enugu, the police and the local vigilante, apparently acting on intelligence, swooped on a gang of outlaws attempting to vandalise railway tracks at Nkwubor rail-line.

Of course, if one had imagined that the vandals would restrict their heists to the sprawling network of disused tracks littering every corner of the country, Nigerians would, in the same month of May have a taste of the new broth being prepared; the brigands extended their reign of outlawry to the newly delivered Itakpe – Aladja – Warri line.  This time, the vandals cut several sections of the track around Kilometre 30, Adogo, in Kogi State. All of these – we told were going on – while Minister Amaechi was making frantic  efforts to persuade his colleagues in the Federal Executive Council to buy into his digital security template!

Last week the ‘vandals’ would remind us that the country is still at war; more than that, they also served notice that nothing is off-limits; that all is fair in war!

Those who still doubt the progression of the so-called roving band of outlaws to their the mutation into bandits and to what is finally their unrestrained embrace of raw terror, and so believe that the rest of us should join in their wild semantic sophistry apparently know a thing or two that the rest of us do not yet know. However, while our common rationality still subsists, it’s probably not too much to ask them to consider the programmed mass murder that would have eventuated had the vandals had their way – from the coaches careening off the track at those ungodly hours of the night, with the scores of the bandits lurking nearby moving in to finish what they had planned all along! By then, there would just be enough passengers alive to hive off a hefty ransom from Nigeria’s subdued mass!

Talk of the terrorists that they have misnamed bandits being on the march; from missions to down fighter jets, they have their sights now set on the railway’s terra firma!

We must of course thank God for the tragedy that was averted. Also, we must hold Minister Amaechi to his promise to fish out the terrorists who planted the explosives on the rail track.

Even at that, the job would not be considered as nearly half done. Nigerians deserve to know whether some officials had actionable intel and neglected to take action or pass on to the appropriate organs of government. They need to know why basic things were not in place before the commencement of the rail services. For while Nigerians might have been in the race to join the rest of the civilised world in rail transportation, it stands also to reason that such small but basic things as comfort and security are actually what signals our arrival into modernity!

Nigeria, it’s been said over and over again, is where stuff happens. If you live in these parts and have not received a rather strange, anonymous call from a lender alerting you about a certain debtor that you stood for as guarantor being on the run; and for whom you are not only presumed liable but faces imminent retribution in the event the debt not being made good within the hour, you are probably one of those lucky ones insulated from the humdrum that have come to define Nigerians’ existence.

The first time I got the strange call which I initially considered a big joke, was some three weeks back. According to the caller, I stood surety for a debtor who has failed to pay as at when due. The call, according to caller, was to alert me of the consequences of further default. Before I could wrap my head around what the caller was saying, he cut the phone.

I simply told myself that the call was not for me. Except the referenced transaction was done in the course of sleep!

It wasn’t that one was unfamiliar with unsolicited calls of the kind routinely received from cable TV service providers as if one needed reminders about subscription nearly due; this one, a one-way monologue was different, meant to rattle.

Some three weeks on and nearly a dozen calls after, so mentally dismissive of the endless rambling, or rather inured that the calls had become, to me, another variant of Nigeria’s all-too-familiar but nonetheless unending pathologies.

And the calls simply kept coming. By Sunday night, the new merchant-lenders knew enough to raise their game not just to unnerve the supposedly recalcitrant ‘guarantor’ but apparently, to seek to bend his will.

Reproduced hereunder is the message sent to my Whatsapp Sunday afternoon by the obviously agitated but emboldened creditor. For obvious reasons, I chose to leave out the real name of the debtor and the location.

DEBTOR: -XYZ HYJX- whose BVN ends with (011) and phone number 0815099… collected loan from AIMLOAN Residential address: ABCD Avenue, ORANG UTANG, CITY and she has been acting STRANGE. She has refused to pay back the loan she collected and She dropped your number as one of her emergency contacts meaning she has involved you.

Kindly inform HER to make payment in the next an Hour or Report her before she puts you in trouble. This will be sent to all your contacts if that payment doesn’t drop in the next an Hour. WE ARE YET TO SEE THE PAYMENT… KINDLY WARN HER SO THAT SHE WONT REGRET HER ACTION AND ALSO PUT YOU INTO TROUBLE LATER.

Me, an emergency contact in the case of inability of the debtor to repay her loan? Don’t ask me if I knew the amount involved, the time the transactions took place, the terms of the offer and other such considerations which the two parties agreed.  It was sufficient that my name featured, perhaps among many, on the contact list of the debtor for which I must necessarily assume vicarious liability!

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Trust me, I did a few checks. Do I know any of the debtors named? The answer of course is yes! One of them, a distant cousin I last saw some four years ago at a family function during which we exchanged contacts. Since then, we have barely spoken outside of the typical Nigerian pleasantries of “How you dey” and this often lasting no more than a minute or two. The other, I recall came my way during her undergraduate days at the University of Ibadan where she was apparently the team leader in a group assignment in her class. A friend had referred her to me for possible assistance following which I facilitated her access to the company library. That must have been some six or seven years ago! Since then, we have probably met a few times and only in the context of a young lady and extending the usual courtesies to ‘daddy’.

These are supposed to be the debtors on the run for which I am deemed liable!

As anyone would imagine, I simply placed a call to the subjects of interest – the debtors. Both of course did confirm that the transactions took place. Interestingly, both would almost swear that nothing in the process alluded to a third party let alone someone like me whom, both agreed, could easily have been notified were that to be found necessary. The closest, one admitted, was a pop up question on the company website –requiring permission to access to contacts which she had, almost without thinking, obliged! And then, she also let out one other element as if to help resolve the puzzle: some half-dozen names on her telephone contacts have also been contacted and harassed over the issue loan!

Surely, one needn’t be a student of cultural anthropology to appreciate where this is coming from. Call it an attempt, though misbegotten, to fit an old debt-collection tactic into modern financialism; the inherent logic – ‘name and shame’ – which ordinarily underlies it would seem hard to beat. The problem isn’t just that the creditors opted to sink into the time-warp that is absolutely their making, in their seduction to communalism, they failed to read the signs correctly to appreciate how much things have changed in the age of BVN and other such tools and in the environment where such things as privacy and data protection have come to matter. For while the sometimes twisted psychology of the creditor and their resort, sometimes, to the crude tactic not unlike that of Shylock, the fictional character in William Shakespeare’s play – Merchant of Venice – would seem the natural order where the weak and the strong are involved, the truth is that a lot has changed.

Now it would appear that the small fry has come of age. In a country where the big man can borrow billions of naira from the financial system with neither the plan to pay nor the consequence to bother about; where the lenders and their agents in exquisite suits charged with duty to ensure that the system is not fleeced choose to act delinquent, comfortable enough to pass off the fruits of their fatal indiscretions to the bad bank – AMCON, our new club of players – lenders and borrowers alike – by their latest ignoble conducts have not only shown how much they have learnt, but how ingrained the disorder is in the polity.

Back to the shylocks currently on the prowl. Nigerians have seen banks – big and small – rise and fall as a result of those borrowing failing to pay back. It’s bad for business – not just for banks but any business for that matter. Unfortunately, if yours truly understands their dilemma, I have very little appreciation for their self-inflicted pain of abdication, stemming from the simple failure to do due diligence and to properly secure their loans. While they have every right to collect every kobo owed them, the idea of making me a collecting agent, going as far as issuing threats for a transaction that I was neither privy to let alone endorse is simply criminal. Although, I have not spoken to lawyers, there is a sense in which the companies could be held liable for the misuse of data harvested from the phones of their debtors.

Messrs AIMLOAN and others disturbing my peace should take note.