Category: Sanya Oni

Sanya Oni

Thanks to a section of the Nigerian elite for yet another chapter from their book of mischief and bad faith: it’s like the cries of our nomads, particularly those of their armed variant – not those of the victims of their scorched earth activities across the length and breadth of the federation – have finally reached their heavenly abodes. Words like “mass eviction”, “massacre”, “genocide” and “ethnic profiling” have suddenly become the buzz words in a clime where notions of standards of right and wrong, not least, that of human dignity have come to mean next to nothing. Finally, the hurt is being felt in the part least expected!

Welcome to Nigeria, a country of innumerable paradoxes and puzzles!

Seems like yesterday when scores of Agatu communities in Benue State were razed and hundreds, including women, children and the elderly, massacred by suspected herdsmen of the Fulani stock. That was in February 2016. And just when the country was still in wonder as to those behind the heinous crime, a certain Saleh Bayeri, then Interim National Secretary of Gan Allah Fulani Association, had not only stepped forward on behalf of “his” people to own the crime, but claimed that it was merely a reprisal attack for an earlier injury inflicted on his people.

According to him, some 20 Agatu and Tiv militias had on April 20, 2013, invaded the compound of one Shehu Abdullahi, killing him and carting away over 200 cows. He claimed that the police confirmed to Fulani leaders that they knew where 150 of the cows were kept and the Divisional Police Officer promised to recover and return the cows. As it turned out, nothing of the sort happened.

End of story? Not quite!

He claimed that three days after the murder of Abdullahi and the stealing of his cows, a prominent Fulani leader, Ardo Madaki, invited to the palace of the district head of the area to help resolve the crisis, was beheaded Ardo right in front of the district head.

“This action”, he had claimed at the time, “reverberated across all Fulani people in the whole of West Africa and the clamour for revenge began to grow strong…” We know the rest of the story.

Five years on, there are enough of the harvests of impunity and self-help for a country said to be a constitutional republic to choke on. Such has been the horrific twists in the tales to the age-long farmers-herders clashes, the metastasization of the festering sore to such an extent that an old problem is not only now barely recognizable but has since become so complex as to become intractable.

One recalls a notable example in 2018, when some communities in Guma and Logo local governments of Benue State again came under the fire of the pastoralists’ militia in an attack that left 73 dead. That time, the Minister of Defence, Mansur Dan-Ali, it was, that supplied the rationalization. The herders, he surmised, had little choice; it was a last-ditch challenge to an existential threat in the event that their grazing routes had since been taken over by the agrarian farming communities of Benue. As if it was not bad enough that the state government enacted the anti-open grazing law, he says, it went on to set up and arm forest guards to enforce the legislation.

Again, we know the rest of the story

Today, the theatre has since shifted to the Southwest. And so has the nature and texture of the crisis. Talk of the push coming to the shove – just very much like the Tivs and the Agatus of the Benue Valley, the increasingly restive Yorubas appear neither willing to turn the other cheek while a band of rampaging herders turn their homesteads to a wasteland, nor persuaded of the admonition of President Muhammadu Buhari for tolerance in an atmosphere where the government, expected to be the guarantor of the public peace has chosen to be either AWOL or seen to betray a certain degree of complicity in the tragedy!

Yes, everyone is talking of a certain Sunday Igboho and his forces of atavism, his outlawry and mission in self-help.  Those who love him of course see him as their man of the moment, just as few are prepared to appreciate how much awareness he has brought to the layers of the problem that is not only threatening to tear the country apart but also fast redefining our humanity.

To some, it suffices that he’s broken the law and so the law should be set upon him! Did I hear someone say – wishful?

It is perfectly understandable, that some, while of enamoured of the specious legalism of invoking the constitution for a lost cause would at the same time gloss over other issues that would truly give context and meaning to the whole. A good example is the claim currently bandied about the rights of Nigerians to live anywhere of their choosing as if this vitiates the rights to own and keep property or that a land tenure system is actually in place!

Call him a hero or villain, Sunday Igboho’s coming, like I pointed out on this page two weeks back, seems to me the perfect foil needed to force a rethink on the multifarious issues around herdsmen’s menace at these dangerous times.

So much for the denials at the highest levels of government; few Nigerians could claim to be unaware of the destructive activities of the migrant herders. To them, it is like the laws, simply do not exist, or it does at all, it does not affect them. It explains why many of them carry sophisticated arms that they are only too willing to display and use at the slighted provocation. Unfortunately, while it doesn’t help matters that the business of pastoralism has come to be associated with the Fulani, or that their modus operandi have tended to convey an impression of untouchables which often times takes the form of invasion of ancestral lands without care to the concerns or the feelings of the owners; the rape, kidnapping and the mayhem that is increasingly associated with the occupational group has become something difficult to ignore. And so, the governors, increasing helpless and lacking the formal means to enforce their will in their domains, have had to increasingly improvise while the people themselves, left at the mercy of the outlaws, have since resorted to helping themselves.

Reminds me of Newton’s third law: For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

By Sanya Oni

When all is said and done, one of the things that would stick out like a sore thumb among many of the instances of our pathetic response to the Covid-19 pandemic and its variegated correlates is the absence of an enabling presidential leadership.  For an administration that has been practically AWOL in all matters substantive, the other noteworthy observation is perhaps the astounding dissonance – the lack of coherence – among the actors at the highest echelon of government. Only that would perhaps explain why the Covid-19 has suddenly become less concerning than a ministerial pet project of getting all SIM cards integrated with the National Identity Number (NIN) and all expected to be concluded within a month. For those who thought that the country should be locked in a different kind of emergency given the surge in recent time of Covid-19 cases, Minister Isa Ali Patami has a contrary view: a country burdened by internal security challenges which in any case would outlast Covid-19 had bigger things to worry about than the super-spreader event that would follow a swoop on the NIMC offices to get an NIN. That is supposed to be a minor price for the citizens to pay given that the latter (terrorism) would still be with us long after Covid-19 is gone!

Dissonance could not have been more apt – or fitting description.

That, as I earlier noted, is however nowhere near the absence of enabling leadership that have characterized the management of Covid-19 pandemic. So much for the foibles of a certain Donald J. Trump, it would seem particularly doubtful that the world would have reached this point without Operation Warped Speed a wholly American presidential initiative designed to speed up the discovery and development of vaccines.

Last July, I had written on this page a piece titled Missing in Action to express my concern about the biggest economy on the continent not only missing in action in the race for Covid-19 vaccine but that she stood little chance of accessing them whenever they are ready. Unfortunately, this is what the events since the emergence of the breakthrough vaccines have since borne out. Thanks to the global pharm giants, Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, the world might have begun to see a tiny spark of light at the end of a long dark tunnel as far as the battle against the virus is concerned; we are now finding out that only those who get to their money where their mouths are not only gets served first, but also determines who and whether anyone else for that gets served in the end; and that all talks about globalism are cheap – it avails only after the big and the mighty have had their fill.

Now, we are stuck with the Hobson choice: to turn eastwards for the unproven Chinese vaccine, or wait endlessly on the West for the tiny droplets that would trickle down after the rich and the powerful have had their fill.

Sure, Nigeria will get the vaccines at some point; the relevant questions however are which, when and in what quantity.

The country, according to Health Minister Osagie Ehanire, has a working group in place to handle vaccines. It is also working with the COVAX programme backed by the World Health Organization. She is also in talks with vaccine manufacturers as well as teams in Britain and Russia. In fact, the United Arab Emirates is said to have introduced the country to the makers of a Chinese vaccine that its officials had tested.

And the big catch? Nigeria does not at present have many facilities that can store the Pfizer/BioNTech shot, which must be kept at minus 70 Celsius!

Sound familiar?

In all of these, only in the past few weeks was the nation actually reminded of the few worthy names in the local pharma/scientific community not only left in town but whose on-going endeavours could actually make a huge difference at this time.

To be sure, not a few Nigerians could claim to have heard of a certain IVERCOVID Research Group, at least, not until very recently when the group emerged from the shadows to present their work on Ivermectin, a drug, hitherto used in the treatment of River Blindness, to Vice President Yemi Osinbajo. The group, said to be led by Femi Babalola, an Ophthalmologist and surgeon, Chris Bode, the Chief Medical Director of LUTH, the chairman of the Medical Advisory Council at LUTH, Lanre Adeyemo; a US-based Clinical Pharmacologist, Adesuyi Ajayi; two project virologists: S.A Omilabu and Olumuyiwa Salu; with Felix Alakaloko as  Project Coordinator. Not to these eminent Nigerian scientists a case of seeking to re-invent the scientific/pharmaceutical wheel; rather, what they sought was a “repurposing of an existing drug for the treatment of the pandemic. The work, carried out in the Lagos University Teaching Hospital (LUTH) was said to have followed the report of a 5,000-fold reduction in viral load by Australian workers with in-vitro use of Ivermectin on COVID-19. Recall that the Americans actually undertook a similar work of “re-purposing” Remdesivir and the controversial hydroxychloroquine – all with limited, although incontrovertible results. Only that this time, the group of eminent scholars are not only well prepared by carefully documenting their breakthrough findings but are also ready to engage their peers in the global community on their findings.

By the way, whatever happened to Helix Biogen Consult, & Trinity Immonoefficient Laboratory, both in Ogbomoso, Oyo State, whose potential vaccine was listed among the candidates way back?

I do understand that the Buhari administration is highly interested in partnering with the IVERCOVID group to ensure that the country reaps the benefit of their work. That seems the reasonable thing to do particularly at this time. In any case, the choice before us is pretty limited: at an average cost of $8 per shot, we have neither the funds to ensure universal vaccination of our 200 million citizens nor the infrastructural wherewithal to take, preserve and deliver the new vaccines!

Unfortunately, if I understand how things work in these parts, that quest would remain a tall order. Not with the ingrained psychology in which public policy is decidedly skewed in favour of procurement; certainly not with a leadership class known to be hostage to foreign interests. In the end, all that would be required for the noble endeavor to be thrown through the window is for one third-rate, no-good bureaucrat-agent of the Big-Pharma to render a one-line unfavourable opinion for the efforts of these acclaimed scholars to come to naught!

Isn’t that what makes us what we are? By the way, when shall be begin to celebrate our homegrown initiatives?

By Sanya Oni

I know a tribe out there who still maintain that the attempted coup on the Capitol on January 6 was not pre-meditated; that it was merely a case of protest gone awry. That Donald Trump, the wily showman couldn’t have imagined that the insidious forces which he unleashed in the aftermath of the United States’ November elections would end up in undermining the very institution in the world’s greatest democracy.

I guess those in the tribe still imagine that those serial attempted criminal subversion of the election were simply fake news. Add to it the curious mathematics in which his 75 million supporters made him WIN BIG leaving his opponent Joe Biden with 81milliin votes a LOSER! Moreover, that the Electoral College which he also lost by 232 to Biden’s 306 actually counted for nothing – at least in the eyes of the Trump mob. And then the tales by a certain Brad Raffensperger, Georgia’s secretary of state, in which Trump was alleged to have implored him with veiled threats and lies to change the outcome of the election; that was supposed to have been sexed up. Never mind also: those frantic calls – and if you like to add the shuttle from court to court -to torpedo the will of the voter – were part of the supposed democratic process.

Welcome to America’s exceptionalism – the theory that the United States is inherently different from other nations. Or better still superior to other nations or having a unique mission to transform the world.

For me, it is a good thing that the January 6 infamy happened. Had things turned otherwise, we’d probably still be under the illusions of the so-called greatest democracy on earth being the exemplar of its finest tenets. Now with five dead and probably scores of heads broken not to talk of the damage and desecration of its sacred symbol, the iconic Capitol building – victims of a riot incited by a law and order President Trump, there might just be one or two things still left from that old manual of democracy a la Uncle Sam!

How much of things have turned asunder in God’s Own Country remains a matter of debate. But then, if the world was caught in any surprise, it was because it failed to pay attention to the character-portrait so apt, of the man at the centre of the storm by no less a man than the late conservative columnist, the late Charles Krauthammer years back: “This is beyond narcissism. I used to think Trump was an 11-year-old, an undeveloped schoolyard bully. I was off by about 10 years. His needs are more primitive, an infantile hunger for approval and praise, a craving that can never be satisfied. He lives in a cocoon of solipsism where the world outside himself has value – indeed exists – only insofar as it sustains and inflates him … (He) is dangerously out of the mainstream and temperamentally unfit to command the nation.”

Of course, he had more to say – like for instance when the news surfaced that his campaign had sought to obtain dirt from the Russians on his 2016 opponent, Hillary Clinton. He had written inter alia: “Once you’ve said ‘I’m in,’ it makes no difference that the meeting was a bust, that the intermediary brought no such goods. What matters is what Donald Jr. thought going into the meeting, as well as Jared Kushner and then-campaign manager Paul Manafort, who were forwarded the correspondence, invited to the meeting, and attended … (The) three top Trump campaign officials were ready to play …It’s rather pathetic to hear Trump apologists protesting that it’s no big deal … It’s one thing to be open to opposition research dug up in Indiana. But not dirt from Russia, a hostile foreign power that has repeatedly invaded its neighbours”.

Coincidentally, such sinister plots, familiar as the skin to him, would consume his administration when he turned to Ukraine for dirt on his current nemesis, Joe Biden and his son Hunter. With Nancy Pelosi’s House having none of it – he was summarily impeached by the Democratic Party-led Congress.

Like the prophet, Krauthammer had surmised of the Trump odyssey: “Trump” he said “is a systemic stress test” for America even as he had noted that, “the institutions of both political and civil society are holding up well.” Hence his abiding faith that “the sinews of our democracy” will thwart “the careening recklessness of this presidency.”

That summation, though somewhat prescient, unfortunately fell short of explaining, not just the Trump phenomenon but his mythical, cult-like following – the throng once described by Hilary Clinton as “deplorables”. For a country that prides itself as the most ‘civilised’ in the world, that some 75 million odd American citizens – more than a fifth of the population actually fell to Trump’s twitterdom of lies and wild conspiracy theories, is itself indicative of pathology far deeper that the episodic rants by their culprit in chief.

Thanks to January 6 storming of the Capitol, the ugly side of America’s public life, long in denial, has now been fully revealed. More, the fabric of a nation that claims to be God’s Own has been sundered by those to whom the right to lord over others has come to equate divine right.

Of course, Trump didn’t happen by chance any more than he would suddenly disappear from public view after January 20. Expect the impeachment axe, currently hanging over Trump to drive the lunatic fringe among the hordes of his supporters over the edge, as America prepares for the worst in the coming weeks.

Understandably, there are those Americans who would rather halt what has become an inevitable curve in humanity’s collective march for progress. And to imagine, as the eminent Tatalo Alamu puts it, that the “struggle has taken up most of the last three centuries and has witnessed a momentous civil war, horrific massacres of native Americans, emancipation of African-Americans from slavery, race riots, civil rights campaigns, protest marches for the rights of all American to vote and be voted for, affirmative action in colleges, the rise of extreme and murderous right-wing clans and a countervailing upsurge in a radical Black prelacy and the election of an American president of African extraction”.

Now, short of an outright civil war, those gains – although too little and somewhat incremental – would appear to have come to stay hence the current rage across the vast lands of America. For America, it might yet be morning on creation day.

Finally, a word for Trump’s religious enablers – the Evangelicals and their local protestant minions. Trump might be their Cyrus the Great, the famed annointed king of Persia, prompted by God to decree that the Temple in Jerusalem be rebuilt. He may have pandered to their religious fancies; but to put him in the pedestal of that remarkable monarch under whom the Babylonian captivity ended is to abuse the import of history. By now, they ought to be humbled by the knowledge that God’s ways are not necessarily theirs just as their claims to exclusivity in the divine order, are more often than not, without the so-called ecclesiastical basis.

By Sanya Oni

Earlier in April the New York Times had reported that the Trump administration had reached an agreement in principle with major airlines over the terms of a $25 billion bailout to prop up the aviation as the coronavirus pandemic ravaged. In the deal put together by the Treasury Department, carriers like Alaska Airlines, Allegiant Air, American Airlines, Delta Air Lines, Frontier Airlines, Hawaiian Airlines, JetBlue Airways, United Airlines, SkyWest Airlines and Southwest Airlines would benefit from the package designed to help them pay their workers. A month after the US intervention, there were also reports of Her Majesty’s government, also in a desperate attempt to mitigate the devastation caused by Covid-19, reportedly shelled out £1.8bn of British taxpayers’ money to four British carriers – British Airways, EasyJet, Wizz Air and Ryanair

Several months after, Nigerians could only mutter about the fate of their local aviation industry in the face of their own experience of similar devastation wrought from the months of imposed inactivity. Today, if the conventional wisdom across the globe is one in which countries continue to work out mitigating interventions to keep their domestic aviation industries up and running, the Nigerian government has certainly done pretty little to demonstrate not just the enormity of the challenge let alone a resolve take such measures that are necessary at this to rescue its beleaguered carriers.

And this is an industry that is traditionally assailed by myriad of challenges not limited to high operating costs, multiple charges and unfriendly policy environment. And now to add the burden imposed by the enforced lockdown from the pandemic, the outlook cannot be anything but deeply concerning.

And the signs are already with us. In August, Air Peace, arguably the nation’s leading airline not only laid off 70 pilots, it went on to effect an across the board cuts in salaries and emoluments for staff. A simple notice from the airline had summed it up: “The airline cannot afford to toe the path of being unable to continue to fulfil its financial obligations to its staff, external vendors, aviation agencies, maintenance organisations, insurance companies, banks and other creditors…”

That note had ended rather ominously: “Anything short of what we have done may lead to the collapse of an airline as could be seen in some places worldwide during this period”.

Arik Air another promising airline would join the train when earlier in the month, it offloaded some 300 workers. For an airline already on the throes of asphyxiation (over 50 per cent of its workforce of over 1,600 staff had been on furlough in the last six months), the development must have come as a final nail on the coffin of sorts.

Like the statement from Air Peace, the text was in every way similar: “Arising from the devastating impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to the constrained ability of the airline to complete heavy maintenance activities and return its planes to operations, stunted revenues against increasing operational costs, the management of Arik Air (In Receivership) has declared 300 staff members redundant to its current level of operations”.

Put simply, Covid-19 with its associated disruptions, has, like an opportunistic disease, finally uprooted the remaining vestiges of the pretence of an industry that had long been endangered. And now with flight resuming in earnest, the need by the airlines for considerable resources for a rebound has become very urgent.

As it turns out, the debate on the bailout is now stuck between the N4billion proposed by the federal government on the one hand, and the N50 billion proposed by the operators via the Senator Smart Adeyemi-led Senate Committee on Aviation, on the other. In between them is another proposal by the National Economic Council (NEC) for a N27 billion package for the sector. Unfortunately, if one expected a sense of urgency given the gravity of the situation that is presented, nothing of sorts is evident up until this time; none of the careful, painstaking appraisal to match the imperatives of the moment more so at a time the industry is already in the death throes, gasping for breath! Clearly, if the talk about Nigerian carriers being a part of the global chain and so are not insulated from the pangs of the pandemic has come practically to nothing; so also are the fancy talks about the quantum losses in millions of jobs; the fears of possible depletion in airline revenues and with it the massive threats to aviation investments would appear to count for little now.

As they say in these parts – all na talk! Talk of the tragedy of a nation perennially unable to identify its priorities, let alone moving speedily to do what it must.

Clearly,, if Nigerians would focus less on National Assembly’s rather alarmist prognosis on the state of the industry vis-à-vis the ravages of Covid-19 aspresented at their recent public hearing, there certainly cannot be running away from the debate on the bigger issue of the future of the sector even now as the industry struggles to emerge from the ravages wrought by the pandemic.

It seems to me that a part of that debate must necessarily focus on the on-going rule of natural selection as it affects the industry under which the boys are finally being separated from the men; the debate on the so-called national carrier to be funded wholesale by taxpayers but whose rationale is not foggy still, but appears to make sense only to its promoters.

It should touch on the daring foray by Air Peace into the international aviation orbit amidst its many challenges and what this forebodes for the local industry as a whole. We are talking of an airline which, despite the turbulence of the environment, has not taken a dime of public funds either as grant or bailout and yet successfully made a grand entry into the Lagos-Johannesburg route last week and this at a time the South African Airways which hitherto held a near monopoly of the route had lost its mojo. And more fundamentally, shouldn’t the airline with the largest domestic carrier by fleet, one that has shown exemplary character in the face of storms, not only enjoy huge financial assistance but encouraged to consolidate its lead in local and international operations?

Wouldn’t that be a better, smarter way to save the nation the huge fortune being expended in the vainglorious search for the so-called national carrier?

Merry Christmas dear readers!

By Sanya Oni

For those who do not already know, the Nigerian economy, as long predicted, slipped into the recession during the three-month quarter ended in September. Never mind that the ordinary Nigerian has known nothing but systemic regression in his lot in the last decade and more, it is – coming after the 2016 from which the country has barely recovered – a sobering reminder of extremely modest progress and the frightening vulnerabilities of which the nation’s economic management team are yet to find the answer.

Let’s begin by thanking God for little mercies though. The starting point of course is the figures which show that the economy actually shrank by 3.6 per cent in that third quarter and this against an earlier forecast by the International Monetary Fund of 4.3 percent; compared with the 6.1 per cent contraction recorded in the second quarter, that would pass for a significant improvement. And then, the other notable bright spot: the non-oil sector, which makes up some 90 percent of the economy, actually declined by a comparatively modest margin of 2.5 percent during the period.

As we are wont to say in these parts– things could have been much worse. Remember, Mallam Mele Kyari, the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, was recently quoted as saying that things were so bad in April that the corporation had to beg buyers of crude to take a barrel of our sweet crude for $9! And this at a time we could barely push our crude output of 1.8 million barrels which in fact came down to 1.67 million barrels in the third quarter, according to the Financial Times. We are talking here of crude oil, the main driver of the economy, a commodity which provides nearly 90 per cent of our foreign exchange and some half of government revenues.

And all of these due chiefly to Covid-19. The National Bureau for Statistics puts the situation succinctly: “The performance of the economy in Q3 2020 reflected residual effects of the restrictions to movement and economic activity implemented across the country in early Q2 in response to the COVID-19 pandemic”.

It went on to note that: “As these restrictions were lifted, businesses reopened and international travel and trading activities resumed, some economic activities have returned to positive growth”. In other words, things can only get better – at least to the extent allowed by the gradual return of economic activities and the limits imposed by the unfriendly operating environment.

Most certainly, there can be no wishing away of the devastating impact of Covid-19, any more than the attempt to paper over the economy’s inherent vulnerabilities would amount to living in fools’ paradise. These vulnerabilities, which are now legendary, will unfortunately remain long after Covid-19 pandemic has exited.  Even at that, these are merely long shadows of our consumptively skewed economy – under which genuine creators of wealth are meant to sweat while speculators and flight-by-night businesses rake fortunes in unearned wealth!

Let’s take a few samples to illustrate the depth of the crisis – starting with our forex management – an area pretty much stiff – no thanks to the low price of oil and the associated poor demand – and which we are certainly not doing badly given the current circumstances. Never mind that the rate of forex accretion has been rather sluggish, we certainly can still boast of an impressive $35.7 billion in foreign reserves as at the end of October – a figure Godwin Emefiele, the CBN governor, reckons will suffice to finance eight months of imports. That unfortunately is where the rosy part ends. Indeed, if one had imagined that the Covid-19 lockdown would have imposed some curbs on demands for forex, not only has it turned out the exact opposite, Emefiele and company now carries the additional burden of separating those who genuinely need forex to get their businesses up and running and those in the business of illicit forex transfers!

It’s certainly not hard to figure out the forces behind the rush. Call it what you may, it is certainly not the ordinary forces of demand and supply as would play in the normal market setting but forces unleashed by parasitic actors to stoke panic and ultimately to kill the local economy. With the naira officially trading at N390 to the United States dollar, the same naira, in the hands of the merchant speculators and their portfolio-investor allies, aided and abetted by their friends in high places, trades at nearly N500 to the United States dollar. Imagine a well-connected player with access to a million dollars at the official rate. He could, without lifting a finger, return over a hundred-naira profit in a single cycle of transaction! If he is one of those flight-by-night investors, he could afford to offer just about any amount for the dollar to cart his Nigerian trophy home! Either way, the economy, through the mindless bet in the national currency, bleeds. Those are the kind of forces that Emefiele’s CBN have to contend with.

Can anyone see why our dear naira would not heal anytime soon?

Let’s talk about the other matter killing the economy albeit slowly: the billions of man-hours lost on daily basis due to either the criminal negligence on the part of officials expected to get things done or the indifference of our regulatory institutions. Let’s mention briefly the story of the ports, where years after the so-called reforms, the story remains one of disappointing outcome with the systems remaining nightmarish for operators. This newspaper recently published on its front-page the photograph of a multi-million-naira scanner purchased to aid operations at the ports but which officials, for whatever reasons, have refused to put to use. Taken together with the virtual absence of ancillary infrastructures as befitting a modern ports complex – all of which renders productivity nigh impossible and needlessly increases turnaround time for the most basic of port operations, the best the country can hope for is a fringe player in the global maritime trade.

But then, as it is in the maritime sector, so it is in the road sector, where, no thanks to the programmed nightmares under the guise of road reconstruction/rehabilitation, billions of otherwise productive man-hours are not only wasted but also vital assets reckoned in billion routinely destroyed. Today, if it is hard to imagine a trip from Lagos to Ibadan, a journey of less than 150 kilometres taking less than six energy-sapping hours, picture a truck, carrying tomatoes from say Oturkpo, Benue, bound for Lagos, a journey that would ordinarily take 10-12 hours now taking days to arrive the Lagos market with the perishable still in fit-for-consumption state! And now as if the story of the billions of naira post-harvest losses to the farmers are not daunting enough, or that of endless clashes between itinerant herders and farmers, we are finally at a point, where farmers, in their scores, are summarily executed by terrorists for no other crime than the search for the daily bread.

Recession, as against regression, would seem a more tolerable path in the circumstance.

By Sanya Oni

These must be such seasons when words conveniently loose their meanings. In the course of rummaging through tomes of materials sent to this newspaper for publication in its Op-Ed pages, the word – massacre – was noticeably, freely bandied in the bid to describe the terrible events of last Tuesday. Thanks to the social media and its new-found power of subversion, it is hard to know what to believe in the situation where a group would stream live the obituary of an activist only for the subject in question resurrect in another social media platform!

And so like the search for a lone needle in a pile of hay, not only has the quest for the truth increasingly proving hazardous, the word seems to have lost its meaning, buried in the toxic mass being daily spewed by the grandmasters in the cyber-sphere.

And so here we are – exactly a week after, still quibbling about whether to count the number of the dead in Lekki on October 20 in scores or in the dozen as if such would either lessen the pain of bereavement or mitigate the gravity of the crime.

Now, with anarchy since loosed upon the land, it’s probably superfluous at this time to begin with hard questions as to what happened that fateful night. Which is a pity really considering that the event of the night actually marked the turning point in the long-drawn but largely peaceful protest?

So how many died? Eight, 15 or 78? Better still, who ordered the fire to be opened on a group of unarmed protesters? Lagos State governor, Babajide Sanwo-Olu has spoken loud and clear: he neither had the authority to deploy the army nor did he at any point set them loose on the protesters. No one appears to believe him. Not even his strident denial that the state government ordered the removal of the security cameras at the toll gate. In any case, he was quick to remind that his office as governor conferred no such authority to deploy any troops.

In a society driven more by emotions by reason, it’s probably a tough call to expect anyone to believe a governor who has shown admirable leadership in the face of an unprecedented crisis. The same of course could be said of attempt to understand the circumstances under which the dark forces came to be unleashed on the innocent protesters. Guess it’s convenient to live in denial that some rogue elements in the security establishment may have played some part.  Trust Nigerians to dispense with the niceties of rigour at a time like this – that painstaking attention needed to connect those tiny dots needed to unravel the mystery – one half may have appear to have long made up their minds before the facts come tumbling in; half of the other half are probably still out there looking for the facts to fit into their theories of what could have happened. As for the rest, they can only gawk in horror at the fast-unfolding post-truth world of alternative facts!

We must of course keep this in mind: nothing in the dust being stoked could be said to mitigate the tragedy of the current time. We are talking of lives brutally terminated in circumstances that were clearly avoidable. Of the lives of young, idealistic Nigerians needlessly wasted for the only crime of daring to protest against police brutality.

Having said that, there is yet another layer of tragedy that must be seen as no less disturbing: the crass exploitation of the unfolding crisis by those who apparently have different agendas in view or have some axes to grind. In this, only the extremely naïve would fail to observe a certain pattern in the wave of destruction that has taken place across Lagos. Here, I am not talking of the scenes of giant warehouses being flung open by the hordes of rioters being presented as another reason for the mob to hate the so-called leaders. I do understand why the best of arguments would not suffice to assuage the anger of those who see the lock up of those critical supplies as another evidence of our officials’ greed and callousness. And while one needs no tutorials in basic sociology to appreciate that the rampaging army now variously descried as hoodlums and thugs are the very by-products of our iniquitous socio-economic system, I do have some worries about the complete breakdown of the national security apparatus at such a time like this. But then, that is for another time and season.

For now, my little worry is the pattern of destruction witnessed in Lagos in the past week.  From the palace of the Oba of Lagos – the monument of traditional authority – to the courts, the very symbol of the justice system; to the rioters, nothing was considered sacrilege. Not even the multi-billion naira forensic laboratory said to be the best in the West African sub region, the brand new BRT buses – the new face of public transportation in Lagos was spared. So also were media houses like TVC, The Nation newspapers and Lagos Television. Talk of a careful method to a contrived madness!

And the target? One lone individual adjudged as in the Biblical Prophet Elijah as the Troubler of Israel!

You want to know what I think. I do not need to be a conspiracy theorist to sniff the work of fifth columnists in last week’s tragedy; the early evening raid on the protesters says a lot; nor could one pretend to be blind to the macabre political dance already playing out in the build up to the 2023 elections. Now, that is a story for another day. As for the effusive indignation of the self-proclaimed Atona Yoruba, you can put it to local grudge, the destructive force of hate – the sort that perennial losers indulge when their opponents are beyond their reach.

For now, let’s join the hard working Governor Babajide Sanwo-Olu to mourn the despoliation of our dear Lagos. Afterwards, we can then loudly proclaim – there’s no killing the Lagos Spirit!