Category: Sanya Oni

By Sanya Oni

Never mind the sensational dissolution of its National Working Committee last week by President Muhammadu Buhari and his equally dramatic order on the feuding parties to sheathe their swords, most observers have come to agree that the crisis-ridden ruling All Progressives Congress party has at least been handed a sure life-line out its self-inflicted troubles.

Whether the measures taken were strictly legal or constitutional or whether they actually go to the roots of the problem which is the unbridled jousting for the control of the party as indeed the contestations over the soul of the party – is a however a different matter.

With a good chance, Governor Mai Mala Buni and company in the caretaker committee have a fair chance of putting the broken parts together in the next few months. In this, the former chairman, Adams Oshiomhole as indeed the outgone NWC have made their tasks easier. Whereas the former has since accepted the decisions of the party’s National Executive Committee (NEC) in good faith, going as far as withdrawing his pending appeal at the apex court, the latter has sensibly acquiesced to the resolutions taken at the party’s NEC to allow peace to reign.

Unfortunately, if we agree that the catalyst – certainly not the casus belli –for the rapidly unfolding events was the debacle in Edo, one cannot but wonder if the party has equally adverted its mind to the other crises foisted by the factionalisation of the party in the state more so as the gubernatorial election is actually less than three months from now.  Yes, the highest organ of the party, NEC has affirmed the primary that produced Pastor Osagie Ize-Iyamu as its candidate; but then, with the state chapter of the party torn down the middle with one party rejecting the process that produced the candidate, the handshake, would appear to have gone past the elbow – so to speak!

For a party, that is an unenviable position to be. Here is a party that produced the governor who has now decamped to another party. We are talking of a party whose one-time governor did not just rebuff all entreaties by the party and its leadership to swear in elected members of the state legislature, but has employed every conceivable tricks out of the rule books to keep majority of the elected members out of parliament using his minions in and out of government. So much for his attempts to play the victim, we are supposed to accept that Governor Godwin Obaseki’s unilateral abrogation of the seats of 14 members in a 24-member parliament is an acceptable political play since, apparently, he deigns to so pronounce. In this, he has made it clear, that the governor’s word, like those of ancient emperors must be law!

That Obaseki enjoys the perquisites of incumbency and with it the advantages is of course given; what is at issue is whether his legion of moles remaining should be allowed to press that advantage to the detriment of the party now that the dust he created in his former party is beginning to settle somewhat.

Where does Anselm Ojezua, the other factional chairman of Edo APC belong now that his principal and sponsor, Obaseki has left the party? As it is, the matter isn’t so much about his claim of being elected chairman with a four-year mandate to expire in 2022; rather, it is one of fidelity to his party in the aftermath of the affirmation of Pastor Ize-Iyamu as his party’s candidate.  Will he now surrender his pride to work with a candidate that he once publicly scorned or will be, as it appears to be the case, remain to spoil the fun for his party and its candidate?

The bottom-line: will the party overlook the schism promoted by those whose mantra of Right of First Refusal has fallen flat on their faces? What about the other injured party – the lawmakers elected but prevented from taking their seats? Where does their interest – which are legitimate – fit in the forced but uneasy truce? Will the party, as it seems reasonable to do, apply the same stick to the recalcitrant mob that have all the while defied the party’s instruction to inaugurate those majority lawmakers through frivolous court actions? Will President Buhari’s order on all to withdraw all litigation apply to those also?

Trust me, the Buni leadership will have its hands full in its bid to resolve the various contending issues.  His leadership will certainly be put to test on this as his party hits the road in its bid to retake Osadebey House. To have any chance of success, it seems to me that nothing short of a thorough house cleaning would be required in the coming days.

By Sanya Oni

As the nation mourns the passing of Abiola Ajimobi, I recall how a little more than a year ago, precisely on April 2, 2019, I had described the late governor as an unlikely candidate for a popularity contest.  I gave my reasons. Here was a governor who dared to tell a bunch of unruly, red-eyed undergraduates to respect ‘constituted authority’ when they came marching on Agodi, the seat of Oyo State government. As if to cement his public image as “Mr. Controversy”, then followed the rather bruising encounter with the musical icon, Yinka Ayefele over the latter’s violation of the state’s town planning laws on which the governor had insisted that the law rather than sentiment would hold sway. And then to crown it all, his attempt to modernize the traditional institution in the ancient town of Ibadan, his beloved city, which, though well-intended, became politicised.

But then, I also noted that those would pass for mere footnotes given his rather impressive legacies. I noted his impressive efforts to transform the ancient city from the urban jungle that it was, into a modern functional city with physical planning infrastructures in place and befitting aesthetics. I couldn’t resist touching on what I called the Ajimobi Magic: the wider and neater urban roads particularly the inner-city roads which he had put on a steady path of renewal. I highlighted in the piece the drainage masterplan aimed at banishing the perennial flooding in the ancient city, and his administration’s singular effort to transform their rustic landscapes of Oke-Ogun right through to the other ancient cities of Oyo and Ogbomoso into modernity. I then concluded on what seems to me his greatest achievement: the successful termination of the reign of the warlords – the rival transport unions who saw themselves as not only above the nation’s laws but are known to routinely unleash violence and mayhem on innocent citizens without provocation.

To these I can only add another fitting epitaph – the statement credited to Seyi Makinde, his PDP successor on the Ajimobi administration’s novel School Governing Board policy under which old boys/girls and the community are given a seat in the running of schools: “Let me give kudos to the last administration for bringing SGB onboard, but I want to add here that our administration will take the policy to a greater height”.

Surely, the good people of Oyo State will remember Ajimobi as a man who not only dared to dream but also actualized them. Now, all that matters is the testimony across the board – which is that he left the state far better than he met it!

Adieu Isiaka Abiola Ajimobi.

By Sanya Oni

I have long resolved not to take our political actors too seriously more so as their excitable mind games sometimes border on the delinquency.

Not so however, when such pathologies not only seek to stretch our traditionally fragile institutions to their limits but are actually programmed to undermine, if not destroy, them.

Now, if anyone is still in doubts as to whether delinquency pays, they only need to look at the latest happenings in Edo, Ondo and Rivers’ APC to appreciate how rewarding it has since become for some and maybe costly for others!

From Port Harcourt, to Benin right up to the nation’s seat of power – Abuja; the story is the same of politicians’ endless judicial forum-shopping all in the bid to ambush their opponents.

If it is not a desperate governor seeking to bar opponents from contesting an election in a democracy, his legion of minions are everywhere shopping for courts to use in thwarting the democratic process!

Of course, with countless  ex parte orders may of which were procured sometimes at the speed of light and more often than not in the dead of the night from a no less complicit judiciary over just about anything under the sun, there can be no telling of how far things can still degenerate.

Like a friend quipped over the weekend, we might yet see a court in Nigeria issue an order ex parte barring one party in a matrimonial ruckus from performing his/her conjugal duties pending the determination of the motion on notice!

Thanks to the technocrat wayfarer in Edo Government House, politicians have been presented a new playbook when things get really tough.

In the book, political disagreements are supposed to be akin to a dispute over sharing of state money – in other words, those who worked to put you in the Government House aren’t entitled to reasonable expectations of patronage!

Because the fight in Edo, in the book of Godwin Nogheghase Obaseki, is one between the forces of ‘good’ and ‘evil’, every conceivable force in the land – from the courts to the police and the legislature – must be suborned in the quest to crush all opponents.

In the project, party rules and practices are fair game; everything must be wrestled into the ground in the bid to return Obaseki to the throne (my emphasis) in September.

Don’t ask me if the hounding 14 in a 24-member parliament into exile is right from the playbook; I leave you, my readers to judge.

Political delinquency has never been so rich and rewarding!

But then, the latter would appear not a preserve of the tenant at Osadebey House. In Alagbaka House, Ondo State’s seat of government, a similar macabre dance is playing out.

Trust the police not only to insert itself into matters strictly within the arena of politics but actually lending itself to partisan play and this in a brazen manner.

Here, I refer to the latest incident in Akure, the Ondo State capital, in which the residence of the deputy governor, Agboola Ajayi, was invaded by a police detachment led by the commissioner of police, Salami Bolaji.

Here is what the state government said of the incident that should ordinarily embarrass its helmsman, a learned Silk: “It should, [however], be placed on records that it is a time-tested code in government’s business for officials to take inventory of offices and quarters before and after an official is moving in or out of offices or quarters.”

Moving out? At this time, the information in the public domain was that the deputy governor planned to resign from his party – the APC; no suggestion giving up the plum job, which he insisted his people had not so directed – which makes it rather far-fetched that the number one cop in the state would summarily revoke the deputy governor’s immunity in his self-appointed role as the state’s chief inventory officer!

Here is the relevant part of the transcript of the comments by CP Salami in video which has since gone viral: “We are not saying you should not go out.

Since you are defecting, even your letter was brought to me in my office this evening that you are doing it (decamping) on Monday.

What the government is saying is that you cannot go out with official vehicles. This is politics; I am not saying it is right. This is a government house, the governor is the one talking, give me a few minutes, let me talk to my boss.”

The summary: an admission that the governor was actually the one behind what in intelligence parlance is called psych-Ops! Never mind the incoherence; the lapsus linguae (slip of the tongue); or even the pathetic attempt at playing the Pontius Pilate, our top cop was merely the marionette!

Stranger still however is the spin put to the shameful encounter days after the embarrassing video hit the cyber-sphere. To Tee-Leo Ikoro, spokesman of the state police command, his boss “only came to the scene when his officers and men at the government house could not broker peace between the aides of the governor and that of the deputy governor over the number of cars the deputy governor would drive out at the time.”

You say blessed are the peacemakers? I say – not those who make an already bad case worse!

For a polity already suffering multiple underlying conditions, the problem isn’t just that our politicians have infested the polity with a deadly variant of pandemic not unlike Covid-19, it is that the two key institutions – the judiciary and the police – which ought to have provided stabilization, have become part of the problem.

Which is why the directive by the Chief Judge of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, Justice Ishaq Bello, barring judges of the court from issuing ex-parte orders to stop elections comes as refreshing.

Warning that disciplinary action would be initiated against any judge that violates the New Practice Direction operative in all high courts in the FCT, he says: “we want the natural growth of democracy.

We want the political actors’ role to learn how to resolve their disputes within themselves without coming to court, except where it is exceedingly necessary”.

Fine talk, no doubt. But do they care?

Sanya Oni

 

Disbelief – was my gut reaction to what some newspapers made of the communiqué released by the Bureau of the Board of Governors of the African Development Bank (AfDB) of their June 4 meeting in Abidjan, the Ivorian capital.

To describe some of the reports on the outcome as misleading is to be charitable; such was the blatant misrepresentation of the five-paragraph communique rendered in plain and unambiguous language that one could one could not but wonder if those who authored the news actually saw a copy of the source document before setting out.

A case of poor comprehension or the more tragic failure to appreciate the nuances of the raw powerplay starring the American Goliath and the African David?

Imagine the screaming headlines– ‘African Development Bank bows to U.S., authorises independent probe of Akinwumi Adesina’; ‘AfDB Board of Governors authorizes review of ethics committee report on Adesina’; AfDB Board bows to US pressure, approves fresh probe of Adesina’.

Really?

Give it to the bureaucrats at the premier continental financial powerhouse – they certainly did a good job of not leaving room for ambiguities in their text.

To be sure, nowhere in the communique did the AfDB board come anywhere close to bowing to any United States pressure let alone authorizing a fresh probe of Adesina! Recall that US Treasury Secretary, Steven Mnuchin had in his tightly scripted letter issued last month demanded of the board…”to initiate an in-depth investigation of the allegations using the services of an independent outside investigator of high professional standing”. And the response: “… the Bureau agrees to authorize an Independent Review of the Report of the Ethics Committee of the Boards of Directors relative to the allegations considered by the ethics committee and the submissions made by the President of the Bank Group thereto in the interest of due process. (My emphasis)

The board said more – of course. It further noted: “The Independent Review shall be conducted by a neutral high calibre individual with unquestionable experience, high international reputation and integrity within a short time period of not more than two to four weeks maximum, taking the Bank Group’s electoral calendar into account”.

Finally, it voted for “an independent comprehensive review of the implementation of the Bank Group’s Whistle-Blowing and Complaints Handling Policy” to be conducted “with a view to ensuring that the policy is properly implemented, and revising it where necessary, to avoid situations of this nature in the future”.

How “an Independent Review of the Report of the Ethics Committee of the Boards of Directors relative to the allegations considered by the ethics committee and the submissions made by the President of the Bank Group thereto in the interest of due process” became a fresh round of enquiry as gleefully reported in some media beats me.

Most certainly, the suggestion of a fresh, trial and with it a new round of investigations, could only have been part of the elaborate spin by those bent on pulling the Nigeria-born Adesina down! And to think that some sections of the media not only went to town with the conclusion that the board succumbed to the American pressure and that Adesina would again be docked to answer to the same charges which the ethics committee had in fact found to be unfounded and baseless!

I do understand that the last is yet to be heard particularly on a matter in which the global bully has vested interest. Thanks to the amorphous Trump Doctrine, which seeks as its core, to Make America Great Again (MAGA), the house that Uncle Sam cannot control, must be pulled down.

We saw it with UNESCO (October 2017), then Global Compact for Migration (December 2017), followed by United Nations Human Rights Council (June 2018); and then World Trade Organisation, and now the World Health Organization (WHO) and this right in the middle of a global pandemic! How about the Paris Climate accord; the Iran Nuclear Deal, NATO etc.

Here’s one chief steward of the continental lender that cannot be bullied; one who, unlike those before him, believes that the continent can no longer afford the luxury of conventions and practices that delivers very little for the people; one unafraid to go for the bold measures needed to turn things around, and would not suffer any dictation from the all-knowing experts from co-equal multilateral institutions.

Recall that the World Bank President David Malpass once pronounced, rather magisterially, that the bank under Adesina was lending “too quickly and to add to the debt problem of the countries”; recall one particular report issued in July 2016 by the French Treasury lamenting that “the AfDB…president very seldom speaks in French, and uses the language rarely, if at all, when talking about strategic or financial matters”! And then the carefully orchestrated media campaign from the so-called regionals in the aftermath of the so-called whistle-blower complaints alleging sundry infractions on the part of Adesina.

One particularly confounding charge was that Adesina employed hordes of his countrymen into the bank – never mind that the individuals so named – in a more just, fairer world – would have been worthy candidates for the number one position at the World Bank itself.

The world of course awaits the next phase of the American wonder. Whereas to the Americans and their regional cohorts, it is Adesina’s cup that is not only deemed full but running over; to Africans and the rest of the world, it is the bank’s ethics committee which returned a finding of exculpation and with the board of governors who, applying the relevant rules, adopted their findings wholesale that the Americans have resolved to put in the dock! In other words, it is the AfDB and the lofty dreams of its founding fathers that are being put to the fire by some misguided outliers!

Which explains my surprise that the media, which ought to have been more engaged if not outraged, somehow got sucked into playing the spoiler in the dubious orchestration! Remember, this is a wholly African development finance institution founded in Khartoum, Sudan, in August 1964, by 23 African governments to address the problem of poverty and underdevelopment.

I close with an extract from a letter penned by Kenya’s Raila Odinga expressing support for AfDB and by extension, Adesina’s leadership: “We have faith in him as a proven and experienced leader who is prioritizing Africa’s development and who has proved his ability to guide the bank effectively and honourably during this critical time for Africa.

Mr Adesina has proved his deep belief in lifting Africans out of poverty through a deep understanding of development issues and economic and political reform.

We urge him to relentlessly pursue the goals set out in his vision and which are in line with our aspirations as a people and continent. We further urge those who have misguided agendas to cease and desist. This is the time to stabilize AfDB, not destabilise it”.

Like I noted earlier, the last has not been heard on the matter.

By Sanya Oni

After my May 12 intervention aptly titled Kogi contrarian and Covid-19, I had assumed I was done with the needless contestation between the state government and the Presidential Task Force on Covid-19. Indeed, if I thought that the infodemic that has now held humanity down for three months running was nearing its cycle, it was on assumption that those who should know would have by now, applied the brakes if only to allow some measure of normalcy return to our lives. Here we are three long dreary months of shutdown later, barely comprehending what is supposed to be the next phase of the battle against the virus, yet condemned to prepare for a “new normal” we know pretty little about outside of the unseemly, ubiquitous masks that have since become a national costume – minus the so-called social distancing rule!

A lot of course has happened since that outing in reference. The lead agency, the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control, NCDC – has shouldered on. With a total of 60,825 tests in a country of 200 million people by Sunday night of which 9,855 is said to have confirmed, 6,726 active, 2,856 discharged and 273 dead, Nigerians are best placed to judge whether the agency is on track to delivering a Covid-19-free country this millennium!

In the meantime, the tribe of Covid-19 deniers appears unwilling to let off. One of them, Governor Ben Ayade of Cross River State claims “that the global Coronavirus pandemic has become a full-scale business for some people and that the world is using it to exploit Africa and Nigeria in particular”. He sums up his aversion to the current Covid-19 strategy this way:

“I can tell you this testing for Coronavirus has gone ecopolitical. In the US for example, it is about the November elections and for some businessmen, it is about more reagents, more money. But for me, it is science, it is reality and because a wrong mentality will give you a wrong reality, I will hold the right mentality. Only contact tracing can help you identify those to be tested. I am a scientist please’’. By the way, Ayade holds a PhD in Environmental Microbiology.

Now, you know the story of the other Covid-19 denier – Kogi’s Yahaya Bello – who, early last month, turned back the Presidential Task Force on Covid-19 team sent to offer the state support. Finally, or so it seems, the state was said to have joined the league of Covid-19 states with the NCDC reporting two index cases for the state on Wednesday last week, a development which the state authorities sensationally denied.

“Kogi State till this very moment”, the commissioner for health, Saka Haruna Audu, on behalf of the state government insisted, “is COVID-19 free. We have developed full testing capacity and have conducted hundreds of tests so far which have returned negative.

“We have also continued to insist that we will not be a party to any fictitious COVID-19 claims which is why we do not recognise any COVID-19 test conducted by any Kogite outside the boundaries of the state except those initiated by us.

Never mind that the family of one of the index cases have since confirmed the case to be so.

Like I hinted at in my previous outing on the subject, the problem, it seems to me, is not so much about the science or the epidemiology but what is increasing being perceived as mismanagement of the pandemic. For while it might not be shocking to many that security agents have in the last two months killed no less than 18 Nigerians under the guise of enforcing the national lockdown, Nigerians would certainly be alarmed by the sheer number of deaths recorded since the first index case was recorded in Nigeria, and these from deaths unrelated to the virus, oftentimes directly traceable to the unwillingness of our private and public hospitals to accept even routine cases. The other time, I reported on the case of a pregnant woman who, the doctors insisted would have to procure the personal protective equipment for the medical team in charge of her case. She, no doubt, being among the lucky ones got by after shelling out N120,000 for the protective gears. Others have not been that lucky. In this category is Obiefula Anya, said to have succumbed to pneumonia after he was rejected by eight Lagos hospitals for fear he might have contracted COVID-19. The story is particularly interesting because two of the hospitals – the Lagos University Teaching Hospital, Idi-Araba and the Federal Medical Centre Ebute-Metta, although supposedly top-notch, allegedly cited lack of bed space and also demanded COVID-19 test result before treatment!

What of Citizen Joel said to have been rejected by Isolo General Hospital in Lagos over fear of being a COVID-19 patient? As reported by Punch, the man slumped while playing football, and the hospital, thought little of shutting its gates on him fear of Covid-19! There are countless other reported cases of deaths, which though preventable, yet happened because our medics would not lift a finger to help for fear of the virus! Unfortunately, the pattern appears to be the same across the entire national landscape where the fear of the corona virus has since become the beginning of wisdom.

There has to be a better way to manage the pandemic without sacrificing or as it appears to be the case, crippling the limited options available to citizens to access critical healthcare.

So much for the dog fight in Kogi. Let me put things the way I see it: I have no problem with the administration in Kogi ranking one public health issue over another. That is entirely its prerogative. There is, however, a world of difference between the denial of the science of the pandemic which the governor and Governor Yahaya Bello and his government prefers, and a healthy dose of skepticism about the pandemic in general given the many variegated but yet unanswered questions about the origins and the nature of the virus. That the Covid-19 denier in Lugard House not only repudiates the science but insists that investigations can only proceed strictly on the terms of his own specious protocols would seem the limit of chicanery.

By the way, I am still waiting for the doctors and the other frontline health workers in the state to speak out. It is either they are with their beloved governor or against him! Being on his side on the issue of course means that the virus is mere hype and so life can go on as usual; if, as it appears to be the case that the governor is acting ignorant, one expects them, if only for the sake of their safety and those of their loved ones, to insist that the state government put in place, measures tailored to the risk, should the inevitable happen.

They should speak out now, or forever hold their peace!

Sanya Oni

 

Again, thanks to Covid-19, many Nigerians may have missed out on two running stories, somewhat parallel, involving a section of the federal bureaucracy for the better part of last week.

The first, a relatively innocuous incident in which a group of aggrieved contractors were said to have massed at the gates of the Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (FMARD) to protest a lingering N17bn debt.

The second, perhaps more earth-shaking, is the query served on the permanent secretary, Ministry of Science and Technology, Mohammed Umar Bello, by the Office of the Head of Service of the Federation, Folashade Yemi-Esan over an alleged N48 billion contractual liability despite the budgetary provision.

While both stories appear dissimilar on the surface, it took a closer scrutiny to reveal that each actually represent the obverse side of the other.

The first, a typical sad story of the local businessmen entangled in the web of a monstrous, indulgent bureaucracy; the second, a window into the inscrutable decadence of the civil service institution, particularly the collapse of the controls which traditionally set the institution apart.

It started when a group of contractors under the aegis of the Concerned Unpaid 2018 Contractors, numbering 50, massed at the headquarters of the ministry where they blocked the entrance leading to the minister’s office on Wednesday.

Their demand: that the ministry settles all outstanding debts owed them – most of them since 2018. Spokesman of the group Daniel Mozie, says “you’ll be shocked to know that some contractors are dead; many others have sold or mortgaged their houses and their creditors are on their neck.

Many can’t pay house rents and school fees for their kids or access medication”. Call it a familiar story of how the bureaucracy ruins the best of men!

The other is no less straightforward: a case of the ministry’s top gun being called out to explain how a debt, for which the government had duly provisioned, could not be settled as at and when due.

The two, as it turns out, find intersection in the role of one powerful individual – permanent secretary, Mohammed Bello, now of the science and technology ministry who, it is being alleged, not only got the ministry needlessly entangled in the contractor mess but also allegedly filched from the cookey jar.

In a private memo now leaked, the Head of Service had demanded explanation (query) from Bello why the latter did not pay the eligible contractors which led to the ministry having an outstanding contractual liability in the sum of N48,429,543,895,722.

Part of the memo read: “Under your leadership as the accounting officer, the ministry utilised the entire 2019 first quarter release of N7,737,208, 135.18 to pay for the 2018 contracts that were fully funded in 2018 which constitutes virement without authority.”

Not that alone, he was accused of giving out seven deep drilling rigs for borehole procured by the ministry at N1.3 billion to some unnamed individuals under “fraudulent arrangements.”

The seven deep drilling rigs for borehole which were reportedly purchased at an average cost of N300 million were said to have been done without recourse to the Federal Executive Council only to be handed out to some individuals under fraudulent arrangements, without the approval of the minister”. He was accused of failing to return one of the rigs linked to him “despite several written reminders”.

The Head of Service further would further charge: “You misapplied the intervention funds approved for the purchase of strategic grains and the establishment of the Rural Grazing Area Settlements in violation of extent Financial Regulations; two of such misapplications are the use of N2.026,838,775.25 to pay contractors and execute programmes from the funds released for emergency procurement of strategic grains which is unrelated to the purpose of the funds.

He was given a 72-hour ultimatum to respond to the weighty allegations.

Expectedly, the embattled permanent secretary has denied all the allegations. Describing the allegations as “baseless, completely concocted, unfounded, without facts, malicious and calculated to deceive”, he urged the Head of Service to “kindly note that we have been invited, interrogated and cleared by the EFCC and ICPC on this particular matter after glaring facts were presented to them”.

He also wrote: “I state that contractors were duly paid. The allegation of contractors not been (sic) paid is totally false.

All contractors whose contract was captured in the 2018 budgetary allocation were paid in accordance with budgetary releases.

However, contractors whose contracts are ongoing were rolled over as ongoing. Rollover capital projects are not new in contract management”.

In other words, the contractors might have well been from the ghost-town!

Given that some of the allegations are criminal in nature, I suspect that the last has not been heard on the matter.

Suffice to say that questions remain, not least the one of what to do with the contractors, but the location of the rigs on which humongous public funds were spent.

In the meantime, the FMARD’s Director of Information, Theodore Ogaziechi, could only pray for the patience of the contractors, pointing out that the liabilities were “inherited”.

Said he: “On behalf of the agriculture ministry,  I would like to state that the ministry is not unmindful of the outstanding liabilities owed to contractors, and to also affirm that the honourable ministers, the permanent secretary and the management team share in the agony of the contractors which has informed their agitation”.

The officials, he assured, are “in the process of compiling and verifying all outstanding contract liabilities with a view to facilitate their payment”.

Appealing for patience, understanding and cooperation of the contractors, he said this became necessary to enable the relevant officials “complete the process and forward the outcome to the Federal Ministry of Finance, Budget and National Planning for further action.”

Well said. However, if that seems any consolation to the lot many of whom have been thrown into penury, that appeal obviously begs the question of how the allocation voted to settle those liabilities could not be made during the applicable financial year more so when the budgetary release for 2018 is said to be near 100 percent.

It raises, in a more fundamental sense, the question of where the funds went and the extent to which extant controls on funds utilization were compromised.

For now, as the scriptures is wont to say, we know only in part. One part says the debts were duly provided for. The other claims that the contractors covered under the relevant budgetary vote were duly settled.

For the sake of the masses huddled at the gate, we need a truth panel to unwrap the mystery at the agriculture ministry.

The days ahead promises to be interesting.

Sanya Oni

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read Also: Medical doctor tests positive for COVID-19 in Osun

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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