The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Dealing with inconvenient stats

    Sanya Oni

    Flashback to December 19, 2018. Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) had just released its routine Labour Force Statistics showing that additional 3.3 million Nigerians exited the labour force between December 2017 and September 2018 to bring the fledgling figure of the unemployed to 33 million Nigerians. In other words, unemployment rate had increased from 18.8 percent in the third quarter of 2017 to 23.1 percent in the third quarter of 2018.

    Baloney – blurted the president’s spokesman, Garba Shehu days after. The NBS not only lied with the figures, it has admitted that its methods were outrageously out of date. This much, he stated, was admitted to by no less than the nation’s statistician general, Yemi Kale to the Federal Executive Council subsequent to which he was directed by the president to go and put out the truth to the world!

    “When he finished addressing the federal cabinet last week, the government asked the DG of NBS, go out there and tell the Nigerian public, you are just saying to us now that Jigawa, Kebbi and Ebonyi are recording the lowest unemployment rates in the country on account of agriculture”.

    Claiming a “presidential vindication” of sorts, he said:  “the president had complained many times about the unemployment figures reflecting mostly the white collar jobs and therefore unfairly underplaying the millions of jobs his administration has created in the farms…”

    The NBS chief had of course retorted that this was arrant nonsense: the NBS reports not only covered all sectors of the economy including rural and urban areas as well as age groups, the methodology was as adequate and scientific as could be! Moreover, he neither admitted to the president nor his cabinet that the figures were flawed let alone telling them that he would address the media – local or global – to ‘adjust the figures’!

    “Assuming what you claim was actually said” he wrote on his twitter account, “then I make it very clear that neither the statistician general nor NBS ever made any such admission at any time to anybody and the unemployment computation does take into account all sectors, age groups and both rural and urban areas”.

    I actually thought that the press conference, ostensibly under the directing hands of our benevolent presidency would be the mother of all conferences hence my piece titled And now, Garba Shehu vs. NBS. Of course, it never held. As for the rebuttal, Nigerians are still waiting – nine months after – which of course leaves Nigerians in quandary as to who between the presidency and the NBS was to be believed!

    That turned out to be foretaste of things to come.

    At the inauguration of the presidential think-tank, the freshly minted eight-member Presidential Economic Advisory Council (PEAC), the president would give what amounted to a marching order: time for new stats!

    To quote the president in his own words: “As you develop your baseline study, I would like you to focus on primary data collection…Today, most of the statistics quoted about Nigeria are developed abroad by the World Bank, IMF and other foreign bodies…

    “Some of the statistics we get relating to Nigeria are wild estimates and bear no relation to the facts on the ground.

    “This is disturbing as it implies we are not fully aware of what is happening in our country.

    “We can only plan realistically when we have reliable data. As you are aware, as a government, we priortised agriculture as a critical sector to create jobs and bring prosperity to our communities.

    “Our programmes covered the entire agricultural value chain from seed to fertilizer to grains and ultimately, our dishes.

    “AS you travel in the rural communities, you can clearly see the impact. However, the absence of reliable data is hindering our ability to upgrade these programmes and assure their sustainability”.

    That was the president to the new team. If you ask me, I would say that the president was not only putting a wrong foot forward, he was actually talking to a wrong audience! Data collection job for the body of eminent technocrats? That is certainly a new one from the Buhari presidency!

    So much for the president’s love for ‘reliable- stats; if only his minders would care to tell him that his presentation was actually to a wrong audience; second, that his PEAC is an unlikely body for the purpose of generating the primary data that he so badly craves; third, that there is already a statutory body – the Nigerian Bureau of Statistics (NBS) charged with that very elementary primary data gathering job that he wants done; and moreover that the same NBS stats that he’s so eager to discredit is no vastly different from those routinely churned out by Financial Derivatives, the influential economic consultancy outfit headed by his PEAC member, Bismarck Rewane!

    A fightback from the presidency would provide comic relief –save for the dire emergency out there. Imagine; where Nigerians see fear, unemployment and insecurity; the presidency sees social intervention programme, anchor borrowers and other fancy schemes; when the majority complain of being poorer with each passing day, the government sees need for more tax revenue to finance projects! Now, thanks to Donald Trump, the world has since moved firmly into the post-truth era, which means that leaders can freely choose their version of reality – or call up alternative facts whenever it suits them. Does anyone still see why the NBS deserves the scorn?

    The presidency can seek to generate as many primary data as it suits it and for all manners of purposes under the sun; our development partners as indeed the rest of the international community surely know better than to think much of politically-tainted brews. And really, no one had said that the NBS, a quasi-independent body, is perfect; or that its conclusions cannot be questioned. But then, to go as far as to pretend that the body does not exist or simply deny it legitimacy because its findings do not align with that of government merely plays into our peculiar brand of negative politics! Minus the templates which have global benchmarks, I wager that nothing in the NBS stats that this presidency hotly disputes can be said to be anything but home grown stats! And so, while I understand the presidency’s desire to showcase achievements which I consider as sometimes exaggerated, I do have a problem when a self-proclaimed reformer- administration either chooses to see established performance benchmarks as something beneath it or seen to be actively working to undermine a critical institution like the NBS!

    I close: Yours truly cannot claim to know what this presidency expects of the PEAC; however, if the job description as spelt out by the president at the inauguration is anything to go by, Nigerians should be prepared for an interesting time!

  • The raids by customs

    Those who have followed the wave of clampdown on car dealers by men of the Nigeria Customs service in the last few weeks are bound to wonder if the nation isn’t under the siege of an undeclared emergency. I do not here refer to the routine seizures of cargoes of contrabands either at border posts or warehouses usually announced with fanfare on radio and television; rather, I refer to the macabre drama of going after car dealers and motorists on the highways and business premises all in the bid to collect unpaid duties on cars.

    Those of us who grew up in the late 60s will most probably remember the ubiquitous tax man at whose approach, able bodied tax defaulters scaled fences for the fear of being hauled before the officials for restitution; or fearsome local council officials perched on the highways supposedly collecting radio or advertisement taxes. Now, if we had thought that the country was permanently done with crude tactics of chasing tax suspected defaulters on highways and street corners, the ongoing onslaught by the men of the Nigerian Customs shows how deeply ingrained the psychology is.

    That is the context in which to see the ongoing rampage by men of the Nigerian customs under the leadership of the no-nonsense Col. Hameed Ali (rtd). For a country that continues to experience the shrinking of its civic space– no thanks to the general insecurity in the country – the resort to locking up of business premises and invasion of hotel premises all in the guise of chasing car owners believed to have evaded duty payment can only further take the country down the pole.

    The Punch reported an eyewitness account by one Imo Ugochinyere, said to be national spokesman of the Coalition of United Political Parties in Abuja thus: “Customs men have invaded Fraser Suite Abuja and sealed it, blocking diplomats and guests from coming in or going out…The affected guests include some soldiers who are lodging in the place….They are harassing guests and ordering hotel workers to wake guests up from sleep to identify their cars….’

    In the end, a total of 11 vehicles mainly of the Toyota, Lexus and Mercedes Benz brands were carted away.

    Interestingly, the Customs boss has since provided an interesting perspective to the saga. He told newsmen at a forum last week that 90 per cent of cars in Nigeria were smuggled into the country by unscrupulous elements. He specifically singled out vehicles on display in auto shops across the country just as he said that the raids on car dealers’ spots were to ascertain whether the vehicles were brought in genuinely or not. The country, he said, needs revenue for development, hence, it became necessary to collect duties on those smuggled vehicles.

    Said he: “We want to use this opportunity to ensure that cars within our borders are fully customised, which means duties are paid on them.”

    “We are looking for revenue from everywhere and we have these people who brought in vehicles and failed to pay duties.

    “What we are doing now, we are just enforcing the law, which allows us to collect revenue on behalf of Nigeria and also ensure those vehicles you and I will go and buy have genuine papers that are roadworthy.”

    The truth is that the customs boss is only beating a well-trodden path.  In fact, the approach is neither novel nor could be remotely described as smart. In the end, the treasury might be several billions of naira richer at least for a while; of course, the question of whether that crude, antediluvian extortionate method – a method itself so fraught with corruption – is the best that the men of the customs can come up with in this day and age would perhaps remain a part of our intriguing national question!

    To say that we have been on this route before is merely stating the obvious. Under President Olusegun Obasanjo, the method was deployed until Obasanjo asked the Customs to back off following complaints by Nigerians. I recall the former president saying that an institution that could not muster the capacity to collect appropriate customs duties at the designated point had no business rolling tanks into town for the same purpose. In President Buhari’s first term, the customs also attempted to resurrect the obnoxious tactic only to run into another brick wall. Again, I recall that the Bukola Saraki-led National Assembly in the course of the altercation between the customs and the in the 8th National Assembly  actually went as far as attempting to change that particularly aspect of the law which most Nigerians had found increasingly offensive.  Unfortunately, rather than the customs getting back to the drawing board to address the issue in a fundamental sense, the institution’s leadership has again resorted to bandying an old law which seeks essentially to the reward failure of its establishment in the age of technology.

    So what will the latest activism achieve? Is it simply about more revenue into the coffers of government (and perhaps men of the customs)? When will the customs learn to do things the way the rest of the civilised world do? What will it take for the customs to shake off the jack-boot mentality in favour of a technology-driven enforcement?

    Imagine the customs supremo admitting that 90 per cent of cars in Nigeria were smuggled; in other words, for every 10 cars imported into the country, nine is smuggled. That being the case, it is either that the customs which he leads is either irredeemably corrupt and hence qualifies to be disbanded, or, that the law which he operates is so fatally flawed to have any redeeming feature.

    Is it any wonder that the world is laughing at us? For the sake of all that is sane and decent, President Buhari should order Col. Hameed Ali (rtd) to get his men back to the border posts. As for the National Assembly, it should proceed forthwith to amend the relevant laws permitting such open-ended raids. Remember, this is 2019!

  • Nigeria @ 59

    Thanks to one particular WhatsApp group among the countless others I belong whose subject can range from nothing to just about anything under the sun, I found myself in a long drawn debate over the state of the nation, with particular reference to our institutions vis-à-vis the civic responsibility of the citizen, and the interplay of the two in the current morass in which the country has found itself.

    The particular forum, appropriately named Lagos- Ibadan Road Update, created in the wake of the on-going construction works being undertaken by the German firm, Julius Berger at the Lagos end of the Lagos-Ibadan expressway, not only sought to provide regular, periodic updates on the hellish traffic situation to group members but for members an avenue for engagement on wider range of issues. For yours truly, the chat group has since become a must – a daily companion for the most part of the nearly four harrowing weeks on that traffic corridor. As one might imagine of such groups, discussions, more often than not, tend to veer into the railing against just about everyone deemed complicit in inflicting the needless pain on the “innocent motorist”: the federal government, the police and the traffic management agencies, and of course, the construction company – Julius Berger.

    It is as one might expect of the typical Nigerian Public Square where rules are not only expendable but readily dispensed with. If you discount the indulgence – by some- for disinformation, the penchant to trade fiction for facts, the bombasts, the uncivility of the language deployed to drive arguments, you probably have enough left to make sense of any issue in focus.

    And so it was that the chat group suddenly erupted on Sunday afternoon. This time, the big news was that the contractor, Julius Berger, had allegedly dug a giant canal on the alternative earth road known to have provided some succour in the last four weeks that the closure has lasted.

    What could be the basis – many had wondered? To some, the move was to discourage impatient motorists using the bye-pass to cut their ordeal even as it always turns out, that they end up further complicating the nightmare down the road. The big question was – whodunit?

    Was Julius Berger truly responsible? No one could be sure. A giant earth moving equipment allegedly sighted in the vicinity moments before the act would seem to suffice! Time it was once again, to call out the company for its ‘wickedness’, atrocious speed, indifference to the agonies of the road users and its evident lack of social responsibility given the scale of dislocation that have attended the construction job.

    Having been on the road for more than three years now, could the company not have made better plans not to talk of mobilization? How come, many ask, that JB couldn’t work 24 hours? Are they not being paid? This wasn’t the JB they knew; the one they knew would not only work 24/7 but at breadth-taking speed! The ranting went on and on…

    I perfectly understand the outbursts given the needless pains forced on the commuters on that stretch long arguably as the nation’s busiest traffic corridor.  If you have had the experience of enduring a minimum of four hours of stress in the terrible traffic in the course of eight hours work, you’ll probably understand not just the basis of their frustrations but why their anger is justifiable

    We must agree that Julius Berger has made a mess of the job. After all, it has been four weeks of hell on the highway. True, we may not have seen Nigerians dropping dead on the highway at this time; the same cannot be said of the slow, instalmental death which will surely come in the fullness of time.

    I mean, it would not matter if in the end, the stretch is paved with gold; the idea that a construction company in this day and age, could dispense with the niceties of good corporate behaviour and robust community relations/engagement obviously says a lot about how much premium the company places on the citizens. Ever heard of a doctor putting a patient through the rigours of a major surgery without anaesthesia? But that is what JB does to Nigerians!

    Yet, there is a sense in which our anger is misdirected. In treating Nigerians the way it does, Julius Berger may have in fact stretched outlawry to the limits; nothing however compares with the criminal indifference of Nigeria’s absentee government. Nigerians are supposed to be grateful that the government is finally minded to deliver the road; nothing, it would appear, matter after. The needless death and the public health issues from the lack of attention to details of planning and management are simply taken as necessary derivatives by a government that would rather mouth change than give it practical meaning!

    But then, if the Works Ministry is indifferent, the police, the FRSC and the other agencies of government deployed on the road are worse than pathetic. Good thing that they have not – at least not yet, set up tolling points; they have neither the sense of duty nor the understanding of what their duties demand at a time like this. When they are not indifferent to lawbreaking, some have proven to be abettors of indiscipline – the chief reason why chaos rule on the road.  Forget professionalism; we are yet to see evidence on display on that small stretch of the highway. At best, our uniformed men are mere bystanders!

    Nigerians are truly an impatient lot; not only that, they are certified wailers. They complain about everything under the sun – from the crass incompetence of their institutions to the legendary insensitivity of their government. The truth however is that they are no less complicit in condoning bad behaviour. Imagine how the antics of a few people, driving against traffic at peak traffic periods, turns the entire scene into bedlam. The next thing you hear is let him go – without so much as a demand for penance for the pains inflicted on other road users or the thought that this might constitute an incentive for others to follow the bad example. The trick is to tolerate and complain later!

    I would wager than a good number of motorists would readily present as a good case for the shrink. That is what the scale of chaos suggests. More than that however, it takes a high degree of permissiveness for bad behaviour for the chaos to endure. It is part of the intriguing mystery of how our society still manages to function – albeit minimally as a structured human entity. At best, the agony daily experienced on the Lagos- Ibadan expressway is a window into how we have sunk as a nation.

    Happy Independence Day celebration!

  • Still on the nation’s hell highway

    The song by the late Robert Nesta Marley Those who feels it knows it would best capture the daily agonies of motorists on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway in the last three weeks. In a country where public health issues count for nothing, guess it’s futile to begin to talk of the metrics of the slow, agonising death daily visited on thousands of motorists all in their bid to move from one point on the segment under construction to another.

    Last Friday was yet another experience like no other. From Arepo, a settlement along the expressway to Matori, Mushin, a distance of 31 kilometres took five whole hours of driving time to cover!  A vehicle laden with Automotive Gas Oil, had, earlier in the day, fallen spilling its contents by Otedola Bridge, near Berger, Lagos. The result: several hours total lockdown of traffic on both sides of the freeway!

    The obviously overwhelmed officials were a sight to behold. In the end, professionalism was not only in short supply, synergy was the last thing anyone thought of hence an accident scene became more like a market scene thus anarchy was allowed to rule!

    Our situation is truly pathetic. We have an army that has a corps of engineers; yet the leadership is yet to fathom ways of bringing their services to bear whenever emergencies pop up. A Federal Road Safety Corps that would rather print plastic cards for motorists yet would remain a non-starter in matters of search and rescue infrastructure.

    We are truly a joke!

  • Further thoughts on border closure

    Until the Sunday Punch report quoting Babatunde Ruwase, the President, Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry as saying that the Federal Government’s ‘indefinite’ closure of the country’s borders with its neighbouring African neighbours will ultimately hurt the economy and cross-border economic activities, I could have sworn that the Organised Private Sector (OPS) were on the same page with the Buhari administration on the border closure issue.

    That yours truly thought that much informed the minor piece I did on this page with the sub title Finally, the ECOWAS giant roars published September 3.

    I had written “I do not know if many Nigerians paid much attention to what happened at the Nigerian borders with Benin Republic last week. Without as much as a fanfare of a prior announcement, the Nigerian authorities finally, although temporarily moved to shut our western borders. President Muhammadu Buhari would later clarify that the measure had become necessary owing to the intolerable level of smuggling going on in that axis. Well, the measure is certainly overdue; the problem is that it did not go far enough. Why single out our western neighbour, Benin for a crime that Cameroun, Niger and Chad are guilty although in different degrees?

    Moreover, I understand why the federal government would focus on rice smuggling at this time. That menace is killing local initiatives. However, were Nigerians to be asked to choose between that menace posed by that class of smugglers and those posed by transhumance activities across the borders, I suspect that they would gladly opt for the lesser evil in the age of mindless terror!

    Freewheeling transhumance seems to me one area where urgent and drastic action is also needed”.

    Most certainly, no one expected the horde trading in the nation’s misery – big time smugglers and merchants dealing in illicit trade across the borders – to be happy at a measure specifically designed to put them out of business.  It is however different ball game altogether when a body like Lagos Chamber of Commerce and Industry (LCCI) that prides itself as think-tank of sorts would, rather than show understanding and hence plead for forbearance by citizens on the measure, actually pretend to be oblivious of the rationale behind the drastic action. To LCCI, the war could as well be won without as much as firing a single shot!  What a delusion!

    Here’s what the body’s president said as reported by Punch: “The closure of the land borders has enormous implications for cross border economic activities around the country.

    “The indications are now that the closure is indefinite.  While we share the concern of government on issues of security and smuggling, we believe that the indefinite closure of land borders is not the solution to the problem.”

    My response. First, that the closure has “enormous implications for cross border economic activities” is not in denial; the issue is whether this could be traded for national security or domestic socio-economic aspirations in the age of terrorism and in the face of continuing de-industrialisation of which the OPS are supposedly its worst victims!

    Second, no one says that the border closure is indefinite. Nigeria’s Comptroller General of Customs, Hameed Ali, was clear on this: the borders would remain shut until neighbours helped Nigeria to curb the widespread problem of smuggling! In other words, the ball is entirely in the courts of recalcitrant neighbours: either to stop availing their territories as transit bases for activities decidedly injurious to our local economy or risk the pain of prolonged closure.

    Third, LCCI claims to “share the concern of government on issues of security and smuggling”. Fine. Nowhere, as far as the statement went, did the body hint at any on-going efforts by the countries concerned to address the issues underlying the closure – issues deemed by the federal government, as constituting existential threats. Need one remind that efforts by successive administrations to control the border trade have either been thwarted by our club of home-grown whiners or the same countries long adept at waving the ECOWAS card!

    Imagine the speaker of the ECOWAS parliament, Moustapha Cisse Lo, saying the closure is “a hindrance to the achievement of the community’s main objective, which is to achieve the creation of a prosperous, borderless West African region where peace and harmony prevail.”  Hopefully, there will be sufficient time for the ECOWAS top brass to educate us on how a country that is perennially the butt of unfriendly acts from wayward neighbours would fit into his dream of “a prosperous, borderless West African region where peace and harmony prevail.”

    We need to be clear about what the issues are. The federal government didn’t close the borders in violation of any protocol; rather she was forced to take the drastic measure to stop its abuse by delinquent players on both sides of its borders. Which protocol are we talking about by the way? The one being daily observed in the breach by countries that would rather treat Nigeria like a beast of burden than a partner in quest of shared prosperity?

    Here is my candid advice: Nigeria should stand firm – ECOWAS or not. Hardly about the African giant throwing its weight around; rather, it is what leadership demands at such a time like this!

  • Who says it won’t happen again?

    From Lagos to Harare, Lusaka, Accra to Johannesburg, it’s been nearly two weeks of unrestrained rage back and forth. For once, the victims appear to have had enough of the seasonal madness called xenophobia from the rainbow country. In Zambia, scores of bitter and angry students marched on the South African High Commission where they burnt tyres and an embassy sign in apparent frustration. Not done, they went after South African-owned shops such as Pick n Pay, Shoprite and MTN, forcing them to close shop. Accusing South Africa’s government of not doing enough to prevent the attacks against Africans in South Africa, Zambia National Students Union (ZANASU) Vice President Steven Kanyakula warned that “South Africa was not an island and the actions of South Africans pose a serious risk to South African investment and businesses in African countries”.

    By this time, Zambia Radio stations had stopped playing South African music; a friendly football tournament against Bafana Bafana, the South African national team, was swiftly cancelled by its football association.

    The Zambians were not alone. From the African Giant, the response would follow the same pattern. Sufficiently piqued by the madness in South Africa, cultural icon Tiwa Savage would release a volley on her twitter handle September 4: I refuse to watch the barbaric butchering of my people in SA. This is SICK. For this reason I will NOT be performing at the upcoming DSTV delicious Festival in Johannesburg on the 21st of September. My prayers are with all the victims and families affected by this.

    Perhaps even more dramatic however was Nigeria’s Sheila Chukwulozie, who left her booth at the Johannesburg’s FNB Art Fair empty – with a boldly printed message “Thanks, xenophobia,” on her space.

    Meanwhile, in Lagos, the mob simply descended on the Sangotedo and Surulere Shoprite malls carting away everything on sight. Typical of the police, an attempt to minimise the destruction would leave one dead. Similar attacks were reported on Shoprite malls in Abuja and Ibadan with varying degrees of destruction.

    Moments before, the federal government had announced its boycott of the World Economic Forum in Cape Town, to join Rwanda’s Paul Kagame, and Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC)’s Félix Tshisekedi in the league of boycotters. All of this in addition to other diplomatic shuttles to contain what was already a festering crisis.

    By Wednesday last week, thanks to the local carrier, Air Peace, what would ordinarily have been deemed unthinkable happened: the evacuation of 178 Nigerians (actually the first batch) from the former apartheid enclave.

    Read Also: Xenophobia: 320 Nigerians to return from South Africa on Tuesday – Mission

    None of the above however yet compares with the cold reception accorded the South African leader, Matamela Cyril Ramaphosa, at the burial of former Zimbabwe President Robert Mugabe in Harare at the weekend.  As reported by this newspaper, the crowd booed the South African leader as he was introduced by the master of ceremony at the funeral held at the National Sports Stadium.

    Thoroughly embarrassed, the South African leader could not but eat the humble pie: He apologized to the people of Zimbabwe for the acts of violence “directed at our brothers in other African countries”.

    Hear him: “I stand before you, fellow Zimbabweans, fellow Africans to say that we are working very hard to encourage all our people in South Africa to embrace people from all other African countries.

    “We welcome people from other African countries and we are going to work very hard that will encourage and promote social cohesion of all the people of South Africa working side by side with people from other part of our continent. This we shall do, because we want to embrace the spirit of unity that President Mugabe worked for throughout his life.”

    Call it a Pauline conversion coming from a man who, en route to the presidency, read what amounted to a Riot Act to foreigners who he tagged with operating businesses without permit. Of course, the born-again President Ramaphosa couldn’t have been speaking for Goodwill Zwelithini, the Zulu monarch who in 2015 famously declared that ‘foreigners must pack their bags and go home’! (He later blamed the media for grossly misrepresenting him, while nonetheless maintaining that “this country would be reduced to ashes” were he to issue such a directive).

    Or, Bongani Mkongi, the country’s deputy minister of police who while claiming that residents of the Hillbrow neighborhood of Johannesburg are 80% foreign born, insisted that “We cannot surrender South Africa to foreign nationals… We fought for this country, not only for us, but for generations of South Africans.”

    Official denial or not, the fact of the matter is that xenophobia is deeply ingrained in the country’s DNA. According to Xenowatch, more than 500 attacks occurred between 1994 and 2018.  In 2008 alone, more than 100 xenophobic attacks occurred during which more than 60 people died.

    Yet, much as the current outrage is understandable, xenophobia ought to be seen merely as a derivative of the same forces driving Trumpism, Brexit and other nativist sentiments.  In a fundamental sense, the objective conditions as indeed the forces driving them are the same. Both are fearful of the future in which they see themselves as losing out to an army of invaders. However, whereas the champions of ultra-nationalism exploit the fears of the mob while presenting present themselves as champions of a mythical past, the xenophobic mob seizes the initiative while the elites waffle in abdication.

    This is where Ramaphosa deserves pity. Special envoys might help to the calm nerves of the injured party; the question of how a government that was practically missing in action when the violence broke out will suddenly acquire the capacity to put a brood that has tasted blood on the leash is one that only he can answer at this time.  As Ramaphosa and his ANC crew will soon be finding out, statesmanship isn’t exactly the cheapest of commodities.

    Of course, Nigerians will remain Nigerians, warts and all; for sure, the brashness, the swagger and if you like, that tinge of deviance that evokes love/hate is unlikely to change overnight. It is even unlikely that this latest cycle of violence will curb their appetite for greener pastures. As far as I can see, the Rainbow Country will remain a fair destination.

    And the South Africans with their sense of entitlement?  Which is easier to confront between the hapless 3.6 million foreign nationals who make up a mere 7% of the population and the local white priviledged class who although make up a mere 8.9% of the population but hold the bulk of the nation’s wealth?

    Your guess is as good as mine.

  • The scamming of a country

    No thanks to an unknown quantity that goes by the name – Process and Industrial Developments Limited (P&ID), the nation’s economy as indeed the welfare of millions of its citizens now hangs precariously on the edge.  For a country that is never short on materials to excite, the award by the English Court in favour of the little known Irish engineering and project management company obviously surpasses anyone that the country has known.

    Clearly, if the quantum of the award – a record $9 billion fine for a contract that never was could be deemed as exceeding the threshold of reasonable and exemplary, considering that the firm in question neither brought a dime into the country beyond the offer to turn the nation’s rich gas resources into gold, the story of how the company ‘agreed’ to accept $850 million in compensation, negotiated down from an initial proposal of $1.5 billion by a government committee after things fell apart, and how this later morphed into the July 2015 — $6.6 billion award for “loss of income” and which has now ballooned  to $9 billion, would qualify for a prominent chapter in our long-running Incredible Naija story.

    As the story went, P&ID reportedly entered into a 20-year gas and supply processing agreement (GSPA) with the federal government to build a gas processing facility. By the terms of the agreement, Nigeria would receive 85 per cent of the refined non-associated gas, free of charge to power generating and industrial entities; P&ID would receive the remaining 15 per cent and the by-products – namely methane, propane and butane for export.

    Simple, or is it? But then, the government was obligated to supply 150 million standard cubic feet (scf) of gas per day to the plant. This was to rise to 400 million scf in the life of the project.  A critical element is for the government to build a gas supply pipeline to the P&ID facility to be located in Adiabo, Odukpani LGA, Cross River State. The gas was to be sourced by the government from OMLs 67 and 123 operated by Addax Petroleum.

    End of story?

    Not really, in fact, the story had only just begun. First Nigeria did not build the pipeline; but neither did P&ID build the plant although it claimed to have spent about $40 million on pre-take-off expenses. Of course, P&ID claimed that the failure of Nigeria to build the gas pipeline breached the agreement even though there was no evidence that it acquired any land anywhere in Cross River let alone the one for the proposed facility. And so the government maintained that it could not, have conceivably, built a network of pipelines when the off-taker had not itself determined the project site let alone turn the sod!

    To put things in the Nigerian parlance, the matter thereafter became a case of “cunny man die, cunny man bury am’. Trust the foreign buccaneer; an arbitration clause simply became handy for a compensatory award for loss of “potential” income! At this time, not even Nigeria plea that the gas pipeline could not have been constructed to an unknown site made sense as P&ID would contend that Article 6(b) of the GSPA forecloses any such precondition!

    That, in summary is the story. You wonder how a $40 million pre-feasibility expenditure by a corporate entity would become the basis of an aggravated – and I daresay a most perverse award – $9 billion against a sovereign? That could only be made for Nigeria!

    I have taken time to peruse the different sides of the arguments on a deal that easily qualifies as a travesty.

    In this, Nigeria, I must admit, is no stranger to settlements that are best described as odious.  We saw this in 2005, when the Nigerian piggy bank, brimming full with cash courtesy of the windfall from petro-dollars was forced to shell out $12 billion cash in settlement of a most odious debt to the Paris and London Club cartel of creditors.  Never mind that Nigeria had as at this time had paid sums far in excess of the original sum borrowed in compounded penalties and charges even as the debts kept mounting! We are supposed to be grateful that the tidy sum which could have delivered the Lagos –Kano standard gauge railway was used to appease those foreign gods so our children could live debt free – even if we are a few years after, back in the same credit circuit shopping for funds to finance public infrastructure!

    Now, 14 years after, a variant of the game is at play via a deal that aspires to be the scam of the century. Think it is far-fetched?  The reader is invited to google up the recent shuffling of feet at the corporate suites at VR Capital Group, the hedge fund managers said to have taken a large stake in P&ID in the aftermath of the award. The group, as aggressive as they come, takes no prisoners. They have the money and the clout to make things happen – and are prepared to foreclose on Nigeria’s assets anywhere on the globe even if in the end, the African giant is brought on its knees.

    And to think that a few Nigerians actually inflicted this treasonable scam against their country. Unfortunately, stories of a few incompetent and unpatriotic fellows who, blinded by greed, couldn’t care about taking an entire country down the valley have not only become commonplace, they have since become the stuff of the Nigerian tale. Today, armed with a briefcase, you could literally walk out of the corporate towers of the national oil corporation with billions of dollars in sweet sleaze in the name of “strategic alliance”!

    Siemens. Subsidy-gate. Malabu. These are simply variants of the same Nigerian pathology: Impunity Inc. Talk of the malaise ceaselessly mutating; a virus well ahead of a known therapy. Knowing how others before this went, one could not but wish Magu and team lots of luck as they seek to unravel this latest mystery.

    Finally, the ECOWAS giant roars 

    I do not know if many Nigerians paid much attention to what happened at the Nigerian borders with Benin Republic last week. Without as much as a fanfare of a prior announcement, the Nigerian authorities finally, although temporarily moved to shut our western borders. President Muhammadu Buhari would later clarify that the measure had become necessary owing to the intolerable level of smuggling going on in that axis. Well, the measure is certainly overdue; the problem is that it did not go far enough. Why single out our western neighbour, Benin for a crime that Cameroun, Niger and Chad are guilty although in different degrees?

    Moreover,  I understand why the federal government would focus on rice smuggling at this time. That menace is killing local initiatives. However, were Nigerians to be asked to choose between that menace posed by that class of smugglers and those posed by transhumance activities across the borders, I suspect that they would gladly opt for the lesser evil in the age of mindless terror!

    Freewheeling transhumance seems to me one area where urgent and drastic action is also needed.

  • Much ado about food import ‘ban’

    Trust Nigerians to go into frenzy over issues they had barely time to digest let alone understand; a lot has been said about the directive given by President Muhammadu Buhari in the course of his Eid-el-Kabir lunch with APC governors in Daura last week. The President, we are told, directed the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) to stop providing foreign exchange for importation of food into the country, since according to him, agricultural production has not only steadied, but the country is already inching towards  food security.

    “Don’t give a cent to anybody to import food into the country,’’ the president was quoted to have told his guests in a message meant for Central Bank of Nigeria governor, Godwin Emefiele. He had noted, perhaps for effect, that some states like Kebbi, Ogun, Lagos, Jigawa, Ebonyi and Kano had already taken advantage of the federal government’s policy on agriculture with huge returns in rice farming, urging more states to plug into the ongoing revolution to feed the nation.

    For the hyperactive Nigerian commentariat, it was perhaps time again to kick dust. Unfortunately, such has been the deliberate muddling of the semantics that Nigerians are now at a loss as to what to make of it: Is it a case an outright ‘ban’ of food imports – which seems highly unlikely under the rules of the World Trade Organisation? Or, as it appears to be the case in this particular instance, barring food importers from access to foreign exchange– which though permissible and certainly not without precedent, has proven to be inefficacious?

    And then, there are those who couldn’t care because our dear president means well for his constituency – the poor masses of this country!

    Let’s admit that there are other contributors who not only see things different but more rationally. Among the latter is Kingsley Moghalu, a former Deputy Governor of the CBN who not only insists that the president lacks the power to so direct but was explicit that the Central Bank Act of 2007 makes clear that the bank “is independent, and not supposed to be taking direct instructions from politicians.”

    IN this category is Bismarck Rewane, the economist and chief executive of Financial Derivatives who while expressing similar misgivings on the wider implications of the president’s directive, says Nigerians have reasons to worry. To quote him as reported by Punch: “Did this policy emanate from a holistic, cross-pollination of ideas after the rubbing of minds from the relevant stakeholders such as farmers, food processors, marketers, the Customs service as well as the Ministry of Agriculture across the country?

    While a great number of Nigerians – certainly excepting the duo – could be forgiven for buying into the muddle, the presidency appears to be its chief promoter vide its inelegant response to the Financial Times report of August 15 on the issue. Nigerians who have not bothered to read the piece titled Muhammadu Buhari sparks dismay over policy shift on food imports should Google it to read. Written by its West Africa correspondent, Neil Munshi, the piece interestingly didn’t say anything new that highly informed Nigerians have not said about the knee-jerk, cut and paste, policies of the Buhari administration, the absence of internal coherence in its policies and plans, the conflation of monetary and fiscal policies, the systematic derogation of the independence – and I dare add – integrity – of the apex bank, and most worrisome, the clear absence of the clear-sighted leadership on the fiscal front.

    Stopping short of editorialising, Financial Times actually did no more catalogue the views of some of those who should ordinarily know – never mind their role as critics – on these wide-ranging issues.

    Take this sample of contribution by Amaka Anku, Africa director for the Eurasia Group as quoted by the author.  Her contention is that the policy  “sent a troubling message for an economy suffering from high unemployment, low foreign direct investment and sluggish growth”.

    Said she: “Most actors, especially the central bank, should know that a total ban of food imports is not practical and I doubt that will be the policy”. She also observed that the president’s comments “will continue to drive home the sense that Buhari has no idea how to manage an economy and will raise uncertainty about what other [foreign exchange] restrictions are coming, and contribute to already low business confidence.”

    Or Cobus de Hart, chief economist at NKC African Economics who said that the president’s call for a currency ban raised more “serious concerns”. The directive, he said, “also cast doubt on Nigeria’s commitment to a landmark continent-wide trade agreement, which it signed last month after more than a year of delay”.

    As it appears, if the article was guilty of anything, it is for projecting those critical voices on the issue.  To imagine that the article, which yours truly has read at least twice, could have been so terribly and perhaps deliberately misunderstood; add to this the needless tiff by officials that ought to be more reflective and far less sentimental; surely, these are not normal times and just as has been said by many that our country Nigeria is not a normal country.

    Will the restriction work? Aside being an overused weapon, its overall efficacy is suspect. Presently, we know the story of rice as indeed those of the 41 items earlier placed on forex ban. Restrictions or not, trade in those items continues to flourish. Don’t ask me where they source their forex from. Trust our officials to live in denial of the stratospheric rise in rice imports in Benin Republic, Niger and Cameroun; our markets continue to present the more plausible story of the astounding lacuna and the flawed assumptions that continues to be our nation’s undoing.

    No doubt, the measure by the president was well-intended and most certainly, the president means well. However, until the administration is able to come to terms with the fact success will not be measured by the  number of items on the prohibition list or even by the dizzying zillions poured into ad hoc interventions including the much touted  anchor borrowers’ scheme, but in the ability of the administration to create a sustainable climate for agro-preneurship to thrive, the country will remain on the same spot.

    This is where we need a completely new thinking. Emefiele and company at the apex bank can only do so much and all within the ambits of the monetary framework. As it is, Emefiele’s apex bank is increasingly being pushed to become a jack of all trades. I hope the time will not come when the bank will be called upon to help secure the borders!

    Of course, current times demand strong leadership at the level of the Economic Management Team. We need this to push refreshingly bold ideas to get the country working. Put bluntly, an innovative and effective fiscal strategy is what has been lacking in the last four years.  For now, if I may use a cliché which I am well familiar, a strategy of forex restriction at this time is at best – a placebo.

  • AfCFTA: Now the hard part

    Your excellency, our reports show that, on balance, Nigeria should consider joining the AfCFTA”, and using the opportunity of the on-going AfCFTA negotiations to secure the necessary safeguards required to ensure that our domestic policies and programmes are not compromised…

    “Our study has shown that the AfCFTA is not without major risks and undesirable impacts. The most significant of which is the potential rise in smuggling and abuse of the rules of origin. The risk is that it will provide incentive for traders to disguise goods imported from outside the continent as made in Africa goods to qualify for duty-free treatment…The risk is further complicated by the lack of capacity, resources and will on the part of some African countries to enforce their borders. Tackling this threat will require collective efforts at the highest level of ECOWAS and the African Union”.

    The above was the summary of findings/recommendations of the Presidential Committee on African Continental Free Trade Agreement last month. Barely a week after, the federal government in a terse statement would announce that “Nigeria is signing the AfCFTA Agreement after extensive domestic consultations”. With Republic of Benin also boarding the AfCFTA train, Eritrea remains the only African Union member yet to agree to the trade policy.

    The horizon, as it would appear, couldn’t be better. We are here talking about continent whose members would rather do business with former colonial masters than their kith and kin now deciding finally not only to change course but to redress through concrete measures the historic imbalance with major trading partners. Currently, the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) puts the percentage of total trade conducted between African countries at less than 20%– as against 80% with the rest of the world. One can only imagine the impact of a redirection of the current trend from, say the current 20 percent to 50 percent on the various economies in the continent. Or better still, the impact of the removal of the costly customs duties which the agreement guarantees and which the UN Economic Commission for Africa (UNECA) projects could increase intra-African trade by 52% within five years.

    The problem is that AfCFTA idea is increasingly outmoded. In fact, I’ll put the chance of its making a difference – or even survival – at less than 20 percent – and that I will consider rather generous.

    I start with the African giant, Nigeria whose 2018 Gross Domestic Product (GDP) of $397.30 billion readily presents a study in the mismatch between infrastructure and the GDP. With the value of Nigeria’s infrastructure put at about 35 per cent of GDP, compared with 70 per cent for larger economies, we are simply not there yet!

    Some estimates suggest that Nigeria will require an annual investment of N9.47tn ($30 billion) over a decade to make the bend – a problem very much at the heart of its diminished economic growth and lack of competitiveness. So, it’s a long road ahead.

    Here, at once is the great irony: Everyone from the high official to the lowest operative pretends to know the problem(s). Of course, it has to be the case with the country having been on roller-coaster train of de-industrialisation as far back as anyone could remember. Little wonder an average high school kid, even without any serious contemplation, can roll out the problem on the tip of his/her fingers: lack of basic infrastructures such as roads, railways and power.

    For an oil producing country, a petrochemical industry which would have provided the raw material base for the nation’s industrial take-off, has become a tall dream. Absent the critical linkages between agriculture and agro-processing, post-harvest losses are not only among the highest in the world, farming has remained at a most ridiculous pre-industrial level. Today, with perhaps the exception of the indigenous conglomerate – Dangote Group, and few other international brands that have managed to survive the Nigerian scourge, the environment – no thanks to the harsh and myopic policies of government – is now renowned as a giant cemetery for manufacturing entities.

    But then, just as the problems are well known, so also are the solutions seemingly very straightforward. Yet, the matter, like a party manifesto that gets recycled from one electoral season to another, are such that the Nigerian government has done practically little else than recycle them, and when it suits the government in power, kick them down the road! And so the scourge endures in its manifold variants.

    Let somebody tell me how the government intends to dissolve the heavy baggages that have hobbled our industrialisation quest short of a miracle.

    Of course, I am amused when I hear otherwise knowledgeable Nigerians relish the AfCFTA promise of “immense opportunities for Nigeria’s manufacturing and service companies to expand to Africa”. They forget that the African Growth and Opportunity Act (AGOA) initiated by the United States government to give African countries a berth in the United States market existed before it. Exactly 19 years after, Nigerians should be interested in knowing why the initiative floundered here even when other smaller, relatively less endowed countries on the continent were able to take advantage of it. It is a lesson in our penchant for sloppiness, our lack of abiding standards and our predisposition to cut corners.

    I can list other dozen reasons why AfCFTA is fated to die on arrival. I will cite two. Thanks to Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again and his Brexiteers and resurgent Far Right allies in Europe, not only the old sanctimonious rules of globalisation being rewritten, global trade relations are being altered to an extent that would have been unimaginable barely a decade ago. In a real world where the issues of economy intermingle with those of national security, the rule has since become one of country first! While Nigeria continues to luxuriate in the most expensive farce called ECOWAS – and now AfCFTA, other countries more discerning know better than throw their borders open without cast iron guarantees on what it considers its national interest more so at a time the entire humanity is experiencing unprecedented turmoil. A country where a foreigner – a Nigerien could easily saunter into an airport, going as far as mounting the wings of an aircraft readied for take-off obviously belongs to a different age!

    Finally, ever wondered why the mention of Nigeria evokes fear, hate, anger, mistrust and envy? Talk of Nigeria’s brand of exceptionalism. Didn’t they say in these parts that Naija no dey carry last? Talk about our signature reputation of fierce but sometimes crooked competitiveness that has become too loud to be ignored!

    I close this way: there is nothing mysterious in the so-called free trade. The talk about AfCFTA being nothing without the African giant although seductive is cheap. A Nigeria already burdened with its own internal problems can do without a club whose rationale is utterly questionable at this time. Let’s get cracking with the business of fixing our economy and, if I may add, the security challenge and everything will fall in place.

  • Trouble with Ruga

    Truly, failure is an orphan. Like the famed abiku, the authors of the Ruga Settlement initiative ought to be ruing the day their pet initiative – conceived in the wake of the simmering herdsmen/farmers clashes – was made public. Talk of things going terribly awry; between the office of the vice president, which, in the ensuing outrage that followed, swiftly washed its hands off the initiative; the Federal Ministry of Agriculture which although initially claimed its authorship and which has since settled on playing the fall-guy, and, President Muhammadu Buhari which promptly scuppered the charade before things got out of hand. Now, Nigerians must wonder how an initiative so utterly misguided, looking as it were, like a lifting from the Miyetti Allah playbook, could find its way into the arena of public policy in a country of multiple ethnicities.

    So much for the semantics of whether the word ‘Ruga’ means Rural Grazing Area (RUGA) or is actually a Hausa concept for cow settlement; there is a sense in which Nigerians would ordinarily wonder whether an initiative, to be funded solely by the federal government, and which seeks to carve out settlements exclusively for an occupational group would stand the test of equity, considering that the federal government neither owns an inch of land nor a trustee of same under the laws of the country. For even if we permit the federal government’s expansive definition of the ruga concept to embrace all shades of animal husbandry; the question that naturally follows is whether the scheme would embrace colocation with pig farmers since the ambience so described in the Ruga plan would equally do their own business a world of good!

    Let’s look more closely at the federal government’s definition of the age-old problem of herdsmen/farmers clashes which, in recent years, have grown, not just in frequency but also in intensity with sophisticated arms freely deployed. In this, a lot has certainly been said of how climate change which berthed in desertification has compounded the problem of the herders, particularly with Lake Chad – the main artery of the Northeast economy – almost now nearly dried up. In the same vein, a lot more has been said of how the problem could be addressed scientifically without necessarily rupturing the fragile fabric holding the Nigerian federation together. Among such was the offer by Rivers’ Governor Nyesom Wike last week. Although meant to be a joke, he was reported as offering to supply water from Bonny to wherever it was needed in the North to boost the development of pastures whenever they finally makes up its mind! Though meant as a joke, it certainly offers a different perspective – far useful than the one-track approach being pursued by the federal government.

    By far, the Achilles heel of the policy is the character of today’s herdsmen. I am not here talking here of our old time Fulani herdsmen brothers and sisters with whom we once lived together in peace and harmony. I am talking here of the AK-14 wielding pastoralist which though Fulani by association, could be from Mali or wherever. Whereas nothing has been said about the farmers being the aggressors, the exact opposite is known to be true of the new itinerant herdsmen. From Plateau to Benue, Taraba to Oyo, from Kogi to Enugu, the stories are virtually the same: entire villages being sacked as they marched on, families throwing into mourning in mindless orgies of killings and mayhem sometimes over disputes that could range from nothing to serious.  While there have been instances of the farmers matching terror with terror in cyclic reprisals, over all, it has been, mostly, one sided with the visitors having the upper hand.

    Yet, the federal government, in its wisdom, thinks that these unknown  ‘visitors’ deserve much more than accommodation; that they need to be appeased so the country can have peace. Never mind the farmers, the hapless victims of their terror; not only are they are expected to give up their ancestral lands to the bargain, theirs is an added burden to find the milk of kindness for belligerent visitors soon to be settled in their neighbourhoods to be supplied with modern appurtenances that the federal government deems fit to put in! Those reading sinister motives to the policy are simply reminded that the Sahelian drought is not only as real as the African sun; and that the herders, being endangered species, deserved shelter from the merciless drought stealthily coming upon them.

    Not a word about the fears or concerns of the farmers. Suffice to say that they would have their protein needs in meat and fura de nunu met in the new framework in addition to assurances that no stray cattle goes beyond the ruga gates to their farmsteads!

    Nigeria!

    For a federal government that had long perfected the art of robbing Peter to pay Paul, I do understand that such one-sided propositions are a familiar territory. I also understand the ease with which politics can get in the way of well-meaning initiatives. It explains why a federal government that would not touch the open grazing law in operation in Samuel Ortom’s Benue State with a long pole would seek a federal fiat to expropriate lands for its own version of solution to the same problem. And here, we are talking about farmers whose own cries of oppression have gone unheard being required to give up their ancestral lands in the sweet poison packaged variously as livestock transformation programme or Ruga.

    That anyone can seriously imagine that a policy conceived in bad faith can deliver the peace in an environment where, the one party is known to insist on the primacy of their interests, as opposed to those of their compatriots surely beats me.

    Good thing that the federal government has now suspended the Ruga Settlement policy. Let it remain so!