The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Before PMB expands the jailhouses

    Fresh from his 10-day working vacation in the British capital at the weekend, the media pointedly put the question to President Muhammadu Buhari on what Nigerians should expect from him going forward.

    “More Nigerians”, he said, “are expecting that we are going to jail more of the thieves that brought economic problems to the country. I think that is being expected of ME and I will do it”.

    No one, it seems to me, ever doubted where the president stood on the monster called corruption. However, if the expectation was that the rest period in the United Kingdom would have afforded our president ample time for deeper, perhaps more comprehensive reflection on those seemingly intractable problems that have hobbled past and current efforts to build a united, peaceful and prosperous country, it must have come to many as disappointing that he almost instinctively, relapsed into his now traditional default mode of chasing after the wind of the ‘looters’ of our commonwealth.

    To start with, it should alarm Nigerians that the president will implicitly and perhaps most cavalierly, discount the strictures embedded in our constitutional order simply to press the case against the so-called looters even when they are yet to be put to trial. As far as yours truly can see, the president, as the symbol of executive authority, could cause the building of as many jailhouses as the national appropriation would permit; he could even sign as many executive orders to address perceived lacuna in the existing laws as he deems fit – the most recent being Executive Order No 6 which seeks to restrict the use of suspected stolen funds; nowhere in the constitution, it needs to be made clear, is the president empowered to declare any Nigerian a looter any more than the presidency could procure any extra-legal measures to put any citizen out of circulation – no matter how heinous or grievous the perceived misdeed might be.

    That role, it bears stating, belongs exclusively to the judiciary.

    That a president sworn to the observance of the due process and of the law would harbour such exaggerated notion of presidential powers would seem to me at the heart of all that is wrong with our country. The same would apply to the anti-graft and security agencies, all of which, in the frenzy of the moment forget that they are in fact creations of law, going overboard with mindless activism – despite the clear delineation of their roles as investigative and prosecutorial bodies – all in the cause of a so-called presidential anti-corruption agenda.

    No doubt, the president may be right in his assumption about Nigerians sharing his revulsion for corruption. Most likely, they do. After all, they bear the direct consequences of the uncountable billions routinely filched from the treasury – monies that could have been judiciously deployed to improve their living conditions. What is debatable is whether they – by this I mean citizens – would tolerate means that are more foul than fair all in the name of stanching out the scourge. This is even more so, from a presidency, which although imbued with such awesome powers, have neither enhanced the institutional capacity of the anti-graft bodies to do the hard work, nor evolved a coherent strategy to stop corruption from budding.

    Let me preface this by admitting that the president has done quite a lot to bring corruption into the front burner. Perhaps more than all the previous leaders before him, he has deployed the moral force of the bully pulpit to awaken Nigerians to the consciousness of the scourge as a lethal, not-too-silent killer of nations. The implementation of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), for instance, has not only eventuated in massive curbs in wastes in the federal bureaucracy in particular, it has somewhat, streamlined our public finance and its unfathomable processes. As it is, gone as it were, is the era where public officers, did as they pleased with public funds, only because their helmsmen thought little of the appropriation process.

    Of course, we have seen a new zeal on the part of the anti-graft institutions to confront the menace, even if the agencies are still largely light years behind as far as the cutting edge technology required for the fight is concerned. This we must also admit is when showmanship is not allowed to undermine the rigour of due diligence needed to deliver. And with the judiciary recently providing a spark in what had hitherto proven to be an unwinnable war, a country primed to confront the un-silent killer has finally begun to emerge.

    Clearly, while the economy may not have returned to robust health, the mindless haemorrhage is increasingly becoming history.

    As important as these are, they are certainly not sufficient to deal a fatal blow on corruption. That factor, long lost in the current treatise on corruption in these parts, would again be missed by President Buhari in his single-minded resolve to herd the nation’s colony of looters into the jailhouse. That factor, if I may put it simply is the push for a fairer, more just and equitable society.

    Surely, the fight is certainly not exclusively that of the executive to fight. While the president could prod the anti-graft agencies to investigate corruption whereever found, the job of determination or exculpation from guilt obviously lies with the judiciary. To go beyond that is to undermine the institutional integrity without which the body is at once reduced to an executive lackey.

    But the more fatal is the assumption that the anti-corruption stands any real chance without a deliberate move to expand the frontiers of opportunity for everyone.

    To be sure, that factor boils down to the basic question of how a diligent worker is expected to own a home without a mortgage system in place without dipping his finger into the treasury; we are not even talking here of a pensioner, who, after, toiling faithfully for 35 years in public service has nothing of shelter to boast of. Or a young man, who after spending more than decade in employment and on a salary that would hardly suffice to take him home, and with all the societal pressures, is nonetheless expected to cough out more than a million cash upfront to purchase a car in the absence of a functional credit system.

    And we sure know how rents and wages are paid in these parts; whereas the former are in advance, sometimes as many as two years; the latter, which comes in trickles, are oftentimes hopelessly in arrears, sometimes for as much as six months as we have seen in some of the states in recent time!

    That is the reality of our society.  Time we began to evolve  functional institutions in credit delivery.

    It is not too late for the president to ponder on these even as he moves to expand the jailhouses.

  • The danger ahead

    Once is happenstance. Twice is coincidence. Three times is enemy action”. To anyone familiar with the above lines from Ian Fleming’s gripping detective novel Goldfinger – the seventh in the popular James Bond series, the events of the past week must have rekindled distant chords. For while the main elements of the thriller Bond story, particularly the plots and counterplots may have possibly been lost in distant memory, not unlikely are those immortal words which, long after it leapt out of the pages of the 1959 novel, has, like an imperishable commodity, remained in the public square to be routinely drawn upon to describe aspects of the human, nay Nigerian experience.

    True, the polity that has not been in short supply of excitable moments since a group of 15 senators and 36 members of the House of Representatives defected from the ruling party on July 24. But then, the raft of countermeasures witnessed in the past that have not only left the citizens bewildered but have thrown up questions about the character of the actors and their understanding of the niceties of process and constitutionalism.

    It is a silly season, no doubt. From the train of defection which kicked off in Abuja July 24, it has since berthed in Benue where the embattled governor, Samuel Ortom alongside members of the state parliament dismounted the APC coach to join old comrades in the PDP. Days after, the spectacle would shift to Sokoto where the governor, Aminu Tambuwal also alongside some lawmakers moved from the APC to the PDP. And then the mother of all defections in Akwa Ibom State, where Godswill Akpabio, erstwhile minority leader in the upper legislative house junked the PDP on whose ticket he not only rode to parliament but served in the exalted office as governor for eight years.

    Nothing outside the Nigerian pathology of opportunism – if you ask me.

    And to imagine that these merely preface the real battles –the control of the National Assembly and the ultimate prize in 2019. This is where the weeks and the coming months promise to be exciting. Suffice to say that  we are at the point where it is safe to say that things would never remain the same for the Bukola Saraki-led senate. In the unlikelihood of Saraki yielding the exalted office of Senate President which he apparently coverts more than life; and in the equal unlikelihood of the majority APC willing to let go of what they consider as theirs by right, a do-or-die battle appears joined. And so between a senate carved in Saraki’s image – a body that has done little else than shop for ignoble technicalities to retain the ‘stolen’ trophy – and a determined and equally inventive ruling party, one that claims the moral high but would nonetheless betray a willingness to sacrifice due process for expediency even if it tends to a repudiation of everything it claims to stand for, the rest of us, can only watch– in slow motion – as the fight crawls to a photo finish.

    Call it a state of neither war nor peace; that is precisely where we are at the moment. However, never mind the sabre-rattling and threats of Armageddon; or even the few egos that would be bruised and the momentary discomfort that would come by a few of the current actors as a result of shifting loyalties, nothing of the long predicted tectonic shift would happen.

    In the end, it would still be they, versus the rest of us!

    Only if they had spared us the terrible migraine from their unfathomable mind games; then we would have been content with a ring-side seat to watch as events unfold. Unfortunately, the insidious, grotesque institutional atmosphere they also seek to nurture as they cruise dangerously along, has become too unsettling to ignore. It is increasingly, proving to be toxic to our constitutional health.

    I cite three examples – all of them fresh. On July 30, eight lawmakers from Benue State House of Assembly reportedly served an impeachment notice on the state governor, Samuel Ortom. Their leader, Terkimbi Ikyange, who coincidentally had in the preceding week been removed as Speaker it was who gave the governor a seven-day ultimatum to respond to alleged misconduct and corruption charges. In all, a tidy N54 billion broken into N22 billion (security vote) and N32 billion (local government funds) was cited.

    As in a movie, the gang of eight lawmakers actually moved to impeach the governor – never mind that this was a 30-member parliament!

    The mother of it all was that the police actually provided the renegade lawmakers security while shutting out the majority 22 members!

    The story unfortunately, didn’t end there. Last week, the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) reportedly swopped on the account of the state government, thus effectively crippling the activities of the government for days. And all of this happening few weeks after the governor’s defection from the ruling party at the centre!

    Happenstance?

    How about the more recent – perhaps the more dramatic one which happened in Akwa Ibom – also last week. The story, according to the Sunday edition of this newspaper is that a tidy N1.4 billion belonging to the Akwa Ibom government was traced to 11 slush accounts. Already, the finance commissioners and three others were said to have summoned by the anti-graft body. Again, this happening few days after the former governor, Godswill Akpabio, defected from the ruling party in the state.

    Mere coincidence?

    Now the third – and perhaps the biggest one, a class act is the invasion of the National Assembly by hooded men of the Department of State Security on Tuesday last week. While we worry about the motives or even the characters behind the violation of the hallowed precincts of the National Assembly, there is – good enough –a near unanimous acceptance that the Lawal Daura-led Department of State Security had finally crossed the red line. That is certainly important just as the swift measures taken by the acting President Yemi Osinbajo is also critical to restoring credibility to the body. So much for our collective outrage; the pretence about the pattern as somewhat strange to the polity seems to me an extension of the culture of denial. Closer to the reality is the implicit admission by the highest authorities in the land that our nation’s secret service is not only fickle but so patently amenable to seductions by opportunistic actors in the political system.

    That danger, which we daily live with, is something to chew upon.

    Let me end this piece this way: politics and the work of EFCC or DSS do not mix. Let politicians indulge in their fancies; let those running the federal government allow the EFCC and the DSS to work for us – without political interference. By the way, given the critical roles of the two institutions to the nation’s democratic project, it seems to me that a crash course in optics wouldn’t entirely be a bad idea for their leadership.

  • Problem Has Changed Name, again?

    Until very recently, few Nigerians could claim to know the body that goes by the name ANED let alone what it represents. Not anymore. Today, the body struts the space leaving the electricity little doubt about the ascent of new powerful cartel, which although cannot get their members to deliver on their mandate, insists on operating in lieu of rules. For Nigerians who had thought that they were done with the public utility monopoly that morphed from ECN to NEPA and to PCHN, they are finally, finding out that the problem has changed name literally and figuratively!

    Welcome to the world of Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED) – the new cartel presumably so powerful that, after wrestling the electricity consumer to the ground and sending the electricity sector regulator on a Rip Van Winkle sleep now thinks it’s time to mount the lecture circuit to teach the minister in charge of power – Babatunde Raji Fashola, SAN one or two things about power – minus the art of delivery!

    Ours truly is an interesting country.

    Twelve years into the coming of the Power Sector Reform Act and another five years after the takeover of the unbundled entities of the defunct PCHN, we pretend to be making progress even when it is so obvious that movement is in reverse gear.  Never mind the old assumptions about private capital providing catalyst for national development; the promises of new ways of getting things done, the elementary principle of value delivery that is at the heart of modern capitalism or if you like – businesses; all of these are being torn into shreds – right under our very eyes – by a body that perennially goes in search of a problem to a solution!

    Not too long ago, yours truly recalls accusing the minister of being soft on his “Abiku” Discos – a charge the minister would vehemently disagree with.

    Not to worry; he insisted then that the job of policing – if you like regulating – the industry, lay elsewhere. The minister was of course right – at least legally; my view then and which has since been borne out, was that the position, considering our peculiar circumstances, amounted to mere sophistry.

    Not that I do not understand the dilemma of the minister. It is the dilemma of the mother of an Abiku child. With the child is said to be sworn to die, the mother nonetheless insists on splashing all the due care hoping sometimes against hope that the child might somehow find the will to live. Never mind the claim about mother’s milk of mercy being inexhaustible, there comes a time when in a fit of desperation, the supremely troubled mother tells the child to choose to either go or stay!

    With the Abiku neither ready to let us alone nor allow us the peace of mind, a push-back would seem at some point inevitable. We are apparently at that moment now.

    That perhaps is the sense in which yours truly understands the minister’s briefing of Monday, July 9 aptly titled “Power Sector State of Play, Next Steps and Policy Directives”. In a tone that could be considered most unusual in the circumstance, the minister, in bare knuckle manner left no one in doubt that the season of indulgence was over.

    First, the minister thinks NERC, is not doing enough given the extensive regulatory powers conferred by the law “including the power in Sections 73 and 74, to amend or cancel a license if the licensee is unable to discharge the duties and obligations imposed by the license.”  That reminder is, quite frankly, long overdue.

    More tellingly, he thinks NERC should proceed to enforce the contract of DisCos to supply meters and act to ensure the urgent speedy supply and installation of meters with a view to eliminating estimated billing and promote efficient industry and market structures. On this, I have nothing to add.

    To the Discos, he says it is time to either shape up or ship out. Again, few would contest this.  The sins of the Discos are not only many, that Nigerians have been forced to endure their crippling debility from their inability to deliver service says more about our legendary resilience than anything else.

    They include failure to provide prepaid meters; failure to ramp up capacity to enable them take up the available 2,000MW difference between the generated power and their distribution capacity; their penchant to play dog in the manager –threatening private entrepreneurs from entering the market to supply consumers whom they are unable to supply and their overall antagonism to other initiatives – private and public – to bridge the electricity supply gap.

    For these failures, particularly the failure to match the distribution infrastructures with the pace of power generated, the generating companies (GenCos) are not only left to choke, the banking sector, the enabling arm currently asphyxiates for the same reason of the failure of the Discos to discharge their due obligations to the other players in the electricity value chain.

    Yet, in the midst of these, the Discos would dare to press for territorial exclusivity or even monopoly. Never mind Section 71(6) of the Electric Power Sector Reform Act (EPSRA) dealing with Terms and Conditions of licenses. Now, the minister reminds that nothing in the law provided for the so-called “exclusivity” nor could “monopoly” for any class of players have been envisaged. That looks like telling it as it is!

    “If we take into consideration that, after five years of privatisation, there are still people and businesses who do not have power or enough power, common sense and public interest demands that we must not resist ordinary people, small businesses like shops and markets from seeking alternative sources of energy.”

    “The truth is that they already have these sources of alternative energy, in small petrol and diesel generators that cost them about N100 per kilowatt hour. If the DISCOs are not resisting the generator sellers who are contributing to pollution, what is the logic of resisting small entrepreneurs bringing mini gas plants to supply a market need?”.

    “Government” he said with some tone of finality, “must act, and will do so. The DisCos bought these assets with their eyes opened, and they must compete to deliver or exit”. These no doubt, are tough words.

    Which of course takes us to the final question – what does ANED want? Although the minister calls the body “interloper”, I believe ANED deserves a hearing. Yes, the body has spoken – mainly about technical issues hampering service delivery, the challenges that they daily face – the same standard rote routinely dished out as rationalisation. For a body that wants to be taken seriously, there is as yet, no serious signs of concrete investment in structures and processes on the basis on which the future of their sector could be anchored.

    Want to know what ANED truly wants? You guessed right; they want money – loads of it from the piggy bank.  How can anyone forget the N213 billion bailout packaged by the apex bank for the sector in 2014?  Or the N39 billion said to be in support of their metering plan only last year? They want more. Period.

    Sure, the Problem Has (merely) Changed Hands!

  • Stomach infrastructure 2.0

    How times change. Welcome Stomach Infrastructure 2.0. From a concept associated with the basest instincts for which the Ekiti electorate was only a little while back terribly savaged; its morphology into a permissive tool of electoral politics obviously says a lot says about the confounding dynamics of electoral politics in the nation’s perennially shifting moral firmament. Today, the Ekiti electorate are eminently entitled to rejoice in that the end-game somewhat justifies the means given their experience of pervasive meltdown in the last four years under the impertinent Ayodele Fayose.

    Not so however the debilitating poverty, the bye-product of which was the open trading of votes for all its terrible portents in what is at best a pot of porridge, now threatening to put a seal on the strain of the perversion unleashed by Fayose four years ago.

    That of course takes nothing away from the victory of the winner – Dr Kayode Fayemi, the new governor-elect. Take it or leave it, Fayemi’s 197,459 votes as against the 178,121 votes garnered by his PDP rival Professor Olusola Eleka would ordinarily have settled the matter. And that is even without the sweetener, the victory so spread across 12 as against his challenger’s four out of the 16 local governments as to make any disputation about unassailability to be quite frankly, suspect.

    And to imagine that this is the same Fayemi that could not take even a single local government in the 2014 gubernatorial election as an incumbent running against Fayose!

    Now, the story is that the election, like that of 2014, was somewhat flawed. It might well be. But then, the contest, as one might imagine, isn’t so much one of saint versus sinner, but which of the sinning party had the upper hand. If it came to anything, it seems a matter of one merely cancelling the other out. In any case, given the terrible injustices suffered by Fayemi and his party the Action Congress of Nigeria four years ago, perhaps only the most starry eyed idealist would expect Fayemi and his party, APC to play the dove while Fayose and his rampaging mob are allowed a field day to re-enact the 2014 magic. This time around, it seems a case of the game-master being beaten flatly at a game in which he claims to hold the ace!

    But then, talk of a tragic dimension to the farce: isn’t it sad, considering the impressive pedigrees of the two Ekiti sons supposedly sparring, that both not could, at any point during the husting, spare the time for an eyeball to eyeball debate if only to allow the electorate to size them up? Whereas Fayemi – who having been in the saddle for four years with clearly laid out plans for governance – could be deemed familiar to the electorate; not so Olusola Eleka, the PDP candidate who chose to remain in the shadows and so could not be held to anything, and so was practically missing in action. This of course left the enfant terrible, Ayodele Fayose, whose name although was not on the ballot, to strut the space, consumed as it were, by a messianic complex that bordered on the schizophrenic.

    For the 49-old professor of building engineering, the universe remains open and wide – in or out of public service.

    More than a week on, the debate rages on how the Ekiti battle was supposedly lost and/or won. Understandably, there are a throng out there who would swear that money played a major part in deciding the outcome. In all of this, the Ekiti electorate, for trading their cash for votes, are supposed to be the villains perhaps just like in 2014, when they supposedly voted for the god of the stomach against rational expectations.

    Quite frankly, I do not disagree that poverty could for most part explain such clear aversion to rational choice.  But then, this would apply all the elections that have held at all levels from the second republic till date in different parts of the country – with differences merely one of degrees rather than real substance. The big issue of course is that Ekiti, home to a proud and fiercely independent people, a people reckoned among the politically sophisticated in the world has in the last four years become a byword for everything base in electoral politics. That is what makes everything truly troubling.

    In other words, much as some of the current attempts to revile and cast our Ekiti folks with borrowed robes might come across as opportunistic and cheap, equally hard to ignore is the ugly spectre that flowed directly from the last two gubernatorial elections in the state. Which leaves the current task as simple as finding answers to the lone question of how a people so deep and knowledgeable could have been sold for so cheap.

    This is where the next four years might just make the difference. After four years of pointless and misdirected activism and the banality that governance has been reduced, the state can at least do with some focus and direction. To start with, it seems utterly incongruous that a state said to boast of the highest number of professors and PhDs would rank among the poorest in the Nigerian federation. It just doesn’t add up. Mercifully, the governor-elect has spoken of the values that define the Ekitis and the need to restore them. He spoke of respect for leaders, commitment to the people and aversion for brigandage and criminality and so on; these are certainly important although it remains to be seen how these could be achieved without a solid material base which in the end is measured by the overall improvement in the material conditions of the people. Stomach infrastructure might in the end not be so bad after all!

    As they say – what is the worth of Omoluwabi when the stomach is empty?

    For Fayemi, it is no doubt a familiar terrain. Which is why expectations are very high, this time around. Four years might seem a long way from now, the reality is that there is so much to be done. The reason he cannot afford those costly distractions.

    My congratulations, dear governor-elect.

  • When ‘go slow’ is virtue

    Two deals on the table with Africa’s Big Brother showing no signs of shifting grounds on either, it seems one moment the world had better listened to the underlying message. For much as it is tempting to see every instance of dilatoriness as merely the mutation of the same old affliction of state stasis, I must however confess that the typically go-slow Buhari administration seems to have made a wise choice in its studied ‘tardiness’ over the hot-button aspiration for a continent-wide free trade area.

    You know the story already.  I begin with the African Continental Free Trade Agreement (AfCTA), an initiative which stakes a grand ambition of pooling together the 55 African Union member states closer by removing such barriers to trade like tariffs and import quotas, allowing the free flow of goods and services between its members. On March 21, 44 African countries – minus the two continental economic powerhouses, of Nigeria and South Africa – had signed the instrument to kick-start its take-off.

    Way back then, President Buhari had spoken on the so-called $3 trillion continental free-trade zone covering the continent’s 1.2 billion people and what it meant to the nation’s economy: “We will not agree to anything that will undermine local manufacturers and entrepreneurs, or that may lead to Nigeria becoming a dumping ground for finished goods.”

    Only last week, at a news conference during a visit by South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, he also made it quite clear that his administration was in no hurry to sign the agreement:  “In trying to guarantee employment, goods and services in our country, we have to be careful with agreements that will compete, maybe successfully, against our upcoming industries.”

    “I am a slow reader, maybe because I was an ex-soldier. I didn’t read it fast enough before my officials saw that it was all right for signature. I kept it on my table. I will soon sign it”, the president was reported to have said, tongue in cheek.

    A little while back, I watched the president address the same concerns before a European Union delegation that had called on him to sign the West Africa-EU free trade agreement – the Economic Partnership Agreement (EPA), put up precisely for the same general reasons covering 16 West African countries (and Mauritania) and the European Union.

    “Our industries”, I heard the president say then, “cannot compete with the more efficient and highly technologically driven industries in Europe”.

    “We are not enthusiastic about signing the EPA because of our largely youthful population.”

    Never mind the profound irony in the biggest economy on the continent being unable to take on the challenge of regional or continental trade on the grand scale; however, away from the penchant to play the numbers and, if you like, the egoistical game, it seems one of such times when a perceptible lack of enthusiasm for the big league must be seen as borne of profound self-awareness.

    In a way, the AfCFTA deal is important – perhaps far more than its symbolism. That intra-African trade presently stands at a miserable 15 percent obviously says a lot about the extent to which the economies of the countries suffer disconnection and disarticulation from each other. And irrespective of what one makes of the statement credited to Chiedu Osakwe, Director-General, Nigerian Office for Trade Negotiation (NOTN), AfCFTA’s Nigerian negotiator that AfCFTA was “much more than a trade agreement but about strategically reorganising the geo-economic landscape of Africa, Nigeria’s leadership position, competitiveness and modernisation”, or even his debatable allusion to its potential to address  “the issue of unemployment, market access and economic growth for Nigeria and Africa”, there is no doubt a lot to be said of the merits of a more robust continent-wide trade as having the potential to strengthen the bonds of African brotherhood.

    The big problem, as always, is how to achieve this in such ways and manners to deliver maximum benefits to the disparate actors.

    Can we frankly say that we are ready for a global free trade agreement as envisaged under AfCFTA or even the EPA? What will Nigeria be bringing to the table? What would be the basis of reciprocity since Nigeria currently lacks the competitive edge?

    What safeguards are there in a continent where even neighbours are known to act contrary to each other’s national interests as it is often the case with our ECOWAS neighbours?

    The point is, there is a world of difference between our continuing pretence to being the continent’s economic powerhouse and the hard reality of a truly industrialised self-sustaining economy. The fact simply is that our industries are simply not there yet, either in terms of their competitiveness or in any real sense of global appeal.  The same with our educational system. The much that can be said is that they are not ready to take on the challenge of grooming our youths for the economy of the future. One direct result of that is the current situation in which one out of two youths are either unemployed or unemployable.

    Today, for all our  pretences to real time manufacturing, our basic infrastrcutures are still basically antedeluvian which of course renders any real prospects of competitiveness herculean.

    But then, what might yet prove to be the greatest obstacle are the countless other bilateral trade agreements by AU countries with the rest of the world. It goes without saying that a number of these agreements actually run counter to the spirit of AfCFTA. As for Nigeria, it seems easy to see that many of the agreements not only have potentials to undermine current efforts at shoring up manufacturing capacity through large scale dumping of cheap products that are not necessarily manufactured on the continent, they might in fact prove injurious to our national recovery efforts. Of course, with most of African countries still largely yoked to their former colonial, trading patterns, it remains to be seen how the AfCFTA framework will deliver on the expected goals.

    Yes, South Africa has signed – convinced it was in its national interests. Being the continent’s indisputable manufacturing powerhouse, it should have done so, long before now.

    As for Nigeria, it seems one moment when ‘go slow’ could turn a virtue. By opting to take it easy, the president is perfectly in order.

  • Black Thursday on my mind

    NSR 888 YC. Does it mean anything? Guess, it doesn’t. I believe it should. Indeed, Nigerians ought to by now, be familiar not just with the registration number but the actual owners of the killer truck that has thrown scores of families, if not the entire nation, into mourning since Thursday last week. While the media may have, overall, done fairly well in their reportage of the tragedy, in vain did yours truly find any reference to the registration mark let alone the question of the ownership of the truck said to have despatched some nine citizens to their early graves in addition to the scores wounded  – until Sunday evening.

    To Ladi Lawanson, the Lagos commissioner and his colleagues at the transportation ministry must go the credit for lifting the lid on the identity of the killer truck – that is permitting some measure of uneasiness that the vital information was tucked somewhere obscure among the other updates supplied by the ministry – and this after 72 hours.

    That of course is big deal to the extent that the media didn’t consider that “small matter” important until that formal disclosure on Sunday night. Is it a case of being overwhelmed by the scale of human tragedy, or one of media’s typical obsessions with morbid statistics? Whatever may be the reason, that lacuna, in my view, underlies another chapter of the same malady: the tragedy of a nation that has neither the discipline nor the stomach for important details when they matter most; a window into understanding how and why we have become what we are today.

    Needless to state that little piece of information is actually everything – from whether the hapless, innocent victims of the man-made disaster will ever get justice; whether the citizens as a whole will ever be able to wrest themselves free from the stranglehold of the licensed mass murderers prowling the highways, to whether operatives in the economic realm could be compelled to adorn a human face.

    Back to NSR 888 YC.  For now, the much we know is that – “It (the tanker) was manufactured in 1999 by Mack Trucks Inc at its assembly plant in Winnsboro, United States”. Secondly, it was “designed as a 14,959kg (approximately 15 ton) drilling rig with low bed, but it was converted in Nigeria from a drilling rig to fuel tank carrier to carry 30 tonnes…” And that “the truck should not have been loaded to the weight of 30 tonnes, which is twice its pulling capacity.”

    Although the identity of the owner(s) would have to wait a bit longer since, according to the state government, the vehicle has changed 13 times since the original purchase, Lagos of course deserves every support and encouragement in its bid to unravel the mystery of ownership of the man-made disaster unleashed on the highways by the uncaring system.

    There are a number of reasons why this is this important. For far too long, we have indulged in the crazy, noxious fatalism of leaving matters, even when they are man-induced, to God. As a result, individuals, corporate bodies as indeed all manners of for-profit entities have been known to perpetrate murder and mayhem often with innocent citizens as victim, and perhaps in the understanding that they will never be called to account.

    Picture a 15-ton low bed truck originally configured as a drilling rig being converted by some unscrupulous local fabricators into a 30-ton fuel tanker. Never mind the age of the vehicle – something that hardly matters in these shores – imagine some officials passing off the “disaster” for use in the highly combustible business of fuel haulage? Again, imagine that some Vehicle Inspection Officers actually caused a roadworthiness certificate to be issued to the operator of the contraption ostensibly to fulfil all righteousness!

    Still believe that NSR 888 YC was anything but an accident waiting?

    Already, I see in my mind’s eye many layers of actionable torts that public defenders and other public-spirited lawyers could pursue in defence of public interest! Unfortunately, can we truly say we are anywhere near that level, yet?

    I think Lagos State government is uniquely positioned to take the nation there. It is no accident that Lagos is described as the Centre of Excellence. Here is one instance when that burden imposes the duty to act not just in the interest of the victims but also to set an unmistakeable governance template for corporate responsibility while ensuring that operators within its jurisdiction live by them.

    This is not about reinventing the wheel; that template, to be sure, already exists. What is perhaps missing is the political will, the firm resolve and the due diligence to avail countless hapless victims of criminal behaviours the necessary protections within the ambits of existing laws. Here again, the point bears restating that Lagos, with its culture of excellence, with its world-class forensic infrastructure, proven leadership in governance and an unequalled justice delivery system in the Nigerian federation, can make all the difference.

    What do we expect? A two-layered class action on behalf of the victims of that Black Thursday, against the owners of the truck and against the federal government. First, without prejudice to criminal charges that might be deemed necessary, the state government, through the Office of the Public Offender (OPD) with active collaboration of public-spirited lawyers, should sue the hell out of the owner(s) of the truck. The hefty monetary compensation – to be demanded, should not preclude the winding up of the business of the owner(s) of NSR 888 YC.

    Will that bring back the dead? Certainly not. But most assuredly, it will set a new bar for public conduct by corporates. Secondly, the point would have been unambiguously made that human life – as against profits – not only matter but should actually come first. Thirdly, in a clime where impunity rules, it would send the signal that actions can be made to carry consequences.

    As for the federal government, whose culpable negligence contributed to the disaster, the claim should be exemplary damages/compensation. Much as I understand how politically sensitive such action might be at this time, it seems the only necessary step to be taken against that tier of administration which although invested with awesome powers, continues to visit the ordinary citizen with the fruits of its derelictions.

    May God almighty console the grieving families.

  • Before we hang the National Assembly

    Although the cat and mouse game has endured for months, last week would provide the moment for President Muhammadu Buhari to let out his irritation with the National Assembly. If the president was any dismayed that it took the august body seven long months to pass the budget instrument, more intriguing perhaps was the outcome of the exercise. With nearly 5000 new projects inserted into the original proposal by the National Assembly while at the same time cutting almost equal number of the administration’s own proposals, the president pointedly accused the lawmakers of not only distorting his projections but also of mutilating the document on which his administration’s plans and programmes for the fiscal year are anchored.

    Never mind the charge about the president scoring an own goal when he opted to put his hand on a supposedly flawed document; guess the president might be forgiven for placing the interest of the economy over and above what would ordinarily pass for an unproductive turf war, even if, his artful play on victimhood would seem by far, less forgivable.

    So what did the lawmakers do wrong?

    I can hear a horde of angry Nigerians chorus – everything. To be sure, not a few times have I heard a horde of angry citizens’ call for the storming of the so-called Nigerian Bastille for their uncountable transgressions of which its latest handling of the 2018 budget may actually be the least treasonable. That, although bizarre, is perhaps understandable. In these terribly lean times, if you pay, for instance, a senator N750,000 monthly in consolidated salary and allowances, an unearned running cost of N13.5 million every month, and an additional N200 million per quarter pork described as constituency fund, the least the citizen would expect is that the ‘greedy fellows’ to leave whatever is left in the treasury for the hoi polloi! Clearly, the suggestion that they would rather not, can be quite frankly, difficult to bear. So much for their love for us; imagine them jacking up the budget from N8.6 trillion to N9.1 trillion, only to cut off N347 billion from the votes considered strategic by the executive. That was not before raising their own votes from N125 billion to N139 billion.

    Ours is an interesting country no doubt; a country where citizens bandy the law when it suits them. I have read many of the so-called defence put up to justify the blatant heist. In all, at the heart of the defence is the claim that constitution recognizes the parliament as the ultimate custodian of the purse. I don’t think there’s any question as to whether or not the nation’s organic law grants the lawmakers the power to determine what gets spent or even how. Nor does anyone suggest that an institution that has the power to authorize the use of funds cannot move some or parts thereof around. It is therefore not about law – but morality and public policy.

    Fortunately, we do also know that the obverse side of the same law charges the executive branch – exclusively – with the implementation of the budget. This of course depends on the quantum of funds available within the given year, the capacity of the implementing agencies and the will (by the executive) to get things done. Guess this is where the law clashes with reality – call it practicability!

    Never mind the posturing legislature; it seems clear which of the branches that holds – ultimately – the joker! Where the executive chooses to play ball, there is at least a faint hope that something would be done – which in any case hardly guarantees that values will be delivered in the end as the funds are either stolen or where attempts are made to implement something in the name of projects, they are at best done, haphazardly, which of course explains the hordes of white elephant projects spread across the length and breadth of the country today.

    And where it chooses not to play ball? They can always dangle the sword of impeachment and so risk the Bastille treatment!

    Does the above serve as endorsement for the blustering and oftentimes sanctimonious executive branch? For an arm of governments whose own sins are legion, it seems about time the nation also paid equal attention to its own transgressions. A few sure stands out. One that Nigerians are most familiar is the humongous figures annually rolled out but which never gets to mean anything to the ordinary man in the end. To that we can add the tardiness and incompetence that have become the hallmarks of the budget process. Those are what have made our budgets the farce that they have become.

    Having said all, it is not hard to imagine what is essentially at the heart of the turf war. It’s all about procurement and the power of patronage! The chief executive in charge of a parastatal knows what it means in real terms. The lawmakers surely do hence their endless, almost insatiable craving for a piece of the pie! The bureaucrats understand the power only too well. So do the contract-spinning weekly Federal Executive Council meetings where the subject is guaranteed to sit atop the weekly Order Paper! The absence, I am told, makes governance something of a grinding, monotonous labour!

    Welcome to our self-help republic! As they say, like it was in the beginning…

    Let no one therefore suck us into a meaningless war. If you ask me, I will simply say there’s nothing in this war – not for us. It is an elite game; either way, we are guaranteed to lose. What is currently playing out between the two arms of government comes to a failure of elite politics.

    So, you don’t want the National Assembly to pad the budget? Fine. How about getting FEC to leave those routine businesses of contract awards to the professionals in the bureaucracy while political appointees get their hands dirty with policy? Shouldn’t the sauce for the goose be good for the gander? Or put another way, why should one be made to feel that it has a right to eat to its satisfaction while the other feels left out?

  • Law, justice and the June 12 question

    Nigerians wouldn’t have been the most excitable people they are globally acclaimed to be had the familiar legal hair-splitting not attended the national awards conferred on Chief Moshood Kashimawo Abiola, the acclaimed winner of the June 12, 1993 elections and the foremost human rights lawyer, Chief Gani Fawehinmi by President Muhammadu Buhari penultimate week. Clearly, Nigeria may have been described as a country never in short supply of excitable moments, some of the reactions that have trailed it has merely reinforced this national character.

    In an environment permanently locked in the partisan mode, dissensions would not only seem the natural order but something to be expected. Dissension, by the way – if I may borrow the Biblical cliché –is the way we live and have our being. For daring to reach out for the trophy of righting the historic wrong, the administration has been variously accused of cynically manipulating the historic event for political advantage. Others, perhaps more charitable, have insisted that what the president did was doing the right act done in a wrong way. Considering – some say – the mass alienation of the southwest in particular –the motive(s), they charged could not be altruistic!

    And now – the ruse – as against the ballyhooed – rule of law has since come handy for those interested in obfuscating issues than see justice done. For something that every fair-minded citizens has long deemed cut and dried, the revelation of how deep the resentment still runs in some people’s veins –the usual familiar quarters –which sees any attempt – even merely symbolic – to revisit the historic wrong as something of an equivalent of their own Golgotha moment – must be something to chew upon.

    Pity that a quarter of a century gone by has quite clearly failed to wash off those terrible blinkers hence the specious patriotism couched in legalism.

    Thanks to President Muhammadu Buhari, the nation would appear to have turned a new chapter – even as it turned that not a few remain unimpressed – and that is to put things mildly. On Tuesday, June 12, he dared to do what others before him couldn’t find the courage to do, or as in an earlier attempt made, half-heartedly.

    As they say in these parts – the president literally killed two birds with one stone. In what appears a move designed to stoke a fierce fire of legalism, the president did not stop at announcing a posthumous honour of Grand Commander of the Federal Republic on Bashorun Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, winner of the June 12, 1993 presidential election, and Grand Commander of the Order of the Niger on the irrepressible lawyer – Gani Fawehinmi, he went as far as putting June 12 on the nation’s foremost calendar as Democracy Day.

    Not so fast – said former Chief Justice of the Federation, Alfa Belgore – and with it an instinctive disclaimer:  “It is not done…”

    The national honours committee – which he chaired in 2016(?) – he said, was not consulted prior to the decision. He claimed, citing Section 3 (1) and (2) of the National Honours Act,  that the particular awards could not be done posthumously: “Subject to the next following paragraph of this article, a person shall be appointed to a particular rank of an Order when he receives from the President in person, at an investiture held for the purpose”.

    Did the revered jurist bother read the next subsection? That seems doubtful. That subsection, clearly unambiguous, gave the president the latitude to do what he did. It reads: – If in the case of any person it appears to the President expedient to dispense with the requirements of paragraph (2) of this article, he may direct that that person shall be appointed to the rank in question in such a manner as may be specified in the direction!

    Case closed? You bet not. Foremost constitution lawyer, Prof Ben Nwabueze (SAN) has  since opened another flank – at best a variant of the same specious legalism. Last week, he fired a statement to The Guardian titled “President Buhari’s 6th June, 2018 Declaration of a New Democracy Day and the Rule of Law”.

    And what did legal luminary say?

    First, he questioned the motive behind the declaration – “whether it is motivated by the public interest or by a political desire to secure the votes of Nigerians in the 2019 election, especially the votes of people of the South-West or to sow the seed of division among the members of the National Assembly in order to scuttle the threat to impeach him or to throw the country into turmoil or to smear the polity with the taint of illegality”.

    He then concluded: “A motive of mischief seems evident on the face of the declaration. It is indeed a masterstroke of mischief and insincerity, a deceitful contrivance, suddenly and mischievously trumped up to rescue his dying image three years after his installation as president”.

    I will concede that the eminent lawyer is entitled to his opinion. In fact, he is entitled to conjure as many doomsday scenarios that suit his moods or fancies even when these fly in the face of reality. My question: if the specific acts resultant from the declaration is deemed as positive and desirable as it appears that our legal luminary somehow believe they do, do we then treat them as wrong only because of some perceived benefits accruable to the initiator?

    Second, he delved into what he called the legal aspects of the President’s Declaration, and pronounced, rather gracelessly, that the president misfired! Let’s look closely at his grouses? To him, the Federal Military Government (FMG) Decree No. 61 of 1993, which annulled the June 12, 1993 election, would seem cast in steel and so would remain inviolable perhaps for all ages!

    In the opinion of the learned Silk, President Buhari had no right to treat the decree, which he calls “as a matter both of fact and law” as if it does not exist! Here at once is the supreme irony of it all: a foremost constitutional scholar treating the corrective, albeit largely inchoate acts of an elected sovereign as inferior if not subordinate to a military decree procured under the cover of darkness to subvert the will of the Nigerian people!

    I need not to into the other leg of his argument about the Rule of Law being more fundamental and overriding than any consideration of justice! His exact words: Respect for the rule of law must not therefore be sacrificed to the need for justice.

    Thankfully, not everyone subscribes to this specious but tragically mechanistic view of the relationship between law in process and justice as an end. Not least is the revered Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka whose famous dictum –Justice is the first condition of humanity – has long provided humanity a worthy template for resolving the thorny question in the face of the endless clashes between the forces of regression known to trade the ruse for the rule.

    By the way – I almost forgot to add that Nwabueze not only served in that infamous contraption called the Interim National Government – put in place to bury the June 12 struggle, he was the drum major in the orchestra to confer legitimacy to that interim nonsense.

    Glad to be back!

  • Stamp duty: NIBSS as Nigeria’s supra-state?

    Until my colleague Segun Ayobolu’s April 21 piece appropriately titled Stamp duty impunity, I could have sworn that the managers of the national economy have  finally rid the system of the more manifest oddities in our public finance system.  What with the operations of the Treasury Single Account and its clean sweep of every kobo of public revenue from the filchy hands of officials into the national coffers.  Yours truly was one of those who celebrated the measure designed to snuff the life out of the islands of mini-governments operating as parastatals; entities whose expenditure outlays, sometimes exceeded those of states, and yet couldn’t be bothered by the niceties of parliamentary appropriation not to talk of remitting their operating surpluses to the national coffers.

    You know the familiar culprits – the mini-federations within the Nigerian state. For obvious reasons, I will leave out the apex bank – which insists on conflating autonomy with independence and so believes erroneously that it could dispense as much as it pleases from the piggy bank.

    That cannot be said of the national oil corporation – the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation – that one that routinely sends the crumbs to the national exchequer only after it has had its fill. Or the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA), a behemoth which although spins billions if not trillions but ensures that nothing ever gets pass the gatekeepers – until perhaps when our lawmakers on self-help sorties, come calling for them to open the tap. Then is the Nigerian Maritime Administration and Safety Agency (NIMASA), which until recently ran errands for a certain Tompolo and other big boys from the Niger Delta rather than attend to its primary business of tending the country’s blue economy.

    TSA which ensures that every kobo of public fund is captured and pooled into the piggy bank is supposed to have changed all of that. Unfortunately, we may have failed to reckon with the cowboys in the financial services sector – smart Alecs trained in the art of subversion, of whom no rules are held as sacrosanct and niceties of transparency and fair-play are luxuries to be cynically dispensed with.

    Thanks to Ayobolu’s illuminating piece, we ought to by now, know better than to ignore the cabal of ruthless operatives. Let me refresh if only in the interest of those who did not read the piece and the report he alluded to. To paraphrase Ayobolu, the story in two parts started when a certain Nigerian, Tola Adekoya, saw an opportunity in the then moribund Stamp Duties Act, 2004. His outfit, the School of Banking Honours (SBH), SBH then approached the Nigerian Postal Services (NIPOST) on April 20, 2012, to see how it could partner with it to boost its internally generated revenue by affixing adhesive stamp on banking receipts as provided for in the law. Armed with a Masters Services Agreement with NIPOST on September 14, 2012, SBH then approached the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) for authorization to engage Deposit Money Banks (DMBs) and other qualified institutions as collecting agents. The apex bank, convinced of the immense possibilities in the partnership, gave the nod On December 3, 2012. Then, on October 15, 2015, the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) issued the SBH a Copyright Certificate (No. LW1023) affirming its copyright ownership of the initiative on stamp duty collection.

    As Ayobolu would further have us know, the Nigeria Inter-Bank Settlement System (NIBSS) collected the stamp duty on all cheques with a value above N500,000 something it had done since 1993, although there was no evidence it remitted same into the federation account as required by law. With SBH came the expansion of the scope of the Stamp Duty to encompass all gamut of banking transaction ranging from manual to e-transfers.

    Today, SBH reckons that the unremitted revenue to the Federation Account is in the region of N20 trillion – monies which ought to have been remitted into the distributable pool to be shared between the federal, states and the local governments. Call it double jeopardy if you may –not only is the federation account denied access to the huge fund probably lying idle somewhere, the agents – SBH is equally denied fruits of its toil. And to imagine what difference the huge funds could make at a time of unprecedented infrastructure deficit.

    The good news: the president has since directed the monetary authorities to collect every kobo and remit same into the federation account. The directive is said to cover – SBH, the labourers for their toil. The bad news is that the president’s express directive, which traverses the whole gamut of constitutionalism, sanctity of contracts and proprietary interests, has not been carried out.

    That was the summary of the story as told by my colleague.

    So where is the money? Could the money be with the individual banks – the collecting agencies or their alter ego, NIBSS through which all transactions must necessarily pass through? Does that in any way confer the custodial role on a private company? And under what authority? Would that not strike a dart at the heart of the TSA?

    To be sure, we know what NIBSS does – it holds the franchise for inter-bank payments in order to remove potential bottlenecks associated with inter-bank funds transfer and settlement. That is what their website says. A limited liability company owned by all licensed banks including the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), it operates the Nigeria Automated Clearing System (NACS) which facilitates the electronic clearing of cheques and other paper based instruments, electronic funds transfer, Automated Direct Credits and Automated Direct Debits.  None of the roles as far as one can see, makes the company a revenue collecting agency of the federal government. Even if was so appointed – which seems extremely doubtful  at least from a constitutional point of view– it still has to explain why the funds, which belong exclusively to the distributable pool is floating around at a time most of its beneficiaries are struggling to pay salaries and pensions. Or are we dealing with a supra-agency – an institution above the strictures of state control?

    Could the money be with the apex bank? That again seems doubtful. For much as it can claim to sits atop the financial system, it remains at best an agent to multiple principals – the federal, states and the local councils – the beneficial owners of whatever accrues to the distributable account and all in accordance with guidelines established by the constitution.

    Which again takes us to the earlier question – where is the money?  If only to affirm the sanctity of the saying that the labourer deserves his wages, Nigerians must help Adekoya and his SBH find the money. How much does the Nigerian Governors Forum know? And what have they done about it?

    While we dwell on what that quantum of fund can achieve in a clime like ours, we must also think of the alternative to which the funds could be put –when left in the hand of rogue operatives.  It is the latter prospects that must be seen as truly frightening.

     

    • The column proceeds on vacation.

  • Omo-Agege: Death of outrage

    A week after the invasion of the hallowed chambers of the upper legislative house, it is not exactly surprising that a good number of supposedly outraged Nigerians have, in the fouled-up atmosphere of partisan bickering, done little else than fish for the moral equivalence to justify the odious act.

    To be sure, many have condemned the invasion in one breath. Overall however, there is a sense in which in the eyes of many, the brazen outlawry could be tolerated, if not entirely vitiated by the so-called weak moral or ethical foundations of the current Senate leadership, its supposedly tyrannical hold on the institution and alleged unwillingness to tolerate dissent. And so they argue that the suspension of Senator Ovie Omo-Agege was merely the tipping point!

    It is a measure of how far things have sunk that the citizens cannot find a common voice to condemn the brazen despoliation of the sacred institution of parliament only because the current temporary occupants of its precincts belong to the club we love to hate. It has been a tragic week – if you ask me.

    Away from the tepid rationalisations – the pertinent question and which the entire country must find urgent answer remains – Is the Senate right to have suspended the lawmaker from Delta Central? To the extent that the brouhaha was kindled by the spark of the suspension of the senator, that would appear as the heart of the matter hence the need for a dispassionate consideration of the issues.

    I certainly do not agree that the issue is as cut and dried as often presented. Clearly, just as it is inconceivable to have a complex organisation without a body of rules and conventions guiding its day to day activities, I do not think there can be questions as to whether or not the parliament as an institution can set out the rules to guide its members. It would seem given that such rules would include sanctions for infractions to parliamentary conduct. While arguments about what could be deemed as misconduct by the institution itself and the general public would be understandable, the rules are not only fundamental but inviolate.

    Now to the arguments. The first– an emotive one, insists that the senate lacks the power to deny the constituents of representation in parliament.  The other– an interesting one – which has since become something of an orthodoxy particularly in the aftermath of  last Monday’s event insists that the parliament lacks the power to suspend any of its members. Those of this persuasion cite the November 2017 ruling of Federal High Court in Abuja which nullified the 90 days suspension handed to Senator Mohammed Ali Ndume by the Senate. In a judgment delivered by Justice Babatunde Quadri, the Senate and its President, Bukola Saraki, were ordered to pay the embattled lawmaker representing Borno South Senatorial District, all his outstanding salaries and allowances.

    The matter, if I may recall, has since gone on appeal – which means that it is far from closed. For now, the best we can do is to await the decision of the appellate court if not the apex court for final resolution.

    However, for a guide – I find the example of the United States, a country with older tradition and practice and where our presidential constitution was borrowed helpful if to illuminate the debate and hopefully strip arguments of their pretensions to sanctimoniousness.

    Specifically, Article I, Section 5, of the United States Constitution provides that “Each House [of Congress] may determine the Rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behaviour, and, with the concurrence of two-thirds, expel a member.”

    We know what that means. It means stripping the electors of their representation in parliament – an extreme measure – by means of mere internal parliamentary rules!

    For milder forms of punishment, censures and reprimands are imposed by a simple majority of the full House.

    Permit me to quote rather extensively from the website – History, Arts and Archives of the United States House of Representatives http://history.house.gov/Institution/Origins-development/Discipline/:  “In devising this framework, the Constitutional Convention drew upon British legislative tradition as well as nearly 175 years of precedent in the colonial assemblies in North America. Other than the two-thirds requirement, however, the framers left it up to the House and Senate to determine their own rules and the type of behaviour that might warrant expulsion from their respective chambers.

    It further states: “Despite this broad grant of authority, the framers set the two-thirds threshold because such an action would necessarily remove someone who had been elected by the popular vote of his or her constituents. And though the House has wide discretion to act in such cases, it has demonstrated keen deference to the peoples’ choice of their Representatives. One measure of that restraint is that the House has never expelled any Member for conduct that took place before his or her House service. Nor has the House removed Members for action in a prior Congress when the electorate insisted on re-electing them to the House despite a record of improper conduct”.

    The debate is no doubt, legitimate; not so however is the pretensions of those – like Ovie Omo-Agege, who think little of the rules of proper parliamentary behaviour. It therefore follows that those who go into parliament must accept that rules exist to guide their conduct –that certain behaviours are no no!

    My final point. It’s certainly not time yet to judge the Eighth Senate under Bukola Saraki. Not by the events of the suspension of Omo-Agege and its aftermath or by the manoeuvres that swept it into the office. Surely, there will be ample time to evaluate the performance of arguably the most expensive parliament in the universe. The same goes for the APC government that swept into office wielding their brooms of change. For now, it suffices to say that what is bad is bad. And if I may borrow the words of the most Distinguished Senator Shehu Sani, no amount of deodorizing of last Monday’s outlawry would make it smell like rose.