The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Ease of Doing Business: One thing thou lacketh…

    For a country renowned for its stifling bureaucracy, corruption and red tape, the report that Nigeria has moved by – wait for it – 24 places on the annual global ranking of Ease of Doing Business should ordinarily gladden the heart. From being 169th in 2017 and 170th in the 2016 edition, Nigeria, according to the World Bank 2018 report now takes the 145th spot out of 190 economies ranked.

    If it is any consolation, she joins El Salvador, India, Malawi, Brunei Darussalam, Kosovo, Uzbekistan, Thailand, Zambia and Djibouti in the league of 10 top improvers – countries said to have carried out numerous reforms to improve their business environments.

    “These economies together, implemented 53 business regulation reforms across 10 of the areas measured by doing business.

    “Overall, the 10 top improvers implemented the most regulatory reforms in the area of getting credit, starting a business, dealing with construction permits and paying taxes,’ the report said.

    Thanks to the work of the Osinbajo-led Presidential Enabling Business Environment Council (PEBEC) set up in July 2016 by President Muhammadu Buhari; something, it appears, is finally being done about those retrograde forces holding the economy down. Among the priority bills said to be in the kitty are the National Collateral Registry Bill and the Credit Bureau Services Bill designed to make it easier for businesses to get access to credit; the coming of the Visa-On-Arrival process to include e-submission of applications to dedicated desk at Nigeria Immigration Service and, the push to eliminate manual baggage searches at airport. All of these, no doubt, part of the package designed to make Nigeria a global investment destination.

    Now, I do not deny that reforms are important. After all, we all are somewhat agreed that Nigeria can do with a better environment for doing business. And that many of the regulations currently guiding the process are, to put it mildly, archaic.

    There is however a limit to what improved regulations can achieve in the face of infrastructural limitations. One part of the problem is whether our globalist aspirations can be described as realistic at a time the minimalist conditions for erecting a truly modern economy are a long way yet. Never mind our pretensions about being the biggest economy on the continent, a lot has certainly been said of our antediluvian infrastructure support for business and so require no further elaboration. Ours is a financial services environment which, although touts credit as the life-blood of business yet prefers to operate a usurious regime that sucks the very life out of business. Do we talk about the port system so riddled with corruption and inefficiency that the turnaround time of vessels has shifted from an average of three days to 30 days? Talk of the malignancies of corruption and indolence that ensures that nothing gets to move unless they are moved!

    All of these, unfortunately, are nowhere near the systemic decay in the very foundations for human capital development which in the end can only guarantee that the so-called improved regulations sunder apart.

    This is where I find the theme of the World Bank 2018 report “Doing Business 2018: Reforming to create jobs” interesting.  For a country in a perpetual reform mode – and which admittedly the so-called fruits of reform have remained forlorn, this year’s theme merely affirms the centrality of the human capital question in the debate on growth and development; a subtle rebuke on the comparatively limited attention the Nigerian government continues to pay to the building pillars of development in its haste to be garlanded among the global best.

    Now, if my understanding of the obsession with easing our business process is any correct, it is about getting our businesses up and running; the inescapable assumption is that other things – including the expansion of opportunities for our young people to be productively engaged – would naturally follow!

    It seems to me part of the same patently false assumptions underlying the craze for foreign direct investment at a time local companies are known to be dying in their dozens.  Whoever told the government that the foreigner-investor stood a chance in a clime that has proven a veritable graveyard to countless indigenous entrepreneurial efforts?

    Sure we know that the so-called job magic won’t happen unless the citizens, particularly the youths, are prepared for that future. It certainly will not happen any more than the 70 percent left out of the 1.7 million who sat for this year’s Unified Tertiary Matriculation Examination without success will automatically land in one of the difficult-to-find but no less derided vocational institutions. This can only happen when the provision is made.

    Presently, we know that our educational system is in crisis. Now that is an understatement: It is broken. I’m not here talking only about universities whose products are now routinely tagged as ‘unemployable’ but of a sector that cannot even guarantee the supply of low to middle level skills needed to get basic industrial or household tasks, done. Gone are the days of standards – and standardization – when you needed a Grade Three certification from the Department of Labour to get a job in the formal sector. It does not matter whether the job was masonry or driving, each came with its own standards and certification just as progress came with crossing next hurdle in the proficiency ladder and so on and so forth.

    All of those now belong in memory.

    What to do? Something far beyond what the current fixation with regulations can ever do: Bring the standards back! Start with an ethical reorientation that affirms not just the dignity of labour but one that assures that trade practices run on the principle of fair wage for a day’s labour.

    Second: Bring back the technical colleges. That way, the nation would be better primed to take advantage of the current reform efforts. One centre of excellence in each of the six-geo-political zones would not be a bad idea at this time. Yes, we are in an emergency. Pump in money – I mean tonnes of it – into equipment and training of vocational personnel. In an age of cutting-edge technologies, it seems the least the federal government can do ensure that the trainees maintain the competitive edge. By the way, some states, notably Lagos with its technical schools and Kwara with its International Vocational Centre are already doing something in this regard.

    I say – there is room for more across the states to bolster the critical skills pool to get the country running on its feet. Sure, those steps offer a faster route to economic recovery than the World Bank Ease of Doing Business prescriptions would.

  • Economy on bailout mode

    How can anyone go to bed and sleep soundly when workers have not been paid their salaries for months? I actually wonder how the workers feed their families, pay their rents and even pay school fees for their children.’

    That was President Muhammadu Buhari at a parley with a group of governors led by the chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum, Abdul’Aziz Yari, at the State House, Abuja last week. If the statement was meant to convey the President’s frustration with the fiscal crisis ravaging the states – the crisis that has hobbled their capacity to meet their obligations to their workers – it would appear that his presidency either misdiagnosed the ailment, or rather conveniently, substituted placebo for an organic therapy.

    To the extent that neither option comes near to being a way out of the problem, the least that can be said is that it does not bode well for an administration known to stake much claims to change.

    One takes it that the President meant well. Otherwise he wouldn’t have called out the club of governors. However, if after two cycles of bailout and another two rounds of Paris Club refunds, the situation in almost all states have neither changed in any appreciable sense nor their future any assured than it was before the intervention, the only conclusion left is that the bailout instrument hasn’t quite worked the magic. Whereas the report of death by suicide, of the 54-year-old Kogi State civil servant Edward Soje over an alleged 11 months’ salary arrears merely drives home the horror of the current situation far beyond the daily statistics reeled out on the countless casualties – either of pensioners collapsing at verification venues or of those still in active service succumbing to the same fate on their way to work – could have ever done, we must acknowledge that a solution is not even yet on sight!

    To state therefore that the fiscal crisis has since moved from being an epidemic to something of a pandemic is merely stating the obvious. With the exception of the federal government, the Federal Capital City administration and half a dozen out of the 36 states, it continues to be a story of insolvency writ large. The blame game of course has not been in short supply with most commentators, almost without exception, instinctively laying the blame exclusively on the laps of the governors most of whom are accused of not only run their states as personal fiefdoms, but live extravagantly, totally oblivious of their environment. This of course is aside the now familiar charge of lacking the creative imagination required for such a time like this. And so it goes on that the governors that having begged for the job should not be indulged since they knew what they were getting into.

    The governors’ job, as I once wrote on this page, has suddenly become the most hazardous job in the world! Did I hear someone say – serves them right?

    Again, like I said before, those who believe the grandstanding and the lie about the federal government being a model in fiscal rectitude are obviously entitled to their delusion. A central government which rakes a whopping 54 percent of the federally collectible revenue and yet maintains a recurring cycle of deficit budgeting on the scale that we have seen has no business lecturing the states on their handling of finances.

    Clearly, if it seems incongruous that the same outsized government would go sourcing for nearly a third of the funds required to execute its 2017 budget from the international financial markets, consider also that a single federal agency – the Nigerian Ports Authority –actually proposes to spend N278 billion out of its projected N288 billion revenue – some 96 percent leaving a paltry N10 for the federation account for 2017. How about that as a window into the swamp described as the federal bureaucracy?

    The figure, by the way, is more than the Ogun State budget of N221 billion; Borno’s N183 billion and Enugu’s N105 billion for the same period – without the accompanying bureaucracy.  We are talking here of the budget of a single agency of the federal government under the supervision of a board exceeding those of state governments for the entire year! Consider also for instance, that in 2016, NPA’s revenue was N201,146,319,843, out of which N174,009,312,695, representing 86 per cent, was expended according to the Senate. NPA is not alone in this; the same could be said of other agencies. Ever heard of the bureaucracy’s cart driving the nation’s development horse?

    The other day, yours truly had raised the question of where the Paris Club funds were kept all this while. I raised the question because it takes an economy run on patriarchal, paternalistic lines to have the kind of trillions being announced as Paris Club refunds warehoused somewhere and the governors of the owner-states subjected to the daily taunting, humiliation and ridicule such as we have seen of late. Surely, nothing can be more ironical that a federal government on a borrowing binge purporting to teach a bunch of insolvent states fiscal rectitude. Only a country where different standards behaviour is expected of different grades of actors in the system can such be contemplated.

    Having put the economy on bailout mode, one assumes that the President has sufficient grasp of its staid arithmetic to be able to pronounce authoritatively not just about its place in the nation’s political economy but in restoring the states to sound financial health. With 50 percent of the Paris Club refund left to share, the president obviously need not worry about availability since the funds are already in the kitty. And now with the Excess Crude Account (ECA) reportedly hitting $2.31billion in September, working on Plan B can expectedly begin in earnest.  After all, the governors have spoken. And so citizens can look forward to another cycle of Paris Club naira rain.

    Trust me; the Parisian cash rain would be far less troubling to the anaemic states; for sure, it allows the governors to kick the problem down the road while sparing them the rigour of effective governance. You can bet that the option would be just as attractive to the benevolent federal government who needn’t bother about either shedding its bloated weight let alone be called to answer for the 54 percent unearned and undeserved share from the piggy bank.

    As it was in the very beginning, so shall it be. A terrible cycle – that is.

  • Final rites for Abiku Discos?

    For the tribe of those, of which yours truly is included, that have long called for a comprehensive review of the power sector privatisation, the suggestion that the federal government is finally mulling the option can only be a vindication of sorts. Responding to a request by Tony Elumelu, the billionaire chairman of Heirs Holding – an operator in the power sector – for a fresh injection of funds to bail out the electricity sector during one of the plenaries at at the 23rd Nigeria Economic Summit (NES) last week, Vice-President Yemi Osinbajo, spoke the mind of the tribe: transfer ownership to new investors if you can’t get the bsuiness going!

    The same point would be echoed to newsmen by Minister of State for Budget and National Planning, Mrs. Zainab Ahmed also in the course of the summit that the government and other stakeholders had come to the realisation that something critical needed to be done quickly in the power sector.

    She told the journalists: “The power sector has been privatised but I’m sure every Nigerian can attest to the fact that the privatisation has not worked well, in the sense of what we sought to achieve in terms of power efficiency… We have now come to the point where government which is a stakeholder in the power sector and other stakeholders must come together and decide and cede some of their holdings to new investors that will inject new funding; investors that have the expertise to grow the power sector that will serve Nigerians.”

    “It’s a process that is on-going, it involves negotiating with the existing owners and also with the government in deciding the right level of holdings that will go up for another round of sale.

    “The privatisation has not worked out. We discovered that many of the companies are indebted to the banks, making it difficult for them to make fresh investments in their infrastructure. All stakeholders must come together to grow the sector, especially in discussing with the existing owners.”

    Call it the moment of truth – and you are damned right. The same truth which Power, Works and Housing Minister, Babatunde Fashola, had long admitted but apparently feels too constrained to do anything about.  Recall that the minister had earlier in May during the 15th edition of the monthly power sector operators’ meeting in Jos, had attempted to read something of a riot act to the operators. Then he had made it clear that their perennial whining over service and operational issues had become galling: “You must do more to improve service, rather than complain about old infrastructure. I wish to remind you that nobody forced you to buy those assets and you knew what you were buying”. He had equally told them that their cartel – the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED), had no place in the process noting that his ministry will not deal with it “because the Bureau of Public Enterprises (BPE) acting for the National Council on Privatization (NCP) did not contract the asset sales and performance agreements with an association and neither did Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission grant you licenses as an association.”

    But then, those were not the only issues dealt with at the May monthly meeting of the operators. In addition to the recurring issue of the failure of the operators to provide their customers with prepaid meters, the other sticky issue was their claim to exclusivity rights in their distribution areas.  A case in point is Enugu Disco which sought to contest the space with the 188-megawatt Geometric Power, Aba at a time the same Enugu Disco could not guarantee basic services to households in the East. Fashola made clear that he could not understand the logic of “standing in the way of a consumer seeking to get for himself what the service provider, Disco, has failed or is unable to give them”.

    The untold story of course was that the Discos wanted more for doing less. They wanted to call the shots even when there was yet no proof that they had invested a dime to improve the sector; higher tariffs on the old billing methodologies that robbed Peter to pay Paul; assurances that the ultimate guarantor would always watch their backs irrespective of whether or not they fulfilled their basic service obligations to customers. Finally, despite being private entities, they craved for a system that sees nothing wrong with being permanently hooked on government life support.

    That was some five months ago.

    With the latest request, we must thank Elumelu for letting us know that things have not changed. Not that Nigerians routinely dealt a bad card by the inept contraptions described as distribution companies were ever at any point in doubt about how bad things are. The difference this time is that the federal government would appear to be saying – no more; going as far as pushing for fresh hands to move the sector forward.

    It comes to a Eureka moment.

    More thanks should go to Vice President Osinbajo for letting Nigerians know that there is yet, a third way. Before now, we have heard from no less personality than Minister Fashola that an attempt to review the process that delivered the abiku Discos will not only be counterproductive but would set the nation back by several years. Remember the same wearisome arguments about negative signals being sent to investors – the god of process that slips into the sleep mode when public interest is about to be mangled but automatically kicks in each time the government steps in to right the wrongs of the injured citizen? Did you say only in Nigeria?

    Have the actors on the privatisation divide finally come around to agree that the exercise has served neither party  well? Possibly. While those on the receiving of the daily deteriorating service affirm that the exercise has yielded no appreciable investments to raise expectations of possible upgrade in capacity or improvements in service thresholds either now in the foreseeable future, the investors have also realised that Discos are not the pots of fortune they had thought it would be. A difficult if not a hopeless marriage if ever there was one.

    Salvage is of course not impossible. By this I mean a win-win for both sides. With the federal government holding 40 percent equity, the task would seem as simple as persuading a club of non-performers to shed a sizeable chunk of their holdings to a proven core investor. That way, everyone, hopefully, wins!

    As for possible resistance, with many of the operators already in serial breaches of the various Service Level Agreements, persuasion shouldn’t be an entirely difficult proposition. It is about finding the process!

  • Kachikwu – Baru saga

    Kachikwu – Baru saga

    Days after, Nigerians are left to hazard wild guesses as to what transpired at the meeting between President Muhammadu Buhari and his Minister of State for Petroleum Resources Ibe Kachikwu last Friday over the latter’s letter in which he levelled allegations of grave misconduct against the Group Managing Director of Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (GMD-NNPC), Maikanti Baru. We must admit to the strange ways of this presidency that a letter written by the minister since August did not get the President’s attention – not until it was leaked to the media last week. We surely have the President to thank for considering the contents at least weighty or sufficiently embarrassing to generate some action.  Never mind that the issues provoked are themselves a measure of how detached the chief steward is from his team and the government that he leads; or that it strikes at the heart of the charge that a cabal actually holds his government by the jugular – a charge that has unfortunately stuck; Nigerians should by now have a better appreciation of the character of the administration which, aside tardiness has since elevated intrigue to a directing principle of state policy.

    As for the issues raised by Kachikwu in his letter to the president, they are grave as they are disturbing. The minister complains of gross insubordination, subversion of rules, contempt for the rule of process and other sundry malfeasances against the GMD. He mentioned the $24 billion worth contracts said to have been made without the minister’s input or review by the NNPC board. No doubt, the coming days will be interesting as facts and ‘alternative facts’ are bandied around.

    For now, even if we grant that two big, somewhat irreconcilable egos are at play in the unfolding development, no less revealing is the high wire intrigues, the bad faith and the subterfuge also at play – something that has become the administration’s defining character. Whether it is Department of State Service (DSS) making the appointment of Ibrahim Magu difficult if not nigh impossible, or the justice ministry engaging the EFCC in needless turf wars, or even the executive secretary of the National Health Insurance Scheme openly challenging the authority of his supervising minister for daring to ask him to proceed on leave while being investigated for sundry financial infractions, what we see are daily manifestation of the degenerative disease of institutional  disorder being systematically nurtured by the so-called reformist administration of President Muhammadu Buhari. Agreed, our politicians may have proven to be an inventive lot; however, if Nigerians had expected an administration headed by a former army General to have a handle on something as simple as running a tidy administration, what we see are daily manifestations of crass indiscipline, opportunism, and cronyism that the politicians are often deemed to be guilty of.

    We must of course insist that the issues do not appear quite complicated despite the attempts by spin doctors to obfuscate them. Understandably, a lot of heads are already swooning over the funds said to be involved which of course informs some of the most unhelpful interpolations being made. In a sector where some smart alecs have been known to walk away with billions of dollars merely by conjuring sweetheart deals, Nigerians’ concerns would seem understandable considering that we are dealing with amounts far in excess of the 2017 budget and even more so at a time billions of dollars are being borrowed in their name supposedly to finance critical projects.

    For sure, no one is yet talking about missing funds; we are instead dealing with what is potentially a return to the ancien regime under which our institutions are suborned to private interests. Coming from an administration which promises to deploy a new broom to clean things up, Nigerians obviously have reasons to be worried.

    This newspaper has helped in no small measure to lay out the issues. As against the strict administrative cum bureaucratic legalese which the NNPC has deemed fit to put out, there are obviously serious questions requiring clarification by both the Presidency and the corporation.

    Let me start with the obvious – which is the status of the minister of state. One part of the narrative being put out is that the NNPC Act did not recognize the office of the minister of state. And so the theory goes that “the NNPC Act is explicit that the petroleum minister is the chairman of the NNPC board.” Of course, no one argues about who the petroleum minister is. The real issue is whether the actors can by some administrative subterfuge, declare the position of Kachikwu as minister of state and chairman of the NNPC board, redundant without keeping the appointing authority in the know. This is where the bits of the puzzle begin to fall into place.

    See the picture? The President is the de facto petroleum minister. To help him effectively run the sector, he appoints Kachikwu as minister of state and chairman of the NNPC board. The President also names other members, one of which notably, is the President’s Chief of Staff, Abba Kyari and then the GMD-NNPC, Maikanti Baru. The duo of Messrs Baru and Kyari are said to enjoy the confidence of the de facto petroleum minister. One works directly with the President; the other is said to nurse a grudge with Kachikwu for pushing him, earlier on, upstairs, if you like, into redundancy. Between the duo, Kachikwu’s fate would seem to be all but sealed. Could the duo have procured a parallel reporting line to the President while keeping Kachikwu in the dark?

    To imagine the joker:! ‘The Act establishing the NNPC stipulates that the chairman of the corporation’s board is the Minister of Petroleum Resources and NOT the Minister of State for Petroleum Resources’! The hierarchs of the NNPC also make the beautiful point that “the board of NNPC cannot approve contracts but they can review and give advice”.

    Really? The same statute says that makes clear that “Any contracts for a value beyond the financial limits of the NNPC Tenders Board will go via the Board to the Federal Executive Council (FEC) for approval”?

    By the way, it is worth remembering that Kachikwu, the man originally head-hunted by President Buhari to help clean the NNPC’s augean stables is from South-south; Baru, the man who succeeded him as GMD is from the North-east and Kyari –the President’s major domo is also from the North-east!  For a presidency already carrying a terrible baggage of ethnicity, the perception of unfair treatment seems to have stoked fresh round of debates about equity and equal treatment for our federation’s  constituent parts!

    Although, the minister did not give anything away as to what options he might consider in the circumstance, it seems unlikely that the management of the petroleum sector will remain the same.

    The big issue of course is the management of the industry. As chairman of the NNPC board, Kachikwu has deftly outlined the issues begging for answers. As far as he is concerned, none of the contracts in question came either before the board or the Federal Executive Council for consideration – as required by the NNPC statutes. The NNPC on its part argues that due process was duly complied with.

    Suffice to say that in one of the contentious contracts – the Crude Oil Term Contract (COTC)- valued at over $10bn – the NNPC admitted that it ‘was presented to the approving authority (Mr. President) for consideration and approval’. Which of course raises the begging question: Does the presidential approval vitiate the requirement for the consideration and approval of the Federal Executive Council as spelt out in the NNPC handbook?  

  • Restructuring and states’ fiscal crisis

    To the club of governors currently chaffing under the burden of their workers’ wages and salaries, the modest resurgence of crude prices should offer cold comfort of some sorts. That the Brent – finally hit $58.38 a barrel last week should be good music to the ears of the club of insolvent governors; not least the managers of the piggy bank called Excess Crude Account: a furlough from the troubling wintry season which would have been inconceivable only a few months back has suddenly become a distinct possibility.

    It’s still a long way out of the winter though. Two bailouts and two tranches of Paris Club largess to boot, there are, as yet no signs, that the interventions by the federal government have made appreciable dent on the precarious financial situation in the states. Only two weeks back, NLC President Ayuba Wabba threatened to name and shame governors, who, he accused of refusing to pay complete salaries to workers, in spite of the bailout funds. Never mind, he listed 10 states as being particularly guilty, and then went on to name the six states of Imo, Bayelsa, Ondo, Ekiti, Benue and Kogi as the most terrible of the lot. Kogi, with 40 per cent of workers paid up to date and 25 per cent not paid for between eight and 21 months takes the cake as the worst among the worst.

    To the extent that none of the affected states has put any sustainable structure in place to guarantee their exit from the crisis which attenuated the oil price slump, it seems reasonable to expect the situation to endure a while longer – in which case, another cycle of bailout would appear as not entirely, foreclosed. In other words, I see the worst affected states, pushed to the wall, seeking another tranche of Paris Club loan refunds in no distant time – until things, hopefully, normalise!

    Let’s be clear about the nature of the current problem. The states have, rightly in my view, been accused of not doing enough to rebalance their finances in the wake of the crisis. Much has been said on the need for them to drain their swamps – to borrow the cliché from Donald Trump – given the level of profligacy at that level of government. We do know about the bloated payrolls and the subterfuge going on in many states of the federation in the guise of staff verification – exercises more often than not designed by their Excellencies to buy time as against the stated objective of payroll clean up.

    Could the states have fared better in the circumstance? That seems debatable. Earlier on, I wrote about the governors as being endangered. Now let me stretch the argument a bit further:  while the attempts by the governors to draw attention to the cold realism of financial arithmetic underlying their predicament may have failed to impress many; yet, it seems to me that the arithmetic must be located at the very heart of the current fiscal crisis threatening to overwhelm them. Again, I am reminded that while all eyes are on the governors to explain how their state’s shares of the bailout and Paris Club refund were spent, with many of the governors’ critics having long concluded that the one-off intervention fund should actually offer a permanent elixir to the fiscal crisis facing their states, not very many Nigerians are minded to ask where the funds that the federal government has found necessary to disburse are coming from. Most certainly, it cannot be from the whopping 52 percent it takes from the distributable pool, which are expectedly, captured in the annual budgets. Hard to imagine a piggy bank somewhere from where the federal government which insists on playing the baseless donor role, can draw the kind of funds being deployed to bail out the states!

    Now, the suggestion that Nigerians are before now, oblivious of the fiscal waywardness of the federal government is certainly not true. The difference is the government currently striving to put things on the table which of course is the esence of the current debate. Thanks to the operations of the Treasury Single Account (TSA), and the streamlining of the budgetary process by the Buhari administration, we are suddenly finding out about agencies of the federal government running budgets outside of the contemplation of the law. There were before now, agencies whose annual budgets, although exceeded three or four states combined – were never brought under the normal appropriation process. And now that some agencies federal government are suddenly remitting their operating surpluses into the federation account, we are supposed to be in glee over the dawn of a new era.

    And so I look at the texture of the current debates on restructuring and observe a lot of exertions on geography and ethnography of the concept as against what should ordinarily be a simple and deliberate move to evolve a federation that is functional and truly productive. Yes, we know that the federal government is inept, wasteful and dysfunctional; that Abuja needs to be drained of the swamp (that expression again!). For a bureaucracy so evidently removed from the grind of our day to day experiences of citizens, and where the kind of stealing that are daily reported goes on, I would argue that it not only needs a fraction of what it current gets to get its jobs done, some of its organs truly needs to be taken out. The problem is that some actually imagine that we require a high-octane constitutional affair and all the works to effect changes that are so easily achievable even under the current constitutional strictures.

    As my colleague Segun Ayobolu brilliantly argued in his column on Saturday, we do not require a new conference to effect changes to the lopsided fiscal architecture that puts the states in such terrible disadvantage. And so he puts it aptly: “The 1999 constitution makes provision for a continuous revision of the revenue allocation mechanism every five years obviously to take account of changing dynamics and circumstances. If the political actors refuse to continuously adjust the revenue allocation formula  as constitutionally stipulated and the electorate is impotent to elect into office those who will do so, is the constitution to blame?”

    Let me close by saying that more funds in the states isn’t just good politics but sound economics. The question is – how do you get the funds through when the federal government while keeping a disproportionate share of the common pool also insists on putting shackles on the feet of states? Over to you – our Abuja exports!

  • IPOB and South-east governors

    Earlier in the week, a friend had posted on his Facebook page his reading of the no contest between the bunch of stick-wielding IPOB militia and the Nigerian Army. In the decidedly a one-sided narrative of what he would acknowledge as a David versus Goliath mismatch, the army was cast as the lone aggressor, the clash between the modestly armed youth and a well kitted army is presented as a heroic new normal in the quest for self determination.

    The daily spectacle of quasi military parades by IPOB and its leadership meant nothing, the buildup and priming of the obviously misguided youths for an inevitable showdown was supposed to be fair agitation as in war. The images of the Biafra Secret Service, the Lion Brigade and other paramilitary assemblages counted for nothing. Add those to the threats to burn down the zoo; the order by Nnamdi Kanu to his equally unhinged supporters to kill anyone who dared to come near to take him in.

    Juxtapose these with the venomous frothing which has gone on the for years on Radio Biafra against the inhabitants of his Nigerian zoo, the ethnic and religious baiting, the delusions which bordered on the schizophrenia the climax of which was the threat and overt mobilization to stop the election in Anambra; all of these were deemed to be cowboy affairs – and, ostensibly for some – supposedly more tolerable of the countless moral equivalences symptomatic of the many dysfunctions of our diseased polity!

    I beg to differ. Understandably, a lot has been made of the unbridled militarization of the civil space as evidenced by Operation Python Dance and its many hybrids across the Nigerian federation. I would of course agree that the situation is deplorable as it is. It does not matter whether it is Operation Crocodile Smile in the South-south and parts of South-west, Operation Harbin Kunama II in the North-west and parts of the North-Central, aberration is the word. I will argue that the developments are merely a window into the grave distortions that have made our federation experience such a nightmare – a topic for another day.

    The psych-op deployed against the IPOB leader is however a different kettle of fish. The one, although by far inexcusable, is tolerated because the Nigerian state failed in the duty to equip the Nigeria Police; the other, a necessary measure in the face of direct and sustained affront to the territorial integrity of the Nigerian state by a group whose declared mission is to break up the country.

    Conflating the military show of force against bandits, kidnappers and murderous Fulani herdsmen with the psychological operation against the secessionist band in the circumstance would seem plain cheap and opportunistic!  Those who see the army’s so-called ‘provocation’ in Kanu’s neighbourhood as anything more than a signal warning to a putative foe and so indulge in the fancy semantics and dubious legalese about IPOB being ‘non-violent’ only because it has not opened up its armoury for review or formally commissioned its fighting brigades are entitled to their delusions. As the Yoruba is wont to say – you do not wait for the stubborn gouge your eye; you take steps to remove it from a safe distance!

    One does not have to be an authority on military psychology to understand why the army would not take kindly to the threat that Kanu and his IPOB have come to represent; perhaps only in the Kanu’s vacuous universe of thoughtless followers could that kind of scenario be contemplated.  This is perhaps what the army set out to prove. It certainly “helped” that Nnamdi Kanu and his IPOB, jointly and severely, crossed innumerable treasonable red lines. Even at that, the timing of the ‘confrontation’ would seem a matter of operational convenience – coming few days before the September 15 kick-off of Operation Python Dance.

    Where do we go from here? At this stage, the answer is hard to hazard. One thing seems clear though:  things will never remain the same for IPOB and its leader Nnamdi Kanu. In the first place, the operational symbolism of the psych-op apart, the action by the military has somewhat demystified the IPOB leader; for now, it appears to have created a dramatic effect of enabling the constitutional authorities regain the initiative –assisting the South-east governors to pull the chestnut out of their fire. With IPOB proscribed by the South-east governors and the federal government going as far as declaring IPOB a terrorist organisation, there is perhaps now a remote possibility of a more productive discourse if not engagement – among and between different regions – on the contending issues at the heart of the crisis of our nationhood. By hurling all manners of invectives against other ethnic groups, Kanu and his co-travellers would appear to have foreclosed that prospect or possibility in his pet Biafra project.  Apart being tragic in the circumstance in which the nation currently finds itself, it is, as current developments seems to dictate, proving to be fatal to his Biafra quest.

    Now, I do not by any means underrate the capacity of the group for mischief; a lot would of course depend on well the Buhari administration is able to respond appropriately in the coming months. However, it does seem highly likely that the world will, going forward, insist on measuring the atavism of the group against its latter-day pretensions of being non violent. For the South-east leadership many of whom had been thoroughly embarrassed by the antics of the group, including those browbeaten into silence, (I am not talking about closet IPOB diehards who obviously see the appeasement of Kanu as the only way out), it seems about the best of times to step out to offer contributions.

    At the moment, the buzz word is restructuring. Like I observed sometime ago on this page: “while most of us – in some form or the other – somewhat agree that Nigeria, in its present form, is not only a political, but also an administrative, nightmare. That whereas Frederick Lugard and company may have designed it to secure maximum benefits for the colonial authorities, the structure has neither served to integrate the people nor fostered development; and that while the in-built dissonance is itself potentially fraught with challenges, our situation has been exacerbated by the crisis of governance that has dogged her since independence…”

    My warning then bears relevance even today: we must be wary of the current champions of unbridled ethnic nationalism. Yes, a new architecture of governance is desirable; in fact, it has become imperative in the circumstance to remove the suffocating hands of the centre from the states to allow them to be more productive. Nothing is to be gained by the secessionist cry as championed by IPOB.

  • Misau versus IGP

    Until a few weeks back, it seems unlikely that many Nigerians could claim to have heard let alone be familiar with the name – Isah Hamma Misau. Well if you aren’t, the fellow is the distinguished lawmaker representing Bauchi Central in the Upper legislative House.  Now, thanks to the social media, all you need to do is hit your data-enabled PC and the name pops up among the many names and issues that have been trending in the last two weeks.  Thanks in most part in the ribald drama that the man insist on playing the star cast; a drama that some insist, threatens to eclipse Tafa Balogun’s unscripted heist. The senator, an ex-cop himself, by daring the gods of the police establishment, has since found himself swapping role between an overnight ‘celebrity’ to a potential felon.

    Never mind that the Police Service Commission – the agency in charge of discipline, promotion and presumably, exit from service – has pronounced him as having no sin; and never mind that the police hierarchy has till date offered no defence or justification to the weighty charges hauled at it by the senator; the man, at least in the eyes of the police led by Ibrahim Idris Kpotun, is guilty as hell and may well be guillotined for the crime of desertion.

    While the drama continues to run, Nigerians, it must be admitted are not entirely without an opinion one way or the other. Unfortunately, were they to choose who to believe between the police and their quarry – Misau, majority, would, it seems readily swear that the Nigerian Police is rotten through and through with differences perhaps only in the degree of the perceived rottenness. As it is, not even the ugly twists and turns or the diversionary sub-plots inelegantly contrived to overshadow the main narrative of criminal diversion of funds can take away from the chunk of evidence supplied the Bauchi born lawmaker on the gangrenous infestation at the highest level of the Nigerian Police.

    Guess it makes a lot of difference that Nigerians are hearing it, straight as it were, from an ex-cop whose own father retired as an Assistant Inspector General of Police.

    The ‘facts’ of heist of course remains unproven and so we must give the office of the IGP the benefit of the doubt. The broad allegations – the first bordering on cash for security and, the second, the culture of cloaking of the corporate and institutional support of the police establishment (by its leadership) with the customary veil on non-transparency – obviously bear a familiar ring.  Less talked about is the third – the allegation of cash for posting of personnel!

    For as sure as day is as real as the night, there can be no talking here of smoke without fire!

    As alleged by Misau, oil companies, oil servicing companies, multinational companies, corporations, big hotels, embassies, oil marketers and private institutions dealing with the police pay for services rendered.  He put the amount involved in the range of N10bn monthly or N120 billion annually. So also is the humongous sums as well as hundreds of operational vehicles donated to the police across the states on an annual basis.

    Here is how he puts what is clearly a national dilemma:  “As we speak, there are no records. You don’t know what the Federal Capital Territory Command spends on the police; the same with Kaduna, Kano and elsewhere. You will only see on television that so-and-so state governor has donated 20 Hilux vehicles to a police command. What about operational vehicles budgeted annually by the Federal Government for police commands across the states? There is no state in Nigeria where a governor doesn’t give money to the police on a monthly basis. If we want to get rid of corruption, we must start by being accountable. If a state government is donating equipment to the police, there should be records – records should be kept at all levels. This will reduce waste because when the police come for appropriation at the National Assembly, we will be in a position to say, ‘Look, you were given 100 vehicles in Kaduna, 250 in Rivers and so on.’ As we speak, nobody can tell you the number of serviceable vehicles the police have because they are collecting vehicles and equipment from individuals, states and international donors. Even embassies pay monthly fees for special protection (by the police)”.

    Familiar? Well said? So, where did the man from Bauchi go so wrong that the deluded police hierarchy would have him hung on the line in the tropical sun?

    Granted that the N120 billion allegedly collected by the police as ‘revenue’ is possibly exaggerated;  and agreed that the practice has endured from regime to regime, the question is whether the law permits – under any circumstance – what appears to be the wilful privatisation or better still, conversion of the funds donated by corporate bodies for whatever reasons.

    Is it really true, as suggested by Sir Mike Okiro, the Police Service Commission boss, that the Police Act actually recognise the practice by corporate bodies, of underwriting the cost of security services offered them?  If so, are there no guidelines? How are these payments determined? Considering that the funds in question are more often than not, tax exempt, does the leadership of the police have the discretion to use the funds as they will?  And what kind of the footloose accounting would permit hierarchs of a state institution, funded – almost exclusively – by the taxpayer to collect the quantum of monies being alleged almost without strictures and without any controls whatsoever – as alleged by Senator Misau?

    It certainly goes to the heart of the bastardisation of our public finance system that some key actors could even imagine spending a dime from the public till without the due process of appropriation. The tragedy is that chieftains of the primary agency of law enforcement are being accused of breaking the law in an age of constitutionalism and under the regime of Treasury Single Account!

    The issue would appear straightforward. However, unlike the lawmaker from Bauchi who sees the issue strictly from the prism of non-remittance of the tidy sums into the national kitty, the matter borders on corruption and subversion of process which the Buhari administration claims to hate with passion and which the constitution deplores.  An unfettered investigation by the National Assembly would seem for now, the way to go. For how long has the police top brass maintained the cash till? Who are the beneficiaries? Nigerians obviously deserve to know.

    By the way, I watched the police image maker defend his boss the other day on TV; rather than talk about the allegations, he would rather dwell on the mode of exit of Senator Misau from the police; lost to him was the fact that he was actually indicting his own PSC!

  • Kachikwu’s metamorphosis

    Ibe Kachikwu, Minister of State is back once again to the old game of foretelling. Recall that he prophesied moments after the federal government hived off subsidy that petrol price would come crashing after six months? Never mind that the May 2016 prophecy never came to pass, last week was for him an occasion to roll out another audacious prophecy that product  prices will crash in the next four to six months! Like one reading from a crystal ball, he saw “competition inherent in the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) price modulation”, relative stability of the market, and, the three refineries are working simultaneously, although at 50 % of their capacity – for which we all must be glad that the good times are here – finally!

    To be sure, Kachikwu is no prophet; but even if he was, I’ll probably have taken him on, all the same – mindful of course of the story of that fellow in the Bible who ran into trouble after daring the prophet as told in the book of 2 Kings 7: 2. The no-nonsense Prophet Elisha it was that pronounced the cessation, within hours, of the terrible famine which reduced Samaria to a cannibal colony. A palace aide, obviously flustered by its sheer audacity had quipped “Behold, if the LORD should make windows in heaven, could this thing be?”  Well, sure as he said, the word of the prophet came to pass barely 24 hours later while the poor fellow died – trampled afoot – but not before witnessing ‘live’ its fulfilment exactly as the prophet had foretold!

    Six months of course barely 180 days from now – in which case, the miraculous could still happen. However, considering that Nigerians had just about twice the space of time to get the earlier prophecy fulfilled to their frustration, they ought to be forgiven for taking this latest voyage in futurology with a pinch of salt! For while Minister Kachikwu cannot be said to be new to the oily business, for the hard-nosed technocrat drafted by President Muhammadu Buhari to clean up a graft-ridden industry a little while ago, his metamorphosis would seem about now complete with his latest induction into the club of mealy-mouthed politicians.

    Remember how he started out: he wanted the refineries sold – if need be – as scrap. Later he demurred – arguing that they could be fixed with private funds. Now he’s drum major – if you like the champion – of the quest to get the government put scarce funds into the bottomless pits!

    Unfortunately, had the minister not been too eager to cart home the trophy before the game is called, we probably might be looking more dispassionately at the current state of the industry as against what he inherited.

    Left to the minister and his boss, progress is supposed to be served in tokens; from the sink holes described as refineries to the incurably obsolete pipelines right up to the dysfunctional dry depots, progress must come as incremental, snail-paced; that is supposed to be the rule at a time hydrocarbons are increasingly dated.

    That is why the so-called “competition inherent in the Premium Motor Spirit (PMS) price modulation” is supposed to be big deal; something that would ordinarily be deemed as ordinary in an industry driven by volume. Never mind that the fundamentals have not changed in any significant manner. Or the question of whether the costs are truly going down or are there other dynamics at play? We are supposed to roll out the drums that the club of traders have, after flooding of the market with imported white products, are offering marginal discounts as one would in the normal run of business!

    The truth of course is that story of steady climb-down in the price of petrol is more farcical than real. While it is true that some stations sell for N143 per litre as against the official price of N145, the development is neither widespread nor has it proven to be sustainable to warrant the minister’s exaggerated notice.  As for diesel –a product which admittedly has ceased to be the high-priced commodity that it was in recent past, the reason is not far-fetched: the refineries – although in fits and starts – have lately been pushing limited quantities of the product into the local market; which of course explains why the price returned to the upward climb as soon as Kaduna and Port Harcourt refineries went out of action, leaving Warri Refinery, which itself is only now returning into operation after a break.

    Howbeit, Nigerians only need to recall that the current stability in supply was purchased at a princely cost of a hike in fuel price of nearly 80 percent if only to appreciate the true measure of the ‘achievement’.  Moreover, considering that the Jonathan administration, its predecessor never enjoyed the luxury –one would have expected that the administration to be less exuberant in staking such as achievement.

    Like the refineries, the other pressing issue in the industry is the state of the pipelines and depots. Last week, I did a quick enquiry. Here is what I found: The Satellite Depot in Ejigbo, Lagos has been out of action in the last six weeks; during the period, it has remained – dry. The one in Ibadan is said to have managed to receive some quantities of white products, but is yet to resume operations. The same with the depot in Ore and Ilorin; at the moment, no loading is going on in the two depots leaving Sagamu (Mosinmi) in the entire western zone in operation! As for the pipelines, while the federal government is said to have done a heroic job of tending to them, the reality today is that they are not yet in the fuel supply matrix. Rather than address those critical infrastructures considered as the life-wire of the downstream sector of the oil industry, the government, true to its character continues to sell the dummy of an imminent price crash.

    Six months will be here, soon enough.

  • Is this the reform they promised?

    If there are still lingering pretences about what is left of the restructuring of the electricity sector under the so-called Power Sector Reform Act 2005, two developments which emerged from the 18th Monthly Power Sector Stakeholders Meeting hosted by Kano Electricity Distribution Company (KEDCO) may have finally sealed it. Not only did the outcome finally lay bare the bad faith of the government and its attendant hollow posturing as an impartial umpire in the process to midwife change in the sector, it also exposed the farce packaged as the liberalization.

    I start with the approval by the Federal Government of the tidy sum of N39 billion as loan to Electricity Distribution Companies (DISCOs) for the supply of meters. On this, the minister would have us know that the gesture was part of power sector recovery programme aimed at ensuring that every consumer of electricity is provided with a meter. That ordinarily seems fine except that the government needed not treat the firms as another parastatal of the government subject to period bailouts. What then is the essence of privatization if after formally relieving the federal government of the burden of funding and operating the anaemic entities, the same government still has to make back door financial accommodation to keep them in business? And for how long?

    The second is the strange announcement by Minister Babatunde Fashola that the federal government “will not oppose the wishes of electricity consumers that are willing to pay for meters from their distribution companies based on agreement between both parties as endorsed by the power sector regulator”. He claimed that he had “been receiving several requests from the Discos that their customers still wanted to pay for meters”.

    Permit me to quote the minister extensively: “Please recall that government had in the past attempted to intervene in meter supply through CAPMI, which ultimately I decided we should wind down because of the distrust and disaffection it was creating between consumers and Discos with government caught in the middle with numerous petitions by customers who paid for meters that were not delivered within the approved time.

    “Some Discos have come back to say that their customers still want to pay for meters and they can reach agreements with them on how to pay for it. Government will not stand in the way of such an agreement. It is consistent with the intent of privatization envisioned by the Electric Power Sector Reform Act or at least it does not violate the Act.”

    And in what appears like a bid to take out the sting out of the abdication, the minister added: “What I will reiterate is that the Discos have the obligation to meter customers because they are the ones who charge for electricity which must be measured. If the customers and the Discos reach an agreement between themselves, where the customer assumes the responsibility of the Disco of his own free will and NERC sanctions this agreement, then so be it.

    “The difference between this kind of agreement and CAPMI is that it is not a government initiative. However, through NERC, government will monitor and regulate to ensure that Discos do not use this as an excuse to abdicate their responsibility to provide meters.”

    The minister, a lawyer and Senior Advocate of Nigeria to boot, may feel entitled to his play on words or even seek to rewrite the rule books on power sector restructuring in whatever way that suits him; what he is not entitled to is the attempt to pull the wool on the eyes of the citizens.

    A quick recap of the exercise – that has since turned the mother of all deceptions – would help here. Nigerians will recall the story of how the power sector got stunted under successive nomenclatures – from ECN to National Electricity Power Authority – NEPA and of course, to the transitional holding company, the Power Holdings Company of Nigeria (PHCN); the years of corruption and under-investment that took the sector to the nadir, and how the efforts by successive governments to improve the situation yielded no respite leaving the country with a miserable 4,000MW of power generation, a broken transmission grid and a hopelessly incompetent distribution chain after some 130 years after the  first public power plants opened for business and 66 years after Electricity Corporation of Nigeria came into being via an Act of parliament.

    Flip over to the Power Sector Reform Act 2005 – the anchor for arguably the most ambitious attempt to restructure the electricity sector since independence. From the go, the exercise, as advertised, was designed to mobilize funds and expertise from the private sector, to modernize, upgrade its systems to deliver world class service. Twelve years on, the verdict is one of a dream aborted – whether of the much needed injection of requisite capital or of new technologies to turn things around, or of basic service delivery as one would imagine under a private sector, it has been an unmitigated disaster. Today, the story across the board is that things have fared worse than when the sector was under government control.  From the gas infrastructure that has remained shambolic to the antediluvian transmission lines right up to the patently anaemic Discos, it is increasingly difficult to find any redeeming feature on an exercise on which the country has staked much faith.

    Even for something as ordinary as the demand by the electricity consumer for meters to enable them pay only for what they consume, the government had to broker accommodation for the Discos through the so-called Credited Advance Payment for Metering Initiative (CAPMI) which allowed customers to pay for electricity meters through their respective Discos. Ironically, the exercise was bungled by the same Discos due essentially to their inability to supply the meters after payments were made. This was what made the minister to direct the regulator to wind up the programme in April last year. The mother of all ironies is that the same Discos that could not meet that basic obligation under government direct oversight are now being promoted by Minister Fashola as the guarantor of the public good and this under a novel notion of best practices.

    While I have written a lot about the botching of the power reform; of the abiku discos that would rather feast on our misery than give us light, and the inept regulator terribly out of depth with the breathtaking developments in the sector. What no one could have bargained for, at least from a government that rode into office on a banner of change is the latest act of surrender to a bunch of inept but no less, extortionate service providers. Talk about turning cycle – under the ancien regime, the electricity consumer is more often than not not, known to have supplied service cables, transformers and other vital materials. Today, we are apparently back to the same starting block where the consumer is being asked to provide supplementary capital to enable our much touted messiahs provide us meters. It seems only a matter of time before the electricity consumer is once again enlisted into the business of providing transformers, cables, couplings – and don’t rule it out – voluntary labour – by the their government.

    Whenever it happens – as I am sure it will somehow do at some point – at least we know who to thank.

  • A nation in free fall

    If anyone needed any barometer to gauge how much as a people we have sunk, it is the on-going but systemic displacement of law and the mores as we know it by the rampaging brigade of self-helpers across the land. Today, it seems part of the striving to reconfigure the new-normal in our ethically-challenged society is the deadly contest between elements sworn to champion society’s regression into unimaginable barbarity and the brigade sworn to dispense with the niceties of due process as they set out to mete summary justice. While neither side is necessarily guaranteed to win, the rest of us – the orderly society – are the assured losers.

    I start with the discovery by residents of Ijaiye, Ahmadiyya and Abule-Egba areas of Lagos State of a ritualists’ den in the early hours of Tuesday last week. Using The Guardian report as guide, the matter is said to have started with a horrific cry from an underground tunnel linked to a canal – a shrill cry which apparently drew the attention of a female sweeper. By the time passers-by drawn to help locate the fellow behind the cry entered the canal, the victim had been reportedly killed – allegedly by the ritualists – although her little baby was reportedly found still alive. A follow up sweep by security men would yield a man said to belong to a 28-member gang operating under the canal. The residents, by now incensed stormed the scene ostensibly to rescue more victims and possibly apprehend the ritualists. The efforts reportedly paid-off with two suspects brought out only to be whisked off by the police. Thereafter, it became a case of the mob taking charge as two more suspects brought out from the underground were burnt alive by the mob who overpowered the police and other security agencies.

    Another scene would play out two days later along the busy Lagos-Abeokuta expressway by Ile-Zik Bus Stop, Ikeja where again, two men, suspected to be kidnappers were similarly set ablaze. It is something like a scene from a movie.

    It is a familiar story. The big part is supposed to be  the  cold, ruthless killers on rampage. Whether it is the ritualists or the Mafiosi-styled killer cult – Badoo –operating from their Ikorodu redoubt, the fear of the merchants of human parts has since become the beginning of wisdom. The bigger story however is the scandal of a society on fast regression into savagery; a scathing testimonial of the boundless contradictions of our thoroughly diseased and astoundingly superstitious society; a society where science and rationality are in full flight; where religion trumps reason and religiosity is in full ascendance.

    There is however another angle to last week’s discovery that is arguably a fitting testimony the dual character of the Centre of Excellence; a city that is arguably the most progressive on the continent; yet is one where superstitions of the most heinous kind not only inhere but thrive. A city with the highest number of religious houses on the continent yet is the bastion of some of the most fetish, syncretistic practices.  It is a story of a state which although aspires to a world-class status, yet insists on manifesting some of the more malevolent features of prehistoric society.

    Say what we may of the cult of Badoo or those of ritualists, they did not chance upon us. Those in the group are no ghosts; they live among us. Their wives shop in the same market with ours, their children the same school with our children. That they have grown to become a menace to the rest of us is to be put squarely to the uncaring, indifferent society that we have nurtured.  In other words, the situation, at the very basic level, is a symptom of failure of citizenship. I say this borne of conviction that only an indifferent people would permit the swathe under which such anti-social groups would thrive. While we know enough to blame the leadership – from the traditional to the government –  for the failure to secure the public space, the problem is that the failures of our basic humanity is what comes back to haunt us in a spiral of tragedy.

    Today, there are enough stories to illustrate how most Nigerians, despite their pretensions, are light years away from modernity. Is it not interesting that the same Nigerians that are only too ready to spread the fable about some toxic GSM numbers said to induce heart attacks when picked cannot find the use for the same tools in moments of emergency? How often do Nigerians get those silly solicitations so inelegantly baked as it were from the mythical mill?

    Yes, while the government is encouraged to do its part by providing modern security infrastructure, what about the citizens who couldn’t be bothered about the age-long values or accept the basic duty of being ones brother’s keeper?

    It is something for those pushing for reworking of the national architecture to think about.

    Now, that takes yours truly to the massacre at St. Patrick Catholic Church in Ozubulu, Anambra State in the course of an early morning mass. The story – although still largely unofficial –of a business gone sour has all the elements of the underworld gang wars. While preliminary account tends to suggest a clash over money and power, it comes basically to the story of individuals who have not only renounced the values that bind the collective together, but sold their souls to the devil.

    That some loony would slaughter 12 unarmed innocents for whatever reason is as evil as it is unimaginable. Of course, those mouthing sacrilege only because the church suffered savage violation of its hallowed precincts miss the point: mass slaughter for any reason or no reason at all is bad; unjustifiable. Taking the turf fights into the church – the symbol of the moral community, is although indicative of a society in free fall, hardly makes it worse.

    For the church, the lesson must be to continually denounce evil; to condemn, relentlessly, the crass individualism that has taken over the gospel; to eschew the gospel of mammon that guarantees the followers a one-way ticket to hell.