The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Putting Dangote to the sword?

    Putting Dangote to the sword?

    So much for the wailing and gnashing of teeth in the aftermath of Dangote Refinery’s planned ‘intrusion’ into that last bastion of the inefficiency in the fuel supply and distribution chain; the talk about the new wave of disruption set to be loosed upon the segment is no longer whether or not it is unprecedented, but about the impact of the new measures will have in a terrain that has hitherto thrived in institutional lethargy, plain opportunism and organised subversion.

    I refer hereto the plans by Dangote Refinery to start direct distribution of petroleum products to filling stations and other stakeholders across the country particularly those in the critical sectors of aviation, manufacturing, and telecommunications – not excluding of course the so-called independent marketers. Not known to settle for half measures, the Dangote initiative, set to commence on August 15 will see the behemoth roll out some brand new 4,000 CNG trucks in furtherance to this.

    Surely, if Nigerians had prayed for that day when a band of unscrupulous predators would be put on notice that their perfidious game was over, they seem to have got more than they could have wished for in the Dangote plan! 

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    The deployment has, expectedly, raised questions about logistics dominance, fair competition, and pricing control in the downstream sector. Specifically, marketers under the aegis of the Petroleum Products Retail Outlets Owners Association of Nigeria (PETROAN) have since concluded that the plan would distort the market. Drawing attention to their earlier warning about the refinery’s intentions to dominate the downstream sector, the body fears that “the company may leverage its market power to fix prices, limit competition, and exploit consumers, much like it has done in other sectors.”

    It went on to note that the development “could lead to a massive shutdown of filling stations across Nigeria, resulting in widespread job losses. The introduction of 4,000 brand-new Compressed Natural Gas-powered tankers…poses a significant threat to the livelihoods of thousands of truck drivers and owners.

    “While CNG trucks may offer a lower cost of transporting petroleum products, this shift could lead to widespread job losses in the industry”, it noted.

    Dangote Refinery, it also added, “might be deploying a price penetration strategy, offering fuel at low prices to seize market share and force smaller players out, ultimately threatening the survival of independent operators”. In their opinion, Dangote refinery should focus on refining and exporting fuel rather than competing directly in the retail distribution chain!

    I believe that the body deserve more pity than understanding. This concerns (or is it recommendations), coming from a group long fattened by the regime of ‘equalisation’ under which uncountable billions of naira are doled out in bridging claims to fuel transporters is, to put it mildly, gratuitous and rich!

    Most certainly, I do understand why the Dangote plan comes close to a final death knell in an industry known to mistake rent for enterprise. For while their cash cow, the Petroleum Equalisation Fund (PEF) may have been certified as dead and buried, at least officially, under the current regime of liberalisation; it remains a measure of how deeply ingrained that psychology of rent is, particularly among the players of yore that some, among them, still fantasise about possible return of that ancien regime under which transporters collected subsidies to maintain fuel price parities long acknowledged as existing only on paper! Truly, old habits die hard.

    By the way, how about the tyranny of tankers drivers, whose all-powerful union could decree, at the drop of hat, that their workers embark on strike on just about anything ranging from a mild skirmish with police on the highways to frustrations with the electronic call up (e-call up) system at the loading bays is finally nearing its end? Who wouldn’t want their chokehold on Nigerians broken?

    Even among the hordes cringing at the budding ‘monopolistic dominance’, it seems unlikely that any, would crave for a return to the fraudulent, organised chaos of yore!

    So much for the labelling therefore; the choice, really, is hardly one between the so-called monopolistic dominance’ as some have chosen to frame the Dangote Refinery’s ‘intrusion’ into the fuel distribution segment on the one hand, and the fading past characterised by organised chaos foisted by the players in the absence of a virile rail infrastructure, functional pipelines and other ancillary distribution infrastructure on the other. To that extent, current concerns, though legitimate, matters little to Nigerians already ill-served by their predatory distribution arrangement; at least so long as fuel flows at the pump and at a price that seems fair enough!

    Rather than the strange charge that the development bodes ill for the market, I believe Nigerians should ordinarily be interested in seeking answers to the far more profound issues provoked the development. Issues about the state of the depots and the products receiving bays, the sprawling pipelines criss-crossing the entire country and countless critical ancillaries that once defined the downstream sector, all of which are now currently in ruins with no plans to resuscitate them. What of the railways that once served to transport bulk products into the hinterland? Billions of dollars of loans after, the sector not only remains subpar, but a recurrent item on electioneering manifestoes!  To imagine that the whiners – the same cartel that has contributed in no small measure to the sorry states which the industry has found itself, whose activities have undermined the very notion of competition, and whose understanding of competition comes to bear only when it suits them; that they have suddenly become drum majors of equitable rules in the market must be the revelation, the joke of the century!

    Yes, there is little doubt that Dangote’s 4,000 trucks present a looming threat to the club of indulgent and patently short-sighted players in the same way that the cartel of fuel importers have been whining to no end about the dominance of Dangote  Refinery hurting their market! The challenge is to engage; not one of a fruitless call to arms. Call it a price to pay at this stage of the industry’s steady evolution. How I love the way a certain Obasa Sanmi put out the matter in his social media handle. “Please Dangote; come up with a scheme like that for the distribution of cement. The middlemen are the profiteers. It’s time to chase them out!”

    Surely, Nigerians understand that. If anything, it seems the way to go. Most certainly, it is a far cry from the chant which comes basically to putting Nigeria’s leading entrepreneur to the sword, and this for no crime other than putting his money where his mouth is!

  • The anatomy of opposition

    The anatomy of opposition

    That the Bola Ahmed Tinubu administration has given Nigerians, nay the world, a lot to chew upon in the last two years of being in the saddle is certainly beyond debate. For while most Nigerians would not readily characterise the president as a disruptor in the mould of United States President Donald J. Trump, whose mission to carve the global socio-economic and political landscape after his liking continues to roil global capitals, the fact remains that nothing in the course that his Nigerian counterpart has set upon in the last two years can be said to be any less tremor-inducing in terms of their impact in fundamentally reordering the nation’s beleaguered political economy.

    From the swirling controversies over the removal of the graft-ridden fuel subsidy to the termination of the atrocious regime that left forex management in the hands of corrupt bankers and their allies, right up to the steady revamp of the decadent public finance infrastructure, there is, most certainly a lot to be said of the dismantling of those elegant castles of corruption as marking a turning point in the nation’s redemptive journey.

    Already, we know what the numbers are. From allocations to the federal, states and the local governments that have grown exponentially to the steady rise in foreign reserves that has brought relative stability to the foreign exchange market, the returns on the GDP (this newspaper, quoted a World Bank report as stating that the GDP grew 3.4% in 2024, the highest in a decade) the gradual moderation of the troubling inflation with foreign reserves now at $38 billion, there is a sense that things will return to normalcy in no distant future. In fact, only yesterday, inflation, the scourge of the working class, reportedly declined from 23.71 percent in April to 22.97 percent in May – a decline of 0.745.

    Today, if those numbers are any indication of the soundness of policy, a reflection of the extent to which some of the issues holding down the economy are being tackled headlong, what Nigerians must find exasperating isn’t just the unceasing denial of the reality by the so-called opposition, but their desperate insistence in foisting their specious, alternative reality on the people in the bid to make their prognostication of gloom and doom a living, self-fulfilling prophecy!

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    For while the idea of an opposition being unable to live down the prospects of citizens’ hope finally being renewed by an administration that has demonstrated far more grits in tackling the demons which have held the country down than those before it would not seem entirely strange, particularly concerning is the state of opposition politics in the last two years, given the inability of the leading parties, the PDP of Atiku Abubakar and the Labour Party of Peter Obi, to reinvent themselves after the gruelling 2023 elections.

    Nigerians will recall the blatant campaign by these sore losers to de-legitimise the election outcome at every turn. When allegations of widespread malfeasance of electoral practices increasingly sounded hollow, their spin-doctors trained their attention on the I-Rev portal said to have ‘suddenly’ malfunctioned. They would neither countenance nor accept the rational explanation that this actually has nothing to do with the credibility of the outcomes – not with party agents in all of the 176,974 polling units already having in their custody, copies of the already scanned result sheets, which at that point, were being uploaded, albeit slowly on the I-Rev viewing portal. That a glitch occurred along the line was apparently sufficient to declare the entire process as compromised!

    But then, this would be child’s play compared with the vicious campaigns that followed, home and abroad, to kick out the winner, not on the basis of the election that had just been held; certainly not in any breach of any of its known guidelines, but on matters that could only have been conjured in their opportunistic flight of fancy! To ensure clinical execution of ‘righteous’ anger, their supporters had to literally put the guns to the heads of our eminent jurists in the Supreme Court in their bid to secure what could only have been justice pleasing only to them! As for the Independent National Electoral Commission, INEC, not only did they declare the body the number one public enemy, they wanted the body sequestered and their leaderships condemned to the guillotine!

    In the whole of 24 months, they have done little else but rant – over anything and everything that has to do with the Tinubu administration and its handling of the economy – which, by the way, is no crime – unfortunately with no coherent alternative suggested.

    Apparently, no lessons was learnt from the events prior to, and in the aftermath, of the 2023 elections; no time to reorganise and reflect; and no strategy to reconnect with the people after that electoral cycle. Rather, it was sufficient to retire to the shadows to plot, to keep playing the victim, to accuse the government of not working for the people; to claim that the removal of fuel subsidy – which they themselves – I mean the leading opposition candidates Atiku Abubakar and Peter Obi – also swore to do – was callous – going as far as branding other notable reforms being undertaken to get the economy going as nothing but self-serving.

    Never mind that when the Labour Party candidate in particular was asked what he would do differently on the subsidy issue, he could only utter some incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo about doing so IMMEDIATELY but in an organised manner!

    Touching on corruption, he claims, in his utmost naivety, to possess the magic to stamp it out overnight, although he would admit that a good number of the policies that he wants to pursue, like the one the administration was being criticised for, would also require some time before gestation since he didn’t claim to be a magician! As far as the LP candidate is concerned, the policies aren’t working simply because, he, Peter Obi, is not the one in charge! Hubris or plain dissonance?

    Now, between the trio of Atiku Abubakar who would rather spend valuable time and cash in the (vain) pursuit of a vehicle of convenience that would guarantee that his perennial quest for the presidency finally comes to fruition, a confused Peter Obi, whose credo of leading from behind is largely responsible for the crises afflicting his Labour Party, and the brood of entitled wayfarers from the ruling APC, the most prominent of which are Rotimi Amaechi and Nasir El-Rufai, individuals,  who, apparently , could no longer bear the thought of life out of power – the anatomy of Nigeria’s current opposition may have finally come, fully unveiled. The sight, to say the least, is unflattering.

    Glad to be back from vacation, dear readers.

  • Duplicity by another name

    Duplicity by another name

    Nigerians must consider themselves ‘indebted’ to the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA), first, for giving new meanings to the once-familiar concepts of ‘principles’, ‘morality’, ‘law’ and ‘constitutionalism’, and second, for insisting on operationalising them in their new, but self-assigned opposition role in the ongoing Rivers fracas.

    Thanks to the august body, the string of absurdities which started with the torching of the parliament building, the banishing of 27 in a parliament of 32 members into the proverbial Siberia and their subsequent replacement with three members, the running of the business of government without a duly passed appropriation law and other heinous constitutional infractions are supposed to count for nothing.

    Even less – in their view – is the unambiguous, declarative judgment of the highest court dubbing the Fubara-led contraption in Rivers State – and that is what it is – as the height of despotism. 

    In the eyes of the Afam Osigwe-led NBA, those fundamental infractions should still be deemed as tolerable and that is even long after the Supreme Court had pronounced on the death of law and constitutionalism in the aftermath of Governor Sim Fubara’s coup in the state!

    Wouldn’t that amount to defecating in the communal pond – in a moment of opportunistic exigency?

    Imagine, we are supposed to be dealing with a grave matter – the subversion of those fundamental tenets of democracy; one whose terrible derivative, was the treatment of the legislature branch as expendables! It is certainly a new day that the NBA has since deemed them as tolerable – including the open call for anarchy by the dictator!

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    Could the strident defence of those absurdities have also counted for the defence of principles and constitutionalism in the books of the NBA?

    Even with the above background, the tragedy is that the NBA continues to push the specious narrative that the problem in Rivers State actually started on March 18 when the state of emergency was declared by President Bola Tinubu. Ever since, the body has somewhat assumed the role of the judge in all things right and wrong. Finally, Nigerians are beginning to know why! And that is far from ennobling!

    Little wonder the NBA has pronounced the president wrong to have staved off the looming anarchy; wrong to have directed the combatants to take time to rest in the event that truce was nowhere on the horizon; and wrong with his appointment of a sole administrator to take charge to allow things to cool down. And then the National Assembly for approving the declaration as the law required.

    Talk of a body traditionally sworn to the defence of the rule of law and constitutionalism, finally revealed as having a dog in a most unnecessary fight!

    And the result? Muck everywhere. And so the predictable verdict by the same NBAS – the once-famed Garden City is no longer place to do business. Why? Because the government halted the spiral of impunity by a benevolent despot who once declared that the parliament can only exist to the extent that he allows it!

    In their sponsored anomie, we are supposed to be torn between the Supreme Court-declared constitutional aberration and the National Assembly-approved administrator temporarily holding the reins of government in the Garden City! Well, they, the NBA and their allies could not be more wrong!

    Yes, we grant our ‘principled’ NBA the right to its persuasion that living under the former’s jungle rule characterised by impunity would have been more dignifying than the mere thought of staging the high-octane event under the latter brought in to preserve peace and order. Only that we must give thanks that body does not have the last word!

    To be sure, no one is contesting the body’s freedom to take their AGC to Enugu or wherever! It is entirely their business. They also free to glorify their stance as a ‘principled stand against the unconstitutional governance of Rivers State’. Or even still, their insistence that continuing with the AGC in Port Harcourt would have amounted to “a tacit endorsement of constitutional violations and subversion of the rule of law.” And finally the declaration that the NBA “could not, in good conscience, hold its flagship event in a state governed unconstitutionally. These are entirely the body’s prerogatives.

    Except that in the exercise of their discretions, the body not only chose to lapse into an unforgivable amnesia, they forgot one little matter that was just as important to Nigerians and to the good people of Rivers State – the N300 million paid by the suspended governor to the NBA to host the event. The revelation obviously sheds some light into the dynamics at play as indeed the motivations behind them.

    For now, the issue is that the state has been denied the hosting rights to the event and the good people of the state of its potentially accruable benefits. And so the administration in the state wants the money back.

    That should ordinarily be fair or if you like – just, if you ask me!

    On its part, the NBA says that the state should not only perish the thought, but also that nothing of the sort is being contemplated – a case of double whammy. It says the fund was “a gift” to the association for its 2025 Annual General Conference, not tied to any hosting rights. It claims the NBA usually seeks support from organisations, government agencies and state governments due to the “enormous cost” involved in hosting the conference.

    While those may well be, still, they do not vitiate the issues of principle, of law and of due process. Here, it ought to be strange that the NBA would choose not be bothered that the fund could not have been lawfully appropriated by the three-man parliament that the donor (or is it their client) opted to work with.

    Even more deplorable is the very idea of holding on to what appears to be an unlawful item when the demand was made. For while the NBA might feel entitled to whatever pretences it deems fit to project, to most discerning Nigerians, that stance could only be a measure of the ingrained pathology of impunity that has led the state as indeed our beloved country to this sorry pass. Trust Nigerians to recognise duplicity when it manifests. The latter would seem one which no puerile legalism would wash.

    For now, Nigerians have to wait for the courts to determine who, between the NBA and the Rivers people, is right or wrong.

    Talk of the strange times we are in.

  • NNPCL: Not yet back in business

    NNPCL: Not yet back in business

    It should not be difficult to understand why things oftentimes get animated, or better still, the adrenalin suddenly boils over, whenever the name of the behemoth – the Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited, NNPCL pops up in public discourse. Ask the ordinary Nigerian on the street how much he/she knows about the entity in whom – to borrow the Biblical parlance – they live and have their being, and you will be surprised at how variegated the answers you will get. More often than not, you hear such dreary appellations as ‘Number one house of rent’, ‘Subsidy incorporated’, or worse, ‘Corruption Inc.’ to such other unflattering appellations that somehow sums up to how much the company has missed, not just its way but its essence as a going concern.

    Unfortunately, whereas most Nigerians would appear to be in broad agreement that their beloved state oil corporation is not only ailing but terminally so, the option of a corrective surgery to prevent a certain death would seem far from their minds!

    Here, I refer in part to the general reactions that have trailed the appointment of Bayo Ojulari as the new helmsman at the NNPCL a key highlight of which is the needless descent into Nigeria’s identity politics.  However, if it seems that the departure of the last helmsman, Mele Kyari, was the least that Nigerians should be asking for after more than six years of stewardship, nearly four of which saw him transition the entity into a commercial, service-driven one only in name, that Nigerians are soon after, more interested in the elite game of musical chairs as against the immense promises made since the advent of the Petroleum Industry Act (PIA) must be seen as the ultimate tragedy of these times!

    Perhaps the only thing that could be said to be worse is the situation of apparent disinterestedness, under which Nigerians appear so totally oblivious of the rapidly changing but nonetheless dire global dynamics of which their beloved national oil company is being challenged to operate as indeed the texture of the individuals required to drive the required change.

    Whether in its original coming as NNPC or its NNPCL mutation, the story of the behemoth has certainly been told so many countless times that it is now impossible to forget. Aside being everything that a national oil corporation should not be, it’s probably the most abused entity on planet earth. Pillaged on all fronts by various mechanics the most notable ones being the supply misalignment, mismanagement, opacity and the apparent lack of capacity of which Nigerians routinely debate; the existential nature of the battering forces, often more complex and deeper than Nigerians would care to know, are such that anything less than a massive overhaul can only but postpone the evil day.  

    I remember the story of NNPC’s early beginning, as told me by industry veterans, particularly at its take-off as Nigerian National Oil Corporation (NNOC) in the 50s. The founding fathers, even if it appeared more like a venture into the wild, still had a sufficient understanding of what their mission was. They envisioned an entity that was everything a state oil corporation should be, both in the way it carried out its business activities, and in its field operations. Then, the ministry and the bureaucrats in charge, approved and procured oil rigs more than the operators then required, with the extras meant to be taken apart in what was designed to be launch pads for the early birds in the industry – something that their counterparts like Algeria did and largely succeeded.

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    I guess that was an era in which public service counted for something!

    Unfortunately, if the successive inheritors of that legacy understood the goal, they chose rather to find satisfaction in what was convenient – the ignoble joint venture partnerships and the crude and the unfathomable alliances which bred the rentier culture under which the entire country not only chokes but are routinely gang-raped by unscrupulous nationals and foreigners alike!

    Interestingly, while the same bureaucrats of old still had the good sense to establish the ancillary infrastructures and institutions such as the NNPC Engineering and Technical Company, (NETCO), to address specific engineering gaps the industry, the National Petroleum Development Company (NPDC) to advance the nation’s aspirations in exploration and production, and then of course the Pipelines and Products Marketing Company (PPMC) and with it the countless depots spread across the nooks and corners of the country, to guarantee seamless petroleum products distribution, they would later become a huge avenue for creating jobs for the boys!

    Yes; the generations that came after ensured that the facilities were either unable to deliver optimally or were allowed to rot away! 

    This is where my sympathy goes to Bayo Ojulari and his team. His job at this time is an unenviable one. True as might be that the rules and the terrains have since changed, still everyone expects the NNPCL be to all manner of things to all classes of men and deservedly so given the NNPCL’s pre-eminent status as the industry leader.

    True to its nature, the government expects it to deliver on its primary goal of oil exploration and production, to continue its role as the cash cow that it has always been, hopefully beyond its current exertion as mere collector of rents and royalties that must at every month’s end, share from the pool collected to its beneficiaries. Like other entities in the energy terrain, government expects it to play the lead in the quest for energy diversification.

    To the ordinary folk however, everything begins and perhaps ends with ensuring that petrol and perhaps diesel continues to flow at the pump and this in a sustainable manner. This is where things could get tricky in the middle term and in no distant future, given the total collapse of our depots and pipelines infrastructure. In fact, to suggest that the current model of fuel transportation is neither profitable let alone sustainable is merely to restate the truth that Nigerians have always known but have chosen to keep in abeyance for the more weighty matters of fuel supply itself! 

    Which is where the depots as indeed the sprawling network of fuel distribution pipelines covering several thousands of kilometres would seem the best place, if any, for the Ojulari-led NNPCL to make his golden mark. I refer to the pipelines running from the Atlas Cove to Ejigbo in Lagos, then to Mosinmi in Sagamu, to Ore in Ondo State and then to Benin on the Mid-west flanks; and then western flank running from Lagos to Ibadan to Ilorin proceeding to Suleija and Minna and to Kaduna and beyond; and then those running from Port Harcourt to Aba and Enugu and other parts of the east.

    Only thereafter could the NNPCL under his watch truly claim to be back in business!  

  • The rule of market foxes

    The rule of market foxes

    Even now, the most incurable believers in market forces, of which yours truly could claim to be numbered, must have grown weary of the programmed (or deliberate?) misapprehension if not entirely the brazen subversion of the rules by those who claim a near-exclusive monopoly of the market and its allocative power. Talk of an era of easy solutions. From the service provider in the much debauched electricity sector for whom service means crude exploitation, the telecommunications industry operators and their fixation with routine adjustments at the expense of quality and the imperative of service, right up to the general services sector where issues of value for money have remained an alien concept, we are not only now in a season where the market hounds, thinking little of being left on the prowl, insist on hitting the tariff button at every sign of imagined turbulence.

    By now, the alibis have become standard even if they remain essentially what they are – alibis: the country, they say, is hard. The business environment, they complain to no end, has remained not just unfriendly but endangered in the atmosphere of rising costs, inflationary spiral and stifling government regulations. In their books, not only is the consumer out of the equation; rather, it is a one-way traffic that leaves nothing to the imperatives of service delivery or market equity, a scenario in which the supposed king is actually a guinea pig!

    In their season, a season marked by the curse of tariff addiction, even the institutional arbiters are supposed to be seen not heard even when gang rapes go on!

    Can anyone imagine the irony of an underperforming service provider which claims it has neither the money to procure basic tools to enhance service delivery for the consumer, nor would come up with a strategy to raise the funds, yet turns over to the latter to pick the bill; imagine the same returning, without shame, not to the capital markets where it ought to be making its case for funds, but to the public arena via the ready option of higher tariffs!

    Or the other case – that of an ill-served subscriber being asked to pay more even when minimum service threshold could neither be attained let alone guaranteed just to appease the ruling market foxes – not forces. Thanks to their ingrained market monopoly and with it the false but baseless assumption of holding the yam and the knife, they assume, equally falsely, that their words ought to remain law.

    Nigeria may well be a country where anything is permissible; nothing however casts the ugly shenanigans in bolder relief than the current tiff between the nation’s lead competition and consumer protection agency – the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) and the entertainment company, MultiChoice and its subsidiary DSTV.

    Now, the current issue is the Monday February 25 notice of another round of tariff hike that took effect on March 1, served by MultiChoice over which the FCCPC had expressed legitimate concerns about what it perceives as the recurrent issue of unilateral price hikes, potential market dominance abuse, and anti-competitive practices– concerns that predate the current leadership at the FCCPC.

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    Relying on its mandate under Sections 32 and 33 of the FCCPA, the FCCPC had directed the chief executive officer of MultiChoice Nigeria to attend an investigative hearing at the commission’s headquarters on Thursday, February 27. It warned that failure to provide a satisfactory explanation or any violation of fair market principles could result in penalties, sanctions, or other corrective measures, even as it confirmed that it was engaging the sector regulator and other relevant agencies to ensure fair competition and stronger consumer protection in the local pay-tv industry.

    We know how that went. While the company asked for time to prepare and the regulator insisting that the new price be put on hold, the company, in a brazen act of defiance and bad faith, went ahead to give effect to the new prices!

    Are the underlying issues legitimate? Like most Nigerians, I believe they are. To start with, let’s look at the trend in recent years, using the data from Dataphyte, the data analytical firm. As Dataphyte would observe, price increases for each subscription package between 2023 and 2024 has been phenomenal.

    For instance, in May 2023, premium package subscribers were hit with a 51.23% increment – from N16,200 to N24,500. Six months after, another major increment of 20.41% would follow, pushing the price to N29,500. Yet again, in another six months, that is, in May 2024, the service provider would be back with a new price of N37,000, a leap by another 25.42%; and then the latest adjustment effective Saturday, March 1, taking the package to N44,500 a 21% increase– representing over 300% increase using 2015 as the base year.

    For a company that pretends to be less of a monopoly that it is in reality, not even its claims about the stifling operating environment ought to suffice to deter a consumer protection body worth its salt from seeking an explanation on the dynamics under which the pricing model that many Nigerians have long described as heinous, continues to take place. And while that quest is supposed to be standard, at least in an industry said to be service oriented, what must remain the truly troubling part is the unwillingness on the part of MultiChoice to engage the consumer rights body, preferring instead, to play the Jekyll and the Hyde. 

    No matter how the current tides turn, the on-going tiff between the FCCPC and MultiChoice would merely appear a shadow of things to come. In fact, Nigerians would have, traditionally, let pass such inscrutable arrogance on the part of our local service providers. Not anymore. Today, countless evidences abound not just of how things are changing and this on a daily basis, but their endorsement of the work of the FCCPC even when this comes at a risk of being misunderstood. That, to yours truly, is a measure of progress.

    Surely, what would count in the end would not be so much about one dominant player clutching to the straw of legalese for narrow cause(s), but one of solid awareness of what is just and equitable between service providers and their consumer counterparts. In fact, thanks to the Nigerian non-governmental organisation – Save the Consumers, Nigerians have since been taught another lesson on how the sauce for the South African goose cannot be good for the Nigerian gander: MultiChoice offering simultaneous enhancement of service offerings and 38% reduction in prices for its South African customers at a time their Nigerian counterparts are being asked to pay 21% more with perhaps far less offerings – presumably to lessen the impacts of the cost of the living crisis on the former? The word discrimination could not have found a better operational definition. How about that – straight from the books of MultiChoice?

    Trust me, if the final judgment – or better still, that much feared Armageddon – is yet to come in the loud whispers of falling revenues or precipitous decline in subscriber bases, it seems only a matter of time before the reality comes tumbling in. That, surely, is one verdict that the market foxes cannot escape!

  • Still on the Natasha matter

    Still on the Natasha matter

    Surely, if those minding the information committee of the senate couldn’t be accused of having done a particularly stellar job of effectively containing the minor stirring in the teacup that has now assumed a threatening conflagration in Nigeria’s upper legislative chamber, perhaps even worse could be said about those managing the image of the man in the eye of the storm in the wake of the so-called Natashagate.

    Thanks to Natasha Akpoti-Uduaghan, the senator from Kogi Central for teaching her colleagues a thing or two on how the spin works; it seems to me a new day in which emotions and artful manipulation will coalesce to deliver sellable, irresistible, but sizzling  narrative about sex in high places. With Akpabio’s corner on virtual AWOL, should we still be asking how things have turned beyond ugly to potentially irredeemable embarrassment?

    It may well be that politicians wouldn’t be what they are without their uncanny ability to muddle up facts, to twist and then proceed to foist their specious interpretation of reality on the rest of the orderly society. But that the enlightened society – particularly those who, by their orientation, are supposed to be chroniclers of truth, would join the politicians in marketing devious narratives for some narrow, partisan ends can only be described as the ultimate tragedy.  

    Yes, it’s been weeks since Nigerians were treated to the drama on the floor of the senate. At this time, it is doubtful if there is any Nigerian still in confusion about the sequence of the events that took place- the only probable exception being the usual tribe – the hordes of conflict entrepreneurs who seek to make a capital of what is actually no more than a hare-brained delinquency.

    Then, a senator, the chief whip, with the name Mohammed Tahir Monguno, had risen to raise some observations on the conduct of a certain senator in refusing to proceed to the seat allotted to her following some changes in sitting arrangement. He then proceeded to read from the senate red book as if to clear any doubt that the exercise was anything extraordinary. Citing the authority of the presiding officer as captured in the book, the distinguished senator from Borno had reminded all that the exercise was entirely the prerogative of the senate president.

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    Thereafter, Akpoti-Uduaghan, against whom the complaint was made jumped to her feet –claiming her authority from the same book. The problem was that the presiding officer would have her know that she could only validly raise her matter of privilege from the seat allotted to her!

    There was no suggestion that the privilege would be denied her; only that the rules of the chamber required that she speak from her allotted seat, which she apparently thought was not photogenic enough! What followed was hell literally let loose in the chamber with the now out-of-control senator daring the authority of the institution and that of its leader.

    That was the drama – a very shameful one – that Nigerians saw on ‘live’ television. The story of a senator being required to leave the chamber for unruly behaviour is one that Nigerians should not forget in a hurry!

    Worse however was to come.  Next stop was Berekete Radio, a station which, for its famed notoriety, could neither be accused of good judgment nor sound ethical practice. The station, in a rather strange twist to the event that was then gathering steam, and in a series of follow-ups that could only have been well choreographed, placed a call to Senator Akpoti-Uduaghan, requesting for her account of the events on the floor of the senate. If that part of the drama could be described as entertaining, no less intriguing is the barely disguised spin designed to whip emotions against the yet-to-be-heard number three citizen, who, moments later, would be summoned to the live programme without formal notice or invitation!!

    Even that singular act of putting the senate on the spot was just as terrible.

    Now, a lot has happened since to give Nigerians enough to chew. From high-octave TV appearances that seek to supply ample flesh to shadows in the absence of substance, to court cases that appear designed to inject life into the matter while it lasts. Of particular note is the narrative of sexual harassment, whose particulars have remained the petitioner’s best kept secret, well timed to whip supporters into frenzy. Not only has the latter trended, but has trumped everything else even when Nigerians have not been availed a scintilla of proof!

    To our hordes of street jurors, nothing about the contemptible treatment of the highest law-making body by a member would seem to matter. Nothing of the carefully laid out procedures of the ethics and privileges committee designed to guarantee fair and expeditious hearing can make sense. In the eyes of those cheering her on, the senate, not the particular individual sworn to drag the individual into the cesspit and who, as it turns out, is yet to familiarise herself with the rules of the institution in which she claims to represent the good people of Kogi Central, is the one that erred!

    Little wonder the part of the bizarre narrative that the senate subordinates its rules to the whims of gender activists on the whiff of mere allegations by asking the senate president to step down!  Talk of the lone warrior making good with her voluble, fit-for-camera activism even when her understanding of the simple rules of the institution in which she is privileged to serve is utterly suspect!

    The above narrative is the one on the verge of being buried by the lynch mob in the specious narrative in which Senator Akpabio and the distinguished members of the Upper House are being cast in the image of Lucifer and his fallen angels. As for the individual who desecrated the hallowed chambers of the senate, broke protocols, defied her country’s foremost institution, and thought little of dragging the entire nation to that global body – the Inter-Parliamentary Union – to settle personal scores, I can hear some Nigerians demanding her being asked to go and sin no more, if only to prove how gender-friendly our parliament is!

    That is where we are at the moment. Who knows whether her next stop will be the office of the United States president, Donald Trump? Or even the United States senate. Who says there are limits to such unbridled delinquency by our pampered, over-fed elite?  Whichever way things turn out, that date February 20, seems unlikely to be forgotten by Nigerians in a hurry.

  • Fubara: Pay day for outlawry!

    Fubara: Pay day for outlawry!

    Thanks to the candid judgment of highest court of the land, the events of October 29, 2023 and their many confounding aftermaths in the Garden City State, have been comprehensively settled. Reminds me of the Biblical abomination of desolation – used to describe an egregious violation of covenant, the judgment came to me as an unambiguous censure of outlawry; a brutal excoriation of that individual for whom the law is what he alone, apparently, thinks it is!

    Lest I forget, those Nigerians, particularly the supremely voluble television lawyers still in expectation of some judicial reprieve from the lower court on the question of the status of the 27 lawmakers decreed out of existence by Fubara and his henchmen, the publication of the entire text of the judgment in this newspaper’s edition of last Friday must have come as a terrible blow.

    As far as judgments go, nothing that could have been touched appears to have been left untouched. From how the parliament, the symbol of representative government in that beautiful enclave, was razed to the ground by anarchists, who, supposedly for the loved for their beloved governor, thought little of taking the country back to the Stone Age.

    To how the governor, following their steps, in an unparalleled demonstration of executive delinquency, moved in the bulldozers to complete the rite of destruction on that symbol that had cost the state treasury billions of taxpayers’ money.

    And still to the constitutional absurdity of a four-member parliament making laws for the people to the exclusion of the majority of 27; the intervening charade of screening members of the state executive council followed by the bigger sham of local council elections that mocks not just the law but the tenets of constitutionalism, with the governor disdainfully proclaiming that the jungle – his self-declared jungle –has matured.

    And then the travesty of all time – a gang of four members assuming the power over the purse of the state in place of a properly constituted legislative assembly even when a lower court had earlier pronounced such activity as a clear usurpation of the powers of the majority and thus illegal.

    All of these and many more were touched upon by the five-man panel of justices.

    Talk of the house Fubara built finally collapsing like a pack of cards!

    To borrow the words of the jurists: “In this case, the executive arm of the government has chosen to collapse the legislature to enable him to govern without the legislature… As it is, there is no government in Rivers State”, the apex court had thundered!

    Fubara, it specifically noted, “started the prevention of the sittings of the Rivers State House of Assembly constituted by the number of members as prescribed by Section 96 of the 1999 Constitution long before the issue of the remaining 27 members defecting to another political party arose.

    Fubara’s activities “were adjudged by the concurrent holdings of the Court of Appeal in its judgment in Appeal No. CA/ABJ/CV/133/2024 as illegal and unconstitutional long before the allegation of defection started”, said the justices while referencing an earlier judgment of the appellate court.

    His “reliance on Sections 102 and 109 of the Constitution and the doctrine of necessity”, it said “is to continue his brazen subversion of the Rivers State House of Assembly, the 1999 Constitution and legitimate government in Rivers State”.

    How, truly are the mighty fallen. This is a governor, who in May last year had told “those group of men who claim that they are assembly members; they are not existing. I want it to be on record…

    “I accepted that peace accord to give them a floating. That’s the truth. There is nothing in that peace accord that is a constitutional issue. It is a political solution to a problem. I accepted it because these are people that were visiting me and we were together in my house.

    “These are people that I have helped… in many ways when I wasn’t even a governor. Yes, we might have our disagreements, but I believe that one day, we could also come together. That was the reason I did it.

    “But I think it has gotten to a time when I need to make a statement on this thing, so that they understand that they are not existing. Their existence and whatever they have been doing is because I allowed them to do so. If I don’t recognise them, they are nowhere; that is the truth”.

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    That was the almighty Fubara announcing the dawn of jungle rule to a visiting delegation from the neighbouring state of Bayelsa led by former Governor Seriake Dickson; moments after openly repudiating the political settlement brokered by President Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

    No doubt, the past few days must have been a rather traumatic metamorphosis for Fubara. From being everything from underling, to deal breaker and then to lawbreaker and finally to supremo; and now with the apex court’s definitive judgment, he has been stripped of his self-assumed pretences to unchallengeable power. What an elegant way by the Supreme Court to restore order and decorum to the conduct of government business.

    Can the law, which he had all of these while scoffed at, still save him? With the options so narrow and in-between, I guess that is a tough question to hazard. Will the political process which he falsely assumed would answer to his diktat still avail given how rapidly things have turned? That is even more problematic particularly as he still talks as someone living in wonderland, totally oblivious of the unambiguous pronouncement of the apex court. Like Donald Trump and his blithe summon to his MAGA goons in the dying days of his first term, imagine Fubara even asking his own ‘cult’ to stand firm for further instructions!

    And what about those supposed elders, the army of conflict entrepreneurs and ethnic jingoists, egging him on? Assuming that they have not been too far gone in their Samsonian Complex; will they now afford him the space to read the signs correctly and to take corrective measures? Will he be willing to eat the humble pie to engage his nemesis? What about those who, only yesterday pronounced him their hero? Will they still have the nerves to stay the course?

    The days ahead promises to be interesting. 

  • Markets and the burden of regulation

    Markets and the burden of regulation

    That Nigerians are not amused by the across the board tariff increases at a time of shrinking disposable incomes is merely stating the obvious. With the vicious, battering forces of the market as unfriendly as can be, and with services providers across the board barely managing to keep a steady course, the irony isn’t just that the Nigerian consumer, who ordinarily should be the king in normal circumstances are left with the short end of the stick, but also that the service provider whose primary duty is to make that happen, being themselves increasingly enfeebled, have more often than not, gone on a ruthless binge of extortionate pricing, to survive.

    Admittedly, no sector of the economy, has been untouched by the headwinds. Thanks to the Tinubu administration’s valiant efforts to reset the economy, to unchain it from the wasteful subsidies and the discretionary, but transparently corrupt foreign exchange regime that have held it down, it has been a slow but painful adjustment across the board.

    From basic household items to food, transportation services to raw materials for industries, no sector has escaped the gale. Currently, the inflation rate, aside ranking among the highest in Africa has seen food prices in particular, balloon; so also are transportation costs and the cost of housing; until lately, they have all been on a steep increases. Again, raw material prices as indeed the cost of industrial spares, thanks to the new forex pricing regime and the attenuating devaluation of the naira, have shot up. Overall, the ease of doing business or the mere prospect of it has remained daunting whether for entities small, medium of even large scale.

    Between the fabled Scylla and Charybdis, the Nigeria economic actor – whether as a consumer or a producer of goods or services – has suddenly found himself caught up in the maelstrom of the forces over which he little or no control.  

    Just like the Good Book is wont to say, it may well be the case that the parents were the ones that ate the sour grapes, it is the children’s teeth that are set on the edge! Nigerians, long impervious to such concepts as ‘cost recovery’, ‘appropriate tariff’ and the long maligned ‘market forces’, are not only now waking up to the dawn of a new reality, but are finally, it seems, learning the lessons the hard way too.

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    And so the current pressure by service providers for across the board tariff reviews. From the telecommunications companies that claim to require it so bad that any contemplation of an alternative or even a delay in granting their request can only be at the cost of their survival as an industry. Imagine; last year alone, the MTN Group reportedly posted a staggering $414.7 million loss; the same with the electricity sector which continues to guzzle billions of naira of taxpayers’ money post-privatisation (the Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission puts the subsidy largess in the first 11 months of 2024 at N1.91tn), hence the buzzword today being that tariff reviews have become somewhat inevitable. 

    Now, the latest in the tariff quest is the entertainment company, MultiChoice, the operator of DStv and GOtv, which Monday February 24 served notice of its intention to hike subscription prices, effective March 1. Again, as with the other corporates, the reason as given by the company’s Chief Executive Officer, John Ugbe is, ‘higher operational costs’. 

    Part of the statement from the company read: “Due to prevalent economic factors leading to increased operational costs, we have unavoidably had to adjust the prices of our DStv and Gotv subscription packages”.

    As Dataphyte, the media, research and data analytics company would note: “Over the past nine years, Nigerians have dealt with a series of price increments on DStv subscriptions. The increments have become more frequent in recent times and the reasons for increment has (sic) always been due to the rising operational costs in the country.

    Expectedly, the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC), has since taken up the challenge with the latter not only raising concerns about what it described as ‘recurring unilateral price increases’, including serious questions about ‘fairness, market abuse, and potential anti-competitive practices’ but requesting a meeting to discuss the matter.

    As it is, it is hard to see any part of the FCCPC invite as anything but legitimate public duty. MultiChoice is, after all, not just another fringe player in the entertainment sector of the economy, its dominance is unequalled, or if you like, unchallenged. 

    Surely, this will not be the first time MultiChoice will duel with the regulators or even the parliament. Yet, as with every duels past and present, the issue(s) have remained basically the same issues of inflation and rising costs and how this impinges on the service delivery and prices, and then the question of how it responds to it, not just in the market place, but in the context of its status as a lead player in a sector in which it has remained, inexplicably, a dominant player.

    However, while the issue has remained somewhat intractable and so doesn’t lend to easy answers, it is not necessarily because the roots of the problem are unknown but because they are out of control!

    Surely, I understand the case that the FCCPC is eager to make: it doesn’t accept that the tariff review by DSTV makes any sense any than the extremely short notice of barely five days served on the subscriber fair; needless to add that it considers both to be, not just injurious, but antithetical to consumer interests and to that extent demands some regulatory action. Not only is this reasonable, it may well be the right call to make in the current circumstances. This, as indeed, the alleged monstrosity of a dominant player in a country of over 200 million population being legitimate questions that Nigerians have had to raise in times past, but for which concrete answers are yet to be found, precisely because the solutions, although in plain sight, are not easy to deliver, are live issues!

    To put things simply:  Nigeria’s case is akin to that of the proverbial bird perched, delicately on rope; neither the bird nor the rope could claim to be at ease!

    Therein lies the burden of the nation’s competition and consumer protection body. The body has certainly done a yeoman’s job of pounding the streets in the bid to bridge the perceptible animus between the different set of actors in the economy, producers and consumers alike. Sometimes the body has found itself, reading the riot act, to those for whom the issue of fair, just and equitable market prices would remain an alien concept. In all, it has done well to raise the stakes for the consumer and the service provider alike. But then, as far as the matter of tariffs go, the case of the service providers may well be an instance of those creating value being forced to carry more than they can capably bear.

  • IBB: Revision for contrition?

    IBB: Revision for contrition?

    It is just as well that Nigerians have been speaking on Ibrahim Babangida’s long awaited book – “A Journey of Service” since its public presentation Thursday last week. Surely, if a week after its release, most Nigerians appear less convinced about the aptness of the subject’s so-called journey of service which the title desperately sought to project, what the snippets out there suggest goes beyond a less-than-credible account of the eight-year trauma unleashed on a long-suffering people by the individual now famously described as Maradona. It is, to put things mildly, a nauseating patchwork of astounding self-justification, and a most egregious assault on the psyche of an injured people.

    Let me start with a confession at this stage: I have not read the book. I will hopefully do as soon as I am able to grab a copy. But like every concerned Nigerian, I have followed, closely, the events from the presentation to the subsequent naira rain in the service of the vainglorious monument of a so-called presidential library project – a scandal, an obscenity, if you ask me. That is a different matter by the way.

    Just as theirs belong the prerogative of what to make of his account as laid out in the book, Nigerians ought to join me in commending the number one artful dodger for finally coming out with his story – never mind that this is coming after 32 years since the annulment of an election that the world has come to accept as the freest and fairest in the nation’s electoral history.

    To say that the man they call IBB is no ordinary leader is no overstatement. For good or bad, the point really is not to deny him his place in history. Next to Yakubu Gowon under whose leadership the nation fought a bloody civil war, he is arguably Nigeria’s most consequential leader till date. Howbeit, if a minority few detected his pretensions to high-mindedness particularly in the early days of his administration, one must give it to his uncommon ability to deploy a certain charm offensive, added to his trademark toothy smile, to get majority to accept that he meant no harm.

    With all manners of palace intellectuals in his beck and call, the administration, which he was the supremo, was apparently well prepared, to answer to any and every quest, right up to playing god! In those giddy moments of intoxicating power, some even dared to call him the Prince of the Niger!

    To be sure, he was not all image and no substance. He was a doer of sorts. For roads and food security, his administration had the Directorate of Food, Roads and Rural Infrastructure (DFRRI); there was the Mass Mobilization for Self-Reliance, Social Justice, and Economic Recovery (MAMSER) to educate the citizens about the political process, their civic duties and to inculcate in them a dependence on locally made goods and Nigerian products. They, the administration that is, even had the National Agricultural Land Development Agency (NALDA) to assist willing farmers to prepare the land for cultivation! Nigerians will recall the much reviled Structural Adjustment Programme (SAP), the policy anchor to address the then looming economic catastrophe. 

    And then the spectacular bid to nurture a so-called new breed of politicians and with it, the laboratory of costly political experimentations; an era when politicians were banned, unbanned and re-banned by his administration– politicians thought to have crossed the lines of the administration’s political orthodoxy.

    If Nigerians were exasperated by the chaos falsely presented as a transition programme, the artful manoeuvres which berthed few hours into the elections and the subsequent annulment of same on June 12, 1993 certainly went beyond a mere turning point, it has since defined everything that the administration represents to Nigerians if not the global humanity.

    It is precisely why Nigerians chose to see the book – A Journey of Service – as an essential June 12 story – as against the autobiography that it is. As far as most are concerned – everything of meaning starts and ends with the story of MKO Abiola, a man who won an election fair and square but was denied the fruit of his victory for reasons that are as inexplicable as they are illogical. (Like most adults at the time, I could still play back in my mind those testy moments when a rambling Babangida, as if under the influence of substance, decreed the election annulled)!

    Now that the Supremo testament is out in the bookstands, many are actually wondering whether the so-called memoir should not have been more appropriately titled The Return of the Maradona. Yes, an exposition on the same old indulgences in semantic inexactitudes that is vintage IBB!

    Still, there is lot that Nigerians ought to be thankful for. First the dubious, but utterly self-serving attempt to conflate ‘acceptance of responsibility’ with ‘expression of remorse’ has been finally exposed for what it is – an exercise in chicanery at best. The man is apparently far too gone to understand the difference and their import. He apparently thinks that he has done the country no wrong to call for an apology to be offered. Or better still, he thinks that would detract from his macho image of the soldier’s soldier!

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    That thousands died didn’t appear to matter; nothing about the grave socio-economic dislocation spawned by the crisis seems to matter; these were mere collateral damages and should be accepted as such! That, for yours truly, is a revelation, a sure profile in leadership.

    Second, the confession that he, IBB was never truly in charge of anything! Again, I am relying on newspaper reports!

    Yes, he was supposed to be the commander-in-chief, but Sani Abacha, his army chief, was actually the one running the show! Interestingly that all of the other brass-hats which he gleefully named as his nemesis, and all of whom he claimed were sworn to ensure that the transition did not run its full course, are now dead! While that remains his words against theirs, the only thing that he did not add is that the perceptibly rattled, rambling and incoherent general that appeared on TV to announce the annulment was actually a Babangida clone!

    How about that shameful admission, coming from our beloved military president, a four-star general?

    Now that the man has pretty little to offer the nation or anyone for that matter, it’s probably time Nigerians left him alone as he continues to enjoy the peace of his rarefied hill-top mansion in Minna!

  • Labour on the wrong path

    Labour on the wrong path

    It is probably too late in the day to remind the leadership of the Nigerian Labour Congress and its allies, currently angling for war over the newly approved telecommunications charges, of the basic factors of production whether of goods or services. As my grandmother, now late, is wont to say of the futility of teaching a geriatric the use of the left hand, that proposition, as far as organised labour is concerned, is long dead.

    Surely, if the Congress’ continuing retention of the logo of Labour Creates Wealth is any suggestive of the movement’s ideological fixation in the world of Artificial Intelligence, its continuing failure to embrace the cold realism of market imperatives has, quite frankly, become a source of embarrassment that might spell its undoing.

    Yes, it is no news that NLC has, true to its character, called out its men for mass action over the Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC)’s approval of a 50% hike in telecom tariff. At the end of the emergency meeting of its National Administrative Council (NAC) January 29, it came to a number of startling resolutions top of which is the flat rejection of the 50% tariff hike,  proposing a five percent hike instead, and with it the resolve to embark on a nationwide mass rally effective today, Tuesday, February 4 to press the point. 

    While describing the new tariff as “unjust” and a huge burden on Nigerians already struggling with economic hardship, it says the proposed rally, “will serve as a warning on the dangers of imposing such an unfair increase on a struggling population earning a minimum wage of only ₦70,000; a population that has suffered outrageous hike in the price of petrol, high cost of food, hike in electricity tariff and general rising inflation”.

    Talk about its resort to the familiar weapon, it says nothing is off the table including “a nationwide boycott of telecommunication services and further mass actions which may involve nationwide withdrawal of our service to resist policies that exacerbate poverty and inequality!

    And then adds that it is doing this to protect ‘the interests of Nigerian workers and citizens against exploitative economic policies.

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    “We will not relent in our struggle against policies that undermine the welfare and dignity of our people. Nigerian workers and citizens must unite and take action to prevent further economic oppression. We must resist any policy that prioritizes corporate profits over the well-being of the people”, it said in its communique.

    Never mind that the NCC had in its announcement justified the tariff increase as “necessary to safeguard the sustainability of the industry, while balancing consumer protection”; or even the other point, which the telecoms operators had made long before then, and on which they had premised their initial demand on 100 percent tariff hike, that their industry was, under the existing tariff regime, headed for an imminent collapse, appeared to have made sense to the NLC and its allies.

    Not even with the public knowledge, that MTN, despite posting a 32.6 percent growth in service revenue to N1.5 trillion, actually incurred a loss after tax of N519.1 billion in the first half of 2024 which it blamed on record-high inflation and the naira’s devaluation. The other operators have chosen to make their figures best kept secrets even when the indications are of an industry straining under the yoke of unbearable operational costs! Not a word of understanding let alone sympathy for the operators in a critical sector on which the future of the country’s digital aspirations lie!

    Yet, if the Congress ever needed another casus belli on which to hang not just an industry facing existential threats, but the Tinubu administration that is not infrequently accused of unrestrained embrace of market orthodoxies, it thinks that the NCC approved tariff review qualifies for one.

    By the way, it isn’t exactly that Nigerians do not understand where organised labour is coming from. Grandmasters of the art of populism, if the issue is about winning an argument, it seems unlikely that organised labour could ever lose an argument against any opposition, no matter how rational the latter’s position appears.  Whether it delivers the intended results or not is a different matter; against the Nigerian government, they stand no chance at all and so the round-robin game persists.

    Which is truly tragic. The blatant disdain for its concerns aside, the big question is whether the NLC actually knows anything about the industry. From our major cities where services are barely passable to the theatres of war and violence where vandalisation of telecoms infrastructure are daily fares further down to the sprawling spaces across hitherto served by countless base stations which have since been put out action because it no longer makes economic sense to keep them running, how much of the industry does it know aside the cheap retort about prioritising profits over the well-being of the people?

     This takes us to the premise of NLC’s rejection of the tariff – the charge that the hike is ‘unjust’. I find the charge laughable if not ludicrous. Apparently, ‘just’ to the NLC means leaving the industry to limp from spasm into a certain death. It says nothing about balancing the market imperatives with the demand for service, or even the more concerning issues of transparency, upfront disclosure of all critical details of plans, including costs, validity periods, and benefits, which the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission (FCCPC) has artfully articulated for the benefit of the public but on which the organised labour seems ill-prepared to educate itself let alone the people on whose behalf it claims to be acting.

    By the way, whatever happened to the research department of the NLC? Once upon a time, it used to be said that Nigerians love  to plan without facts; it would seem a most recent development that a once research-centric NLC has succumbed to the virus in which demands made outside of the prism of, rational, objective realities are served as staple! Or is the NLC suggesting that the operators should continue to sustain the losses even at the risk of their survival?

    The problem with the organised labour, as I see it, is the jaded thinking about those traditional tools availing for all times and seasons.  Not anymore. Whereas the dynamics have changed, only the movement cannot see the signs – a pity really.