The Nation Newspaper

Category: Sanya Oni

  • Tax reforms: Lessons in leadership

    Tax reforms: Lessons in leadership

    Many thanks to the Nigerian Governors Forum (NGF) for dousing the firestorm needlessly stoked by some self-appointed activist-governors, Nigerians can look forward to an expedited consideration and hopefully the passage of Nigeria’s Tax Reform Bills by the National Assembly. Given how the forum managed the process – particularly the broad consensus that came after – based on their communique – most Nigerians will probably still be wondering what the entire fuss was all about in the first place.

    Imagine: now the NGF was unequivocal about the imperative ‘of a modern tax framework in ensuring fiscal stability’; the importance of aligning Nigeria’s tax system with global best practices hence their declaration of commitment to ‘a more efficient and transparent fiscal policy that will foster economic growth and development’.

    Even more interesting is that the governors didn’t appear to have come to the point without some specific ideas of their own: they wanted a revised Value Added Tax (VAT) sharing formula essentially driven by the need ‘to promote fairness and balance in resource distribution among the states’.

    They even proposed a sharing formula: 50% based on equality, 30% based on derivation, and 20% based on population, which, in their view, will ‘bridge the economic disparity between states, ensuring that all regions benefit from national revenue while rewarding states that contribute significantly to VAT generation’.

    Yes; the NGF considers any contemplation of an increase in the VAT rate or reduction in the Corporate Income Tax (CIT) a no-no at this time; they seek continued exemption of essential goods and agricultural produce from VAT to protect the welfare of Nigerians, support household incomes, and to promote agricultural productivity. They even recommend the removal of any terminal clauses in the allocation of development levies to critical national agencies, namely the Tertiary Education Trust Fund (TETFUND), the National Agency for Science and Engineering Infrastructure (NASENI), and the National Information Technology Development Agency (NITDA) – all in the effort to ensure uninterrupted funding of education, technological innovation, and infrastructure development, which are vital for Nigeria’s long-term growth.

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    To imagine that this is coming from a 39-member body, 19 of whom on October 28, 2024 had all but pronounced on the bills as not only anti-North but actually instructed the lawmakers from their part of the country to reject them– based on their rather specious definition of ‘derivation’ in the sharing formula of the Value Added Tax; talk of a new day!

    Moving on: it is beside the point that the presidency did not, at any point, pretend that the proposals as outlined in the original bill were cast in stone; or as some of the opposing governors would have the world to believe that they came anywhere close to extra-constitutional executive orders or military decrees.

    It perhaps mattered less to some that the president neither dismissed the concerns of the elements opposed to it nor pretended at any point or indicated at forum that the draft bill was perfect. Or that all that the president wanted was that the process be made to run its full course in the finest traditions of law-making and constitutionalism, considering the sheer efforts that had gone into its making, as against the clamour by some to have it peremptorily aborted by any means fair or foul.

    Yes; all of those are apparently now forgotten. As they say – they belong to the past. Hopefully too the role of some leaders, who after confessing that they had neither read nor were prepared to even read the bill – still couldn’t imagine the president as deserving the benefit of the doubt let alone his prerogative to push an issue that could arguably be said to constitute another critical pillar of his economic reform agenda!

    Do we add the not-so-subtle blackmail by one Bala Mohammed of Bauchi State that his beloved North would show its true colours to the president and presidency if they insist on going ahead with the policies despite the outcries?

    “We will show our true colour; we will fight for it. No policy should be imposed on the people because Nigeria does not operate an oligarchy system of government or a military rule.

    “It is not a good policy for northern Nigeria because we are not going to get money to pay workers’ salaries, to do roads. The presidency and federal government must listen to our plights; otherwise, they are calling for anarchy. And that is not good”.

    Those were his exact words.

    Now, the wheels have turned full cycle.  Common sense has been allowed to prevail; talk of another moment to prove why leadership – of an enlightened, focused and effective variant – is neither cheap nor popular. Yes, the same play, which some arrogant and incurably bad actors had insisted must be called off for peace to reign – is back in session and in the designated arena of the National Assembly, which is precisely where it ought to be in the first place! And while it seems unlikely that the team of slow learners will ever admit to making a false call, it seems to me the ultimate test of leadership that the president, whom they have since resolved must be made to lead from behind, is the one making the final call – right in the front!

    Now, the rest of us can only but wonder about what shape their next game plan might take!

    This takes us to the other revelation – which I actually consider more troubling. We know – and the saying is true – that our governors are powerful. And that quite a good number only hanker after the peacock thrones and so cannot be seen to suffer the inconvenience of the daily grind that comes with the responsibility of the office. But that a section of the governors could openly threaten the president for doing the job that he was elected to do, simply because they find some of his policies disagreeable? How about setting new limits in gubernatorial errancy?

    Again, as they say, it is not truly over until it is over. Whereas the governors’ forum may have spoken, it seems early in the day to suggest that the bad faith and the toxic politics that characterised the discourse in the last few months will dissipate anytime soon. Nigerians had better prepare for the mutations of the same toxicity as the battle shits to the National Assembly. It is, after all, Nigeria’s season of opportunistic politics.  

  • When outrage is not enough

    When outrage is not enough

    Unlike most Nigerians who, after seeing the short video clip showing the unfathomable ill-treatment of the three-year-old Abayomi Michael of Christ-Mitots School in Ikorodu, by her teacher, Stella Nwadigo, continue to voice their outrage at what they consider as a most egregious violation of a tot by a supposed minder, I still have a bit difficulties in actually resolving the question of which of the actors should be the legitimate target in the circumstance.

    I understand that most Nigerians would probably want to see the principal offender – Stella Nwadigo – hung and dried in the merciless sun, if not for those custom-made slaps that would, even, in normal circumstances, be too much for an adult to take, but for its artful delivery. I say this because of the ease and the practiced care with which she went about the slap business. It was akin to a lady eating the boli (roasted plantain) with palm oil. Given that the mother of the abused child is also a teacher in the same school, one can only imagine what other children with no such ‘privileges’ are made to go through under her watch.

    Clearly, if question of how the barely literate, ill-tempered individual could be put in charge of a classroom of pre-school children is one that the owners of the school are best placed to answer, what about those business it is to ensure that those who handle our children are qualified?

    What of the society that pretends that a child should at least be six years old before being herded into the icy, unfriendly classrooms but makes no provisions for pre-school kids whose parents have a duty to earn a living?

    Yet, there is still another side to the story – which is that someone, yet unknown, actually held the camera to record the cruelty, and then going as far as putting it on the internet for the rest of the world to see! For much as it is tempting to imagine humanity being in the debt of this particular individual for capturing the moment, the profound moral issues thrown up by merely watching the savagery go on, and this on a three year-old, with no indications that any challenge was actually put up by anyone in or out of sight, should be no less confounding.

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    Was the idea behind the photo to draw attention to the obnoxious practices, which although known to be at commonplace but which the larger society prefers to live in its denial? Could it have been a case of the photographer enjoying the moment while the teacher administered the rod of correction?

    At this point, suffice to state that there are simply too many questions on the individual’s motivations to which answers are unlikely to be found – which means that the questions are such that the particular individual will have to duel with his conscience to resolve.

    Here, interested Nigerians might find a good example in the story of Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who won the Pulitzer Prize for his iconic photograph in 1994 only to commit suicide three months later. To Carter, the image of a starving Sudanese girl who collapsed on her way to a feeding centre with a vulture in tow may have presented one aspect of the Southern Sudanese war that was impossible to ignore. Nonetheless, when The New York Times published the photograph, I believe in 1993, there were as would be expected, far less issues raised about the war as there were about the humanity of the story-teller.

    Did the child die? Why would Carter prefer taking pictures to saving a dying child? As more and more posers were raised by a clearly flummoxed public, things got to a point that questions turned into accusations. I believe the final blow must have been delivered by a newspaper – St Petersburg Times (Florida) in its editorial comment: “The man adjusting his lens to take just the right frame of her suffering might just as well be a predator, another vulture on the scene.”

    Clearly, if his widely reported interview, moments after his Pulitzer win that after taking the photograph he “lit a cigarette, talked to God and cried”, were meant to salve his conscience, his suicide, weeks after would prove to be less than an atonement for what, admittedly, could only have been a tragic failure of his humanity at a critical time.

    So much for the Abayomi Michael case; the jury is yet out on what to make of the role of the individual behind the camera. At this time, Nigerians would seem beyond care. Most likely, the individual has moved on. Yet, there is just enough blame to go round if Nigerians are to be honest with themselves. Could the individual doing the recording have stepped in to stop the beastly act, or better still, prevent the commission of what now constitutes potential crime? While the other intervention mercifully paid off; would that, in the circumstance, suffice as consolation?

    The answer, in my view, cannot be that straightforward.  Imagine if the tot had died; would the individual have experienced the same current of vindication as he/she’s most likely doing at the moment? Wouldn’t that failure have made the individual an accomplice by default to the crime?

    Thanks to the power of the social media and Nigerians love for story-telling, the stories of Nigerians going for their camera phones at the sight of either tragedy or crimes are increasingly common-place; which is not necessarily a bad thing.

    I understand that there are exceptions when the citizens have little choice but to record an ongoing crime real time. What is unacceptable is when Nigerians begin to imagine the act alone as sufficient to relieve them of the psychological burden to either immediately activate the mechanisms for crime prevention or physically stop the criminal in their tracks. Imagine a Nigerian doing a video shoot of criminals removing manhole covers on Abuja in broad daylight when he or she could easily have called in the police or mobilise other Nigerians to challenge and then apprehend the criminals?

    To me, part of the reasons lawbreakers believe that they can get away with anything is their understanding of the Nigerian psychology, which appears to preclude the potential offender from suffering even the most minor of inconveniences while doing their dirty jobs.  I believe we are now at a point where some doses of active heroism on the part of citizens will do some good.

  • NNPCL and OBJ in the news

    NNPCL and OBJ in the news

    I understand why not a few Nigerians are rightly peeved by ex-President Olusegun Obasanjo’s latest but unfathomable voyage of self-justification. Surely, if it seems entirely in the character of this particular individual who fancies himself as next only to the Biblical King Solomon in matters of wisdom and discretion to always court attention, it seems to yours truly, a new day that this very individual, famed for taking the credit for the labour of others, has only now a straw of baleful revision to latch on to.

    There’s no prize for guessing what truly ails the ‘patriarch’. Two of the nation’s refineries – those in Port Harcourt and Warri – long given up for being ‘unserviceable’ are, finally up and running. That this fundamentally undermines and renders flat, Obasanjo’s judgement would seem too much for Obasanjo to swallow.

    Never to give up a fight even in the face of defeat and against all evidence, it is interesting how he’s been going on and on…

    Never mind the crass revisionism, since his first word on the refineries way back in 1999 seems now unlikely to hit the target, he appears to have persuaded himself that only he, deserves the benefit of the last word:

    “Well, you know what I said about the Port Harcourt refinery? Do you remember? I will remind you. I said when I was president, I wanted to do something about the three refineries we have. Port Harcourt, Warri and Kaduna. And Aliko Dangote got a team after I asked Shell to come and run them for us, and Shell said they wouldn’t.

    “I said, please come and take equity. They said no. All right, don’t take equity, come and run it. They said no. Later on I called them. I called the boss of Shell then. Come and tell me what it is. And he gave me four or five reasons.

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    “He said, well, first of all, we make our major profit from upstream, not from downstream. Downstream we run just to keep our head above water. Two, the refineries are too small, 60,000 barrels per day, 100,000 barrels and I think 120,000 barrels. He said at that time, the average refinery was going for 250,000 barrels per day. Three, he said our refineries are not well maintained.

    “Four, he said there was too much corruption around the activities of our refinery and they would not want to get involved in that. And when anybody tells you a thing like that, what will you do? And it was after that that Aliko got a team together and they paid $750 million to take part in PPP, running the refinery. My successor refunded their money” – if I may add, for good reasons?

    That is the account of the Wise One.

    If Obasanjo’s handling of the process is any revelation of how he sees himself, the rest of the citizens, and the state which he was privileged to lead, the sale few days to the end of his presidency in utter breach of the Privatisation and Commercialisation Act, qualifies for a study not just in the corruption of power but also the power of corruption.

    Imagine: the act of returning the $750 million cheque to the Dangote Consortium could only have amounted to the unforgiveable sin for which the late president, Umaru Yar’Adua stands perhaps eternally condemned in the courts of OBJ. Presumably, the only thing worse, at least to Obasanjo, is being reminded, some 17 years after, of how fatally flawed his judgment has turned out to be. Now imagine that this ‘impossible turnaround’ is being steadily delivered under the administration of his nemesis – President Bola Tinubu! That can only be akin to a blow to the solar plexus.    

    Surely, only in Nigeria will a man who had the whole of eight years to take a decision on the refineries but chose to do nothing until the very month of his exit from office (or maybe he needed the aborted third term to take the decision) gloat over nothing.  And if it seems ordinarily inconceivable that the individual would take to the lecture circuit to regale citizens on why the news of the successful revamp of the refineries should be treated as ‘hoax’, the limit to me must be the repulsive and the utterly self-serving anecdote of the farmer who lied about the volume of his crops during the planting season and then concluded that the truth will be soon revealed during the harvest season!

    I am here referring to Obasanjo’s allegory of ‘the man who plants 100 heaps of yams and says he has planted 200 heaps, they say after he has harvested 100 heaps of yam, he will also harvest 100 heaps of lies”! Seems to me the stuff that can only be found in Obasanjo’s strange school of leadership!

    The question is – who between Obasanjo and NNPCL is lying? Surely, it is for Nigerians to judge. However, whereas the institution accused of lying has dared to invite the accuser to verify the state of things at the refineries, the only response from the quarter of the accuser has been a heap of insults! So, where do we go from here?

    In any case, who is NNPCL or even Nigerians to complain about Obasanjo’s legendary obtrusiveness or even conceitedness?

    Should anyone ever need evidence, here is a character portrait from an individual who perhaps should know the man more than the average Nigerian: “You are one of those petty people who think the progress and success of another takes from you. You try to overshadow everyone around you, before you and after you. You are the prototypical “Mr. Know it all”. You’ve never said “I don’t know” on any topic, ever. Of course this means you surround yourself with idiots who will agree with you on anything and need you for financial gain and you need them for your insatiable ego. This your attitude is a reflection of the country. It is not certain which came first, your attitude seeping into the country’s psyche or the country accepting your irresponsible behaviour for so long… I pray Nigeria survives your continual intervention in its affairs”.

    I should add – a thunderous Amen. Enough said. Don’t ask me who it was that penned those lines. Just google it!

    Once again, happy new year!

  • 2025: Who needs a crystal ball?

    2025: Who needs a crystal ball?

    With the clock slowly ticking as humanity makes the final approach into the new year, one can only imagine the bucket list of supplications that would be dumped in heaven’s gate in the year that one lone individual – Donald Trump – has promised will be defined, strictly, by himself alone. With his inauguration barely three weeks away, Trump, courtesy of his MAGA/America First doctrine, has sufficiently served notice that the year, either for good or for bad, will be like no other –in global trade, diplomacy or immigration for America and the world.

    Take this example: Trump in his ruffling showmanship thinks Panama Canal could well be America’s to be taken at his whim: “Merry Christmas to all, including to the wonderful soldiers of China, who are lovingly, but illegally, operating the Panama Canal,” the US president-elect had posted in his cryptic Christmas message – adding “Welcome to the United States Canal!”

    Not done, he actually thinks Canada should be America’s 51st state with its prime minister, Justin Trudeau as “governor” so he could better harvest the boundless prospects of his Greater America.

    And then his remaining nemesis, China, which he conceives as the beast; he insists that the Orientals need to be brought down by punitive tariffs so his America – his White America, could relive the once great dream. As for the rest of the world, they could as well stew in their juices at least to the extent they do nothing to imperil his empire’s grand ambitions. It is after all, Trump’s world.

    I wager that such far-flung issues will be the last thing in the mind of Nigerians as they troop to their religious houses as they are wont to do in the annual ritual of countdown.  Surely, there must be far more immediate things on their plate – from the monstrous principalities of hunger, the ravaging inflation, not least the engulfing atmosphere of insecurity, than the overblown anxieties over the now-familiar eccentricities of America’s wayward returnee-president.

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    However, if one understands those last minute sieges on religious houses by Nigerians as an intrinsic element of transition; the army of religious leaders of every shape and hue ever so available and so eager to cash out on the anxieties through hare-brained prophecies can only be part of troubling culture of citizens’ penchant to outsource their responsibilities.

    Nigerians had better watch out for them as things are already bad enough without the cheap, opportunistic zealots needlessly raising their hopes, (which is not necessarily a bad thing so long as these are grounded in plausibility and undergirded by the lessons on hard work), and stoking their fears.

    Hours into 2025, a section of Nigerians, ever so implacable, could easily write a book about the hardships in the 12 months and how the Tinubu reforms have compounded the pains of the people. If they have not succeeded in painting the past – the same past they only a while ago decried – in glowing colours solely on the grounds that the man running the show, Bola Ahmed Tinubu, is the one they would love to hate, it has not been for a lack of organised effort. In their efforts to de-market the administration and its policies, they have left little to imagination.

    For a Bola Tinubu administration that neither pretended that the pains of adjustment would be easy, nor that the problems that have endured for decades would lend to quick-fixes, what we have seen, largely from its army of critics, are the same wearisome fixations with tired orthodoxies that created the mess in the first place.  Even those who agree that the reforms being undertaken by the Tinubu administration was not only inevitable but necessary, merely argue that only they could do a good job of it.

    Take Peter Obi, the Labour Party candidate in the 2023 presidential elections. Asked on a television programme as to what he would do differently on the subsidy issue, the same individual, who had earlier depicted the oil subsidy as organised crime with a pledge not to allow it beyond the first day of his presidency, could only mouth some incomprehensible mumbo-jumbo of an ‘immediate-effect palliative pills’ to be administered on his first day in office to cushion its pains! Talk of political opportunism having no better name or description!

    The same with the ongoing tax reforms; the vocal few sworn to oppose the four bills have since told Nigerians that they couldn’t be bothered to read it! They would rather have the proposals killed before the benefits of appearance on the floors of the parliament.

    In the books of the man leading the charge, Senator Ali Ndume, the gadfly from Borno, leadership, a la democracy, is doing what the people want, simplicita!  In other words, it is not about doing what is good for the people!

    Summary: President Bola Tinubu should be leading from behind on a major pillar of his administration’s reform agenda if only to convince his ilk that he, the president is a democrat! Coming from an individual who has been in parliament in the entire life of the current republic, it is sadly a reflection of how unschooled he appears to be on the subject of leadership.

    This obviously takes us to the prognosis of the coming year. That the outgoing year has been a particularly difficult one is no exaggeration. In the same vein, it is neither useful nor does it make sense for anyone to understate the enormity of the challenges awaiting Nigerians in the coming year. Without any doubt, there is a lot to be concerned about. The revenue side, for instance, might seem encouraging but so also has the debt been growing. While it might well be the case that Nigeria has no debt but revenue problem, the managers of the economy will certainly will do well do pay attention to its management.

    The other is the monstrosity called inflation. Again, if I understand Yemi Cardoso and company at the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) so well, it has to be fought ruthlessly. However, much as the CBN is already doing a yeoman’s job to tame the monster, the problem, particularly the food component of it, would appear far more than the monetary tools can effectively wrestle. This is where the federal government needs to do more. The current expectation of bumper harvests is no doubt a good testimonial to the efforts to stabilise the food inflation. Yet, one must hasten to add the other lacuna that has remained somewhat intractable is a reliable and efficient system of logistics on which our hordes of farmers can count on. Clearly, if Lord Frederick Lugard understood this imperative in the last century, one finds it hard to understand why successive governments could not understand its place in the scheme of things.

    Here’s my candid advice on the matter: our old, disused rail network might seem obsolete for moving people in this day and age; there can be no denying its utility in moving cattle and produce particularly in the circumstances that the country has found itself. With good thinking, right investment and proper management, Nigerians might yet discover the gold on those old tracks.

     Here’s wishing Nigerians a happy new year!

  • In public interest?

    In public interest?

    Had Festus Keyamo, Minister of Aviation and Aerospace Development not been overtly consumed by his planned January trip to Dublin to meet his so-called major airline financiers supposedly to bail out his ailing aviation sector, he would most probably have sufficient time to pore the issues without his rather uncharitable, but quite frankly, characteristic exuberance of dubbing another agency of the same government as ‘careless’ on prime time television.  

    “It was a very careless statement by the agency, making such a pronouncement without consulting the NCAA,” he said of the tiff over which the Federal Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, FCCPC, and the local airline, Air Peace had, days before, been locked in combat.

    “The NCAA is responsible for regulating airlines and ensuring compliance with pricing structures. The FCCPC should have allowed us to provide the facts before issuing public statements”, he reportedly told Arise News with a tone of finality.

    Clearly, if for the most part of the interview, the minister chose to be oblivious of the fact that an agency like the FCCPC actually exists, what came out rather alarmingly is that a steward of state sworn to the performance of public duty would choose to play the mouthpiece of a private organisation that was supposed to be under investigation. Citing what he called the overriding challenges faced by Nigerian airlines, including Air Peace, which in his view, stem from capacity limitations and foreign exchange volatility, he made no pretences about which side his ministry’s interest lay in the context of the raging controversies over anti-competitive behaviours of that particular dominant airline operator.

    Nigerians already know how things came to be. Earlier in the month, FCCPC issued a public notice conveying its intentions to launch an inquiry into widespread consumer complaints against leading players in the banking, telecommunications and aviation sectors. The inquiry, it said, were intended to address issues of poor service delivery, exploitative practices and potential consumer rights violations. Specifically named were three entities –Guaranty Trust Bank (GTB) for network failures hindering customers from accessing their funds or using their banking applications; the telecommunications giant, MTN, for persistent complaints about undelivered data services, unexplained depletion and inadequate customer care; and finally, Air Peace, for alleged exploitative ticket pricing, including significant price hikes for advance bookings on certain domestic routes. To leave no one in doubt as to the source of its powers, the notice cited the FCCPC Act 2018, particularly Sections 17, 18, 32, 33, 80,110,111, 112 and 113, which it says, empowers it to investigate and resolve practices that undermine consumer rights, disrupt markets or create unfair competition.

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    Of the three, Air Peace thought little of the inquiry. In fact, the conduct of the airline in the aftermath of the interaction with the FCCPC – and this is typical of the airline – would somehow betray the antics of an entity that somehow considers itself as being beyond regulation. For a supposed business – a serious one at that, it has been tantrums all the way! From claiming to have reported the allegation of exploitative fares by the FCCPC to the Presidency, to an alleged loss of a summer slot in another country to the damage occasioned by FCCPC allegation, to the ludicrous claim that it should actually be charging N500,000 to N700,000 for a one hour flight (coincidentally, this happened in the same week that another airline actually pegged a one-hour flight fare at N80,000), the airline, quite characteristically, has chosen to fall short of addressing the issues at the heart of its tango with the FCCPC! 

    The tragedy here is that the minister, rather than direct his agency, the NCAA to undertake its separate investigations, merely picked up the gauntlet, not on behalf of the public at whose behest he purports to serve, but in defence of the interests of the operator. Yes, if Minister Keyamo saw any substance in those complaints that have long become commonplace, he was neither prepared to acknowledge them let alone finding merits in them. Like the proverbial dog in a manger, he would rather have the foremost consumer protection body, FCCPC do nothing – while his beloved NCAA luxuriates in its Rip Van Winkle sleep!

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    So much for the jurisdictional and operational issues raised by the minister as highlighted in the interview, it must be surely amusing that the minister actually believes that the airlines problems, which he appears all too eager to inundate the public with, actually vitiate the right of the consumer to seek redress with the FCCPC or any other agency for that matter, within the ambits of the law.

    But even worse is the false assumption, again by the minister, that the NCAA’s statutes somehow convey on it the exclusive jurisdiction on matters bordering on consumer rights and protection in the aviation sector. Even in the United States where the Department of Transportation is often assumed to possess exclusive jurisdiction on such matters, we have seen how, not too long ago, a bipartisan group of 36 state attorneys general actually took an unprecedented bold move to ensure that the country’s Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is granted new powers to investigate airline passengers’ complaints – and this against a 1958 law, under which passenger airlines are exempt from FTC oversight and most state investigations for consumer complaints.

    Said the attorneys general: “Americans are justifiably frustrated that federal government agencies charged with overseeing airline consumer protection are unable or unwilling to hold the airline industry accountable and to swiftly investigate complaints”. 

    Familiar?

    The development, if it must count for anything, is obviously a measure of how the world has changed; an attestation to the primacy of consumer interest in the emerging global aviation eco-system. Applied strictly to the Nigerian situation, it shouldn’t be hard to locate the source of a number of the problems plaguing the aviation in the unwillingness and failure of the players and the regulators to adapt to change and to global best practices. For while it would ordinarily be bad enough that an airline operator would threaten to shut down operations upon being called upon to answer to consumer complaints, (under the patently vainglorious assumption that an entire country should be perpetually indebted to him), what could be worse than the sector’s minister going to a television house to put down an agency of the same federal government? Only in Minister Keyamo’s book!

    Last line:

    It’s been nearly six months since Keyamo’s Federal Aviation Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) mounted its toll at the new Lagos international airport terminal requiring each passing motorists to pay N2,000 in cash only! A less distracted minister would obviously have recognised the arrangement for what it is – an infrastructure in service of Corruption Incorporated. Would that also require a trip to Spain to dismantle?

  • Return of an old malignancy

    Return of an old malignancy

    It is Nigeria’s wild season. It is a season, when the more you try to make sense of what is going on, the more muddled up things get. Were things to be judged by the fiercely uncivil discourse that has gripped Elon Musk’s X-dom – (or is it twitterdom) in the wake of the blowout of the feud between Chief Afe Babalola, SAN and Barrister Dele Farotimi, some Nigerians might be tempted to imagine that the long-predicted third world war has actually begun.

    Most probably, only a minority few could claim to have taken note of the disquisitions (which are by now wearisome) on the subject of ‘civil defamation’ and what qualifies for criminal libel’ in the context of Nigeria’s constitutional guarantee of free speech. The greater majority obviously have few kind words to say of the Ekiti State Police Command, perhaps less for the Ekiti State judiciary; so it is for the entire of criminal justice system as a whole, not excluding the federal government; they are already deemed complicit even if merely by default. It isn’t sufficient that the self-appointed life benchers in the trenches have shown utter disinterest in interrogating the issues outside the traditional comfort zones of mindless activism, following which they and the misguided mob in the internet have since pronounced that Nigeria it is, that is on trial?

    This, in my view, is where things get interesting. That some Nigerians are unduly worked up over what they consider as an egregious ill-treatment of Farotimi is certainly understandable. They are entitled to raise hell about his ‘abduction’ and ‘illegal arraignment’ even, as they equally alleged, the status of the statute under which he was being charged was somewhat unclear! I guess these legitimate issues to raise.

    I have also come across some specious readings and interpretations of the law, the kind that would strip a titan of Chief Afe Babalola’s stature of his right to seek remedy in the circumstance of the injuries he complained about and by every means permissible by the law. Nothing at this stage has been said about the ignoble conduct of a counsel for whom a private battle must needlessly be pushed into the domain of public interest, using the crudest language possible?

    The irony in all of these is that the grave injuries complained about actually came about in the course of a legal tussle. Yes, the two parties had their days in court and a final verdict given. We are talking here of a private matter that ran through up to the Supreme Court – a court, which in the words of the late Jurist, Justice Chukwudifu Oputa, is ‘final not because it is infallible but infallible because it is final’.  In this instance, rather than a graceful acceptance of the verdict as would be expected by a practitioner of law, one chose a path that could be deemed as defecating in the communal pond.  Indeed, while it would seem ordinarily ‘strange’ that the counsel would go as far as to write a disparaging book to attack both the opposing counsel and the high officials of the apex court, the greater tragedy is that the institutions of the bar and the bench appeared to have allowed the finagling of this strange practice into its rather conservative orthodoxy!

    That is where we are today. Yes, Nigerians have a lot worry about in what appears to be grave issues of rule law and due process thrown up by the Farotimi matter. They are in order. But also are the grave moral and ethical delinquencies exhibited by the accused now branded victim no less deserving of interrogation. They surely have greater worry in those!

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    I don’t know how many Nigerians have read the book. I haven’t beyond the snippets currently being shared online. For a lawyer, the language is not only offensive but quite frankly atrocious – the kind that would undermine any argument. My suspicion is that those leaders of the Bar and Bench who have read the book would have found it appalling. Those who have read it and still chose to do nothing have certainly done a great disservice to their noble profession. Today, the joke is on all of us without exception as the global audience regales in the cesspit that the Nigerian judiciary has sunk.

    The good thing is that not everyone regards the development as mere storm in a teacup. As the eminent lawyer, Jiti Ogunye would care remind us in his Channels TV interview, Farotimi’s alleged statements against the Supreme Court justices certainly carry grave consequences. Yes, Farotimi didn’t just take the Supreme Court Justices to the cleaners; he called them names, accusing them of being corrupt.  Such grave accusations, he reminded, constituted solid foundations for criminal contempt charges against him. So also are the unsubstantiated claims against the Lagos State Judiciary, particularly the Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice of Lagos State Lawal Pedro SAN. The latter, he said could potentially sustain additional charges. One hopes that he knows what he’s talking about in the end!

    Talk of the resurgence of an old malignancy. Once upon a time, a lawyer actually dared to look an innocent judge in the eye and accused him of demanding a $10 million bribe in an open court! Although the claim turned to be absolutely without foundation, the lawyer nonetheless got away with a slap on the wrist! His client would later turn round to ask the judge to recuse himself, since, in his view, the judge could no longer be trusted to be dispassionate in his matter! Yes, it happened before our very eyes!  

    This is where those Nigerians currently framing the duel as one between David and Goliath as neither helpful to his cause nor to the cause of the justice system. To the extent that truth and truth only constitutes his main defence, the least is that he’ll begin to spill them out at trial. Otherwise, he’ll do well to prepare for long, dark nights. 

    Unfortunately for the old man, it seems unlikely that anyone would believe that he’s done nothing wrong, beyond protecting his well-earned reputation, that is. Reminds of the old African fable of the tortoise and his in-law: It’s a messy business in which no one is guaranteed to win!

  • Season of bad faith

    Season of bad faith

    Much to its credit, one burden that the current leadership of the National Assembly has somewhat managed to discharge quite admirably, is standing firm in the face of what is inarguably orchestrated but certainly uninformed opposition to the four fiscal bills sent by President Bola Tinubu to the National Assembly for consideration. Interesting how four different bills – the Joint Revenue Board of Nigeria (Establishment) Bill, 2024; The Nigeria Revenue Service (Establishment) Bill, 2024; The Nigeria Tax Administration Bill, 2024 and the Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024 are being presented as one in moments of expediency.

    For the Senate in particular, save for the noisome few like Senator Ali Ndume (APC, Borno) and Abdul Ningi (PDP, Bauchi), last week’s session could be said to be remarkable both for the eagerness of the distinguished members to be open to all shades of opinion on the four bills but also the uncommon resolve of the members to dive deep into its nitty gritty particularly after the club of the so-called northern governors had pronounced a fatwa on them.

    The same, quite interestingly, could be said of the House of Representatives; while the latter may not have proceeded with the same speed, it’s not hard to discern the inclination of the body to doing justice as would be expected in the circumstance. Both of them, have apparently gone beyond accepting that the current tax laws are obsolete but have come to share with the executive branch the conviction  that the broad reforms which the bills are anchored on are such that the country could not afford further delay. 

    The same, most certainly, could not be said of the state governors with their cheap, opportunistic gamesmanship. For the most part, theirs has been a revelation in executive chicanery, bad faith and, as one might imagine, inverted nationalism. For the northern governors in particular, most, it would seem, would prefer to hold on to the old, unimaginative, parasitic, do-nothing, development paradigm that has bred destitution and the poverty currently ravaging the region. Little wonder the communique, which came from their Kaduna meeting on the issue, read more like a declaration of war on the presidency than a sober call for reason and engagement. Said Governor Yahaya of Gombe State on their behalf: the tax bills are against the interests of the North and so northern lawmakers should reject them; period!

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    Such directives to  parliamentarians, though unhelpful, would seem a familiar territory. Majority of them, after all, control, not just their parliaments but the purse and everything else – although through means that the constitution neither donated nor conferred under conventions known to modern governance. The best one could say of the powers is that these were assumed in moments of unquestioning acquiescence by an oftentimes ignorant, pliant and/or pauperised citizenry.

    In this particular instance, what must have come across as new and which Nigerians could not have imagined is the governors’ attempt to export their brazen contempt for their state lawmakers to their elected representatives in the National Assembly; so also is the resort to cheap blackmail and raw threats that would trail the president’s simple but corrective call on those opposed to the bills to follow the route prescribed by the constitution to push their dissent. 

    For while it is understandably in the character of the out-of-control governors to seek to control the presidency through the back door –such as the so-called resolution by the National Economic Council (NEC), directing the president to withdraw his bill for further consultations, it seems unlikely that they bargained for the subtle lecture or shading on due process and constitutionalism.

    The issue is, it is not an open secret that the northern governors had, before this time, taken a position to reject the bill, (whether they took time to read and digest the provisions of the four bills is a different question).  As for the issue of how the governors managed to persuade their southern counterparts to adopt their position at NEC–we can only hope for a full accounting in no distant time. And also the bit about a NEC meeting presided over by the vice president, whose FEC not only initiated the tax reforms but ensured that the bill which emerged from the work of the expert committee set up by the administration was transmitted to the National Assembly for consideration, could effortlessly rubber-stamp the wish of the governors without any known record of dissension. Never mind the manifestation of bad faith and opportunism in full colours, all of them, to be sure, elements of the history in the making.

    This is where the president was right, in my view, to have pointed out that the National Assembly, whose responsibility it is to enact it into law, remained the best place to table whatever concerns anyone might have, on the bill. It is the path of due process and constitutionalism. And that is precisely what the two chambers of parliament are set to do. Anything outside of that would have been out of order.

    Will that settle anything? That seems unlikely. True, the governors and their NEC may have beaten a strategic retreat; the battle has only shifted with a certain Governor Babagana Zulum of Borno State coming along to lead the charge. Along with his fellow Borno native, Senator Ndume, the government not only thinks that the timing of the four bills is inauspicious, he has apparently convinced himself, if not his Borno people, that that the entire tax reform is anti-North, a scheme to further impoverish their region – a section of the country current lagging behind its counterparts in the federation.

    That, coming from an academic, a supposedly scientific mind, an acclaimed agricultural engineer, an individual that was once touted as representing the new face of northern leadership, is what makes the latest development truly sad.

    To conclude: I do not claim to know what the future holds for the four bills. The best that one can hope for is that reason prevails in the end. Whether passed or dropped, what is certain is that things would never remain the same.

    As they say, there is nothing new under the sun. Today, it is 19 governors driving a hard bargain. In 2021, it was Nyesom Wike, then Rivers State governor taking on the federal might. In 2024, the government seeks to overhaul the whole gamut of the tax system to ensure its simplicity, fairness and equity. For Wike in 2021, it was all about fair and equitable distribution of VAT. He actually sought the order of a Federal High Court in Port Harcourt, Rivers State to restrain the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) from collecting value-added tax (VAT) and personal income tax (PIT) from his state. Today, the government seeks a better way to collect tax dues and to ensure that everyone benefits under a more transparent system. Nigerians wait to see who wins.

  • How not to be a service provider

    How not to be a service provider

    Old habits may truly be said to die hard, but then the electricity consumer would appear to need more time to see if truly the Electricity Distribution Companies (Discos) have finally made good their threat to shut out their customers using the Unistar brand of prepaid meters. That deadline, by the way, expired last Thursday, November 14. Recall also that the directive, considered by many as unjust and inequitable, had pitted Nigeria’s lead agency for consumer protection, the Tunji Bello-led Federal Consumer Protection Commission (FCPC), National Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC) and the electricity consumer on one side, and the ignoble cartel on the other.  

    With a new sheriff who not only understands the import of equitable market practices but ready to reset that delicate balance between the disparate actors in the supply and demand chain that has all along been missing, the days ahead promises to be interesting. 

    Surely, the story didn’t start last month; it only got to a head shortly after the Eko Electricity Distribution Company (EKEDC) and Ikeja Electric (IE) directed their customers using the Unistar brand of prepaid meters to replace them latest by November 14. The directive, as one would imagine, came with the usual arrogance that Nigerians have come to expect from a cartel lacking in the elementary knowledge of service delivery and corporate responsibility. To them, it was sufficient that those consumers still desirous of enjoying their service visit the respective websites of the DisCos for replacement of the meters before the deadline.  The measure, they claimed, had not only become imperative due to incompatibility of the Unistar card meter technology with the Standard Transfer Specification (STS) system currently in use by them, the process would involve the customer parting with N130,000 of his/her hard-earned money. Failure to comply means the customers will be unable to recharge their meters and hence no service.

    It’s been nearly two years since I wrote a piece with the title IKJDC: Ponzi as game!

    I reproduce hereunder a part of my ordeal with a supposed service provider as published on the January 3, 2023 edition of this newspaper.

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    “First week in December, my wife had gone to the neighbourhood office of Ikeja Electricity Distribution Company (IKJDC) to top up our pre-paid meter. Although she wanted N20,000 loaded on the card, she ended up being charged twice, no thanks to the glitches routinely suffered by Nigerians on the erratic payment platform. Not to worry; she was assured that the first transaction, which the official had assumed did not sail through, would be reversed in due time. Days of waiting for a reversal that didn’t happen, she went to the bank to lodge a formal complaint. Only then was she told that the two transactions actually went through and that the IKJDC account had been duly credited with N40,000 for which she was supplied proof!

    At this point, the matter looked quite simple and straight-forward: She would get IKJDC to transfer same to the card in the unlikelihood that they would want to refund the money.

    Soon after, we realised that our nightmares had only just begun. At the IKJDC headquarters in Ikeja where she went to lodge a formal complaint, the customer relations staff on duty, after perusing her documents including the bank statement admitted that the fund in question (N20,000) was in their account alright, only that this could not be loaded because the card – yes, the same card on which the earlier credit was loaded days before – was no longer supported on their company’s payment platform!

    She was then availed two options: pay for a new meter which attracts a free of N115,000; never mind the interminable waiting time for installation during which we would be thrown back to the old estimated billing system; or in the interim, do another top up on the same old card and by that forfeit the N20,000 already into their piggy bank!

    Just like that!

    I took over at this point. I told the officials that neither of the options made any sense. In the first place, I had absolutely no problem with the current pre-paid meter to warrant my coughing out N115,000 for a new one under the current difficult economic climate. Second, to the extent that any technical/operational issues that have rendered the old meter obsolete had nothing to do with me, the consumer, (need I also remind that the same meter in question was duly paid for), the cost of any proposed upgrade ought to be borne by IKJDC, not me the hapless consumer! Third and most intriguing suggestion- that I could actually load new units on the old card but that would mean forfeiting the N20,000 that was the subject of the original complaint. And all of these in the raging background on what to do when the already purchased units run out considering that Christmas and New Year celebrations were only few weeks away!

    Convinced that I could at least pull some levers to get the problem sorted out, I called everyone I knew. From their field staff to the customer relations personnel right up to some supposedly top guns in the public relations department; none, as one would imagine, could offer any practical help. Even at that, what I could never have bargained for was being taken through the lecture circuit; the customer relations officers with their standard, icy templates that left no accommodation for common-sense, fairness or equitable dealing; the antediluvian public relations directorate that suffered no pretences about being either ‘public’ or ‘relational’. In all, you are told that the system has been long on this process of upgrade, only that the electricity consumer opted to remain light years behind by neglecting to pay for the modern digitised meters!

    Summary: Either it is the ways of IKJDC or hell’s highway!

    In the meantime, I was expected to ‘comfortably’ endure the agony of spending the holidays without public electricity supply! And that’s exactly how the holidays went! And all of these for the sole prize of running from IKJDC’s pillars to their outposts!

    Well, this is my story a la Ikeja Disco. I guess it captures the agonies of millions of electricity consumers in the hands of the clueless, shylock operator”.

    That was in January 2023. Has anything changed? Rather, the monstrosity is back and well – that is if it ever went anywhere in the first place. Now, thanks to the Federal Consumer Protection Commission, the ancien regime, under which the Discos could claim to have the last word, appears gone forever. And the other good news: NERC, which has all these while, been on a Rip Van Winkle sleep appears to have resurrected!

    For proof, yours truly relies on this newspaper’s report of yesterday. A part of the report referencing a statement from the commission read: “If any customer’s meter is adjudged by any DisCo to be obsolete or faulty, it is the responsibility of the DisCo to replace the meter free of charge, provided that the fault was not caused by the customer”.

    Surely, it’s a new day!

  • Debt of a decade

    Debt of a decade

    Exactly today, November 12, 2014, my dearest father, Paul Oni Meduna, passed to the great beyond. As if in a movie playback, I could recall the bits of the details as if it happened yesterday. Three days before he slipped into the coma from which he never ‘returned’, I had spoken to one of the doctors treating him only to be told that he was doing ‘just fine’ as if that was any reassuring. With no visible signs of improvements days after, my siblings and I, convinced that the man deserved every care in modern medicine that money could buy, decided to move him from the place of his primary care in Kogi State to the University of Ilorin Teaching Hospital. Shortly after, I secured the ambulance to take him down to Ilorin the next day along with the temporary nursing aid taking care of him. I then told my driver to get ready for the trip from Lagos to Ilorin the next day. To ensure that nothing went wrong, I offered that he take my car home so he could arrive latest by 5 am for the six-hour long journey from Lagos to Ilorin.

    My mistake. I got ready at 4 am the next day and thereafter put a call to the driver only to have all his known telephone lines switched off! By 5 am, it was the same story. That I was in panic was an understatement. Not sure of what to do, I left the house confused. Twenty minutes later, I was on the way to the airport, where mercifully the 7 am Overland Airline was on tarmac ready for its early morning Ilorin trip. Somehow, I found myself on the flight and by 7.45 am, landed in Ilorin! I headed for the hospital to find the old man already settled in the ward. A gentle touch and the old lion stirred if only to acknowledge my presence, his first son.

    Meanwhile, the hired private ambulance from Kogi had, I was told, arrived some 25 minutes earlier, and, many thanks to some of the doctors who were my younger brother’s classmates in the medical school, the patient was immediately taken in to be followed by preliminary examinations.

    Soon after, my driver called to inform me that he had just arrived! This was long past 8 am! Without betraying any emotions, I quietly requested him to hand over the car keys to my wife, not forgetting to add that the trip was no longer necessary since I had already arrived at our agreed destination!

    And then my mission began, starting, expectedly with the bills; then the long to-do lists of tests, some to be conducted at the Kwara State government-owned diagnostic centre some 20-25 minutes away, and then ancillary instructions. Although past caring what the procedures cost or how much time it took, I managed in between, to steal furtive glances just to be sure he was still around.

    Sometime around 4 pm, we returned from the diagnostic centre to the hospital where the doctors took their turns to examine him. I then turned the nurse, who, by now, extremely fatigued from lack of sleep and the tortuous journey, could barely stand. I requested that she took out some time to rest till about 8 pm since she would have to spend the night at the hospital, after which I could retire to the hotel.

    Moments after being finally left alone with him, memories of everything he has been to me and my siblings came flooding in.

    Here was a man, who never saw the four walls, of a formal school, yet grasped the import and value of education in his adolescence. While his peers thought little of formal education, he taught himself how to read and write; did a number of correspondence courses in religious education with nearly a dozen certificates elegantly framed in his living room as attestation. He was a regular subscriber to the Yoruba Challenge, the Yoruba publication of the Jos-based Challenge Publications founded by the Sudan Interior Mission (SIM) better known now as Evangelical Churches Winning All (ECWA). A community leader, his life exemplified service. He would travel miles on his Raleigh bicycle to attend weekly community meetings and then stay behind for church service.

    A bridge builder and intense family man, he taught by his sheer force of example the virtue of sacrifice and giving. He was the go-to whenever knotty issues in the family and community arose. To his immediate family, he ensured they never lacked; his children’s education came first, second and possibly third in his order of priority. Often derided by his friends for spoiling them, he never took offence; his argument was that the choice he made was in farming – and so his children, being entitled to theirs, and having already made their resounding choice with their good grades, deserved every encouragement to stay the course!

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    Known to be strong willed and decisive – a firm believer in not sparing the rod of discipline no matter who was involved, I often took pride in being able to access the genial side of his intrepid personality.

    Did he laugh last?

    Lying there almost lifeless, I needed no medics to appreciate that the omens were far from good. Then, the tears came, slowly. Surely, at 84 and in a country where life expectancy was barely 50, it was not a question of being too young to exit. But then, I recalled that he had cheated death, not once but twice before this time.

    First was a ghastly motor accident on January 5, 1978 from where he not only emerged as a lone survivor but left him with a lifelong limp after several rounds of surgical interventions. The second, a gripping drama of sorts, could best be described as a case of quackery by a so-called doctor. That was in 2002. He had called to complain of being unwell and was immediately directed to see a doctor. The latter had put him on a drip, but rather than improve, his condition got worse. My younger brother Temitope, also a doctor, had called the doctor in charge (a private hospital) from his South African base to inquire not just about his condition but the course of treatment. He would call to request that I take my dad from that doctor of death – something to do with the doctor giving a patient with high blood sugar intravenous sugar solution!

    Was he going to be lucky the third time?

    This was the question on my mind as I left the hospital that night. Time was 9 pm. Arriving  the hotel 45 minutes later, I suddenly remembered that I hadn’t eaten all day and so immediately called the restaurant. No sooner had I dropped the intercom than my phone rang – and with it the message I dreaded to hear: Papa has gone to sleep.

    Just like that. And then the flood of tears came.

    It’s been 10 years since. His body was committed to Mother earth on April 3, 2015. Today, as my family celebrates the decade of his passing, there remains, for yours truly in particular, a pile of debts remaining to pay. From the people who freely gave of their resources to those who risked the trip amidst the heavily militarised highways as the 2015 elections reached crisis point, the moment affords me the singular opportunity to finally say – thank you. May God bless you all.

  • How not to handle ‘little’ things

    How not to handle ‘little’ things

    Thanks to Julius Berger Plc and the Nigerian officialdom that only remembered the need to replace the expansion joints on the Lagos-Ibadan expressway long bridge months after the project was supposed to have been in use, it has been a return of travellers on that route to the Season 2.0 of the nightmare that the daily shuttle on that vital corridor was once was.

    For commuters, whether in-bound or outbound the nation’s commercial capital, the story of the daily agony is perhaps now surpassed by the Season 1.0 in the Dante’s Hell that Nigerians were forced to endure by Julius Berger and a works ministry that chose to treat a foreign entity contracted to do a job as if it was doing the people a favour.  Never mind their programmed misery, Nigerians are supposed to be grateful that an element of the work that the company had left undone is at least receiving attention, even if it comes at the pains of sorrow, tears and blood (apologies to the immortal Fela) for the hapless people.

    Yes; it’s been nearly a year since Julius Berger and their enablers returned to the Lagos-Ibadan expressway with their rod of affliction on the hapless commuters of that vital gateway. You would imagine that fixing those expansion joints – the rubber connectors that allow the disparate concrete slabs just enough space to ‘breathe’ to avoid cracks – wouldn’t take eternity to replace, at least not on such a vital road that connects Lagos with the rest of the country. Not to Julius Berger, the so-called construction giant. Apparently, nothing moves them: Not the imperative of urgency; nothing of empathy for those forced to do their runs on that stretch. Nothing in the needless millions of man-hours lost daily in their construction-induced snarl is supposed to make a difference in their operational manual. Nigerians, after all, can take anything.

    Yes, it is a far cry from what obtained in Season 1.0. Then, Nigerians understood the meaning of shege. On a particular night, my colleague, Lawal Ogienagbon and I left our Matori Lagos office at 10 pm only to arrive at our Arepo home which is some 30 minutes’ drive away the next day at 8.15 am! There was a particular story of a medic said to have given up the ghost right on the wheel in the impossible traffic.  I know a family that sold their beautiful home when things became unbearable to relocate to a ‘saner’ part of Lagos.

    I must state that things are much better now.  That is if you consider the in-bound traffic taking some 30 odd minutes for a trip that would ordinarily take a maximum of five minutes as less-bad. However, I must also say that the out-bound segment is much worse. The other week, it took me and another colleague, Kelvin  Osa – Okunbor, nearly two hours to make the distance. While I thought that hell had returned at some point that night, his worry was that the company, at their current pace, will probably extend till sometimes around the middle of next year to complete! He couldn’t figure out a worse nightmare.

    Yes, things are better; but then it is not necessarily because the company has done anything to improve on its management of the work; as for those charged with the duty of oversight, theirs have been simply disaster! Whatever noticeable improvements have been recorded are only because the scope of the job is smaller. Julius Berger has done nothing to improve on its service standards any more than those in oversight over them have raised their game.

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    Which is Nigerians must wonder: what it is in those joints on a stretch that is barely four kilometres long on either side to qualify it for a rocket science that must cost the treasury – aside the billions of naira in contract sums – the indeterminable man-hours, in addition to incalculable public health issues?

    I would imagine that a huge chunk of the contractual costs charged on our treasury by an entity like Julius Berger would cover to the minutest detail, the value of the man-hours of skilled, semi-skilled and unskilled labour deployed – added to the material costs and possible time overruns!  Do those in charge of our public works ever factor in the economics of time and such other vital details in the agreed programme with the contractors?

    Now that the yuletide season is barely two months away, Nigerians obviously have a lot to worry about. I recall a respected senior colleague, Jide Oluwajuyitan once quoting Clement Oladele, a Federal Road Safety Corps (FRSC)’s sector commander, as saying that the road caters for “no fewer than 16 million passengers during the festive period”; and that some 1.8 million vehicles, 72% of which are commercial vehicles, actually ply the road between December and January every year. That was a few years back. With petrol prices hitting the roofs since, projections, although uncertain at this time, leaves little to imagination. High petrol prices or not; it seems unlikely that Nigerians will give up their yuletide reunions. That is simply saying it as it is!

    As to what might happen in a short while, I can hazard a guess: the company will by mid-next month offer to remove those concrete barriers, the very source of the agony, only for the nightmare to return in full force when the yuletide season is over.

    The above, no doubt, is a familiar story. Far from being an isolated one, it is the archetypal Nigerians story of the gross mismanagement of public trust by regulators and service providers alike. They come in various shades and colours.

    How about, for instance, the so-called electricity Distribution Companies (Discos) and their perfect con-act of reaping where they have not sown; who after procuring your billing meters at a premium turns round to tell you years later, that the still-functioning device has not only been phased out, but that you need to cough out another humongous sum for replacement or risk being slapped with an outrageously extortionate estimated billing regime?

    Here is my appeal to Julius Berger; it is time  to get the job over and done with. While to you might belong the near-absolute control of time and space, not so for the long-suffering Nigerians currently forced to endure the agony of your inscrutable tardiness, if not arrogance. To put it nicely, the current pace of fixing the joints is painfully slow, unacceptable. 

    And if I may ask: what would it take the company to put more men and material to work if only to lessen the pain of the travellers on that corridor?