Does COP26 concern Nigeria and Nigerians? Yes. It concerns your children and grandchildren more than you as the decisions at COP26 will mean destruction or deliverance tomorrow- i.e. 50-75 years and make the world a liveable or an unliveable planet. Already we see the wild variations in climate events from massive floods to droughts, raging fires to earthquakes to hurricanes with threats of entire countries falling below the waterline. These changes occur more frequently and erratically each year.

In 1992 there was an Earth Summit and subsequently every year there has been a Conference of the Parties concerned, COP. The ongoing COP in Glasgow is the 26th Conference. Hence COP26-Glasgow. The world is heating. Imagine the world as two standing fridges, one on top of the other but the lower one upside-down -the earth. On full power the freezer remains frozen and below it gets less and less cold to the least cold lower section where vegetables are kept. That would be the junction with the other fridge. The world is like that, frozen in both the Arctic and Antarctic and progressively warming up towards the warm Equator. We all know what happens to the freezer in a prolonged power failure. The freezer section heats up and the ice melts, flooding the lower sections where the fruit is kept. The earth is suffering similarly. Just substitute the power failure with ‘excess of greenhouse gases’ mainly carbondioxide, methane and water vapour. Sources of these gases include the oil, coal and natural gas industries. Every Nigerian knows the cost and burden of the petroleum industry on communities in the Niger Delta and Ogoniland, where Kenule Saro-Wiwa championed the nonviolent fight against massive pollution by Shell and paid the supreme price under Abacha with eight other heroes of the environment, the Ogoni Nine, being criminally executed on 10-11-1995.

Who has not seen the oil-slimy earth dead to vegetation, water dead to fish and vegetation dead to forests from oil spills -4,919 in six years-  and transportation and gas flares of natural gas, destroying health – mental and physical, lives, property and poisoning the air and surroundings even though annually Nigeria shouts gas-flaring bans! Natural gas is mainly methane, is shipped as LNG, Liquefied Natural Gas. For cooking we use Liquefied Petroleum Gas, LPG, propane.

Read Also: COP26: Buhari pledges net zero emissions by 2060

The fridges are overheating and must be cooled. Climate change reversal is essential to holding temperature rise to a level of 1.5oC. ‘Net Zero’ carbon emissions by 2050 for the world is the demand of the science of global warming. We await industry and politics to agree and act. Already we have in the pipeline fossil free steel and fossil free transport services and fossil free energy sources with green and renewables. They need ramping up.

Nigeria’s role: Sadly, our country depends on oil, a fossil fuel source, to feed almost everything especially corruption. Efforts to diversify have widened the income base but not nearly enough or fast enough. Growth in Nollywood, the music/fashion and entertainment world, diaspora remittances, food and beverage industry and an IT industry are good. However, the manufacturing industrial growth is almost absent. The only much-touted major industrial project is the Dangote Refinery -somewhat of a paradox at this time of climate crisis when the world is being urged to withdraw from oil and its products ASAP. Maybe Nigeria plans to be the recipient of millions of cheap old petrol and diesel vehicles from a world of electric vehicles by 2030.

The current increase in price of oil to $75-80 a barrel is a welcome lifeline which Nigeria is badly in need of because it haemorrhages so much to corruption draining its foreign reserves and milking the local economy and reducing confidence in the business and governance systems. These problems manifest in poor infrastructure, rubbish roads and power, poor customs and an unpleasant working environment. These have hobbled and paralysed our ports and borders, making them corruption ridden that has thwarted the growth plans of many corporate citizens. They have led to ‘Industrial Flight’ to neighbouring countries, particularly Ghana even for education, a non-machinery business. Today’s oil offers government greater revenues to meet its self-inflicted huge debt profile and also may increase the foreign reserves towards the magical $50b. Because of this and being a victim country of first world development strategies, Nigeria is unlikely to reject the added income in favour of climate change action to reduce fossil fuel use. Nigerians pray that for once this increase in oil revenues will be used for real development and not for the destruction of Nigeria. Perhaps Nigeria is greedily waiting to ‘chop’ some of the COP26 potential $100b for climate change action, supposedly to decrease its dependence on fossil fuels and move to renewables. Fortunately, Nigeria has a few token solar projects, but no serious nationwide solarisation. Nigeria’s climate change reversal need ramping up.

COP-26 Decisions today = Destruction or Deliverance tomorrow. Beyond politics, we must defend a world, and a Nigeria to be handed to our children to whom they belong as their inheritance not from us but from God which we have nearly completely ruined-without the help of Shell etc. YOU in homes, schools and businesses, streets and communities, must urgently manage better waste and energy with 5Rs = Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Renew and Rethink waste and water use. ACT OR CLIMATE POLLUTION WILL KILL US ALL!

 

INEC IS NOT A SECURITY SERVICE: INEC has no security responsibility, only security fears, like the rest of us. Please note that INEC is not responsible for any security anywhere. INEC must never be held responsible for security situations, good, bad, ugly or murderous or riotous, in the electoral process. The security of every election from start to finish and environmental security of collation centres, neighbours and personnel is purely government’s job. Period! INEC does not send thugs to burn its own buildings or destroy voting material and card readers or maim or kill its INEC staff or the public. It is only the political parties which do so and they hardly ever get to court or face punishment. The sooner we suspend, ban, fine and jail political individuals and parties under whose protection and on whose behalf common criminals perpetrate such anti-democracy outrages, the sooner will we make our elections more sanitary and secure, allowing millions more to participate. Transgressors must not gain from their criminal theft of the election process. Political crime is crime against our future. We are victims. It is not soft crime or forgivable crime. Only this installs election sanity.

STOP EXAMINER MALPRACTICE: What measures ensure Nigerian students taking public exams are fairly marked and get results dictated by their performance? We know of, and many have experienced, tertiary institution lecturers and sex/money-for-marks and lowering marks for ‘bad-belle’ and ‘because I have the power’. But what is the situation at secondary school exams and even JAMB? Are result mistakes being made and ignored with students being failed falsely? How many students annually face wrongly downgraded marked scripts without their knowledge? What is the fate of the examiners who do not live up to the teachers code of fairness and honesty but instead disappoint innocent children at their mercy by criminally marking down and underscoring exam scripts? Are there checks and balances to identify this peculiar malpractice among examiners and prevent it from happening? Is there a group within examining bodies like JAMB and WAEC which remarks randomly chosen scripts as quality control? Many examiners are dedicated and thorough. Some are not. Every wrongly marked script is a disaster for the affected student and extra cost for the parents for the resit exam. The student will face immediate disaster, stress, lose time and focus and sometimes be forced to change direction in career with lower expectations and job prospects. The marked-down student goes through the emotional trauma and depression of being publicly known as an exam failure, lose the respect of siblings, family and friends.

Read Also: Niger legislators query NECO, WAEC fees charged by private schools

So, the examiners carry a heavy burden of responsibility to be fair and honest as the future of each student is 100% at stake. WAEC and other examination bodies must not wait for requests for remarking before instituting actionable examiners fraud detection plans for monitoring examiners. Exam body Annual Report must include a section on ‘Examiners Malpractice’ and ‘Results of Remarking Scripts’. It is no longer enough to just boast about students caught cheating. How many examiners are caught cheating the students? Remarking scripts and finding their score change by factors of up to 30+ marks demonstrate malicious and fraudulently criminal alteration of documents, and prosecutable offences. Such large changes are not accidents or stress mistakes or technical differences in examination style and preference manifest as finding 2-5 marks difference on remarking. This indicates a non-malicious difference of exam strategy and opinion. The high difference guilty examiners should be removed from the examiners list and actively prosecuted for use of excessive mental forces, wilful damage to the property of students and the examining body with intent to cause mental and financial harm to innocent youth some of whom may find themselves so mentally upset as to attempt and sadly even succeed at committing suicide. Only prosecution will deter others from following that evil path and be a warning to potential perpetrators. On being found guilty, there should be a fine to be paid to the candidate to reimburse the student for needlessly re-examination fees and extra-classes fees and inconvenience. If there is an exam body/examiner agreement, the examiners have to sign, it should be updated recognising that some examiners are cheats themselves.

Instead of actually reading the script and marking it, maybe because of tiredness from traveling or a late-night party or family or social commitments, the examiner may just glance at the pages and write down some invented or ‘best guesstimated’ marks. This is usually because the guilty examiner knows no one will remark the script afterwards. An examination body policy with compulsory random remarking of one in every 20 sample scripts already examined by each examiner with the remarked scripts randomly chosen by computer may frighten the examiners to do what they are paid to do – i.e. be fair and honest and just to the innocent young student who has paid fully to be examined at that examination by a neutral judge, not a negative or cheating examiner judge. Stop examiner-caused fraudulent results. Yes, we hear and expect that fraudulent results are excessively high. However, we must recognise and search out and red flag fraudulent results which are excessively low. Parents, it is not enough to accuse students of doing poorly and waving their result slip in their faces. Examination bodies must look at poor performance of good candidates and exclude CRIMINAL EXAMINERS MALPRACTICE.

As Nigeria@61 in mid-October, celebrates the 61st year, ask if Nigeria PLC on sale to the highest political bidders?

Our democratic structure, NASS, lacking altruism, refuses to cut by 75%, its Salaries and Perks, SAPping Nigeria dry or restructure Nigeria and stood against comprehensive electronic voting, diaspora and local. These are vicious stabs in the poorly beating heart of a democracy still on life-support.

Hurray, NASS has caved to public outcry and reversed its selfish ‘Ban on electronic vote transmission’. This 21st century has strange anti-democracy backlashes ‘against modernisation and innovation’ but allowing ‘anti-education’ terrorists to use ‘modernised and innovative’ military transport and weaponry. NASS must learn that ‘Electronic Voting’ is now Course 1-0-1 to legitimise democratic governance. Also, NASS instead of boldly securing for the citizenry a befitting National Library, seeks to selfishly refurbish its own nearly ‘abandoned’ NASS library as a copycat of the American National Library of Congress. The best ideas are often used in Nigeria to repeatedly misappropriate funds. Even book business is dragged into corruption.

NASS, please ensure that Nigeria’s public National Library is befitting’ before a ‘befitting’ NASS library. If NASS members really read and value books, they would never have taken till 2021 to ‘discover’ the NASS library deficit. Has any NASS official bemoaned the Nationwide Library Book Deficiency of 50-300m for 10-15m students at 5-20 library books each?

It was shocking  to all that ‘electronic voting’ in Nigeria was not a single act but was Machiavelli-like secretly split into ‘actual electronic voting’ and ET ‘Electronic Transmission of vote results’ – ‘contract-splitting’. Such evil comes from malignant midnight brainstorming in unscrupulous political and technocratic circles previously notorious for ‘home grown’ political manipulations perpetuating a disruptive political agenda.

Sadly, nasty political gambles have spanned mathematical creations like 12  2/3 of states, ‘annulments’, third term magic, reversible/deniable zoning, money under the hat or in the belly of an agbada or babanriga, votes in a phantom pregnancy or a pot belly for ever-reoccurring ‘stuffed ballot boxes ’, ‘snatched ballot box’,  the criminal falsification and fraudulent replacement of ‘voter results’ during transportation from polling booth to the collation centre. Add the debatable value of contract-splitting  specifically for corruption like Contract 1 for clearing of gutter and the never executed but awarded Contract 2 for clearing of the rubbish dumped by the cleared gutter rubbish. The rubbish then falls back into the gutter with zero gain and financial cost. Add non-corrupt contract splitting ‘supposedly’ to speed up the job like the two contractors on the 120km Lagos-Ibadan Road and, shame on an obstructive NASS which diverted N120b budgeted ‘job-finishing funds’ to NASS constituency projects’ not finished to date after 8+ years later. Add snakes or other creatures supposedly found in the transformer and office safe chopping all the money. As you have worked to improve the country, some Fellow Nigerians sat around actual tables discussing ways to implement these crimes against Nigeria, in thousands of places and many times over, nationwide in honour of the elusive true Federal Character! The court martials surrounding the Fayose Ekiti Elections confirm such election disruption meetings. Wherever good men and women sit to save and serve Nigeria best, others sit with self-service and destruction of the nation and the electoral process as goal.

Read Also: Firm challenges cooperatives societies on benefits of E-voting

Thankfully INEC chairman, Professor Mahmood Yakubu  is nobody’s ‘yes man’ and refused to be silenced just because NASS had spoken. He risked being humiliated or sacked or even having false accusations of fraud and threats. He immediately protested, also a credit to the INEC commissioners, on behalf of voters, against electoral corruption-motivated misinformation. Others joined, including media, CSOs and international organisations assisting to drag Nigeria into modern electoral processes.

Well, congratulations to Professor Yakubu and all others; NASS has approved Electronic Voting and Electronic Results Transmission. This will speed up and help sanitise the process. It removes travel time with extra security challenges to staff and theft or alteration between polling booth and collation centre, the headquarters, speeding up the electoral process in 70-80% of the country. If only Nigeria’s courts were fully computerised and backed up.

The next battle is for ‘Diaspora Voting’. Nigerians get $17-24b annually from Nigerian remittances. Diaspora Nigerians want to vote and would have a huge election impact. Presumably that is the fear of the anti-diaspora voting lobby which would lose power.

However, the battle for free and fair elections cannot be won if NASS still approves excessive ceilings for candidate spending – president N2b, governor N1b and senator N500m with background 70% Nigerian poverty. No politician or political party is ‘humanitarian’. Money nearing these figures must be raised and spent by each candidate, cumulatively dwarfing budgets for states and many federal ministries. All this money must be recouped, by every single politician in and out of office as 10-70% first line deductions, during political office usually from nearly phantom contracts, fictitious contracts feeding insatiable -political party structures, supporters, as political favours for election investors or for planning a ‘next  election war chest’ of maybe N100b’.

How can a governor perform with such deductions from the budget? Our winner-takes-all politics creates losers who pester same-party state governors who cut infrastructure, pensions and salaries of workers to ‘help’ pay up such ‘political debt’. The people lose perpetually. Knowing us, the midnight manipulators may manipulate even this NASS assent into malignant manifestation – like the rubbishing of Federal Character. A luta continua. Victoria non–acerta.

As we continue to bask in the sunshine month of October, celebrating our 61st year as an independent country we must ask if we have served Nigeria well considering all the natural resources it has provided at our fingertips?

Nigeria PLC needs a Board Meeting and a Poll of the people, on the way forward. It should vote on the need to cut back on its cost of governance and the national and state assemblies. For years we have demanded a cancellation of one of the houses of NASS especially the senate. It is truly a dangerously consumptive and needless luxury for the NASS members which we, the company members and shareholders, cannot afford especially at this time of falling value of life and currency nearing N600:$1, as any Nigerian CEO will tell you. Nigeria PLC cannot afford the salaries and perks, SAP, self-allocated far in excess of any political group pay anywhere, even in the prosperous developed countries. SAPs must be cut by 75% and/or the political class placed on the upper levels of an elongated Civil Service Salary Scale-Level 17,18, 19 20, 21, 22.

But more importantly, there requires to be a massive campaign against corruption with full expose of its consequences in the past, present and future for Nigeria PLC’s survival as a company. No country in the world can prosper and grow with more than 10% corruption. However here Nigeria PLC survives, defying the odds, with 30,40,50,60,70, 80, 100% and more corruption. We are a country on life support with many already left out as corpses and victims of violence. Oxygen supplies are running dangerously low and anyone knows what oxygen is to survival from Covid. Nigeria may have survived Covid, so far, but it is definitely succumbing to the big C so common in everything we do- CORRUPTION. CORRUPTION IS NOT INSTITUTIONAL, it is MAN-MADE. The determination of corruption percentages to be inflated and added into contracts or removed on receipt of contract fees, the passage of envelopes and bank funds, the removal of funds, the diversion of materials, the creation of fake contracts and especially witchcraft phantom but very expensive workshops are all man and woman made.

How do we get the individuals in institutions to imbibe the sense of honesty still to be found in the likes of Charity Bassey and Josephine Agwu who returned money found and also late Professor Dora Akunyili who returned left over ESTACODE even as we have lost her husband to murderous highway terrorists, and those unsung honest citizens of whom Professor Is-haq Oloyede is a current leading light.

Read Also: EFCC: Asset declaration for bank executives not witch-hunt

Individuals destroy every good thing in Nigeria. EFCC has identified N157,000,000,000 Pension Fund, approximately N1000/Nigerian, fraud after a N84,000,000,000+ fraud, N500/Nigerians in the NSITF-founded to provide poverty alleviation measures to members. All funds stolen by individuals, Fellow Nigerians put in the place of trust. They did not steal only our money but also stole and destroyed the present and future comfort of tens of thousands of family members. They stole a large bit of the Nigerian fabric and helped destroy the naira’s value. Both were compulsory deductions from staff and offices. Spectacularly immorally, citizens and companies would be jailed for not making the payments into fraud-ridden organisations. How stupid! What system allows such cash asset stripping on such a scale and still expects a proper outcome, without adequate checks and balances, to nip such nefarious activities from onset? Prevention is better than cure! In this age of forensic auditing and massive angry unemployment, how is it possible that such huge amounts of money cannot be stopped before they are stolen? What happened to continuous monitoring? Why are the funds so easy to steal?

But we have repeated this process so many times that it appears ‘a normal expected occurrence’ and not an aberration. Where were EFCC and the auditors community and the boastful oversight NASS when the first N1m, 10, 100, 200, 500, 1000m was stolen? No whistle blowers? Where were the gatekeepers? Every month Nigerian companies are forced ‘mumu’ to pay the NSITF even after the mind-bending theft of N84+b. Will more theft take place?

Why do our best systems fail? Experience teaches us to expect fraud everywhere because that is what has been revealed a thousand times! In the light of history, any government would be foolish not to anticipate and counter a huge fraudulent backlash from ‘trusted’ civil servants, contractors and vendors. Yet, we wait for many years, stupidly laughing at the ongoing huge damage, initiating belated fire brigade mechanisms aimed at ‘discovering’ the fraud. Look at JAMB, scamming youth of N5-7b every year for many years, many people in education probably ate their money, and nobody did anything.

At 61, we are the third most insecure in the world. We are at the wrong end of indices worldwide. How can people steal N157b from pension funds, depriving tens of Nigerian thousands of families of a lifeline and forcing many youth into depression, suicide and criminality and their parents into depression, suicide and death from derivation of funds for housing, health and sustenance and for further studies and work-life support of children?

NARD has called off its strike for 6-8 weeks. Mr Government, are these strikes necessary? Yes, because government neglects its duty. NUPENG strike was narrowly averted but the price of diesel went up demonstrating immorality of proxy marketers.

By Tony Marinho

Nigeria deserves that just as doctors treat patients, wealthy legitimate and ‘repentant billionaires’ join forces to lend, give or anonymously donate to the Foreign Reserves of Nigeria in a bid to achieve a background stability magic figure of $100b or at least $50b Foreign Reserves cushion. Nigeria and the naira deserve to live after its services in petroleum and other resources to make some enormously wealthy while paradoxically so many millions wallowing in infrastructural and social poverty. This is manifest by associated hunger, loss of immediate and future status, loss of power of income growth and a tsunami of growing anger and insecurity sweeping across our fear-torn and beleaguered country.

We face so many preventable threats. Most of these threats would never have occurred if only those who boastfully empowered themselves politically and even militarily over 60 years to protect and lead, not mislead the growing country had done so with Truth, Honesty and Faith and Justice and Equity -words flippantly used by politicians but almost never practiced by them. The results of their collective leadership failure at federal, state, LGA and ward levels are manifest in the millions who have left the country some drowning and dying by other means. Add the millions in IDP camps, driven from their ancestral lands and homes. Add the millions of youths facing an uncertain present and future employment prospects. Add the millions of living and dead workers and pensioners and their dependents, also dead or alive, denied or short-changed of their salaries and pensions as and when due, disrupting family life in the nuclear and extended families.

The naira’s 1980-2021 40-year precipitous fall – huge devaluation [$1,000=N546 in 1980, $1=N546 in 2021] especially on the ever-greedy black market continues to turn our hard-earned money into cheaper than a single sheet of toilet paper. Who are behind the black market in Nigeria? Why is the rate so poor, which board of governors or corner forex trader, which company head wakes up every morning and says ‘This will be the exchange rate today’ and we all sheepishly follow to throw our hard-earned naira at them and are actually grateful for the few dollars we get?

Why is the demand on the black market so high? Can that demand be reduced by giving Nigerians across the counter forex for those no-paperwork-items, petty cash items like family clothes and accessories, medical journals and gift items for friends and family? Is that wrong? So why can I not go to my bank and buy a few dollars or pounds to send for presents at Christmas or for a birthday?

When I was young, we went to any post office to buy foreign exchange Postal Orders. We soon spoilt that opportunity and required Travellers’ Cheques for the same purpose and an airline ticket to get foreign exchange unless we were on ESTACODE, a luxury not extended very far down the food chain. On the other side of the Foreign Exchange problem are the political and other classes, especially bankers whose collective decisions have serially abused and killed the foreign exchange opportunities which in turn have now made rubbish of the value of our currency. They are directly responsible in devaluing for 40 years, the work of our hands and the worth of our lives. Shameful that they refuse responsibility for our hellish life today.

Nigerian Economic and Social History Research will judge the abuse of our democracy – the poisonous ‘Exclusive List’ harshly used for its power of destruction, instead of development. The dreaded and deadly ‘Exclusive List’ hindered the growth of Nigeria and is applied like a negative economic war weapon to reduce the benefit to others. Practiced today, the Exclusive List’ is a veto power against the development of Nigeria as a unit and many of the individual constituent parts. The Exclusive List has become a noose around the neck of Nigeria used to empower the few while pauperising many.

Nigeria should distribute VAT differently, better and more in favour of those states paying VAT. We must cut the Exclusive List misused power to precipitate more underdevelopment of everywhere but liberalise the ‘Concurrent List’ with devolving powers to the periphery.

Is it not frightening that courts prosecute all manner of criminals who have mostly been forced into crime because the real criminals are never prosecuted because they remain in power? Even judges who deliver deliberate or accidental misjudgments go free even when judgements are reversed

Wearing any uniform, police, literary, paramilitary and even plain clothes detective is an increasing dangerous. We mut respect the good among them.

Nigeria needs: A 75% reduction in governance costs by cutting political ‘Salaries And Perks’, SAPing us dry. States should pay for their representatives sent to National Assembly. We require a ‘Referendum Clause’. We require a single house preferably House of Representatives and cancellation of most of immunity clause. We require E-voting for diaspora and local citizens alike. We require decentralisation of the federal system with more powerful states and a weaker centre with marked move from the Exclusive List reserved for the Federal Government to the Concurrent List with more funds for states. Nigeria needs ‘Justice’ and Truth in fact, not word alone. The greedy must share Nigeria with all Nigerians, just like in that Nigeran Pledge written by Felicia Adebola they force children to swear to but refuse themselves— to be ‘Faithful, Loyal and Honest’.

Paying salaries and pensions is morally responsible and good entrepreneurial support strategy.

Authorities in Nigeria quickly threaten ‘No work, No Pay’. What is pay? It is the in-controvertible right of a worker to pre-agreed cash for work and it is paid by agreement on a daily, weekly or monthly or other contractually agreed time and the responsibility is passed to the next government in case of any wage lapses. But why should there be workers wage lapses in the first place? Do your governments and ultimately Governors have a bad track record of ‘No Pay for Correct Work’? – be it salaries for work recently done or for past work like pensions. Most political figures want to accumulate money as ‘Salaries And Perks ‘-SAP and ‘Life Perks and Pensions’ and also for cronies, political hangers-on, ‘The Party Machinery’ and ‘Election/Re-election War Chests’. However, they deprive workers of salaries and pensions for 3 months to 10+yrs. Calculate your losses: emotional, medical, social, educational, business start-ups and situational  if you were denied a pension for 10 years!

Authorities must take responsibility, as actions have an earthquake effect immediately but also may make the future of millions of families unliveable. Certainly, exclude ghost and dead workers but pay the real living ones promptly. One person’s salary is like an octopus with many tentacles or a centipede with 100 legs or a flower with many petals and keeps many alive. Non-payment of salary in a family’s monthly lifecycle causes much of the population unrest. It is the oil to fuel the family-life to success. A salary’s absence is petrol to burn down the family structure and the community beyond.  Youth  become delinquent at home and lawless.

Everything revolves around that salary. Salaries provide essentials -food, water, shelter, power, security, health, transportation and education and seed money for businesses even to extended family. Each impacts the neighbourhood entrepreneurial business through supporting market vendors, lesson teachers, transporters, distant farmers, tanker drivers, clothes makers etcetera -all important salary beneficiaries.

Similarly, a pension may fund start-up business for children/grandchildren or guarantee further education. With no salary or pension there is breakdown in child-parent respect destroying the family hierarchical structure. Bitter youth deprived of lesson teachers and educational opportunity, fall below targeted earning power and life-expectation, have grudges and no respect for non-providing parents and grandparents who only deliver words of wisdom. Remember, even the poorest grandparent has a coin, currency note, sweet or biscuit for visiting grandchildren.

Future social and political and economic scientists, researching causes of our nation’s failings, will eventually trace the bitter youth backlash at the tail-end of the SARS Campaign and the seething rage pervading young society today, to a systemic government’s sometime institutionalised failure to pay-as-and-when-due salary and pension to their parents and -even the police! The salary and pension must be seen by governments, not as ‘Hurray, the Governor has paid salaries or pensions’ or political favours but actual essential legally binding, obligatory tools or weapons in the war against poverty of mind and body, required to prevent unrest and troubling socio-political turbulence.

No governor or government official should sleep knowing that somewhere a single worker has not been paid because that person, the dependent family and owed vendors are not sleeping and the children are deprived of a better education.  Ditto the pension is used by one retiree, but sometimes for an entire village of dependents.

Nigerian contracts are often found to be quagmires of corruption. However, government debts for bona fide contracts, especially transferred from previous governments has also created huge family upheaval and economic disastrous losses for disengaged workers.

Each unpaid  salary or pension seems only one person to a politician, a drop collectively amounting to a tsunami of potential good economic progress. No salary and pension scenario amount to a tsunami of bad faith, poor performance and poor achievement of a generation of youth denied their education and business goals because their parents and grandparents were broke. The mathematical equation for a nation’s failure will show that past wage payment failures are a big part of the national social failure puzzle.

The world will die if climate change measures are not quickly taken but Nigeria spends $1b+ on previously failed Turn Around Maintenance on 40yr old refineries. Nigerian Governors now use diesel powered street corner generators to provide welcome electricity while scavenger contractors rip up past government’s climate friendly solar lighting systems merely in need of bulbs, batteries and solar panel cleaning. Similarly, Nigeria may face serious threats if Governments, Governors and influential politicians do not face the task of promptly paying not just themselves, who they always manage to pay first but their armies of employees and therefore indirectly millions of dependents and beneficiary industries.

Do you hear of developed countries not paying salaries equitable to their currency value?  No one flees those countries to come to Nigeria. Ask why so many thousands of Africans are fleeing,  risking death by drowning or thirst or murder for possessions or body parts for organ transplant, kidnapping and slavery and prostitution. Our governments should be ashamed that leaving the country is now a strategic survival strategy for rich and poor alike. This began for economic and social reasons  occurred long before the terrorist wars of today.  Pay Salaries and Pensions please! Any delay fuels the smouldering flames of current social upheaval!

Nobody asks why ‘Government Owing for Work Done and Breach of Contract’ are not crimes?

Resident Doctors Strike ‘No Pay, No Work, Better Working Facilities and Conditions’ yet Nigeria spends over $1b on ancient refineries failing treatment of ‘Turn Around Maintenance’, even as earth overheats from fossil fuels. Wrong strategy!

Medicine is about caring for the sick. I was a House Officer in Lagos State during the NMA strike in 1975 when doctors were thrown out of quarters and jobs. Doctors are not the health services problem. They are government’ whipping boy. In late 60s-early 70s, celebrated neurosurgeon Prof E Latunde Odeku lamented falling UCH standards.

Doctors have delivered humanitarian service in mostly inadequate facilities with rubbish toilets, mimicking abysmal war conditions. But there was no war. I have operated with torchlight, without glove, delivered women in agony because someone withdrew pethilorphan narcotic and watched cancer patients die because someone arbitrarily increased the radiation isotopes like Caesium tax from N200,00 to N2,000,000, and watched Nigerians being amputated or die from the preventable Okada Epidemic, mostly in disgraceful conditions breaching medical codes.

Most doctors pay poor patient bills to help. Meanwhile politicians, especially NASS, wallow in disgusting seven-star luxury, generators, jeeps and avaricious 1st world SAPs -Salaries and Perks and wrongly use our money for self-glorifying ‘Medical Outreach Programmes!

What is 419?

I wrote in 1989 – ‘DOCTORS LOVE THEIR COUNTRY’. Sketch newspaper

‘’To clarify points raised in Daily Sketch, November 28, 1988.

Confrontation in Lagos State in 1975 by the NMA, confrontation with Gowon leading to ‘give in or get out’ order showed doctors were powerless, penniless, propertyless and pitiable in a society that overnight put money [power and milito-politicians welfare] above professionalism, probity and the people.

Government and media stigmatise such NMA fights as ‘selfish’, but item one is ‘Improved Health Services’ from which everyone benefits.

Remember ‘hospitals became mere consulting rooms and mortuaries. In 1985 NMA was proscribed. Our members were incarcerated [and ostracised] – elderly doctors and women – not just the ‘young radicals’.

No patients crying out for their release. NMA [merely] wanted 5% budget [for health and still a problem].

We live in escapism – lavish parties amidst abject poverty, (people eating out of dustbins), of N120,000 Peugeot 505s and N600 bicycles but N100 salaries and N6,000 air fares. The real world is out there. We need the hospital [but would rather fund absolutely valueless political lifestyles and foreign medical trips]. Money misspent and stolen.

As responsible adults, our duty is family, self and nation [in that order]. Professionals have done more [to keep Nigeria going] than many [questionably] given official honours. Doctors have fought, been injured [and died, attacked e.g., Dr Stella Adadevoh, others and NMA Covid Casualties] to improve health care. When an abandoned prophet is paid adequately abroad for the same service, people should not complain [as they encourage criminal malpractice short cuts in a defective medical system.]

The professional does not love Nigeria less but loves family more. [Medics are not mumu! When you die, the family is alone]. Nigeria is not a welfare state [except for retired governors, politicians and high civil servants]. The people get crumbs.

The system has squandered funds and driven workers to frustration or abroad and then accuses them of not being patriotic. [How patriotic is the political class?]

Today it is the doctor. Tomorrow, media men or politicians – then noise will stop about ‘selfish ends’. Dr. A.O. Marinho, Ibadan Sketch 1989’’.

The citizens are already dying and drowning in illegal migration, but no fat-salary politician asks why?

Little change since 1989. WHO HEALTH RANKING 2020/1 has Nigeria 189/191, Transparency International 149/183, and poor in SDGs. Amazingly Nigeria is ranked 4th in Covid-19 response. Redemption? More please! ‘Professional Standards’ are political casualties across all professions which have suffered because politicians take precedence. Historically medical school is difficult and sometimes hostile – getting and staying in, exams, finishing. Medical practice is difficult to progress in. Hierarchy is traditional, rigid and demeaning allowing ‘Junior’ as an identity. The public translate ‘junior’ to mean ‘know nothing’ when a ‘junior’ doctor actually knows and delivers a lot of professionalism to patients. Medicine is on-the-job-while-working-very-hard training.

We contaminate all good. Ongoing typically Nigerian PHD-Pull Him/Her Down’ tactics appear to be needless anti-doctor activities. Orchestrated objections to ‘Doctors’ even being called ‘Doctors’, rubbish salary scale adjustments and defunding a standard 120-hour-a-week house job appear as signs of ‘Chronic Anti-Doctor Disease’ perhaps even ‘Medical Jealousy’, machete cuts to Nigerian medical values. Many poor Nigerians become doctors, many sponsored by doctors. A non-paid house officer year may be politics but it is malicious slave labour and Machiavellian ‘Man’s Inhumanity to Man’ prosecutable before The World Court/ILO!

House jobs are coming. Editors, organise journalists to embed with new House officers for, not a day or week, but a year 24/7x52wks, including family visits if any. Do not judge what you know nothing about yet.

When the PHDs finish with doctors -who next?

Solution: Cut politician numbers and stupendous ‘Salaries And Perks, SAP, by 75%. If politics is claimed    to be ‘a profession’ then pay them like other professionals in Nigeria are paid, not a penny more, not a penny less. Time for all professionals to be heard or the professions, except politics, will become roads less travelled by our youth. Then who will treat our sick?

By Tony Marinho

 

 

COVID -19 deaths approaching 4,237,000 among 199,000,000 diagnosed cases and 3.65b vaccines, 4.1b vaccines given worldwide. Nigerian cases approaching 179,000 and 2,200 deaths with 3.4+m vaccine doses with 1.4m fully vaccinated.

Since 2019, in education, Oyo State advances from 26/36 position in education to 11th. Wow! A determined Governor Makinde’s government has through its Teaching Service Commission, TESCOM employed 5,000 of an ongoing planned 7,000 teachers and cancelled ‘PTA teachers’ employed by PTAs when government failed in the past. Governor has restored school running cost grants, is paying salaries and pensions to all including 20,000+ teachers and renovated schools and sports facilities as well as lighting Oyo State and doing roads etc. and other projects. Thank you. Kudos to Governor Seyi Makinde. Like Ogbemudia of the 70s, every governor can identify tomorrow’s great athletes by funding school ‘Sports Equipment Kits’ for track, field and indoor sports for students state-wide and competitions.

It seems terrible to discuss sport during nationwide insecurity but we must not repeat this woeful performance after the glorious road paved by past Nigerian Olympians. Our sportsmen and women deserve better planned support as it takes 2-3 Olympic cycles to discover, nurture and deliver each Olympic Gold Medallist.

In the Olympics, 86 nations won medals, 63 nations won gold medals. Nigeria won a silver from wrestler Blessing Oborodudu and bronze from Ese Brume in the long jump taking Nigeria to joint 74th position with Malaysia and Jordan. Kudos to them. Pity about Adegoke and Blessing Okagbare awaits tests on B sample.

Wanted: Funded Nigerian Multisport Paris Olympics-2024 Masterplan

Officials like to call us Giant of Africa etc. Note well that Jamaica [21st position] population 2.7m earned nine medals and Kenya [18th position] population 52m got 10 medals with both getting four gold. ‘Giant Population Without Progress’ is worthless noise. Nobody claps for your population. It just means you have unprotected sex a lot. Period. Nigeria has underperformed for its population of160m, not the bandied figure! Sixty years since independence, name one institution or area of proudly Nigerian true growth apart from remittances for our diaspora exported population.

Read Also: COVID-19 in Africa peaks with 6,400 deaths, says WHO

 

Wanted: A federal, state and LGA talent hunt and coaching plan for Paris Olympics 2024-2028.

Nigeria always sends more ‘jamboree officials’ than qualified athletes to the Olympics, even Covid Olympics was no different. Did Nigeria’s Olympic Committee do its homework? Why did major sponsor Puma withdraw $2.7m support? What was really behind the dismissal of 10 athletes? Athletes’ collective failure or administrative incompetence and greed or demand for kickback? Even Nigeria had not upwardly reviewed the prize money for medals until after the first medal was won by Brume. Shame.

Nigerian governments are typically late. This same government has been in power for six years and could have announced the Olympic 2024 strategic plan six years ago. Such prize money can help compensate for the athletes’ huge investment in time over many years, energy, specific high energy diets and vitamins, and cost of equipment, training and  travel and accommodation and entry fees for events, countrywide and internationally.

An Olympic medal costs each medal winner and every member who did not win the same – a lot of money and years in time. The journey of most of today’s Olympians started when they were young seeing someone who inspired them or in some cases they needed sport to escape from danger and took up sports in general and then one in particular depending on availability and opportunity.

Today Nigeria failed to participate on over 100 of the available sports showing how short-sighted the sports leadership at school and community level is and how deprived the citizenry is in sports facilities and opportunities. Schools and universities and Community Development Centres must please look at the Olympic sports list and note the sports and get local carpenters etc. involved and set them up immediately in your own old school or a school near your home or business or in a community centre. High jump with landing foam bed and measuring rod, long jump sand with board and measuring tape, handball and locally made goal posts, net ball and net and ditto for 80 other sports. We have a huge abandoned young population

Governments must activate programmes for secondary school talent hunt and coaching. Sports Day used to be the finale of a year-round preparation by students, not just with a few days running around. The records are on Google for anyone to judge any performance.

The Olympics brings out the best of mankind and reveals the worst attitude of government workers to sport. Governments and private sector which see sport as a weapon of nationhood, employment soft-power, diplomacy and  promotion provide sports networks to CTY, TTU,KTIS- Catch Them Young, Train Them Up, Keep Them In Shape.  Primarily for athletes, it is about self-achievement and flag-flying. Of course, any Olympian is primarily a champion at home and abroad after many years of gruelling, painful, sacrificial training and self-denials. Their sport becomes a consuming passion and they may succeed in the absence of government support. The world’s greatest runner, jumper, discus and shot put and javelin thrower, ball player, swimmer and kayaker may be in Nigeria today. The greatest writer and artist, runner or wrestler will never be discovered without opportunity or implements.

Sadly, during the Olympics, Nigerians are still dying from Cholera, 60 in Katsina in 2021 and youth corps members died on their way to serve Nigeria.