The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Osun: Aregbe to Oyetola

    After eight short years, the Osun governmental baton yesterday changed: from Rauf Aregbesola, the self-named Ogbeni, the simple gubernatorial man next door, with little or no frills.

    He hands over to Adegboyega Oyetola, his former chief of staff and another gentle soul, though with less boisterous public persona, than the Ogbeni governor, who patented his idea of “government unusual”.

    To the introspective, what would both gentlemen be thinking in their bed tonight — or would they be too excited to sleep?

    Aregbesola, after eight years in the saddle, has lost no opportunity to tell everyone he wanted to seize the time to rest.

    Though the jury is still out on the final place of his gubernatorial tenure in history, the fact is that he is leaving Osun with many legacies that the state never witnessed before his advent — and his aggressive infrastructural upscale and his unprecedented policy of social infrastructure and social safety net are prime proof .

    Yeah, many of his traducers talk of a “debt burden”, and many even indulge in the hyperbole that the debts would cripple future generations — no political crime, for hysterics and callous de-marketing come with the territory of democratic contestation.

    Still, Aregbesola would not be totally wrong if he permits himself the luxury, nay satisfaction, of a deep, sound sleep, thinking that despite all the odds, in a tough economic clime, he had managed to make a brilliant difference, and made some clear landmarks.

    Of course, he made his own mistakes, some of them unforgettable and unpardonable to the Osun opposition.  Still, he can nestle in the comfort that, give or take, he put in his very best, under very difficult circumstances.

    But as Aregbesola exits, Oyetola enters.  From now, all of the pressure, all of the insults, all of the heart-shattering rumours, all of the demonization, where Political Osun is in a class of its own, now stop on Oyetola’s table.

    Yes, the flip side is the gubernatorial lollies — for Nigeria is still one of those states in the world, where governors are still close to mini-gods, in terms of power, influence and patronage.

    But as everyone knows, these sweet nothings are nothing but the vanity of office.  They are extremely sweet while they last.  But the second you leave office, they vanish — fast, like dew, before the morning sun.

    At that moment, what you are left with are the legacies of your gubernatorial tour of duty.  God save you, if your report card is bare.  Straight, you get despatched into the dustbin of history.  But if you have a lot to point to, you cement your place in history.

    So, would new Governor Oyetola sleep at all tonight?  If he doesn’t, don’t blame him.

    He has at most, eight short years (if wins re-election) or even worse: four short years (if he doesn’t), to make a mark — and time, bloody time, is always flying, nay, zooming!

    The clock starts ticking from now!

     

  • Of Chinese hawks and Western crows

    By way of an entrée, an ancient wisdom posits that the sky is capacious enough for all the birds to fly in without any incidence of collision. They actually have in mind that the earth is so large to the extent that if we cannot be friends, we don’t have to be enemies.

    In other words, if ever we are assailed by differences of pathological magnitude, we could simply carve our separate paths and stay in our different lanes. The earth affords us humans that privilege as the sky, the birds.

    Or so our fathers imagined. But earth is earth and man is man. The sky is the massive unfathomable expanse above and birds are the winged, little organics planes coasting freely in it. Though our sages of yore must never be said to have erred, but the juxtaposition of these earthly and aerial elements may be a stretch.

    Well, let’s stretch it. While birds would rarely collide in the air; well unless there be carry-over libidinal aggro taken too far (or too high if you like), thereupon one bird may make to torpedo another mid-air.

    But it is not so for man. Hardball wagers that if the earth were a million times larger than it is, the British for instance would still have forded all the seas and brackish waters in between to seek out the spice isles of India. Marco Polo, the restless adventurer and merchant seafarer, wasn’t content sitting in his native Venice; he found the sea route to the Indies, navigating the wild oceans and cold seas.

    Columbus was restless until he found and conquered the Americas and part of Africa. Man, therefore, is a restless animal who is never content sitting quietly in his backyard no matter how commodious.

    Back to now and the issue of the day: why would anyone leave a place such as the confounding expanse of China, half of it uncharted and seek so voraciously, to ravage another continent? And why is Europe and North America so jittery at China’s rapacious incursion into Africa?

    The reason is simple. While Europe and America view Africa as a vicious conundrum and an irretrievable basket case; China seems to burst forth with a new paradigm: throw in enough money to create a bonded colony in perpetual peonage.

    The Euro-America colonial conglomerate seeing their perpetual tokenistic strategy in Africa in jeopardy is in a quandary. It can’t stop China shovelling billions of dollars into Africa so it resorts to ruinous propaganda…

    Hardball sees interesting new times ahead when the skies would truly be too little for the  birds…

     

     

  • Ill-prepared

    How did it happen? It is unbelievable that the November 18 Boko Haram  attack on troops at Metele village, Guzamala Local Government Area, Borno State, which claimed many lives, reportedly happened because the attackers disguised as friendly soldiers.

    An eyewitness account by a soldier who is said to have “escaped the attack by a whisker” sounds incredible: “We saw some people dressed in full military uniform who came into our camp, but we thought they were friendly forces. They went straight to the office of our commander and shortly after, there were gunshots in the office. We became confused, waiting for orders but it was too late. Boko Haram had already surrounded us.”

    The account continued: “They killed the commander with five other soldiers that were with him in the office. Before we knew it, there was heavy fire from Boko Haram from all sides of the camp with more fire at the entrance. One of our anti-bomb vehicles tried to charge through the barbwire but got hooked. It was a terrible fight. We couldn’t do much because their number and fire power were more than our own.”

    This picture shows that the army needs to get its act together. How were enemies able to penetrate the soldiers’ camp, and even surround the camp, so easily?

    This picture shows unacceptable unprofessionalism on the part of the troops.  This is not the way to fight against dangerous insurgents. It exposes the troops as ill-prepared.  The casualties were many, too many.

    It is disturbing that the federal government seems not to be winning the anti-terror war, but it wants the world to believe otherwise. A report said: “Boko Haram has sacked six military formations from that axis since September, each coming with heavy casualties on the side of the Nigerian troops.”

    Also: “Nigerian troops in Metele suffered a similar attack in September this year when about 18 Nigeria soldiers were killed while another 151 soldiers and six officers were declared missing in the same area in another devastating attack on 157 Battalion on October 8, 2018.”

    Clearly, the latest Boko Haram attack shows that the Islamic terrorist group is alive and well despite contrary claims by the country’s military authorities. Borno State has been vulnerable to Boko Haram attacks since the insurgency started in 2009, and there will always be a possibility the terrorists would strike again as long as they remain undefeated.  Less talk, more action.

  • Nigeria ricing

    By the lore of the streets, it is said that whatever doesn’t speak couldn’t be wiser than man. Taken one level off the streets, it actually means that an inanimate object is subject to the manipulation of man.

    Taken up one more notch yet, we are saying that no challenge is impossible for man to surmount; and indeed, anything man sets his mind to, it’s only a question of time before he gets result or solution as the case may be.

    Examples abound; mind-boggling ones even. How on earth did man conjecture to hoist that monstrous contraption the size of a sizeable event centre, called aeroplane into the air? And as if making it float is not magical enough, it is made to move faster than anything on land at about 1000 kilometres per hour! Seemingly crazy stuffs of human imagination made real and functional are indeed too many to recount.

    Therefore, how come Nigeria cannot seem to be able to cultivate rice, her major staple food, a chow she loves and relishes so much she cooks it in her own special, world-renowned way?

    The Agric Minister, Mr. Audu Ogbeh has said Nigeria spends about $5 million per day on rice imports from Asia. Multiplied by 265 days, that comes to an unspeakable sum of money to be shipped out to other countries just for rice.

    To think that rice derived from a wild grass (oriza sativa) which was domesticated more than 2500 B.C (that means before the coming of Christ). How come then more than 2000 years after Christ, Nigeria is still incapable of cultivating her own rice.

    Read also:Price for embrace

    Put more succinctly, roughly over 5000 years after man perfected rice cultivation, Nigeria, the most populous Black nation still imports the bulk of the rice she consumes. And how about this: the rice produced in the Far East is far cheaper than the one produced right here in our backyard.

    And this: according to Ricepedia, “African rice has been cultivated for 3500 years. Between 1500 to 800 BC, Oryza glaberrima (African specie) propagated from its original centre, the Niger River delta, and extended to Senegal.”

    So African rice may have been with us long before the biblical times. Yet we still import rice!

    Government is making spirited efforts to produce at home. Our Agric Minister is passionately patriotic about this to the point that he probably wishes he had a magic wand.

    Not long ago, he said we now produce so much rice that the Thai merchants faced bankruptcy. That tale was debunked. He said again that he had so much harvest he couldn’t get enough bags. His current moment of epiphany is his claim of a glut of local rice shattered by a US report that Nigeria imports more now than before.

    Arice oh compatriots!

     

     

     

  • The Brit, the cash, the blackmail

    Briton Priti Patel, former UK Secretary of State for International Development, is not sounding very pretty over Nigeria.

    For a Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation (NNPC) deal gone awry with a British firm, P&ID, Ms Patel has assumed accuser, judge and jury in her own case; and in her court, has sentenced Nigeria — an investment pariah no investor must touch.

    Verily, verily Hardball says to other Patel-like Brits: blood is indeed thicker than water!  And were it a play, or indeed any genre of writing more dramatic that a newspaper opinion piece, the Patel ranting and sweeping convictions would have been titled: “The Brit, the cash, and the blackmail”!

    Ms Patel fumes — no disinterested party, for the particular reason that she is a Brit, just as the firm, which cause she was pushing — over a 2010 botched deal between NNPC and P&ID, a 20-year contract to create a new natural gas development refinery.

    Because that deal went bad, Ms Patel scrambled to her word processor, and fired, for a British local newspaper, a judgment condemning Nigeria as an investment outcast — just because one deal went awry!

    Especially cheap was the magisterial way Ms. Patel wielded the so-called “international law” as some potent blackmail — some sword of Damocles that must (sharp-sharp, as they say in that famous Nigerian urban lingo) come swishing down to consume the object of her ire!

    Luckily, that mythical Greek sword never comes down.  But scrupulous fairness drives the fear that it evinces.  Nevertheless, that potent morality doesn’t cover Ms. Patel — for you can’t be involved in a case, and yet pass judgment in that same case.  If the famous British justice was that warped, no one would respect it today.

    Of course, the former British minister stacked her blackmail card, referencing some so-called Transparency International (TI) rating, claiming corruption had flared, under President Muhammadu Buhari.  Well, everyone is entitled to their democratic delusion. But right-thinking Nigerians know that claim is a fallacy.

    But even if that were true, when did Patel’s country start playing the active anti-corruption partner with Nigeria? The last time Hardball checked, a good chunk of Nigeria’s stolen money nestles in British vaults, powering their economy, willy-nilly.  If Ms Patel’s stand is on Nigeria is not hypocrisy, Hardball would be ready for new and extensive schooling on what is!

    Garba Shehu, a presidential spokesperson, has explained the state of the contract in dispute, suggesting it could have been some racket under the Goodluck Jonathan presidency in 2010, which needed some due diligence to clarify.  In any case, the matter is before a US court.  So, why the rush to condemn and malign, when a court is yet to give its verdict?

    But no prize for guessing right: it’s the sickening sense of entitlement, nay arrogance, that sparked British imperialism in the first instance.  You must pardon Ms Patel for thinking Nigeria is some British neo-imperialist enclave, that could be threatened and hectored and bullied into to parting with her scarce resources, because some Brit just thundered!

    Well again, Ms Patel is entitled to her democratic delusions!

  • An elephant story

    Elephants are in the news. Not many Nigerians know there are elephants in Nigeria. Well, there are. And the news is that they are causing havoc in Lagos and Ogun communities. Elephants from Omo Forest Reserve in Ogun State are said to be on a rampage in some communities.

    The Chairman of Active Hunters’ and Farmers’ Club at Epe, Alhaji Ajagunoba Aribada, was quoted as saying in a November 19 report: “We have been facing this situation for the past seven months. The elephants have destroyed all our banana, plantain and cassava farms. We can’t even reach the other parts of the farm because the nursing female elephants are aggressive. This has caused food scarcity in the community.”

    Corroborating this disturbing account, the village head of Oki Gbode Imobi, Baale Adeleke Olaitan, said: “Nobody can go to the farm for fear of being attacked. The elephants have eaten all the cassava crops and plantain on the farms. We want them out.”

    The elephant invasion has also affected fishing business in the community. “The elephants enter the river to drink and bathe and ruin all the fish traps,” said Ismaila Lekan. “My mother who is into fish business can no longer go about her business because of the fear of the elephants.”

    Why did the elephants move out of the reserve, described as “one of the last few elephant habitats in Nigeria”? Farming and quarry activities are to blame. The elephants forced to leave the reserve now roam at the Ogun-Lagos border, where Imobi – Itasin – Epe lagoon communities are located.

    The next question is: How were the elephants able to move out of the reserve?  If the elephants had a reason to leave the reserve, that shouldn’t mean they must have a way to leave. The elephants were able to leave the reserve because they could.

    If the reserve were properly managed, farming and quarry activities would not have been issues. Wildlife conservation is a serious issue. A report to mark World Elephant Day on August 12 said: “The Wildlife Conservation Society has outlined and advocated               the need to increase aerial surveillance in strongholds, train and deploy more rangers in the protected areas, supply new rangers with equipment, assist the authorities in tracking and shutting down trafficking networks, and grow our community development programmes to support local communities to co-exist with wildlife.”

    There are plans to create a wildlife sanctuary within Omo Forest Reserve.  The authorities should take action.

  • Pay us or leave us

    Hardball is stumped silly on this. There is no single English word to describe a sustained and confounding aberration is there? But it’s just a tiny four-letter word in a Nigerian language. That is the power of vernacular: original, organic and rich.

    Where are the academics? Where are the seminal works on the plight of the Black race perpetually yoked under confounding aberrations? Why is a man condemned to thinking in a native language but translating and verbalizing in foreign tongues?

    Of course what you are thinking is never exactly what you are saying or doing.

    It reminds of the looney in my village market square: I think something else but I do something else entirely; that is what is wrong with me, he would always recite. Thinking in Igbo, for instance, and speaking in English must a pose a peculiar challenge.

    Could this perchance explain why we behave how we do? Is this in any way related to the plight of the colonized world; are we living under sustained and confounding aberration, a condition that has no single word to describe it?

    If not, why is it that the life of an average Black man on the continent comes across as an aberration?

    For instance, how is it that a supposed country would exists for say, 50 years yet the citizens are not afforded clean piped water in their homes? Why is it that after 50 years of running a country, pupils still sit on bare, red-earth floor to study? Why is it that a country managed by humans cannot cultivate its already fertile land? It matters nothing that food production process had almost been perfected many decades ago, yet this man cannot manage to grow his own food.

    He has to ship in nigh everything from faraway lands. Everything he ought to ship out, he ships in. He lives in perpetual dependence, want and agony.

    This long excursion brings us back to the current imbroglio about wages for workers. Like every other problem of Nigeria, aka the Blackman, this is another perennial problem; another sustained and unending aberration. What is living wage for the people, how do we arrive at it, when do we review it. Seven years ago in 2011, it was the same raucous folly as we are embroiled in today. We are bound to return to it in another season. Our lives seem like one long foolish cycle.

    Would our so-called governors please pay us living wages or leave us alone? Whosoever cannot convert our fertile soil into a wealth of cocoa, palm oil, cotton, maize, groundnuts, sesame, livestock, etc., has no business governing us. Simple.

  • Of Chinese hawks and Western crows

    By way of an entrée, an ancient wisdom posits that the sky is capacious enough for all the birds to fly in without any incidence of collision. They actually have in mind that the earth is so large to the extent that if we cannot be friends, we don’t have to be enemies.

    In other words, if ever we are assailed by differences of pathological magnitude, we could simply carve our separate paths and stay in our different lanes. The earth affords us humans that privilege as the sky, the birds.

    Or so our fathers imagined. But earth is earth and man is man. The sky is the massive unfathomable expanse above and birds are the winged, little organics planes coasting freely in it. Though our sages of yore must never be said to have erred, but the juxtaposition of these earthly and aerial elements may be a stretch.

    Well, let’s stretch it. While birds would rarely collide in the air; well unless there be carry-over libidinal aggro taken too far (or too high if you like), thereupon one bird may make to torpedo another mid-air.

    But it is not so for man. Hardball wagers that if the earth were a million times larger than it is, the British for instance would still have forded all the seas and brackish waters in between to seek out the spice isles of India. Marco Polo, the restless adventurer and merchant seafarer, wasn’t content sitting in his native Venice; he found the sea route to the Indies, navigating the wild oceans and cold seas.

    Columbus was restless until he found and conquered the Americas and part of Africa. Man, therefore, is a restless animal who is never content sitting quietly in his backyard no matter how commodious.

    Back to now and the issue of the day: why would anyone leave a place such as the confounding expanse of China, half of it uncharted and seek so voraciously, to ravage another continent? And why is Europe and North America so jittery at China’s rapacious incursion into Africa?

    The reason is simple. While Europe and America view Africa as a vicious conundrum and an irretrievable basket case; China seems to burst forth with a new paradigm: throw in enough money to create a bonded colony in perpetual peonage.

    The Euro-America colonial conglomerate seeing their perpetual tokenistic strategy in Africa in jeopardy is in a quandary. It can’t stop China shovelling billions of dollars into Africa so it resorts to ruinous propaganda…

    Hardball sees interesting new times ahead when the skies would truly be too little for the  birds…

     

  • An abominable state

    Some days are utterly impossible. Muse could well have taken a trip to a distant land leaving those who live by the written word stranded. In this circumstance, you could pummel your grey matter an entire day and you may never find the spark you need to kick-start a piece; any piece for that matter.

    You may never be able to find a suitable theme in the first place; not to mention getting an inspired title or intro. When you are circumscribed by such wearisome mental lethargy; when Muse has elected to go AWOL, you literally gasp for air like fish out of water. And of course deadlines are exacting and unforgiving… tick, tock, tick, tock; the clock never pauses.

    At a time like this, you may be rescued by some compelling tale that touches. But you must consider yourself quite lucky to find one at the nick of time.

    Such was Hardball‘s predicament; but the story about the recent rounds of killings in Plateau State saved the day. The report of the state government committee on the resettlement of Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs) in the state turned out to be quite a tale. The report which was presented to Governor Simon Lalong of Plateau State early in the week is so grisly it is actually an abomination to humanity.

    The statistics are dire, for want of a more telling word. Here are some samples: about 1,801 were killed in the festival of gore. More than half this number injured; about 59,212 were displaced; 87 villages, farmlands were destroyed and 28 IDP camps sprung up like a black scourge, on the state. Five local government areas are afflicted by the conflict.

    But here is the clanger: the sacked villages, 87 of them have been annexed as grazing grounds by the herders. Hear it in the words of the committee chairman:

    “The committee also identified 87 villages and farmlands that were destroyed and, in most cases, annexed by herdsmen in the five local government areas.”

    It is abominable that a country that is not at war is growing misery camps as if they were green houses. But even more damnable is that government – both state and federal has no capacity to manage the camps. Yesterday a photo of children of the IDP camp of Jos was on the front page of many national dailies. A horde of miserable children of war, bowls in hand, queue for ration.

    In best of times and conditions, Nigerian children were vulnerable; now these ones can be said to be doomed – no proper food, shelter, schooling or health care. No hope of returning home soon… their land is currently occupied. Land of sorrow.

  • “Restructuring” — mean what you say

    A certain bard, at the Department of Mass Communication at the Univesity of Lagos, would always tell his students: “say what you mean and mean what you say”.  It was his own way of saying his young wards must cultivate the rigour of clear thinking, before hoping to master the Art of mass communication.

    Mean what you say and say what you mean just jumped into the fray — the cacophony over “restructuring”, the political vogue everyone mutters but hardly anyone can say for sure what it means.  But even with some recognizable meaning, can anyone wager it doesn’t mean different things to different people?

    President Muhammadu Buhari just muttered what is close to an SOS to the Nigerian Diaspora in France.  ”There are too many people talking about restructuring in Nigeria. Unfortunately, people are not asking them individually what they mean by restructuring.  What form do they want restructuring to take? — could Nigerians in France please help?

    In Lagos, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo repeated what he had always believed, and projected, from his days as Lagos attorney-general and commissioner for Justice: fiscal federalism and a doughtier defence of the right of states.

    PYO has been consistent in his views, since he fought those titanic legal battles against the Olusegun Obasanjo Presidency and won hands down in the courts.  That, to him, is “restructuring”; and “geographical restructuring”, to him, is a no-no.

    Even Olisa Agbakoba, SAN, a “restructuring” high advocate, is assailed by the noise.  ”I agree with him [Buhari] conceptually in the noise-making part,” he told The Nation.  ”There is so much noise about restructuring that even proponents of restructuring have forgotten about what it means.”  Is that so?  So, if gold rusts, what will iron do?  If proponents have forgotten, in the din of the moment, how would the fair weather “restructuring” friends fare, who are just in it for election time gravy of gullible votes?

    Still, Agbakoba sheds some light: “The issue is that Nigeria is a fundamentally sick and tired nation.  Personally, I don’t like the word restructure, because it frightens those who are against it … I’d rather use the word rebalancing”.  From “restructuring” to “rebalancing” — any evidence even that would won’t lead to noisier noise?

    Restructuring would appear, indeed, a concept whose time has come — and it has come a long way from a near-exclusive South West campaign, to having adherents (real or genuine) from almost every part of the country.

    But that same mainstreaming would appear its very new nemesis.  It is like the Yoruba felling of the huge elephant — knives of all sorts and all shapes come to party!  The result is a Tower of Babel and its babble of confused voices.  Though the noise might account for what appears a momentum in the media, it is doubtful if it can enhance the chance of its coming to fruition.

    As the South West rally has proved thus far, talking at, as against talking with people, on the restructuring question, could be a fatal fixation that does no one no good.  This is because positions are stiffened and fear might even spiral off into paranoia.

    Which is why what is needed is a pan-Nigeria consensus over the issue, taking cognizance of the interest of those genuinely fearful of radical re-federalization, in a polity that has run on practical Unitarism since 1966.

    Media posturing, streams of insult, booming threat and vulgar abuse won’t achieve a consensus.  But cold and patient reasoning, with one another, just might.  Still, even that would start by saying what you mean and meaning what you say!