The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Secure parliament…

    “Seek  ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness” admonishes the scriptures in Matthew 6:33, “and all these things would be added unto you.”  That was the Christ Jesus telling the multitude to shun mammon, and glory in godly living.

    If people’s faith is their way of life, then politics is the life of citizens in a democracy.  Even if you are not an active politician, you’re periodically being called to exercise your franchise by those politicians, for whom politics is a way of life.

    Whatever your attitude, even more than the hyper-visible executive positions of president and governors, just know that securing the parliament is key.  If you did that, you just may have secured the political equivalent of the biblical kingdom of God, and frankly, you can expect every other thing to follow.

    How so?  Ask All Progressives Congress (APC) National Chairman, Adams Oshiomhole.  He has been reported in the news, saying his ruling federal party would reward loyal party members in the National Assembly, and do away with opportunists and traitors.

    Ha, Comarade Adams should know!  Since 2015, his party had endured a pair, at the helm of its parliamentary machine, who answer Dr. Jerkyl, representing APC during the day; but no less zealously, answer Mr. Hyde of Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) at night.

    The duo of Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara ensured a slowdown, if not outright sabotage, of legislative backing for President Muhammadu Buhari’s programmes — in delayed budgets, padded budgets, rogue bills forged to ensure own selfish interests, threat to abandon parliamentary confirmation duties as rogue protest, sundry cynical filibustering and allied parliamentary rascality, that tend to de-market the government in which they both served.

    The latest phase of that enemy-in-the-house-war-of-attrition took off when Saraki announced senatorial defections to the opposition, hoping to build a new rogue majority that would still retain him as senate president, even in PDP colours!  Talking of Mr. Hyde finally coming out in the open!  Since that backfired, it’s been parliamentary shutdown — maybe until new stratagems are forged?

    Dogara has, more or less, pranced in Saraki’s wide and merry way.  As he has crossed over to PDP, he stands degraded, by the standing numbers, as a minority lawmaker.  Yet, he holds on as “Speaker”.  Well, the bastion of this 8th National Assembly is hardly honour!

    Hardball’s concern is not parliamentary personalities per se.  Politicians of several hues would still be politicians and would play politics — euphemism for cynical opportunism, if they can get away with it.

    Hardball is rather concerned with getting the people a good deal.  That is what the 8th National Assembly, under the duo of Saraki and Dogara, are not doing.

    That is why, as we build up to another bout of elections, the parties must ensure that, whoever their candidates are, they are not just another band of opportunists, who would feed fat, mouth cant but leave the people’s job undone.

    Which is why it is imperative to secure the parliament.  It starts, first with the parties to present their best minds — diligent, honest, industrious and loyal to their party’s programmes.  Then, the stage moves on for the people to choose right.

    Those done, there would be assurance that both the executive and legislature are on the same page, double-charged to delivering a renascent Nigeria, where the people come first, and not the antics and whims decadent leaders, no more than vicious power dealers.

  • Wanted: brand new Palm Avenue

    Hardball must congratulate — and empathize with — the Mushin Local Government Area, in its clearly un-winnable war, to make Palm Avenue, Mushin, Lagos, more motorable — and for good reasons too!

    Palm Avenue hosts the council’s secretariat, aside from one of its prime health facilities.  If Mushin, the council, derives its name from Mushin, the prime market, then Palm Avenue is well and truly its high mart.

    From the Agege Motor Road junction, adjoining and spilling into Palm Avenue, is the multi-billion Naira Amu plywood and glass market.  Down the road, just past the Ladipo Street, roundabout, is the no less valuable auto tyre and accessories market.

    Add all that to the bifurcating auto spare parts and allied market, the rash of banks nibbling for nourishment in the Palm Avenue, Ladipo Street and Fatai Atere Way business district cum industrial park, not to talk of hundreds of auto artisans that sprawl through the entire stretch of Papa Ajao, Ladipo and Palm Avenue itself, and it’s easy to conclude that Palm Avenue is Mushin’s commercial high hub and headquarters — formal and informal.

    So, you can’t really blame the Mushin council for its endless efforts to give Palm Avenue a facelift, via the near-eternal renovation.  Indeed, Hardball had had cause to chastise the local government for craters, that could virtually have swallowed its secretariat (never mind the hyperbole!) right in front of its prime office! (Palm Avenue: healing sore of a council, Hardball, 28 August 2017).

    Since then — more than one year ago — the council had patched the road and filled the craters, doing so, all through the whole stretch of the high street.  But lo, the rains came, and viola!  The craters staged triumphant comeback!

    But now, Hardball can happily report, the council is making another round of repairs. Already, the “gully” at the Palm Avenue-Mushin road T-junction is filled.  Also, the notorious set of craters, almost in front of the council secretariat, has been filled and re-tarred, such that driving on that section is uncharacteristically smooth.  Well done, folks!

    Still, as the next bout of rains would all-too-soon reveal:  working on that road is not unlike tacking, with needle and thread,  a starched but ragged shirt or garment.  It’s only a matter of time before it gets ripped — and even more ragged!

    What Palm Avenue needs, therefore, is a new road, complete with bigger and deeper drainage, to drain off, in no time, the after-rain flash flood — acidic waters that chew the tar like a maniac; and restore the hateful craters, before you can even bawl “Palm Avenue”!

    What Hardball thinks? The council should partner with the Lagos State government to birth a new Palm Avenue road, but not without its once-upon-a-time famous palms.

    Indeed, that deal should include replanting those famous palm trees to make the high street, a Palm-fronded boulevard, to re-green the area, and make it more environmental-friendly.

    It’s do-able — but after work is completed on the ongoing BRT corridor on Agege Motor Road, the Airport access road and the Agege Pen Cinema corridor.  Otherwise, it could be a another putative bottleneck, worsening Lagos’ already crippling traffic.

    Still, a new Palm Avenue is the panacea to save the Mushin Local Government from its Sisyphus-like frustration  — of returning to fix eternal craters, on a road it just splashed valuable scarce cash on, virtually just yesterday!

  • Pensioners’ pictures of peril

    When all else fails, simply alliterate. This is what Hardball has done above. Life is not easy sometimes for an organ grinder. Churning out stuff for the back page of a national newspaper everyday can be akin to organ grinding a lot of times. First you have to find the issue that is worth grouching about; then you contextualise it and apply the right devices to realising and rendering it to Hardball’s standard.

    Sometimes it is a tough call; every stage of it. Especially if you are assailed by deadline and you don’t have nary an idea yet. Or you manage to find an idea but can’t create a suitable head to drive the writing. Sometimes you manage to set sail but mid-sea you get storm-tossed…

    Pushing this out was one of such moments. Nothing seemed to fit and the clock is perverse when you are pressed for time. Then there are these ugly front page photos of stacks of dusty files. Workers are bent over then trying to sort them. But they are remarkable for the nose-masks they all wear.

    At first sight it looks like a theatre room where a delicate surgical procedure is going on. But on closer look, it is officials of the Pension Transitional Arrangement Directorate (PTAD) who are said to be cataloguing and digitalising pensioners’ files. The files are said to have been inherited from an old pension office in Lagos. What a bizarre bequeathal.

    Recall again, pictures of the old and wrinkly pensioners of the defunct Nigeria Airways which assailed the front pages of our newspapers last week. They were said to be undergoing verification prelude to payment of their entitlements after 22 years. Those pictures, like these dusty file, have lodged in our psyche: ugly picture of failure, waste and degradation.

    How do you begin to reproduce these pictures into a Hardball story? How can you possibly do that in a hurry without losing its production quality and essence? This is what prompted the title: “Pensioners’ pictures of peril.” The alliteration here is a device to set the tone and enact a passable opening.

    How did we get to the point of missing out our old workers who have toiled in public service for at least three decades then they are literally chucked out of service and left in limbo? It is tragic irony that the workers of yesterday are the pensioners of today and vice-versa.

    Could we put this down to acute shortsightedness, ineptitude of the bureaucratic kind or sheer self-annihilation that civil servants cannot manage to take care of their tomorrow while they are at their civil best?

  • A driver and a company

    In yet another case of reckless driving, 10 people reportedly died when a bus owned by Young Shall Grow Motors Limited collided with a stationary truck on October 22. There were over 40 passengers on the bus, which was en route to Lagos from the South-east.

    A survivor’s account painted a picture showing how the bus driver and the management of the company that owned the bus contributed to the avoidable tragedy.  Godwin Ikechukwu was quoted as saying:  “We left Enugu in the night…  About 10 minutes after we left, the driver started driving recklessly and everybody on the bus was alarmed, telling him to slow down. The man did not listen to any of us; nobody was comfortable.”

    The account continued:  “When I could no longer bear it, I decided to bring out my payment receipt ticket, checked the telephone numbers and found the customer care contacts of Young Shall Grow Motors. I called and told them our experience. I said the driver taking us to Lagos was driving recklessly and the company should caution him. They asked for the number plate of the bus and I gave it to them. They said they would take care of it.”

    But it looks like the company didn’t make a move to address the bad situation. Things got worse. Ikechukwu said: “When the man continued to drive recklessly, I decided to call them again. I called for more than 10 times, but they did not pick my calls. The next thing, their phone was switched off. Our ugly experience from Enugu continued to the point that nobody could sleep; we were all praying. The driver refused to listen to advice as he drank and smoked.”

    Another passenger said:  “He was under the influence…There were other buses that passed where we had the accident without any problem. If he was in his right senses, even if there was no sign to indicate that there was a broken down vehicle at the spot, he would have controlled the bus. But before he realised it, he had rammed into the stationary bus at top speed. After the accident, he disappeared.”

    The tragedy was avoidable. Drink-driving and overspeeding are condemnable.  So the driver must not go unpunished. There is no excuse for dangerous and potentially destructive behaviour behind the wheel. Also, the company’s failure to intervene before the tragedy happened is inexcusable.

  • APC: Still a long way to party?

    The sensational allegation, by a body that calls itself the Buhari Support Group (BSG), that some All Progressives Congress (APC) governors were working against President Muhammadu Buhari, Chairman Adams Oshiomhole and Asiwaju Bola Tinubu, has sure taken the APC cosmos by storm.

    Most of the governors have issued sharp ripostes, which, to be honest make a lot of sense.

    But instead of viewing it all as some putative rebellion against party authority and supremacy, it is perhaps wise to situate it within the contestation of various tendencies, within a very young political party, which nevertheless has had a chequered history, in terms of crisis management.

    A post-nPDP APC, with the combined policy treachery of Senate President Bukola Saraki and House of Representatives Speaker Yakubu Dogara, would appear to face new teething problems.

    But it could also have resulted from in-built pathologies, accumulated from the post-political new breed era, from Ibrahim Babangida’s experiment, that started in 1991.  With a stroke of the pen, IBB built completely new parties and hoped the tendencies and affiliations to 1st and 2nd Republic parties would vanish in the new golden vacuum!

    Well, it hasn’t — and the political party system has been the poorer for it, even with the new breed of yore now coming of age.

    So, if some governors are indeed unhappy with APC’s new direction under Oshiomhole, that is only to be expected.  For the hitherto all-mighty governors — the party be damned! — that portends a power paradise lost, never to be regained.

    It is natural for any group about to lose power to grumble and throw tantrums.  Doing otherwise would not have been human.  If the governors were hitherto lords and masters, who could impose, drop and re-impose candidates, by virtue of their exalted elected posts, it would be only natural for them to kick.

    Now link that with the flamboyant and swash-buckling Oshiomhole style — Oshiomhole, who probably as a governor, was guilty of what he now tries to stamp out among the present corps of APC governors — and you can understand the gubernatorial angst.

    But if the ruling party must move from its teething stages, to build a cohesive and highly integrated outfit, able to impose discipline and enforce its authority, the governors and other hierarchs just must reconcile themselves to shedding present powers for the future good of their party.

    Besides, beyond APC, the Nigerian party system is at the crossroads.  The APC experience: a party, goaded by a treacherous few, that made itself an opposition against itself (reference Saraki’s 8th National Assembly), is only the latest disturbing example.

    Earlier, the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) had had a field day subverting other parties by poaching their parliamentary members and goading them to cross over, in a brazen display of real-politik, in its ugliest form.

    That has worsened the ideological crisis among the parties (you belong to one, you belong to all).  It has also led to errant and fickle defections, which again the present Saraki National Assembly has brought to a rather ugly nadir.

    So, while the APC governors and other hierarchs fume, at the loss of near-absolute powers to build intra-party dynasties, Hardball thinks the Oshiomhole reforms are on the right track.

    Nigeria’s democracy needs a re-build of the party as a vibrant entity with defined policy and ideological direction.  That is the direction every political party should go.

  • Classic zero-sum politics

    A house raised on a foundation of deceit even the littlest of dews would bring it down. This is ancient Nigerian wisdom. There is of course no better summation of the on-going transition politics in Nigeria today.

    We are witnessing on a scale never known before, a most desperate politics of skullduggery, iron gloves and  smash-and-grab tactics. It is winner takes all. It is zero sum game. It is do or die. It is as if there is no tomorrow. Is it altruism; a call to service, to bear the cross for Nigeria or a vaulting zeal to plunder, loot and remain perpetually in power?

    Examples abound: bad examples of bloodletting on the fields of preliminary elections known as primaries. These are elections within the party – that is, inter-party election ending in vicious acrimony and gore.

    All the political parties are guilty; especially the two leading All Progressives Congress (APC) and the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Apart from the presidential primaries of these two parties, hardly any other election went on without infraction and rancor.

    Examples abound. In fact every case is an example. A few will suffice.

    Imo APC guber primary for instance was like a gun play by cowboys. The fastest draw ran off with the ticket only to be ambushed in Abuja and the ticket snatched from him. Today, the ticket may have been re-retrieved but the war is still on.

    For the All Progressives Grand Alliance (APGA) also in Imo, one contender is said to have put about 20 other contenders in a trance (perhaps with a long juju); by the time they came to, the primary result was already in Abuja. They are still wondering what happened.

    In Zamfara State, APC could not produce any candidate. Not one. The election of 2019 will be consummated without the ruling party. This must be a new low in the annals of Nigeria’s democratic experience. Shame.

    In Ogun State APC, the governor threatens to decamp having been handed the short end of the stick. In Kaduna, something queer has happened with one of the senatorial primaries. There are actually no prisoners taken in this place and it is the classic example of classic zero sum game. Buildings of party members had been bulldozed overnight.

    Yet another candidate had been barred via a court injunction voiding the conduct of election yet election was held and upheld.

    The most vile and evil tactics have been brought to play by political parties in the prelude to the main event in 2019.

    Is this a foretaste of the Armageddon to come during the general election?

  • Unreformed rebel

    Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) leader Nnamdi Kanu has resurfaced with a bang after a mysterious 13-month disappearance. The Kanu that reappeared was not different from the Kanu that disappeared.

    An October 19 online video had showed him praying at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem. His scheduled “world press broadcast” on October 21 showed that he was still on the warpath. Evidently, between September 14, 2017, when he disappeared and the time he reappeared, he had not had a rethink about his group’s separatist rebellion.

    Before he disappeared, Kanu was facing trial for “alleged conspiracy to commit acts of treasonable felony and other related offences.” He was granted bail by a Federal High Court on April 25, 2017, after many sympathetic voices had called for his release from prolonged detention.

    At a point, the Federal Government wanted Kanu’s bail revoked and sought a court order. The government’s argument: “The offence for which he is standing trial is not ordinarily bailable, but due to the magnanimity of the court and its quest for justice and fairness, he was granted bail on health grounds. Among the other conditions for his bail is that he should not be seen in a crowd exceeding 10 people and he should not grant any interviews, hold or attend any rallies. And that he should file in court, medical updates of his health status every month. But rather than observing all of the conditions listed above, Kanu, in flagrant disobedience to the court order, flouted all conditions of the bail.”

    According to the government, Kanu had taken his rebellion further by inaugurating a so-called Biafra Security Service, which it considered a serious threat to national security and national unity.

    Kanu had disappeared during an army exercise in the Southeast, “Operation Python Dance”. Following his disappearance, his lawyers had argued that the Nigerian army authorities should be made to produce him. They alleged that soldiers invaded Kanu’s house in Afara-Ukwu Ibeku, Umuahia, Abia State. They claimed that “rampaging soldiers” abducted Kanu or killed him. Kanu’s reappearance shows that his defenders had lied.

    Kanu was quoted as saying in a broadcast on Radio Biafra after he resurfaced: “Nigerian court is a Kangaroo court. I did not jump bail…I shall not be honouring the court… I will fight till the last day.”

    If he didn’t jump bail, what did he do? Kanu has reappeared but he is unreformed.

  • Poverty of politics, politics of poverty

    In Osun, the poverty of politics and politics of poverty seem to have coalesced, and produced a mirage: politics-induced perception of poverty while the economics of it all gives a diametrically opposed verdict. It’s an unfortunate conundrum projected by politicians and amplified by a media’s progressively humongous appetite for the sensational and and the titillating, even if facts don’t support these hysterics.

    According to a story in The Nation of October 18, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), in sync with the Nigerian National Bureau of Statistics (NBS), just released its yearly Human Development Indices.

    Here is a verbatim report, from a paragraph, from the story: “The computation of Human Development Indices for the UNDP Nigeria Human Development Report was released by the NBS; and [it] rated Osun the second lowest state in Nigeria in Poverty Index in 2013, one of the five states with lowest unemployment rates by NBS, and the second richest state in Nigeria, by the United Nations Multi-Dimensional Poverty Index in 2017”.

    The report went on: “The new report places the state’s poverty index at 17.5 per cent, ahead of Lagos, Nigeria’s economy capital.”  The report also puts Osun’s unemployment rate at 6.7 per cent, though it did not state the national average unemployment rate.

    By no means, this UNDP report doesn’t rebrand Osun as an el-Dorado.  It’s, after all, the media vortex of the salary arrears crisis, which though is a national crisis, was projected as a sole Osun problem.

    However, if with the salary crisis, a UNDP human poverty index still returns the state as one of the least poverty-stricken in the country — even besting Lagos, Nigeria’s economy dynamo and Rivers, the country’s foremost oil business state — then there are certainly some deliberate, non-cash anti-poverty initiatives, which the Osun government has done rather well.

    A media that takes itself seriously would have pored into the UNDP HDI report — and it has been consistent in its returns on Osun, in the past few years — and studied what the government there has done right, if only to recommend those right steps to other governments, to stem the current Nigerian poverty crisis.

    But no!  The lords of the Fourth Estate of the Realm would rather hug street emotions, even coming from suspect sources, and join the lamentation orchestra of “hunger and poverty in the land”, without adding any value, as to how the poverty pest could be creatively curtailed.

    Still, aside from sensational reportage and a banal media mindset, organized Labour should be out there, studying strategies Osun had put in place to mitigate the poverty in its environment; and therefore achieved some relative stasis and social peace, despite the hostile economic environment, caused by past decades of wanton, wilful and wild wastes.

    Armed with such strategies, they would then be better armed with winning strategies, as they engage the government with policies to battle and banish poverty; and depart from their fixation with raw cash, as epitomized by Labour’s obsessive attachment to wages, sans other non-monetary benefits.

    Since the days of Udoji and Williams salary awards, of the early and mid-1970s, raw cash has proved itself incomplete to rein in poverty.  The Osun feat therefore points at fresher and more rigorous thinking, to face down the poverty question.

  • Technically undefeated

    Terror war is like shadow boxing. All you see are silhouettes of the enemy; you never see him, he’s like the stalker, like your shadow. But you certainly would hear from him. He comes with loud bangs and deadly blows. Especially when you are not watching or preferably when you are snoozing. Terror is like the serpent of the night, you know not where its head lies; stealthily slitheringly, it sidles up to you and deals you a deathly blow.

    Terror has no rhyme or reason. Like the sons of perdition of the Scripture, terror revels in terror; it feeds in gore and is refreshed by anguish. Hardball never saw him but he wagers that he must be one of bloodshot eyes. Frantic visage and anxious, fidgety movements; he is the restless soul who finds peace only in sorrow… other people’s sorrow, pain and anguish.

    Such is it with the Boko Haram terror. Unleashed on Nigeria since 2009, current report from the UNDP’s 2018 Human Development Report on the North East of Nigeria encapsulates a gory statistics of incremental terror.

    The report says 32,570 Nigerians have been killed by the rampaging blood hounds as at 2016. About 600 teachers were among that black number. A whopping number of 1,044 attacks were unleashed on the country over this period while over 1.6 million Nigerians have been rendered homeless and perhaps made destitute. The number of injured people cannot be determined but it must be in the region of double the fatalities.

    How do we quantify the infamy of women and children abduction, sex slavery and forced marriages? Nubile innocence savagely broken and fresh cherries ravaged in infernal far-flung wildernesses. Harrowing journeys of no return suddenly foisted on young virgin women and beautiful bright dreams turned into nightmares at a twinkle.

    The UNDP report says 547 schools were damaged or destroyed; 19000 teachers displaced from their bases. Who can adequately quantify the multiplier effects of this mayhem; the cyclic damage of this evil? Many children will never return to school; many schools will never be rebuilt; many abducted women and girl child would never be found.  And what about all the military careers cut short?

    Finally, there is no end in sight yet. UNDP says the blood count has continued to increase from 2009 to 2016, the cut-off date of the report. While there were 2,320 deaths in 2009, by 2016 the toll has almost doubled to 5,350. This means our terror is technically undefeated!

    Today, the evil is morphing into an international abduction-for- ransom gang. Pay up or we kill is the new mantra. International aid worker Hauwa Liman is the first poster horror… who’s next?

    Meanwhile, where has military intelligence gone?

  • Inexcusable mess

    Evidently, the planned payment of the entitlements of ex-Nigeria Airways workers needs better planning.  Over 4,000 ex-workers of the defunct national carrier were expected to be verified for payment of their retirement and severance packages, following an announcement that the Federal Government had approved N22.68bn out of the N45bn owed them.

    The Ministry of Finance had issued a statement saying bio-metric data of the beneficiaries would be captured before the payment. The exercise was scheduled to start on October 15.  But, according to reports, the Lagos centre, Sky-Power Catering, Murtala Muhammed Airport, has been a scene of disorder since the verification began.

    One of the retirees was quoted as saying:  “The whole arrangement is chaotic and logistics is very poor and traumatising. Most of the people here are over 70 years old, so you can imagine subjecting them to this kind of situation. On Monday, nothing could happen; people spent the whole of the day here but there was no power back-up for whatever they were doing; they claimed that the server was not working.”

    The complaint continued: “Today (Tuesday), they are claiming that the printers are not working when there is so much to do. They are not attending to people and many people are becoming restive and unruly.”

    The exercise is scheduled to end on October 21. The reported disorderliness doesn’t help matters. For the retirees, it has been an agonising wait for the payment of their entitlements since the then President Olusegun Obasanjo liquidated the national carrier in 2004.

    From the look of things, the long wait is not over. Apart from the complication of the disorganised verification, there is no information about when the payment would begin. One of the ex-workers was quoted as saying:  “We don’t know when the actual payment is going to start; there is no statement from anywhere.”

    This is not how to plan a long-overdue payment. A process that should be a relief to those who have been waiting for their terminal benefits has only compounded their distress. The mess is inexcusable.