The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • The Harder They Come

    This title is straight from the popular crime film of the early 70s. Starring the Jamaican  reggae music star, Jimmy Cliff who plays Ivanhoe, a notorious criminal. You must remember it if you are old enough; it is suffused with reggae music and patois.

    Ivanhoe ‘Ivan’ Martin (Jimmy Cliff) leaves the countryside to Kingston (Jamaica) in search of job. None is forthcoming and in the tough life of eking out a living, he is lured into a drug couriering and the resultant scrape with the law. In his recurrent altercation with the police, not even his emerging talent as a musician could safe him from eventual damnation.

    This old story reminds Hardball of the travails of the Nigerian youth and the tough path he has to traverse to acquire education in Nigeria. To successfully get educated in Nigeria up to the tertiary level, one can almost write a book titled … yes, you guessed it, The Harder They Come. To get the most basic education in Nigeria today is almost as difficult as travelling to the moon.

    In the 70s and 80s, average Nigerian youths who passed school certificate examination would easily get into over dozen federal universities available. The less-than-average students who could not make requisite grade one or two travelled to America or Canada for university education. Even they thrived upon getting to the U.S. This a testimony to the quality of intellect of the average Nigerian.

    The story has change tremendously today. Getting education in Nigeria today is like striking water in the desert. In the first place, there are over 1.5 million prospective students seeking for admission while less than 500,000 openings are available in all the tertiary institution in the country. Successive federal governments, short on strategic thinking, never built schools to match her burgeoning and uncontrolled population.

    What we have today, therefore, is akin to a mad scramble to gain admission into tertiary institutions. To keep otherwise brilliant students out of the universities, seems the purpose of the much frazzled authorities these days. Nigeria’s university admission system therefore does not strive to get the best into schools but to keep the horde.

    A student is therefore subjected to about half a dozen examinations in other to qualify to study in the university or polytechnic. Let us count: there is the West African Examinations Council (WAEC); the National Examinations Council (NECO); Joint Admissions and Matriculations Board (JAMB); there is the Post-UTME: there is also JUPEB and even Pre-Degree in some instances.

    Some hapless fellows could pass through this rash of exams for three to five years without getting admission to desired universities or for desired courses. And make no mistake these are brilliant students.

    It’s indeed a tortuous journey to education in Nigeria today.

     

     

     

     

  • Bluffing DisCOs

    The electricity distribution companies (DisCOs), the leprous fingers of the Jonathan-era power reforms regime, are getting more brazen by the day.  After feeding fat on their rogue trove of “estimated billing”, the industry’s new euphemism for billing at a premium for darkness, they now puff and bluff to high heavens: refund our investment money and take back your sick child!  Seriously?

    Now, this new rascality comes from their trade group, the Association of Nigerian Electricity Distributors (ANED), an otherwise legitimate trade group that is so haughty and reckless it now plays the merry parasite howling for the death of its host.  Is it not a goner too?

    Or, in Achebe-speak, the stupid man challenging his “chi”(Igbo for personal god; or what the Yoruba would call “Eleda”, roughly “the maker”) to a wrestling match.  Isn’t such a person gone bunkers?

    But why this sudden ANED rogue radicalism, not to enhance service but to further ingrain the DisCos’ current culture of absolutely no value?  The simple issue of pre-paid meters.

    For too long, the electricity consumer has been condemned to DisCo greed, growing fat for delivering no value, using the so-called “estimated billing” as newfound yo-yo to fleece long-suffering consumers, while supplying nothing but absolute darkness.

    For too long, they were too busy “eating” for them to hear the loud groans from their market.  But the moment Power Minister, Babatunde Fashola, SAN, went radical on the imperative of metering customers, and that DisCos had better shape in or shape out, their jaws suddenly dropped, knowing they might be swallowing the last sweet morsel or crushing the last sauce-suffused bone of rogue feasting!

    Now, faced with sure starvation — hardly illegitimate! — the DisCos now push ANED to perhaps the most laughable bout of amateurish bluff in Nigeria’s corporate history.  Nice try!

    But as ANED, the DisCo parasites delude themselves with the merry prospects of premature but total extinction — for if DisCos buckle, where is the threatened knuckle from ANED? — let the government stay firm.

    The Power Sector reforms envisaged a vibrant electricity market, not a neo-monopoly from the ashes of the old Electricity Corporation of Nigeria (ECN), National Electric Power Authority (NEPA) or even the stop-gap Power Holding Corporation of Nigeria (PHCN).

    Let the regulator, Nigerian Electricity Regulatory Commission (NERC), strictly apply the law.  By all means, be fair to the DisCos.  But be no less fair to the consumer, without who there would be no market to milk.

    Let the DisCos meter their consumers, and bill for what they supply.  Because the new meters are pre-paid, it’s a win-win.  DisCos are paid before service.  And the consumer gets full value for his power charge.

    Now, how can that be bad for anybody — except rogue DisCos sold to the sickly culture of earning money from selling darkness, as a key business growth strategy?

    As for ANED, let them concentrate on DisCo peer review, all aimed at improving service and value.  Otherwise, both ANED and the present DisCos’ business days could be numbered.

    Maybe it’s time to get a new breed of licencees to do the job — for the business of powering the country is too vital to be left to amateurish corporate blackmailers.

     

     

  • Nigeria err

    Chinua Achebe notes in his famous book, Things Fall Apart, that proverb is the oil with which Igbo eat yam. And Hardball would wish to also add that word, not proverb, is the yam with which Yoruba make pounded yam. Those who know would tell you that it’s no gainsaying that half of the strength of this race probably lies in word power.

    It is not because Hardball finds a good line to kick off his treatise today. Far from it; though it helps a mighty lot that this Yoruba adage is handy. It says that the problems of the old witch are compounded as she suffers the ill fortune of making only female children.

    While Hardball lets you chew on those wise words, the problems of our dear mother land seem to multiply daily not unlike the witch and her female children. Hardly anything seems to jell for this administration. Not even low hanging fruits drooping and grazing the ground could be plucked by officials, it seems.

    We do not speak of the now dissipating opportunity of building one of the most enduring political party in Africa after providence gifted it the mantle of leadership of the country three years ago.

    Hardball speaks of the promise to set up a national carrier in the first year of the administration. It is otiose to say that setting up a national carrier is probably one of the easiest tasks for any smart leader of a country as rich and viable as Nigeria. It can also be gotten almost for free too, considering that Nigeria has a big and viable aviation brand to sell.

    In the sense that Nigeria is clearly the natural air hub for Africa’s West coast as well as perhaps, being the most lucrative route in Africa. With more travelers than any other country in Africa, this must explain why over 20 foreign airlines fly the Nigerian route. There must be some hard currency to be made here.

    Setting up a national carrier therefore would be a most viable proposition that any serious consortium would gladly run with at little cost to the government. But three years after a presidential pledge, what have we come up with?

    Our aviation honcho flies to an air show in London and announces to the world that we now have a national carrier called Nigeria Air (Hardball calls it Nigeria Err!). He painted to the (laughing) world, a most intriguing scenario ever.

    Distraught and bemused, he announces a national carrier that is palpable only on a poster and notable by a name and logo. That is all. Apparently, hardly any work has been done in three years for such an easy win project.

    Nigeria errs; again and again.

  • Eko, eku juice o!

    Today, Hardball revisits the popular Yoruba greeting mode, with the prefix: “Eku”.  Every phenomenon of human activity or even nature, that requires complementing, deserves an “Eku”, by the greeting-freak Yoruba.

    “E k’aaro” (good morning), “E k’aasan” (good afternoon), “E k’aale” (good evening), “Ek’odun” (happy anniversary), “Eku’gbadun” (happy jollification), “E ku’simi” (happy repose).

    But not every “Eku” is complimentary.  Some could be outright impish and clinically dismissive, like “Ek’osi” and “Eku’ya” (good riddance)!

    It is along this “Eku” spirit that Hardball this morning proceeds to greet Lagosians, which with Katsina, Senate President Bukola Saraki just declared the juicy capital of Nigerian political pork.

    “Eko,” Hardball hails, “Eku juice oooo!”

    How would this greeting sound in Katsina, the joint-juice capital, according to the Saraki theory?  ”Saanu de juice”? Toh!

    Sigmund Freud was right.  You don’t access people’s true character, when they are mushy and the situation is sheer bliss and there is a lot of juice — ah, that word again!  But when it becomes jerky, and the tough situation rather bumpy, and you become rather angry, then those rather hidden thoughts come peeping out, like some psychical peeping Tom!  Psychoanalysis calls it Freudian slip.

    In the heat and anger of forced(?) defection — your comrades don’t jeer at you as traitor and you still sit immobile — the probable innermost drivers, of Saraki’s senate agonistes became manifest: juice, ladies and gentlemen, juice!

    The Saraki that a few days ago rhapsodized on his talks with the president, claiming it wasn’t about who got what but how to fix Nigerian democracy and anchor it on a surer footing, was suddenly, in defection mood, bawling about juice and nothing but juice!

    He claimed all the juicy positions were oscillating between Katsina (the president’s home) and Lagos (the vice president’s base); and no one ever threw any juice in the way of Saraki (for his Kwara plebs) and Yakubu Dogara (for his Bauchi talakawa)!  Then, another “breaking news”, as those amateurs always scream on the social media: a cabal had taken over the federal government!  How fresh!

    So, the Alpha and Omega of every political odyssey is personal juice?  And the “cabal”, would they have mattered if they helped to funnel the sweet, sweet  juice into the parched throats of Saraki, Dogara and company?  If they did that, would they still remain “cabal” in that friendly and juice-saturated camp?  Toh!

    So, it’s time to war for juice.  The battle line being drawn, the battle cry must be formed.

    Rise o compariots?  Naaaaa!  Rice is sweet.  But juice is sweeter!

    Juice, o compatriots?  Excellent!  To parched throats in estranged camps, juice is coming — Juice, o compatriots!

    Lagos and Katsina, watch it!  Saraki and gang are coming for your juice!

    Meanwhile, E ku juice ooooo!  Enjoy it while it lasts!

     

     

  • This state of no nature

    Scenario One: Did you know a bit about Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, David Hume and even Mozi? They are philosophers across various ages who grew gray hair propounding theories about man in his primordial state; that state when man roamed wild in jungle and there were no settlements or group life. They conceived of this condition as the state of nature.

    Scenario two: Did you also ever hear the wisecrack about the village loony who set his hut ablaze and when confronted, he declared that he noticed a few other huts were up in flames and not to be left out, he torched his too so as to join the carnival of bonfires! In his wisdom, a communal inferno would require a communal fire brigade, and why, he would not want to be ostracised from partaking in that exercise of fire-quenching either.

    And here is Hardball’s third scenario: Did you hear the ordeal of Chief Magistrate Ngozi Onyenemezu? He is the presiding jurist in Umuneke Ngor Magistrates’ Court in Ngor Okpala Local Government Area of Imo State. The magistrate reportedly struck out charges against three armed robbery suspects on the grounds that the charges were defective. He set the suspected robbers free on mere technicalities.

    The prosecuting police officers, including the leader of the team who is a Divisional Police Officer (DPO), in reaction, went berserk in the court room and pounced on the magistrate and two defence counsels. It took the quick arrival of the Area Commander to rescue the magistrate who had locked himself inside his chamber.

    Scenario four: Amnesty International AI) has disclosed that at least 371 people have been killed in the last seven months as the wave of insecurity rocking Zamfara State escalated in recent weeks.

    According to AI, bandits have intensified killings and kidnappings especially in remote agrarian communities in Zamfara and many north central states. Communities are invaded and at will and razed; citizens are slaughtered and entire villages are left bare as the dwellers are herded into hastily set up camps.

    Internally displaced people’s camps are springing up everywhere. The government lacks the capacity to maintain the camps nor ward off the marauders. In some instances, the deserted villages are taken over by the same people who sacked the villages in the first place. In the midst of all these none is arrested or brought to book.

    Final scenario: Top members of the ruling party are jumping over the fence to the other party. They claim they are not getting their fair share of the booty; that the country is tottering under the President and that he is using the hoe to share appointments…

    Hardball hereby gives you a simple assignment. Please piece these scenarios together.

  • Dino Tarzano is monster hit

    Seen the latest box office monster and movie blockbuster in town?

    It is Dino Tarzano, from the billion dollar-spinning Ajeku(n) Iya Studios, the new kids on the block, in music, movies and sundry global entertainment.

    It is a gripping adventure of an intrepid Nigerian lawmaker, who is Dino in the Senate but Tarzan in the jungle.  Just eleven hours up on the trees, and Tarzan sent the jungle into a spin!  What all-out action!

    After its monster debut, “Ajeku(n) Iya”, from which the hugely successful studios took its name, it followed up with a blistering second, “O, my Home”, in which the protagonist homes in on some exciting and more challenging political adventure.  Now, Ajeku(n) Iya Studios serenades — and is in turn serenaded by — its doting fans, by the release of Dino Tarzano’

    It’s the making of Dino the Formidable — such fearsome roar!

    Needless to say, in both habitats, when Dino — well, Tarzan — roars, everyone catches a paralyzing cold.  But those still agile enough, after that chilling roar?  They simply spring into a dive, in rush for dear life!

    If you doubt, ask the millions of chirping birds, forced into panicky migration, simply because Tarzan emerged from nowhere, and from a battle that concerned not the poor birds, for eleven long hours!

    Dino Tarzano’s release itself, came by a no less pulsating news break.  A certain senator, himself a showbiz impresario, who loves to proudly call himself Common Sense, gave a graphic and ringside account of Dino’s transition to Tarzano.

    Dino, he announced, was en route to keeping a court date when some alleged bandits, in any case armed kidnappers, pounced on his car.  He claimed those kidnappers took Dino away.

    But that account has since been modified by Ajeku(n) Iya Studios.  True, there were some armed kidnappers.  But before they could pounce and take Dino away, to bay for Satanic ransom, at the pain of death or grievous bodily harm, Dino vamoosed, all thanks to his immaculate sprinting skills.

    Still, what the kidnappers lost, the jungle gained.  But the greatest beneficiary here is clearly the Ajeku(n) Iya Studios, which has the umpteenth chance to showcase the mercurial  skills of its ace actor, in a totally new adventure!  Great fortune there, for its a back-to-back hits and still counting!

    Indeed, even after five, fully booked viewing-a-day, with the audience bawling and screaming for more, in every cinema worth its name nationwide, demand to see Dino Tarzano hasn’t waned, clearly priming it for a place in the Guinness Book of Records, for global adventure!  The doting fans just can’t get enough of the spectacle.

    But not to worry, high-grade, home video CDs of Dino Tarzano are hitting the market soon.  Book your copy NOW!

     

  • Dialectical dilemma of defections

    Dear reader, here is a caveat: Hardball is totally befuddled today. So, read this with utmost care. But blame him not; he is apparently caught up in the current, dizzying political whirl. To be best conceived as politics of divide, division and fission, live imagery would be required here to make plain this seeming dialectical dilemma.

    Chinua Achebe in his classic novel, Things Fall Apart, brings cheery elucidation to the moment, albeit unwittingly. Writing on the Feast of the New Yam, Achebe tells the story of “a wealthy man who set before his guests a mound of foo-foo so high that those who sat on one side could not see what was happening on the other, and it was not until late in the evening that one of them saw for the first time his in-law who had arrived during the course of the meal and had fallen to on the opposite side. It was only then that they exchanged greetings and shook hands over what was left of the food.”

    Let’s bring this illustration home and to Nigeria’s current political shenanigans. Consider a great divide of foo-foo and imagine politicians back-flipping from one side of the divide to the other. Look at it as the great Chinese wall of foo-foo but with the accompaniment of different variety of soups. If you didn’t like the soup on this side, for instance, you could flip over to the other side and join the feasting therefrom.

    This must explain such headlines as “Defectors have agreed to work for Buhari while in PDP – Presidency.” In other words, you are privileged to be attacking the foo-foo from one side of the divide and your interest is being taken care of on the other side! Didn’t they say gluttony is evidenced by the size of the tummy?

    Hardball can only surmise that Nigeria’s politics of the moment is a big feast. It presents a wholesome dialectical ofala (Igbo for royal feast) for people of ideas to gorge on for many weeks on end (while people of no ideas eat the fruit of the land). The current dubious political temperament presents a cartoon of political stalwarts not unlike monkeys jumping from fence to fence and making the best of Nigeria’s ides of anarchy.

    As general election approaches early next year, the ruling All Progressives Congress, (APC) is caught up in the throes of a non-dialectical schism (if there is any such thing). Tenuous tendencies which helped the party wrench power are disgruntled and are flipping from one side of the great foo-foo divide to the other.

    A ham-fisted presidency has been run ragged by a circus group that suddenly finds it wields powers of political life and death… and on and on. (Please see opening sentence!)

  • No automatic election

    It should be obvious that the 2019 general election will not happen automatically. Certain important things need to be done to make it happen. President Muhammadu Buhari had last week sent a request to the National Assembly seeking the approval of N242billion for the conduct of the 2019 elections. The National Assembly last week proceeded on a two-month recess that will end in September.

    The Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) has once again highlighted the reality that the general election may be affected by poor funding. INEC chairman, Mahmoud Yakubu, lamented that the commission is facing a funding challenge ahead of the 2019 polls.  At a retreat organised by State House Correspondents on ‘Covering Election Campaigns’ at the Epe Resort in Lagos on July 28, Yakubu said the electoral body may have to seek other sources of funding to ensure that the elections happen as planned.

    The INEC chairman, who was represented by the Lagos Resident Electoral Commissioner, Samuel Olumeku, said: “As you know, our procurement process is very cumbersome and to make procurement, it may take up to four months and this may affect what we are doing at INEC. But we may be forced to look at other sources of funding so that our preparation for the 2019 election is not affected.”

    Yakubu also lamented that not assenting to the  2018 amendment to the Electoral Act may make the commission to jettison the Act unless it comes into effect not later than six months to the election. He said: “As you know, we work with rules and the 2018 Electoral Act is expected to guide the conduct of the 2019 general election, but we may not be able to use it unless it comes six months before the general election. We need a budget to be able to run the election. Any law that does not come into effect six months before the election cannot apply to the 2019 general election.”

    It is indeed a cause for concern that the elections budget is not getting the attention it deserves. INEC’s electoral activities are timetabled, meaning that schedules will be affected if funding is delayed open-endedly.  The National Assembly’s role in this situation leaves much to be desired.

    In the final analysis, what needs to be done to get INEC well prepared for the 2019 elections should not be neglected by those concerned based on narrow motives and interests.  Elections don’t happen automatically.

  • Katsina-Alu and the things men do

    There is a treasured African saying that forbids you to speak ill of the dead.  But there is also a famous Shakespearean quip, from the tragic play, Julius Caesar, that the evil men do live after them, but the good are interred with their bones!

    Pray, which of these two applies to former Chief Justice of Nigeria (CJN), Justice Aloysius Katsina-Alu, who just passed away?  Perhaps both!

    Hardball’s heart goes to the people the late CJN left behind.  In his mid-70s, he was an old man by Nigerian standard.  But compared to other climes, even if the Biblical lifespan is said to be three scores and ten, he was no more than a young old man, who could still manage a few years more on earth.

    Besides, no matter how old your loved ones become, you never want to see them go.  He must also have left fond memories in the family, immediate and extended, to make his loss so painful. He also must have done some good deeds in the judicial world.  May the good Lord, therefore, condole the grieving; and give the dead complete repose.

    Still, after satisfying the African bit about not speaking ill of the dead, the analyst in Hardball is hooked on the Shakespearean segment, of the evil men do living after them!

    The “evil” here is no more than the enduring memory of CJN Katsina-Alu’s tenure, and the scandal that  demystified the National Judicial Council (NJC), as not a conclave of angels as another former CJN, Justice Muhammadu Lawal Uwais, envisaged by giving it pole positions in the post-2007 electoral reforms, but another Nigerian coven, easily penetrated by political intrigues.

    For stuff to do with power politics, not strictly judicial matters, CJN Katsina-Alu tried to force Justice Ayo Salami, then sitting Court of Appeal president, to get willy-nilly promotion to the Supreme Court, or take a jump from the Judiciary before his due time.

    In the short run, Katsina-Alu succeeded in forcing Salami off his Court of Appeal presidency, by a suspect suspension, powered by nothing but brute force, not at all in tandem with judicial fairness, popularly acclaimed as “rule of law”. That was a grave irony, that all but tarred CJN Katsina-Alu’s tenure.

    What is more?  Before Justice Katsina-Alu died, he endured the great discomfort of Justice Salami regaining his honour.  But everyone had always known Justice Salami was and remains a conscientious and honorable jurist, in or out of service.  That cannot be said of many, around the troubled temple of justice today.

    But the greatest stain on Justice Katsina-Alu’s CJN tenure was his brute power game, which exposed NJC as no higher conclave than other rotten gatherings in contemporary Nigeria.  That is no legacy to leave behind in any high office.

    Indeed, the evils that men do, live after them!

     

     

  • True colour of a woman

    Now this is a tricky one. Even Hardball knows enough to step gingerly around this one; a wise man must handle the matter of the opposite sex with uncommon equanimity and the measuredness of a sage. If only because you are a man and in some way or the other, you would need a woman or her service. So matters of femininity must be treated with the delicateness they require.

    Now, do not take the above title literally; it’s not about the complexion and tone of the fair sex. Notwithstanding that most of us African men now have a bit of difficulty discerning the real texture and coloration of the skin of the typical African belle. Over the years Western civilisation – not to mention cosmetics – has eroded the rich tonality of the original African woman’s skin. The much-cherished luscious glister of the female dark skin was organic aphrodisiac of sort, especially in the half dawn moments of conjugal co-efficiencies.

    But this is not about new-day African woman skincare methods; far from it. Hardball is troubled here today, about the make-up (again, not cosmetic), character and constitution of the average Nigerian woman. Who is this person? What is her psychological state? Is there a common glitch bordering on the pathological and homicidal?

    Now consider this story before we return to the question of the true colour of the African woman: a housewife in Owerri West Local Government of Imo State reportedly forced her niece to eat a dead chicken raw.

    As recounted by a neighbour, she was returning from her shop and overheard the woman (Ugochi) telling someone to finish that thing. She was going to pass by but the anguished cry of a little girl ignited her curiosity. She stopped to look and behold, she saw the little girl (Chiamaka) eating a dead fowl raw. She was aghast and beckoned on other residents. According to the witness’s account, the little girl, who looks like a seven-year-old even though she is 12, is subjected to perpetual torment by her aunt.

    The accused (Ugochi) denied that the chicken was raw: “It is not true that I asked her to eat the chicken raw, although I was angry. I came back and met my fowl dead. When I asked her what happened, she said she didn’t know. I forced her to cook the chicken and eat it.”

    Hardball asks again: what is the true colour of a woman? Some have wagered that it only comes alive when you keep her in charge of another woman’s child.

    Recently, cases of hot water baths, hot iron burns, solitary confinements, sometimes in chains, are rife – always against the other woman’s child. This psychopathic tendency would stand a good academic study; Hardball recommends.