The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Din-ga-lin ga-ling, it’s Dalung!

    Once in a while Hardball gets off the hook in order to make even a small point. This is what has happened now. Straightaway, this small note is about our Honourable Minister of Sports and Youth Development, Mr. Solomon Dalung. And the issue is why does Hardball’s mind go into a swirl each time he contemplates Dalung?

    For instance, the above title is derived from the songs of that inimitable Reggae music king of the 80s, Winston Forster, better known as Yellowman. And the first question is why do I in some way, remember King Yellow each time I see or envision Dalung?

    Well, let’s draw some comparisons. Yellowman is much stigmatised Jamaican albino lad who proved a genius in his vocation. He did not only break social and physiological barriers with his music and feisty acts, he became the hottest musician of the Reggae genre after his compatriot, Bob Marley, passed on. He indeed changed the game and with his capacity to literally set dancehalls on fire in that fecund era of disco and pop.

    A great performer and improviser he could hold his audience spellbound for hours, never short of words or songs. He picks them on the go, on stage. That is his forte. It was during those performances he rendered something close to the above title. There are particularly signature notes all of his own like: “Zungguzungguguguzungguzeng!” and “Every mickle make a muckle, every muckle make a mickle, you never know Yellow could make a good couple…” and so on.

    But Forster’s winning formula may well be his knack for not taking himself seriously. He sang about his peculiar pigmentation and he even dressed to match it.

    Could this be his link with Dalung? Not a few people were aghast when Dalung stepped out in khaki and red beret at his inauguration as minister of the Federal Republic. Those who thought it was a momentary lapse have long accepted Dalung as a casuals-wearing comrade lawyer and minister who probably does not take himself seriously.

    And there lies the trouble: if it suits him to be bohemian and to dance Reggae with his daily existentialities it’s ok but we the citizenry don’t have such luxury. Apart from the fact that we as a nation are running behind time, the times are too dire for inconsequential faddism. He is a minister and unbeknownst to him, he has the most important job in the land today after the president’s.

    We cannot have a man going off at tangents or improvising like Yellowman when we have serious tasks to accomplish. Since he came to this job, he has not been able to impact on his two crucial sectors – youth and sports. Visit our National Stadium, Lagos and weep for dear country. Notice the shambolic preparation heading towards the Rio Olympics and his stoking of the Pinnick-Giwa NFF crisis. And this: did you see pictures of him in a clandestine operation into the creeks to dialogue with the militants?

    Gee! What’s going on?

  • Kukah’s latest brew

    The Holy Matthew Hassan Kukah, Catholic Archbishop of Sokoto, has a new release on corruption — the Buhari Presidency is fighting the symptoms, not actual corruption!

    Well, the holy father is not totally wrong, especially in the polemic world, where he is especially adept.  In that world, there is no white, no black — and just grey?  Why, even grey has its own distinctive shades in the rainbow universe of colourful polemics!

    So, don’t be cross if you don’t — or can’t — pin the bishop down to a particular direction — or conclusion, no matter how formidable his rhetoric. The father’s intellectual jousting and thrusting is enough sumptuous fare for the mind!

    Which brings the discourse back to his new polemics on Buhari’s anti-corruption war — and the theory of fighting symptoms instead of corruption.

    But hey, isn’t somebody forgetting something here? At the start of it all, if the holy father had his way, those so-called symptoms would have remained piously un-fought!

    Remember the holy father’s pious cry at the start of it all? Everyone should move on and forget the past.  His reason?  Jonathan had done fantastically well by losing election and quitting. Because of that singular fact, he thundered, everyone must move on!

    By pray, Your Lordship, if we had done that, would we have fought even the so-called symptoms which you now glibly talk down?

    Even God, the Almighty that the father worships, frowns at not giving praise where and when one is due.  Yes, fighting corruption is a systemic process. But that would taper off to the long run.

    Right now, every patriotic citizens should laud the Buhari effort to face down the challenge and defeat it.  So, the earlier the bishop quit his quixotic quest for fighting corruption but decrying fighting its symptoms, the better

  • The merry still goes round …

    All the things we dreaded/ all the things we hated/ and all the things for which we booted out the other fellows/ they are happening to us once again/ the merry still goes round and round/ and now we are dizzy/ we can’t even cry/ there is no tears to cry anymore …

    Okay, dear reader, this is not a poem, not even a ditty; it is just Hardball experimenting with an intro. One would bet that you can’t even imagine how trying it can get sometimes trying to churn out this stuff daily. Indeed, it just might be interesting to do a how-to-write-a-Hardball someday soon. Task for another day.

    Back to now: what in heaven has elicited the street corner verse above, you might ask? Well, a few days ago, over five ministers were in London for one week for a jamboree tagged “Nigeria Investment Road show in London” The ministers according to report, are those manning Trade and Industry; Agriculture and Rural Development; Transport and Aviation and Water Resources.

    Going by reports, a select group of federal and state governments were in London to highlight business opportunities in energy, agriculture, transport, solid minerals, ICT and infrastructure. The objective, they say, is to create a platform for the Nigerian government to profile business opportunities to UK audience; etc.

    Hmm, same old story bearing much similarity to our immediate, much-maligned past. This is one of such missions under the PDP government which Hardball used to describe as junket and wasteful jamboree.

    Imagine five ministers with their aides and some hangers-on. Add that to states’ officials and their ubiquitous friends and concubines. Can anyone tell the tax payers the exact cost of this week-long talk-show? And last Friday, news broke that six governors are heading for Germany for vocational training. Now, do we have artisans as governors? Also, our NASS has recessed for the year, putting in only about 100 days out of a stipulated 181.

    How come it does not matter to government officials that the economy is in recession and that the times call for frugality? Why is it that our government officials cannot understand that you don’t have to travel abroad these days to tap into global finances and investment opportunities? Why won’t our leaders sit still for a moment, get sober, think through the country’s problems and do even the basics?

    Let’s close with just one graphic illustration of inertia in government: Nigeria’s local beans are much sought after in Europe. It is a multibillion dollars trade. Exactly one year ago, the EU trade commission suspended imports of our beans because of a high content of a certain insecticide. The suspension was for Nigeria to meet EU’s prescribed standards.

    But Nigeria’s ministries and agencies, many of which are on this London sight-seeing trip could not take requisite action; warranting EU to ban Nigeria’s beans for three years. Imagine the fate of numerous beans farmers in Nigeria who had built capacity for export? Imagine the billion dollars losses? Is anyone working with some urgency to reverse the ban? Not likely.

    This our story … the merry still goes round!

  • Oritsejafor agonises

    Oyo Oritsejafor, former president of the Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), but who by virtue of his position and ethnic contiguity with former President Goodluck Jonathan, firmly established himself as the Rasputin of the Jonathan presidential court, agonises.

    His grouse?  That as CAN president, fellow Christians actively insulted and betrayed him. Yet, he claimed, he staked his life for the cause of Nigerian Christendom.

    Pastor Oritsejafor was clearly referring to those best-forgotten days of Boko Haram, when Christians and their temples, even around important Christian festivals like Christmas and Easter, were fair game for those crazed murderers, after some quixotic, Stone Age, Islamic republic.

    But the bubble soon burst. Boko Haram would pounce on fellow Muslims, with even more savagery, that any talk of the blood-thirsty terrorists being some Muslim rod against Christians — or any faith outside Islam for that matter — became a bad and grim joke.

    Crazy and bloody times, back there.  May we never see such again.  And yes, to be fair, Pastor Oritsejafor did his best, as CAN president, to rally the faithful in times of great peril.  Kudos and respect.

    What was unclear, however, was Oritsejafor’s motive for such admirable activism: to serve Nigerian Christendom, or to ingratiate himself into the Jonathan court, in a not-too-complex ethno-political intrigue for power, which catapulted CAN, under the trendy Warri pastor, as a spiritual (?) consultant to the Jonathan court.

    That plan was simple.  With CAN’s reach, Oritsejafor would help dress up an embattled president, desperate for re-election, as some helpless Christian about to be undone and unhorsed by some infidel Muslims.

    If the 2015 electioneering quaked with ultra-dangerous religious antipathy, with not a few church pastors, especially in the Pentecostal movement, passionately campaigning for Jonathan along religious lines, it was the dangerous potency of Oritsejafor’s combustible brew of spiritual secularity or secular spirituality, put in the opportunistic hands of political partisans. Nigerian Christendom never appeared uglier.

    And the scandals.  First was the news that the holy pastor’s private jet was involved in a profane currency smuggle into South Africa, for a controversial arms purchase.  The holy pastor pleaded not guilty, since it was the aircraft’s operator that was involved in the deal. Fair enough.

    But that was after some ugly insinuations about the nativity of the pastor’s jet. The pastor claimed it was a birthday gift from his blessed congregation. But some deep throats grumbled, with rumbling rage, that the pastor should tell them another story.

    But who would say the man of God was guilty of untruth? Not Hardball, who is no iconoclast.

    At that juncture, however, the Oritsejafor political activism had planted enough resent in some conscientious Christians, thoroughly scandalised at the ugly turn of events.  That explains the pastor’s allegation of in-house Christian plots and insults.

    Still, Pastor Oritsejafor, instead of shopping for pity, must brace himself against his own personal demons. Notorious fact: his actions (or inactions) as CAN president, under President Jonathan, brought Nigerian Christendom to ridicule — and no amount of shopping for pity can cancel that.

    Well, Oritsejafor is now history as far as the CAN presidency is concerned. His successor, Rev. Samson Ayokunle, would do well to learn from the pitfalls of his predecessor.

    Otherwise CAN would be assured of nothing but a can of worms.

  • Echoes of Oloye in Alabama

    Bukola Saraki and his deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, should read reports from Alabama State in the United States. They will find a kindred spirit in a man called Mike Hubbard, the speaker of the House of Assembly. He had no immunity and no fellow lawmaker asked for him to be shielded from court action.

    About two weeks ago, he was convicted on 12 felony charges in an ethics case, and he could face 20 years in jail on each count. Sentencing is pending.

    The man is not like Saraki’s deputy, Senator Ike Ekweremadu, who not long ago sent an SOS to the world. For the record, it will be the first time that a senior lawmaker will cry to the tribunal of the world opinion. But this is not to say Hubbard acted with grace or dignity. Like Saraki, Hubbard lashes out at his political opponents and calls the case an act of “political witch-hunt.”

    Saraki has been saying APC political leaders and the presidency accounted for his woes. He does not want to own up to his iniquities. Observers of Alabama politics call it a “black eye” on the image of the state.  It did not stop the fellow lawmakers from washing their hands of the misbehaviour of their colleague and leader.

    Here though, we have a herd Senate under Saraki where corruption stares them in the face and they followed their leader to court in a stinking spectacle of solidarity.

    Unlike Hubbard, Saraki and his men are not accused of making $2.3 million from peddling their influence. But Saraki has to answer forgery charges, which are no less serious than Hubbard’s offence. So, the same western world to which the epistolary deputy Senate president sent an SOS are not willing to spare their own. They are not asking for adjournments of interminable lengths of time.

    Since last year, Saraki has been under the gun for forging house rules to enable him become president. The substantive matter has not been heard. Rather, his lawyers and the judges are in a dance of sophomoric rigmarole. There are postponements. The matter got to the Supreme Court and danced back to the lower courts.

    Meanwhile, the Oloye is still holding court. The matter has been adjourned to September in a comical drama in which Saraki’s lawyer suggested that the judge was tired. The judge agreed. Even the EFCC lawyer raised no objection, except a tongue-in-cheek remark.

    There is a twist in this matter, though. In Hubbard’s case, he had led the legislature to enact an ethics law that forbade unnecessary use of influence, which is how Achebe defines corruption in his political novel, A Man of The People. He is now about to go to jail for violating it. For Saraki, he is accused of forgery in changing a rule.

    Both cases point to contempt for the rule of law and trying to profit by it. “This is a good day for the rule of law,” commented Attorney-General Luther Strange of Alabama State. “This should send a clear message that in Alabama, we hold public officials accountable for their actions.”

    Another representative, Victor Gaston, who welcomed the return of dignity to Alabama legislature, made a great point that those poodles of Saraki and Ekweremadu should learn from.

    Hear him: “The Alabama House is not defined by the actions of any one member, it is defined by the motto that appears on the wall of our Chamber, “Vox Populi” which means “Voice of the People.”

    Can the same be said about the house of Oloye?

  • History and a chief challenge to Buhari

    A few years ago, a former president, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, looked at history with disdain. He translated the disdain into policy.

    Barely a month ago, two key figures in our history were remembered. They were Sir Ahmadu Bello, who was the Sardauna of Sokoto, and Chief Festus Samuel Okotie-Eboh. The cerebral events took place in the north and south respectively.

    The one was the premier of northern Nigeria in the First Republic and the other was a finance minister in the same republic in the Tafawa Balewa government.

    During that Okotie-Eboh event, three-in-one minister, Babatunde Raji Fashola (SAN), showed how our students no longer studied history. He noted that the students who studied abroad, especially in the United States, knew foreign histories more than ours. For instance, they know who Abraham Lincoln was and when he became president.

    An elder pitched in recently. He is the respectable J.O.S. Ayomike, a historian and chairman of the Itsekiri Leaders of Thought. He called for the return of history to the curriculum of schools. He made the call when he was honoured with an Exceptional Lifetime Achievement Award to mark the Golden Jubilee celebration of the Federal Government College, Warri, Delta State.

    Hear him: “I use this occasion to make a call close to my heart. It has bothered many Nigerians that history, as a formal discipline, is no longer taught in our schools up to tertiary level.”

    To demonstrate his fidelity to the past, he presented a gift of history books to the famous college.

    Chief Ayomike’s gifts, which also included several other books, were emblematic of the value of the past. We cannot know who we are without knowing who we were.

    It is ironic that Chief Obasanjo who turned our schools against history has been under the spell of history all his life. Was that not why he fought some partisans over the Owu leadership? Was that not why he wanted to reign as civilian president after his time as military leader? Was that not why he wrote books, especially a historical book about the Nigerian civil war?

    If we neglect the past, we lose the future. That was Chief Ayomike’s point. It is high time the lawmakers and the new president returned us to studying our history.

  • Sinus Bradycadia, Doyin Braggadocio

    Dear reader is of course wondering what has come over Hardball today. Why is he speaking in tongues and setting confusion in the atmosphere, you may wonder? Well let’s say that some fellow was trying to outdo Hardball in some game and he’s only responding Latin for Latin, punch for punch.

    Now let’s unknot the knots of the matter! Remember Doyin (the Bulldog) Okupe? Who can forget the big, swashbuckling medical doctor-turned-Presidential ‘Attack Dog’.

    In fact he was so good at playing hound dog he was appointed twice for the same ‘onerous’ job by two presidents. And guess what? No sooner in his second coming, he started snapping viciously at his first master. Well in Houndland, that must be in the line of duty, nothing personal.

    Besides he has recently returned to the first master to prostrate on all fours like the good dog he is. That of course is classic canine characteristic and survival instincts.

    (Initial lesson: beware of your dog!)

    Now to the main lesson: Dr. Doyin Okupe who abandoned medical practice to make good in the strange new world of political hound-dogging was cornered the other day by Mr. Nemesis. Remember that during his last posting as top dog in Aso Rock Presidential Villa, he was eating with a spade (some call it shovel). Let’s clarify that: under his boss (the simple-hearted President Goodluck Jonathan), he was carting away cash in sacks (by his admission) as if it were end-time.

    Now asked to answer a bit of questions and guess what he says: he pleads an exotic ailment. He says he had suffered an eternal affliction known as Sinus Bradycadia. Wow. Since that is a new one Hardball counters it with something of his own: Doyin Braggadicio.  So all that attack dog stuff was mere puff.

    Have you noticed how all our big men (and women too!) of yesterday who acted as if they owned the world suddenly fall sick or indeed fall to pieces as soon as the hand of the law reaches out for them. Some begin to ride in wheelchair and post ugly pictures of some ugly illnesses to attract our sympathy: sickness as defence.

    But Okupe who’s even endowed with the jowls of a great hound took his own one notch higher when he decided to throw in an arcane medical terminology to impress us. But on the contrary we quickly saw through him as Yoruba would say, ase ko tie le (he is but a weakling!). We now see all that posturing as a tough hound dog as mere braggadocio. That is how we come up with our own Latino (medical!) term: Doyin Braggadocio which means a lily-livered fellow pretending to be hardy.

    By way of explanation, he said he was born with his Sinus Bradycadia – a non-disease based slowness of the heart which though has grown worse with age, he recently underwent a successful procedure in the US and is now under satellite monitor.

    We sympathise with him but urge him to SLOWLY give account of his stewardship as top dog. Simple.

  • Between Justices Salami and Oloyede

    In this take, Hardball is visiting the State of Osun, in the heart of Yorubaland, in Nigeria’s South West.  So, the tale may well start with a grim Yoruba warning: whoever does the unthinkable is fated to suffering the unthinkable!

    That is the rather tragic story of Justice Olamide Folahanmi Oloyede, a judge in the Osun High Court, who just rashly sacrificed her career on the profane altar of crass politics.  The National Judicial Council (NJC) just recommended her for compulsory retirement for gross misconduct, and has asked Governor Rauf Aregbesola to do the needful.  Meanwhile, she hangs in the limbo of suspension, pending the formalisation of her sack.

    That, of course, brings to the fore Justice Ayo Salami.  Justice Salami is a goodly jurist, who conscientiously did his job, and found for justice even if the heavens would fall, when he was president of the Court of Appeal.  For following the straight and narrow path, the Goodluck Jonathan establishment, prompted by political renegades from this same Osun, prematurely ended his career.

    Justice Salami’s crime?  His Court of Appeal forced vote robbers to surrender their loot in Edo, Ondo, Ekiti and Osun.  That stung the rotten Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) back then, to make him a marked man.  First, it was “compulsory” promotion to the Supreme Court, which the man rightly spurned.  Then some gobbledegook allegations, thrown up not to convict him but to railroad him out of the system.

    At the end of the day, President Jonathan played condemnable politics with the Judiciary, and upheld an unjust suspension of an innocent man, until his mandatory retirement at 70.  That brazen injustice may well haunt Jonathan for the rest of his days.  But it also justified why he was unfit to hold the presidency.  Though Justice Salami unfairly exited, he did so with heads unbowed.

    Justice Salami would appear an exact opposite of Justice Oloyede who, in the words of the NJC “crossed the fundamental right of freedom of speech and created a negative perception of the Nigerian Judiciary to the public.  The allegations against the Hon. Judge,” the NJC added, “constitute a misconduct, contrary to Section 292(1)(b) of the 1999 Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, as amended and Rules 1(1) and 5 of the 2016 Revised Code of Conduct for Judicial Officers of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.”

    And there went a judicial officer, virtually kissing her career goodbye, in never-to-be envied circumstances!  And horror, no shred of evidence to back up her wild allegations!

    But whatever would make a high court judge, after basic training in law, either practicing for stipulated years before being appointed judge or rising through the magistracy, commit such blunders with eyes open; and writing turbo-charged political correspondence, against a sitting governor?  No doubt, it would be the first ever that a judge in the Nigerian judicature would essay such recklessness.

    Besides, was the judge aware of the strict separation of power under the presidential system of government and the judiciary’s eminent position to adjudicate constitutional disputes?

    Justice Oloyede got her just desert — and it’s good riddance to bad rubbish!  NJC did good for its prompt action, before the judge infected others with her scandalous conduct.

  • Bullying not allowed

    Even by his account of what happened, Dino Melaye, the Senator representing Kogi West, further exposed how his conduct did not help matters. He was reacting to public criticism of his reported wild behaviour during a Senate executive session to discuss the ongoing trial of Senate President Bukola Saraki and Deputy Senate President Ike Ekweremadu who are accused of forgery by the Federal Government.

    Melaye told reporters at the National Assembly that he was stating his own side of the story to counter “misinformation in the public sphere” about how he allegedly threatened to beat up Senator Oluremi Tinubu (Lagos State Central) during the closed-door meeting.

    Melaye said: “When I stood up and I made my submissions that day in the Senate, all I did was to pacify my colleagues and asked that the case in court be withdrawn because already there is a resolution of the Senate that the rules of the Senate were not forged and since there was a resolution of the Senate that the rules of the Senate were not forged, then, I said, all those who have gone to court should go and withdraw their names from court and that if at the end of the day there were  those who refused to withdraw their names from the court we should penalise them by suspending them. I said that.” He added:  “But I did not use any insolent, abusive, degrading or mannerless language…”  Is that so? Maybe Melaye didn’t understand the effect of his words.

    To be fair, Melaye quoted himself faithfully, perhaps thinking that what he claimed to have said made sense. But did his words make sense? How can any sensible individual argue that a so-called resolution by the Senate should be regarded as the final word on a matter that is beyond what the Senate thinks or what it wants the public to think? A case of forgery against the Senate’s leadership is not strictly an internal matter and cannot be seen as such.

    Certainly, Melaye spoke unreasonably when he tried to give an order that the senators who had taken the matter to court should withdraw from the case, or else, face suspension. His thinking was unbecoming, particularly considering his position as a senator. Indeed, he was talking rubbish!

    So, if someone, in response, allegedly described him as a “thug” in view of his bullying conduct, was that description off the mark?  Also, if someone, in response, allegedly called him a “dog”, doesn’t that depiction fit the bill?

  • EFCC’S new cash crop

    In business parlance, it is said that cash is king. The simple reason is that money, man’s greatest object of desire comes in numerous forms and formats. Well, to the mealy-mouthed common man, money is those dirty, little small notes and coins he is eternally accursed to handle and count forever. To this small fellow, cash is simply money and money is cash.

    But not so the big man: indeed the bigger you get, the less cash you see or handle. Again, for the simple reason that cash is dirty, smelly, pedestrian and the fare of the lowly: in fact, no truly rich man carries cash in today’s world.

    But it used to be said that cash is king because it is ready to use unlike other instruments like credit card, cheque, draft, coupons and even money in the bank. Cash moving from hand to hand, especially in yet digital societies like Nigeria, can work quick magic.

    For instance, would you offer cheque to an area boy who puts a sharp, hard object to your cheek on one of those forbidden, dark traffic nights of Lagos? Would you give the abductors of your husband a draft? Or would you dare suggest to effect that huge kick-back with a bank transfer? When brutish bandits lock-down your apartment in the dead of the night, are you going to offer them your plastic wallet? You would not dare lest they have you cashiered from this side of the cosmos.

    This is why we still say cash is king in this clime because it often still is a matter of life and death. Hardball posits that that mindset may have changed a bit: cash is now a cash crop in Nigeria and here is the corroboration for this assertion. The other day, the number four man in Nigeria, the Speaker of the House of Representative, Hon. Yakubu Dogara, stated that billions of naira is buried in a farm in Abuja.

    Said he during a recent interview: “As we are speaking now, they are recovering monies from someone’s farm somewhere around Abuja. It is very unfortunate where people stole money just for the sake of stealing.”

    But we must interrogate this statement in order to properly situate it. The story was adumbrated some more when it was revealed that it was the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) that dug up about N1.5 billion from a farm (and they were still digging at the time the source story was filed).

    Now, Hardball must warn that this story is not as lineal (or straight forward, if you like) as it seems. And Hardball asks: is cash the new cash crop in Nigeria? Suppose the fellow planted cash on his farm, does EFCC know what he sought to reap? Suppose a diviner had asked the man to plant cash instead of corn in order to harvest gold or diamond or even crude oil?

    Again, EFCC had found huge cash in septic tanks and water tanks and even shrines and groves. Perhaps cash is no longer king, maybe it’s the new deity – cash is god!