The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Save Baby Esther Ajayi

    The story of Baby Esther Ajayi, who fell into a bubbly pot of a neigbhour’s rice, should pierce many a soul, no matter how stony.

    Baby Esther was playing with her elder sister, who sat her on a pavement, in their 9, Olorunsola Street, Mushin, Lagos home.  The play, between toddler and minor, soon turned tragic. Without prying adult eyes, poor Esther soon fell in the boiling pot of rice, and her tender, baby skin got cooked!

    As at the last count, after initial medical treatment, a part of Baby Esther’s neck, according to a report in The Nation, is glued to her chin.  The accident, according to the story, occurred six days to her first birthday.

    So, though Baby Esther was born whole, she risks being deformed for the rest of her life, no thanks to an accident — perhaps preventable, with better parental vigilance — before her first birthday!

    Esther’s case reminds Hardball of a similar case in the late 1970s in Lagos.  A whole pot of boiling water poured on a baby, which innocently crawled her way towards harm’s way.  That baby today still lives. But the trauma of that accident never left her. Like Baby Esther, part of her neck is glued to her chin, so much so that a simple chore of turning the neck is near sheer torture.

    Apart from the physical discomfort, the psychological scalding and trauma has been unquantifiable. That baby is now a mother.  But she seems so retarded you would not know the mother, between her and her child! Of course, it has not been conclusively proven — medically — that the accident at babyhood caused her retardation. But not a few suggest that that trauma, very early in life, altered her life almost beyond belief.

    Baby Esther appears to be manifesting another such a future life of pain, discomfort and sorrow, not to talk of psychological trauma. Already the burnt part of her skin she scratches, she sleeps with one side of her body finding it difficult to turn. Failing to turn however, she screeches, leaving her parents in unquantifiable pains and regret!

    Would this be a life-long torture? It need not be, if there is corrective surgery.  The snag, however, is that such surgeries cost money: this particular one, N4 million.

    Every concerned citizen should, therefore, rally to save this baby from a life of pain.  The social welfare department of Lagos State too should take especial notice. Four million naira, to most Nigerians, is a lot of money.  But to a government, it is not much. Even, that the government would be spending such to save a baby from life-long throes, is even money better spent.

    Still, a word to the Ajayi parents.  Inasmuch as accidents could occur anytime and anywhere — that’s why they are called accidents — it is scandalous that their baby, a precious gift, would fall into a boiling pot of rice under their very noses! It is a form of fatal distraction, the consequence of which they may yet live to rue for the rest of their lives.

    All the same, little Esther should not suffer for her parent’s negligence; or the carelessness of her elder but infant sibling.

    That is why all should move fast to save this poor, innocent baby. She deserves a life of comfort, just as millions of her peers.

  • Constituency cheating

    If the so-called constituency projects are meant to contribute to the country’s development, it is likely that the country would continue to develop at an unacceptably slow pace, considering the revelations in the 2015 constituency project report by a civic technology organisation, BudgITNigeria.

    BudgIT’s Team Leader/Founder Oluseun Onigbinde said at the launch of the report in Abuja: “We have 221 abandoned projects, 145 were completed, and 77 are ongoing. The number tracked was 436 in 16 focus states.” The states tracked are: Lagos, Edo, Ondo, Delta, Jigawa, Niger, Kebbi, Kano, Kaduna, Gombe, Kogi, Ogun, Imo, Anambra, Cross River and Oyo.

    It is no news that, every year, the Federal Government controversially budgets massive amounts in connection with  constituency projects across the country, and this year’s budget for these projects is reported to be N100 billion.

    Onigbinde observed: “The unusual cost of construction in the country compared to its peers worldwide is mindboggling, thereby making contractors the biggest beneficiaries of developmental projects rather than the people.”

    Strangely, the people for whom these projects are supposedly meant often do not know about them. Onigbinde noted: “Citizens are not aware of the budgetary provisions for constituency projects. Secrecy in the preparation, enactment, and implementation of the budget, as well as a pervasive lack of transparency conspire] to keep citizens in the dark…”

    This may well be a form of corruption in a country where the corrupt seem to continuously explore ways to expand the scope of corruption. There is no doubt that lack of public access to information about constituency projects encourages corruption.  For example, according to the BudgIT boss, “Many projects were signed off and contractors were paid, with little or no follow-up reporting and assessment by government authorities.”

    Onigbinde added: “Certain projects in the budget are brazenly not executed as specified in the budget. There are several instances where the actual work done does not match the description of the budget provision. An example is the N20 million construction of two units of two blocks of three classrooms at Dakata and Tudun Murtala wards in Nasarawa Local Government in Kano State, where only one block of two classrooms was built, despite an awareness of the authorities that this project was being tracked.”

    Who will monitor constituency projects effectively, and how well can effective monitoring check corruption? The people who are supposed to be beneficiaries of constituency projects need to demonstrate greater political consciousness and demand greater transparency from their elected representatives.

    As for people in power who think constituency projects are a source of self-enrichment, they need to be told that this kind of thinking is stinking thinking.

  • The Chibok Archipelago

    There cannot be a more graphic way to situate the Chibok debacle than to drink from the fount of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn who captured the horrors of Soviet political prisoners in his book, The Gulag Archipelago.

    But you would think that Hardball is merely exploiting the sound and cadences of Solzhenitsyn’s great book to tell the Chibok story. No. Similarities abound not just in tonality but in the depth of psychological trauma of the victims of both situations and eras. Consider the official sleight of hand and a failure of intelligence both mental and architectural in both narratives.

    While Solzhenitsyn’s Archipelago, published in 1973 is about the forced labour camps of Russia’s dark Stalinist era which damaged and dehumanised citizens of conscience, Chibok’s archipelago is of a slightly different hue.

    Chibok is the story of failed elite in a semi-failed state using her citizen as fodder for their eternal folly. Chibok is the modern gulag where grubby leaders dispose of their citizens like refuse.

    To put Chibok in perspective, on April 14, 2014, about 276 (exact number still unknown) girls were abducted from Government Girls Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State by a minor terror group known as Boko Haram.

    Since then, most of the girls – over 200 – remain missing.

    Last week, there were bold newspaper headlines to the effect that President Muhammadu Buhari has approved fresh probe of missing Chibok girls. According to the report, the President had in January ordered his security adviser to set up a committee to carry out a fresh investigation into the circumstance of the Chibok bungle.

    There had been uproar during the first year anniversary of the government when no concrete report was issued on the girls. It was always the same lax way manner of the former President Goodluck Jonathan. Several weeks rolled by before his government woke up to the reality of a possible abduction and it took immense international pressure and a global campaign to stir ex-President Jonathan to a grudging action.

    A 26-member committee was set up then to investigate the abduction and ascertain the exact number of missing students. This committee had reported that there were 276 girls and that 57 managed to escape. But that was as much light as was shed on the great Chibok mystery.

    Here are some benumbing posers: these were supposedly final year students of a government school; how come they cannot be identified with some exactitude? If as many as 56 girls escaped, how come they did not serve as lead to tracing some of the missing girls?

    Finally, how could a band of terrorists move so large a number of people in the early days without trail by Nigeria’s intelligence corps? Let us compare for a moment the trauma of the parents and siblings of the missing girls to that of those labourers of the Russian Gulag of yore and you will agree that the Chibok narrative is wrought in the archipelagos of the mind.

    • CORRECTION: Prince Tony Momoh was Information Minister under President Ibrahim Babangida and not Muhammadu Buhari as Hardball mistakenly stated last Thursday. Error regretted.

  • Senatorial letter writer

    Once upon a time, on Gen. Muhammadu Buhari’s first coming as military head of state, there was a public letter writer.

    As Buhari’s Minister of Information, Prince Tony Momoh, famed journalist and lawyer, wrote what he called “Letter to My Countrymen”.

    In those missives, the minister engaged his compatriots on the best of patriotic practices.

    His principal, Gen. Buhari, scoffed at the fictive Andrew, that nevertheless epitomised the very popular notion among Nigerians back then, to “check out”, telling them: “Nigeria is our country. We must stay and salvage it together.”

    Minister Momoh reinforced that message, with his letter writing engagements, pleading with, persuading and logically prompting his compatriots to give their country a second chance; and join in its rebuilding.

    The media?  O, those ones were at their cynical worst. With the Buhari government’s exploits on Decree 2 and Decree 4 (under the second law, two top journalists were gaoled), they were too grumpy to be receptive to Buhari’s — and minister’s — redemptive pleas.  That was then.

    Now, at President Buhari’s second coming as elected president, a letter writer of a different hue has emerged.

    He is no less than Ike Ekweremadu, the deputy Senate president, who incidentally had written and launched, with fan fair, a book on “patriotism”, writing letters to hang his country on the gallows of the “international community”.

    Indeed, the quixotic search for the “international community”, in times of personal throes, is not new.  It was patented by Olisa Metuh, in the opening days of President Buhari’s tenure, as a sort of coping mechanism, that Mr. Metuh’s party had lost federal power.

    Senator Ekweremadu can, of course, insist that his letters didn’t hang his country — and Hardball would be the first to admit he didn’t necessarily have to admit that, since it was Hardball’s interpretation, and Hardball is not infallible.

    Besides, Ekweremadu and Hardball approach this matter from different prisms. Both are therefore logically bound to arrive at contrary destinations.

    Still, Hardball insists it is rich for the deputy Senate president, an integral part of the agency of the Nigerian state (not just a partisan apparatchik, like Mr. Metuh) is writing a letter excoriating his country, that gave him such a high platform to stand.

    It is even more condemnable that the so-called letter is premised on a base personal motive, which moves to confuse alleged personal indiscretions with the institutional health of the Senate and (illogic of all illogics) to conflate putative personal comeuppance with the mythical collapse of democracy!

    But while still at base motives: in that “international community”, where would a minority senator emerge as deputy Senate president, through an illicit and soulless trade-off, fuelled by crass careerism, and still show his opportunistic face, in the comity of “international senators”?

    Mr. Ekweremadu can write whatever letters he likes.  But in playing the victim and demagogue, he should at least recognise his limits. Surely, as a lawyer, he should know: he who comes to equity must come with clean hands!

    So, he should quietly go have his day in court and stop embarrassing himself and his country.

  • Talk is cheap

    Twice in two months, on two different days and on two different platforms, Minister of State for Petroleum Resources Dr. Ibe Kachikwu said something many Nigerians would really like to accept as true. But it sounded too good to be true.

    Kachikwu was on June 23 a guest speaker at the 10th Annual Business Law Conference of the Nigerian Bar Association Section on Business Law (NBA-SBL) in Abuja, with the theme: Law reform and economic development. He spoke on the sub-theme: Future prospects for the oil and gas industry.

    He said something very important, which is that Nigeria would stop ridiculing itself and end fuel importation by 2019, less than three years away. Who believed him? The absurdity of an oil-rich country that imports fuel is so tragic that it has become comic. But who is crying and who is laughing?

    Notably, Kachikwu said the country’s refineries were currently operating at about 40-50 per cent capacity, which was not good enough. He painted a picture of the problem with a chain of rhetorical questions: “How does a refinery work if the pipelines supplying them are out most of the year and so they can’t supply crude? You can’t refine an empty space. How does it work when you don’t do your turnaround maintenance or if when monies are budgeted for them they are diverted? How does it work if your contracting process is so long that you never meet the turnaround days you’re supposed to? How does it work when you send the wrong set of people with the wrong set of skills to what should have been very important portfolios in the establishment?”

    It is noteworthy that a month earlier Kachikwu had said the Federal Government’s target was to stop fuel importation in 2019. The forum was an interactive session on removal of fuel subsidy organised by Coalition of Civil Society Organisations (CSOs) in Lagos. “I am putting so much strength in terms of what do we do with our refineries, because that ultimately is the solution,” he had declared.

    Kachikwu had also said: “… the plan is that by December 2018 we should have reduced our importation of petroleum product by 60 per cent. This is because we would have brought enough money to get our refineries working to the tune of about 90 per cent.” Of course, a plan needs action for materialisation.

    Repetition has its uses as well as its misuses. Merely repeating something that sounds good to the public is not the same thing as achieving something that makes the public feel good. Stopping fuel importation will need far more than mouthing repetitions.

  • Hardball bids for bankrupt states

    By this piece, Hardball is applying to take over the 15 states in Nigeria said to be at the brink of bankruptcy. Of course, this means a state of insolvency whereby the state government cannot meet its basic financial obligations. As we have seen in the last one year or so, many states of the federation have been failing intermittently in meeting basics, such as monthly pensions and salaries bills.

    Some states have been doing gidigbo with these basic obligations that Hardball is of the mind that they need help. Some proposed paying half salaries; some have mooted a cancellation of many months of arrears among other gimmicks some minders of some states are dredging up.

    But our elders have one rather mischievous saying to the effect that when a man fights to the point of hauling fist-full of sands at his opponent instead of throwing manly punches, then the fellow is calling for help. And one asks: why would elders watch two men slug it out until their tongues begin to hang out in breathless palpitation? Well, Hardball digresses.

    The point being made is: a man who cannot pay workers’ salaries for four months consecutively is probably never going to be able to pay it in four years. And like the tired pugilist of the old fable, who begins to throw fist-full of sands instead of punches, he sure needs help. Of course he would never admit it and call for help; and in street fights there are no towels to be thrown in as a mark of surrender as happens in prized fights. But urgent help is in order.

    Hardball hereby posits that in a rather charged atmosphere of deceit and chicanery, all would be fair that ends well – even euthanasia. In other words, you either allow the fellow to brawl to his sad end or you help him out of his misery by breaking the fight.

    Now that it has become apparent that most states’ leaders have reached the end of their tethers, Hardball is playing with some ideas. He is waiting in the wings to play the merry undertaker; he is putting together, a consortium of consultants to inherit all the dying states.

    Hardball projects that soon enough the crunch will come upon them. Soon enough, the Federal Government’s bailout will dry up; soon enough the workers would refuse to take it anymore and in the throes of acute hunger, ‘eat’ up their traducers.

    Hardball will come to the rescue. And what is the magic wand he is coming with, you might ask? Simple, very simple. As Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson wrote in “Why Nations Fail,” one will simply initiate a government that will be open, transparent, accountable and responsive to the citizens and the great masses of the people.

    One example: it is utterly criminal for any state in Nigeria to declare an IGR of N2.2 billion in an entire year. Such a government is simply not responsive, transparent and accountable to its people. Such a state is simply stealing from its citizens and it is destined to fail.

  • St. Paul, the Metuh, has landed!

    Guess the Saul sensationally turned Paul, in Nigeria’s anti-corruption war?  Olisa Metuh, of course, the hitherto loquacious Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) national publicity secretary, but of late very gentle!

    But maybe “Saul sensationally turned Paul” is somewhat hyperbolic. Yeah, the politician-cum-opposition instinct in Metuh bristled with cynicism over the war, perhaps, at the earliest stage of his docking; even aligning himself with the theory of “witch hunt”, each time a member of the opposition was hauled before a court for alleged sleaze.

    Geez!  Back then, he made a ritual of instantly alerting the “international community” on how the war against sleaze was threatening Nigerian democracy, no matter how absurd or illogical such a stance sounded.

    Well, all that is in the past — and, right now, it all appears quiet and contrite on the Metuh front.

    Contrite?  Again, that might be another hyperbole.  It could even be near to risking contempt of court, in a case the court is yet to determine — for “contrite” presupposes penance after guilt. But the court is yet to pronounce Mr. Metuh guilty, and he may well be innocent.  In any case, he is presumed so; and Hardball has absolutely no intention of suggesting otherwise.

    Still, it is interesting: Mr. Metuh’s latest submission to the court, via his lawyers. The lawyers propose their client returns the N400 million in question, which he was alleged to have illicitly collected from the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA), the vile spigot that allegedly turned Nigeria’s common purse into election-time partisan cash for PDP.

    By this new reasoning, nothing has changed. Metuh maintains he didn’t still know the cash came from an illegal source. He maintains former President Goodluck Jonathan gave him a privately official (or is it officially private?) assignment, for which he mobilised him with the cash. He maintains too that the job had been done, and the released cash spent for the purpose.

    But since this matter just won’t go away, and to show his good faith that, by his action, he didn’t have any sinister motive, he told the court that his people, friends and associates had agreed to mobilise funds to return the contentious N400 million to the federation’s coffers.

    Well, the ball is in the court of the courts, and we’ll soon see how both parties would play.

    What however interests — well, thrills — Hardball is Mr. Metuh’s new conversion to the anti-corruption train. ”It is pertinent,” to directly quote Metuh’s lawyers, “to restate our client’s continued support for the anti-corruption campaign, which is necessary to ensure probity in the affairs of Nigeria, to the extent that it is conducted within the rule of law”.

    And in the rich ways of neophytes, bandying a new faith, Metuh even signed off with prayer: “Finally, it is our client’s prayer that this nation shall come through this difficult time by the grace of the Almighty God” — somebody, somewhere, shout a thunderous amen to that!  Aaammmmmeeennnn!

    Well, there you have it: the great Olisa Metuh has landed — and his beloved “international community” had better take note!

  • Night market

    Hardball would have described it as ‘night business’, but it is more appropriately night market for that conjures up its full ominousness. But even that does not capture the thought and idea needed to be purveyed here on a matter that touches deep down to the very soul of our country. Yoruba seem to have a better hang of it. They call it oja okunkun – meaning to trade in the dark.

    So why would you transact under the cover of the night? And if you elect to, you cannot but be willing to accept all the vile and vices that come with it.

    Night market is transacted under very opaque lights and lightings. This portends two immediate dangers: you cannot see clearly the faces of buyers and sellers. Second, you cannot be sure of the exact hues and coloration of the articles of trade. For instance, you may have bargained for isi ewu (head of a he-goat, used for that sumptuous delicacy of same name), only to get home and find that you had paid for a bearded skull, and so on!

    But even more portentous is the fact that night market is the fare of everyone – including spirits, witches, wizards and ghosts. You are bound to encounter strange things if they don’t encounter you. Be careful not to look too closely or mope or gawk. Of course the more you look, the less you are bound to see. In fact looking too closely is liable to earn you a cold chill or a fainting spell. The kind of feeling you get when you look too closely at a passerby and swear that that must be Uncle John going. Then you remember Uncle John had passed on last year. You instinctively seek to take a confirmatory look and you are not sure whether the fellow suddenly vanished or mixed with the night crowd. Such is the thing with night market

    Such is verisimilitude of a certain document known as the Report of the Auditor-General of the Federation. And such is the source of Hardball’s gripe today. The all-important Office of the Auditor-General of the Federation (OAGF) is charged with producing the all-important annual report and accounts of all financial transactions in Nigeria.

    Now the OAGF and the so-called report have become like transacting in a night market; or dark market if you like. The crucial document which has the singular capacity of reducing official corruption by half if properly done, like article for night trade, is hardly seen by Nigerians. The document, if and when produced, is passed to the Public Accounts Committee of the Senate as is required by law. The PAC is supposed to stage public hearing on the report but they do nothing of such. In fact, they simply bury the report.

    In this Internet age, you would think the report would be posted up somewhere, but zilch. You will never find it. Between the OAGF and the Senate, the public never finds a copy.

    Bottomline: the OAGF which is the fulcrum of the fight against corruption is a night market where corruption is cleverly concealed under the dark covers of officialdom. To think that the OAGF spends about N3 billion of tax-payers’ money in annual budget for its pointless annual ritual.

     

  • Rice-for-child swap on the rice (sorry, rise)

    The old line in the mid-80s was a-rice o compatriots! Then essential commodities, most notably, rice was so scarce that each time Nigerians heard the word rise, in any conversation, speech or even the national anthem, they would come to attention, if only to find out the next location for the rationed sale of rice.

    There was a famous cartoon in one national newspaper of that era, which depicted guests apparently at a seminar snoring away even as the speaker pranced and puffed, presenting his speech. The great moment came when the speaker said: “In conclusion, all these would give rise…” and pronto, the snoozing audience came alive exclaiming: “Rice? Did he just say rice?! Where?!”

    Today, Nigeria’s rice conundrum has shifted another gear and downhill it seems to throttle. Two grievous incidents happened last week to buttress this point.

    Inside Government House, Borno State, Northeast of Nigeria, there was a near-fatal shootout as policemen and soldiers struggled over control of bags of rice meant for Internally Displaced Persons (IDPs). Also in Borno, some officials of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA) were apprehended attempting to re-bag rice meant for IDPs with a view to diverting them.

    But all these would be mild drama compared to the event last Sunday at Singer Market, Fagge Local Government Area of Kano State. A man identified as Mallam Yusuf Bala procured a bag of rice from Alhaji Suleiman Bagudu, a rice dealer in the market and reportedly left his five-year-old son at the rice dealer’s. He had promised to dash home for some more money to make payment. He never returned for his boy.

    When he was traced to his residence, he confessed he was impoverished, thus had to devise such a means to find sustenance for his family. This trick is not novel by any means. A woman had played it out quite successfully in Akure, Ondo State recently.

    With the strictures at the land borders to curb rice importation and attendant massive smuggling, it has become apparent that Nigeria, the giant of Africa boasting of a population of over 170 million, can hardly produce one tenth of her most important staple food. The prices of the imported commodity have continued to skyrocket, almost jumping out of the reach of the common man. A 50 kg bag, which sold for a little below N10, 000 about a year ago, has almost double, depending on the city you are.

    One worries that so much hoopla has been made about local production of rice; in fact, the last government had claimed it was going to achieve local sufficiency by 2015. Yet hardly can local rice be found in any significant quantity in any part of the country. So much for diversification of the economy, food security and the rediscovery of Nigeria’s rice belt, which had been the buzz phrases in the past few years?

    We knew about crude oil swap deals; now we have rice for child swaps; what next?

  • Messy exit for Messi

    Messi and what a mess!

    That should be the agonized cry from the vanquished Argentine camp, as the Argentina national team fell short, yet again, to clinch the Copa America, which Chile, the defending champions, retained 4-2, after penalty shootout, after regulation and extra time ended in a barren draw.

    For Argentina, with the mercurial Lionel Messi, arguably the most talented footballer of his generation, it was three straight defeats, in three straight finals, in three straight years!

    In 2014, it was at the World Cup in Brazil.  In 2015, the Copa America in Chile.  And now, 2016, it is, again, Copa America in the USA.

    The Argentine failure, in this special Copa America centenary (the first tournament was in 1916), may well underscore Messi’s epochal failure for Argentina, despite his fair personal claim as the best footballer ever, after Pele, the Brazilian great and three-time World Cup winner and Diego Maradona, Messi’s compatriot, as hugely controversial as he is hugely talented!

    To make matters worse for Messi, the tempestuous Marasona snaps at his heels.  Even before the latest Copa debacle, before Argentina made a mincemeat of the not-so-innocent hosts, USA, with a four-goal drubbing in the semi-final, Maradona had dismissed Messi as lacking leadership, to lead Argentina anywhere.

    Maradona is perhaps gloating right now!  First, he has bragging rights.  When Maradona ruled the roost in global football, he won the World Cup for his country.

    Then, the bad tempered Maradona — and perhaps, the equally hurting Argentines — would equate the fluke of a penalty shootout loss, in a crucial final, as confirmation of Maradona’s leadership charge.

    Yet, it is not clear if history would not be far kinder to Messi, than it would ever be to Maradona.  For one, Maradona, despite his prodigious skills, was at best a flawed genius.  At his first World Cup at 18, at Espana 82 World Cup, he was red-carded for viciously kicking a Brazilian opponent in the groin.  At 17, Pele had won the World Cup, at his first try.

    But even at the height of his glory in Italia 90, his first goal against England, in that great match, was fraudulent self-help.  That Maradona promptly appropriated that goal, even after TV camera evidence showed it was carefully palmed in, as some “hand of God”, showed one with an intrinsic penchant to cheat.

    Though he would later score a goal of sheer genius, after single-handedly routing the whole England team, the terrible chink in his character was established.  That would become irrevocably etched with his later doping scandals.

    Not Messi.  Though he too earned a yellow card for diving in the June 27 Copa final defeat, he has been a far fairer athlete than Maradona.  Character-wise, therefore, he would appear to tower above Maradona, despite his puny size.

    Still, Messi would lug the unenviable record of never winning , for his country, the World Cup, as the world’s greatest player of his era: a feat both Pele (thrice) and Maradona (once) achieved.  But he, at the Copa, emerged as Argentina’s highest ever goal scorer, so far, for the national team, besting Gabriel Batistuta’s record.

    But that would appear cold comfort, after the umpteenth loss, in three consecutive finals!

    Messi has turned his back on his national team by sensationally announcing his retirement.  Argentina would miss him; and so would the world, in Argentine colours.

    But his exit couldn’t have been messier, exiting on the low.  How would history capture it?  Messy exit for Messi, perhaps?

    O, what messy business, the exit of this prodigy called Messi is!