The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Take me to Panama!

    Is Hardball a dull fellow? Why is it that he always misses on all the historic ‘actions’ happening in his time? The other day, it was the Dasukigate revelations which showed dozens of fake and obviously phoney companies floated overnight in a bazaar of global loot-laundering.

    Dasukigate as it turned out was for all-comers; every smart alec in town, every half-wit took part and all roads led to the Office of the National Security Adviser (ONSA) who doled out Nigeria’s cash as if he would die if he stopped. Almost everyone joined that big money scramble except Hardball. He buried his in the dreary thickets of words. He probably thinks the world waits on him. But alas, he may come up from his forage one of these days to find that the world had gone!

    Well some digressions there, but this time, the world; or let’s say the smart world was dealing in a place called Panama. According to the news in the whirl, eleven million secret documents, now famously called the Panama Papers, have been leaked from a Panama-based law firm, Mosack Fonseca.

    Panama for those who may not know is a Central American country hemmed between Colombia and Costa Rica. It is also bordered extensively by the Caribbean Sea on the northern parts and the Pacific Ocean south-wise.

    For a long while in its history, it was a stooge of the United States that built and controlled the strategic Panama Canal. The canal which beats a most important path between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans is in itself as iconic as icons go.

    We digress yet again. The Panama papers, eleven million of them, contain largely illicit and secretive monetary transactions emanating from nearly all corners of the world. Huge monies and assets too large, too dangerous or too hot to be kept within countries’ borders are squirreled to Panama.

    Shell companies (or fake companies if you like) are formed on the go and these hot assets are quietly warehoused there. No questions are asked, fronts (or ghosts) are used as directors and from thence, these monies move around the world. That basically is how it works.

    As the civilised world pressured Switzerland which enjoyed that reputation as the world’s banker of slush funds, money grubs migrated to Panama, a middle-of-the-way banana republic.

    Just one law firm has 11m documents, consider what the troll might be when all the law firms and financial consultancies are checked out.

    They said water had no enemy but it’s actually money that seems to have no qualms or boundaries. To think that the Prime Minister of Iceland too has secret stash in Panama! Did anyone ever know where on the universe was Iceland! No exaggerations, it is actually a large icy island near the northernmost part of the world. Did you ever meet anyone from Iceland? Probably a frigid (unexcitable) people, what would they need money for!

    And now the meat of this tale: if frozen people from Iceland partook in the Panama pancake, how come Hardball’s name is not on that list? That simply means Hardball is dead to the world and that cannot be a particularly great virtue is it?

     

    • This piece was published on April 11

  • Is this much ado about nothing?

    Among the legacies of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and its 16 inglorious years as the country’s ruling party, there is this curious matter of the profile of Professor Wale Oladipo who emerged as the party’s national secretary at some point.

    A high-profile columnist on June 21 focused on this curiosity in a piece titled “A nuclear scientist at the crossroads”.  It was a curious piece about a curious issue.

    The columnist asked: “Who is he, really, and where is he coming from?  What positions has he held in the nuclear science establishment?  What books or scientific papers has he published?  Does he by any chance hold a patent?  If so, for what product or process?”

    He went on to say: “His formal designation is professor of Nuclear Analytical Techniques, and his last known workplace address is the Centre for Energy Research and Development (CERD), at the Obafemi Awolowo University in Ile-Ife. CERD would therefore seem to be the appropriate starting point for learning more about Professor Oladipo.”

    It is interesting that this columnist’s efforts to learn more about the man resulted in further unclarity. He said: “At this writing, he does not figure on CERD’s web site.  I sent an email to CERD asking for information about him.  No luck.  I followed up with a phone call; no luck.  Perhaps it is CERD’s policy not to give out any information about their faculty and staff, for security reasons.  And CERD is nothing if not a national security facility.”

    The search continued: “My Internet search turned out more information about Oladipo as PDP national secretary than about his scholarship in the arcane field of particle physics.  It also yielded more information about his time in prison custody with Iyiola Omisore in the investigation of the murder of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, Chief Bola Ige, than about his scientific work.”

    The curious columnist went further: “Even his home page, such as it is, says nothing about his education and the universities he attended.  There is no picture showing him at a nuclear facility, or at his study surrounded by books and scientific papers; no picture showing him with colleagues at a conference; none showing him in any scientific context whatsoever.”

    This cannot be a dead end. Could this be a failure of research or the failure of a researcher? Curious observers want more information, and more information should be made available, considering the public’s high impression of the man’s impressive designation. Or is this much ado about nothing?

  • Policing criminals and criminal policing

    It has often been said that in Nigeria, anything and everything is possible. So why does Hardball think that some things should not happen in Nigeria of 2016? Why is he struck dumb when he hears or reads about certain strange stuff? Is it sheer naivety or is it that he is not in tune with reality?

    Here is one good example of such matters that set Hardball tizzy. At about 9.30 pm on May 30, 2016, as the report goes in a national newspaper, a detachment from the Owutu Police Division in Ikorodu area of Lagos State pounced on Ori Okuta in the Agric area of Ikorodu. They seized on anyone in sight, intimidating and subduing them – boots and butts and ‘abducting’ them to their station nearby.

    They ‘captured’ over 70 persons, including a 15-year-old boy and a Lagos State Polytechnic student. At the station, according to the account of the student, it immediately became a sordid mammy-market of sort where you bargain-and-pay-for-your-freedom or you are doomed. In a while the place was a beehive of activities as relatives of ‘captives’ converged quickly to ‘rescue’ their people lest they stay in the cell overnight for a start.

    The price for freedom was between N5000 and N30.000 depending on your ability to bargain with the police and whether you tried to prove you know the ‘law’ or your right. Those who insisted on their innocence and their right paid more.

    Such was the case of the student, Taiwo who wanted to know what his offence was slapped to muteness. He bought his freedom with N30.00 ‘and with profuse ‘abeg’, as we say here, according to his account. Another victim, Yemi recounted that he was in front of his wife’s shop and only intervened when the police picked up the 15-year-old son of his friend. The lad had called out as they make to haul him away.

    But he too was pummeled by the team and taken away. He paid for his freedom.

    But if you thought this was Hardball’s usual elasticitification (this is a Hardball special, don’t bother rushing to your dictionary) of facts, here is the police’s side of the story. The officer in charge of the Nigeria Police Complaint Response Unit (CRU), CSP Abayomi Shogunle said: “It is a weeklong operation and it is in response to recent cult-related attacks in Ikorodu town. Some of the apprehended persons found not to be linked to the ongoing investigation, have been released after initial screening, while 120 persons of interest… have been transferred to the State Criminal Investigation Department, Yaba.”

    Hmmm, What more can Hardball add than to say that if you have to haul in the whole community in order to find the criminal elements therein then sorry, Hardball must term it CRIMINAL POLICING that is starkly bereft of intelligence. Would Scotland Yard work like this?

  • The Senate also cry

    The Rich Also Cry was a hugely popular Mexican soap, aired a few years ago, on terrestrial Nigerian television.  Those pre-cable days!  When The Rich got aired, the street was funereal-quiet, as nearly every family that boasted a TV set was captured.  Such humongous popularity!

    But with the latest development in the Senate, and the screeching fore-cry issuing from that hallowed — no, it can’t be hollow, now! — chamber, that soap could well have been a rare hit of life imitating art!

    What’s brewing at the Senate?  Not much, really.  Just a straight case of alleged forgery, which a court can clear in no time: the guilty slammed in the can; and the innocent discharged and acquitted with honour.  But this simple gamut of due process appears giving someone, somewhere the jitters!

    Well, Senate President Bukola Saraki and his Deputy, Ike Ekweremadu, with one or two others in the National Assembly bureaucracy, are named in another scandal — that of allegedly forging the Senate Rule, under which they both got into office.

    To be sure, the charge is not really new.  It had been there for almost a year now.  The Police were said to have investigated the allegations, and established a prima facie case.  But for some reasons, the Attorney-General, Abubakar Malami, SAN, has been bidding his time.

    But all that seems changed, as the indications are that the case is ready to go to court.  That, however, has provoked a fearsome shriek, as official reaction from the Senate, as usual mixing up individuals’ putative culpability with the Senate’s institutional identity.  That, Hardball can outright say, is rich — and extremely cheap.

    In reacting to the formal prosecution of the case, Sabi Abdullahi, Senate Media and Public Committee chairman, went absolutely ballistic, threatening everyone, jabbing at the Muhammadu Buhari executive, throwing hideous hooks at the All Progressives Congress (APC) top party hierarchs, and accusing about anyone in sight, of allegedly trying to destabilise the Senate.

    He even growled, like the absolutely provoked bad-tempered would, that prosecuting a case of alleged forgery could cripple the doctrine of separation of powers, and its handmaiden, checks-and-balances, with the sinister hint that such a move could be impeachable for the president!

    But how so?  Is the president docked for forgery?

    But after all the thunder and tempest, the case is clear and very simple.  That Saraki and Ekweremadu tweaked the Senate Rules to aid their controversial elections is only an allegation.  It is trite: he who alleges must prove.

    So, if the state must prove; and defendants avail themselves of their rights under the law, what is the excitement about?  Or is it just a case of the guilty being afraid?

    If true, that would be well and truly tragic.  But it can’t be, even if that is what Senator Abdullahi’s media filibustering would suggest.  We just cannot have the highest legislative chamber in the land, which principal officers gained office by fraudulent means.

    So, let justice come blind-folded.  Let the innocent be freed, but the guilty be chained.  But let no one resort to funny threats.  Far from strength, it is a sign of contemptible weakness.

  • The baby died

    This baby gave us enough time to intervene but it’s unfortunate that we lost her when arrangements had been concluded for her surgery.”  The speaker was Dr. Pius Simon, the Consultant Neonatologist who was managing the baby called Aisha before she died. The baby born with her heart outside her chest died on June 14 at the University of Maiduguri Teaching Hospital (UMTH), Borno State.

    It was tragic enough that Aisha died. It was even more tragic that she died while waiting for a heart surgery.  A report quoted Dr. Simon as saying that Aisha died of infection because her heart had stayed outside the chest wall for too long.

    Before she died, a report said Dr. Simon “did voice his fears for her survival due to the continued exposure of the heart, more so that she was delivered at home and brought to UMTH three days later, hence increasing the chances of infection”.  The doctor reportedly said that the surgery should have been done “within four to six hours after delivery”.

    Aisha was admitted at the neonatology centre of the Pediatric Unit of the UMTH three days after her birth in Gonigori in Geidam Local Government Area of Yobe State. Following the baby’s death, the Chairman, Medical Advisory Council of UMTH, Dr. Mohammed Bashir, made some important clarifications.

    Dr. Bashir said:  ”The First Lady Aisha Buhari did not donate any cash through us (UMTH) to the baby. What she was planning to do was to fly the baby to Ghana for a surgery.” He also said: “It was the N2.5m that Yobe State Government gave that we started making arrangement to take the baby to Enugu when she gave up. I am surprised to hear that the First Lady donated N3m for the surgery of the baby. I want to make it categorically clear that we didn’t receive that money here.”

    However, certain things remain unclarified. If Aisha got to UMTH three days after she was born on June 5, why was she still waiting for the critical operation at the time she died on June 14?  Could the operation have been performed in Nigeria? Why was Ghana an option?

    Aisha’s lamentable death is yet another grim reminder of the inexcusable inadequacies of the country’s health care system. There was enough time for a surgical intervention, which did not happen before she died. Those who allowed her to die without the needed intervention should hang their heads in shame.

  • Female and furious

    Femininity is second nature to gentleness, sensitivity and kindness. This soft side is more so when it comes to matters of children. Children anywhere, irrespective of their parentage ought to find succur and favour in the lush laps of fair gender. On the contrary, Hardball would probably get into trouble if he delves into what may be termed a generalised assertion to the effect that women seem to possess an uncanny capacity to become soulless, even ruthless in maltreating the other woman’s child.

    Two examples in The Punch of last Tuesday will suffice. The first report says: “woman tortures five-year-old step-daughter for bed-wetting” and the second reads: “Policeman’s wife batters 10-year-old niece for N30.00″.

    The two stories on facing pages of 4 and 5 have graphic photographs to illustrate what Hardball would describe as feminine stone-heartedness. The five-year-old little girl has her tiny, tender back scalded and pock-marked feminine vile and hatred.

    What could be the offence of this tot? The step-mother accuses the little girl of being obstinate. “She is very stubborn. If I give an instruction, she will not follow it. She is bed-wetting and I have cautioned her several times. She is also fond of stealing meat from the pot of stew. I only beat her with brooms; I don’t use any other object on her.”

    This is the blabber of the woman known as Kudirat Oyediran. The little girl’s mother had died only three months after her birth and her father had married Kudirat to take care of her. But all Kudirat seems to have inflicted on the child are pains and psychological trauma that is bound to linger into her adulthood.

    On the other story, the picture shows the back and buttocks of the 10-year-old girl with various degrees of gashes and patches of wounds. Mrs. Caroline Akanwa was said to have brought the 10-year, old from the village to help out with her petty trading. It happened that Caroline, mother of three, beats this little girl at every excuse that her back and buttocks are riddled with scars, some very fresh.

    The little girl’s school teacher had noticed the wounds and taken her to hospital for treatment. The hospital requested for a police report before treatment and the matter was referred to the Lagos State Office of the Public Defender (OPD). The two women are in ‘dialogue’ with the police.

    But the point to be made here is that what would prompt a mother to act in such furious wickedness towards another woman’s child?

    The matter of the other woman’s child obviously needs some interrogation; too often we read stories of extreme callousness like the above. Recall also, biblical King Solomon and the two women: one wanted the baby in dispute split into two! Do certain fiends overtake some women when they are charged with another woman’s child?

  • P-D-P … commotion!

    During its halcyon days of unquestioned power, which it boasted would last for 60 years at the first go, the rallying cry, exultant and triumphant, was clear.

    Pee-Dee-Pee … PAWA!

    But these days, just one year outside power, the music has changed.  A cacophony of chaos and bitterness has taken over.  Sons and daughters of yesterday’s power are busy falling upon themselves with murderous relish.

    Pee-Dee-Pee … commotion!

    Might Iyiola Omisore, via the Ekiti rigging audio tape, be right after all — that PDP is nothing without federal power?  Ha — and what prescience!

    Since losing power, the grandmasters of partisan impunity have known no peace.  But that would seem to get progressively worse, given the ECOMOG show of Senator Ali Modu Sheriff (SAS) of June 13, and its resultant uproar.

    As news had it, SAS with his ECOMOG (euphemism for an unruly and potentially violent mob) stormed the PDP Wadata Plaza national secretariat in Abuja.  SAS claimed he had a court order to take over — and eventually declared himself “in charge” till 2018.

    But court order is one; gaining entrance is another.  Didn’t the Bible say you can’t capture a strongman’s abode if you didn’t first bind him?  The kingdom of PDP post-power years suffereth violence!.

    So SAS, street-wise guy, mobilised his ECOMOG, which seemed to have put the fear of God into Ahmed Markarfi’s Caretaker Committee.  After an initial gra-gra (Nigerian urban-speak for empty braggadocio), the Markarfi committee melted!.

    Now, SAS and his roughnecks are lords of the manor.  Markarfi and co are staking claims from exile!.

    To be fair though: SAS’s ECOMOG may have painted, in stark colours, that SAS won’t take no for an answer.  The police initially rebuffed the mob.  But on Sheriff flashing his court order at the Inspector-General of Police, Solomon Arase, the police had no choice but to give way to a court order.

    But if SAS had a valid court order, why the ECOMOG flexing of muscles?  Well, it perhaps has something to do with the impunity embedded in PDP’s DNA!.

    The next few days would be very interesting.  SAS is sitting pretty at Wadata. But  Markarfi isn’t finding it amusing at all outside, though the former governor, who found the ultimate stop to Kaduna’s periodic ethno-religious riots, would appear too much of a gentleman to match SAS mob for mob, ECOMOG for ECOMOG!

    Even SAS’s declaration that he would be chairman till 2018 conjures the tension of a cock perched delicately on a taut rope.  Neither cock nor rope would know peace!.

    If SAS delivers on his threat and stays put, would he prevail over the contrasting will of many critical stakeholders and power centres arrayed against him?

    In the ensuing confrontation, PDP may well find itself losing more than federal power.  It may just dissolve under the violence of its own contradictions.

    Meanwhile, at every opportune time, like a drowning man popping up to holler in panic before the final sink, PDP always brags: we’ll retake power in 2019.

    But pray, do the dead take power?

     

    Pee-Dee-Pee … commotion!

  • Accused of evil

    June 12 has come again; and it has gone again. For how long will the historic date come and go before clarity is finally achieved?

    June 12, 1993, was the election date that saw the emergence of Chief Moshood Kashimawo Olawale Abiola, popularly known as MKO, as the country’s apparent President before the poll was controversially annulled by military strongman General Ibrahim Babangida. It was a critical juncture in the country’s political history.

    The sudden death of General Sani  Abacha who extended the injustice, on June 8, 1998,  followed five years of ruthless oppression of the pro-democracy opposition including presidential claimant Abiola.  Abiola’s similarly abrupt passing one month later on July 7, 1998, was supremely suspicious, particularly in the context of an intense campaign for his release from detention and restoration of his ruptured electoral mandate.

    How Abiola died 18 years ago remains a riddle. On this year’s June 12 anniversary, his personal physician, Dr Ore Falomo, repeated what he has been saying since Abiola died in detention: “There is no argument about Abiola’s death. He died on July 7, 1998 at about 3pm at Aguda House when he was being visited by an American delegation. He died shortly after being offered a cup of tea by the leader of the delegation. On that day, Abiola was very alert. He recognised Susan Rice whom he saw last in 1982. The Americans came with a flask containing tea. The flask had three layers. Why should they come with their own tea, special tea? Is it normal for visitors to come with tea and offer a prisoner? It was abnormal…It was a conspiracy.”

    Falomo continued: “It is now left to all of us to find the cause of Abiola’s death. He died 15 minutes after the tea. My conclusion is that the tea is probably fundamental to his collapse and sudden death. Until detailed investigation is carried out, the death of Abiola will continue to generate controversy, supposition, reasonable and unjustified conclusion for a very long time to come. Abiola died in government custody. It is the duty of government to unravel the cause of Abiola’s death, after drinking a cup of tea.”

    The question is:  Who should be held responsible for Abiola’s death? Falomo’s answer: “The Federal Government under General Abdulsalami Abubakar should be held responsible.”

    It is crucial to pursue the truth in this case.  Until the issue is satisfactorily clarified, the government of the day at the time Abiola died stands accused of evil.

  • Fayose phantasmagoria

    The above headline sounds like the title of an epic poem isn’t it? For that land thick with intellectuals as there thickets, Ekiti State today presents a perfect setting for literary works of magical propensities. As events shift rapidly from the farcical to the absurd, the stage seems being set for a dire denouement.

    If you are minded like Hardball, you are bound to be apprehensive about the turn of events in the country generally. But the Ekiti situation comes with peculiarly unnerving presentiments. To put it plaintively and unbeknown to many, governance has crashed in many states across the country for sure. What we see daily is a façade that is bound to be stripped of its cover sooner.

    But Ekiti seems to take the prize. With the giddy over-lordship of a fellow who goes by the tag, Ayo Fayose moving in frenziedly from the bohemian farce to the apocalyptic, many discerning minds are furrowed with deep worries. Lines from Y.B.Yeats’ “The Second coming” keep flashing across the mind:

    Turning and turning in a widening gyre…

    Workers in Ekiti State have been on strike since May 26, for non-payment of salaries for several months. Ekiti is not the only state where citizens have been reduced to destitution by popinjay governors. But Governor Fayose makes an especial mockery of this deathly human condition.

    He is inured. He responds with a most juvenile broadcast recently: “I want to tell workers that I have placed myself on indefinite strike in solidarity with you. I shared (sic) your pains but it is rather unfortunate that a man cannot give what he doesn’t have.

    “I have told you the true position of the finances of the state, of which you have played critical roles in the allocation of the federal allocations (sic) to relevant sectors which shows how well I have carried you along (sic) since the dwindling revenue to state commenced (sic)…

    “… But the present situation is very unfortunate and we have to learn to live with it until the country wriggle (sic) out of it and things will change for better.

    “I want to say that I will be expecting you back to your offices when you are ready to return to work. I shall be expecting you because presently (sic) I am handicapped and there is nothing I can do…”

    An elementary school valedictorian would have mustered a better address. But he did not stop at this nonsensical talk, he made a show of marching on the streets with workers.

    And in a moment of uncommon candour, he noted above that “I am handicapped, there is nothing I can do”

    Brilliant self- analysis; Fayose is truly handicapped. And Yeats gives more perspective:

    The best lack conviction, while the worst

    Are full of passionate intensity

    But what Fayose can do is to resign immediately.

  • This way for gubernatorial buffoonery

    In the Second Republic (1979-1983), when governance still had a modicum of serious business, and the likes of Goodluck Jonathan and Ayo Fayose had not strayed into those portals, a leading player, in the course of a public controversy, cracked a joke.

    Should the late Mallam Aminu Kano, the undisputed champion of the northern talakawa, become president, he wagered, he would probably have led a protest against his own government, bearing the lead placard, before being reminded he was indeed the president!

    The moral?  Mallam Aminu was such a congenital protester he would do so against himself, if and when he got the urge.

    Well, that joke is now playing out in Ekiti — but as a ribald joke taking the shape of gubernatorial buffoonery only a comic-tragic, in the mould of Ayo Fayose, stomach infrastructure governor of Ekiti State, is capable of.

    The impulsive Fayose had thundered, when Osun was in the eye of national storm, on account of salary default: any governor that couldn’t pay salaries had no business remaining in office.  He should resign.

    To that Fayose-an cacophony, the commonsense senator from Bayelsa had added his own sophisticated coarseness: in sympathy with the starving, he would donate part of his wardrobe allowance to  Osun workers and some Bayelsa widows.  How noble!

    Well, as it turned out, both Fayose’s Ekiti and Ben Murray-Bruce’s Bayelsa are catching the salary default bug.  Bayelsa’s Seriake Dickson, despite his state’s oil wealth, is settling for the lean Osun’s half-salary formula for some categories of workers, to placate what Commonsense Senator, in Osun-speak, would have called “starving Bayelsa workers”, to whose rescue his wardrobe allowance must come.

    But our golden senator is mute — pin-drop mute!  Whatever happened  to his Osun offer?  Or doesn’t it apply to Bayelsa, his own people?  Political demagoguery is reckless business.

    But back to Ekiti, where Fayose, away from his numberless ponmo jaunts, is now leading a protest against his own government in sympathy with the striking workers.  Seriously?

    At first, he was deadpan: the stomach infrastructure governor could not pawn himself to pay workers.  Is that not the core of his governmental philosophy? But what happened to his declaration that any governor who couldn’t pay salaries should scram?  Obviously, no quitting for Fayose, only more buffoonery.

    Later, it was a comical motorcade among Ado-Ekiti Okada riders, “protesting” the salary non-payment.  But, of course, a non-thinking governor is most at home with boisterous company.

    Even then, that is a short fix.  In time, even these Okada riders would wise up: the bale of cash their leaders may have taken and the drum of paraga available to the riders could not make up for cash from a hard day’s job.  When the stomach rumbles without cease, they would realise the vacuity of a ponmo-driven governor, hollering stomach infrastructure.

    Now, the last — or latest — act of desperation: the government issuing a fraudulent statement that purportedly recalled a segment of the workers.  How far can Fayose’s tomfoolery go?

    Hardball keenly watches.  It is, after all, democracy: the right to ruin yourself by your vote.