The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Wike the borrower

    With the way Rivers State Governor Nyesom Wike has started, it can only be imagined how much more he might decide to borrow during his four-year term. He has been in the saddle for just one month and has been able to raise N30 billion borrowed from two banks ostensibly for developmental purposes. On June 11, the state’s House of Assembly gave him the green light to take a N10 billion loan from Zenith Bank Plc, which the governor said would be used to fund major projects. On June 30, the legislative house also approved Wike’s move to borrow N20 billion from Access Bank Plc.

    In a letter to the House, Wike said: “government has met with contractors handling major roads construction in the state with a view to mobilising them back to site.” He continued: “since the state government has no funds in its coffers we will be unable to mobilise any contractor to site without first finding the funds” Based on this logic, Wike said:  ”we approached Access Bank Plc, which has graciously agreed to advance the state government with a loan facility of twenty billion Naira only for the purpose of funding these projects.”

    He listed ”the following ongoing road projects subject to availability of funds”:  ”Abuloma-Woji road, Woji Akpajo road, Rumuepirikom-Whimpey-Rumuolumeni road, Ozuoba-Ogbogoro-Rumuolumeni road, Rumuepirikom-Eleproanwa road and Igwuruta-Eneka-Elimgbu-Rumukwurushi road.”  Wike said:  ”we have also concluded plans to embark on the construction of the following new roads and other projects; Elelenwo-Akpajo road, Oroigwe road, Igwuruta-Chokocho road, the rehabilitation, fencing and construction of internal roads in Government Girls Secondary School, GGSS, Rumuokwuta.”

    Wike painted the picture of a governor enthusiastic to serve the people, saying, “it is important to reiterate that these projects, when completed, will accelerate economic development in the state and improve the social well-being of our people.”

    The House found his argument for the loan convincing, even though the terms were unclear, not to say unstated. That was probably the easiest part, considering that all the 29 lawmakers present during the sitting reportedly supported the move. The more difficult aspect is likely to be ensuring that the money is used for the stated purposes.

    Wike was quoted as saying: “While this money is not enough, it would enable the contractors to be mobilised to site and to achieve milestones.”  It remains to be seen how he intends to fund the named projects to completion, given that the loan is supposed to get the contractors working and not necessarily to get the work completed.

    Stories abound of state governors who borrowed so much money and did so little with the loans. Even worse, some of them got their states so heavily indebted that the debts owed for the sake of progress became debilitating burdens. A word to the wise is sufficient. But is Wike wise?

  • Saraki the innocent

    It took the controversially-elected Senate President Bukola Saraki 18 days to reconstruct the story of his emergence from his own point of view. And when on June 27 he personally narrated to journalists how the whole thing happened on June 9, his tale stretched the imagination.

    He said: “I can tell you today that I was in the National Assembly Complex as early as 6:00 in the morning and I stayed in a car in the park from 6:00 in the morning till quarter to 10:00am…All I was monitoring was how people were arriving at the complex. It was at quarter to 10:00 that I got information that the Clerk to the National Assembly had entered the Chamber.”

    Saraki continued: “So I got out of the small car I was inside, stretched myself and put on my babariga because I didn’t have it on before then. I walked from the car park into the chamber.”

    His moment-by-moment narration conveniently left out interesting details. For instance, just out of curiosity: how small was “the small car”? Saraki sounded like he hoped to make a point by introducing the adjective “small.” It sounded like a case of “hypocritical humility.”

    The highpoint of his pointlessness came when he said: “Before I knew it, my election had come and gone.” In other words, it all happened in a flash – did he mean like flash fiction?  But, evidently and evidentially, not as quickly and suddenly as to suggest that Saraki was unprepared, or that the direction of the drama was unanticipated, or even that the event was unplotted.

    The eventual cementing of a strange and strangulating leadership combination at the helm of the country’s upper legislative house is a source of wonder, just as Saraki’s post-event crocodile tears are unbelievable. He was quoted as saying: “It is unfortunate that we have a PDP man as Deputy Senate President. It is painful. It is painful for any APC member because we went through the struggle. That was not what we signed for.” Saraki added: “But it has happened; but it is unfortunate and it is not fair to put the blame on one side because it is a combination of errors and miscalculations that led us to have what we have.”

    His developing denial of party supremacy, manifested in his own defiant pursuit of position and his subsequent downgrading of the party’s choices, may well be at the heart of the self-identified “errors and miscalculations.”  But Saraki seems too self-absorbed to appreciate the fundamental nature of his own miscalculation error.

    It would appear that Saraki’s meet-the-media session had a redeeming feature, though. Perhaps unwittingly, he said: “I want my action to speak more than what I say.”  Saraki must be familiar with the idiom “Actions speak louder than words.” So far, his actions have said so much about the worthlessness of his words.

  • Saraki and Apparition Ekweremadu

    Senator Bukola Saraki, the embattled Senate president, is trying to explain away the vile controversy surrounding his election.

    In combat term, Saraki’s is tantamount to winning the war and losing the peace — for why shed blood in battle, when you cannot secure the peace?

    That explains the no-war-no-peace situation in the Senate — indeed, in the two chambers of the National Assembly.  Though the Yakubu Dogara House of Representatives too appears a whirl of discontent, Saraki, that showed more desperation at his own election, would appear more on the spot.  He feels obliged to tell his own side of the story.

    On that score, the trading off, to Peoples Democratic Party’s Ike Ekweremadu, of the Senate deputy presidency, would appear Saraki’s first apparition, not unlike the three witches of Macbeth that baited, with a series of apparitions, the tragic hero of that Shakespeare play, first to commit regicide; and finally to doom himself.

    On the allegation of selling his party’s Senate patrimony to the PDP, in exchange for personal gain, Saraki has pleaded innocence.  In a well reported engagement with the media, omo Baba Oloye claims he was not to blame; but his co-APC members that mysteriously kept off the venue of the election.

    In a rather disingenuous alibi, he claimed that but for the arrival of APC House of Representatives members, from the botched meeting with President Muhammadu Buhari (to which, by the way, nobody invited the innocent Saraki), PDP would well have grossed the House deputy speakership, where it was in a roaring minority!

    What is more?  Saraki, “uninvited” to the presidential palaver, had intelligence he would be kidnapped and kept off the election venue.  That was why, he claimed, he arrived the National Assembly precincts early (around 6am) and sat in a non-descript car until 10 minutes to 10 am, the time the Senate presidential election was to kick off!

    Well, the Senate president can tell that to the marines!  Yes, Saraki has a right to defend himself and shed light on events to explain his case.  But this yarn would just not wash!

    All too soon, the senator is realising — hopefully not too late — that the Ekweremadu deal, which looked like a simple but telling trade-off that landed him the coveted seat, has turned into an apparition that just would not vanish.

    Besides, that it took Saraki no less than two weeks to rebut the widely reported story, which The Nation even broke on the eve of the June 9 election, that Saraki had sold his party to gain the Senate presidency, speaks volume about his so-called alibi.  Well, the embattled senator can kid himself with his latter-day yarn.  Hardball wonders if he even believes himself.

    Senator Saraki may well be right in his claim that the so-called meeting with the president, which explained the absence of most APC legislators from his election, was a manoeuvre by his intra-party opponents to tweak his colleagues and truncate his putative success.  That might be; for you cannot afford to trust politicians, who can go to any length to tilt things their way.

    But, as Saraki is finding out, there is a gulf between intra-party manoeuvring and alleged treachery and perfidy against own party and colleagues.

    That is why Apparition Ekweremadu would haunt the senator until the end of his political career, no matter how long or short.

    Not all the waters of Kwara (Niger) and Benue could wash it off his mind, any more than all the waters of Arabia could wash King Duncan’s blood off Lady Macbeth’s evil hands!

  • A billion toothpicks for CBN

    The title of this piece is actually: “A billion “Okon’s” toothpicks for the folks at CBN” but newspaper headlines don’t often lend themselves fully to the whims and mischief of writers. That is why you have this abridged version. But never mind; nothing spoil as we say out there on the streets. The gist is why Hardball is so magnanimous to award a billion toothpicks to CBN and indeed, which one be Okon’s toothpicks?

    Good questions. First, Okon’s toothpicks: a great friend of Hardball’s told the joke long ago. A certain Madam had asked his houseboy why the toothpicks in the house always got depleted so fast and Okon had answered: “Madam, it’s junior who wastes the toothpicks, I, Okon always put them back in the pack after use!”

    Well, no one was around to tell how Madam reacted upon this revelation but that marked the birth of Okon’s toothpicks. And Hardball hereby awards one billion of Okon’s toothpicks for our gallant folks at our apex money house, Central Bank of Nigeria, CBN. This award, coming from the fullness of heart of Hardball is in recognition of CBN’s courage, wisdom and promptitude in refusing to keep doling out dollars to ‘crazy’ importers to ship in tiny, little sticks.

    To think that Nigeria can supply the entire world with wood-stick toothpicks and to think that with Okon’s environmentally friendly renewable method, a man could use a toothpick for an entire lifetime. Why then would our CBN contemplate, not to talk of condone the release of our hard-earned hard currency to ship in tiny, little pieces of wood from across many seas.

    Poor Mr. Godwin Emefiele, the CBN chief has been rather triumphant since Tuesday when the apex bank announced this earth-shaking no-official-forex-for-toothpicks-policy. According to CBN, it had become imperative to exclude some importers of some goods and services from accessing foreign exchange at the Nigerian foreign exchange market in order to encourage local production of these items.

    Wow, great, that must have taken some timing, some doing and some thinking of course. Hardball understands items on the exclusion list like private jet and rice. But any man who ships little sticks from Oyinboland to the woodlands of Africa and he who aids and abets such act; should they not be examined thoroughly whether they suffer extended and un-extenuated psycho-cognitive deficiencies?

    Hardball understands even CBN’s understanding of the importation of stuff like Indian incense, palm kernel, palm oil, vegetable oil, chickens, eggs, tomato paste, soaps, wheelbarrows, head pans, etc. Hardball is full of understanding. Indian incense must be an essential ingredient our teeming marabouts use in preparing potent preparations for our leaders. One must therefore be a bit self-annihilistic to obstruct such a product in high demand by the Brahmins.

    Hardball understands again, Mr. Emefiele’s temerity to tamper with private jets now. He would never have dared a few weeks ago. The times truly are changing indeed. But the aspect Hardball would never understand or live down is the thought that a country known as Nigeria and her CBN and her entire people would ship out dollars and ship in little pieces of wood (for picking our mostly yellow teeth) in this 2015 age! Simply preposterous!

  • Judge or politician?

    The sheer oddity of it all made it go viral:  a sitting judge calling for the impeachment of a sitting governor!  This was one example of new media giving an old media principle a fillip.

    Move over, the classic news oddity of a man biting a dog.  Take a bow, the neo-classic oddity of a serving jurist calling for a governor’s sack! And extant journalism teachers, take note.

    Justice Oloyede Folahanmi, reportedly a serving judge in the State of Osun,  just did a 30-page petition, reportedly to the Osun House of Assembly, calling for the impeachment of Governor Rauf Aregbesola and his Deputy, Grace Laoye-Tomori, in accordance with sections 128 and 129 of the 1999 Constitution.

    Justice Folahanmi also reportedly copied the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime, Amnesty International (AI), Transparency International (TI) and reportedly “others”, calling for the investigation of those he claimed were responsible for the “deliberate mismanagement of the economy of Osun State.”

    Now, is Mrs Folahanmi a judge or a politician?

    First, is the oddity of a judge on a state Bench turning activist to politically terminate the tenure of an elected governor — probably unprecedented in Nigerian history, as troubled as it is.  Besides, this jars against the culture of professional reticence, which is the hallmark of the judiciary; not to talk of the rigid separation of power doctrine, the rigour of checks-and-balances, on which the presidential system is anchored.

    Then, the list of the agencies the judge copied in her petition.  EFCC — understandable, for its forte is investigating sleaze in the public space.  But UN, AI and TI?  Do Their Lordships too, by training, inclination and professional conduct, play to the gallery, no matter how just their cause?  Besides, how does the judge measure as a disturbing portrait of the Judiciary as meddlesome interloper, as her core constituency would, without hesitation, say?

    Hardball would really like to read Justice Folahanmi’s petition, because the reportage of the quotes from it is a bit fuzzy and confusing.  Samplers:

    “I declare that in addition to the media-hype [media-hype: if so, why are people being owed salary for months?], I have firsthand experience which constitutes evidence of the unfortunate situation in which Osun currently finds herself [so, experience which is aggregated opinion, now qualifies as hard evidence?]

    “Neglecting the welfare of members of the community under the guise of wanting to provide infrastructure, run contrary to the teaching of Christ, the son of God, Jesus of Nazareth …” Now what is this — Law, politics or theology?

    “Mr. Governor and his deputy are assiduously working against it [ideals of social order], as exemplified by the cruel, and harsh debasement of pensioners and civil servants by DELIBERATELY and MALICIOUSLY (capitalisation Hardball’s) withholding their salaries for months, in an attempt to browbeat, subjugate to take away their God-given free will, and reduce them to mindless robots …”

    Really — and does His Lordship have concrete evidence for these assertions?  Besides, is this a judge speaking with forensic evidence or some market folk just mouthing wild allegations?

    And the clincher: “Their action … is as illegal as it is immoral and unconscionable … There is therefore no legal or moral basis for their continued stay in office. “  Now, what is the judge’s forte: morality or legality?

    Well, the appropriate authorities should probe Mrs Folahanmi’s allegations.  But so should the National Judicial Commission (NJC), the judge’s disgraceful conduct of exposing the Osun Judiciary to politics and possible odium.

    All lovers of democratic institution-building should decry Mrs Folahanmi’s reckless intervention.  If NJC does not post-haste call her to order,  the Osun Judiciary would soon be swamped in politics — of the most reckless hue.  That would be well and truly tragic.

  • Aliko vs. Arsenal’s long juju

    Nigeria’s own Africa’s richest man, Aliko Dangote has obviously been caught in the thrall of the White man’s long juju – football. And Arsenal Football Club is no doubt one major coves of worship. This is quite understandable. Yours truly too must confess upfront that he is also under the same spell of English football and a member of the Arsenal FC congregation.

    Football indeed may well be the new religion, the new opium, the new global economy and even the future world order. Is it for nothing that the US recently started fiddling with FIFA? Or has the new power game just begun? Why are the Abramovichs, the Glazers, the Kroenkes, Usmanovs the Arab and Asian moguls taking positions in English and European leagues? Now Aliko has joined the fray. These fellows are no ordinary folks, they sure see farther than the rest of us.

    Such is the growing importance of football that Aliko wishes to buy Arsenal – almost at all cost. He is pitching in a board that has strong American (Kroenke) and Russian (Usmanov) blocs. Over the years, the Gunners, as Arsenal is known, has grown to be among the greatest soccer landmarks not only of England but in the football world. Nigeria alone would boast of no fewer than 10 million fans while its worldwide fan base would likely nudge the billion mark.

    This is no doubt a huge global brand that could be deployed to sell even products as lugubrious as cement. This may explain why Aliko, Nigeria’s own Midas has been under the spell of this football club and insists he must own it if not today, certainly, tomorrow. He had made the first bid to acquire substantial interest five years ago but was apparently rebuffed.

    He was not deterred. Aliko said recently that he had been a fan for about 30 years when he was taken to watch Arsenal by David Dein, a one-time major shareholder and grandee of the club. And here is what the multi-billion dollars mogul thinks: “What I always say is that money doesn’t have colour. It doesn’t matter whether you are from Africa or anywhere in the world. The colour of money is the same. Once I put money on the table, they will not think if I am an African.”

    Aliko also debunked the notion by some commentators that he is setting about some form of vanity investing in which he is bound to lose money. He said pointedly that the club is doing well and requires just another strategic direction for it to do even better.

    Well, Hardball has one or two frank words for Aliko here: first, without discounting his deep business acumen, football doesn’t seem like such a money spinner; it seems more an ego business. Second point is that it would take some doing and an unduly large cash too to hand Arsenal to an African.

    Finally, Aliko’s charity must begin from home. Kano, his home state is teeming with a horde of sports-crazy youth who have scarce opportunity to express themselves or get discovered. Kano could use some modern sporting facilities for catching and grooming young talents. Aliko can help in this regard before he buys Arsenal.

  • Iroko vs Osoko    

    Iroko versus Osoko — that is the latest inanity in the plate of the South West Peoples Democratic Party (PDP).

    Ayo Fayose, the excitable Ekiti governor, seems to have issues with Segun Mimiko, the opportunistic Ondo governor, over Mimiko’s election as chairman, PDP Governors’ Forum, which a newspaper promptly reported as “a fresh crisis …” in South West PDP.

    Hardball is not quite sure, what it was: reporters’ penchant for combat to spice the news?  The customary hyperbole to achieve news raciness?  Or just a question of cliché in news reportage?

    Whichever, a Fayose/Mimiko clash is certainly no crisis; and even if it were, it is certainly a crisis on nothing but inanity — and how can excitement on inanity be “crisis”?

    But make no mistake.  Hardball would not be bothered however Osoko and Iroko clobber each other.

    The one is an ever excitable vacuum, eternally in search of the empty noise to distract the polity; his own unique way of seeking relevance by playing the nuisance.

    The other is an ever meticulous power schemer, the ultimate Machiavelli; and poster boy of power for power’s sake.

    Both, in Hardball’s humble opinion, are bad for the polity.

    Still, for the sake of public good, it is necessary to put the records straight.  Fayose claims Mimiko’s emergence didn’t follow due process.  How?  Because, he claims — and indeed, that claim is true — Mimiko just defected to PDP, from Labour Party (LP) last year.

    And so what?  Didn’t Mimiko earlier in 2007 defect from PDP to LP, after earlier betraying his old Alliance for Democracy (AD), simply because he didn’t get the party’s 2003 gubernatorial ticket?  Of course, the PDP National Working Committee (NWC) has reportedly promised to look into Fayose’s grouse.  Well, let them!  A chronic Post-Power Withdrawal Syndrome (PPWS), laced with idleness, is a terrible combo.  Better be busy with Fayose’s inanity than engage in costly national political mischief!

    Still, the PDP NWC had better take itself seriously by not taking Fayose’s seriously.  The Osoko’s diagnosis is simple: an infantile megalomania that assumes that, after staging an Ekiti political comeback, every power and principality, in PDP and beyond, must bow at his grubby feet!

    The same infantile megalomania, that made Osoko declare himself South West PDP leader, over and above former President Olusegun Obasanjo (no Hardball role model!), thus precipitating the old man’s untimely retirement from politics and peculiar self-promotion as “statesman”.

    The same infantile megalomania that made Fayose throw all decorum to the winds, in his morbid death wish for President Muhammadu Buhari, passing as electioneering adverts in Fayose’s troubled soul.

    Now that the Ekiti APC legislators and their potent threat of impeachment have been vanquished, it is the same infantile megalomania that spurs Osoko, like a wild horse, to challenge the Iroko’s chairmanship.  With nothing to offer, this dubious campaign is as good a nuisance bit as any other!

    But here lies the bitter truth — the Yoruba bit about being fun to cheer a lunatic display, even if no one is happy his offspring is the looney pulling the stunt.

    The long and short of Fayose’s suspect campaign is that he considers himself, as self-named  “South West PDP leader”, more qualified to clinch Mimiko’s diadem.

    But even after subversive cheer of Fayose’s daily display of how not to be a governor, it must hurt the Osoko that even his PDP peers cannot tolerate his gubernatorial rascality outside Ekiti borders!

  • One very hardball for Ambode

    An okra plant can never grow taller than its planter, no matter how tall it ever grows; a wooden oracle is but a piece of wood on the day of its demystification. It is said that only the foolishly brave would mistake the stealth movement of the tiger for cowardice; does a proper fish catch cold in the deeps? When the duck swallows pebble, would it not pass water still? And no matter how large a tail is, would it wag the dog? The matter at hand has grown so bloody it has to be presaged with proverbs so that those who have understanding would appreciate its full import.

    On Friday, June 12, 30-year-old Sodiq Shittu was put down in broad daylight on Lawani Street, Mushin, in the suburb of Lagos. A gang of hoodlums surrounded Sodiq, knocked him down, cracked his skull with hammer, gouged out his eyes and finally smashed his head with a large stone. They made to set his body ablaze when residents summoned courage and chased them away. Sodiq’s became another body in the morgue for family to grieve over. That was the third killing on Lawani Street this year.

    A fourth killing suspected to be related was reported last Wednesday. The body of a young man of 30 known as Godwin Victor aka Sangba was washed up by the lagoon front near the University of Lagos, Akoka. The body was bound hand and feet and a log of wood was also found to be tied to its back. It is suspected that Victor Godwin was pushed into the lagoon alive by his killers.

    According to report, Victor had renounced the cult group he belonged to, but his erstwhile members would not hear of it. He was said to have fled to Port Harcourt for sometime, but upon his return to Lagos last week, he was abducted and that was the last his family saw him until his corpse was washed up.

    As sure as the day would break tomorrow, another body would be reported soon and another and yet another. If not in Mushin, it would be Fadeyi, Idi-oro, Somolu, Bariga, Mafoluku, Oshodi or Ajah. This is how it has been for nearly 10 years now. But today, it gets more gruesome, more rampant and more brazen. Today they abduct and kill in the daylight; they use heavier weapons today. They are well known and they terrorise streets and neighbourhoods; they cow the police and they dare the government to stop them. And nobody speaks up.

    When rival cults engage in crossfire, many innocent people get hit. And if you are hit, you are hit. You simply bury your dead and crawl into your corner or go get your own arms if you are so minded. There are dozens of such collateral deaths over the years. Nobody gets prosecuted and none compensated. It is like a jungle where only the most brutish survive.

    And the malaise festers deeper and deeper into many other neighbourhoods and communities of Lagos, the mega city in the making. The gruesome killings of Sodiq and Victor would serve as gauntlet thrown at Governor Akinwunmi Ambode. Will somebody speak up and arrest this malady?

  • Butcher of Cairo?

    Alright, alright, President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, the Egyptian strongman, is no sissy.  But for Egypt’s ultimate good, Hardball would wish he slowed down on his seeming ravenous appetite for blood and gore, evidenced by the alacrity with which Egyptian courts now sentence political opponents to death sentences and life imprisonments.

    But before going further, some clarifications.  Ordinarily, Hardball would dismiss the Egypt Muslim Brotherhood (MB) battering as Afghanistanism — that media penchant to wallow in foreign matters, when there are pressing local issues.

    True, Egypt is not Nigeria, almost always in an emergency, having more than its fair share of problems. But the Yoruba also say that if without a care, you watch your neighbour devour unwholesome stuff, the sheer racket of his laboured snoring would banish sleep from your own eyes.

    So, if you accuse Hardball of Afghanistanism, for dabbling into the Egypt of el-Sissi, remember that when the Egypt thunder breaks, no one would be immune from its tragedy.

    Yes, former President Mohammed Morsi and his Islamist Freedom and Justice Party (FJP), the MB electoral vehicle, committed a fatal power blunder.  Though FJP got at best a split mandate, winning the presidential election with a 51-49 margin, its rush through its Islamist vision brought the Hosni Mubarak-era military back from the dead.  Banding with a good number of Egypt’s liberals, very keen on Egypt’s secularity and scared stiff by MB’s Islamist project, Morsi’s presidency and its Islamist dreams came a sad cropper.

    But did it, really?  The repressive way el-Sissi goes about his anti-Islamist campaign, he may well hand Egypt a long, long night of Islamism.  El-Sissi’s fist of mail may set up a titanic clash between the proverbial manic executioner and the zealous suicidal!  Egypt would certainly be the worse for it.

    An Egyptian court just confirmed the death sentence on Mr. Morsi, president from June 30, 2012 to July 3, 2013.  Also harvesting death sentences are five MB leaders, including Mohammed Badie, the MB leader and Said el-Katatni, head of the now disbanded FJP.  Some six MB convicts had faced snappy execution.  Another 21 got life; while yet another 93, tried in absentia, got death sentences pending arrest and retrial.  Perhaps then, their death sentence would be confirmed, or downgraded to life (which by Egypt’s law is 25 years in gaol) or even lesser terms.

    Strictly by law, former President Morsi’s sentences, which Egypt’s highest appeals court will automatically review, were for alleged crimes arising from the Mubarak-era gaol breaks, from where he was sprung from prison to later become president, after Egypt’s first democratic elections. But in the eyes of hurting MB cadres and even the detached public in and out of Egypt, it is little more than harsh crackdown to break MB and smash its Islamist vision.

    Whatever ideology is best for Egypt, Islamist or secular, is for the Egyptians themselves to determine.  It would even push credulity too far to suggest that because Mr. Morsi was former president, he should not account for alleged crimes he was party to.

    But what is absolutely unacceptable is el-Sissi’s apparent belief that he can brutally smash MB, with its nonsensical Islamism.  That is a near-impossibility — not with the equal opportunity anarchists,  calling themselves Islamic State (IS), prowling.

    Indeed, el-Sissi can easily make himself the Butcher of Cairo, by killing anyone killable among the MB cadre.  But that might only gift Egypt to Islamist forces in the long run, if the Iran example is anything to count by.

    That is why he must change tack before it is too late. Egypt is too important to fall a potential bastion of IS.

  • Warrant of arrest for bench-warmer Reps

    Hardball is outraged beyond words! Why is it that the snake would always give off ropy stuff and the witch would often re-enact her gender? Why does everything emanating from the National Assembly (NASS) come off almost always odious? Why do things seem to crawl out of that otherwise noble edifice; why do stuff always happen there?

    The other day, we saw pictures of aides of legislators removing even the smallest pieces of furniture and computer accessories from the offices of the exiting members. Yesterday, news was abroad that an initial jumbo pay will soon hit members’ bank accounts with a ‘deafening’ credit alert. It must be a different alert system to announce such hefty sum as N16.5 million for senators and N14.5 million for House members.

    This must be the best paying job in the world for a man who was inaugurated into a job one day and who proceeds on a month-long vacation the following day only to be greeted next with a resounding multi-million credit alert. And this is just the beginning. It’s a fairy tale of a job not found anywhere else on this planet, one must wager.

    Well, no grudges from Hardball’s quarters; if that is the way it is, so be it. Hardball is not a grouch. But what often galls one to thrombotic proportions is taking all this money from the treasury (and wherever else) without bothering to put in any work whatsoever. For instance, the primary duty of a legislator is to make laws mainly through Bills. We ask, is it possible for a House of Representatives member or a senator to run through a four-year tenure without even one Bill to his name?

    Believe it or not, this is the report emanating from the House of Representatives: 191 lawmakers out of the 360-member house initiated no law whatsoever in all of four years. Yes, this is a fact as contained in the official report: “Status of Bills, Petitions and Other Legislative Measures,” of the out-gone session known as the 7th House of Representatives.

    It is bad enough that some of these men virtually stripped our national treasury and got away in the manner even armed bandits would never have gotten away. Some of them are back at their ‘duty’ post, even at a higher position.

    Hon, Yusuf Lasun (Osun), who has just been elected Deputy Speaker of the House did not move one Bill for four years (2011 to 2015). Other notable ‘honourables’ as they like to be addressed, who slept through the period include a certain Aminu Waziri Tambuwal (Sokoto), Pally Iriase (Edo), Farouk Lawan, Eziuche Ubani (Abia), Olumide Osoba (Ogun), Omegara Mathew (Imo), Ayodeji Jakande (Lagos) and Debo Ologunagba (Ondo). Of the entire team from Gombe, not one could muster a Bill; same for most of the horde from Lagos, Kano, Katsina, Bauchi, Niger, Ondo and Sokoto.

    Before Hardball moves for the arrest of these ‘Honourables’ in order to make them refund four years of unearned allowances, I confess that our man of the pen of Hardball intensity, Hon. Eziuche Ubani, is also a culprit. What a let down!