The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Prof. Nnaji vs. EEDC: impunity of embedded power

    Nigeria’s power sector has gotten more exciting since privatisation even if it may not have become more efficient. Hardball has suddenly learnt that electricity is such a huge subsector complete with its own broad spectrum of lexicon.

    For instance, hitherto, I did not know about MYTO: Multi-Year Tariff Order. The way Dr. Sam Amadi (NERC) bandies this MYTO matter about, you would think he speaks about a sacred order of some hooded knights. But it’s all a bogey to increase tariff without commensurate service. You must have heard about NBET: Nigerian Bulk Electricity Trading. This is supposed to be a market where electric energy is bought and sold.

    Of course you know about GENCOS and DISCOS. These refer to companies that generate and distribute power. There are a fewer other registers emanating from Nigeria’s highly vibrant but ineffectual power sector. But one concept that has been of eternal fascination to Hardball is “embedded” power. In the technical sense, this means electricity generated outside the national generation grid which is loaded into the grid.

    But today, Hardball speaks of a different kind of embedded power, the kind of power that you never see or know its source yet it is there and you feel its impact daily. Worse, it is a waif of a power; a wicked ghost that is hard on doing you in slowly yet you are helpless. Embedded power is the power of impunity at its most cynical and devious pivot.

    It is cruel irony that embedded power is the very undoing of Professor Barth Nnaji, Nigeria’s immediate past Minister of Power. An engineering scholar of international repute and a laureate of numerous US awards in Design, Engineering and Robotics, Nnaji was invited home to bring his intellect to bear on the growth of his motherland by former President Olusegun Obasanjo. Until he was ignominiously yanked off the cabinet, he was regarded as the best minister of the Goodluck Jonathan administration.

    He was said to be the architect of the current power reform which became mired after he was chucked out. But Nnaji was not only disgraced out of office, the Jonathan administration unleashed a vicious kind of embedded power on him perhaps with the intent to either drive him out of town or out of his mind – or whichever comes first.

    Prof. Nnaji was so traumatised he had to cry out recently. In an article to national newspapers (“Travails of Aba Power Project”) he lamented how the Jonathan administration through Enugu Electricity Distribution Company (EEDC) unleashed brute power on his project in Aba.

    In a nutshell, the Federal Government had in 2005 granted him an agreement to build Aba Integrated Power Project (AIPP) to serve Aba metropolis. Working in collaboration with the Aba business community, USAID and banks, Nnaji built world-class power generating, transmitting and distributing facilities in Aba to serve as a model for other cities.

    But in repudiation of its agreement with Nnaji,  the Federal Government again concessioned Aba to EEDC in a most cruel show of power. Till today, Nnaji has been running from pillar to post, incurring huge bank costs and suffering untold mental torture. Why has the underperforming EEDC concession made under controversial circumstances blocked the Aba Power project? The Southeast must be big enough for one disco.

  • Help, hate revolution consuming own children!

    Help, help, the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) hate factory is consuming own children!  Things are falling apart and the centre can no longer hold!

    During the ill-fated elections, in which the once-upon-a-time largest party in Africa shrunk into the pitiable regional party of Nigeria’s Southeast and Southsouth, the most vulgar was the undisputed queen of the belle.

    That was Herself, Dame the Game, Patience Faka Jonathan, who would share her glory with nobody, on partisan vulgar abuse.  Samplers from her rotten words on marble: Buhari be brain-dead, the North born throw-way ‘shildren’, APC na expired drug, If you hear ‘shange’, stone dem — chai, dia ris God oooooo!

    Then the triad of Ayo Fayose, the unapologetic morbid advertiser, Femi Fani-Kayode, irredeemable spewer of sweet nonsense; and presidential bulldog, Doyin Okupe, he of the toxic fixation: Muhammadu Buhari would never be president, no matter how bad Goodluck Jonathan was.

    While Fani the Son ought to have devoted his sweet tongue to the wonders of Candidate Jonathan, though he be sitting president, he made himself Don Quixote, on a wild search for Candidate Buhari’s school certificate which was never lost; and, having hit a dead end, deliriously declared the man lacked that paper.

    Playing the Yoruba fool that bawls what the wise whispers in private and strict secrecy, he even helped to amplify, rationalise, beatify and endorse the Faka claim that Buhari “is brain-dead”!

    For Okupe and his pack of presidential hounds, many of them barking away in cyber space, it was a loud and raucous Mission Destroy Muhammadu!

    But now, all is quiet on the Buhari destruction front, except the bitter recrimination and mutual gnashing of teeth, in the Mission Unaccomplished camp, where the hate revolution is consuming its own children.

    The Fani-Kayode/Okupe camp launched the opening blistering attack, telling Chairman Adamu Muazu (ironically about the lone sane voice in a camp that went gaga) and his embattled PDP national executive to fall on own swords, for delivering crippling defeat, instead of thumping victory.

    But the other side has charged right back, blazing from both sides of the hip, screaming and whooping for a fight-to-finish.  Dame Faka?  As gentle as a dove right now, diagnosed with withdrawal syndrome!

    Still, as the Mu’azu camp counter-attacked, claiming the hateful quad sank Jonathan with their bile — not altogether false — they too stacked their cards in villainy.

    Even before the campaigns opened, Olisa Metuh, without much ado or any shred of proof, dubbed the rival All Progressives Congress (APC) an “Islamic party”, a noxious theme Fani-Kayode, in his patent flippancy, soon stretched to a related tag, Haramists, meaning a party aiding and abetting Boko Haram.

    PDP controversial National Secretary, Prof. Adewale Oladipo, also declared, without provocation, that the presidential contest was between an “illiterate military jackboot” (that had no school certificate) and a PhD holder (spoilt for choice with academic laurels).

    The bitter truth?  There was little PDP could do, given pretty little to pin-point as Jonathan’s achievements.  So, they deliberately adopted a crooked campaign strategy.  They ran a campaign of passionate hate, not clinical issues.  For all of Jonathan’s vaunted PhD, rigour is not his strongest point.

    But PDP leaders, most often deficit in honour and decorum, are just dishonest to accept they adopted wrong tactics and strategies — and got walloped, big time, for it!

    Still, the recrimination is welcome comeuppance.  It is sweet, very sweet, for the hate revolution to, in earnest, start consuming its own children!

  • Eleventh-hour liberators

    From the look of things, only God knows how many women, girls and children are still caged by Boko Haram terrorists.  The number of such vulnerable captives recently rescued by Nigerian troops from Sambisa Forest in Borno State suggested that those kidnapped by the Islamist group may have been extremely underestimated.

    On April 28, news spread that the military had rescued 293 captives, comprising 200 girls and 93 women. The following day, another 60 women and 100 children were reported saved. Then on April 30 yet another rescue operation yielded a new set of women and children.  The Director, Defence Information, Maj-Gen Chris Olukolade, said of the third batch: “Another set of 234 women and children were rescued through the Kawuri and Konduga end of Sambisa Forest on Thursday. They have been evacuated to join others at the place of ongoing screening.”

    What about the over 200 Chibok schoolgirls seized more than one year ago by the terrorists? This question remains unanswered, despite the large number of girls recued in the three operations. More disturbing, Olukolade’s words offered no guarantee that the missing schoolgirls would be found or rescued. He said: “The assault on the forest is continuing from various fronts and efforts are concentrated on rescuing hostages and destroying all terrorists’ camps and facilities in the forest.”

    The Chief of Army Staff, Lt- Gen. Kenneth Minimah, painted a picture that perhaps offered less hope. At the opening ceremony of the reconstructed 81 Division Officers’ Mess at Marina, Lagos, he said: “We will continue to push in major operations in the fight against insurgency…It is our wish that we find them (the Chibok girls)…I am sure that as we edge further into the forest, we will begin to capture more camps.”

    Minimah’s expressed confidence sounded shaky when he added, “We pray that we rescue more people. Every Nigerian looks forward to this.” If the army chief is relying on prayers to achieve success in this matter, it is a signal that divine intervention may prove to be more crucial than military operations.

    It is worth reflecting on the timing of the activities that resulted in the three-stage liberation of these 687 children, girls and women. With the May 29 transition date fast approaching and the outgoing Goodluck Jonathan presidency haunted by the #BringBackOurGirls campaign, it is understandable that the administration may be desperate to finish strong by ensuring that the kidnapped Chibok schoolgirls are located and liberated. The question is: Why did the Presidency and the military leave the intensification of rescue operations till now?

    The dramatic show of state capacity looks like the result of an eleventh-hour decision to act decisively. If the administration and the military authorities expect that the last-minute moves to free Boko Haram captives would bring public applause, then they need a rethink. The problem with the eleventh-hour liberators is that their push may just be too late, apart from being suggestive of inexcusable and condemnable lethargy.

  • Bode George as new Andrew

    Everyone knows Bode George — popular with some, notorious with others, anonymous with none.

    Everyone too, knew Andrew — the iconic rogue in that famous television commercial of 1984, threatening to “check out” of the country, just after Gen. Muhammadu Buhari’s first coming (as military head of state), to which came the General’s prompt riposte: “Nigeria is our only country.  We must stay and salvage it together!”

    History, of course, has a way of playing cruel jokes!  Could Chief Bode George then be the Andrew of Gen. Buhari’s second coming, this time as elected president?

    Just look at the parallels!  In 1984, Gen. Buhari and his military junta had just sacked the Shehu Shagari presidency, which 2nd Republic National Party of Nigeria (NPN) administration had collapsed the state and beggared the country.

    With that crunch many Nigerians, great ones for fleeing from their problems thinking that would make the problems go away, were threatening to brain-drain.  The Andrew commercial was a creative response by the Buhari government — and boy, did it capture popular imagination!

    Sure, Andrew didn’t quite nip the brain-drain, which became a deluge under the Ibrahim Babangida regime, which played further yo-yo with the people’s destiny.  But it, at least, showed the resolve of the Buhari government to tackle a clear and urgent problem.  That, unfortunately, it couldn’t do; with its dictatorial scowl and martial high-handedness.

    But fast-forward, 2015.  Like Shagari’s NPN before it, Goodluck Jonathan’s Peoples Democratic Party (PDP), had run the state prostrate and the people ragged.  But as it put virtually every foot wrong, Presidential Candidate Buhari, with his All Progressives’ Congress (APC) opposition alliance, loomed.  It required no especial acuity to project PDP was heading for doom.

    Was it then fear?  Electioneering rascality?  Soap box hyperbole to rouse the flagging faithful?

    Whatever it was, Bode George was emphatic: “I will go on exile, should Buhari become president”!  Now, was this earnest, in other words, literal: suggesting that Chief George meant exactly what he said?

    Or was it a literary code-speak, suggesting a Buhari win was an impossibility, in the context of an equally misguided Doyin Okupe, the ace presidential bull dog, who kept on barking and huffing, huffing and barking, his notorious old wives’ tale: Buhari is unelectable!  Buhari is unelectable! Wruff!  Wruff!

    Now, George is a veteran of a sort — at least, in Lagos terms, a veteran electoral loser, even with his succession of great George hopes: the latest being Jimi Agbaje, but earlier dashed hopes being Ade Dosunmu, Musiliu Obanikoro, the late Funsho Williams, etc.  On the Lagos front, he was — and is — always a serial loser.

    But not at Abuja — not with the seeming impregnable PDP rigging machine, which was to go without stutter for 60 years in the first instance!  Could Papa George be thinking of this quiet but happy arsenal when he made his exile boast?

    Well, Bode George’s nightmare has come true — Buhari is president-elect!  Perhaps to make the grim cup pass over him, Brinkman George grabbed, with both hands, Oba Akiolu’s dire caution before the Lagos governorship poll of April 11, perhaps hoping that the backlash, with reportedly renewed presidential dollars, would do the trick.  But no dice!  No refuge for our loquacious George!

    So, will Pa George play Andrew of Buhari’s second coming, or eat crow?

    Hardball is setting up a Bode George Andrew watch!

  • The grand larceny at NNPC

    One notorious expression often bandied during the equally notorious era of President Olusegun Obasanjo was that “the rot is deep”. Meaning that the preceding and indeed, fleeing military junta had damaged the country almost beyond salvage that it would take so much time and huge resources to repair. Such was the banner hoisted by the Obasanjo administration that for eight years it accomplished very little and failed to repair anything of note.

    The rot was deep no doubt but Obasanjo did not tackle it with the requisite zestfulness either. If the rot was deep then, today, the entirety of Nigeria has become one heap of soggy mess and the petroleum industry is the epitome.

    The Ministry of Petroleum Resources and its prime agency, the Nigerian National Petroleum Corporation, NNPC, have turned out to be the most debased institution of government in the last six years. Ironically, this is the honey pot of the nation which accounts for more than 80 percent of her revenues.

    It must be noted upfront that there was no love lost between Hardball and our dainty oil minister, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke but beyond that, it must be said too that the worst thing that happened to the about-to-be-rested Goodluck Jonathan administration was charging Diezani with the running of Nigeria’s most valuable assets – petroleum resources.

    Through this period, she infested the sector with so much scandal that NNPC is in putrefaction. Every new month of her tenure came with a new scam; it was as if she was appointed to wreak havoc on the system. To compound it all, she never could get anything done all this while. Not old refineries were repaired nor a new one built. When she is not into a dubious oil swap deal, she is locked in a crude trade snafu; petrol subsidy-gate or kerosene subsidy rip-off.

    At a time when oil prices soared above $100 for about five years, the NNPC accounts were in a mess and its treasury leaked damagingly. But the mother of all scandals was the report of the missing $20 billion from the treasury of NNPC.

    This issue is turning to a case of grand larceny because when the former governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Lamido Sanusi, first blew the whistle, government officials blatantly denied and even mocked that such a sum could not be removed from the system. As pressure mounted, government instituted an audit of the accounts of NNPC by Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC).

    The so-called ‘forensic’ audit was carried out and its report was handed to government. It was as damaging as can be but official releases claimed NNPC had been vindicated. It was to pay only a ‘paltry’ $1.48 billion. Even that sum was never remitted to the treasury after one year.

    But the big bang now is that everything has turned out to be a lie. It has come out that PwC never did a proper audit as Diezani and her people in NNPC, CBN and NPDC would not avail PwC requisite information. PwC even prefaced the report with a disclaimer! Is this not grand larceny?

  • Yuguda’s multitudinous aides

    Our forbears in their wisdom had determined that when an abomination subsists for a season, it often becomes the norm. This dictum appears most true for the people of Bauchi and their handsome, urbane governor, Isa Yuguda.

    This two-term helmsman of the land of the exotic Yankari is also a technocrat; at least by Nigeria’s definition of that much abused word. Prior to his delving into politics, he was a banker who rose to the very apex of a now defunct merchant bank in Lagos. He was indeed well horned among the elite of corporate Nigeria and was well schooled in best business and organisational practices.

    This is why Hardball is flummoxed – to use a kind word – that Mallam Yuguda turned out the ‘transcendental’ Nigerian politician he turned out to be after eight years at the pinnacle of power in a large sprawling corner of Nigeria. It is a form of apotheosis of a Yugudan kind when you contemplate his rare political and administrative trajectory. It is an especially extraordinary method that must be subjected to scholarly interrogation now that he is leaving office.

    The story is that Governor Yuguda has dismissed his “well over 2000 aides,” leaving only few on special duties. If you think that this number of political appointees by a governor is outrageous, consider that in his first term, he had no fewer than 4000. This does not include commissioners, permanent secretaries, head of MDAs and board appointees.

    Though Nigeria’s presidents and governors often spray appointments like confetti as soon as they get to power, being part of the political largesse in a starkly impoverished country, there is nothing to compare with the Yuguda example. There is a telling anecdote about former President Bill Clinton of the US on one of his visits to Nigeria during President Olusegun Obasanjo’s time. Clinton was said to have marveled at the size of Obasanjo’s aides and advisers, noting that Obasanjo was lucky as his work had been made light. Obasanjo was said to have retorted in his usually raucous manner that Clinton missed the point. He told Clinton that while their role may be different in America, here in Nigeria, he advises his advisers.

    How did Yuguda manage his multitude of aides? Were they ever issued appointment letters? Did he know them all? Did they have office space to work from? Did he build a special conference hall to meet with them? Did he pay them? Hardball has a dozen troubling and indeed troublous questions to ask Mallam Yuguda.

    Well, let’s conjecture some answers: he didn’t have to manage them (there is only one manager in the land); he didn’t need to give them appointment letters since most of them may be ‘ghosts’ anyway; what do they need office space for if they are ‘ghosts’; do you have meetings with phantoms and finally, he pays them into ‘ghost’ accounts.

    Pity, after eight years one only remembers Yuguda for his ingenious folly in a Bauchi that has the unsurpassed potential of becoming a world tourism destination with its Yankari Game Reserve; Lame/Burre Forest and Game Reserve and Bagam Wetlands. Yuguda was unremarkable in a remarkable way.

  • ‘Or am I dead?’

    News of Chief Edwin Clark’s self-exhibition to journalists in Abuja to make the point that he is bodily unaffected by President Goodluck Jonathan’s failure in the March 28 presidential election was interesting. From the look of things, Clark, Ijaw National Leader and a former Federal Commissioner for Information, is reaping the harvest of his sycophantic support for the Jonathan presidency.

    A weekend report said of Clark, who is in his 80s and a die-hard Jonathanian: “He said some people had been going round with rumours that he collapsed when he heard the outcome of the presidential election.” Clark was quoted as saying, “I am here today to tell you that I am not dead. Or am I dead? In every election, there would be winners and losers. The same thing happened during the last presidential election. I am alive. Today, I won’t talk about what happened before, during and after the election. That will come another day.”

    Clark continued: “I am talking to you now because I am travelling tomorrow and some people will go into the streets and say I was carried into air ambulance…Jonathan was the one who contested election, I didn’t. So, why should I die?”

    Perhaps more appropriately, Clark should have asked: Why did people think Jonathan’s defeat could kill me? In the period before the election, Clark was unapologetically visible as a pro-Jonathan campaigner and was even associated with extreme views that implied a national shutdown if Jonathan wasn’t reelected. The passion he brought to the Jonathan reelection project was often disturbing, if not terrifying, especially when considered against the backdrop of his advanced age.

    It needs to be said that Clark must be exceptionally physically strong to have received the stunning blow of Jonathan’s fall without falling. No one who had followed how Clark clung to Jonathan and what he stood for could have imagined that the blow of disappointment would fail to knock the old man down. So, it may be understandable that stories of Clark’s alleged collapse followed the collapse of Jonathan’s dream. He was considered too close to the subject and it was unthinkable that he would be unaffected by the death of dreams. In other words, to employ a Yoruba cultural metaphor, Clark gave the impression that he was Abobaku, a courtier fated to die with the king. Isn’t it thought-provoking that Clark asked the journalists: “Or am I dead?”  This may have been not just a rhetorical question. It suggests that Clark may be truly confused about the state of his existence. It is also possible that Clark is biologically alive but politically dead, meaning his pro-Jonathan performance was probably his swan song.

    Another interpretation: It could be that Clark has become a shadow of his former self, meaning something died in him when Jonathan lost the election. Or could it be that a source of easy wealth and influence dried up unexpectedly leaving the old man gasping for breath?

  • Ecclesiastical spite?

    Radical Lagos pastor Tunde Bakare has come up with a prayer perhaps only his inimitable self can pray: “My sincere prayer is that,” he prayed his prayer, “not all those who helped Gen. Buhari to win the elections will help him run the government”!

    That is Pastor Bakare’s latest prayer release from his Akilo, Ogba big house of prayer  — and his congregants must have lapped it up, the diktat of the man of God!

    Now, how’s that?  In the secular world, that prayer would qualify for basic inequity — for is that not praying that whoever sowed should not reap?

    Should it not also translate into prayerful iniquity on the ecclesiastical plane, if God is not man and man is not God, even if there are trumpeted (wo)men of God, who nevertheless delude themselves by playing God?

    And pray, where is the place of that part of the scripture, which stresses divine grace and never human accomplishment, by saying, without the grace of God, all is as clean as a filthy rag?  Perhaps that never has any appeal in Bakarean theology, as the radical evangelical petrel unleashes Bakarean prayers and even prophecies, from his blessed pulpit!

    Recall, 1999.  The equally controversial Gen. Olusegun Obasanjo had just won the Nigerian presidency.  Bakare was perhaps piqued by Obasanjo’s monumental betrayal of the June 12 cause, as MKO Abiola lost both his presidential mandate and, eventually, his life.  Besides, the trio in the Bakarean drama — MKO, Obasanjo and Bakare — are ethnic Egba.  Well, all politics is local!

    So, perhaps brimming with ecclesiastical rage, the stormy Bakare went ahead to predict — no, that is secular! — prophesy: Obasanjo would somehow not consummate his mandate!  That requiem of the futurologist (though of a chartered spiritual hue!), apologies to Prof. Wole Soyinka, held a troubled nation spellbound, and kept Obasanjo friends and fiends on sheer tenterhooks.

    Well, perhaps that prophesy would come true tomorrow?  O, sure!  It could well be that more powerful bleat of prayers eventually overthrew that dire prophesy?  Or that it had really come to pass since, not a few would reason, after eight years of presidential power, Obasanjo himself had badly unravelled?  Or just that God’s grace, which is sufficient for all, just punctured the virtual fatwa.

    Whatever it was, the notorious fact is that the Ebora Owu did not only consummate his first term, he gifted himself another four years, and, by the third-term gambit, even ogled an illicit third and, after failing, had moved on to other power mischiefs that drew his fancy.  And the Ebora Owu still dey kampe!  But so is the prophet with unfulfilled prophesy; he also is still in business.  Indeed, the grace of God is sufficient for all!

    On the cusp of another historic change of order, the first time the opposition defeated the central sitting government, Pastor Bakare has rolled out another controversial diktat, couched in “prayer”!

    But strictly, Hardball is not worried about Pastor Bakare.  No, not in the least!  The scriptures, to which he is totally devoted, has a short-and-sharp riposte to spiritual waywardness from any quarters: it is not what you eat that defiles you, it is rather what comes out of your mouth!  Pastor Bakare will be saved or nailed by his own pronouncements.

    It is rather an appeal to the new Buhari government.  Nigerian Christendom, through President Goodluck Jonathan’s evangelical allies in the Ayo Oritsejafor-led Christian Association of Nigeria (CAN), actively contributed to the president’s democratic ouster.

    Gen. Buhari cannot afford such destructive luxury, for it is hard to see how the Buhari government would benefit from Bakare’s prayer of inequity.

    As for Bakare, Hardball’s friendly advice: keep to church matters; and leave politics to politicians.

  • Sheikh Diezani finally speaks to us

    Wow, our dainty queen of the oil industry, the dowager of OPEC nations and she who would have been a sheikh were she of a different gender finally responds to our irritations. Ha, Hardball is particularly relieved that this is happening in his lifetime – the times indeed are a-changing.

    Mid last week, the unflappable empress who held sway as Nigeria’s oil minister under President Goodluck Jonathan let it escape her that she is human after all and that she is susceptible to all the frailties of ‘we mere mortals’ too. Upon the first sign of faltering by the PDP and its president in the March 28 election, there had been rumour abroad that she had scurried to former head of state, Abdulsalami Abubakar to seek some shielding. But she had dismissed that for what we have said it is: rumour. But let us just label it the first sign of Diezani’s ‘fearful capitulation’.

    But the second sign came last week when she ‘encountered’ the ‘miserable State House Correspondents’ after the Federal Executive Council (FEC) meeting. Hardball will stand to be corrected, but he cannot remember her condescending to talk to that ‘mob lesser humans merely littering’ the corridors of power in the inane pretext of being journalists. But voila, in her current waves of fearful capitulation, the inimitable and redoubtable Mrs. Diezani Alison-Madueke granted what Hardball must describe as a ‘torrid’ interview to the press horde of Aso Rock.

    Remember that ‘small’ episode right in the chambers of the House of Representatives when she knocked the recording machines of reporters off the table because she insisted she did not want the press around during a hearing. Such was her disdain for the press.

    Today she needs to be heard and heard extemporaneously and effectively too. Now our Queen of the Niger has something to tell us; she has cause and indeed, the need to explain to Nigerians; she now wants to at least pretend to give some account, any form of account as her colleagues were wont to do all these years. A charade she would not deign to indulge in hitherto; not because the charade was beneath her but because we, the people were beneath her to address.

    Her third sign of ‘fearful capitulation’ is that she spoke so solicitously and in self defence, she spoke long and she spoke expecting to be understood and perhaps exonerated. She spoke for the record, her own self-kept and un-scrutinised record. She spoke about the things she refused to speak about. Remember she defied the House and wangled a judgment that helped her escape answering for her alleged N10 billion private jet cruises; she spoke about the $20 billion missing oil revenue and the Pricewaterhouse Coopers (PwC) forensic audit report (which she said was done a few weeks ago); she spoke about opening up the oil industry to Nigerians…

    She urged us to “remember the unprecedented reforms that have happened in the oil industry in the last six years.”  We would have been fooled by her vacuous effusions until she let slip the Freudian Slip that most of these reforms are stacked sky-high in her much vaunted Petroleum Industry Bill (PIB) which has “languished in the National Assembly for two years,” her words. These are refreshing times indeed.

  • Enter ADB designer president?

    Designer minister with designer moustache, designer shoes, designer pair of glasses, designer shirts, designer ties, designer hair cut and even designer elocution!

    That is the affable Akinwunmi Adesina, PhD, for you — outgoing minister of agriculture and rural development, and perhaps the greatest ministerial salesman Nigeria has ever had!  Among his many feats as minister is his designer cassava bread which, sources say, has snatched and retained its pride of place on the Goodluck Jonathan presidential breakfast table!

    Indeed, such is Dr. Adesina’s designer razzmatazz that many an informed literary mind has zealously opined that whereas the late American Arthur Miller wrote Death of a Salesman, a classic in contemporary dramatic tragedy, a putative future follow-up, using Adesina as merry and living example, should be entitled Life for a Salesman.  Such is the outgoing minister’s charm in salesmanship!

    What Nigeria would soon lose, however, the African Development Bank (ADB) will (hopefully and happily) soon gain.  Dr. Adesina, brilliant Nigerian patriot and technocrat, is training his designer pair of eyes on the ADB presidency, but he has seven others to contend with: Sufian Ahmed, Jaloul Ayed, Kordje Bedoumra, Christina Duarte, Samura M. W. Kamara, Thomas Z. Sakala and Birama Boubacar Sidibe.  The election holds on May 28 in Abidjan, Cote d’Ivoire, during the ADB annual general meeting.

    Which is why, President-elect, Gen. Muhammadu Buhari has thrown his weight behind the technocrat as a son  in whom his native Nigeria is well pleased.  But, as Gen. Buhari told the visiting President John Mahama of Ghana in canvassing ECOWAS support, Nigeria’s support for her own is not just because Dr. Adesina is Nigerian.  It is simply because he has the cognate experience and exposure, as a development agriculturist, even before landing the job as President Jonathan’s agriculture and rural development minister — a round peg in a round hole, many would insist, even if Hardball had always had some issues with his portrait of a minister as jolly showman and zestful salesman.

    Still, he is not all gloss, no substance.  Hear Gen. Buhari: “Dr. Adesina has a proven track record in a career that predates his position as Nigeria’s minister of agriculture and rural development”, adding that his long career experience, which has taken him through the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), has earned him many years of working experience in Francophone and Anglophone countries of Africa, thus making him at home with Africa’s developmental challenges.

    The candidate’s campaign war cry is also sure to resonate with many, if not most: eradication of poverty in Africa by reducing unemployment among African youths, reviving rural economies to create prosperity, ensuring continental economic growth and regional integration and prosperity.

    But beyond the quest proper, what makes it for Hardball is Gen. Buhari’s unequivocal support for Dr. Adesina’s quest.  It is loud and clear: elections are over but governance must continue to build a greater Nigeria.  Of course, in other climes, that should not be a big deal — supporting a minister of an outgoing government.  But Nigeria is not “other climes” and that is what makes the Buhari move a welcome experience.

    Hardball would miss Dr. Adesina, though — his technocratic showmanship, hitherto a familiar home brew, would now be an object of overseas reportage.

    But Hardball would not despair: what is Nigeria’s designer loss is Africa’s designer gain!