The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Abducted girls: let us all hit the forest

    One week has passed. It must be the worst one week in the lives of the parents of the captured little girls. Young lasses of Government Girls’ Secondary School, Chibok, Borno State have been in captivity. Men reportedly dressed in military uniform had gone to the school in the dead of night, herded an entire ‘school’ of girls into buses and spirited them away into the night. Young ladies clad only in their night dresses. The story of the mode of the abduction is a thick plot that may never unravel, but it doesn’t matter now. What matters is that as at Monday, an indeterminate number of the hapless girls (no fewer than 100) are still in captivity, holed up in some thick forest of Borno, perhaps beyond the boundary into the mountainous fringes of Cameroon.

    It’s belly-gutting, it’s heart-rending, it’s unspeakable. How would a man or a woman eat even a morsel of food or catch a wink of sleep knowing that his or her nubile daughter is right there in the bowels of the forest, chaperoned by hoodlums. It’s the worst tragedy that could befall any parent; it’s the worst death a family would have to die. It’s psychological torture – death by installments. Would death have come with a bang?

    It is a classic modern Nigerian macabre tale. First the state fails to protect school children, even after repeated deadly attacks on schools in the zone; a zone that is supposedly under military garrison. Why was there a total lack of intelligence surveillance over this all-girls’ school? If there was a semblance of a watch over the facility, a tip-off could have been triggered. How come there seems to be no clue as to the whereabouts of the abductors over one week after the act? Not even the escape of some of the girls seems to have given the security clan a lead.

    Also instructive is the emerging fact that over one week after the incident, the school authority cannot ascertain how many students were in school on that fateful night and how many were actually taken away. There have been as many figures as there are commentators. The initial report was 100 girls; then 130, 157, 187, 230 and 234. Even the school’s principal could neither state an exact figure nor say why there is so much discrepancy. We are talking about adult human beings here; even materials would have some kind of inventory. If the school management knew not the exact number of students on campus, it could at least be close; the gap is unthinkably wide.

    Now everyone is a security operative in an omnibus search party – parents, teachers, hunters, vigilantes – maybe the entire country should empty into the forest of Sambisa? Well, one thing we can at least do is to keep vigil – prayer vigil for the girls. We must also mainstream the search: let us discuss it, protest it, condemn the crime and relentlessly query the government until all the girls are freed. It concerns our collective humanity. Let this abduction unite us against the merchants of hate and destruction in our midst.

  • From YEAA to GIFT

    From YEAA to GIFT — it is the distinctly Nigerian penchant to reward failure with huge benefits.

    Remember the apocryphal tale of the inimitable Esama of Benin, who reportedly admonished the people of Edo State to reward his son, Lucky, with four more years, with his curious logic that when a student flunks his exams, he is entitled to a re-sit?

    Before the Edo apocrypha was the notorious reality of YEAA — Youths Earnestly Yearn for Abacha.

    The best forgotten Goggled One, Sani Abacha, was at his murdering and stealing best. He had run all opposition either out of town or into exile. He had tossed into gaol and tossed away the key, MKO Abiola, the elected president whose mandate he brutally usurped.

    He had suborned the Nigerian economy for his sole pleasure, ironically (as later facts would emerge), using the MKO scarecrow to steal his country blind, via bogus security votes. The cash he so cynically salted away in foreign banks would later be known as the Abacha loot.

    At the height of that infamy, a certain Daniel Kanu and his band of racketeers emerged. Eagle Square, Abuja, was their satanic stage. Their no less satanic mission was to rally and rally and rally, until the Goggled One took a break from his humongous evil and answer to their plea that he would succeed himself.

    In their self-given tasks and rogue-funded gambit, they drew into the gravy the cream of Nigerian artistes, who sang away, wriggled their hips and tore their vocal chords, summoning the Goggled One to transmute. He probably would have — until what the media promptly termed “divine intervention”.

    Sixteen years after the iron dictator exited on the laps of debauchery and three elected civilian administrations after, YEAA has promptly morphed into GIFT — Goodluck Initiative For Transformation. But the abiding philosophy remains: power without responsibility.

    GIFT, in a newspaper advert, threatened to rally and rally and rally and rally (ala YEAA) until President Goodluck Jonathan hearkens its patriotic plea to run for second term.

    Now, if Abacha could cook up rogue elements to champion his transmutation simply because even a military dictator realised it was sheer legal brigandage, how do you explain such of an elected president who, under the law, has a right to second term? That he is convinced, by the sheer disaster of his tenure, that he has forfeited his right to a second term?

    Yeah right, President Jonathan, hero of GIFT, has during his first term, brought much transformation to his country — transformation into anomie, bordering on full-scale anarchy; politicised the National Security Council meeting, turning a strictly constitutional injunction, a right of governors of every partisan hue into a monopoly of his Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and satellite governors; wined and made merry at political hustings, even as innocent citizens were mass bombed in his capital and school girls were captured by terrorists; beggared the states to the tune of 40 per cent, even if oil prices have not dipped and oil sales have not come down!

    So, why would GIFT not rally and gift Jonathan a second term?

     

  • Ode to the grim harvesters

    They have done it again. I bet they are clinking glasses now and patting themselves on the back. This must be their biggest haul of bodies and limbs. The cold, calculated dawn attack on an Abuja crowded motor-park last Monday April 14. Call it the Nyanya massacre that fetched nearly 100 bodies and about 200 casualties in one fell swoop. It is a huge Nigerian tragedy, a black Monday. But it is of course the joy of the cowardly mass murderers; the masked sponsors and authors of innocent deaths and senseless killings. They must have savoured some charred fleshwiches that Monday morn?

    Two-faced serpents, they laugh with us in the day and plot our destruction at night. The slitherers, perhaps they are part of the blood donation photo-ops by Tuesday morning? Their children and wards are ensconced in highbrow schools abroad, they enjoy undue share of the national cake but they tell the poor, wretched and unschooled kids that “book is harmful”. They trick them to kill, destroy and pulverize themselves in order to earn virginal pleasures in the clouds beyond. But their children are reading all the books available and supping their pleasure here and now, day and night. What extreme wickedness; fiends from hell! No human would annihilate unless his spirit was first annihilated.

    The cowardly death merchants would first zombify and drug the suicide bomber and then have him go merrily to hell in small bits and pieces under a cloud of smoke and a mangle of metals. The spiteful heathen would hide under the cover of religion to pervert the world. They trick the simple to purvey small pyrotechnic of hell fires, in which they are consumed and with which they maim and destroy. But the real hell is not a child’s play; it’s no fireworks for callow kids crying over candies. It’s not a one-off fire-cracker or IED; it’s an expansive eternal torment. It will shame yee flame-throwers and your improvised bangers would be inconsequential sparks of light on the due day.

    Yee hateful cowards, for your thirst and idiosyncrasy you maim and murder the defenseless, the innocent, the law-abiding, who go about his business. You take the life you never made; you shed blood as if it were waste water, just to salve your megalomania? What would you tell your maker when you face him and you are faced with a collage of the skulls you harvested? Perhaps you have no maker; you made yourself or you are self-made? Which implies that you will never have to answer to anyone, now or forever? Perhaps you will never die; you must be immortal; yes, no mortal would waste so much souls; no man with a pint of blood in him, who feels and feeds, would thirst for so such blood.

    And to what end by the way; for fame and affluence; for power and glory? But even King Solomon expired. Who had more fame, more wisdom, more wealth and more glory, yet all these came to an end. Vanity he called them all. Everything will come to an end someday anyway, so nothing really is worth the killing of so many innocent people. The presidency will come to an end too; so will all the oil dollars vanish, even all the gold and silver in the vaults of England will cease to be someday. Yes, everything will pass someday, but what shall we answer?

  • Fani-Kayode’s rigmarole

    Fani-Kayode’s rigmarole

    From the look of things, Chief Femi Fani-Kayode, an ex-minister of Aviation, former partisan  of the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) and lately an enthusiastic voice of the opposition in the All Progressives Congress (APC), may be exploring a renewal of old political affiliations. Evidence of such possibility was supplied not just by his publicised closed-door meeting with President Goodluck Jonathan at the Presidential Villa, Abuja; it was even more strongly provided by his words after what may not be inaccurately described as a reunion.

     In the first place, after familiar but unconvincing bromides about the Presidential Villa being a place where every Nigerian who is welcome can always visit, Fani-Kayode spoke about “the wonderful people here”, a flattering reference that was food for thought, given his known oppositional attitude to the Jonathan administration.  What has changed about the government to warrant the praise, or perhaps more precisely, what has changed about Fani-Kayode to inspire the new song?

    “I won’t go into that,” was his curt reply to reporters who sought information about what he discussed with Jonathan; and when he was asked whether this rather unexpected meeting was a signal that he was about to exit APC, his answer was pregnant with meaning. He said: “The step I will take will be made known to Nigerians at the right time. The most important thing, and I think you are fully aware of this, is that I cannot and will not be associated with a situation whereby any group of people is promoting a religion above another.”

    It would appear that there was a lot more significance about what he did not say than what he actually said. There was an unmistakable implication that all is not well with his APC-connection.  More importantly, there was also the implied point that religious differences, or differences in perspectives on religion and its political influence, may be why he is rethinking his political affairs. According to him, “I think all of us have gone past the stage of religious politics in this country. We must treat the Muslim community with utmost respect and we must treat the Christian community in the same way, and even the non-religious.”

    So who is playing “religious politics” by Fani-Kayode’s definition or standard? It is noteworthy that Jonathan, before he visited Pope Francis at the Vatican last month, which was possibly the ultimate move in a series of churchy activities, faced a barrage of public criticism for his overt romance with Christian places of worship in particular and his indecent exploitation of otherwise spiritual space for the  strictly secular business of politics.

    Fani-Kayode is probably yet to make full public disclosure concerning the apparent reawakening of his old political passion.  Although in a clearly unpersuasive defensive effort, he subsequently argued that his visit to Jonathan did not amount to departure from APC, adding it was premature for observers to conclude that he had defected to PDP, there is little or no doubt about the signs of disconnection.

    Of course, his freedom of political association is beyond question. So, if Hardball may ask, why the rigmarole?

  • Dame Patience as the new PDP fixer

    Dame Patience as the new PDP fixer

    That title of ‘The Fixer’, used to be the patent right of Chief Tony Anenih, the indefatigable henchman of the Peoples Democratic Party, PDP. Time was when he could determine and declare the next occupant of Aso Rock Presidential Villa about three years before the next election. And woebetide any governor or aspirant who was not in his good books; he or she would be as good as a non-starter. He was held in awe and beheld with trepidation by members of the PDP clan from all corners of the country. Such was his vice-like grip on the party especially in the Olusegun Obasanjo era.

    But not any more today; the pendulum of power may have shifted especially after he capitulated during the recent ‘new’ PDP crisis and showed weakness in reining the want-away faction. Real political powers may well have relocated to the office of Mama Peace, Dame Patience Jonathan, the First Lady and wife of the president. A power monger and a spiked bludgeon, she may well have assumed the position of author and finisher in PDP in all the states and at all the levels. The morbid drama that has brewed between the presidency and the Governor Rotimi Amaechi of Rivers State is of course not unlike her kind of scripting and casting.

    There is a story going round the political mill in one south east state that a group of PDP political elders had visited Aso Rock and after there long, syrupy introductions, Mama had reportedly asked after a House member from the state: “We do not see him, he does not come home and he does not mingle with the party in the state,” they had answered. It was said that Mama shot back at the beefy, old leader of the team that, “if you people don’t know where Hon. Lagbaja (let’s call him that) is, me i know; if he doesn’t come home, go and look for him. He is my son and if not for him, all of us will not be seated here today; he was the one who helped us quench the fire in the House recently. You people better go look for him, he is my son.”

    With such undisguised endorsement, it is said that the House member has already set up a guber campaign office and all PDP members in the state are tumbling over themselves to be in his team.

    Not many were therefore surprised when news went abroad that the wife of the president had already endorsed the next governors for three states in the coming election. Though the claim was refuted by her office but only to the effect that she has endorsed one aspirant only and not three. According to a release signed by her media aide, “In the case of Rivers State, the First Lady wishes to state categorically that the supervising Minister of Education, Chief Nyesom Wike, is the leader of PDP in Rivers State and he enjoys the followership of the people of the state. The First Lady is solidly behind Wike.”

    Anyone familiar with the Jonathan trajectory would have noticed that Dame Patience is the power behind the throne and being strong-willed will always have her way. The affected incumbent governors and the PDP hierarchy would, therefore, either be mere window dressing or they would be up for a big fight in the months ahead.

     

  • S’eruba S’erubawon

    The latest play from the stable of Prof. Wole Soyinka, our own WS, is Alapata Apata. Unfortunately, Hardball has not read that play.

    But its stunning pun of a butcher (Alapata , in Yoruba) doing his butchering in Apata (Yoruba for rock, though there is a rocky neighbourhood in Ibadan, Oyo State, which hosts the Government College, Ibadan, the secondary school the Nobel Laureate attended), is suggestive of some high drama.

    That is why Hardball will most respectfully request our WS to craft another play, S’eruba S’erubawon, to capture the electoral theatre of the absurd, looming over Ekiti State and the State of Osun.

    To put the records straight, S’erubawon is the formidable one that puts the fear of God into others. That was the moniker, on the hustings, of Isiaka Adeleke, who served as two-year governor of Osun State, in the Ibrahim Babangida diarchy, before Sani Abacha scrapped all the grand pretence. That was Adeleke’s first coming.

    But his second coming, his much touted, eleventh-hour Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) gubernatorial bid for the State of Osun, has been less than rosy. The one who used to put the fear of God into others has become one, in which others put the fear of God! That is the long and short of the pitiful collapse of Adeleke’s gubernatorial bid; and hence, the urgent request for the play, S’eruba S’erubawon.

    The S’erubawon of yore, apparently thought nothing of the Biblical quip that the kingdom of God suffers violence — until, from news report, he got the sobering treatment. The iconoclastic duo of Iyiola Omisore and Jelili Adesiyan, simply S’eruba S’erubawon (mortally scared the hitherto intrepid).

    The combined forces of Omisore, Adeleke’s rival for the ticket, and Adesiyan, minister of Police Affairs and his armada of Police henchmen, reportedly did the trick. The pair and their uniformed enforcers allegedly gave Adeleke the beating of his life. That virtually excoriated from him any gubernatorial spirit! Now, from the safety of his Ede country home, S’erubawon is threatening court action.

    The Osun travesty, where an opponent would allegedly manhandle another to scare him off the race, is the grim symbol of the PDP-Jonathan Presidency’s conspiratorial tactics in the two crucial elections in Ekiti and Osun.

    The PDP knows, from its records in the two states, and its parlous federal scorecard, the election would be a disaster.

    Yet, it is bent on illicit and illegal tactics, euphemistically called federal might: Musiliu Obanikoro, minister of state for Defence, putting troops to illegal and partisan uses in Lagos; and Adesiyan making the Police no less than uniformed thugs in Osun. Put in the pair of peculiar candidates in Ayo Fayose (Ekiti) and Omisore (Osun), and the picture is all too clear.

    But all this is not new. Jonathan should find time to read Soyinka’s Ibadan: The Penkelemes Years (for what happened to the power rascals of the 1st Republic); and enjoy Unlimited Liability Company, the musical album that saw off the National Party of Nigeria (NPN) power bandits of the 2nd Republic.

    Those who don’t learn from history are fated to end in its belly!

     

     

     

     

  • Wow! Hardball rebases his economy too

    Gee, whoever thought up this rebasing of economy a la Nigeria must be a genius. Delayed rebasing is like delayed gratification – it just streams in endlessly like someone on an extended trip to cloud nine. Imagine what it would be for Hardball, who had never based his economy before, not to talk of rebasing – I instantly became a billionaire upon first basing and then rebasing my economy in one sweet stretch.

    Now it was a bit complicated considering that I am neither a statistician nor an economist, but I just applied a few rules of the thumb. I first created baskets of all my portfolio of assets. For instance, all my bank accounts – both live and moribund; all my two-bit stocks, including those I cannot find the addresses of the companies anymore and those that had never paid nary a kobo dividend since I was corralled into buying their public offer. In another basket are my salary and other incomes from P-P (we all know what that means don’t we?) and beneficence from well-wishers and people of goodwill. Yet I opened another basket for my pension scheme, esusu, co-operative and thrift penny clubs. I also worked out my landed properties, which comprised a city boy’s quarter apartment and a village cottage.

    Wow, you never really know how much you were worth until you begin to tab it. I threw in my seven-year old corolla and my wife’s 10-year old. I then opened what I termed the domestic basket. Here, I threw in my wife and four children and, of course, the house-keeping money over the years (they are assets aren’t they?); I listed the household items in the houses – from the settee to the kitchen utensils down to my boxers and even madam’s small pieces of clothes and lipsticks. I captured also, all the school fees I had paid for myself, my wife and even my children from their kindergarten days up to this moment (now this is huge). There are also the school books, uniforms, all the little extortionate side payments.

    There is also the social basket, which will hold all such activities like naming ceremonies, birthdays, weddings, aso-ebis, etc. The church is not to be lumped in one basket with the socials – the offerings, the harvests, bazaars, special thanksgiving, building funds, welfare fund, this fund and that fund. The more I give it a thought, the more baskets of assets I fill out to overflowing.

    It can also get a little complicated: would I include all the gifts and donations I had made to less privileged people, including relatives? What about servicing of vehicles, payment of mai-guards, all the drinks I have quaffed and offered to friends and other kuru-kere expenses, the specificity of which are better loaded under miscellaneous, as one may not be terribly proud of them?

    But surely, I must capture all my written works – books of poems, hundreds of articles which could translate into books someday; one must also quantify the column name, which has become a high value brand, and the person behind the column, which could become an instrument of brand/corporate endorsement someday soon.

    There must be so much more left un-captured, especially some brilliant ideas I have swimming in my head all this while. But these will do for now. Upon quantifying all these, I found that I am suddenly a billionaire; what feel good feeling it gives me, but I dare not mention my new worth at home, lest the house-keeping money instantly skyrockets to the status befitting of a truly wealthy man. But great feeling it is all the same.

  • Is Obanikoro a true Lagosian?

    Is Obanikoro a true Lagosian?

    What has the job of a junior minister in the department of defence got to do with lands and housing? We ask, what is he doing defending the indefensible when he should be working with his superior minister on how to stop the menace of Boko Haram, arrest the kidnap of his mentors’ family members or how he should work with the national security adviser to broker peace with a disquieted corps of service chiefs?

    Rather Musiliu Obanikoro, a failed governorship candidate in Lagos State, has morphed from electoral disaster of his own to fighting to bring misfortune to the lives of people he contested to save in his previous incarnation. How can we say he means well when a land that has already been set aside to give shelter to over a thousand souls is giving him sleepless nights in his elite mansion?

    Was that why he contested for the same position in 2007? So he wanted to deprive the homeless of their deserved roofs over their heads. Babatunde Fashola, SAN, the Lagos State governor, who bested him in that election and walloped his party’s candidate the second time, said he has documents to show that the federal government handed to Lagos State the Ilubirin property where the housing complex will be erected. But rather than follow decency by first consulting with the government, he deployed military men to occupy the place. He had the option of going to court first. He did not. Is he minister of invasion of lands and housing?

    Is it a case of Obanikoro bringing his office as a minister of defence to tackle lands that belong to the people? Is that the way he defines his position as junior minister of defence? To attack, they say, is a form of defence. That is Obanikoro’s way of showing that he is the defender of the mandate.

    That is the act of the coward who would not fight until he thinks he has seen a perceived lazy man. Lagos State does not have control of the armed forces. The federal government does. Lagos State does not control the police. The federal government does in our skewed federalism.

    Is it not the proper thing to do for a Jonathan administration that believes in due process to take the matter to court? Rather “Koro,” as he is called, has taken arms before the law. Yet he will claim he is a true Lagosian. Maybe he is a Lagosian by birth. He is certainly not a Lagosian by heart or in spirit. His style to Lagos is perfidy, and Lagos loves those who love them. “Koro” is made of a different stripe.

  • Charity? My name is Charity!

    Charity? My name is Charity!

    Ha, this Charity must be a lucky man or woman, the way some National Conference (NC) delegates are pledging to push their windfall his or her way!

    Lagos lawyer, distinguished Senior Advocate of the Masses (SAM) and eminent Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), Femi Falana, has promised he would donate his NC allowance to Charity.

    That just reminds Hardball of the imperative of being Charity (ah, Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest?); also reminiscent of the exploits of the crafty tortoise in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart.

    The old crook in the folklore christened himself ‘All of You’ and grabbed all the refreshments in the skies; leaving his benefactors, who donated feathers for his make-shift wings, in the lurch. Well, he ended up with a cracked back! But Hardball won’t be like that, after becoming Charity and enjoying NC lollies.

    But the imperative to be Charity became even more imperative when another Senior Advocate, the Apapa Jigijigi (that is his traditional title) himself, Chief Mike Ozekhome, was trenchant on his determination to locate Charity and dash (apologies to President Goodluck Jonathan) him or her his allowances.

    The learned silk said should he give up the lolly, he had no guarantee the money would return to the treasury, since it had already been appropriated. For all you know, the cash could just develop wings and fly away. Besides, the SAN declared he would do the spendthrift Federal Government no good by further enriching it. So — that’s where Charity gets lucky — he would rather give all to Charity!

    So, folks, any good suggestions how Hardball can become Charity? For your pains, let me enter this solemn pledge. If I become Charity, I won’t chop alone. Charity means loving and sharing. I intend to live up to the billing of my name. So folks, I’ll share the almost N10m lollies with you.

    Then, since as Charity I would be burying my snout in Nigeria’s munificence, and I am not even an NC delegate, I will try my best, as long as I live, to sort out the Nigerian problem.

    Unlike the Lamido Adamawa, who just declared a Cameroonian enclave, named Adamawa State of Cameroun, where he can escape to and continue holding court should Nigeria go kaput, it would be Nigeria or nothing. So, I will mobilise my people, that means all of you folks who will share in my good fortune as Charity, to weigh in on the NC to fix our country.

    As Gen. Mahammadu Buhari said in his military head of state days, Nigeria is our country. We must stay here and salvage it together.

    But all these I will do only and only if you show me, Hardball, how to become Charity. To me and to you, my fellow common man, that sum is just too tantalising to let go of.

    Let me also plead with other delegates to address their minds to the Apapa Jigijigi argument. It is no use further enriching the over-rich Federal Government, or even the over-rich NC delegates. The common man needs those millions.

    As your Charity, I represent the common man. So, be charitable. Help Hardball become Charity.

  • ETETE: Olowo o ni ku’re!

    It is the impotent vituperation of the hapless poor: “May the affluent not die well,” the poor fellow would fulminate, tormented by the vast monstrosities of wealth and its unfurled obscenity and awesome power. The above is a Yoruba street-speak that admits that whatever alchemy (situation) money cannot wrought (sort out) either does not exist or there is not enough money to apply to it. Even legendary juju musician, King Sunny Ade (Adegeye) sang about it about 30 years ago, evoking in his rich velvety voice that, “a matter money cannot solve dwells only under the ground; come see the wonders of money on this earth of ours, money indeed does great magic, may Odumare grant me mine too that I may live gay and happy.”

    Why is Hardball waxing lyrical, has he been visited by Mammon, the evil spirit of wealth, recently? Not by any chance, it just happens that a certain Chief Dan Etete, a former Minister of Petroleum Resources under the infamous General Sani Abacha junta regime has claimed big, international headlines once again. The last time he flashed on our radar was mid last year when his company, Malabu Oil, and other co-conspirators made a killing from an ill-gotten oil block, OPL 245. The highly lucrative block which Etete fraudulently awarded to himself when he was Oil Minister in 1998 eventually came to fruition after a long-drawn legal battle, political subterfuge and capitalist power play.

    The block is so dangerously endowed it is said to sit upon about nine billion barrels of crude oil. It is over this well of wealth that all the parties involved have carried out a do-or-die battle for over 15 years. On one side is the international oil consortium led by Shell Petroleum Development Company (and her proxies), the presidency and the Oil Ministry. It has been a battle royale in and out of courts and international arbitrations. In the end, Shell agreed a payout of over $1 billion (please do not say it’s a bribe) to Etete’s Malabu and his Nigerian co-travelers, including top government officials. They simply shared out Nigeria’s patrimony, the gains of a stolen oil block licence, which ought to have been revoked.

    It was a bumper windfall for Chief Etete and all involved and he has become stupendously rich. His name really ought to be among Forbe’s Africa’s richest persons except that his is ill-gotten lucre. But this is an old story now. Also outdated is the fact that the French court in 2007 sentenced this felon to a three-year imprisonment after finding him guilty of money laundering charges in France. He was also convicted of buying luxury properties worth about 15 million euros in France. But as has been noted, this is now in the past, which is the reason for this piece.

    The story today is that our super-rich Etete has been pardoned by the French government. According to a report last week, the French government cleared the former Petroleum Resources Minister, Chief Dan Etete, of the conviction of money laundering charges preferred against him. In a bulletin reportedly issued by the Ministry of Justice, Criminal Cases and Pardon Division, Etete had been pardoned and cleared of the conviction by the French court.

    What else can we add except that whatever situation money cannot sort out must be out of this world. Olowo oni ku’re o!