The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Suspending or ending the banknote controversy

    Suspending or ending the banknote controversy

    Spokesmen of the Presidency and Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN), Dr Reuben Abati and Ugo Okoroafor respectively, on Wednesday issued separate statements announcing the suspension of the currency restructuring exercise that would have seen, among other things, the issuance of N5000 banknote. The statements indicated that the suspension would enable the CBN to do a lot more in persuading the public on why the restructuring was needed. Given the apparent suddenness of the decision, it was thought that the massive opposition to the new policy was persuasive enough to make the President yield to pressure. The CBN Governor, Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, not being a politician himself, and therefore inured to the danger a disaffected electorate could constitute to the President, had been unyielding. He and his team had given the impression the opposition to the new banknote was uninformed.

    It is unlikely the opposition to the currency restructuring exercise, which had taken many frenzied weeks to crystallise, would weaken anytime soon. At least two former Heads of State, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo and Gen Yakubu Gowon, had suggested the policy was misplaced and needed to be jettisoned. But Sanusi had uncharitably countered by arguing that while former President Obasanjo, whose opposition to the policy received wide and dramatic publicity, was a good farmer, he was nonetheless a bad economist. That Sanusi counter itself was to generate another round of intense debates and helped tickle the imagination of comedians. A rough estimate of the distribution of opposition to the banknote policy showed that more people were opposed to it than supported it. And while Sanusi stood, and still probably stands, unreasonably inflexible on the policy, it is unlikely anyone can revive it, no matter how ingenious the apex bank’s economic arguments and propaganda are.

    The most remarkable thing about the government’s volte face is how suddenly the Presidency changed its mind. It was evident to everyone that the National Assembly was dead set against the CBN policy. The President himself uncharacteristically read the mood of the legislature well. With the fire of the fuel subsidy brouhaha still burning, and an angry National Assembly still seething, it would be impolitic of the President to goad the eminent parliamentarians into more fury. By finally disapproving the N5000 banknote, the Presidency was both saving itself further confrontation with the legislature and helping Sanusi avoid a parliament that was still eager to cut him to size. The National Assembly, it will be recalled, had on resumption from recess made it a priority to draw a red line over the banknote controversy. The Presidency correctly read the legislature’s foul mood and sensed the hopelessness of fighting a battle it could not hope to win.

    The National Assembly’s motion against the N5000 banknote makes the public wistful. Had the legislature joined the people in fighting the fuel subsidy withdrawal policy when the government heedlessly announced it on January 1, that battle would also probably have been won. Unlike Sanusi and the CBN, the legislature read the minds of Nigerians quite brilliantly and sensibly stood by them. It should be an alliance that must be nurtured if democracy is to survive and flourish. If the unwritten alliance between the people and the legislature worked this time, as indeed it should always do, we must wait to see whether the parliament could be trusted in the face of threatening controversies not to undermine the republic when it occasionally but recklessly indulges in moments of policy narcissism.

  • No end to security nightmare

    No end to security nightmare

    In addition to the rampant insecurity undermining political stability and economic development in parts of the country, there are indications a new front could open soon to engage security operatives full time and add to their nightmares. If reports are accurate, security agencies are said to be considering various scenarios they may have to contend with when train services resume between Lagos and Kano, the most popular trunk line. Without saying so, according to the reports, security agencies may be thinking of the havoc fundamentalist groups like the Boko Haram could cause for train passengers and railway facilities. Such proaction would be of immense benefit to a country that is already spending approximately N24 billion to rehabilitate and modernise the Nigerian Railway. If the restoration work is completed on time and successfully, it should ease\ long distance commuting and freight services, and catalyse economic activities. But all it takes to bring the whole enterprise crashing down is just one bomb at any point in the over 1000km rail lines between the two major cities.

    While it is good to be proactive in anticipating and solving the problems saboteurs could cause for train services, the government must by now have recognised the need for a holistic method in tackling insecurity. This will involve the government having a deeper and better understanding of the nature of insecurity in these parts, identifying the dramatis personae of insecurity, what propels them, and what patterns of operations can be deduced from their activities so far? In addition, there must be an understanding of how best railway insecurity can be tackled? These are some of the questions the government will have to grapple with and give definitive answers to if the financial and other resources being spent on rehabilitating the antiquated railway lines are not to go down the drain.

    One approach that may prove nugatory is the reactive and ineffectual measure being deployed against the unconscionable Boko Haram Islamist sect, a group that may well prove to be the most daunting enemy of resuscitated and revitalised railway services. Combating Boko Haram required the deployment of the highest form of intelligence operations; instead the government had until recently relied more on firepower. The menace also required a security architecture that brings together all the security services; instead the government had approached the ailment with atomised network of security operations. Things are changing now, and the government may find wisdom in building on the gains and experience it has acquired in combating terrorism to prepare for the security of train services.

    But overall, the trains will never be fully or even really protected until the government can comprehensively secure the country itself and pacify restive groups. Like the problematic petroleum pipeline, which is the prime target for saboteurs, the government can never hope to secure every kilometre of the rail lines. Worse, as the government has found out in trying to secure youth corps members, it is not only an impossible task, it is in fact a foolish undertaking. Even if it were possible to assign a policeman to every youth corps member, pipeline, and rail line it would still not be possible to keep them safe, just as the police have not been able to guarantee safety for every man or establishment, including banks, they have tried to secure.

  • Presidential pessimism

    Presidential pessimism

    President Goodluck Jonathan often complains about the professionalism of the Nigerian media. But in his extempore speech of Tuesday, given on the occasion of the 52nd Independence Anniversary lecture under the theme, Nigeria: Security, Development and National Transformation, the president was once again at his bilious and vehement worst. It was a copious speech, and it revealed the president’s inner, and shall we say, vivid and embroidered thoughts. It also unfortunately amplified his difficult relationship with the concept of security, the political part of which interested and disturbed him. He is also apparently unnerved by media comprehension of the freedom of speech and what he describes as its injurious impact on stability and good governance. Overall, Nigerians should be grateful for the president’s often frank eruptions, for, as this column once said, they are a window into his uniquely pessimistic mind and reveal how delicately wired it is.

    Crucially, the president addressed two interesting things in his speech: the fuel subsidy protests; and his comparison of the media with Boko Haram. He seems to think that given the charming flourish with which the protests were organised in Lagos in January, they had to be sponsored. It is frightening that even the president underestimates the industriousness of his people and belittles their world-famous skill for innovation and improvisation. This column and others like it in this newspaper have repeatedly told the president that Lagos is very enterprising and quite capable of the most prodigious sort of improvisation. When will he believe us?

    The president also compared the Nigerian media with Boko Haram in the following dramatic putdown. Hear him: “And I believe it is not just the media. When we talk about the Boko Haram, we have political Boko Haram, religious Boko Haram and criminal Boko Haram. So also in the media, you have the professional media and the political media. That is why I talk about the political media. Because of the interest of 2015, whatever you do is immaterial, the government must be brought down. And that mentality cuts across most African countries and even outside Africa.” Well, now, according to the president, both Boko Haram and the media seemed to be structured for destructive purposes.

    The president’s minders may doubtless have some influence on his written speeches; it is however doubtful whether they can restrain him a little in his high-voltage off-the-cuff remarks. That is the challenge the aides must bear, the cross they must carry. The president must be told that every time he speaks extempore, he indulges his penchant for goofing. If he doesn’t want to be as highly criticised as he fears he has been, or abused as he believes, he must learn to be taciturn and hope we won’t also abuse him for being laconic.

  • Penny dreadful national honours

    Penny dreadful national honours

    Hardball is today loth to spoon-feed younger readers. He will leave them to find out what penny dreadful means. For older readers, from whose ranks many of the recipients of Nigerian National Honours come from, penny dreadful is certainly not a strange term.

    The old are familiar with it, and more, they can feel an eerie sense of its applicability in the 2012 Honours investiture that took place two days ago for 155 people described fulsomely as eminent personalities. Most Nigerians, if President Goodluck Jonathan, GCFR, would be kind enough to lend us his idiosyncratic hyperbole, think the honours have been bastardised.

    Since 1963 when it began, the awards have gone to over four thousand people, very many of them truly undeserving. Responding to questions over the apparent debasement of the awards and the fact that some awardees have in retrospect proved unworthy of the honours, Jonathan declared: “I have directed that the National Honours Committee compile a list of persons conferred with National Honours but that their current credibility is questionable. If they are found wanting, our prestigious honours will be withdrawn.”

    We leave it to you to determine whether the honours are really prestigious, or whether it would not have been far better to tighten the criteria beforehand and ensure that awardees are people duly and rigorously tested in achievement and character. It is an indication of the vulgarisation of the awards, for instance, that they have become predictable for certain classes of people.

    It is routine to give it to heads of state and presidents, usually after service or, in the case of Jonathan, during service, whether they deserved it or not. It is now also routine to give it to serving vice presidents, some governors, serving top military and police brass, and as it has become obvious, a few outright charlatans. It has in fact become a tool for dispensing favours, and with each passing year, it becomes increasingly devalued.
    No awardee illustrates the bastardisation of the honours as much as the late Gen Sani Abacha, GCON, whose larcenous and libidinous propensity turned Nigeria into an object of international ridicule far worse than the sensuous Mr Silvio Berlusconi occasioned for Italy. Many more recipients have proved unworthy of the awards.

    The task for Jonathan, if indeed he is capable of discharging it, is not to simply compile a list of those who have debased the awards or to pussyfoot over it. He has a responsibility to rework the National Honours paradigm away from its present predictability and its deployment as a reward system for those still in government, including himself.

    It should worry every Nigerian that, like the honours awards so spectacularly devalued, Nigeria now has governors and presidents who site government institutions and giant projects in their hometowns and villages. In the light of the generally selfless leadership of the First Republic and the decade before, it is a scandal the appalling quality of leaders Nigeria has produced since the middle 1970s, leaders who have no sense of history, no sense of fairness, and no sense of the obligation nobility imposes.

  • Free speech and its expanding list of subtle enemies

    These are not the best of times for free speech. The killing of four American diplomats in Benghazi, Libya, on September 11 by an al-Qaeda affiliate, the al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), has brought to the fore in all its ugly ramifications the difficult, if not impossible, relationship between humanity and freedom of expression.

    The killings, if AQAP’s claims are believable, were ostensibly to avenge the killing by US drones in June of Abu Yahya al-Libi, a top ranking al-Qaeda militant of Libyan descent. Libyan authorities seem to think that much more than any other reason, AQAP’s explanation is closer to the truth of what happened in Benghazi last week.

    The Americans are still piecing clues together, but they seem to believe that the killings were connected with the protests by Muslims in many parts of North Africa and the Middle East against the film, Innocence of Muslims, produced and posted on the Internet by an American citizen, Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. YouTube hosts a 14-minute clip of the film that is considered by most people to have excessively denigrated Prophet Muhammad.

    Protests against the film have spread like wild fire in Arabia and some countries even in Europe. While many African countries south of the Sahara have been largely equanimous about the film, public officials in the US and Europe have struggled on one hand with genuine outrage and veiled contrition, and on the other hand with a steely determination to sustain the constitutional freedoms, especially that of speech, that have become integral to their civilisations.

    It is unlikely they will be able to easily resolve the quandary the hated film has put them. In 1988 when Europe was confronted with The Last Temptation of Christ, an award-winning film by Martin Scorsese, state officials were more successful in resisting any temptation to meddle either in restraining the film’s producers or in censoring its availability to cinema houses. Perhaps, too, because of Europe’s sophistication, protests against the film were not too successful. In fact, when a cinema house showing the film in Paris was fire-bombed, a French Minister of Culture at the time remarked that: “Freedom of speech is threatened, and we must not be intimidated by such acts.”

    However, the controversy over Scorsese’s audacious film pre-dated 9/11 and the al-Qaeda phenomenon. Since 2001, when al-Qaeda bombed targets in the US, the issue of free speech has assumed more alarming dimensions. In September 2005, a Danish medium, the Jyllands-Posten, published 12 editorial cartoons that depicted Muhammad contrary to Islamic injunctions. The newspaper said at the time that the publication was its own contribution to the debate regarding criticism of Islam and self-censorship. The ensuing riots that greeted the publication and its reprint in more than 50 other countries led to the death of about 100 people and the burning of many Western embassies.
    After the current gale of protests subside, the world, especially Western societies, will have to grapple with the volatile issues relating to freedom of speech. They will once again begin an examination of the difficult question of where free speech ends and intolerance begins, and how to disaggregate blasphemy in a world of shifting mores, values, interpretations and reassessment of religious principles and practices.

    The world will also have to examine whether the reactions to the Basseley film are just one more landmark in the so-called clash of civilisations between Western culture, or perhaps Christianity, on one hand, and Islamic values on the other hand; or whether the conflicts between the two civilisations merely mask geopolitical struggles in which Israel is at the core.

    What cannot be denied is that the West is finding it difficult to react with the same equanimity with which they often tackle problematic issues relating to the freedoms that underpin their societies. Like the deliberately provocative Danish cartoons, and now the Basseley film, there will be yet more provocations, some fairly harmless, and others quite lurid, to test the frontiers of free speech.

    Western societies do not think free speech must be circumscribed by borders when it comes to religion. Arabia and many Muslim societies think there is a red line that must not be crossed. The current furore will, therefore, not be the last in a world that seems to be growing increasingly and overtly less tolerant. Countries like Nigeria may be unable to contribute meaningfully to the debate, given its peculiar religious tapestry, but advocates of free speech must feel relieved to know that there are still parts of the world that allow or enable challenges to the orthodoxies of the day, whether those orthodoxies are religious, political or cultural.

    For in the end, it must be obvious to all that the world did not start out as either Christian or Muslim, or as any other religion for that matter. What religious texture the world will wear at the end of history, if indeed history will end, remains to be seen.

  • Why did it take EFCC so long?

    Why did it take EFCC so long?

    Mr Chibuike Achigbu, the intriguing man who some reports described as an oil magnate, was on Saturday granted administrative bail by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC).

    The businessman had launched himself into the thick of the controversy swirling around the $15 million alleged to have been offered as bribe to Mallam Nuhu Ribadu by the former Delta State governor, Chief James Ibori. In late August, Achigbu had gone to court claiming ownership of the money, which he said was not a bribe but money pooled together by influential businessmen as donation to the ruling Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) for the 2007 elections.

    He named Senator Andy Uba as a witness and hoped the legislator would corroborate his account of the transaction, which he said was conducted in the senator’s Abuja residence. While Uba admitted knowledge of the transaction, he balked at going into details, saying he knew nothing beyond the fact that his residence was used merely as venue of the transaction.

    But for reasons he would not disclose, Achigbu withdrew the case from court as intriguingly as he filed it. But by then it was too late. The cat had been let out of the murky bag. For soon after, Festus Keyamo, a legal practitioner, applied to court for an order through Direct Criminal Complaint procedure to compel the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) to investigate all those involved in the bribery saga. An Abuja Chief Magistrate Court gave the order and asked the IGP to report back on September 26.

    All these manoeuvres, of course, have nothing to do with the main case itself which is still before a Federal High Court in Abuja where the federal government is battling to legitimise its queer status as receiver of alleged stolen money, and Delta State is latching on to the allegation made by the original beneficiary, Ribadu, to claim ownership.

    Along the line, however, the EFCC on Thursday waded into the legal fracas and arrested Achigbu as part of the agency’s investigation of the bribery saga. It is not known whether they will pick up Uba, also as part of the investigation. Hardball, readers will recall, had repeatedly suggested the case was a very simple open and close one.

    All the authorities needed to do, he argued, was haul all the people mentioned in the transaction to court, particularly Ribadu and the man he sent to collect the money, Mr Ibrahim Lamorde, who happens to be the current EFCC chairman. Surely they couldn’t have become so amnesiac as not to remember how the exchange was done and the discussions that led to it. Why complicate a clear case, a puzzled Hardball queried?

    It has taken EFCC an awful long time to wade into a matter it ought on its own to have tackled effortlessly and even routinely. But better late than never. The public must indeed hope that the agency will really get to the bottom of the controversy.

    After all, Lamorde is available to be interrogated by the agency’s operatives, and Ribadu is still alive and kicking. It must also puzzle everyone that it had to take a court order to compel the police to live up to their responsibility.

    It is expected they will buckle down to it. However, like the EFCC, the police should have taken a natural interest in wading eagerly into a matter that is clearly within their purview. If the country has come to such a pass that outsiders and the courts now think for public officials, well, so be it. Think for them we will; and as frequently as are required to snap them out of their self-imposed paralysis.

  • They won’t even let us share their pains…

    Something curious happened at the London Olympics. During Michelle Obama’s visit to Team USA training camp, the 1.80m (5’11’’) and about 75kg (165lbs) American First Lady was scooped off the ground by American wrestler, Elena Pirozhkova, who herself is a mere 1.65m (5’5’’) and 63kg (138lbs). The point is not that the First Lady connected with the American representatives as the wife of a leading political figure should, or that the wrestler asked for permission to scoop Obama up like a rag doll, and did it with aplomb that belied her size. What was curious was the effortless connection between the First Lady and someone with neither name recognition nor status in the American society. Lifting the First Lady illustrates the worldview of the American politician, a worldview that has seen the obliteration, in the electoral sense, of the iron curtain dividing social classes, a worldview that has rendered the dividing line between the leaders and the led either impotent or artificial.

    A few days ago (we are not told whether what happened was inspired by the incident with Michelle in London), a restaurateur, Van Duzer, also gave President Barack Obama a bear hug and lifted him from the ground as he stopped by at that eatery during his campaign in Florida. Both Duzer and Obama were mighty pleased with the bonhomous side attraction, and it allowed the public many peeps into the mindset of the most powerful President on earth, the inescapable beauty of the American democratic process, and the fact that such bonhomie does not vitiate the aura, allure, drama and energy of the most powerful office on earth.

    Merely considering these two examples makes the Nigerian wistful. He reflects on the British monarchy and the stately elegance of the Queen of England; and as he considers all the panoply of pomp and poetry and nursery rhymes that swaddle it, he sighs with painful regret. For neither the Nigerian Presidency, which he considers burdensome, nor the ubiquitous monarchies scattered around him have risen in solemnity and dignity to half what Great Britain has evinced for centuries. Then the Nigerian encounters the delicate mixture of grace, affability and power of the American Presidency, and he marvels at both the intricate alchemy that has brought together in enviable harmony the lofty elements of human behaviour and the very thoughtful constitution that undergirds, nourishes and stimulates the American of all classes.

    The Nigerian has little choice but to ponder on these things as his presidents ensure that the lines that separate the leader from the led, lines drawn during colonialism, are accentuated by one of the world’s worst perceptions of power. Nigerian presidents do not allow the citizen to share in their triumphs, in their joys, and in their ambitions. They cannot communicate their visions, and cannot connect with the people. It is, therefore, not surprising that they cannot even let the citizen share in their pains and in their defeats.

    This was why Hardball on September 5 penned the following in a piece, entitled: Dame Patience and the Unofficial Secrets Act: “While the tragicomedy of Yar’Adua’s battle with heart and kidney diseases lasted, the government failed to harness the empathy the public felt for the beleaguered First Family and the goodwill emotive Nigerians could have lent his government. This comical affliction of living in denial is apparently still running rampant in the Presidency, especially seeing how paralysed they seem over managing the information side of the First Lady’s (Dame Patience) indisposition. Whether under Yar’Adua or under Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, whose wife Stella stole out to Spain to have a surgery and died in the process, or still under the Jonathan Presidency, it is clear the Nigerian Presidency still casts nostalgic eyes towards colonial and military eras when the Official Secrets Act often stopped any speculation about top government officials and their wives dead in its tracks.”

    It must be hard on the Nigerian. He is denied inspiring leadership; he is oppressed; he is perplexed; he is robbed of the good things that make life tolerable or exciting; and now he is even denied common empathy, the last feeling in him that reminds him of his humanity.

  • Obasanjo and Sanusi: What has good farming got to do with bad economics?

    Mallam Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) governor, exudes virtually the same prickly temperament as Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, a former president. Both are highly opinionated, messianic, truculent and impatient with contrary views. Throughout Obasanjo’s two terms in office, he hardly ever climbed down from his public policy high horse, nor ever acknowledged he was clearly wrong on any decision he took. He was right on the huge payout to Nigeria’s creditors, and he was right on all the higher denomination banknotes he ordered issued. He was right on the levelling of both Odi in Bayelsa State and Zaki Biam in Benue State; just as he was right on all the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) chairmen he whimsically replaced. Obasanjo, in short, was never wrong on anything, and indeed does not believe he can ever be wrong, now and in the future.

    Sanusi may reject this comparison, but like Obasanjo he has never thought himself wrong on anything. He was not wrong on the reforms in the banking system or on the continuing fever of reforms he has unleashed in that sector. He was not wrong on fuel subsidy removal, and now he is not wrong on the decision to introduce N5000 banknote. Perfectly and enthusiastically polemical like Obasanjo, he deploys his fluency, much more than his logic or economics, in intimidating his opponents. If necessary, he summons sarcasm to undermine his opponent’s logic, just as he is doing in his current tiff with Obasanjo. Last week, at an Institute of Directors’ roundtable advocacy forum, the former president had suggested that if all Sanusi was trying to do was curb inflation with higher naira denomination, the CBN governor would inadvertently stall production. To Sanusi, this was a red rag to a bull. Obasanjo’s very words were: “I understand that now he (Sanusi) is focused on fighting inflation, which is a good idea. But if this (N5000 note inclusive) and all that he is focused on is fighting inflation, it will kill production.”

    Sanusi’s reply, which came predictably quickly and with characteristic sarcasm, was ear-piercing. Said he: “This is an interesting country because my uncle or my father, who is our former Head of State, Gen. Obasanjo, you know he is a very successful farmer, but he is a very bad economist. He stands up and says that this higher denomination (N5000 note) will cause inflation and improve hardship… General Obasanjo did N20, he did N100, N200, N500 and N1, 000. He introduced more higher denominations in Nigeria than any former head of state. Obasanjo did N100 note in 1999, he did N200 in 2000, he did N500 two years later, and in that period, inflation was coming down because it was accompanied by prudent fiscal and monetary policy.” On the surface, Sanusi’s sneering and abrasive comment appeared to only damn Obasanjo with faint praise. In reality, however, apart from other wounding remarks, he actually brutally dismissed the former president’s economic logic as unsound.

    Sanusi was unsure whether to call Obasanjo an uncle or a father; indeed his tone was gently mocking. However, he is at least sure the former president’s instinct and judgement as a farmer do not extend to “simple economics.” For as he put it, “We all know that we cannot have inflation by printing higher bills if you don’t increase money supply, and this is simple economics.” No one is sure who will have the upper hand in the banknote controversy, but if we know Obasanjo as well as we pretend to do, he will not let Sanusi have the last word. The former president was in fact uncharacteristically mellow in his initial reaction to the banknote; trust him to be a little bit more acerbic in his next comment. In his fairly long banking career, Sanusi has not been known to suffer both fools and the wise gladly. Even without classifying Obasanjo, the CBN governor will not suffer the former president gladly, nor let him have the last word. And both abhor stalemate.

    If Hardball were to hazard a guess how the war would end, he would refer readers to a long list of Obasanjo’s polemical victims, chief among whom was Otunba Gbenga Daniel, former governor of Ogun State, who is left twitching on the floor with barely a sign of political life in him after many duels with the former president. Sanusi will need all the approvals he can get from an incurious President Goodluck Jonathan to survive the fusillade from the one he cheekily described as the good farmer of Ota and bad economist of Abeokuta.

  • Tea party and sleeping policemen

    Tea party and sleeping policemen

    A day after armed robbers cocked a snook at policemen in Lagos, the Inspector-General of Police, Muhammed Abubakar, rushed down to the state chafing at the daringness of the criminals and the lethargy of his men who, by all accounts, and by his own confession, were caught with their feet on their desks snoozing away the lazy days. The bloody Sunday, as many newspapers have described the coordinated robbery attacks, led to the death of three policemen, the killing of three or four other civilians, and the loss of over N55 million by bureau de change operators. It was indeed a memorable Sunday because such raids were no longer common, and both Lagosians and their policemen had become dulled to the antics of men of the underworld. The same day the IGP visited the state, the Lagos State government, which was also stung to the quick by the robbers’ effrontery, presented some crime-fighting equipment to the police. The IGP received the equipment for the state police command. Among these items were 114 vehicles, 40 motorcycles, and other communication gadgets.
    An obviously impressed IGP, however, found a moment to lambast his men and charge them to wake up from their slumber. He couched his rebuke quite inelegantly. “It is no longer a tea party,” he fumed during the inauguration of the crime-fighting equipment on Monday. “There is no doubt that policemen in the state are sleeping. You must wake up from your slumber.” So that chastened policemen, around whom robbers ran rings on Sunday, would appreciate how disappointed he was, the IGP thundered: “The story of yesterday (the daring raids of Sunday) should not happen again. We must not fold our arms and allow miscreants to take over the state. I have ordered the Assistant Inspector-General of Police, Zone 2, and the state Commissioner of Police to sit down and re-strategise and find a new way of fighting crime in Lagos. You have mobility, you have support, you have allowance from the state government; you must not allow people of Lagos to be terrorised by robbers. It can never be accepted anymore.”
    Though it is too early to estimate the impact of the IGP’s rebuke, it is, however, certain that neither the AIG nor the police commissioner would be willing to be ridiculed again by any group of robbers. Policemen everywhere in Nigeria may be uncomfortable with the scrapping of checkpoints, but as far as the IGP is concerned, that ancient and lazy system of crime control is unlikely to ever return. The heat will, therefore, be on the AIG, Zone 2 and the Lagos police commissioner to devise intelligent countermeasures. Their jobs will depend on how efficiently and quickly they respond to the new challenges. For as the IGP indicated, the Lagos police are the best equipped of all state commands, the most mobile, and perhaps have the best incentives. If robbers once again cock their snook at law enforcement agents in the state, and the snook is not swiftly cut off, there is no telling what the IGP would do, especially when he had said definitively that the situation “would never be accepted anymore.”
    But whether we agree with the IGP or not that Lagos policemen were asleep when the robbers struck, his fiery admonition to them should be capable of rousing them from slumber, even of the Rip Van Winkle quality. More, they now probably know that the party is over, and not even the cheapest tea would be served henceforth. Let us, however, hope none of the slumbering giants had a hangover.

  • Federal monologues and prestige projects

    In an advertorial, entitled: “False rumours on currency restructuring,” the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) tried to tackle stories it described as malicious misrepresentations on the impending introduction of N5,000 banknote. No contracts have been issued on the project, and it would not even cost the N40 billion speculated in the media, it said. But the statement neither answered why currency restructuring in Nigeria must inevitably be directed towards the introduction of higher denomination notes, nor convinced the public why the CBN thinks previous replacement of notes by coins did not raise prices and cause the same coins to be pushed out of circulation. What is clear from the advertorial and from the reactions of leading government officials and CBN managers themselves is that the government has made up its mind to ignore the protests of the people from whom it derives legitimacy.

    While the CBN and its managers were busy ignoring the fears of the public on the currency restructuring programme, the Aviation Ministry was also busy confecting prestige projects that look certain to be both economically unviable and insulting. On these projects, too, the government has made up its mind that there would be no going back. The government never goes back on anything – not on fuel subsidy in spite of superior arguments to counter fuel price hike; not on N5,000 note since it thinks it knows best and Nigerians are ignorant or mischievous; and not on the Aviation projects because Nigerians weren’t even invited to consider them, let alone dissuading the government. The Aviation Ministry is set to construct 11 airports at a cost of N106billion. The funds, we are told, would be sourced from China, and Chinese firms would build the airports. On top of these indignities, the Aviation Ministry, which appears to have so much leverage in this government, is also set to introduce a new national carrier less than a decade after it wound up the former national carrier due to crippling losses and incompetence.

    The Goodluck Jonathan Presidency must have embraced a novel interpretation of democracy. Even if does not say so, the government appears to see democracy not as one of government of the people, by the people, for the people, but one of a conceited, all-knowing coterie of officials speaking down to people they often describe as malicious and uninformed. Nigerians are slowly beginning to understand that they are compelled to listen to federal monologues in which communication between the government and the people is one-way. They are beginning to realise, like Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote of the Charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War, that theirs is not to reason why; theirs is but to do and die.

    In a few years, when the next set of elections will be due, the country waits to see how these monologists will reconcile their monologues with the principles of democracy. Since they have mastered the art of listening only to themselves, and are inculcating the same habit in the electorate, when next they mount the soap box, they will be astounded to discover that voters are also disinclined to listen to them. As the fuel subsidy affair showed, and as the N5,000 banknote issue and Aviation prestige projects are also showing, the damage to the Nigerian economy may be unquantifiable. But whether the damage will be reversible or not will depend on whether voters in the next election have also imbibed the culture of shutting their ears against the political campaigns of those seeking re-election.