The Nation Newspaper

Category: Hardball

  • Senate and shoddy renovation

    Senate and shoddy renovation

    Efforts to renovate the Nigerian Senate’s main chamber produced highly unsatisfactory results, after more than two years, going by the observations of the Chief Whip of the Senate, Senator Ali Ndume.

    In March 2021, the Federal Capital Development Authority (FCDA) had awarded a contract for the renovation of the National Assembly Complex to an indigenous firm, Visible Construction Nigeria Limited. The cost of the project was N30b.

    When the Senate resumed plenary in its main chamber, on May 7, after over two years of sitting in a temporary hearing room, Ndume was reported saying, “This is not a chamber, it is like a conference room. You will not even know that it is me, Ndume that is speaking, so also when the leader was speaking.

    “This is a serious observation. If you play back the record, you cannot identify Akpabio’s voice, you have to listen hard, but the audio is supposed to be very clear… but right now the chamber is echoing.

    “We need to correct this. We need to change so many things. Like the sitting rows. If you want to stand up, you will have to use tactics or strategy to stand up or sit down.

    “Most importantly, these seats were better. You had where you could put your documents and conveniently make your contributions.”

    Read Also: NLC, TUC give NERC ultimatum to reverse increased electricity tariff

    Senate President Godswill Akpabio seemed to be on the same page with Ndume, and blamed the leadership of the 9th Senate under Senator Ahmad Lawan and the FCDA for the unsatisfactory renovation. 

    “This is not our contract,” he explained. “It was a contract that was awarded in the 9th Senate. It is the FCDA that renovated it. If we have a complaint, we have to channel it to the FCDA.”

    It is unclear whether the Senate will make complaints to the FCDA concerning the disappointing renovation. Considering that the project cost was said to have been  N30b, it is surprising that the Senate did not consider an investigation. 

    The negative observations about the renovation are bad for the image of the company that got the contract and the agency that awarded the contract.

    Under normal circumstances, the company and the agency should have a lot of explaining to do. It remains to be seen whether they would be made to account for the observed shoddy renovation. It is not enough to criticise the poor renovation. Those responsible for the unsatisfactory work must be made to answer for it.

  • Between Umahi and Obi  

    Between Umahi and Obi  

    In the Lagos-Calabar coastal highway, and its conspiracy theories by tribal champions, you clearly see the essence of Peter Obi, that just loves to jive; and David Umahi, that just loves to do.

    Incidentally, both were former South East governors. 

    In Obi’s Anambra, razed to virtual ground zero during the Chinwoke Mbadinuju years (1999-2003), but which gradually got its life back during the nullified tenure of Chris Ngige, Obi the eternal grand pretender, dazzled with what he called “savings”.

    He never believed in any grand infrastructure.  Instead of building expressways that would push the Anambra economy to new heights, he was fixated with patching small lanes that led nowhere, because he wanted to “save”. 

    But thanks to the Pandora Papers!  That expose would later prove the “savings” were Anambra trove cleverly funnelled to fund his private and family business but later returned as “savings”, to cook his political saintlihood, during his gubernatorial days. 

    Read Also: My focus now is on how to make Nigeria work not 2027 election – Peter Obi

    But for his family’s brewery, he left hardly any public landmark in Anambra — no great road, not even built a single school.  His contrived “greatness” is by word of mouth: spewing false statistics from China, buttering himself up with false claims, and talking down others with demonstrable records.

    Pray, if Obi says the Lagos-Calabar coastal road is a “white elephant project” just to talk it down, just know that envisioning real “elephants” that “shake up” the economy is simply beyond his ken. Again, the gels with his Anambra record of hardly any legacy.

    Now, to Umahi.  In four short years as governor, he pulled Abakaliki, the Ebonyi capital, from its eternal phrasal moniker: “as dusty as Abakaliki”, to a sleek and alluring modern capital.  But Abakaliki was only the mother metaphor for a long-neglected state. 

    In Umahi’s penetrating roads, deep into Ebonyi’s most interior food baskets, he “patented” the concrete roads, which gospel he now preaches as Works minister.

    Umahi doesn’t have to talk.  His eternal “do” — clearly visible to even the blind — does the talking for him.  But Obi is self-condemned to eternal ranting.  Poor guy!

    A final, telling contrast: Umahi’s radical infrastructural push is why Ebonyi now trumps its “mother state” and old East capital, Enugu, in GDP contribution to the South East, by BudgIT stats just released, just as Obi’s infrastructural barrenness makes Imo to out-perform Anambra. 

    Which is why Umahi should shun the bitter moans of Obi and his ilk. Obi will do that until the public gets tired of his lamentations — a clear public nuisance.  Meanwhile, Umahi will build new legacies on the federal front, cementing his rich Ebonyi records in public works, while Obi moans and cries himself into re-confirmed irrelevance.

    It’s a glorious Babatunde Fashola-Dave Umahi parallel.  Fashola, after excelling in Lagos — by doing — went to the federal front, as Works and Housing minister, to cement his legacy.  Umahi is towing the same path, and it’s getting clear he’ll even surpass the successes of the Fashola federal years.

    It’s the distinct class act of consummate doers — against arid talkers, as Obi and co!  The difference, as the famous 7Up commercial crows, is clear!

  • Unlawful treatment of journalists

    Unlawful treatment of journalists

    Less than two months after Segun Olatunji, Editor of FirstNews, an online medium, was unlawfully detained and tortured for two weeks by the Defence Intelligence Agency (DIA), another journalist, Daniel Ojukwu, who works for the Foundation for Investigative Journalism (FIJ), was reported to be in detention at the State Criminal Investigation Department, Panti, Lagos, in circumstances that were against the law. He was reported to have been arrested by the Intelligence Response Team (IRT) of the Inspector General of Police for alleged cybercrime on May 1.

    FIJ said Ojukwu’s whereabouts were initially unknown, but it was later discovered that he was in detention at Panti, accused of violating the Cybercrime Act. His relative was reported saying the police had indicated that he would be transferred to Abuja. At the time of the report, he was said to have been “held incommunicado for three days, with no access to legal representation.”

    There are disturbing similarities between the two cases. The arrests of the two journalists can be described as abductions. In Olatunji’s case, soldiers invaded his Abule-Egba home in Lagos State, and took him away. The military denied knowledge of his whereabouts. They flew him to Abuja blindfolded, and detained him for two weeks under harsh conditions before eventually releasing him following public and professional outcry.

    Read Also: Ondo 2024: APC will retain power, says Aiyedatiwa

    Olatunji said they asked him about certain stories published in FirstNews, concerning the Chief of Defence Intelligence and the Chief of Staff to the President. Even after the International Press Institute (IPI) found out that the DIA was responsible for his detention and torture, according to the Secretary-General of the Nigerian Guild of Editors (NGE), Iyobosa Uwugiaren, “they lied that the journalist was not in their custody. Yet our sources were telling us we needed to act fast to save our colleague.”

    Lawlessness by state actors was also evident in Ojukwu’s case, which the FIJ initially treated as possibly a missing person case before locating him at Panti.  The police have not officially clarified his detention.

    In both cases, the lawless actions of the state actors involved are condemnable. In a democracy, state actors are not expected to resort to lawlessness in response to alleged wrongs committed by media practitioners.

     Nigeria’s security agencies must not create a climate of fear in the media by carrying out oppressive operations against journalists. The authorities must avoid giving the impression that state actors are above the law and can get away with unlawful treatment of journalists. That is unacceptable.

  • Edo: Beware of the Greek

    Edo: Beware of the Greek

    Edo Governor, Godwin Obaseki, with aplomb, just announced N70, 000 for the least paid Edo worker.   Bravo!

    But you could almost picture Obaseki, a graduate of Classics before going into money and allied business, as an Edo 21st century equivalent of the Roman Cicero, playing to the gallery on the grandstand, expecting raucous and thunderous applause!

    The applause he got all right, with many Edo workers exploding in fulsome praise of the outgoing Edo governor — a worker-friendly governor exiting with charm and grace!

     Yet, these folks should beware of the Greek and his gifts!  Otherwise, they might just be sapped with a Trojan horse that promised hope but delivered nothing but utter pain! 

    Again, Obaseki, as a Classics graduate, knows too well the war between the love-soured King Menelaus of Sparta and the love-struck Prince Paris of Troy, who stole away with the divinely beautiful Queen Helen of Sparta, and made her Helen of Troy!

    But again, enter the Trojan War, with its fatal gift of a Trojan horse of hidden warriors, that stormed the walls of Troy, to retrieve Helen of Troy, to Sparta where she belonged!

    This is no tutorial on classical history.  But it shows that stratagem — strategic deceit, to put it bluntly — was pivotal to ancient warfare as it is crucial to cynical contemporary politics.

    Obaseki’s latest election-eve foxtrot comes in two forms: the N70, 000 minimum pay is a fob for the masses, the Edo hoi polloi, whose low-hanging votes must be plucked. 

    Read Also: NSA orders full implementation of cybercrimes Act 2024

    But the fob for the Edo elite is Obaseki’s latter-day beatification of Oshiomhole — the same Adams Oshiomhole that Obaseki and his impeached deputy, Philip Shaibu, thoroughly humiliated, as the high-wire plots of their reggae morphed into happy blues (apologies to musician Ariyo/Harrysong), and both danced away in reckless bliss, to mark Oshiomhole’s political death!

    Now, election is virtually “tomorrow” and Obaseki just jerked awake to name the new Edo Labour House after Oshiomhole!   By the way, how does Shaibu, busy biting the dust, feel about this new gambit?  It must be sweaty, prickly and lonely out there!

    Let the long-suffering Edo workers take their cake.  It’s their due.  Let Oshio Baba too take his new trophy.  It’s his life desert, given his Labour pedigree.

    But let no one press both gestures beyond the cynical and desperate election-eve gimmick that it is.  Besides, let whoever succeeds Obaseki beware of his Edo Trojan horse.  They might yet find the funding a crushing bag of pains, when it’s time to pay.

    By then, however, the election would have been lost and won!  The end justifies the “mean-ness” — to echo the re-make of Nicolo Machiavelli, by our very own WS!

  • Outside the cage

    Outside the cage

    Many more inmates are on the loose following a downpour that destroyed the fence of the Medium Security Custodial Centre, Suleja, Niger State, on April 24.  The 250-capacity centre is located “about 80km” from the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), Abuja. The authorities said 119 inmates at the facility fled into the night. The facility, said to have been built during the colonial era, was described as old and weak.

    Police said only 13 of the escapees had been recaptured. This means that more than 100 escapees are at large. The FCT Commissioner of Police (CP), Benneth Igweh, vowed to do everything in his power to recapture them. The situation calls for action, not words.

    Early this year, it was reported that about 4,000 escapees from Nigeria’s correctional centres in 2021 and 2022 had not been recaptured. It was alarming. That may well have been a conservative estimate. The figure was from at least eight jailbreaks across the country in those years.

     At the time, Nigerian Correctional Service (NCoS) spokesperson Abubakar Umar was reported saying, “For the purpose of being very sure and exact about the figure, we cannot for now ascertain the number of fleeing inmates, but we are making efforts to do that.”  This showed poor record keeping. It was inexcusable that the agency did not know how many prisoners were on the loose. 

    Read Also: Sanwo-Olu, Abiru make case for road dualisation

     The NCoS spokesperson had bragged that there were no jailbreaks and prison attacks in 2023, attributing the “achievement” to “the effectiveness of the top-level security measures that have been diligently upheld in our custodial centres across the nation.” The Suleja jailbreak contradicted the claimed improved security at the country’s prisons. Indeed, it further exposed poor security at the country’s correctional centres.

    The history of jailbreaks in the country shows that there were 18 cases from 2015 to 2022. A December 2021 report said 5,238 inmates escaped from various prisons across Nigeria within a one-year period from October 2020. It is unclear how many of these escapees were recaptured.

    The Suleja jailbreak compounded a bad situation. With more inmates on the loose,  and many of them believed to pose a serious danger to society, there is a threatening atmosphere that worsens the country’s security crisis. Their escape also defeats the essence of justice.

    The increasing number of prison escapees not recaptured calls into question the capability of the country’s security agencies. Their failure to recapture the inmates on the run reflects ineffectiveness.

  • DSTV and corporate greed

    DSTV and corporate greed

    Where corporate greed will lead DSTV, the pay-TV and its content company, Multichoice, only the market can tell. What is clear though is DSTV’s reflex these days is to hike subscription rates without thinking.
    Does that push further entrench DSTV as the Nigeria pay-TV operational monopoly? Or does it push it to its virtual grave, by its annoying hikes at the drop of a hat, pushing its subscribers to rally a rival competitor to take its place?
    Again, only the market will tell!
    DSTV’s fixation with hiking rates is clear. It has hiked its subscription thrice in 12 months, though those 12 months spill from 2023 to 2024: April 2023, November 2023 and now, in April 2024, it is giving notice of a further hike, effective 1 May 2024.

    Read Also: HIV/AIDS: NACA to tackle mother-to-child transmission frontally


    A pseudo-contrite DSTV was all cant, in its hike message: “We understand the impact this change may have on our valued customers and partners, but the rise in the cost of business operations has led us to make this difficult decision.” Haven’t we heard all of this before?
    That appears the only thing coming out of DSTV these days. Were every firm to behave like DSTV, let’s just say Nigeria’s inflation level would have been something else. It takes that risk because it’s an operational monopoly that feels it can always get away with subscription hikes. Well, good luck.
    It’s latest hikes are, to say the least, obscene: the Premium bouquet jumps from a N29, 500 monthly rate to N37, 000; Compact+, the next in the hierarchy: N19, 800 to N25, 000; Compact: N12, 500 to N15, 700; and the lower packages: Confam: N7, 400 to N9, 300; Yanga: N4, 200 to N5, 100; Padi: N2, 950 to N3, 600.
    The most annoying thing is as DSTV hikes take mathematical leaps, its content takes a geometrical dip, sapping subscribers with a Thomas Malthus warning of viewing doom, while they pay more.
    Both the quantum and quality of its offerings are dipping, with the annoying repetition of old films and low quality of new ones. By the way, can the present quality of “Tinsel”, its longest running serial in Nigeria, match the standard when “Tinsel” made its debut? Then, compare its latest epics like “Itura” the Yoruba epic, with its loose plots and many gaps, with “Ajoche” (the Idoma epic) and “Riona” (the Itsekiri one). How many of its current series can hold a candle to “Hotel Majestic”?
    If DSTV and Multichoice, its content czar, were to look themselves in the mirror, they’d find they now charge more money for relative junk.
    Well, it’s a democracy and market suicide is a choice. Let them keep at it. When subscribers vote with their feet, they’ll get the message from their market grave. By then, DSTV would be an excellent case study of how corporate greed is excellent grave for greedy brands.
    It’s time a viable competitor came to put DSTV out of its market arrogance, just as it was when HItv was around to checkmate DSTV’s excesses.

  • Minimum wage delay

    Minimum wage delay

    It’s impossible to have a new national minimum wage in Nigeria before the end of May, when the President Bola Tinubu administration will mark its first anniversary, according to the Trade Union Congress of Nigeria (TUC). Its president, Festus Osifo, said the body’s National Executive Council, on April 25, “discussed the issue of minimum wage and that the government has to do everything possible to ensure that this is fast tracked because the only way you can inflate your economy is when you empower the working class.” 

    This gives the impression that the Federal Government is responsible for the delay. The National Minimum Wage Committee is made up of representatives of the federal government, state governments, the private sector and organised labour. 

    Last year, the Minister of Information and National Orientation, Idris Mohammed, was reported saying the N30,000 national minimum wage would expire at the end of March 2024, adding, “Certainly, there is a new wage regime that will come in on April 1, 2024.” That did not happen.

    Osifo also observed that “the last wage award that was paid to the federal workers was February 2024 and that of March and April that is just ending have not been paid.” TUC called on the Federal Government to “immediately release the payment of wage award for March 2024 and April 2024 and to ensure regular payments moving forward, so that at the end of April, when salary is coming in, the wage award is also paid until the new minimum wage is put in place as agreed in the communique of October 2 of 2023.”

    Read Also: New minimum wage: May 1 not feasible, says TUC President

    The Tinubu presidency had reached an agreement with the Nigeria Labour Congress (NLC) and TUC, following the dispute that arose from the removal of fuel subsidy and the threat of a nationwide strike by the unions.

    The Tinubu administration had approved the payment of a wage award of N35,000 monthly, for six months, to all federal government workers, starting from September 2023, and “pending when a new national minimum wage is expected to have been signed into law.” The administration should honour the agreement. 

    TUC identified state governments that have performed poorly “in terms of payment of wage award, in terms of putting palliatives in place,” naming Benue, Anambra, Imo, Delta, Akwa Ibom, Kebbi and Katsina states. These state governments can be described as spoilers.

    The new minimum wage is overdue since the old one has expired. The issue should be resolved without further delay.

  • IGP and crumbling empire

    IGP and crumbling empire

    Who dunnit?  That’s not exactly clear — with the hee-haw after, the virtual extended clearing of the throat and the fond bid to deflect the message when it was clear total denial was impossible.

    What is clear, however, would appear the conventional wisdom — more of folly, really — within the Nigeria Police: that despite being stretched so thin, almost ragged, Nigeria is still — to echo that glorious cliche — “not ripe” for state police!

    It was the IGP’s glorious declaration at the House of Representatives palaver on state police and how to go about it, as part of the general re-federalization process of the polity. 

    A day or two later — perhaps realizing how obsolete that stand had become in the face of the current security grit, someone crawled out of the woodworks to claim the take was his personal view and not the Police’s. 

    Even then, a “ghost” lurks in, in there — was the disclaimer for the IGP or his envoy at the parley?  Besides, how flat that sounded!  Was the IGP invited over there to just say his personal opinion or reflect the view of the state institution he represents?

    It’s all wash anyway — that stand against state police.  The grounds indeed are laughable.  The IGP’s magic formula: corral the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps (NSCDC) and the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC) — what net difference will that make to boosting police performance, except making the IGP new “emperor” of a flabby — not necessarily more effective — Police “empire”?

    Besides, aren’t the two agencies already active on the federal front?  If the three — Police, NSCDC and FRSC– had been cumulatively effective, though as discrete federal civil security agencies — why the trenchant call for state police?

    Read Also: Investigate Lagos police officer over alleged N5m bribe, group begs IGP

    Then, the appeal to fear, as desperate fear-mongering tactics: Nigeria must recruit X numbers of police personnel a year for more effectiveness, the states are too poor to run police forces, governors would abuse the police, bla, bla, bla!

    Is the Federal Government, flush with resources, doing all the funding in the Police right now?  Was it the one that transformed the Nigeria Police operating in Lagos to a far better force, with telling hardware and communications gadgets?  Didn’t President Olusegun Obasanjo flagrantly abuse the Nigeria Police to deliver his do-or-die election of 2007?  So, where is the IGP’s pseudo-moral platform coming from?

    That the Police need exponential expansion in personnel even makes more logical boosting the number with state police.  It’s a more effective route to that threshold.

    Let the IGP and his (wo)men ponder checks-and-balances; and rigorous regulations guiding Nigeria Police-state police relations.  The empire the IGP ogles has long past collapsed. The result is the dire security situation.

    Let the Rip van Winkles: the arch-centralists in the Nigeria Police snap out of their reverie.  Others have moved on.

  • Tales from Osun

    Tales from Osun

    There was public confusion over which of the two wives of Osun State Governor Ademola Adeleke would host Nigeria’s First Lady, Remi Tinubu, who was scheduled to visit the state for an official event on April 23.  Each of the wives had claimed to be the state’s First Lady in conflicting posters regarding the visit.

    The governor’s spokesperson, Olawale Rasheed, was forced to issue a statement, “for clarification,” saying “Chief (Mrs) Titilola Adeleke, the First Lady of Osun State, is officially hosting” Mrs Tinubu.  He added: “The flier circulating purportedly from the Office of Erelu Ngozi Adeleke, the wife of the State Governor, is fake news and the person behind it was nabbed and questioned.”  According to him, the said flier was “never authorized by Erelu Ngozi Adeleke,” but was “manufactured and shared by elements who wanted to sow discord and create an atmosphere of confusion.”

    Who was “nabbed and questioned”? Who “manufactured and shared” the flier? In order to be believable, the state government must go beyond presenting vague information. 

    When Governor Adeleke welcomed Mrs Tinubu, who was in Osogbo for the sod-turning ceremony to launch the Alternative High School for Girls, he told a story about their time in the Senate. 

    He said: “I remember that she was my senior colleague at the 8th assembly; there was a time the media caught me sleeping in the Senate, so they wanted to blackmail me. I told them how tedious our job is in making bills and having several sleepless nights over Nigeria.

    Read Also: BREAKING: First Lady arrives Osun for turning of sod of alternative school for girls

    “We don’t sleep till 4am most times. They (the media) were not listening to me; I almost fell for their blackmail. So, I ran to Mama (First Lady) when she was going to Lagos; I told her that I wanted to ask her something. I said I was sleeping and the media came to me that they saw me sleeping and it seemed they wanted to collect something from me.

    “She told me ‘Ma da won lohun’ (Don’t answer them), let them go and write whatever thing they want to write, tell them that you are a human being, because they have done that to her before. I made use of what she told me. That helped me out from paying a lot of money.”

    His uncomplimentary generalisation was unfair to the media.  If certain media practitioners had tried to blackmail him, such alleged blackmailers did not represent the whole of the media. He ought to know the difference between a part and the whole.

  • EFCC on banana peel?

    EFCC on banana peel?

    Is the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), under Chairman Olanipekun Olukayode, about slipping on the banana peel, thus in word or act bungling what is essentially duty?  This question is apt because of two different developments.

    In its showdown with former Kogi State Governor, Yahya Bello, the EFCC thundered it would pull all stops to cage the ex-governor, fleeing from its dragnet.  Bello, the self-named “white lion of Kogi” while in power, has so far been declared wanted.

    A former governor has no immunity.  Bello should have honoured EFCC’s invitation, and even after, turned himself in, as befitting of the dignity of his former high office.  But if he decides on infantile fleeing, EFCC is within its powers to arrest him and start the due process on whatever charges it may levy against him.

    But EFCC went too far, bragging it could involve the Army to arrest Bello.  That’s craven and shameful — is ex-Governor Bello so mighty the Police, with the EFCC corps, can’t arrest him?  What has the Army got to do with purely civil matters? 

    Read Also: Graça Machel: Meet woman who became First Lady of two different countries

    The criminal-justice system is strictly a civil matter.  Besides, a case involving a former elected governor ought to come with far more sensitivity.  Must the military always act as a defining rod over civil matters in a democracy, given Nigeria’s terrible experience under military rule? 

    Pray, did anyone ever hear the military yield ground on its enclave courts-martial, while trying its errant officers, even if that process itself is subject to appeal and possible review by the Court of Appeal, should the convict declare himself dissatisfied?

    So, let the EFCC banish the thought of unleashing the Army to arrest anyone.  It’s a craven weakening of itself as a civil institution.  The Police and EFCC corps can do the job.

    Then, the Wale Akinterinwa matter.  EFCC announced on April 22 that Akinterinwa, Ondo’s ex-Finance commissioner and aspirant in the April 20 APC gubernatorial primary election, was in its net.

    The optics of that sucks.  How can an aspirant, in a governorship election, be in EFCC’s net on the eve of the exercise, without folks concluding — fairly or unfairly — that the EFCC was descending into politics?  Yeah, yeah: EFCC explained that  Akinterinwa “turned himself in” — maybe.  But the perception is no less rotten.

    The Ola Olukayode EFCC should be careful not to down itself with unforced errors; lest it slips on needless banana peels.  That it must do with careful comments and even more careful actions. 

    Both are imperative if it must successfully fight graft and be seen to be so.