Category: Hardball

From 24 February 2022 (when Russia rolled its vicious tanks into Ukraine) and 17 March 2003 (when the International Criminal Court, ICC, announced his arrest warrant), President Vladimir Putin raced giddily from a feared global potentate to a potential war criminal — dragging his Russia with him as a terrorist state.

It was a giddy race from infamy to infamy, in one brief year and a few days! It was as if, as in that Yoruba folktale, that Putin, like the tortoise, won’t quit until he was disgraced.

Putin’s stumble is infamy to infamy because it’s bad enough to invade another country and brutally mow it down just because you can.  That’s brazen international outlawry, not diluted by Putin’s annexation of Crimea, Ukraine’s territory, on 18 March 2014.

It’s worse — indeed, should be unheard of in the 21st century — to be fairly bruised in open battle, yet rain thunder and brimstone on defenceless civilian cities.  That is what Russia has done in Ukraine, in clear contempt of the Geneva Convention. 

That’s even aside from crippling power infrastructure — and in bitter winter too — for millions of Ukrainians to freeze to death, in brazen siege!

Putin’s ICC arrest warrant has to do with shipping away Ukrainian kids, changing their nationality to Russian and making Russian parent to forcefully adopt them.  So, as Russia ogles Ukraine’s land, it also covets Ukraine children, force-feeding with Russian culture, education and history, to brazenly lure away these impressionable kids, at the weakest juncture of their lives.  How vile!

To be docked with Putin is Alekseyevna Lvova-Belova, Russia’s commissioner for Children’s Rights.

“The crimes were allegedly committed in Ukrainian occupied territory at least from 24 February 2022,” the ICC announced.  “There are reasonable grounds to believe that Mr. Putin and Ms. Lvova-Belova bear individual criminal responsibility” — just as well!

But that charge might just be an open salvo, given the mass Russia slaughter of unarmed civilians in the occupied city of Bucha, near Kyiv, at the earliest period of the invasion, now stalled.

Proponents of false equivalences have called on the ICC to also issue a warrant of arrest on ex-US President George Bush and ex-UK Prime Minister, Tony Blair for invading Iraq on virtual fibs over “weapons of mass destruction”.

That call isn’t so unsound, given the hypocrisy, brazen power play and blatant cultural imposition by the West and their media.  Still, such concession hardly excuses Putin’s lunacy in Ukraine.

Let everyone have their days in court, if you can force through international law.  But like Hitler before him, Putin’s threat to global peace, by his rash Ukraine invasion, is potent and real.

Let him face the music without prejudice to whatever happens to others.  There must be appropriate sanctions for international outlawry.

What is the tolerable cost of flagrantly dithering over the rule of law? That is a question the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) must answer to over the disaster that became of its naira redesign policy and the huge toll that has attended it.

Many days after the Supreme Court asserted the validity of old naira notes till 31st December 2023, the CBN spoke up last Monday to confirm its compliance. Before then, the regulator bank was mute over the judicial verdict overruling its 10th February deadline for expiration of old N200, N500 and N1,000 notes amidst scarcity of new notes that has incurred terrible ordeals on Nigerians. President Muhammadu Buhari made a broadcast on 16th February granting isolated extension of N200 notes validity to 30th April; but the Supreme Court ordered on 3rd March that all old notes remain legal tender until the end of the year and should circulate alongside new notes. CBN’s policy statement and presidential weigh-in extending the validity of N200 notes, however, guided dealings within the polity, while the Supreme Court’s order hardly impacted in the absence of confirmation of compliance by the regulator bank. There’s been acute scarcity of cash for routine transactions, while business operators weren’t accepting the old N500 and N1,000 notes as legal tenders. With scarcity of new notes, commercial banks stalled on recirculating the old notes; and when they eventually did, they paid out the old notes to customers without accepting same when brought in by depositors. Effectively, the economy swooshed between paralysis and disarray.

The crisis has been attended by huge costs – some of them fatal. Among the latest was the death last Saturday of a radio presenter who collapsed while trekking to work owing to inability to access cash. The presenter with Ibadan-based Fresh FM Nigeria, popularly known as ‘Baba Bintin,’ was reportedly heading to the studio for his programme on Saturday morning when he slumped. News of his death was broken on the radio station by his fellow presenters who earlier voiced concern over his unusual lateness to the studio. It was reported that ‘Baba Bintin’, who spoke Ijesha dialect in comedy acts on radio, slumped while trekking from Amuloko to the radio station in Challenge area of Ibadan with the hope of getting a Point of Sale (PoS) agent along the way to draw cash. In an audio clip played on the station , a man said the presenter was found slumped on his way and rushed to the University College Hospital (UCH), but died before getting to the hospital.

While CBN Governor Godwin Emefiele luxuriated in poorly-disguised obduracy against judicial order, people were dying from the pangs of his pet policy!

Even after Atiku Abubakar’s tragic miscalculations had wrecked the PDP — returning it to a “northern” party from the results of the 2023 presidential and National Assembly elections — the post-poll era looks bleak for the party, judging from the latest sabre-rattling from Rivers’ Governor, Nyesom Wike.

Wike, boisterous and frenetic, was the Atiku nemesis, crushing the former Vice President’s umpteenth presidential dreams, by rousing the protesting G-5 PDP governors to lethal action.

Whereas the last G-5 vs Atiku battle was fought on power shift, the next, for the soul of PDP, would be fought on mutual anti-party allegations. 

Call it anti-party vs anti-party and you won’t be wrong!

Wike, the master of vicious repartee that leaves his opponents stunned and bruised, has just fired the first shot.  Looking back at the wreck he and his G-5 comrades made of PDP in the South, he said despite the intra-PDP squabbles, he still delivered Rivers — almost wholesale — in the National Assembly elections: three senatorial seats; eight out of nine House of Representatives seats, so far declared.

As for the PDP presidential loss in Rivers, that was to teach Atiku and co bitter lessons for shunning their own party’s law on North-South power zoning.  Atiku, he inferred, must take responsibility.  His vaulting ambition, he insisted, was blind, deaf and dumb to anything else — even the corporate health of the PDP.

Wike then sounded an early warning: “We” — meaning himself and his group — would drive the scavengers from the PDP and rebuild the party.  He said the same scavengers — read Atiku and the nPDP that broke ranks in 2015 and allowed an APC victory — wrecked the party again in 2023, by their crass insensitivity.

It’s not clear how the hurting Atiku camp would react to this bombardment, since they control the national PDP executive.  Iyorchia Ayu, national chairman, belonged to the nPDP.  He was also part of the “northern” stand-off: he rebuffed any move to surrender his chairmanship, to dilute the “northern” image of the party, going into the presidential elections. 

Ayu is doubly wounded because the Benue PDP experienced quite a meltdown — if not a wipe-out — with G-5 member, Governor Ortom and National Chair Ayu busy splitting  PDP votes between Labour and PDP, while APC votes remained a near-bloc.  What’s more?  The governor lost his senatorial run!  National chair lost the presidency!  Mutual annihilation!  Total disaster!

Still, what if Atiku and co also come blazing, with anti-party charges against Wike and co?  Then, it would be war-without-end for the soul of PDP, on North-South lines.

Indeed, it would appear morning yet on the long, long day of trouble for PDP!

It is said that silence is golden. But there are times it does not work, and the situation demands the opposite.

The Federal Government and the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) should know that the public deserves an official response to the Supreme Court order, on March 3, that the authorities allow the old N200, N500 and N1000 notes remain legal tender and co-exist with the new notes until December 31.

More than a week after the consequential Supreme Court order, the authorities have failed to demonstrate obedience. The result is widespread public confusion. Reports say the banks are either not providing the old N500 and N1000 notes approved by the apex court, or not supplying enough. There are also reports that people are rejecting the notes for transactions because they are uncertain about their status.

The cash crisis triggered by the naira redesign and cash swap policy has not abated. Many people across the country are facing hardship because of this situation. 

The Supreme Court’s order was supposed to bring relief. The authorities were expected to obey the order, and act to make it effective.   

The apex court had faulted the government’s failure to obey its interim injunction issued on February 8 ordering that the old notes should remain legal tender until the conclusion of the case instituted by some states to challenge the controversial naira swap policy.

The court noted that rather than comply with the order, President Buhari, on February 16, made a national broadcast during which he directed that only the old N200 notes should remain in circulation.

This was a violation of the separation of powers and the rule of law, the court said, stressing that under the country’s democratic system of government the President or any other person could not vary an order of court.

When the CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, finally appeared before the House of Representatives ad hoc committee on new naira redesign and naira swap policy, on January 31, after apparently shunning two previous invitations, he had conveniently blamed banks for the scarcity of new naira notes, which was a big issue.

But he failed to see, or acknowledge, that he was part of the problem. The chairman of the committee and House Leader, Alhassan Ado Doguwa, had lectured him on the importance of communication, noting that poor communication by the apex bank had contributed significantly to the crisis.

The authorities should issue a statement showing respect for the Supreme Court order, and clarify the status of the old N200, N500 and N1000 notes based on the apex court’s ruling. That’s the responsible thing to do.    

During his lifetime, Libyan dictator, the late Col. Muammar Gaddafi, earned a reputation for self-dotingly asserting his worldview against the tyranny of the West’s worldview in global affairs. Whereas the West gave him no positive attention and treated him as illegitimate, Gaddafi saw there was no bigger stage to get himself heard by a captive audience than the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) where heads of governments take turns  every September to air their respective country’s perspective on ongoings in international relations, and he used that platform maximally during the 64th UNGA in 2009.

It was said to be Gaddafi’s first appearance at the international parley in the 40 years of his rule at that time. And he broke protocol by stretching his address that was billed to take just 15 minutes into a 96-minute stemwinder. The then chairperson of the African Union (AU), who was introduced as “Leader of the Revolution of the Socialist People’s Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, President of the African Union and King of African Kings,” took 17 minutes to get to his main point, namely calling for an African seat on the UN Security Council. Waving a copy of the UN charter, from which he later ripped out a page in a show of defiance and subsequently tossed it away over his shoulder, he denounced the permanent Security Council membership arrangement that subsists till date, which he said encouraged the treatment of other countries as “second-class citizens.” Among other demands, he called for relocation of the UN headquarters to Libya to avoid jet lag and insecurity, in apparent allusion to the September 11, 2001 al-Qaeda attack in New York.

Compared with former United States President Donald Trump’s address at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington last Saturday, Gaddafi in his 2009 address showed more respect for time and attentive capacity of his audience. The former American leader went on for one hour and 45 minutes before a captive audience of ‘Make America Great Again’ faithful in an address that he apparently aimed at warning off challengers within the Republican Party to his 2024 re-run bid, which he is revving up for. Reports said his rambling speech was packed with “wildly inaccurate claims” and was unlikely to appeal to anyone not already firmly ensconced in the conservative bubble, besides that it betrayed a mindset that Trump is determined to take down the GOP if the party attempts to move on from him. The megalomania gene is not race peculiar, after all.

Rupert Murdoch, the executive chairman of Fox Corporation, is perhaps the biggest and most influential media mogul in the world. He is by all accounts a reliable barometer of shifting thresholds in media rules. Until now, it was generally assumed media outlets are accountable for narratives they allow to be vented by their operatives without restraint or, at least, posting a disclaimer. By Murdoch’s rulebook, we now know that media practitioners can be accountable in personal cognizance for narratives they expound without media outlets through which those narratives are pushed being concurrently accountable.

In a court deposition taken by Dominion Voting Systems over the narrative that the 2020 United States presidential poll was stolen, which was strongly plied by Fox News, Murdoch rejected that the right-wing talk network as an entity endorsed former President Donald Trump’s election lies. But he conceded that Fox News personnel – Sean Hannity, Jeanine Pirro, Maria Bartiromo and former host Lou Dobbs – promoted the falsehood that the presidential election was stolen. The deposition in a legal filing as part of Dominion’s $1.6billion lawsuit against Fox News was made public last week.

Trump of the Republican Party refused to concede defeat in the 2020 poll and till date argues that it was stolen (i.e. rigged) by incumbent President Joe Biden of the Democrat Party.  “Some of our commentators were endorsing it,” Murdoch said according to the filing when asked about the talk hosts’ on-air narratives about the election. “I would have liked us to be stronger in denouncing it, in hindsight,” he added. Part of the transcript of his deposition read: Question: You are aware now that Fox did more than simply host these guests and give them a platform; correct? Murdoch: I think you’ve shown me some material in support of that. Question: In fact, you are now aware that Fox endorsed at times this false notion of a stolen election? Murdoch: Not Fox, No. Not Fox. But maybe Lou Dobbs, maybe Maria, as commentators… Question: All were in that document; correct? Murdoch: Yes, they were. Question: About Fox endorsing the narrative of a stolen election; correct? Murdoch: No. Some of our commentators were endorsing it.

In its own legal filings countering Dominion’s lawsuit, Fox News defended the actions of executives and hosts during the 2020 poll, saying its hosts’ on-air assertions about election fraud were taken out of context. It, however, added that it should not be held liable for the hosts’ claims.

To put it bluntly, both Murdoch and Fox News threw the talk hosts under the bus. But what those hosts did is very similar to what is going on presently with Nigeria’s 2023 poll. Journalists beware!