Category: Hardball

An old scandal has bobbed up as rough welcome to King Charles III: some cash-for-honours allegations, involving the Prince’s Foundation, one of the hitherto Prince of Wales’s many charities.

The allegations are not new.  They broke in September 2021, when the Sunday Times reported claims that Mahfouz Marei Mubarak bin Mahfouz, a Saudi billionaire and patron of one of the Prince’s charities, allegedly paid some cash — “tens of thousands of pounds” — The Guardian of 22 September 2022 recalled — to gross British citizenship and a national honour.

Bin Mahfouz was indeed awarded a CBE (Commander of the Order of the British Empire) in November 2016, at a private incident at Buckingham Palace, by the late Queen Elizabeth II.  Shortly after, media reports emanated that the process could have contravened the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.

By February 2022, the London Metropolitan Police (Met), had launched an investigation, which forced Michael Fawcett, 59, one of the former Prince Charles’s closest associates, to step down as the Prince Foundation’s chief executive, though temporarily.  The report didn’t, however, say if he was later reinstated after clearance of any wrong doing.

Still, on September 6 — two days before Elizabeth II’s passage — the Met again announced that “police interview(ed) a man aged in his 50s and a man aged in his 40s under caution in relations to offences under the Honours (Prevention of Abuses) Act 1925.”

Read Also: King Charles ‘ll maintain ties with Nigeria, says British envoy

With curtains being drawn on Elizabeth II’s elaborate rites of passage but before the formal coronation of Charles III, the scandal is back on the public plain, which could well be the first royal scandal of the Charles III era.

So far, there is little to suggest the King was directly linked with the scandal but who knows what the tabloids would dig up?  Tetchy times!

It’s all so reminiscent of the Caesar’s code of impeccable public service, particularly of a potentate: Caesar’s wife should not only be above board, she must be seen by all to be so.

That was the high point of Elizabeth II’s reign.  She wasn’t Caesar’s wife.  She was Caesar herself.  Yet, the grand impression she created was that of a grand, goodly monarch, who never spoke out of turns and managed rather well the occasional royal scandals with stoic grace and regal fortitude.

That helped in no small way to lift the British monarch, despite the many sins of the English Crown, locally in the conquered British Isles and of course globally, with the less-than-stellar records of British imperialism and colonialism.

How Charles III manages this scandal might just set the tone for his own reign.  But it’s all in the belly of time now.

Ancient wisdom teaches that you do not throw down the gauntlet before a bullish adversary unless you have securely amassed weapons needed to prosecute the war, and for the long haul if warranted. That is the sense in the saying among the Yoruba – it’s likely there are equivalents among other tongues – that one does not plot retaliation against the killer of one’s father until you get a firm grip on the sword of vengeance. A reported plan by government to proscribe consumption of animal hide popularly known as ‘ponmo’ contradicts this wisdom; hence the idea, as in past attempts, has a slim chance of flying.

The Director-General of the Nigerian Institute of Leather and Science Technology (NILEST), Professor Muhammad Yakubu, was lately reported canvassing a legislation to ban ponmo consumption. Speaking in Abuja last weekend, he said such legislation was necessary to revive Nigeria’s comatose leather industry. According to him, eating animal skin should be stopped in order to save the country’s tanneries and thereby boost the national economy. “To the best of my knowledge, Nigerians are the only people in the world that overvalue skin as food, after all ponmo has no nutritional value,” Yakubu said. He intimated that NILEST in collaboration with industry stakeholders would approach the National Assembly and state governments to enact legislations banning ponmo consumption, recalling: “At a point, there was a motion before the two chambers of NASS; it was debated, but I don`t know how the matter got thrown away.”

Read Also: NBA may sue FG over plan to ban ‘ponmo’

According to Yakubu, the consumption of animal hide is partly responsible for the comatose state of Nigerian tanneries. “If we get our tanneries, our footwear and leather production working well in Nigeria, people will hardly get ponmo to buy and eat,’’ he said.

NILEST, the agency saddled with promoting leather production in the Agricultural Research Institute Act of 1975, conducts research on leather products and use of local tanning materials in Nigeria. But the submissions of its principal betrays a disconnect from the reality of ponmo consumption. That item is a staple for many Nigerians because of its affordability, hence accessibility. It may lack nutritional value, but it has the psychological value of not keeping soups bare owing to inability of many to afford beef, fish and other nutritional complements. Many who eat ponmo do so, not because they particularly love the item but because they have no choice. You can’t prohibit them from eating what they eat unless you effectively empower them to access the preferred options. In any event, how do you enforce ban on a closet habit borne out of necessity?

War terror” sounds like flabby tautology — doesn’t every war come with terror?  Or at least, some loose mix-up of concepts, in this age of free-wheeling terrorism.

Yes, war is war — boom, boom — you kill or get killed.  Terror is not that clear cut: you get slaughtered, even if you’re not at war with anyone.

In its Ukraine debacle, however, Russia has somewhat fused war and terror into a terrifying gargoyle, behind which Moscow looks not only well and truly soulless but infernally ugly.

Why  would a people teem with such irredeemable brutality and still look at selves in the mirror and not flinch with horror?

In war, Russia’s fat rats scurry before Ukraine’s tiny cats, in a classic 21st century equivalent of Goliath pissing in his pants before puny David.  A Gulliver diving for cover at Lilliput, in an epic reversal of Jonathan Swift’s fictional travels?

But not to worry, Russia’s terror comes as supreme bully tactics.  Lose the battle fair and square.  But use your long-range artillery to kill unarmed civilians deep beyond the frontline; shell hitherto serene homes and knock off critical infrastructure.

In occupied areas, leave behind bone-chilling savagery.  Bucha, near Ukraine’s capital, Kyiv, was a grim metaphor for Russian butchers, after the invaders from Moscow melted away, after taking Kyiv become a catastrophe, very early in Vladimir Putin’s fancy war.

Now, the latest horror corridor is Izium, in the Kharkiv region of Ukraine, again after its Russian occupiers had fled.  In its flat-bed pine forests, the doomed 418 lay buried in shallow graves, most of them, forensics claim, victims of abject torture.

As it was in Butcher — sorry, Bucha — Russia’s heroism lay not in the quick, neat capture of Kyiv, Putin’s rash goal when his terror army rumbled into town on February 24, but in the free-wheeling killing and maiming of helpless locals.

Yet, as Moscow scuttled off in blind panic in Kyiv, it belted out in a humiliating bedlam from Izium and Kharkiv, surrendering in just two weeks what it took nearly seven months to hold!

But just to underscore its self-inflicted humiliation, Moscow is essaying another land grab in Luhansk and Donetsk regions, by planning a “referendum” tomorrow, to annex that part of Ukraine, simply because Russian tribes(wo)men mostly domicile there — and in the full glare of the UN General Assembly, holding its yearly ritual!

To be sure, that is a direct lift from Crimea Primer 2014, where another Moscow “referendum” annexed Crimea by sheer force of arms!  But isn’t it sheer insanity when you do the same thing but expect different results?

Everyone had better know Putin and his Russian irredentists have gone raving mad again — and act fast, with the UN leading the push!

Another Hitler might just be on the loose.  But the globe had hardly fully healed from the chill of the last one, and from the horrors of World War 2 (1939-1945).

Desperate ailments, as they say, warrant desperate remedies. That must be why in some countries, notably in the non-liberal Asian world, grand corruption carries the death penalty. Of course, some of those verdicts are in themselves corrupt designs of political repression, but the message that the culture of graft is intolerable does not get ‘lost in translation.’ In Nigeria, corruption is a deep-rooted malaise that has over the years defied remedial efforts, yet we seem to treat it still with kid gloves. Sensitivity to human rights would not permit us to take after tyrannical models as cited afore, but we at least could abstain from gratuitously providing comfort zones to verified graft dealers.

The Independent Corrupt Practices Commission (ICPC) is a frontline Nigerian anti-graft agency whose official findings could be taken as reflective of truth. Hence, it gives concern when the agency fudges about findings that warrant a crackdown on suspects, even if its intention is to be procedural. There’s a sense in which officialdom takes out the bite from what should be a sting agency and render it tame, which is wholly unhelpful in the Nigerian context.

Read Also: ICPC probes military chief, chairman over N4b fraud

No less than ICPC Chairman Professor Bolaji Owasanoye disclosed last week that the 2021 Federal budget was found padded by Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs) with duplicated projects worth N300billion. In like manner, the budget of the current year 2022 was found padded to the tune of N100billion upon ICPC’s scrutiny of projects already approved for the MDAs. According to the anti-graft czar, some N49.9billion was also preempted from being lost on salaries of ghost workers put on fraudulent payrolls by MDAs between January and June, this year. Speaking during an interface with the Senate Committee on Finance in Abuja, Owasanoye said inter alia: “Names of MDAs involved in projects duplications running into intercepted billions of naira and fictitious payrolls are available and will be forwarded to the (Senate) committee. The good thing about the preemptive moves made by us is that monies for the fraudulent acts were prevented from being released to the affected MDAs and it is gratifying that the Finance Ministry and the Accountant-General’s Office cooperated with us.” He advised relevant committees of the National Assembly to be on the watch for project duplications in the proposed N19.76trillion 2023 budget.

It is good that ICPC headed off the funds from being disbursed. But one wonders why the identities of affected MDAs are being confidentially handled – even so at the interface with lawmakers. With the credibility stock of ICPC, we expect it is certain of its findings; so affected agencies and officials found culpable should be exposed and timeously dragged before the law. That is how to fight corruption.

Chief Bode George, former Nigerian Navy top brass and Lagos PDP chieftain, evoked what EM Forster said of the military, in his novel, A Passage to India: for every problem the soldiers solve (at least on the political front, where they are ill-equipped to deal), they set no less than 10 others awry.

That much was clear from Chief George’s bluster that the PDP suspend its constitution, just to throw Iyorchia Ayu under the bus, as the Wike/Makinde/George bloc, in the raging PDP dispute, demand.

But don’t blame the “Lagos boy” who once bragged, as military governor of old Ondo State (now Ondo and Ekiti states), that Akure would know a “Lagos boy was here”!  Rather, blame the military complex in him.  As the psychologists say, folks’ real essence bubbles to the surface when a crisis cascades.

Still, it’s reassuring formal structures of the South West PDP (Lagos, Ogun, Ondo, Osun and Ekiti, leaving out only Oyo where Seyi Makinde calls the shot) have shot down the “Ayu must go” crusade of the Wike bloc.

That they wouldn’t even deign Pa George’s suspend-the-constitution call any response would appear a salute to PDP itself, learning from own past foibles.

At the peak of its hubris, when Commander-in-Chief and PDP Leviathan Olusegun Obasanjo was decreeing his “garrison commander” over and above elected Governor Rashidi Ladoja, don’t be sure George’s rally wouldn’t have gathered traction.

Read Also: PDP may lose 2023 elections, Bode George warns

Indeed, the party organs, from those five states, would have been clobbered to impose the diktat, if it tallied with the then regnal presidential interests, party laws be damned!  But we all saw how that preening pride came before a shattering fall.

Still, it doesn’t mean this path of legality would necessarily help the PDP electoral mobilization for 2023.  Indeed, you don’t need any magical eye to realize the move could have been cynical legality, pressed by the PDP powers-that-be under the Atiku-Ayu axis, to protect own flanks in the ravaging intra-party war.

That it was a joint press conference by publicity secretaries clearly gave the game away.  Still, the optics were still much better than junking the PDP constitution, no matter how momentarily, as Pa George suggested.

That brings to the fore lessons PDP is yet to learn despite its past debacle: that a cynical gaming of others often ends in collective ruin.

Atiku moved for a “northern” ticket, knowing a platform with party chair and party presidential ticket, coming from the same region, would gore not a few.

The Wike southern camp too gambled to throw the North the fob of northern chair, hoping for an easy harvest the presidential ticket.

Both have ended in a fiasco.  The result is this PDP war without end.

You recall the Arabian folk story about ‘Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves,’ do you? The pervasiveness and irrepressibility of those characters in the elementary school literature text bearing the story were traits that made them legendary and almost superhuman. Oil thieves relentlessly pillaging Nigeria’s prime resource have assumed the notoriety and legend status of that Arabian tale.

The Nigerian National Petroleum Company Limited (NNPCL) made known lately that the country loses 470,000 barrels of oil per day (bpd) to vandalism and oil theft at the terminals, amounting to $700million every month. Group General Manager, Crude Oil Marketing Department, Rose Eshiett, was reported saying security challenges being experienced in the oil sector hindered output by the country. Speaking during a tour of NNPCL facilities last weekend, she said oil theft and pipeline vandalism had compelled shutdown of the Bonny export terminal where the challenge seems most pronounced. She added that Forcados was not completely secure but NNPCL was working hard to fix the challenge.

Read Also: Buhari directs NNPC to fund East-West road

According to the official, negative impacts of the activities of vandals include low crude oil production, interrupted gas supply, countrywide interruption of petroleum products distribution, refinery downtimes and mounting instability of the oil and gas market. She added: “Nigeria suffers for it, the revenues are impacted. So we can only appeal to them to rein in themselves. The oil theft situation is regrettable. It’s not going on across the whole of the Niger Delta, there are trunk lines that are more impacted. I think the Bonny trunk line ranks highest. Our major challenge as a country is our capability to respond, and that is as a result of several factors, the terrain as well as some incapacity that we have.”

The oil giant indicated it wasn’t folding its hands. Group General Manager, National Petroleum Investment Management Services (NAPIMS), Bala Wunti, assured that technologically-driven all-solutions were being evolved to tame the menace. Speaking at a demo organised for journalists in Abuja, he said though the digital solution had a semblance of Saudi Arabia’s security infrastructure, the Nigerian model combined technology with efforts of the national security agencies and oil communities.  “This is beyond the digital control system, it is also a security system,” he was reported saying inter alia.

Pipeline vandals and oil thieves are flesh and blood, not spirits. Security operatives along with NNPCL must do whatever it takes to tackle them down, unless the political will is lacking. This is more so that the axis where their ill-operations are most intense is known. It will be sheer pipe dream to expect they would rein themselves in as NNPCL urges. They have to be stopped.

Reacting to the attack on Senator Ifeanyi Ubah’s convoy, which the Police say claimed no less than five lives, Alex Ogbonnia, Ohanaeze Ndigbo spokesman, had this to say — at least as reported by The Nation of September 13:

“We make bold to say that the level of violence in the South East is caused by two key issues: criminality and aggression resulting from alienation and marginalization.”

How much this statement is official Ohanaeze reaction, or an Ogbonnia’s personal take, moonlighting as Ohanaeze’s opinion, is not clear.  But it is yet another of the sterile, unhelpful and frankly irresponsible hee-haws that often come from the South East, over matters sane voices there should condemn out-and-out.

After Ogbonnia’s “thesis statement” of “criminality and alienation” — and of course, that buzz word “marginalization”, the Ohanaeze spokesman went cold on criminality: but waxed lyrical over “alienation and marginalization”.

“What is happening now” he thundered, “is an effect of misgovernance.  All over the world, the moment you have anger in society, unemployment and poverty, the result is what you’re seeing.” So, to do a logical interpretation: might “criminality” be justifiable, because of “alienation and marginalization”?

Hardball just wonders how Senator Ubah and family; and the kith-and-kin of the doomed five that lost their lives — well, in this romantic criminality — would feel!  Such crass insensitivity from a spokesperson of Ohanaeze, sworn to the welfare and wellbeing of all Igbo!

Then, Ogbonnia’s solution to arresting the crisis, which nevertheless ripples with ringing fallacy: “The only solution is for us to go into 2023 elections with open eyes.  The future of Nigeria will depend on the kind of government that comes in 2023.”

Read Also: Attack on Ubah: Buhari concerned over armed groups in Southeast

Really?  Let’s apply that romantic logic (?) to Anambra where the outrage — and many more before it — happened.  For Anambra, the coming of Chukwuma Soludo was to be some golden age of sorts.  Indeed, the new governor was chirping some sweet renaissance, across all walks of life.  Yet, his opening months have been blighted by blind barbarity and preening criminality.  So long for a utopia of delusion!

When the IPOB nonsense started, the otherwise respected Chukwuemeka Ezeife, PhD, elder, former governor and ex-Harvard egg head, was busy claiming the killings were by the non-Igbo, to give the Igbo a bad name.  Does Dr. Ezeife still hold that view?

Igbo-on-Igbo violence has since claimed Dr. Chike Akunyili, a gentle soul whose late wife was nothing but an overwhelming symbol of good for Nigeria.  Senator Ubah escaped that violence but would battle the lifetime trauma of five aides dying in his name.  Yet all the Ohanaeze spokesperson could offer is some romantic claptrap!

No thanks to IPOB and Monday sit-ins, Igbo commerce and economy bleed.  By the Ubah attack, the cream of Igbo are fast becoming endangered species, in their own land.  It’s time the Igbo faced own demons, and stopped blaming others for own home criminality.

There’s a saying couched differently in diverse tongues, but all to the same effect that prolonged expectation makes the mind / heart sickly. Five months into the strike by varsity teachers, who have been joined by non-teaching staff, the prospects of public universities returning to action remain bleak. Government and the workers’ unions say they’re negotiating, but there is no indication of imminent thaw in the ice. And the parties involved seem to be cool with that!

After a protracted strike that lasted nine months in 2020, the Academic Staff Union of Universities (ASUU) returned to the trenches this year and kicked off a roll-over strike since 14th February. Three other varsity-based unions namely the Senior Staff Association of Nigerian Universities (SSANU), Non-Academic Staff Union of Universities and Associated Institutions (NASU) and the National Association of Academic Technologists (NAAT) are also at daggers drawn with government over university funding and welfare matters.

Read Also: ASUU strike: NANS protests, grounds Lagos-Ibadan expressway

Ask government about the chances of early resolution, and the answer you get is that the matter is complicated but work is underway to reach a truce. “I wish that the ASUU issue is as simple as many of us think. I don’t think it’s that simple. But I want to assure you that a lot is going on behind the scenes,” Information Minister Lai Mohammed said last week. When ASUU was asked how soon its members would return to work, the union, also last week, was at ease to place the onus on government. “I don’t know if we are calling off the strike soon. We are waiting for the final response from the government. (Government’s negotiating committee) is a committee of different government agencies. They need to go back to their principal and look at what we agreed on, and then get back to us,” ASUU President, Professor Emmanuel Osodeke, told the media.

The seeming ease on both sides about the pendency of the crisis is, however, not shared by students who are most debilitated by the industrial crisis, and neither by parents / guardians who watch helplessly at the frustrating limbo in which their wards are locked. Besides the chagrin that rankles over idle time that is irredeemably lost in the lives of the students, the damage to educational standards is to be dreadfully imagined. At optimum level of operation in the sector, the standard of education in Nigeria is shambolic; it is scary to contemplate the additional injury to standards the protracted strike in the sector portends. Nigerians are not interested in the complexity of negotiations, but that the matters at dispute be resolved urgently and varsities restored to life.

• This article was first published on August 4, 2022

Nobel Laureate Professor Wole Soyinka once described his own generation, which played a major role in the struggle for emergence of the Nigerian nationhood, as ‘wasted.’ He was alluding, among other things, to the human capital in that generation lost to the civil strife that hobbled the early years of the nationhood. With sundry challenges that have blighted the country since those early years, succeeding generations have been far worse off than wasted. Presently, we have a generation that seems befuddled and rudderless, no thanks to the abysmal state of the socio-polity. And is there frustration in the land!

An example of confused frustration is Oludare Alaba, a graduate of Agricultural Extension and Rural Development at Ladoke Akintola University of Technology (LAUTECH), Ogbomoso, who recently stormed the school to return his certificate and demand a refund of fees paid the school for his training. A viral video showed Alaba barging in on security desk staff of the institution and ranting about his struggles since graduation, with no financial benefits accruing from having the certificate. “I’m suffering, take your certificate and return my money,” he raved in Yoruba at bemused staff.

In a media interview subsequently, Alaba defended his outburst. “I’ve been struggling with life and the only opportunity I’ve seen is for me to do (sic) blood money and I said I cannot do blood money because I want to be useful to Nigeria, my family and myself, and God my creator. I am an entertainer. I even won an award during my NYSC days in 2016,” he said, adding: I am married with two kids; my dad is 90 years old but I continue to borrow money from him rather than give him. My father said he cannot help me go and borrow money again because he borrowed money to send me to school and he is yet to pay back, and that he is supposed to be reaping the benefits from me now…”

There are many things wrong with Oludare Alaba as a person, and it’s not LAUTECH or the certificate it awarded  that is to blame. After six to seven years since he obtained the certificate, it is curious he’s waiting for white collar employment, especially with the kind of course he graduated in. Of what use would he be to the nation in white collar employment, as he touted the desire, with a training that presumably equipped him to engage in agricultural enterprise? And now that he’s returning the certificate and demanding a refund, how will the school retrieve the knowledge imparted to him that he’s refused to apply? Oludare Alaba has personal issues and ‘the gods’ of LAUTECH are not to blame.

The September 5 fatal shooting of Sheikh Ibrahim Iyiorji, and his death in hospital the following day, leave a bitter taste in the mouth.

The late Iyiorji, an Islamic cleric and scholar, was shot at home in Isu, in the Onicha local government area of Ebonyi State.  He died on the night of September 6, at the Federal Teaching Hospital, Abakaliki, where he was rushed.

A Daily Trust report of September 7 claimed Sheik Iyiorji was killed “by gunmen suspected to be members of the outlawed Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB).”  Now that sounds like a northern reverse of the southern media adducing every crime to the so-called “Fulani herdsmen”.

The Police must thus probe, fish out, reveal the identities and prosecute the culprits.  Until then, “gunmen” killed the Sheik.  IPOB’s alleged involvement should be anchored only on facts, not fancies.

Murdering anyone is bad enough.  But this has a thick ooze of faith persecution — not helped by some flippant comments by Igbo-sounding names, mocking the dead instead of calling for justice.

One, by Chinenye Anyanwu Okonkwo, in pidgin English: “He is not an Igbo man, him mama born am for Ebonyi run”.  Another, Chukwudi Amaechi: “Look at his face.  Stomach infrastructure Igbo Islamic scholar, ndi ngbu!!!”

Read Also: Why Tinubu should be next president, by Igbo businessman

So, because he was “no Igbo” he deserved to be slain?  Yet, another: “There is nothing like Igbo Islamic scholar in Ebonyi State”.

All were reacting to an Igbere TV flashing of the news, complete with the victim’s picture.

“There is nothing like Igbo Islamic scholar in Ebonyi State” is galloping ignorance, pure and simple.  That put these three comments where they belong: blissful ignorance reinforcing a dangerous delusion; or just the lunatic fringe sounding off.  Both should be decried by South East authorities.

Aside from boasting the highest concentration of Igbo Muslims (followed by the university town of Nsukka in Enugu State), Afikpo also hosts the College of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Enohia Itim, Afikpo, which has run and thrived since 1958 (before Nigeria’s independence).

Indeed, from the school’s extensive compound, to the nearby Akanu Ibiam Federal Polytechnic, the Itim settlement which cultural murals and symbols look more Efik than Igbo, down to the Afikpo channel near which nestles the Afikpo monarch’s captivating palace, you see a most profound mosaic of cohabiting faiths and cultures, which Nigeria should be well and truly proud of.

The cruel killing of Sheik Iyiorji negates all that — which is why South East sane voices, made up of the governments there and the religious order, must with one voice condemn this murder and call for prompt justice.

Anything less would give the impression that Igbo Muslims might be endangered species.  That hardly burnishes the Igbo or South East image.