It is always quite easy to know when there is a coordinated media campaign against anyone, judging from my little experience of how blackmail works in Nigeria. Somebody would make a wild allegation, someone else would quickly parrot it, and before you could say “Jack Robinson”, the unconfirmed allegations would begin to trend in videos and comments on social media. NGOs would begin to issue statements threatening brimstone and fire. They would start organising public protests to fight imagined corruption.

This is my reading of the trending and unending media attacks on Mrs Aisha Dahir-Umar, the Director-General of the National Pension Commission (PENCOM). In the last few months, it has been one week, one trouble. Since her appointment and confirmation by the Senate in 2020, the PENCOM DG, has soldiered on even with the avalanche of issues in the sector. There is no doubt that she has the strength of character to implement reforms in pension administration in Nigeria. This is a plus for the country and a minus for some stakeholders. I stand to be corrected.

The National Association of Nigerian Students (NANS) recently threatened to rain fire should the PENCOM DG fail to resign based on allegations that do not have any proof. A member of the National Assembly had alleged that the least paid PENCOM employee earned N1 million a month. However, the commission said the highest paid official, which is the DG herself, does not earn up to N1 million a month. NANS had to beat a retreat and offer a public apology, saying after carefully reviewing its allegations, it found that there was a “marked difference between staff cost and staff salary,” with the former consisting of training allowances, staff exit benefit scheme, and employers’ pension contributions “as opposed to salaries that are fixed and earmarked monthly”.

It blamed its threat on “ignorance and lack of inattentiveness at the National Assembly when the lawmakers recently invited officials of PENCOM to seek clarification on issues as part of their oversight functions”. The NANS senate president then described Mrs Dahir-Umar as a “pacesetter”, saying it had carried out an “independent investigation” and concluded that the allegation of wasteful spending “is in many parts misleading, untrue, unverified and therefore, should be ignored”. This is instructive. You shoot first and reason later.

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It is not all bad news from the stable of PENCOM, as some would want unsuspecting members of the general public to believe with the way Dahir-Umar is consistently coming under fire from entrenched interests. So much so that one might be forced to ask what her sins are. Either she is appearing before the National Assembly, or some civil society organisations are breathing down her neck for reasons that remain in the realm of speculations. Unfortunately, such instances are commonplace in the polity.

What has Aisha Dahir-Umar done differently at PENCOM that has warranted the barrage of attacks? She introduced laudable reforms that saw pension assets rise from N6.42 trillion in 2017 to N14.3 trillion as of July 2022. She introduced the Micro Pension Plan for the participation of informal sector workers in the Contributory Pension Scheme.

A periodic Pension Enhancement programme was instituted, where the retirees’ monthly pension is enhanced based on the performance of their RSAs, every three years. She developed the Enhanced Contributor Registration System (ECRS) to clean up and enhance the integrity of the pension industry database and the RSA Transfer Window to enable contributors to change their PFAs at least once a year. The Multi-Fund Structure of investment of pension fund assets to address the investment appetite and preference of contributors as well as their age profile was also instituted.

Under her watch, PENCOM automated the Annual Enrolment Exercise for retired federal civil servants to remove the inconvenience of the physical process of the exercise and approved access to a percentage of RSA balance towards payment of Equity Contribution for a residential mortgage. Also, she strengthened the minimum capital base of PFAs from N1billion to N5billion for better service delivery to contributors. She also facilitated the payment of outstanding accrued pension rights of federal government retirees, which drastically shortened the waiting period for accessing their retirement benefits.

If these and many more are what she has done to deserve the salvo from all fronts, then something is fundamentally wrong. I would not assume that part of her sins is not opening the PENCOM vault unless the DG herself states this. Whatever may be the case, it might not be farfetched as we are in a society where your ability to open government vaults qualifies you as loyal and hardworking.

We must redefine what our expectations are as a people and country. The PENCOM DG would be celebrated and not bashed for getting the job done in other climes. And God forbid that she succumbs to the pressure from these quarters. The implication is that pension assets in the country would be spirited out in a jiffy, and we would return to the gory days of pensioners unable to access their retirement benefits.

In the 2022 Transparency and Integrity Index ranking for Ministries, Departments and Agencies (MDAs), PENCOM emerged as one of the top three organizations in the Transparency and Integrity Index ranking. The ranking was carried out by the Centre for Fiscal Transparency and Integrity Watch (CeFTIW), supported by MacArthur Foundation.

Umar Yakubu, the Executive Director of CeFTIW, said that 511 MDAs were assessed across six broad variables. “The ranking was aimed at preventing corruption in public office as it centred on procurement, budget, human resources, inclusion and website integrity. We used this to check the level of transparency with regards to public finances, especially in procurement, how the MDAs spend their money, generate taxes, recruit people; it also assesses them generally on efficiency.”

The National Pension Commission has been certified with the ISO 27001:2013 quality standard certification for compliance in all core areas of operations in its Information Security Management System. ISO 27001:2013 is an internationally recognized set of information security standards that govern the security of information assets such as intellectual property, financial information, employee information, and information entrusted by third parties.

These are not ordinary feats for a government agency, whose director general has been accused of spending an imaginary N14 billion on “personnel costs”. No amount of explanation would suffice as those sponsoring the calumny would stop at nothing. According to reports, some NGOs have been making all kinds of threats and allegations against her in the media. If I were in Dahir-Umar’s shoes, I would sue the hell out of them. It is also very important for the security agencies to scrutinise these so-called activists and establish the source of the resources they are deploying for this campaign of calumny.

• Dr. Bajeh is an Abuja-based commentator on public affairs.

A very serious society is anchored to a strong, charismatic political leadership as a fundamental component of its experiential knowledge, critical to sustainable development in all its ramifications. A leadership has to prioritise the needs of the led, understandably because the natural resources of a given geo-polity are not inexhaustible. This shows the centrality of justice and equity to the emergence of a healthy human society.

The Nigerian political leadership has to ensure that the issue of security and welfare are treated with maximum seriousness. These are the two most critical assignments of the president who constitutionally takes on the mantle of supreme power. No room for nauseatingly smelly lamentation! Do the job or get the boot! But painfully, Nigeria has a caricatured legislature unlike what obtains in saner climes and cultures, where poor governmental performance is inexcusable at all.

It is a truism, that those who have been mowed down by kidnappers and bandits can never be resurrected. The same thing applies to those who have died of starvation.

Therefore, the federal government and to a lesser degree, the 36 states have to confront the menace of out-of-school children and abject material poverty with uncommon vigour and determination. A hungry, uneducated population is a major threat to the fabric of our society.  It is much wiser to craft and faithfully implement healthy economic policies (which are capable of reducing security challenges, tensions, and conflicts to the barest minimum) than to be spending a chunk of the national budgets on fighting insecurity. Maximum insecurity will continue unabated, so long as the vast majority of Nigerians live in utter misery.

Again, the Nigerian political leadership is still playing primordial politics embedded in ethnic and religious bigotry after 62 years of independence (at least on paper) from Britain. This primitive desire is one major reason why bandits and kidnappers (mainly from outside Nigeria), find it easy to network with the locals to maim and mow down innocent citizens without any appreciable resistance. The chagrined world is laughing at us, as a result of this baboon-like leadership style that has no respect for human lives. Almost everybody in power is trying hard to rape beautiful, rich mother Nigeria. She is now in a coma. The mess has a long history in our country bereft of unalloyed patriotism.

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There is nothing wrong with taking foreign loans to execute capital projects, but everything is appallingly bad, for spending such monies for unprofitable investments. External loans and corruption lead to greater miseries. It is becoming increasingly clear, that these loans are a deprivation trap for Nigeria as well as most parts of Africa, where there is a dearth of charismatic, messianic leadership. The West and parts of Asia especially China, are strangulating the African spirit as our leaders remain unperturbed by the political machinations of modern globalisation.

Mesmerising Nigeria through the lens of poisonous bilateralism goes on unabated. Thus, for example, the production of export crops like cocoa, coffee, and groundnuts are being encouraged in order to promote and sustain Western and Chinese industrialisation. Even food crops such as yam and cassava are now being exported. Nigerians wait for the finished products often with exorbitantly high prices. We continue to depend largely on cereals from outside. It is a shame that Nigeria remains a raw material economy after more than six decades of independence. Nigeria is like a palm tree with good fronds. However, the tree has refused to grow taller, thereby making it easy to regularly harvest the fronds for a wide range of purposes. In this context, smarter outsiders are the harvesters! Nigeria’s participation in the international community is still uncritical.

The total debts Nigeria owes the West and China as well as locally sourced loans, as of June were approximately $103.31 billion. External debts as of June were $40.1 billion. This is an obvious contrast to $3.3 billion as of March 2007. Again, Nigeria owed China $3.67 billion as of July this year. According to one popular Yoruba adage, “it is risky to be scratching one’s nose with the head of a poisonous snake”. Uncritical closeness to China is deadly. Nigeria could risk the danger of forfeiting a lot of its strategic infrastructural assets to China in the future, if the political leadership refused to take the bull by the horns. It would be a horrible scenario for tomorrow’s youths to be enslaved by China, right here in our country.

Nigerian leaders today (more than hitherto), are encouraging multi-layered, multi-facetted colonisation due largely to their politics of the belly and unspeakable parochialism.

Our political leaders often explain away every serious issue as if the present and the future do not matter to them. There is no justification whatsoever for Nigeria to be a chronic borrower given the enormity of the natural and human resources at its disposal. Even the foreign reserves have been depleted, as a result of prodigality deeply embedded in a gross lack of patriotism and greed. Thus, for example, there has been a decline of foreign exchange reserves from $40.50 billion at the end of 2021 to $38.28 billion in September. The reserves further dropped to $37.22 billion in November.   There is no shock-absorber for the country’s currency, in the face of dwindling global economic fortune in the last two or three years. Good heavens, how can a single human being called Nigerian senator, be earning approximately N30 million (about $37,500) monthly, when the national minimum wage is N30,000?

In 2021, N128 billion was allocated to the federal lawmakers of less than 500 membership as opposed to N46 billion naira budgeted for the healthcare sector to cater for over 200 million people. This is a great disservice to humanity.  Apart from this, the government is still planning to give severance allowances/pay of about N63 billion to very senior political appointees like the president, vice-president, governors, deputy governors, and legislators at the state and federal levels at the end of their term in early 2023. This is a disguised form of crude oil theft.

It is extremely disturbing, that the above scenario is happening in a country where a university professor is still taking a starvation wage of N400,000 (about $500) monthly. No room for equitable distribution of national wealth.  Nigerian leaders (with a few exceptions) are merely interested in maximum power with a view to looting our commonwealth. Consequently, peace and progress remain elusive in the extreme. Therefore, Nigerians cannot afford to elect a bunch of “Janjaweed” leaders in 2023.

Respecting the feelings of the ordinary people, is not an act of weakness. It is a strength in human resource management. Nobody is interested in their primitive posturing or egos.  We need leaders who are ready to tap the strengths from the comments or opinions of the led, understandably because nobody (regardless of his robust education or a lack of it), is an exclusive preserve of wisdom.

• Prof. Ogundele is of Dept. of Archaeology and Anthropology, University of Ibadan.

Nigeria is back again to the familiar terrain of subterfuge. After a long drought in blackmail and campaign of calumny against the ruling All Progressives Congress (APC), the recession is fast giving way to a boom in partisan bull-fight plotted to pitch the unsuspecting members of the public against the ruling party and its presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu.

The setting is Nigeria’s political firmament where familiar faces from the same roots line up in various political turfs with varying schemes and tact to score same goal.

The style, they say, is the man. For the People’s Democratic Party (PDP) and offspring that thrive in mob tactics in driving their agenda, the manipulation of the pedestrian rabble into an act of rage against the opponent is the most clinical way of achieving predetermined ends.

Barely four months to the prized contest to elect the nation’s Chief Executive Officer, operatives of the Nigeria’s political behemoth that are spread in various political parties hitherto rooted in PDP are revisiting their laboratory of old tricks to draw their opponent and easily the most promising presidential candidate, Asiwaju Bola Ahmed Tinubu of APC, into a street-fight against Nigerian voters, aiming to harvest Tinubu’s political teeth and render him prostrate ahead of the February 2023 presidential poll.

The man who started the plots, Olabode George, a military General, seems not to have learnt anything from history. Neither has he appreciated the potency and strength of Tinubu’s formidable political family after the retired naval officer in cahoots with former Lagos State PDP chairman, Muritala Ashorobi, and Obasanjo’s Presidency stirred the Lagos political hornet’s nest that stung George into unconsciousness, but which irrevocably consumed Ashorobi’s entire political career.

Seventeen years down the line, the same George drew the first blood, stoking the fire of hate and rebellion to cage Tinubu in the suffocating political rest room, to nurse the wounds and filth associated with personality and character assassination, the cruel end-game in political humiliation and ultimately an end to a thriving political career.

In this game to tame Tinubu, George has comrades in Peter Obi of the Labour Party (LP) and Atiku Abubakar of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), all political twins from the same womb and, indeed, the same roots with the eye on the ball of the Aso Rock sceptre.

Obi in his subtle assault chose subterfuge, enlisting the services of a discredited polls firm called NOI Polls Limited to spread a lie to Nigerian voters. NOI is allegedly owned by Dr Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala, a former Finance Minister and staunch member of the PDP that is struggling for breath after bequeathing the legacy of waste to Nigeria in its 16 years of misgovernance.

The poll company had in the past conducted several political opinion polls with bizarre projections in 2014 and 2015 with ridiculous results that diminished its worth and shamed its clout, so much so that we thought the organisation would have closed down its operations as a result of its unprofessional and inaccurate polls results.

Recently, Obi unleashed the same NOI on Nigerians’ sensibilities, predicting that Obi will win the 2023 presidential poll in spite of the glaring streaks of failure that beam at the candidate of the Labour Party that has no single councillor let alone House Assembly and National Assembly member in the entire federation.

Obi’s Labour Party is also reputed as the only political party that has no manifesto. No programme appeal! One cynic recently posted the profiles of the political parties contesting the 2023 presidential poll on the internet as follows:  “APC has 22 states; PDP has eight (8) states; Wike has five states (5); APGA has one state (1); while Obi’s Labour Party has Kilimanjaro Mountain, Facebook, Tiktok and Twitter states as its strongholds.”

Besides his weak structures, Obi’s chance is also diminished and worsened by the albatross arising from his narrow ethnic bias in his posturing over sensitive national issues.

Then the Pandora Files albatross. The report  tracked public records and other documents allegedly involving Obi as “one of the individuals whose hidden business activities were exposed by the report, including alleged number of secret business dealings and relationships that he had kept away for years from his Anambra people whom he governed, and from Nigerian people over whom he plans to rule”.

In the media probe that followed, he reportedly admitted that he did not declare these assets in his asset declaration filings with the Code of Conduct Bureau as provided by law to curb frauds.

While Nigerians are so far not deceived by his angelic posturing, it is plain that while Obi has his base and constituency on the internet, Atiku battles with a fragmented house under a tattered umbrella that defies mending, as Governor Nyesom Wike spits on PDP’s assault on the agreement on the nation’s power balance that is now being threatened by Atiku’s dangerous pursuit of power, even as Nigeria faces convulsion over reckless power chase by the ruling elite in PDP.

Wike is today leading the band of aggrieved PDP members who saw danger in breaching power rotation scheme by Atiku and his men. More worrisome is that they have not told Nigerians  how they plan to use the power they desperately and dangerously need after their party laid the foundation for the nation’s economic squalor, as other peoples of the world climb development ladder to prosperity.

Conversely, Tinubu, who never invested Lagos money in personal or family business, introduced “Economic Summit” that drew specialists and professionals to draw an economic blueprint that nurtured Lagos economic growth and stability, including pioneering the “Treasury Single Account (TSA)” that was later adopted by the federal government.

Tinubu was the first in Nigeria’s history to start Independent Power Project (IPP) in partnership with Enron in Lagos State, including introducing “Digital Economy” in governance through Lagos Tax Administration while he also created 37 Local Govt. Council Development Areas (LCDAs) and ran them effectively without owing salaries when Obasanjo seized the state’s allocations for several months, even as he also started telecommunications revolution in Nigeria through Econet before it became a national success story.

PDP, Atiku’s party, chose a time-worn antic, selling a dummy that Tinubu had an alleged drug-related case in the United States over which the APC’s candidate had allegedly forfeited $460,000 to the US government, even though the US government had long explained that Tinubu had no case over which he was being investigated. The media outfit that broadcast the story, Arise TV, has since been slammed by the National Broadcasting Commission (NBC) with a N2million fine over malicious broadcast of the fake news while Tinubu is reportedly on his way to the courts to challenge some media houses on this deliberate malicious libel.

Tinubu has packaged his vision in an 80-page document for Nigerians to read and understand how he plans to grow Nigeria into a major economic power. He has a record of performance that supports him in his vision and mission. He succeeded in growing Lagos State through the same process between 1999 and 2007.

He is a success story that should be trusted. Nigerian politics has grown beyond gambling with the fate of the nation to a practical demonstration of capacity and ability to transform dreams and visions into a veritable confluence of development. Tinubu is the conscious symbol and conscience of that paradigm. He had done it before; he will do same again.

• Olujobi, a journalist, writes from Ado-Ekiti.

They come in different shades, but to the same negative effect. They are merchants of electoral violence, and their ultimate objective is to obstruct free expression of the voters’ will through the ballot box. And they aren’t just enemies of free democratic expression, but also of the good of the Nigerian state. With the 2023 general election under 100 days away – the national elections into the Presidency and National Assembly chambers on 25th February, 2023 and the state elections into the governorships and houses of assembly on 11th March – they constitute a pressing danger the country must earnestly deal with.

It was violence at its crudest wrought against the ballot box with the arson attacks, penultimate Thursday, on offices of the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) in Ogun and Osun states. Arsonists lit into the commission’s Abeokuta South council area office in the Ogun capital at about 1:15am on 10th November and incinerated the premises and movable assets on site. Besides total damage to the main building and its furnishings, assets lost to the attack, according to INEC, include 904 ballot boxes, 29 voting cubicles, 30 megaphones, 57 election bags, eight electric power generators and 65,699 Permanent Voters Cards (PVCs) awaiting collection by registered voters. Few hours after the Abeokuta attack, arsonists struck at the commission’s office in Ede South council area of Osun State and set the premises ablaze. But they didn’t achieve their apparent aim, as swift response by security and fire service personnel limited the damage.

In his overview of the attacks at an emergency meeting of the Inter-Agency Consultative Committee on Election Security (ICCES) early last week, INEC Chairman Professor Mahmood Yakubu said: “While the damage in the attack in Ede South was minimal, that of Abeokuta South was extensive… The Commission is taking urgent steps to repair the damage to the building and replace the facilities in the Ede South Local Government Area so that the office becomes functional again immediately. For Abeokuta South Local Government Area office (however), the destruction was total. Consequently, the commission is relocating our staff to the old state office, also known as INEC Office Annex, in Oke-Ilewo area of Abeokuta.” According to him, activities involving the 15 registration areas (wards) and 445 polling units in Abeokuta South council area will henceforth be coordinated from the new location. He added: “The Resident Electoral Commissioner (REC) for Ogun State has been directed to compile the Voter Identification Numbers (VINs) of all the 65,699 PVCs lost in the attack from our database and submit the record for immediate reprint. We want to assure affected registered voters in Abeokuta South that no one will be disenfranchised as a result of this dastardly act.”

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Other than the arson attacks, issues of concern to INEC and the security establishment constituting ICCES at last week’s emergency parley were incidents of physical attacks on political actors in the course of ongoing electioneering period, and the plagues of hate speech and fake news ruling the airwaves. The electoral body said it had so far tracked 50 incidents of physical attacks during political campaigns across 21 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT), with Professor Yakubu noting that “these unhappy occurrences are coming just a little over one month into the election campaign which is scheduled to last for about five months from 28th September, 2022 to 23rd February, 2023 for national elections and from 12th October, 2022 to 11th March, 2023 for state elections.” He said INEC was worried that if urgent and decisive steps weren’t taken, “the attacks will intensify as we approach the election date.” National Security Adviser (NSA) Maj-General Babagana Monguno (rtd.), who co-chairs ICCES with the INEC boss, corroborated the statistics of violent attacks that said he described as “a bad signal.”

Arsonists targeting INEC facilities are typically agents of political actors aiming to obstruct free expression of voters’ will. So also are hoodlums who stage violent attacks against political supporters from partisan affiliations different from their own. Inspector General of Police (IGP) Usman Baba Alkali has also called out some state governors whom he accused of intolerance by sponsoring attacks against opponents and denying space for plurality of political views as could enable voters to make intelligent choices. A more subtle, but no less deadly assault on the ballot box is the phenomenon of hate speech. These are all weapons deployed by politicians too desperate for power to submit to the free will of voters. And it is the same people who enlist media outlets to traffic in fake news injurious to political opponents.

Not that these tendencies are new in Nigerian political culture, but there have been efforts plied in recent history to rein them in. Non-governmental National Peace Committee (NPC) led by former Head of State, General Abdulsalami Abubakar has been at the vanguard of these efforts. For every election since 2015, this committee has made political parties featuring in respective election to sign a peace accord they are expected to be bound by. For the 2023 poll, it has committed the 18 political parties that will be on the ballot to two peace accords. In a communique dated 22nd September, 2022, the committee had stated: “2023 is more than an election. It is an opportunity to serve Nigeria, to defend Nigeria and to uphold her unity and progress… Nigerians should avoid the spread of fake news and uphold the principles of tolerance, respect, civility and decency in all public and private conversations and engagements about election and the progress of Nigeria.”

It is very obvious, however, that political gladiators aren’t keeping to the peace accord they signed. And the challenge we have is that the peace committee only has the power of moral suasion, while the peace accord it midwifes is only a moral document for which there aren’t sanctions when violated. It would require the security agencies and INEC, in principle, to enforce the provisions of law against electoral offences such as are itemised in Sections 114 to 129 of the Electoral (Amendment) Act 2022. But INEC has made its constraints clear. Besides that the challenge is huge and heavily overbears on its core responsibility of election management, the commission is not vested with power to arrest and investigate electoral offenders, which is why it has always canvassed an Electoral Offences Commission to take up the task. Under the circumstance, therefore, the onus falls on security agencies – the Nigeria Police in particular – to take on electoral offenders. This should be done by relentlessly tracking down and arresting culprits of offences and delivering them inevitably to justice, such that anyone planning to take after them would be strongly dissuaded.

The tragedy, however, is that this is the very thing lacking in how we deal with electoral offences in this country. Take the fresh arson attacks against INEC offices, for instance: no suspects were arrested, and it is doubtful any will ever be. Before now, the last arson attack INEC suffered was on 03rd July, 2022 at its Igboeze North council area office in Enugu State, which resulted in the destruction of no fewer than 748 ballot boxes and 240 voting cubicles besides office equipment and furniture. INEC National Commissioner in charge of Information and Voter Education Committee, Festus Okoye, said at the time that the commission was working to ascertain the status of voter registration machines for ongoing Continuous Voter Registration (CVR) and uncollected PVCs that were locked up in a fireproof cabinet, while the incident had been reported to the Nigeria Police for investigation and further action. As we speak, there’s been no update on arrest of suspects. Among many other incidents previously, gunmen had on 23rd May, 2021, stormed INEC’s office at Igboeze South council area and set the place ablaze. And that was after attacks on the commission’s Udenu council area office on 13th May, and its state head office in Enugu on 16th May, 2021. For none of those incidents has suspects been reported arrested to the best of my knowledge.

With the importance of its mandate and unruliness of some pollical actors, INEC’s offices deserve all-round security protection. But given that the commission has offices in all state capitals, the 774 council areas and facilities in the 8,809 wards nationwide, it is obvious there’s no enough security manpower to police all the sites. The best that can be done in the circumstance is to deter attacks by making arsonists know they won’t go scot free if they dare their ill-adventure.

• Please join me on kayodeidowu.blogspot.be for conversation.

Unfortunate and unhappy is any country ruled by philistines. Nigeria is in that category. A philistine is anyone “guided by materialism and disdainful of intellectual or artistic values.” Nigeria is a truly unhappy land because philistinism is the raison d’etre for many who seek public office. Not for public service or public good but to satisfy personal lust for power and the unlimited access it gives to plunder national resources.

How else does one explain the mindless plunder of the country’s wealth by those in government, that a single official could so casually purloin over a N100 billion from the national coffers, unless stealing is integral to governance! And Nigeria’s unhappiness is further compounded by a one-man dictatorship pretending to be a democracy, led by a congenitally rigid, inflexible autocrat.

The country operates as if it is truly rigged against progress and performance. Not only is massive state robbery a national pastime, those in charge of the nation are also disdainful of intellectual values to boot. If not so, how else to explain the recent casualization of intellectual workers by the Buhari regime! It implies that intellection is now peculiarly Nigerian, to be defined and compensated at the whimsical discretion of anti-intellectual rulers of the state.

Isn’t it shameful that the Black world’s preeminent nation that used to be the beacon of hope to Blacks the world over, has been dragged so low by its own rulers? Diminution is inevitable once any society is under the stranglehold of philistines.

Bad enough that our universities have been subjected to the most pernicious neo-liberal conditionalities imposed since the Babangida regime adopted SAP, but the saddest part is that the Minister of Labour and Employment and Minister of Education, the longest serving in their respective ministries in Nigeria’s history, are also of tasteless anti-intellectual dispositions. Even if I can pity and sympathize with a Chris Ngige who sees university intellectual workers as a group to be subdued, derided and subjected to extreme humiliation in the service of a barely educated autocrat, the case of how Malam Adamu Adamu, Minister of Education, who was respected for his erudition, his informed and analytical newspaper columns, would allow a fellow minister to so badly mess up his area of responsibility. One of his most celebrated and referenced columns is a piece he authored in in November 2013 where he intelligently and eloquently discussed the ASUU strike of that year and their demands for proper funding for education, praising the union for its principled defence of quality public university education while berating the government of the day for its poor disposition towards the education sector.

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Could this be the same Adamu or a doppelganger? Don’t trust any man completely until he has tasted power, raw state power. Since Adamu started overseeing education, nothing has improved in that sector: the number of out-of-school children has grown exponentially, the Almajiri schools on which billions of naira were expended by the previous Goodluck Jonathan administration have been abandoned, federally owned universities have been shut down more times in the last seven years than previous years, none of the subsisting crises in the universities that ASUU has been protesting about for seven years has received attention.

Yet the minister who openly admitted to monumental failure would shamelessly hang on to the job. Why? Well, in Nigeria, the fragrance of power and its alluring perks and perquisites are too overpowering to yield to any considerations of integrity, honour, or any such philosophical claptrap. Adamu’s legacies as education czar are baleful, and will remain detrimental to national development far into the future. Reason is because destruction and disruption are easy to cause, but repair and restoration infinitely more arduous and time-consuming.

On the destructiveness of rigidity. Rigidity not predicated on sound principle or philosophy could be perilous to an individual, group or an entire society, even a whole country. I still want to believe that Malam Adamu had good intentions coming into government, but the burden of working for and under a rigid, authoritarian, ill-at-ease and opinionated boss is his main undoing. Rigidity of this type is destructive. Before I shoot myself in the foot, let me clarify what I mean. Intellectual rigidity, predicated on sound theory, scientific and analytical rigour, is indispensable for intellection.

However, rigidity predicated on sheer personal predilection is dangerous. General Muhammadu Buhari was a victim of this in his first coming as our military ruler between January 1984 and August 1985. He was so rigid, unyielding, inflexible, dismissive, and arrogantly opinionated even when proven to be patently wrong that his own military colleagues in the government had to conspire to remove him before he brought down the roof on all their heads. They accused him of not yielding to sound advice from his colleagues even on highly sensitive national matters because he acted as mister know-it-all. That rigidity eventually destroyed his military career and, mercifully for Nigerians, also terminated his despotic tenure as head of state. One would think that after three decades out of power, three failed attempts at becoming a democratically elected president, and now more than seven years in the saddle, he had grown and matured in the esoteric art of statesmanship, become more adept at grasping the intricacies of administering a huge and complex country like Nigeria. But he quite unfortunately still behaves true to his innate character. Well, the old aphorism, that you can teach an old dog new tricks definitely holds true in his case.

After several months of paralyzing but avoidable ASUU strike during which the government didn’t take any positive steps at resolution, President Buhari suddenly woke up as if from stupor, ordered his education minister to propose workable solutions to the problems. But upon receiving the report and hearing that the only remaining issue was the pernicious no-work-no-pay order, he reflexively thundered that on no account would government pay for ‘work not done’. In the ordinary sense of say a factory worker, his position would have been dead right, based of course on job definition and description. For intellectual workers in the universities however, it is a different ball game entirely. He should have asked: What exactly is it that lecturers do that they can ask to be paid for ‘work not done’? Had the issue been that thoroughly interrogated, he probably would have been less rigid. Again, flexibility has never really been his strong suit.

Remember the same autocratic rigidity over the proposed redesign of the Naira. Without consultation, without so much as a discussion with critical stakeholders on how such a weighty action would impact the economy and affect Nigerians, as a similar exercise did under him back in 1984, he single-handedly approved the decision just because CBN governor, Godwin Emefiele, ‘convinced’ him. Again, what of the border closure he ordered in 2019 and its destructive impact on the economy just like it also happened in 1984? When will his handlers show him that his predilection for rigidity, the know-it-all approach to national issues, is destructive? Again, old dogs and new tricks…

• Prof Fawole writes from Obafemi Awolowo University, Ile-Ife, Osun State.