Over the years, the occurrence of accidents with air crashes as its worst manifestations are not strange developments in the air travel eco – system. Air crashes in its severest dimension, though hurtful, often provides a corrective window for all players in the transport chain to improve the safety culture. It is against this background that probes instituted for air accidents or incidents are often seen as a learning curve for organisations directly or indirectly connected to such an exercise.
It is therefore not out of place that the crash of a Sikorsky SK76 with registration 5NBQG operated by East Wind Aviation recently has elicited varied reactions from players within and outside Nigeria’s aviation industry.
As Nigerians are wont to offer their perspective on any issue, it has been approached from many prisms, ostensibly determined by factors bordering on logic, sentiments and other considerations.
It is against this backdrop that the comments by some self-styled aviation experts, self-appointed stakeholders and journalists have again brought to the fore the cardinal rule of aviation reporting.
Persuaded by the non-punitive rule of air accident reporting, hasty conclusions by persons who have exhibited bias on probable/possible cause of the helicopter crash, when the body saddled to probe the air disaster to unravel the reason the chopper went down into the Atlantic Ocean is yet to come up with its report, should be trashed as an unprofessional verdict.
In aviation regulations, speculations on possible cause of crash only lead to one destination: gross display of unprofessionalism.
Shockingly, some ‘experts’ in a report by a national newspaper had even gone ahead to advise the aviation regulatory body, the Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) to oversight the helicopter that killed eight occupants of the ill-fated flight on October 25.
This wild goose chase appears a disservice to rigorous efforts by the Nigerian Safety Investigation Bureau (NSIB), the body responsible for investigating air crashes in Nigeria, in conjunction with the Search and Recovery partners NNPC, NIMASA, the Nigerian Navy, and HydroDive, which about a month ago recovered the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR), commonly referred to as ‘black box’ from the crashed Sikorsky SK76 helicopter.
The primary functions of an aircraft black box, also known as a flight recorder, are to record data and sound related to the aircraft’s operation and to help investigators determine the cause(s) of an accident. The black box records a variety of technical information, including the aircraft’s speed, altitude, position, control settings, and vibrations. The black box also records conversations between the pilots, co-pilots, and passengers, as well as ambient cockpit noise. The data and sound recorded by the black box help investigators reconstruct the events leading up to an accident and determine its causes.
This equipment specifically gives the NSIB all it needs to unravel the cause of the accident. If that is so, it is preposterous to begin to hazard a guess on the exact cause of an accident that the NSIB is yet to find all the debris from the helicopter.
Moreover, wild speculations concerning the age of the helicopter that crashed, by the experts has exposed the lack of knowledge as it affects the operation of the aircraft. And so the insinuation goes that for deep-water operations, old aircraft should be discouraged in favour of relatively new aircraft because, in their uninformed view, they operate better in difficult terrain with stringent operations.
These puerile propositions, lacking professional validation, runs counter to the body of knowledge concerning such subject.
Little wonder the conclusion of such experts that the age of the chopper cannot withstand the challenge thrown at it by the operating environment.
Experts of course say an aircraft is airworthy as long as it is well-maintained. In any case, the airframe itself is the only piece that remains more or less the same.
In fact, in the view of Sanjiv Gautam, former director general of the Civil Aviation Authority of Nepal, aircraft parts ranging from the fuselage, wings, engine, propeller and landing gear all have their finite lives—the period they are safe to fly before metal fatigue poses a safety threat.
“In aviation terminology, it is called a cycle…If the cycle of the parts ends, it has to be changed or overhauled according to their calendar age. The overhauling means the aircraft becomes new again. So, planes are never old” he once said.
No matter how old the plane is, unlike an old car, there is a busload of inspectors looking every inch over to make sure the thing doesn’t fall out of the sky and hit you in the face, and that it has been adequately maintained.
Asides, all maintenance done on the plane has to be written in the log. You can’t necessarily say that about a car. If a plane has gone too long without required maintenance on a certain component, the plane gets grounded. And if a plane gets old to the point that it becomes a maintenance nightmare to someone who can’t keep pace with the bills, it is sold to someone with the money to put the old treasure back in the air.
So in truth, aircraft cannot be old in the real sense of it. The age of an aircraft is inconsequential. There are procedures for ageing aircraft and helicopters that are part of the regulations of the aviation regulatory body.
In the realm of aviation safety, it therefore goes without saying that the age of an aircraft should not be a primary concern. Instead, the focus should be on the critical factors that truly matter.
If an older aircraft has been meticulously serviced or refurbished, it can offer a flight experience as smooth as the day it was rolled off the assembly line.
Key to this is adherence to the manufacturer’s specifications and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of the United States of America requirements for Part 135 operations and the regulations of Nigeria’s NCAA.
When these standards are met or exceeded, the flying public can be rest assured that the journey will be safe and comfortable.
To get back to the earlier point: only when the report of the NSIB is made public can one speak with confidence on the cause of the accident. Only then can discussions on what was supposed to be done that was not done make sense.
It would therefore be premature at this stage to run faster than our legs and begin to point to what exactly caused the helicopter crash offshore Finana waters in Rivers State.
Obviously piqued by allegations that the crashed helicopter was a ‘scrap’, the Acting Director-General of NCAA, Capt. Chris Najomo has since gone ahead to reveal the status of the aircraft.
The boss of the regulatory authority stated that this became necessary to clear the air about the genesis of the aircraft due to conflicting reports that emerged after the tragic accident.
Part of the allegation was that the aircraft was initially registered in 2004 as 5N-BGN with Aero Contractors after which it was deregistered to Canada in 2009. Reports further stated that the aircraft registration was cancelled in September 2018 after it was “presumably scrapped”, without clearly stating how the equipment was brought to Nigeria.
NCAA, in its response, stated that based on its records, the aircraft could be tracked not only by their registration marks but also by their Manufacturer Serial Number (MSN), adding that the 5N-BQG S76C+Helicopter has its MSN as 760486. In contrast, the 5N-BGN S76C+ helicopter has its MSN as 760468.
The acting director general of NCAA, Najomo further clarified that the S76C+ Helicopter with registration marks 5N-BGN and MSN: 760468 were initially registered at the age of seven years on July 15, 2004 with Aero Contractors as the operator and Capital Aviation Services B.V. as the registered owner.
The registration, Najomo said, was re-issued on December 13, 2006 when the ownership of the helicopter changed to RBS Aerospace Limited, noting that the reports making rounds failed to differentiate the records of the recently crashed Eastwind Aviation Logistics Services Ltd S76C+Helicopter with registration mark 5N-BQG and MSN: 760486 and the Aero Contractors re-registered Helicopter with registration marks 5N-BGN and MSN: 760468.
A couple of readers have reacted negatively to the article I wrote last week titled, “Chidimma’s real beauty is her resilience.” They think that a writer of “your calibre” should not write on beauty pageants because that has a border with frivolity. They think that “hardship” that is affecting millions of Nigerians should be the primary focus of writers like me.
My response to them is that (a) I cannot shy away from writing on a Nigerian girl who has done Nigeria and Africa proud in a global competition involving contestants from 130 countries; (b) in my life as a journalist, I have written a lot about hardship, political, economic and social hardship and how to overcome it. (c) Hardship is not the only subject to which a writer, any writer, must pay attention. Many other subjects are equally important to readers of newspapers because newspapers are general interest publications not specific journals dedicated to single subjects only. (d) The various governments, federal and state, have been alerted by the violent protests that took place in August in various parts of the country and are already taking action to alleviate hardship in their domains. (e) Alleviating hardship is not a one day’s job. It is a long road on which we must all travel. No country in the world has been able to eliminate or eradicate hardship because it is a complex matter that involves government policies and programmes and the readiness and willingness of individuals to leave where they are to the comfort zone that society prescribes for them.
That is why despite the provision of social security benefits in a number of developed countries, a lot of their citizens remain poor. The reason is that you can take a horse to the river but you cannot force it to drink water. Ironically, for the poor to step out of their poverty zone, they must allow themselves to be taken out of that zone. A few examples will help.
In several European countries where the governments provide social security benefits, there still exists a group of their citizens who are called winnows. They sit in street corners, play some musical instruments, drink beer or wine and people just drop money for them. They seek no higher life than that. They are simply satisfied with staying where they are. You cannot blame the government or anyone else for their station in life.
I have lived in Lagos since 1980. Over time, various governments have made attempts to take beggars off the streets of Lagos, camp them somewhere and train them in various occupations at no cost to them. They often spend a few days in those designated centres and then vanish without learning anything. They simply get back to the streets to pursue a life of begging. It has happened several times in the past. That is why beggars are still a phenomenon to contend with in Lagos today.
That is also why we have the extreme hardship that we have in the northern region. Education is the quickest route out of poverty for individuals and for society in general. That is why the Southwest is thousands of kilometres ahead of the rest of the country in every development index. The lack of it, also, is the reason that the north is far behind the rest of the country in every development index. Almost all the governments in the northern states provide free education for their citizens but most of them are not interested in going to school or in learning a trade or vocation. They prefer to get married and after marriage they breed children like mushrooms and get stuck. Unfortunately some of their leaders also mischievously push them along the path of marriage even though they know that marriage cannot feed them and their families.
My reading of the situation is that these leaders prefer to keep their people on the ground floor as their slaves rather than give them the liberating influence of education.
I have said it before and it bears repetition that the reason Boko Haram thrives in the north is not because of Muslim religion. It is because of illiteracy. How can people talk down on western education when everything they are using in their lives are the products of western education? How can anyone tell anyone who has gone to school that he will go to paradise if he wears a bomb, goes out, detonates it and kills some people and himself? The Boko Haram fellows are able to tell youths in the north this – and they accept it – because they are illiterate. The Southwest has a sizeable Muslim population. But Boko Haram has not been able to make any penetration in that region whether among the elders or youths because of education. I have not heard of any youth from the Southwest who has agreed to carry a bomb to use in killing innocent people and himself in the hope of going to paradise.
Education makes that crude talk sound very stupid. That is why Boko Haram has not made any impact on the Southwest. That also explains why Boko Haram has also not been able to make any impact in the North-central zone where there are also pockets of Muslim communities. So for us to tackle the problem of poverty and hardship, the starting point has to be education. We must seek to educate all our citizens in all parts of the country.
It is also evidence of poor education for people to think that writing about beauty pageants is frivolous. It is not. Such competitions help young Nigerian women in the pursuit of self-development, good mannerisms, resilience, competitiveness, relationship building and the pursuit of excellence. Women have always been badly treated in Nigeria because of some so-called customs, tradition, religion and patriarchy. Young women are sent into marriage early instead of going to school. Boys can be sent to school but not the girls because the girls will get married and the family name will be lost. What illogic? So, if girls have opportunities to benefit from God’s gift why shouldn’t they be encouraged to embrace such benefits that beauty pageants provide fully? Apart from benefits that winners get from such competitions, they also have the opportunity to engage in public causes that benefit society. Such causes include health issues, minority, child and women’s rights, racial issues and climate change issues etc. My advice to women who have been given special gifts by God is, use it to maximum advantage. If you have the height, play basketball, volleyball or lawn tennis. If you have the curves go into fashion or modelling business or pageantry. Don’t limit yourself.
We have had a number of young women who were hitherto unknown but who have through beauty pageantry received a warm embrace from the public. They later on went to make a success of their lives. Such women include Julie Coker who became a famous broadcaster; Helen Prest who is now a lawyer and author; Ibinabo Fiberesina who is now an actress; Linda Ikeji best known today as a blogger. There is also Adewunmi Adebowale who won the Miss Nigeria crown in 1988. Now known as Wunmi Ogunbiyi, she is a manager with Zenith Bank. There is also Bianca Onoh, now Bianca Ojukwu, who serves today as Nigeria’s Minister of State for Foreign Affairs. She had earlier been Nigeria’s ambassador to Spain.
So I say to young women with hour-glass figures, personable personalities, graceful manners and quick wit: if you have the opportunity to display your talent go ahead. Don’t let the naysayers be a stumbling block to you. Let the world be your oyster.
Nigeria is on the cusp of transiting from the archaic tax regime that has been retarding its collective prosperity to a progressive alternative that places businesses and people at the core of its general principles. But this transition has elicited highly spirited debates at the National Economic Council (NEC) and the National Assembly. Again, for me, the degree of debates the Tax Reform Bills, 2024 has generated in the last fortnight or thereabouts obviously attests to Nigeria’s democratic resilience. Its intensity also does not in any way indicate any crack or division in the Parliament or in the NEC. Rather, it clearly represents a high mark of dispassionate interests that nearly all political actors have shown in building an economy insulated from external shocks and a federation that works efficiently for all. For this reason, I sincerely appreciate all the inputs into the process of reinventing the country’s tax regime for the fiscal repositioning of Nigeria.
But are the Tax Reform Bills truly regressive or antithetical to people’s aspirations, as some state governments have claimed? This is no doubt an indispensable question that every Nigerian – educated or uneducated, employed or unemployed, poor or rich – ought to seek an empirical answer to. However, the tax proposals should be understood from the lens of our country’s socio-economic and political standing. First, Nigeria is a 64-year old federation with an economy heavily dependent on petroleum rents, royalties and taxes. Undue reliance on oil revenue has infested her with the Dutch disease that stunted the growth of her non-extractive sector until recently. Also, despite its oil wealth, the country’s economic indicators have been bleak and disappointing since the January 1966 military takeover. As shown in diverse reports of the National Bureau of Statistics, this discontent is more evident in 33.88% inflation; escalating exchange rates; abysmal economic growth rate; 63% multidimensional poverty index and declining investment inflows. Likewise, the country’s tax revenue to gross domestic product (GDP) slid to 9.4% in 2023, and the debt-revenue ratio was as horrible as 97% when the current government came on board. However, the latter has significantly shrunk to 65% within the last 18 months.
Since the last democratic transition in May 2023, these are grim realities that we have been contending with or have to contend with not just as a government sworn in “to pursue the greatest amount of good for the greatest number of people,” but as a people hungrily desirous of speedy socio-economic breakthrough. We are not supposed to play politics with such issues of significant public interest or prioritise parochial interests above people’s welfare. Rather, we are under the obligation to address these stark socio-economic realities in the overall interest of our people with creative and innovative legislative proposals that can rejuvenate productive activities nationwide and take away undue burden off the shoulders of the masses and business owners.
This is exactly the intent of the Tax Reform Bills, a set of four legislative initiatives that recently scaled the second reading and are now before the Senate Committee on Finance for wider stakeholders’ engagement. Creatively designed to empower Nigerians across all strata and boost the country’s economic growth, the bills comprise the Joint Revenue Board of Nigeria (Establishment) Bill, 2024; Nigeria Revenue Service (Establishment) Bill, 2024; Nigeria Tax Administration Bill, 2024 and Nigeria Tax Bill, 2024.
From slave labour to sudden wealth. That could well be the story of special constabulary policemen, courtesy of a recent judgment of the National Industrial Court of Nigeria. The court has ordered that more than 22,000 special constables that the police enlisted across the 36 states and the Federal Capital Territory (FCT) be regularised by the force, and four-year arrears of allowances paid out to each. By that judgment, millionaire constabularies strutting Nigerian community spaces may be loading. It will be interesting seeing what difference this makes to their psyche and engagement with the public.
The industrial court, in a verdict delivered penultimate week, ordered the Inspector-General of Police (IGP) and the Police Service Commission (PSC) to issue the special constables letters of formal employment and pay them the arrears of stipends due to them from way back in 2021.
It was late in 2020, under the former Muhammadu Buhari presidency, that the Nigeria Police recruited some 25,000 special constables to help fight insecurity at the grassroots and pilot the community policing initiative of government. Then Police Affairs Minister Mohammed Dingyadi said the constabulary workforce would complement regular police personnel who were being overwhelmed by rising wave of insecurity nationwide. The special constabulary scheme is a creation of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF) Act of 2020; and under that enabling law, special constables were recruited from local communities, trained by the police, and assigned within communities to help with intelligence gathering and community relations type of duties. Many, however, often find themselves filling in for manpower shortage among the regular police, accompany conventional police officers on security operations or perform routine tasks at police formations.
Special constables are not regular police personnel, though their uniforms look very much like that of conventional policemen and they aren’t too different in physical appearance. Only that they do not – are not authorised – to bear arms like regular policemen. But the force has treated them like volunteers and withheld from paying them stipends, forcing many to rely on bribes and extortion to scrape a living.
Part of the challenge is the wooliness of the enabling law on remuneration for special constables. According to the NPF Act, recruitment into the constabulary scheme is for persons between ages 21 and 50. Other qualifying criteria include that they must be of good character and physically fit, and must have indicated willingness to serve as special constable. The law further stipulates that the IGP may provide them with batons, clothing and any other equipment considered necessary. Section 112 of the Act says that a person’s service as special constable shall render him eligible for a stipend as may be determined by the IGP and approved by the Police Council. It also mentions that reimbursement would be made to special constables in respect of expenses incurred by them in connection with their attendance at periods of instruction and as compensation for loss of (other) earnings during periods of full-time duty. But the law isn’t exact on how much that stipend should be and it is silent on the agency responsible for payment. Meanwhile, the same law specifies that the constables shall not benefit from the Police Reward Fund, shall not be entitled to living accommodation at government’s expense, and neither entitled to pension. Besides, some stipends the law provides for could be withdrawn by the police leadership if, in their opinion, there is good reason for doing so.
The standard experience of the special constables, however, has been that they are not remunerated by the police force, and neither by governments of the states in which communities they are deployed to serve. When in September 2022, a motley crowd of constabularies in police uniform thronged the streets of Osogbo, Osun State capital, protesting non-remuneration for their services and bearing placards with inscriptions such as “Pay us now!,” “We are hungry” and “We are dying,” Force Public Relations Officer Muyiwa Adejobi, an Assistant Commissioner of Police, dismissed the protest as unwarranted, explaining that members of the special constabulary scheme are volunteers and not regular police personnel who should be entitled to remuneration. His argument was echoed by the Osun State police command spokesperson, Yemisi Opalola, who said the protest was utterly baseless because the constabulary scheme is a voluntary service.
The industrial court has now weighed in, and it is on the side of the constabularies. It ordered immediate regularisation of the special constables’ engagement by the police and their proper remuneration. Justice Rakiya Haastrup also ordered payment of arrears owed the constables in the verdict she delivered in a case filed by them against the IGP and the PSC. The suit in which Sebastine Hon, a Senior Advocate of Nigeria (SAN), represented the constables aimed to address the long-standing issue of non-payment of allowances to them. The plaintiffs (constables) had through their lawyer sued the police for refusing to pay them monthly stipends despite making them serve the nation for the past four years.
Refuting the argument by the police that they were volunteers, the special constabularies tendered documents showing that, at the time they were engaged, the police had agreed to pay them monthly stipends commensurate with the basic allowance of a regular constable in the force. They argued that the police’s recourse to not paying them the stipends was not just unlawful, but had put their lives in jeopardy as they could not meet up with basic necessities of life. The constables urged the court that having been lawfully engaged by the police, they were entitled to monthly stipends to enable them to perform their duties effectively and diligently. They noted that due to the hazardous nature of their job, seven of them had died.
In her judgment, Justice Haastrup agreed with the plaintiffs that they established a contractual agreement of employment relationship between them and the police. She held that “based on the agreement, the plaintiffs were entitled to monthly stipends for their job.” While observing that the exact amount to be paid as stipends was not fixed by the police, the judge held that the plaintiffs were entitled to a basic allowance of N54,655 per month from January 2021 to May 2024, pending when the IGP fixes their monthly allowance. She ordered the police boss to fix the amount due to the plaintiffs within two months of delivery of her judgment.
Beyond payment of outstanding allowances, Justice Haastrup also ordered that the special constables be “issued with letters of appointment having trained them, equipped them, issued them with uniforms and identity cards and deployed them in states of the federation and the FCT.”
The industrial court’s verdict touches at the heart of the special constables’ work condition that until now has not only hazarded them, but also made them a menace to society on which they prey to survive. Late last year, a video went viral showing two special constabularies in Oyo State extorting money from a Dutch female biker-tourist riding along Iseyin-Oyo road as part of her visit to African countries. Upon public outcry, the police tracked down and identified the constables as Kareem Fatai and Jimoh Lukman, and had them dismissed from service in December following an orderly room investigation. Not that the constables themselves have been silent. They’ve severally bemoaned the neglect by the police to pay them allowances or salaries since they were recruited, saying despite putting their personal safety on the line in service to their respective community, they were not being compensated.
Meanwhile, the constables’ reputed misconduct by routinely extorting bribes from members of the public became such an embarrassment to the police establishment that former PSC Chairman Solomon Arase, a retired IGP, late in 2023 called for an overhaul, disbandment or, at the minimum, introduction of a different set of uniform for the constabulary personnel because, according to him, they are notorious for unethical practices that tarnish the reputation of the entire force.
The NPF Act did not think through the special constabulary scheme, that is why it created a corps of security operatives without making clear how they would be compensated. The idea of their services being voluntary, and as such and non-remuneratory, sucks because their job schedules pitch them against the same hazards that regular policemen encounter. But whereas conventional operatives get remunerated – if inadequately so – special constables do not. Now that the industrial court has foisted more than 20,000 of them on the police, it should go a long way in redressing the notorious manpower shortage in the force. What is required is for the force to properly harness the hands and train them up to conventional standard. Luckily, the job is already half done. What isn’t clear is whether we would now begin to observe comfortable constabularies behaving like one in their dealings with the Nigerian public. We wait to see.
•Please join me on kayodeidowu.blogspot.be for conversation.
The world is still reeling from some of the aftershocks of the COVID-19 pandemic. In its wake, several other health emergencies have also emerged, calling up the need for national and regional and global health systems to neutralise their impacts on public health and safety, and the course of national economies.
If there is anything the past few years have taught us it is this: the interconnectedness of our world today makes it impossible to view any health threat as a local affair. Health security must now always be viewed as a global concern. The health of one is the health of all.
The other week, health professionals from across Nigeria and even beyond converged in Abuja to deliberate on this subject. Convened by APIN Public Health Initiatives as the second edition of its annual symposium themed “Securing our Future: Strengthening Global Health Security in Nigeria,” it was an opportunity to x-ray key challenges at the Nigerian level militating against the provision of health security, and proffering solutions that would help the nation navigate these challenges and ensure the provision of health security at the national level and plugging this into the global health security framework.
Focusing on global health security is important for several reasons. For one, it builds the systems required for the prevention of pandemics: Global health security helps prevent the spread of infectious diseases across borders, reducing the risk of pandemics. It also establishes that protection for vulnerable populations from infectious diseases such as the elderly, children, and those with compromised immune systems, are available.
These help to reduce the economic burden that infectious diseases can have on trade, tourism, and economic stability of nations, and increases productivity through ensuring the availability of a healthy workforce.
However, the basis for this rests on national systems and this was the crux of the keynote address by Dr. Chikwe Ihekweazu, the assistant Director General in the Division of Health Emergency Intelligence and Surveillance Systems, World Health Organisation. He pointed out that investment and strengthening of domestic institutions and health systems respectively, would engender better understanding of health crisis and also drive progress. This was easily illustrated using his past experience as the DG of the Nigerian Centre for Disease Control and how steps taken in the preceding years to the COVID 19 pandemic eventually played key roles in ensuring the NCDC was effectively positioned to help Nigeria manage the pandemic.
Without a doubt, global health security depends on local health security and local health systems depend on local institutions. His emphasis on the dependence of this on local interconnected systems is profound because it highlights some of the gaps that countries like Nigeria sometimes take for granted. The ability to save lives depends on the capacity of the institutions we are building. If the NCDC had not upgraded its systems and elevated its approach to its mandate beyond what was inherited in 2016, Nigeria’s COVID-19 response would have left much to be desired. This need for improved systems can also not be limited to one or two agencies.
When you consider this in the context of Nigeria’s N1.2trn health budget for 2024, a mere 4.47% of our total expenditure (or N1.5trn when include other provisions related to health, such as the Basic Health Care Provision Fund), our ability to build and sustain effective local health systems that equip us for national health security is brought to question. It’s worth noting that this allocation falls short of the 15% Abuja Declaration commitment.
Where a state government for instance is unable to create a framework that enables different but related health systems operating in the realms of either detection, data collection, prevention, innovation or logistics to function as single interwoven units of health service delivery, it becomes impossible for them to provide the concerted efforts that coalesce into a complete system that can deal with public health threats when they occur.
And so, Dr. Ihekweazu had to rightly emphasise the need for governments to invest in domestic institutions to be able to create the necessary paradigm shift that will set Nigeria firmly on the path of effective local health security which plugs in competently into driving the agenda for global health security.
In doing this, the federal government has to take the lead. There is substantial investment in our health systems as a country that is of foreign origin. These have played very instrumental roles in building our capacity to deal with shock and emergencies but the true measure of our capacity can only be measured by the investments we make ourselves.
External partners can support but leading the process to Nigeria’s health security should rest closely with those at the heart of the problems…us!
The federal government, supported by local health partners must be deliberate about investing in efforts to protect and strengthen health systems against unexpected public health threats because these local health systems serve as the first line of defense against health emergencies. Strengthening these systems enables countries to prevent, detect, and respond to health threats more effectively. Today we are dealing with Mpox, Lassa fever…who knows what threat lie just beyond the horizon?
Forward planning and future preparation are key. We cannot contribute effectively to much needed global health security if we have a reactive mind-set particularly in today’s world, where infectious disease outbreaks and epidemics are increasing in severity and frequency.
•Abdul a policy analyst, writes from Wuse 2, Abuja.
I am not anti-semitic and I have many Jewish friends who I hold in high esteem.
I recognise the fact that there are millions of Jews all over the world, particularly in Europe, Russia, Iran, Ethiopia and even in the United States of America itself, who have publicly renounced the excesses and atrocities of the Zionists and who seek nothing but peace, fellowship, love, fraternity and mutual respect with their non-Jewish neighbours.
Having said this, I must also put on record my utter disgust and disdain for the Zionists and for Zionism itself which is a political construct and philosophy that I consider to be akin to apartheid and therefore evil.
It is a philosophy that is espoused by those that can best be described as intellectual barbarians and cultural hegemons.
To add to this I feel nothing but repugnance, contempt and revulsion for the racism and fanaticism of the Ashkenazi Jews, the progenitors and primary promoters of Zionism, who the Allied powers of World War 11, at the behest and with the money of the stupendously wealthy Rothschild family, established Israel for and handed her over to in 1948.
The Ashkenazi were and still are essentially proxies and agents of the Rothschilds and the Western powers, the enforcers of their purpose and collective will in the Middle East and the protectors of their numerous interests in that region.
From inception they constituted themselves into the rich, elite and all-powerful ruling political class of the Jewish State despite the fact that they were nothing but a bunch of non-semitic white primarily Eastern European colonial settlers and immigrants, who were not even originally Jewish but only converted to Judaism in the 8th Century and who saw and still see every other true Jew, including the Sephardic Jews and the real Semites (including the Palestinians), as being inferior to them and unfit to lead their nation.
In a clumsy attempt to cover their non-semitic origins and obscure the fact that they have no genetic link with the people of the Middle East from the outset, they banned all DNA testing in Israel, and that remains the case till today.
This is because the Askenazi cannot legitimately trace their ancestry back to Israel for more than two generations! That is how crafty they are!
To get a clear picture of precisely what the world is up against this contribution will focus on not just the atrocities of the Zionists and the Zionist state of Israel but will also offer a small glimpse into the dark and frightful history of Jewry generally.
It is not designed or intended to offend or to be an attack on the Jews but rather a historical analysis of some of the unspeakable crimes and injustices they have committed and indulged in over the years that have shaken the foundations of humanity and brought pain and sorrow to millions all over the world.
Let us begin with the most significant event of all, which took place 2000 years ago in Jerusalem when the Jews murdered the Son of God, our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, by insisting on his crucifiction.
He was hanged on a cross and crucified like a common criminal, inflicting more pain on Him than the human mind can possibly comprehend.
As He bled and suffered, offering no complaint or resistance and instead asking God the Father to “forgive them for their sins”, they continued to scream in a rabid frenzy with hate and rage shouting, “Let His blood be upon us and our children.”
Till today, 2000 years later, they have not expressed any remorse or regret for this cruel and barbaric act against a selfless, sinless, kind, loving, compassionate and innocent soul who we Believers regard as none other than the Lamb of God, the Ancient of Days, the Lord of Hosts, the King of Kings, the long-awaited Messiah and He who came down as God incarnate in the flesh. But instead, they relish and celebrate it with fervour, even going as far as to describe him in their “holy book” called the Talmud as “a fake, a charlatan and a fraud” who according to their twisted and irreverent minds is “now burning in hell where he is eating human faeces”.
Over the last 1000 years they spread to virtually every nation, taking over the world’s banking system and controlling the worlds supply of money with which they promoted and funded revolutions, counter revolutions and wars, built up and destroyed economies, brought governments and nations to their knees and determined the political future and fate of leaders in the most powerful countries in the world.
Such was the power of the Jews that from 1917, in the persons of two of their most famous sons, Vladimer Lenin and Leon Trotsky, they banned religion and presided over the slaughter of hundreds of thousands of Christian clerics and millions of Christians in the Soviet Union after the Bolshevik revolution.
Yet it didn’t stop there, and their influence continued to permeate the entire world and kept growing.
This awesome power that they had and wielded with impunity incurred the wrath of many in the west including the German Chancellor Adolf Hitler who blamed them for the humiliation and defeat of his country in World War 1 and who, in a classic case of total and complete insanity, sought to wipe them off the face of the earth in what he described in his book ‘Mein Kampf’ as the “Final Solution” and what the world dscribed as “the holocaust”.
He proceeded to gas to death no fewer than six million of them together with millions of Slavs, homosexuals and gypsies in horrendous concentration camps: a barbaric, condemnable and heinous act and a graphic example of man’s inhumanity to man.
Thankfully Hitler and Nazi Germany lost World War 11, and partly to compensate the Jews for the suffering and persecution that they had suffered in the West generally and the genocide that they endured at the hands of Hitler in Germany specifically, they were offered a new homeland in a place known as Palestine, which was at the very heart of the Middle East from which they had been exiled and scattered from 2000 years earlier but where millions of Palestinians had always lived and had never left.
This was a recipe for disaster, given the fact that the Jews and their concept and philosophy of Zionism regarded themselves as being “the master race” and refused to share the land with anyone else, describing themselves as “God’s chosen people” who had a divine mandate to forcefully and violently retake what they called “the Promise Land”, ethnically cleanse it of all other races and practitioners of other religious faiths and re-establish the old Jewish Kingdom of the Holy Bible stretching from the borders of Egypt right up to Iran!
To the Zionists everything that existed in that vast space of land and everyone in it belonged to them as treasure, chattel, vassals and slaves.
Consequently, with the tacit support of the West and in an attempt to establish this vision and objective, over the last 76 years they have fought, oppressed, undermined, caged, enslaved, dehumanised and subdued the Palestinian people and their Arab neighbours, killed millions of Palestinians and subjected them to genocide, and for the last one year alone murdered over 100,000 innocent and defenceless Christian and Muslim Palestinian civilians (mainly women and children) by bombing them with more ordinance and more precision bombs that were dropped in the entire duration of World War 11, slaughtering them with the most sophisticated and deadly weapons and burying them under the rubble of Gaza, subjecting them to what can best be described as a second holocaust.
Such is the mindset of the Zionists that an anti-Zionist secular Israeli activist who lives in Tel Aviv, Gaia Dan, said the following:
“There are only a few hundred anti-Zionist Israelis—about .01% of the adult population—and the vast majority of our society is genocidal.”
Worst still 80% of the population in Israel are opposed to a two-state solution and instead believe in totally subjugating and enslaving whatever number of the Palestinian people that are not eliminated and exterminated and occupying their land.
Simply put, they want all Palestinians who they regard as nothing but “human animals” to be nuked, to be scattered all over the world, to be driven into the sea or the Sinai desert and to simply “disappear”. A countless number of their senior government officials and political leaders, including Minister of Finance Bezalel Smoritch, former Minister of Defence Yoav Gallant, Minister of National Security Itamar Ben Gvir, Minister of Heritage Amihayi Eliyahu and many others have expressed these sentiments publicly.
Today, their leader Benjamin Netanyahu has been rightly indicted for war crimes and crimes against humanity by the International Criminal Court at the Hague (ICC), and instead of showing any remorse or regret he, his nation, his Zionist supporters and his American backers have threatened the court with sanctions if he is arrested in any of the 124 countries that are signatories to the relevant Treaty and have branded as being “anti-semitic” anyone or group of persons that have expressed concern or outrage about his homicidal, lawless and lunatic behaviour.
Permit me to share an example of this idiocy.
In his response to the arrest warrant issued on Netanyahu during an interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity in November 2024, American Senator Lindsay Graham, an unhinged figure who constantly expresses his insatiable lust for war and carnage, said the following:
“You are going to have to pick either the rogue ICC or America. I am working with Senator Tom Cotton to have legislation passed as soon as we can to sanction any country that aids and abets the arrest of any politician in Israel. What they are doing in Israel is trying to prevent a second Holocaust. So, to any ally, Canada, Britain, Germany, France, if you try to help the ICC, we are going to sanction you”.
When Hannity asked what the sanction and penalty would be, Graham replied, “We will crush your economy because we are next. If they can go after Netanyahu why can’t they go after Trump or any other American President under this theory?”
His words confirm the fact that this dangerous, deluded, divisive, toxic and psychotic individual who actually believes that he is still living in the old American “wild west” where lawless and gun-totting cowboys were shooting native Indians for sport and where a drunken all powerful sheriff whose word was law ruled every town with an iron fist and gunned down people at will, is afflicted with what the English common law describes as “a diseased mind”.
More importantly the answer to his question can easily be answered with another, namely: why shouldn’t the ICC go after Trump or any other American President if they commit war crimes and crimes against humanity?
Are Americans and Israelis above the law or have they, like Ian Flemings’ famous fictitious character James Bond (007), been given a licence to kill? If this is the case, who on earth gave it to them?
In reference to the war in Ukraine, Graham was also once quoted as saying “it is a good thing to kill Russians!” Is this not madness in its most graphic form?
Senator Lindsay Graham represents everything reprehensible about the American right-wing and I sincerely pray that he and those that think like him in the American Senate do not plunge the world into World War 3 or a nuclear Armageddon.
My question is this: how far do the Zionists have to go and how many more innocent people do they have to kill before we accept the fact that that they are the problem of the world and that their so-called Jewish state must be brought to heel and made accountable for its unspeakable actions?
To the Christian that says we must love them no matter what heinous crime they commit, I say the following: the greatest of all commandments is to love our God with all our soul and all our might whilst the second greatest is to love our fellow men and treat them in the way we wish to be treated ourselves.
To applaud genocide and to support the ethnic cleansing of an entire race that are God’s creation, no matter what they may or may not have done, runs contrary to both of these sacred commandments and cannot be justified by some far fetched notion that the Jew is not subject to the laws of God and man.
We want a better world: a world where the Christian, the Jew, the Muslim, the Hindu and indeed all men and women of faith are regarded as one and bound together in peace and love by their common humanity and manifest destiny.
Yet it appears that the United States of America, once described by President Ronald Reagan as “a shining city on a hill” and the “hope of humanity”, is determined to deny us such a world.
Mr. Chris Hedges, the highly celebrated and deeply courageous American journalist, summed up his nation’s malevolent disposition when he said the following words on 18th June 2024:
“We do not halt Israel’s genocide because we, as Americans, ARE Israel. We are infected with the same white supremacy doctrine and we are intoxicated by our domination of the globe’s wealth and the power to obliterate others with our advanced weaponry.
“The vaunted democratic values, morality and respect for human rights claimed by Israel and the United States have always been a lie. The real credo is this: We have everything and if you try and take it away from us, we will kill you people of color, especially when they are poor and vulnerable.
“Do not count their hopes, dignity and aspirations for freedom. The lives of those outside the empire are worthless. Global domination will be sustained through racialized violence.
“The lie that the American empire is predicated on democracy and liberty is what the Palestinians, those in the global south, Native Americans and Black and Brown Americans, not to mention those who live in the Middle East, have known for decades.
“But it is a lie that still has currency in the United States and Israel: a lie used to justify the unjustifiable.”
Professor Jeffrey Sachs, an American economist and public policy analyst and a Professor of Columbia University went further by recently saying, “The most violent country in the world in the 19th Century was also the most democratic or second most democratic country in the world, and that was Great Britain. You can be democratic at home and ruthlessly imperial abroad. The most violent country in the world since 1950 has been the United States”.
I concur.
The celebrated British journalist Owen Jones added his voice to the outrage that has trailed the American-sponsored Israeli slaughter in Gaza by saying the following on the 26th of November, “1,410 ENTIRE Palestinian families exterminated by Israel. From babies and teenagers to parents to great grandparents. If one extended family was wiped out in Britain it would be headline news for weeks. It has happened 1,410 times in Gaza with a much smaller population.”
All this yet American leaders cheer the Zionists on and continue to provide them with massive funding and lethal weapons as if they were doing nothing but killing mosquitos or slaughtering turkeys at Christmas.
It follows that the home truth about America is, to say the least, ugly and disconcerting and few venture to dare voice it.
Joe Biden’s America particularly has become a gangerous stinking sore and a formidable challenge to the peace and stability of the world and the only hope the so-called “land of the free” and “home of the brave” has left is if incoming President Donald Trump succeeds and if he truly intends to do so he must rid himself of the inexplicable obsession and fatal attraction that most American leaders have with and for the citadel of evil and enclave of genocide called Israel.
If he refuses to do so, and frankly the signs are not good, given his cabinet choices of pro-Israeli hawks and warmongers, he too, like Joe Biden and the cackling, strange and empty-headed woman that he named his Vice President, Kamala Harris, will crash to an ignoble end.
This would be very sad because I am one of those that has always had a soft spot and the greatest admiration and respect for Donald Trump.
The reason why millions in Africa, the ‘global south’ and indeed all over the world look to China, Russia and the newly formed BRICS economic bloc of nations for leadership and inspiration today is because America has lost its decency and has jettisoned its noble values.
Nothing confirms this more than the unending and unlimited support and blind love that they have consistently displayed for their monster child called Israel.
America is today a nation of genocide-enablers with insensitive and morally bankrupt leaders who have lost all sense of humanity and who have turned their European allies like the United Kingdom, Germany, France and indeed all the other members of the NATO alliance into pitiful puppets and fawning vassals whilst they treat the rest of the world as nothing but worthless serfs and slaves.
Only the Chinese and Russians present hope for a greater and better future for humanity and that is why so many in the global south gravitate towards them.
Permit me share the words of one of the worlds most consistent and powerful voices against oppression and injustice, Clare Daly, the former Irish MP and MEP and a lady who is known for speaking truth to power.
A few days ago she said the following on the arrest warrant that has been issued by the ICC on Netanyahu and Gallant.
She said, “About time. It is only the start. The idea that there are only two people criminally responsible is definitely not the case at this point. It needs to go all the way to the top of the U.S. administration and to the European Union elites who have enabled and ensured that this genocide has continued.
“It couldn’t have happened without them. It wouldn’t have even started without them, to be honest. And unless it goes there, well, then, you know, the ICC has a huge credibility problem. Like, this is it—Israel is finished after this. They have nowhere else to go.
“And it may not seem like that because you know the EU and the US have their backs at the moment but I firmly believe that this is this generation’s Vietnam. Things will never be the same after this.
“A whole layer of young people and people who are older who never paid attention to this issue are not gonna let it go until there is justice for Palestine and this issue is dealt with.
“It’s absolutely tragic that it’s happening at such a terrible cost and still continues. But it is the harbinger of a big change as well”.
Daly is absolutely right.
History is replete with the heinous crimes of the Zionist state even against America herself.
Most are denied and brushed under the carpet but they are nevertheless true. A few examples will suffice.
Who killed American President John F. Kennedy?
Few are aware that there was a raging and longstanding dispute between the then Prime Minister of Israel Ben Gurion and Kennedy about allowing Israel to acquire nuclear weapons, a proposition which was sorely opposed by the latter and which may have resulted in a direct threat to his life.
This has been the prevailing thinking in intelligence and security circles for decades but due to the classification of most of the relevant documents much about the circumstances and motives for his assasination has been hidden from public scrutiny.
Nevertheless whispers of truth are finally coming out.
In an article titled ‘Did Zionists Kill U.S. President John F. Kennedy?’ published in ‘A News Gallery World’ on 22nd Nov. 2023 the American author wrote the following:
“The enduring enigma of Kennedy’s assassination continues to baffle. The former U.S. President lost his life 60 years ago in a fatal attack. Speculation has been raised about Israel’s potential involvement as Kennedy was vocal in opposing their nuclear weapon pursuits.
“There were also claims made linking the two events as Kennedy vehemently opposed Israel’s nuclear programme. In fact, he expressed his concerns in a confidential letter stating ‘Your nuclear weapons will greatly damage our relationship’.
“These fears were further fuelled by a former Israeli General who worried that Kennedy would order an airstrike on their nuclear site. The reason for suspecting Israel was Kennedy’s strong opposition to Israel possessing nuclear weapons.
Despite the fact that it has been 60 years since the assassination many theories have been put forward about it including the claim that Israel was responsible for the killing.
“In the incident, Israel, along with the Soviet Union and Cuba, were among the suspects. After Ben Gurion resigned in Israel, Kennedy wrote a detailed letter to his successor Levi Eshkol on the subject.
“In a letter whose confidentiality decision was lifted by the U.S. National Archives a few years ago, it was clearly stated that any wrong move by Israel would strain bilateral relations. Five months after writing this letter, Kennedy was assassinated.
“Documents revealed the confession of former Israeli Air Force Commander Dan Tolkowsky about that tense period. The unsolved mystery surrounding former U.S. President Kennedy’s assassination, which occurred 60 years ago, continues to intrigue many.”
A French author by the name of Germain Gorais went into even more detail as regards the motives and put the matter rather more concisely and succinctly in an article published in La Observateur Continental in November 2023 by saying, “In order to eliminate resistance to Israel’s nuclear armament and to reduce pressure on Israel for the “right of return” for 800,000 Palestinians, US president JF Kennedy was assassinated.
“Since the 1950s, Israel had undertaken the secret manufacture of atomic bombs. In 1986 reliable evidence emerged demonstrating that Israel had secretly obtained the atomic bomb as early as 1967.
“Since then, all successively elected US Presidents have been held hostage by Israel. Kennedy was also committed to the right of return for 800,000 Palestinians expelled from their homes and villages in 1948 for which the American delegation to the UN presented a proposal on November 20, 1963.
“He was assassinated 2 days later.”
Another excellent piece on the alleged involvement of Israel in the murder of JFK is titled “From Dallas to Gaza: How JFK’s Assassination Was Good for Zionist Israel” by an American by the name of Rick Sterling and published on Dec 15, 2023.
I recommend this insightful contribution for reading for those that are interested.
If all this does not raise eyebrows or provide food for thought about the true nature of the State of Israel perhaps the following will.
Who brought down the Trade Towers in New York City on 9/11?
Few are aware of the fact that Benjamin Netanyahu wrote a book titled ‘Fighting Terrorism: How Democracies Can Defeat Domestic and International Terrorism’ which he made reference to in an interview a few years later. In that interview he said, “The West really doesn’t understand militant Islam so I wrote a book in 1995 and I said that if the West doesn’t wake up to the suicidal nature of militant Islam the next thing you’ll see is that militant Islam is bringing down the World Trade Centre”.
Six years after writing his book the two towers of the World Trade Center were actually brought down by supposedly militant Islamic terrorists and a few years later the same Benjamin Netanyahu said,
“We (meaning Israel) are benefiting from one thing and that is the attack on the Trade Towers, on the Pentagon and the American struggle in Iraq”.
Does anyone need to look any further to know who was really behind 9/11 and who benefitted from it the most?
Again who attacked the USS Liberty, a United States Navy Signals Intelligence ship on June 8th 1967 in the middle of the Six Day war killing 34 people and injuring and wounding another 170 if not the Israeli Defence Force yet the whole matter was covered up out of fear of the rage that this would stir against Israel amongst the American people?
Again who bombed the King David Hotel in Palestine on 22 July 1946 if not ‘Irgun’ the Zionist terrorist organisation that was led by Menachim Begin who later became the Jewish states’ Prime Minister and in which 91 British citizens and soldiers were killed?Again who murdered Count Folke Bernadotte, the Swedish diplomat and United Nations mediator on September 17th 1948 when, whilst on his way to Jerusalem to negotiate a peace deal which would have ensured Palestinian rights, had his plane shot down from mid-air if not the same Zionist terrorist organisation Irgun?
Sadly with him crashed all attempts by the United Nations to help the Palestinians and Israelis arrive at a diplomatic solution.
Again who orchestrated the mass murder of 3,500 Arab Muslim women and children by Israeli-funded and Israeli-armed Lebanese Christian militias during the Lebanese civil war in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila from the 15th to the 18th of September in 1982 after all the men had been lured from withdrawing from the camps and volunteered to go on exile to Tunisia with a guaranty of safety and security from America and Israel for their women and children if not the Jewish state?
Again who created, backed and funded Al Qaeda, Al Nusra, Daesh, ISIS, Al Shabab and Boko Haram? Was it not the CIA in conjunction with MOSSAD that did this and is that not why Israel and Israeli assets have NEVER been targetted or attacked by any of these listed terrorist organisations?
Are these listed terror groups not all tools of destabilisation that are being used by MOSSAD and the CIA to destabilise and destroy the territory and Governments of their perceived enemies like Syria, Iraq and Libya and sometimes even that of their stubborn “friends” in North, West and East Africa?
Again who, if not the Jewish Rothschild family, commissioned an infamous crook and fraudster called Cyrus I. Schofield to doctor the words, meaning and intent of portions of the Holy Bible in 1909 to re-write God’s word and make it appear that the planned re-establishment of the Jewish/Zionist state which was to eventually come in 1948 would be a fulfillment of Biblical prophecy and the intention of God, knowing fully well that this was false and that the Holy Bible clearly states that the new Israel will not be re-established until after the second coming of the Messiah.
This shameless and devastating act of disinformation and misinformation, in my view, has done more damage to Christianity and the Christian pysche and thinking than any other since the crucifiction of our Lord simply because it constrains and compels Christians to erroneously believe that they have a divine obligation and holy duty to support and love the newly established State of Israel no matter what it does and no matter what horrendous atrocities it commits.
Consider the following.
In October 2015
Maidhc O. Cathail published his article titled ‘The Scofield Bible—The Book That Made Zionists of America’s Evangelical Christians’.
He wrote, inter alia,
“Since it was first published in 1909, the Scofield Reference Bible has made uncompromising Zionists out of tens of millions of Americans. When John Hagee, the founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI), said that “50 million evangelical bible-believing Christians unite with five million American Jews standing together on behalf of Israel,” it was the Scofield Bible that he was talking about. Although the Scofield Reference Bible contains the text of the King James Authorized Version, it is not the traditional Protestant bible but Scofield’s annotated commentary that is problematic. More than any other factor it is Scofield’s notes that have induced generations of American evangelicals to believe that God demands their uncritical support for the modern State of Israel. Central to Christian Zionist belief is Scofield’s commentary on Genesis 12:3: ‘I will bless them that bless thee.’ In fulfillment closely related to the next clause, ‘And curse him that curseth thee’. It has invariably fared ill with the people who have persecuted the Jew and well with those who have protected him.
Drawing on Scofield’s rather tendentious interpretation, Hagee claims, “The man or nation that lifts a voice or hand against Israel invites the wrath of God.” But as Stephen Sizer points out in his definitive critique, “The promise, when referring to Abraham’s descendants, speaks of God blessing them, not of entire nations ‘blessing’ the Hebrew nation, still less the contemporary and secular State of Israel.” Notwithstanding this more orthodox reading, The New Scofield Study Bible, published by Oxford University Press in 1984, intensified Scofield’s interpretation by adding, “For a nation to commit the sin of anti-Semitism brings inevitable judgement.” Sustained by dubious exegesis of selective biblical texts,” Sizer concludes, “Christian Zionism’s particular reading of history and contemporary events…sets Israel and the Jewish people apart from other peoples in the Middle East…it justifies the endemic racism intrinsic to Zionism, exacerbates tensions between Jews and Palestinians and undermines attempts to find a peaceful resolution of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, all because ‘the Bible tells them so’. In his 2008 book, The Rise of Israel: A History of a Revolutionary State, Jonathan R. Adelman describes the crucial support Israel receives from Christian fundamentalists as “totally fortuitous.” That assertion is belied, however, by the incredible career of the man who wrote “the Bible of Fundamentalism.” Two years after Scofield’s reported conversion to Christianity in 1879 the Atchison Patriot Newspaper was less than impressed. Describing the former Atchison resident as the “late lawyer, politician and shyster,” the article went on to recount a few of Scofield’s “many malicious acts.” These included a series of forgeries in St. Louis, for which he was sentenced to six months in jail.
Had the Scofield Bible never been published, American Presidents influenced by Christian Zionism such as Truman, Johnson, Reagan and George W. Bush might have been less sympathetic to Israeli demands and consequently more attentive to U.S. interests. Moreover, the American people could have been spared the pseudo-Christian rants of John Hagee, Pat Robertson and the late Jerry Falwell, not to mention the lucrative End Times Rapture “prophecy” peddled by Hal Lindsey and Tim LaHaye..But it is the people of the Middle East who have been most affected by an expansionist Israel emboldened by the unswerving allegiance of Christian Zionists led to believe that Scofield’s words are God’s will. Not least among the many victims of the Scofield Bible are 5 million Palestinian refugees whose right to return is fervently opposed by America’s Zionized Christians. Thanks to their indoctrination by Scofield’s unholy book, they believe that Palestine belongs not to the Palestinians—many of whom are fellow Christians—but exclusively to ‘God’s chosen people’.”
Cathail has hit the nail on the head and I recommend a reading of the full text of his detailed and insightful essay.
Schofield and the Jews who commissioned him have done a great disservice and dealt a grievous blow to Christian Theology. I have little doubt that God will punish them for it.
Andrew Slater, in his book titled ‘Christian Zionism’ supported Cathail’s position when he wrote the following,
“Theodore Herzl and the Rothschilds first approached the current Pope at the time Pope Pius X who immediately rejected facilitating the Zionist takeover of Palestine.
The Rothschilds who were after seizing the land of Palestine, knew that they had to get the Protestant churches on board with their agenda. So they recruited a non-Jew Christian ‘theologian’ called C. I. Scofield to convince the Protestant Churches that the Jews must retake the promised land to fulfill prophecy. The target was to infiltrate Protestant Christianity by creating their own ‘Bible’”.
Again I recommend this fascinating book for those who are interested in this topic. It is an eye-opener.
Kudos to men like Cathail and Slater who have exposed the great lie and damnable falsehood that Christians are compelled to support Israel no matter what and that if they do not they will face the judgement of God.
The intellectual dishonesty of the Zionists and the lengths they are prepared to go to pervert and distort anything in order to achieve their purpose never ceases to amaze me.
When one couples this with the ‘Nakba’ in 1948 in which 800,000 Palestinians were murdered, displaced and thrown out of their homes, the millions of Palestinians that have been killed, tortured, maimed and illegally detained, including women and children, over the last 76 years by Israeli security forces and fascist settlers and the ethnic cleansing and mass murder that is going on in Gaza today it beggars belief and makes the stomach turn.
Atrocity after atrocity, horror after horror, lie after lie, injustice after injustice, wickedness after wickedness, impunity after impunity, breach of the law after breach of the law yet Israel and the Zionists remain above the law, untouchable and unaccountable to God or man for their consistently horrendous actions and callous acts.
Permit me to close this contribution with the words of Aiden Hunter
@AidenHunterX an American commentator.
Two weeks ago he wrote the following on X.
“Rev. Martin Luther (the father of the Protestant movement) once said that the things jews do in secret are far worse than the things we’ve caught them doing. If we had hidden cameras in jewish homes and synagogues, and if we played that footage to the world, I suspect that even the most battle hardened men would find it difficult to watch. In 2016, there were rumors that when the New York Police Department viewed the content of Anthony Weiner’s laptop, it caused seasoned law enforcement officers to vomit and lose sleep. Jews are the only race that has been accused for centuries, independently by people on different continents, of grotesque ritual murder and other horrific deeds that I can’t describe here. The fact that jews always accuse Gentiles of what they themselves do should, therefore, give us serious pause because jews may be signaling exactly they’re doing in the privacy of their homes and synagogues. Only jews could easily and quickly imagine such things, for instance, as 40 babies beheaded, babies cooked in ovens, and pregnant women slashed with their infants ripped out, because jews themselves have been doing exactly those things to Palestinians. There is no doubt in my mind. The number of missing Palestinian children will probably never be known. Nor may we ever know what jews do to them when nobody is around to document it. I promise you this: Martin Luther was right. The things that jews are doing in secret and getting away with are indeed much, much worse than the things we’ve caught them doing.
From engineered famines to assassinations, I’m convinced we’ve only scratched the surface of the monstrous evil that jews have committed all around the world.
As I write this, I can imagine the screams of Gentile children pleading with us to save them. I pray that someday we have the spiritual strength to ditch our comforts and rouse ourselves to action”.
He went further by writing,
“There are Jews, and there are Jewists. By Jewist, I mean a genetically non-Jewish person whose mind has been colonized by destructive Jewish values and narratives. Most of us have been Jewists to varying degrees, since Jews run our media and entertainment. We grew up consuming the Jew’s poisons and false morality. They told us that degeneracy and decay were good.
They wanted us to fear the label “anti-semite” more than anything else. They wanted us never to notice that they are a distinct race, much less evaluate their behavior. They wanted us to view them as the world’s greatest and most innocent victims. They wanted us to always be fair-minded toward them. Meanwhile they polluted our souls. They exploited our sense of honor to gain unfair advantages over us.
They stripped away our very identity and replaced it with artificial identities that would never pose a threat to them. One could write book length treatments on all of the ways Jews have subverted us- linguistically, racially, psychologically, spiritually. The Jew is the premiere mind colonizer. He has created millions of Jewists in his own image. He put us in a trance with his glowing screens and inserted himself into our minds. Now he must be dislodged. In my youthful anarchist days we used to have a slogan: “kill the cop in your head.” This was a way to remind ourselves to overcome our timidity, brainwashing and domestication. Of course, it was not “cops” controlling our media and reshaping our culture. We never looked at the root cause back then. Today I understand that for all of us Gentiles, no matter what our position is, it is the Jew that must be eliminated from our minds. This is half the battle. Reject the mind- colonizer. Unlearn his programming.
Regain your fighting spirit. Activate your ancestral instincts. Kill the …. in your head”.
I have read a ton of views on the proposed Nigeria Tax Administration and other tax reform bills. On one hand, some stakeholders decry the bills as being a contrast to the current administration’s championing for local government autonomy. Some, like the National Economic Council (NEC), last month recommended the withdrawal of the Bills, stating that there were too many controversies surrounding it. They called for more inclusion in the stakeholder consultation process. The Northern Governors Forum (NGF) in similar fashion rejected the new derivation-based model for Value Added Tax (VAT) distribution in the Bills. On the other hand, some wholly support the Bills and believe that its benefits are transformational and necessary. Each stakeholder and commentator holds their view in light of information that is available to them. And that is valid and fair.
But before I go into the lengthy details of my thoughts on this matter, let me share the definition of the two subjects that are crucial to this conversation: attribution and derivation.
The principle of derivation in revenue sharing ensures that revenues from taxes are distributed to the region or jurisdiction where they were generated from. For example, if a company generates revenue through sales in a particular state, a portion of the taxes or royalties from that economic activity is returned to the state. The principle of attribution, on the other hand, involves allocating tax revenues based on predefined criteria, such as population size, geographical size, need, national interest, or expenditure responsibilities, etc, rather than the location of the tax generating entity. Thus revenues are collected nationally and are distributed to states according to agreed-upon formulas.
My View
The present controversy is based on the VAT sharing formula proposed in Section 77 of the Nigeria Tax Administration Bill. I have come to appreciate that the myriad of criticisms against this well-intended Bill may be as a result of the lack of clarity or understanding of Section 22 (12) of the Bill, which provides for Attribution of VAT revenue, requiring companies to file their returns on the basis of derivation by location (place of consumption).
This provision, from my understanding, was included to cure an existing problem with our current VAT administration. As it stands today, in the existing system, VAT returns by companies are not filed on the basis of the place of consumption, but reported based on the head office locations of these companies. This means that a whopping 20% of VAT returns are distributed back to States where these head offices are located—whether consumption took place there or not; it explains why Lagos, FCT and Rivers always take the largest chunk of VAT under the current regime.
The proposed amendments of the Nigeria Tax Administration Bill offer a different position that emphasises fairness and more equitable distribution of VAT returns. It proposes that VAT will now be reported based on the place of consumption, which will ensure that most of the amounts currently reported for Lagos, FCT and Rivers states will now be reported by where the consumption takes place.
The new rule will ensure that places where consumption took place get 60% of the amounts reported for them. For instance, if consumption happens in Niger State, the state would receive 60% of the VAT generated from its jurisdiction, while the balance would be put in a VAT sharing pool, which it (Niger State) would further benefit from.
In my view, this will result in a more favourable outcome for most states, when compared to the current regime that favors Lagos, Rivers and FCT. It will more or less redistribute most of the present allocation received by those 3 states.
My appeal to NEC, NGF and NEF as well as other stakeholders is thus:
A. We must not make the misjudgment of throwing away the baby with the bathing water.
B. Let us carefully look at the benefits of these reforms and weigh the impact on our tax and fiscal space versus the proposed amendments’ ‘perceived shortfalls’.
C. There is no single problem on earth that is without a solution. In this light, we should think out of the box and suggest workable solutions to address or fix these perceived shortfalls, or we will be condemned to having our cap in hand at the doorsteps of the World Bank and IMF Headquarters more frequently than ever.
D. On a personal note and based on my little experience as a tax accountant, consultant and administrator, I would suggest to all stakeholders, particularly the National Assembly to go ahead and consider the bill, pass it to law, and have Mr. President sign same, but provided the proposed amendments to the VAT law will be implemented in phases bearing in mind the following:
1. FIRS is currently undergoing its own reforms; the FIRS Establishment Act has been re-presented to the NASS and is receiving their attention simultaneously. For FIRS to be able to function as envisaged by the proposed changes or amendments to the FIRS Act, then it must first fix the roof over its head to ensure that if any storm arises tomorrow, revenue administration officials and our money entrusted in their hands would be safe.
2. FIRS must also fix the issue of fiscalisation within the next three to five years from now. The need for fiscalisation is one of the key amendments proposed in the Nigeria Tax Administration Bill before the NASS.
Fiscalisation is the process of using technology, like cash registers or POS systems, to ensure businesses comply with tax laws by automatically recording and reporting their sales to tax authorities.
It is an expensive project and will not only require political will at the centre, but also at the sub-national level. To achieve it, the FG, FIRS and FAAC must be ready to jointly fund this project. It is important because it will bring about transparency and accountability as well as address the issue of subjectivity which is mainly the fear of the members of NEC, particularly the NGF.
I must emphasise that Fiscalisation cannot happen without data. This brings me to my third point.
3. The FIRS HQ project should be completed, and equipped as a world class edifice, while ensuring that the entire floor historically conceived as the “National Revenue Data Centre” becomes a reality.
4. Item 2 above (i.e. fiscalisation) will not only address the issue of transparency and accountability, it will curtail the influence and excesses of vested interests particularly the tax accountants who are accomplices in the whole of this VAT issue.
If the amendment is passed into law, and its implementation is not delayed say by 3 to 5 years, the fear of the stakeholders would be justified because tax accountants are likely to be subjective (or used to being subjective) in the course of filing VAT returns (i.e., VAT attribution) in favour of the states of their choice or those of the choices of some of the political class.
As a tax accountant of your company, you know where your customers are located, if not all, especially the major ones. But when asked to file their companies’ monthly VAT returns based on the location of their customers, for instance, sentiments come to play. And even with the proposal in Section 77 of the Tax Administration Bill, the subjectivity is likely to continue.
Though it was an administrative initiative at FIRS in 2020, I recall that we redesigned the VAT Form 002 that required companies to file their VAT returns based on attribution. Only a few companies (less than 10) complied with our directives nationwide (i.e. file VAT returns based on the location of their customers.)
Fiscalisation will help our revenue administrators in many ways including boosting their capacity to generate more revenue for the Federation. It has the capacity to address or track transactions or sale of goods from a customer in one state to the other, particularly cashless transactions. It will also create room for the implementation of a system for immediate tax refunds.
5. Phasing the implementation of the two key controversial but necessary amendments to the VAT law would also assist the states to go back home, sit and weigh the level of financial inclusion in their respective states and address them accordingly. Recent reports on financial inclusion reveal that while you may have an estimated population of 10m people in a given State for example, less than 2m of that population would be financially inclusive. In some states, more than 70% of the population do not have a BVN, not to mention a bank account. So as a State governor, your argument that huge consumption is taking place in your state but the current ‘headquarter effect’ is affecting your share of monthly VAT revenue can only be addressed when your resident population is financially inclusive. It goes without saying that your problem would be compounded in the near future if buying and selling of goods continue to happen in your State using cash. Buying and selling of goods and services in this fashion will also affect your ability to improve on your State’s IGR.
6. The process of input-output mechanism in VAT input claim is another key issue that has been of keen interest to me, and equally needs to be emphasized here. The intended amendments and fiscalisation of Nigeria’s business environment will also help in addressing sharp practices or the abilities of business to manipulate the input claim in the course of filing their monthly VAT returns. This is because under the current regime if an item is purchased in Lagos and taken to Kano for example, the Kano company will not be able to claim the input VAT if the Lagos company fails to correctly disclose the location of its output VAT. With fiscalisation the Input claim of the Kano company will simply expose the Lagos company.
In my view, the following four (4) factors will drive compliance of the proposed tax reform bills, and this will mean more revenue to share to the states:
1. Attribution is now clearly provided in the law. It is no longer an administrative decision or at the discretion of the FIRS or tax accountants working for or representing VAT agents nationwide.
2. There is now a strong political will to drive tax reforms, this means that tax laws will not only be passed but will be well enforced going forward in Nigeria.
3. Technology deployment for VAT invoicing and fiscalisation is clearly provided in the new Bills, with the attendant administrative processes that are ongoing to implement the same. It will no longer be at the discretion of companies to determine who bought what—technology will.
4. The processes and challenges in Input-Output mechanism in VAT Input claims would now be addressed using technology.
Finally, the many benefits of these bills are excellent. It behooves on us to give the NASS our support to pass them into law. But I hold that we should do so on the following conditions:
A. That the implementation of the Tax Administration Bill should be phased.
B. That the implementation (i.e. the effective date) of the proposed amendments to Section 77 of the Tax Administration Bill should be delayed for at least three to five years to enable all parties plan and invest in technology and the relevant infrastructure.
C. FIRS should administratively prepare the minds of all stakeholders, particularly the VAT agents, lawyers and tax accountants on the need to honestly file VAT returns based on attribution as a first step, because Section 26 of the FIRS Establishment Act (as it is today) is adequate enough for them to call for VAT returns based on attribution from all VAT agents in Nigeria.
D. The current sharing formula should be used in distributing revenue accruable from VAT to all parties, and all parties within the next three to five years (that the amendment is expected to take effect) would have played their part so that there would be equity, transparency and accountability as intended by the proposed amendments to the VAT law.
Muhammad Nami, a tax accountant and consultant, is the immediate past Executive Chairman of the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) and Joint Tax Board. He was also the President of the Commonwealth Association of Tax Administrators (CATA).
It is received wisdom that supportive, high-quality friends in good places are important in human relationships and in advancing personal and group progress. It is also the case in strengthening relationships among nations.
Since his assumption of office, President Bola Tinubu has activated the friendship he has built over time in his quest for Nigeria’s development. The President has embarked on reforms to reposition the economy and put the country on the right track for optimal development based on his Renewed Hope Agenda. To realise this lofty objective, he is leaving no stone unturned, including leveraging his friendship and international connections.
President Tinubu’s three-day state visit to France provided ample opportunity for this leverage. The visit was at the invitation of President Emmanuel Macron. During the visit, the French President demonstrated he is a true friend of President Tinubu and Nigeria. President Macron rolled out the proverbial red carpet for his friend. For instance, on arrival in Paris on Wednesday, November 27, officers of the elite Republican Guard welcomed President Tinubu with a parade with full honours at Orly Airport to begin the state visit, the first by a Nigerian leader in over two decades.
The next day, Thursday, President Macron and his wife, Brigitte, formally received President Tinubu and his wife, Senator Oluremi Tinubu, at the historic Invalides Memorial Complex in Paris, where another full parade was displayed. The two leaders then went to Elysee Palace, where their families exchanged gifts. Tinubu and Macron later had bilateral discussions on economic and political issues involving their two countries.
The two presidents and business leaders from their countries attended a business meeting organised by the Franco-Nigerian Business Council. Later in the evening, President Tinubu, his wife, and his entourage were treated to a sumptuous dinner.
By many accounts, President Tinubu’s state visit to France was hugely successful. The visit was unprecedented in the impressive way Macron hosted him, the issues discussed, and the benefits accruable from the trip. The French Ambassador to Nigeria, Marc Fonbaustier, said President Macron had received no other African leader in such a manner.
Two reasons could be adduced for this exceptional reception. The first is the friendship between President Tinubu and President Macron. The French President decided to give his friend the best reception possible. The other is the fact that Nigeria is pivotal in Macron’s new policy on Africa. With Paris’s waning influence in French-speaking African countries, the French President is making overtures to English-speaking African countries where Nigeria holds an important position.
What are the immediate, short and long-term gains of President Tinubu’s France visit?
In the immediate term, the visit helped to put issues about the challenges confronting Nigeria and Africa on the front burner, as evident from the editorial authored by the two presidents before the visit. The editorial was published in the media in Nigeria, France, and across the globe. In the article, the two leaders spoke of their readiness to collaborate as equals in addressing burning issues, which included a more robust health system, education for all, sustainable and legal migration pathways and just representation for Africa in the United Nations Security Council as well as in challenges like insecurity, climate change, security of the Gulf of Guinea and instability in the Sahel Region.
It is instructive that while emphasising their strategic autonomy, the two countries agreed to stay non-aligned with any bloc, opting to overcome these challenges by renewing global governance and backing uniform implementation of international humanitarian laws, whether in Gaza, Sudan, or Ukraine, in a way devoid of double standards.
The two presidents again discussed these issues, among others, in their bilateral talks, and reaffirmed their commitments. An elated President Macron later described President Tinubu’s state visit as a milestone, heralding deeper bilateral relationships.
There was a strategic engagement between Nigerian and French businessmen under the auspices of the Franco-Nigerian Business Council and a follow-up France-Nigeria Business Forum. At the meeting were top Nigerian business leaders such as Alhaji Aliko Dangote, Alhaji Samad Rabiu, Mr. Tony Elumelu, Mr. Jim Ovia and Mr. Aigboje Aig-Imoukuede, among others, as well as some state governors including the Chairman of the Nigerian Governors’ Forum and Governor of Kwara, Abdulrasaq Abdulrahman, Babajide Sanwo-olu (Lagos), Dapo Abiodun (Ogun) and Peter Mbah (Enugu).
Among the ministers at the session were the Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy Wale Edun, Dele Alake (Solid Minerals), Abubakar Kyari (Agriculture), Dave Umahi (Works), Jumoke Oduwole (Trade & Investment), Hannatu Musawa (Tourism, Culture & Creative Economy), Idris Mohammed Malagi (Information & National Orientation), Mohammed Badaru Abubakar (Defence), and Bosun Tijani (Communications & Digital Economy).
The France-Nigeria Business Forum was held on Friday morning and attended by business leaders from both countries. The critical takeaway from the forum is the resolve of the French business people to move away from trading and to engage in value additions in crucial sectors like agriculture, manufacturing, energy transition, and power.
Two interconnected developments during the visit are particularly noteworthy. Zenith Bank inaugurated its banking operations in Paris, while the United Bank for Africa also got approval for its operating license. President Tinubu and President Macron witnessed UBA Group Chairman Tony Elumelu and French Minister of Economy, Finance, and Industry Antoine Armand signing the agreements for the bank to commence full banking operations in Paris.
Two transformative agreements were also signed with the French government and its development agency, AFD (Agence Francaise de Development), during the visit. Minister of Finance Edun led the Federal Government in signing the agreements collectively valued at over €300 million euros and designed to strengthen vital sectors of Nigeria’s economy and drive sustainable development. The Minister of Economy, Finance and Industry of France, Armand, co-signed for the French Government.
During the visit, both presidents affirmed their strong commitment to enhancing investments in key sectors like food security, energy, solid minerals, education, and defence. President Macron had earlier assured of his commitment to encouraging more investments in the solid minerals sector, with the signing of an agreement at a bilateral meeting where the Minister of Solid Minerals Development, Alake, presented the sector’s potential.
Importantly, French investments in the creative industries, particularly Nollywood and youth-focused initiatives, are underway. President Macron, who had lived in Nigeria before when he worked at the French Embassy in Lagos, described Nigerians as hugely talented and resilient people. He paid special tributes to Nobel Laureate Prof. Wole Soyinka and famous Afrobeat musician Femi Kuti, both of whom he called global icons.
Looking back on the three-day visit, President Tinubu thanked President Macron for the warm reception and agreements reached by the two of them and expressed the hope that the relations between France and Nigeria would be brighter and better.
He said: “In addition to the economic prospects and what you mean to Europe, America, and the African continent, there is a good prospect that you will not forget who we are. You open your doors for investment for our friends and brothers here.
“It is a good time for all of us. I cannot be prouder than I am to be President of Nigeria at this challenging time. I have people who are very clearly inspired, who are determined to change the course of Africa by changing the rot of the past, blending a future that our children and grandchildren can be proud of.”
On his part, President Macron remarked: “We have confidence that you, Mr. President, will reinforce our relationship with Nigeria, and it will cover the West Coast region, with ECOWAS playing the leading role. I will seek your leadership to work as partners of progress. You are the great leader of the great country in Africa.”
There is no doubt that President Tinubu is deploying his friendship to advance his economic development agenda for Nigeria.
*Rahman is the senior special assistant to the President on media matters.
On 12 March, 2024, Sam Omatseye, Chair of the Editorial Board of The Nation, launched, in Abuja, a book titled Beating All Odds: Diaries and Essays on How Bola Tinubu Became President. On 19 October, 2024, Omatseye delivered an address at the University of Cambridge, in the United Kingdom, on the topic “Redemption or Perdition, what now for Tinubu reforms.”
Omatseye stated: “Before I address whether the reforms of President Tinubu will lead to perdition or redemption, it is important to understand the context of how he defeated his two major opponents. The two other presidential candidates were Abubakar Atiku and, of course, Peter Obi. Atiku was the presidential candidate of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP). Obi, as I stated earlier, held the banner of the Labour Party. Tinubu polled 8,794,726 votes, Atiku polled 6,984,520 votes while Obi had 6,101,533 votes. It is obvious that those who did not want Tinubu as president were more than those who wanted him to lead the country. If we combined the votes of the Labour Party and the PDP, they amounted to about 13 million votes compared to Tinubu’s eight million. If we consider the bitterness of the polls, especially the religious ferment and ethnic odium, it is understandable why the majority of the country still aches and swears.”
He further said: “Immediately the electoral chairman, Mahmood Yakubu, announced the results, both men rejected them and proceeded to challenge the verdict in court. During the campaigns, they accused him as a thief, without evidence; as a convicted drug baron, even after the United States government through its embassy had cleared him; of forged certificate as a student of Chicago State University, even though the university confirmed he was a student. Yet, when Atiku’s school discrepancies were released, there was little bubble, or when Obi was revealed to have used his own late brother’s certificate, there was silence. In fact, when I recently discussed this with an Obidient – that is, what the Obi followers call themselves – the fellow said he had never heard such a thing.”
In the address, Omatseye further declared: “While they say Tinubu stole state funds, Obi’s followers were not willing to address what their man had publicly acknowledged: that he (Obi) had invested state funds in a family business when he was a governor of Anambra State and that he maintained an off-shore account against the law when he governed Anambra State. Atiku himself had also been accused of selling off public companies at giveaway prices and had fattened on public funds. Few were willing to interrogate them. But Tinubu became the butt of a barrage of umbrage. I am not here to say he is innocent of anything, but just to chart the architecture of rage that pervaded the man’s rise to power.”
And the rage, by the way, also had its beginnings in the heinous attack Tinubu was subjected to even within his own party, leading to the primaries. Omatseye observed as follows in his column in The Nation on 11 March, 2024: “I knew the president – Muhammadu Buhari – did not want him. The peacocks and vampires around him did not want him. Some stakeholders in the country did not only resent him, they were afraid of him. The plot thickened quickly. Conspiracies festered in sewers and in the open. … At every turn, they stumbled into crosswinds. Their own weapon turned their own folly.”
Sam Omatseye also noted in the Cambridge lecture: “In spite of all these headwinds, Tinubu triumphed. Hence, I called the book, Beating all odds. As the two opponents challenged the polls in court, their supporters stoked the flames of subversion. Some of their followers even asked the army to overthrow democracy. It has been a virtual bedlam in the country since he took over office as president. More than half of the country did not accept him as their leader, and whatever he did, good or bad was bad.”
In addition, Omatseye posited: “In his inaugural address, his quote, “subsidy is gone,” has been a refrain of rebellion. He might have believed, perhaps naively, that since everyone agreed that the regime of arbitrage and corruption known as subsidy of oil was bad, it would attract universal acceptance once he announced its history. But when the consequences began to hit with core inflation rising like a hawk, they began to accuse him of bad faith, ineptitude and insensitivity. The cost of food, transportation and fuel staggered the market and the poor.”
It is in the context of this fouled social atmosphere that, on 15 November, 2024, former President Olusegun Obasanjo, possibly the most visceral of President Tinubu’s traducers, delivered a lecture at the Chinua Achebe Leadership in Africa Forum. He opened the Keynote Speech, titled “Leadership failure and state capture in Nigeria,” as follows: “Without being immodest, I will begin by saying that it is appropriate that I was invited to deliver the keynote address at a gathering in honour of the late Professor Chinua Achebe. Not just because I have been Head of State and President of Nigeria on two different periods of our beloved nation’s history – most will agree fairly successfully – but because I have known the man, his work, and his values for as long as our nation has been in existence. He was a great and distinguished Nigerian.”
He continued: “I invoke jest to parlay into a much darker topic for which we are gathered here to address: The failure of governance in Nigeria and the near collapse of our Nation State.” Furthermore, he said: “The 2023 elections in Nigeria were ‘a travesty’ by all rational measures. Following that problem prone exercise, electoral system reform is now among the top targets for change in Nigeria.” In addition, he talked about “politicians corruptly getting themselves declared as winner in an election where votes do not matter and asking winner declared loser to go to court where justice cannot be assured is the easiest and best way to kill electoral democracy.” Moreover, he said: “What is happening in Nigeria – right before our eyes – is state capture: The purchase of national assets by political elites – and their family members – at bargain prices, the allocation of national resources – minerals, land, and even human resources – to local, regional, and international actors. It must be prohibited and prevented through local and international laws.” He then went on and on in what looked like a hatchet job for whoever.
Walking in the footsteps of Obasanjo, singer Davido dissuaded foreigners who wished to relocate to Nigeria to bury the thought because, according to him, the country’s economy was in shambles. To this, Reno Omokri observed, in a Facebook post on 25 November, 2024: “Davido’s father recently testified of his breakthrough in his investments in Nigeria in multiple fields. Mr. Adedeji Adeleke gave a good report on how his $2 billion power plant in Nigeria is thriving and has blossomed to the point where he generates 15% of Nigeria’s electricity. May God bless him for that testimony, which is at variance [with] and contradicts what his son, Davido, said to the world about Nigeria’s economy being in shambles.”
On 30 June, 2008, in a speech titled, “Barrack Obama: Speech on Patriotism,” former President Obama said: “I learned that what makes America great has never been its perfection but the belief that it can be made better. … Of course, precisely because America isn’t perfect, precisely because our ideals constantly demand more from us, patriotism can never be defined as loyalty to any particular leader or government or policy. As Mark Twain, that greatest of American satirists and proud son of Missouri once wrote, ‘Patriotism is supporting your country all the time and your government when it deserves it.’ … Our greatest leaders have always … defined patriotism with an eye towards posterity. George Washington is rightly revered for his leadership of the Continental Army, but one of his greatest acts of patriotism was his insistence on stepping down after two terms, thereby setting a pattern for those that would follow reminding future presidents that this is a government of and by and for the people.”
But it’s not always that Obasanjo has had Davido’s kind of company. He had the opposite of that in former American President Jimmy Carter. When America was in an energy crisis that led to the kind of problems Nigeria is facing today, Jimmy Carter, who was Obasanjo’s friend, sought to inspire Americans to keep the nation afloat as follows: “Whenever you have a chance, say something good about your country.” Implicit in this 2008 entreaty is the Shakespearean admonition: “Discretion is the better part of valour.”
Obasanjo’s attack on specific individuals, institutions and even the country as a whole in his Yale University lecture has elicited a torrent of castigation, and it’s not certain whether the former President anticipated the immensity and depth of the backlash. Olakunle Abimbola of The Nation remarked: “It’s clear: despite his constant huffing and puffing; and empty pontifications, Obasanjo has little sense of fairness; talk less of justice. But God is great! As he opens his mouth to judge others, he condemns himself even more!” Even the reticent Professor Bolaji Akinyemi, in an interview on Channels Television, had remarked, in response to Obasanjo’s 1 January, 2023 self-serving message: “With all due respect to all those involved, don’t let us spend this programme on General Obasanjo’s letter or ideas and what have you, because some of us believe he also is part of the foundation of the problems that we have in this country.”
Former Australian Prime Minister, John Howard, also profoundly asserted in a 1 January, 2001 interview: “Well, no country is ever sort of completely fulfilled. The only fulfilled countries are those that are not going forward. Every country is a nation in transition, it’s got a future.” In other words, as a writer on Facebook, Abiodun Ishola Ladepo, noted and counseled, on 29 November, 2024, “No place on earth is Utopia. Utopia is a phantom state. … Don’t be like that ignorant singer parroting denigrating propaganda about Nigeria.”
These views cohere with the optimistic disposition of Sam Omatseye, and he observed that fundamental changes were taking place which presage a brighter future for the country. The array of optimististic views also disavow Obasanjo’s doomsday predilection. Indicating how deep his phobia for Tinubu was, Obasanjo lapsed into innuendo: “My military training and experience taught me that what you capture, you tend to hold under your sole control for as long as you can hold it. That is the case of one governor of a state who still holds the state captive in his pocket 25 years after being the governor of the state. That, certainly, is no mean feat.
The commissioning of The Wole Olanipekun Senate Building at the Bamidele Olumilua University of Education, Science and Technology (BOUESTI), Ikere, Ekiti State, last Thursday, has again testified to the power of visionary leadership and the boundless potential of human generosity.
In a world where the pursuit of knowledge is often overshadowed by the pursuit of power and wealth, Wole Olanipekun’s commitment to the ‘civilizing mission’ of education is a breath of fresh air. This iconic Senate Building stands as a beacon of hope and an illuminating path to a brighter future for generations of students, scholars and leaders.
The Wole Olanipekun Senate Building is the latest addition to the legal luminary’s benevolent social interventions. As Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council of the University of Ibadan (2009-2013), he oversaw the expansion of the institution to Ajibode, easing congestion on the main campus. Notably, he donated a 450-capacity Law Auditorium to the Ajibode Campus, setting a precedent for private sector support for public education. The auditorium was commissioned by the then Minister of Education, Professor Ruqquayat Rufai, on November 17, 2012. During Olanipekun’s tenure, the University experienced a transformative era of innovation and growth
As Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council, Ajayi Crowther University (ACU), Oyo (2013–2022), Olanipekun built and donated to the University a magnificent Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge, named Wole and Lara Olanipekun Vice-Chancellor’s Lodge. In January 2023, the proprietors of ACU appointed him as the Chairman of the Board of Trustees, a position he currently holds.
In February 2021, the Asiwaju of Ikere Kingdom was appointed as the pioneer Chancellor of the newly-established BOUESTI, a position he has also held to date. The Senate Building gifted to the University by the former Attorney-General and Commissioner for Justice in the old Ondo State was commissioned last Thursday.
When Ladoke Akintola University of Technology, Ogbomoso (LAUTECH) faced a prolonged crisis, resulting in a two-session closure, the Governors of Oyo and Osun States jointly appointed Olanipekun to lead a panel to resuscitate the institution. He accepted the pro-bono assignment, and the panel was inaugurated on October 28, 2016. In 2017, Olanipekun submitted comprehensive reports to the governors, and the implementation of his panel’s recommendations successfully led to the university’s reopening, with academic activities running smoothly ever since.
On January 19, 2023, Governor Biodun Oyebanji of Ekiti State commissioned an ultra-modern High Court Complex, built and donated by Olanipekun to the Ekiti State High Court, Ikere Judicial Division. Also that year, the 20th President of the Nigerian Bar Association (NBA) and 50th Chairman of the Body of Benchers was appointed as a Visiting Professor of Law Practice by the Federal University, Oye, Ekiti State, making him the first legal practitioner to hold this position in Nigeria.
On June 15, 2024, President Bola Tinubu announced the appointment of this foremost Nigerian citizen, “who can do anything for education”, as the Pro-Chancellor and Chairman of the Governing Council, University of Lagos. Of course, it was a fitting recognition of his stature and influence. Olanipekun and all other members of Governing Councils of Federal Universities and Tertiary Institutions were formally inaugurated on July 4, 2024.
Olanipekun’s philanthropic endeavours have significantly impacted numerous individuals and communities. The Wole Olanipekun Scholarship Scheme (WOSS), established in 1996, has produced over 3,019 beneficiaries across various disciplines, in and outside Nigeria. In 2020, he founded the Wole Olanipekun Foundation (WOF) Empowerment Programme to support vulnerable groups. To date, the Foundation has empowered over 200 widows, 200 aged people and 400 young entrepreneurs, in addition to 600 palliative beneficiaries. His donations to universities and educational institutions continue to demonstrate his commitment to empowering future generations through education.
Described by Oyebanji as “a man loved by God who uses his kindheartedness to serve humanity”, Olanipekun will, today, November 30, 2024, be empowering a new set of Nigerians, marking the 5th edition of his philanthropic initiative. He will also award scholarships to deserving students, the 28th batch of beneficiaries.
Olanipekun’s achievements testify to the power of understated generosity even as his remarkable journey in law serves as a powerful rebuke to a society that often prioritizes profit over principle. In a world where wealth and power often define legacy, individuals like the Rockefellers, Cadburys and Fords have left an indelible mark on society. Their contributions have transcended generations, inspiring future leaders to follow in their footsteps. Olanipekun is a contemporary example of this selfless approach. As a Yoruba man, he draws inspiration from Nigeria’s first lawyer, Christopher Alexander Sapara Williams (1855-1915), Nigeria’s first lawyer who believed that “a lawyer lives for the direction of his people and the achievement of the cause of his country.”
This ‘Pride of Ekiti’ also continues the tradition of great lawyers like Sir Adeyemo Alakija, who saw the law as a tool for social progress and human upliftment. This wave of progressive thinking was ignited on August 7, 1925, with the foundation of the West African Students Union (WASU) by a group of 21 students – predominantly from Nigeria – in London, led by Ladipo Solanke and Dr. Herbert Bankole-Bright, a Sierra Leonean physician. Thankfully, the torch has been passed down through generations of lawyers, including superb advocates like Obafemi Awolowo, Rotimi Williams, Bode Thomas, Adegoke Adelabu and Ladoke Akintola. As fate would have it, Olanipekun’s receipt of this torch marked the beginning of a remarkable legacy, one that he has exemplary passed on, cementing a worthwhile tradition.
In the words of the great philosopher, Aristotle, “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Olanipekun embodies the ethos of excellence and the quintessence of a great Nigerian. As a legal luminary, this selfless benefactor and inspirational figure has navigated the complexities of Nigeria’s socio-political landscape with remarkable agility, earning the esteem and admiration of his peers and the gratitude of countless individuals whose lives have been positively impacted by his selfless interventions. As a philanthropist, his concern of passion, born of a deep sense of empathy and compassion, has also brought solace and relief to numerous individuals and communities, reinforcing his reputation as a leader of unimpeachable character and untiring integrity.
Well, critics may have argued that Olanipekun’s initiatives lacked clear metrics for success or adequate oversight. Some may also have been of the opinion that his service to humanity has potentially undermined their effectiveness and legitimacy. Another potential criticism is that of elitism and disconnect from ordinary Nigerians. Others may question the long-term impact of his philanthropy or whether it addresses the root causes of poverty and inequality in Nigeria, and among Nigerians. As a lawyer and former NBA president, Olanipekun likely faced criticism for potential conflicts of interest, impartiality and perpetuating a flawed legal system. His commitment to promoting education and social justice may also have created tensions with traditional power structures or cultural norms.
In the light of reality, philanthropic efforts often face criticism, and Olanipekun’s initiatives are no exception. Experts emphasize the importance of strategic giving, transparency and accountability in philanthropy. While it is natural to expect scrutiny, philosophers like Aristotle and Immanuel Kant remind us that cultivating virtues and moral principles is more important than seeking to please everyone – a Sisyphean task doomed to fail. By acknowledging these complexities, we can better understand Olanipekun’s initiatives and the philanthropic landscape in Nigeria. His example inspires us to strive for virtue, even if we can’t please everyone.
May the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace in Nigeria!
