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  • Before the Supreme Court becomes a commune of Bantustans

    Before the Supreme Court becomes a commune of Bantustans

    • By Chidi Anselm Odinkalu

    In 1954 Sir John Verity lost his job because he won an argument. It was in his ninth year in office as Chief Justice of colonial Nigeria. Sir John arrived in Nigeria in October 1945 from British Guyana, where he had served in a similar position since 1941. At the time, Nigeria was still a unitary system under colonial rule.

    Two years before Sir John’s arrival, the Native Courts (Colony) Ordinance of 1943 had created a “Supreme Court of Justice” for the Colony and Protectorate of Nigeria. Taslim Elias, the distinguished academic destined to play a significant role in the administration of law and courts in post-colonial Africa, described the structure of the colonial court system that Sir John met in Nigeria as comprising “a Supreme Court, which is the highest court for the territory. It consists of two parts, a Divisional Court and a Full Court (as in the West African colonies), or a High Court and a Court of Appeal (as in several other colonies such as Jamaica, Singapore and Kenya), or simply a High Court (as in Uganda and Northern Rhodesia).”

    That system had existed with modest adaptation since the Amalgamation in 1914. In his Amalgamation Report in 1919, Frederick Lugard, Nigeria’s founding Governor-General, pointed out that the court system was made up of a Chief Justice and Puisne Judges who “sat at certain places and visited on Assize the ‘District Courts.’”

    In 1951, six years into Sir John’s tenure as Chief Justice, the colonial government turned the country into a federation. Two years later, one of the issues to engage the constitutional conference that began in London was the implication of this new structure for judicial administration. As the conference began, the delegates – mostly politicians who preferred in the language of the day to be called “nationalists” – advocated the decentralisation of the judiciary. Sir John opposed the proposal, venturing with what proved to be accurate foresight, that such a step “might lead to judges and magistrates becoming tools in the hands of politicians” and “might eventually lead to the control of the judiciary by the executive.”

    The conference relocated to Lagos in 1954 where the politicians overwhelmingly approved the proposal to regionalise the judiciary. Having lost the fight over the future of the judiciary that he led, Sir John took an early retirement from the office of Chief Justice and became the penultimate English man in the role.

    In the reorganisation of the court system that followed upon the conclusion of the constitutional conference, a Federal Supreme Court (FSC) was created in 1954. The regions had high courts from which appeals could go to the FSC. The highest court for the country remained the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London.

    By 1963, the nationalists fighting for independence one decade earlier had metamorphosed into political incumbents seeking control of the courts (like their colonial predecessors). The Privy Council had effectively ruled in favour of the opposition Action Group (AG) on the question of whether the regional governor could remove a renegade premier, Ladoke Akintola, without a formal vote in the regional parliament.

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    Confronted with the loss of a prized ally helpfully decimating the ranks of a loathed political foe, the then-ruling federal coalition led by the Northern Peoples’ Congress (NPC), legislated the Privy Council out of existence, abolished the Judicial Service Commission, and made the Supreme Court Nigeria’s apex court. Sir John’s prophecy had become reality.

    Although the 1963 Constitution enabled the court to sit “in such other places in Nigeria as the Chief Justice of Nigeria may appoint”, the Supreme Court has functioned from its seat, first in Lagos when it was the capital city for the first three decades after independence and, thereafter, from Abuja, the current federal capital. The fortunes of the court have waxed and waned in symmetry with the political economy of Nigeria.

    Unlike other courts in the country, there are no divisions of the Supreme Court and for much of its life, the Supreme Court was an all-comers affair for appeals “on questions of law.”

    As the claims on the court’s judicial bandwidth rose and the political economy of the country grew more complex, it was predictable that its docket would increase. The sensible thing to do was to reform the law governing access to the Supreme Court – as well as its doctrine – to keep pace with the increasing demand for the rarefied attention of the court and preserve its authority. This was not done.

    Instead, since the onset of the current elective dispensation in 1999, the Supreme Court has become preoccupied with electoral and political disputes. Among the many consequences of this, two are notable. First, the preoccupation of the court (and of the judiciary below it) with political and electoral disputes increasingly, tasks its credibility.

    Second, the resulting prioritisation accorded by the court to political cases has created an intolerable backlog to which there is no sensible solution under the current system of judicial administration. The result is that appeals not involving senior politicians or election results vegetate interminably in the bowels of the Supreme Court with no reasonable chance of getting heard.

    It is right that this situation should engage the attention of senior lawyers and senior politicians. Manu Soro, the member of the House of Representatives representing Darazo/Ganjuwa Federal Constituency of Bauchi State, has decided to bell the proverbial cat. On World Anti-Corruption Day, December 9, 2024, his bill for Supreme Court reform was gazetted.

    The bill proposes – among other things – to authorise the establishment of five regional divisions of the Supreme Court, with the one in Abuja serving as the headquarters. The bill comes complete with a political geography of the proposed divisions: Umuahia (Abia State) to serve the southeast; Bauchi (Bauchi State) for the northeast; Uyo (Akwa Ibom) for the south-south; Lagos (Lagos State) for the southwest; and Kano (Kano State) for the northwest. The declared objective of the bill is “to enhance access to the highest (level of) justice, to minimise the logistical cost of accessing justice and to ensure timely dispensation of matters brought before the apex court.”

    Commendable as it is for an initiative, this bill is plainly misguided for many reasons. First, it misconceives and mischaracterises the mission of the Supreme Court. Second, it has no diagnosis for the problems that ail the Supreme Court and, to the extent that it evinces any, offers no reasonable solution to them. Third, the bill offers a misplaced geographical and genealogical solution for a crisis of jurisdictional sclerosis and unimaginative judicial administration that it could not see.

    The most charitable anyone can be about this bill is that it is hare-brained. The solution that it offers is guaranteed to make the situation worse, not better. It will also disestablish the court because a “Supreme Court,” that sits in judicial divisions will be neither apex nor supreme.

    The crisis of appellate throughput and its consequences, which presently afflicts Nigeria’s Supreme Court is too serious to be banished to post-codes defined by geographies of genealogy. To address the problem, the supply of appeals to the court will need to be constrained significantly. The court’s administration should be overhauled and professionalised, and case management, too needs attention. The one thing the court cannot afford is precisely what this bill advocates – to cannibalise it into a collection of judicial Bantustans.

    •A lawyer & teacher, Odinkalu can be reached at chidi.odinkalu@tufts.edu

  • INEC’s theory of honesty

    INEC’s theory of honesty

    Each time I realise that we have done 25 years of unbroken constitutional government in Nigeria, I feel like breaking into song and dance. I deserve to dance because our magazine Newswatch was proscribed because we published the Cookey Report on Democracy which the Babangida government never wanted published. So by having democracy despite the opposition of anti-democratic forces, we won. Then we had an interview with David Mark, one of the coup plotters that overthrew Ernest Shonekan and brought Sani Abacha to power. In the interview, Mark said that Abacha wanted to stay in power longer, much longer than they had planned. Then we were hammered, thrown into detention and charged with mutiny for publishing that interview. So by eventually having a democratic government ushered into Nigeria in 1999 by a decent man, General Abdulsalami Abubakar, who ran the affairs of Nigeria for only 11 months despite pressure for him to stay longer, we won.

    But I am still not ready to push my ageing bones into a dance because we still have a long way to go towards making our democracy close to perfect.

     Last week, a professor of Human Kinetics at the University of Uyo, was convicted and sentenced to three years in prison for electoral fraud in the 2019 election. He was the Collation/Returning Officer for Essien Udim State Constituency in Akwa Ibom State. The presiding Judge Justice Bassey Nkanang convicted him on two of the three charges raised against him. So his illustrious life as a professor has come to an ignominious end because of greed.

     When Professor Attahiru Jega, INEC chairman, decided on picking university professors and vice chancellors as Collation/Returning Officers, he must have said two things to himself (a) as professors, they had a good name to protect and would do nothing to damage it (b) as professors, they were earning a good income and they may not allow themselves to be tempted by money from politicians. These would constitute INEC’s theory of honesty. In theory, this is a viable theory because many of the professors and or vice chancellors did their election duties without damaging their reputations through greed for money. Professor Uduk who has just been convicted is an exception. By messing up himself, he has proved that human beings are not perfect, no matter how highly placed.

    By choosing to pick mainly professors to help him conduct free, fair and credible elections, Jega ignored three things that have been happening in Nigeria’s university system: (a) some professors sell marks for money (b) some professors sell marks for sex (c) some professors do all sorts of dirty things to become vice chancellors. Their professional rank does not even matter to them. Right now, a Dean in the Faculty of Law in one of the universities is in detention for alleged sexual offences with some of the students in his department. He earns enough income to be able to spend some money and chase a girl anywhere in the town where he lives but he didn’t. He preferred his students, soft targets on whom he will not spend his money. He wants awoof sex. Cheap man. Penny wise, pound foolish. Now his career has come to an inglorious end and while he is in prison, there are many pretty girls walking about that he cannot touch.

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    Jega and INEC were not entirely wrong in their theory of honesty. Many of the professors did an honest job. As Shakespeare says there is no art to find the mind’s construction on the face. That is also why the banks in Nigeria prefer to employ women as cashiers. They are partially correct for two reasons: (a) most women are not as greedy as men and have a deeper sense of shame than men; (b) most women are not bread winners for their families and therefore have no need to get money by corrupt means and mess up their reputations in their banks. But then some of the cashiers get caught with their fingers in the till. That does not mean that making most of the cashiers women is wrong. It only means that human beings, whether men or women are imperfect. There is also the view that human want is insatiable because the more we have the more we want.

    The reasons why elections are never perfect anywhere in the world are because human beings are imperfect and also because power is an addiction; anyone who has it wants to keep it and anyone who doesn’t have it wants it. That is why people who lose elections and accept their fate are respected globally. In Africa a sitting president in Liberia, George Weah accepted defeat without making any fuss. It happened in Ghana too. It is only once that it has happened in Nigeria. In 2015 a sitting president, Dr Goodluck Jonathan, accepted defeat and called Muhammadu Buhari to congratulate him. That is the first time that has happened in Nigeria. That is why Jonathan is treated like royalty anywhere he goes today.

     Nigeria’s elections are rigged by three sets of people: (a) some corrupt INEC officials (b) some desperate politicians (c) some hungry voters. INEC is a major but not the only culprit in the election process. They delay, and or divert election materials; they alter election figures; they void even votes that are genuine with the complicity of party agents; they find frivolous reasons to void some votes; they merge votes that belong to different parties and do a series of other magical things to favour their sponsors.

    However, the biggest election riggers are the politicians. They use anything and everything that can be used to seduce the potential voter: money, Ankara, rice, beans, motorcycles, bicycles, Keke Napep, smart phones, laptops etc. Anything that can lure people to vote for them is used. And in this era of poverty, money becomes the most prominent instrument for vote catching. And of course the major target of this expenditure is the voters, especially the poor voter who is not committed to any party or candidate. He is committed only to cash, cash with which he or she can cook afang or bitter-leaf soup with pounded yam.

    The Prof Uduk case took six years for a decision to be reached. This does not help our democracy. We need election tribunals that can decide election cases within months, not years. We must shorten the process. We must bring more offenders to justice; we must find more honest human beings to appoint as collation and returning officers in our elections; we must stand guard over our election results so that our votes count when they are counted. We must be honourable enough to accept defeat when we lose. We must not be bad losers. And when we win we must be humble. We must not be arrogant winners.

     We still have a long way to make our democracy close to perfect. That is a job to be performed by all of us who occupy the Office of the Citizen.

  • Merchant of mayhem

    Merchant of mayhem

    It is a ‘doom’ that was foretold, but America made its choice. Now the world, including a large segment of Americans, quakes from the tremor of his bullish swag. United States President Donald Trump is barely a month into his new term, but he has been a wrecking ball demolishing the global order as it was known, and stretching the constitutional borders of his own country’s governance model with imperial fiats. Call him the disruptor-in-chief and you wouldn’t be far off the mark.

    For a country that for ages was perceived as some refuge for all shades of fugitives excepting criminal ones, Trump came into office promising the largest deportations of  aliens the world has ever seen. He’s been making good on his word. Going by way of executive orders, he has seen to it that many thousands of migrants were airbused away from the ‘land of liberty’ in chains and dehumanised. No fewer than 3,690 Nigerians are marked for that treatment according to a document from the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency, which cited Nigeria as having the second largest African population facing deportation. Somalia has the highest number with 4,090 citizens, while Ghana holds the third place with 3,228 nationals.

    Trump says the crackdown is against illegal immigration, but there are indications he has his sight set on a much wider target including genuine asylum seekers. And he is pushing to bypass the niceties of judicial arbitration and due process for which his country is famed. After taking office on 20th January, he ordered U.S. military and immigration officials to be ready to implement the 1798 Alien Enemies Act – a World War II enactment he invoked ostensibly to deport without court hearings immigrants accused of crime. But only ostensibly, because while the Act offers a leeway for rapid deportation of migrants deemed part of an “invasion or predatory incursion,” it also provides potential cover to sweep in people not charged with any crime. The policy option is almost certainly headed for legal challenges, though.

    Not that Trump would be dissuaded by legal challenges. On the day he took the oath as the 47th US president, he signed a raft of executive orders including one that sought to revoke birthright citizenship for children of undocumented immigrants. Birthright citizenship is protected by the 14th Amendment and the executive order was temporarily blocked by a US federal judge who held it “blatantly unconstitutional.” But that hasn’t stopped the American leader from hardline policy drives. In a supercharged clampdown, he empowered immigration officials to raid hitherto insulated places like schools, churches and hospitals. Again, he has faced multiple contestations by civil and immigrant rights groups and will have to contend with overwhelmed immigration courts where asylum cases can take years to resolve. Court cases are being plied, only they simply can’t keep pace with Trump.

    Read Also: From Ghana’s “Koren Busia” to Nigeria’s “GhanaMust Go” to America’s “Remain in Mexico”

     Meanwhile, the American leader has expanded a fast-track deportation process known as ‘expedited removal.’ But this applies only to persons whose stay in the US is two years or under, and it still gives migrants an opening to pursue asylum. He is staging a more deliberate strategy, unlike his first term when he blocked entry by travelers from majority-Muslim countries and caused chaos in airports worldwide. That, perhaps, because he’s had a four-year hiatus to think through.

    Another front where Trump’s disruption has altered the historical American persona is global humanitarian aid. The new administration in Washington imposed an aid freeze and gutted the implementing arm, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) – pulling the curtains on decades of American ‘soft power’ through humanitarian intervention in needy nations across continents of the world including Africa. Just so we are clear, Nigeria used to be a beneficiary nation.

    United Nations (UN) records showed that the US accounted for about 47 percent of global aid, making it the largest provider of humanitarian assistance globally. Even then, American analysts noted that international humanitarian support constituted less than one percent of that country’s national budget. Since it was established by Congress in 1961, USAID “has brought lifesaving medicines, food. clean water, assistance for farmers, kept women and girls safe, promoted peace, and so much more over the decades, all for less than one percent of our federal budget,” Oxfam America President Abby Maxman was reported saying in a statement.

    Trump’s aid freeze is pulling the brakes on all that. Among others, there were reports of feeding programmes being shut down in places like war-ravaged Sudan, with food distribution elsewhere halted. Health services and support for medicare efforts like treatment of malaria, HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis have been pulled from many African nations, and that includes Nigeria where recent reports said these diseases are yet endemic. “Ending USAID as we know it would undo hard-earned gains in the fight against poverty and humanitarian crisis, and cause long-term, irreparable harm,” Maxman warned.

    But there may well be something to thank Trump for, because his brash tackle on historical American largesse is forcing nations like Nigeria to become responsibly responsive. The American aid freeze formed part of discussions at the meeting of the Federal Executive Council, last week, where the Bola Tinubu presidency approved N4.8billion to support HIV treatment in Nigeria. Health Minister Professor Muhammad Ali Pate told journalists that while government looked forward to continuing constructive relationship and partnership with the US, it was also looking inward to applying domestic financing and other sources of funding “to ensure that those who are in treatment do not lose the treatment that they are already on.”

    The Trump turbulence is rocking Americans themselves, like in agencies of the US government where bureaucrats are being knocked out of jobs in a cost-cutting drive as the new power in Washington claws back spending already approved by Congress. The turbulence is also buckling the world order and busting international trade pacts. Nowhere is the turbulence felt more fiercely, for instance, than in international trade where the American leader has declared serial tariff wars. Shortly after returning to the White House, he called a trade war with his country’s immediate neighbours – Canada on the northern border and Mexico to the south – as well as new superpower rival, China. He threatened a punishing 25 percent tariff on goods from Canada and Mexico allegedly for not strengthening their borders against influx of immigrants to the US, and for cross-border circulation of fentanyl – an illicit drug that reportedly has killed tens of millions of Americans. China was marked for additional 10 percent tariff on its goods for alleged unfair balance of trade. Those three countries are the top US trading partners, accounting for 40 percent of goods imported into the US last year.

    And that wasn’t all. Trump hinted the European Union (EU) could be next to face punishing tariffs after he gets done with Canada, Mexico and China. Speaking when he arrived into Maryland from Florida early last week, he said harsh tariffs on EU goods imported into the US could happen “pretty soon” because “they don’t take our cars, they don’t take our farm products, they take almost nothing and we take everything from them – millions of cars, tremendous amounts of food and farm products.”

    On their part, Canada, Mexico and China vowed swift and commensurate measures in retaliation to Trump’s tariffs if he went ahead. “It’s not what we want, but if he moves forward, we will also act,” Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau said while seeking to assure Washington that action was being taken to address concerns about the borders. The catch: if US imports from Canada and Mexico are hit with levies, it risks undermining Trump’s promise to bring down the cost of living for Americans. The tariffs he threatened were to take effect last Tuesday, but he announced pre-emptive reprieve, saying he’d won major concessions from the two countries. “As President, it is my responsibility to ensure the safety of ALL Americans, and I am doing just that,” he wrote on Truth Social after putting the tariffs on hold for 30 days to see how the “deals” play out.

    The latest whim of the American leader is the possibility of taking over Gaza Strip in the Middle-East and turning it into some high end seaside resort after relocating the about two million indigenous Palestinian population. The idea, which plays well into his land grab fancies and makes what Russia’s Vladimir Putin is doing in Ukraine look saintly, was aired when he hosted Israeli Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu in Washington last week. It was not an idle coincidence, obviously, that Netanyahu will be a chief enabler and conspirator in the territorial dispossession of Gazarians. At 78, Trump has proven the point that age isn’t a shackle. What is left is enshrining a reputation as the Bully of America.

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

  • Holocaust Remembrance Day versus the Slavery Heritage

    Holocaust Remembrance Day versus the Slavery Heritage

    The world set aside January 27 every year as International Holocaust Remembrance Day to remember one of the worst human tragedies of all times. The holocaust was a systematic genocide against European Jew population during the Second World War, carried out by the Nazi party of Germany as led by Adolph Hitler, the then chancellor and Fuhrer of Germany.

    To those who had never grasped the extent of the evil that was Nazi Germany and its hatred for Jews, the holocaust led to the persecution of about nine million Jews, leading to the forceful expulsion and relocation of hundreds of thousands from their homes into ghettos and the mass extermination of six million others, most of whom were innocent German, Polish and Russian Jews either rounded up and sent to forced labour camps to die from starvation, exhaustion, or used as guinea pigs for nefarious scientific experiments. Others were murdered in poisonous gas chambers and through mass shootings in several concentration camps across the German-occupied territories. These atrocities were against the back drop of the war in which Hitler and the Nazis sought to rule all of Europe and Russia in the quest for “living spaces” for the so-called “Aryan” race.

    The world has done better than condemn and halt the wrongful and evil persecution of the world population of Jews. The 1947 UN Partition Plan (Resolution 181) established the state of Israel, offering European Jews the option of being settled, rehabilitated and integrated in a homeland of their own.

    Till this date, I believe, the world community is still grappling with the high moral cost of creating modern Israel as millions of native Palestinians were displaced and the settler-colonial enterprise of successive governments of Israel has caused such atrocious conditions of civil rights and non-existent liberties for Palestinians that political activists the world over have called to question the assumption that the international community has treated all parties —sides— equally and fairly.

    It is often suggested that from surviving the pogrom through concerted global action, Jews in Israel have become the most privileged group of people in the world. The foreign aid and capital flowing into the Israeli military industrial complex and commercial economy dwarfed that of other countries of similar size and political importance by far. Currently, the U.S. provides approximately $3.8 billion annually to Israel, in a 10-year MOU signed in 2016, making her the largest cumulative recipient of U.S. foreign aid. It is estimated that since 1948 the US has provided over $158 billion in bilateral assistance to Israel in military aid, primarily. It suffices to say that Israel could take its friendship with European countries and America for granted, and it might have done exactly so on occasions without consequences.

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    To state the obvious, Israel’s right to be paid reparations —after the holocaust— in so many guises in past and current world scenarios is fully recognised, respected and evidently deferred to. Germany has paid reparations to Israel, under the 1952 Luxembourg Agreement, to the tune of over €70 billion till date. The last may not have been heard of further transfers. Nation states and races all over the world agree with the West that their sentiment of compassion and fair play towards Israel and its population is warranted. The global South has not begrudged Israel or its Jew population this privileged position.   

    What the global South and the rest of the world is dismayed over is, why has the conscience of the international community refused to bear on an equally monstrous case of evil and global injustice predating 1944? Before the holocaust, there was a horrendous culture of man’s inhumanity to man that was perpetrated on Africans. Millions of Africans were forcefully removed from their homes and transported to faraway lands acquired by the West for commercial plantations with which they grew the wealth of their empires. Slave masters owned slaves, use them for creating wealth to tend their future and the future of their generations, and killed them —the slaves—off according to their whims.

    How has such a horrendous case of injustice towards a well-known and easily identified people, perpetrated by subsisting circles of world influence and powers, been left unaddressed? Why has slavery, the dehumanisation of Africans for 300 years, remained a case of an African heritage? Why is the world not acknowledging the need to, first, have a day set aside to remember never to forget, like the day was allocated to remembering the holocaust?

    Why are Africans left to their means without the same level of compassionate interventions and reparations to prop their progress as a civilisation, knowing how much they were singularly targeted and dehumanized, killed in their millions, and traumatised out of their cultural depth. Their human essence was stolen from them for centuries, and the strongest of their youth castrated and used like common beasts of burden to grow the famed prosperity of the West.

    Let no one be mistaken, it is well acknowledged by renowned scholars the world over that the transatlantic slave trade and the holocaust have human cruelty and mass subjugation of the victim peoples in common. The two evils were similar in their severity of “dehumanisation, scale of suffering and global impact”. Yet, when the suffering, dehumanisation and intermittent genocide of over 300 years against Africans came to its slow and laborious end, freed slaves were segregated and scattered unceremoniously around the globe —of indiscriminate towns, cities, countries and continents— wherever the locals would endure them, without concerted heed to their need for protection or rehabilitation whatsoever. Exhausted bodies and traumatised souls were cut loose and pushed to go and fend for themselves in a world that had stripped them of dignity, personal relationships and left them and their forebears behind, materially and spiritually, for centuries.  

    There were attempts in the past to make reparations for Africans, for the suffering in slavery, a cogent international concern. To back up calls for action, international scholar, W.R. Brock (1970s), estimated the value of enslaved Africans exported during the transatlantic slave trade to be over $2.5 trillion in today’s dollars. “Africana Studies Scholars,” using the value of unpaid labour and the intergenerational wealth disparities, recommended reparations of between $10 and $15 trillion. During the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, South Africa, 2001, activists and scholars were of the view that the cumulative cost of the slave trade and its consequences is in hundreds of trillions of dollars, owed to Africans who bore the brunt of slavery. Caribbean Reparation Commission (2013) calculated reparations estimate of $777 billion for “slavery, genocide, and colonialism in the Caribbean”. Authur Ta-Nehisi Coates in his argument for reparations (2014) referenced economists who estimated that reparations for African Americans alone could amount to between six and $14 trillion.

    Late Chief MKO Abiola, of blessed memory, was shouting from the top of every roof his immense business and diplomatic clout provided him, and he was not shy of sounding hoarse on the topic of reparation for Africans as long as the attitude of those who should be accountable, who owed Africa the responsibility for redress, remained lukewarm. If the West, Europe and America, shelves its selective possession of ethical scruples and endeavour to quantify the stolen and misused human development capital from Africa during the years of slavery, pay a fraction of it back in reparation, Africa would stop being the poster child of global victimhood.

    The world needs to establish a day to remember never to forget slavery. It is not an African legacy. It was a culture of evil and shame that blighted humankind while it lasted; now, it is a global community problem how we allow the memory of that curse to shape the world’s restitution conduct towards Africa and Africans.

    We can all stop wondering why Africa is poor. As Walter Rodney’s book title “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa” suggested, our focus ought to have avoided all the distractions and stayed on primary point: what in God’s name are they —Europe and the collective West— ready to do about commensurate reparations for Africans? It is never too late to do the right thing.

    •Hon. (Engr.) David (Chief Whip, Lagos State House of Assembly) writes from Lagos.

  • From business to politics: The making of his footprints

    From business to politics: The making of his footprints

    • By Maxwell Uzochukwu

    It is often assumed that people born with the proverbial silver spoon absorb the system and rarely receive anything on merit. Yet, like most fallacies, such generalisations hardly stand up to scrutiny.

    For example, President Bola Tinubu’s first son, Seyi Tinubu, was made the ECOWAS Youth Ambassador for Entrepreneurship & Youth Development in 2019, when he was hardly in the public eye. One year later, he was inducted into the ECOWAS Youth Council in recognition of his contributions to entrepreneurship and youth development. These recognitions came years before his father became the President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria.

    Back to the beginning

    As far back as 2013, Seyi co-founded Loatsad Promomedia, an advertising company that has become a leader in Nigeria’s advertising industry. The company has since expanded its clientele to include some of Nigeria’s leading blue-chip and multinational companies. He achieved these accomplishments over a decade ago as an independent, resourceful and forward-thinking young man.

    Seyi also founded Red Dot Media, another advertising agency known for its creative marketing strategies. Any narrative knitted to portray someone with such accomplishments as a latter-day upstart lost in the woods of obscurity is misleading and often agenda-driven. Seyi began paying his dues and earning his stripes long before May 29, 2023.

    Leveraging goodwill, a global practice

    His career trajectory also encompasses significant achievements in real estate, advertising, and philanthropy.

    When he is not redefining the outdoor or out-of-home (OOH) advertising space in Nigeria, Seyi is involved in the real estate and property development sector, where he gained valuable experience in property development, management, and investment.

    Of course, he leveraged his goodwill to support his father’s presidential bid in 2023, but that was just as well. Attempts to stimulate or engage generational interest in civic responsibility are not new.

    President Donald Trump credited his son, Barron, with rallying Gen Z in his favour through podcasts and other social media interventions. Similarly, a US voter made the headlines by taking her two-year-old daughter to vote at the last presidential election, a cycle started by her mother when she was six.  

    At the height of the 2023 presidential election campaign, when his father’s closest allies either abandoned or betrayed him, Seyi walked where angels feared to tread, quietly pulling the strings backstage.

    Mountain and molehill

    He is an excellent youth mobiliser and has participated in various youth capacity-building programmes. However, since his father became president, his roles have been given a malicious political twist.

    Has Seyi been involved in his father’s administration? Yes. Does he participate in official visits and contribute to the welfare of people? Yes. But why would anyone assume he is involved in appointing key government officials?

    The only conceivable reason people would think he wields significant influence in government is the false assumption that he would stop being active in the sectors where he has been playing actively for over a decade – real estate and advertisement – and, especially, notable philanthropic endeavours which he has used to impact so many lives across the country.

    Passion for charity scaled up

    Before now, Seyi has followed his passion for charity and generosity. In 2020, for example, he launched an initiative to provide free eye screenings and surgical operations to Lagosians, reviving the spirit of his father’s 2001 “Jigi Bola” programme.

    His desire to help those in need grew after his father became president. If he had cut back on hard work and charity post-May 2023, critics would have said he probably said he lost his appetite after his father entered the Villa.    

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    In 2024, he provided monthly healthcare services to approximately 600,000 indigent patients and donated N500m to flood victims in Borno State in the same year.

    In their own words

    In a recent article published in ThisDay, Keem Abdul painted a much more introspective picture of the guy who happens to be the president’s son. The writer said that at first glance, Seyi might seem like nothing more than a child of privilege, a pampered prince trying to ride on the coattails of a famous and influential father into the corridors of power. But just like many others who have had an encounter with Seyi, the writer said, on close examination, there’s more to Seyi than meets the eye.

    “Seyi Tinubu harbours an unwavering commitment to ensuring positive change in Nigeria via the private sector (and in particular, the MSME ecosystem) as well as by empowering Nigeria’s millennial demographic towards achieving their full potential through entrepreneurship development, innovation, and sustainable ideas initiatives – such as the ones regularly facilitated by the Noella Foundation – the NGO he co-founded and runs with his wife, Layal. The foundation is focused on supporting tech startups and empowering young people,” Abdul wrote.

    As Faith Ajayi alluded to in an article before the 2023 presidential election, some people refer to Seyi as his father’s unofficial personal assistant. That shouldn’t be a problem for someone whose journey combines entrepreneurial success, civil engagement, and a commitment to philanthropy.

    Whether it positions him as a significant figure in Nigeria’s contemporary landscape (or not), Seyi’s accomplishments in those areas predate May 2023 and will outlive his current status.

    There are still new frontiers to conquer.

    • Maxwell Uzochukwu wrote from Lekki, Lagos.
  • A reading list for public servants and reform managers

    A reading list for public servants and reform managers

    • By Tunji Olaopa

    Since its inauguration many decades ago, public administration has generated a permanent discursive framework that ensures that it has the theoretical and practical contents to sustain the professionalism and efficiency that the public service requires to complement the state everywhere. This becomes even more critical given that the democratic imperative keeps articulating and aggregating the significant political preferences of a citizenry that knows what it wants from a leadership and its administrative apparatuses. This therefore means that for public administration to fully and adequately complement the democratic imperative—for the public service to optimally aid democratic governance in any state—the public administrative discourse must always be in full swing to ensure it is not outstripped by the discourse on democracy.

    This, I suspect, is not the real challenge. This is because the public administration discourse has remained fundamentally fecund in terms of its inner dynamics of responding to the challenges that confront public administration and the public service over the decades. From Max Weber to Woodrow Wilson, and from the new public management (NPM) to the new governance theory, public administration has kept up with the changing dynamics of the times that enables it to overcome critical hindrances and challenges from the first to the fourth industrial revolutions to the transformation of the nature of the state, and from artificial intelligences to the new normal instigated by the COVID-19 pandemic and the polycrises that have engulfed the world.

    The real challenge, I think, derives from the capacity of public servants to keep up their intelligence quotient with the vast array of discourses that public administration throws up. The twenty-first century demands a public servant that is knowledgeable, intelligent, adaptable and a transformative leader with the preemptive capacity to articulate a vision, design a strategy and get things done. This challenge to the intelligent quotient of the public servant, like most issues, is again more crucial once we begin to speak about the postcolonial public servant caught within the dysfunctional grip of a postcolonial public service like Nigeria’s. This puts a double bind on such a public servant to do more in order to be able to live up to the national and global expectations of a twenty-first century public servant charged with the fundamental responsibility of crafting and implementing public policies with the tools of modern decision science.

    One significant way, and a most difficult one at that, by which a postcolonial public servant and public manager in a country like Nigeria can keep abreast of the public administration discourse and the challenges of remaining effective sufficiently to man the new public service is to have an up-to-date reading list of books that embody the trajectories of the challenges, triumphs and directions of the public administration apparatuses, especially within a specific context. What I want to do within the limited space of this piece is to outline a few critical books that speak to how far public administration and the public service have advanced. And the methodology is to combine books that provide both a global and national perspectives. This speaks to the necessity of inserting a public manager within a global-local context of operation that ensures that such a public manager can think globally and act locally with the discursive resources garnered from such critical intellectual and theoretical-practical resources.

    The first book on my list is Zeger van der Wal’s The 21st Century Public Manager (2017). The book is fundamental because it is sufficiently situated in a time that captures the fundamental challenges of public administration in times of crisis (except that it is three years shy of one of the most fundamental challenges to humanity and public administration, the COVID-19 pandemic). However, the book recognizes that we live in a VUCA—volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous—time; a VUCA environment that that was aggravated by the pandemic and polycrisis the world, and public administration, is currently confronting.  The author was motivated to write a book that demonstrates that “public administration matters.” It is a book that was “hands-on, actor-driven, and speaking to the daily life of public managers who often operate in tough circumstances.” And with the book, the author meant to “speak to (aspiring) public managers across the globe. A book that would take their issues, pains, and challenges but also their optimism, clever solutions, and coping mechanisms as a starting point…. A book, above all, that would take senior practitioners seriously by providing them with examples, perspectives, and strategies grounded in the latest research evidence and best practices while being accessible and actor-driven at the same time. A book, lastly, that would be relevant and timely to public managers in the developing as well as the developed world, in the West and the non-West.”

    In chapter four, van der Wal enumerates what he calls the “seven clusters of demands, dilemmas and opportunities” that public managers need to think through to operate optimally within the VUCA administrative environment. The first demand is that of “managing stakeholder multiplicity.”

    The new governance space now carries the burden of a multitude of stakeholders with diverse and often ambiguous demands, attitudes and styles. The dilemma is how to design and deliver a coherent administrative and managerial vision to such a diverse audience. The opportunity however derives from the benefits of leveraging the unlimited channels and supports that come from such diverse audiences to push through policy goals. The second demand is “Managing authority turbulence.” This implies that an average public manager is caught within an authority matrix that limits her capacity to utilize her formal power to enact critical decisions. The dilemma for the public manager is that of how to demonstrate collaborative capacity, even with those lacking the requisite skills while still holding on to critical authority. And yet, there is the opportunity of shared accountability that comes from the collective ownership of policies and programmes. The third demand for the twenty-first century public manager is “managing the new work(force)”. The public manager is confronted with the changing nature of work itself, and with an emergent workforce that incorporates new workforce, new worldviews and new generations, from Gen Z to Generation Alpha. This new workforce consists of a young, educated, knowledgeable, tech-savvy and assertive citizenry with a mind of its own. The dilemma is that of how to accommodate this new idea of work(force) while pushing it efficiently to achieve service delivery. The opportunity comes from the ability to remove bureaucratic constraints while achieving performance and productivity.

    Read Also: LASPEC: why public servants should embark on data recapture

    The fourth demand is that of “managing innovation forces.” Innovation forces are the critical resources, especially innovative technologies, that a public manager requires to keep the public service system as optimal and efficient as possible. The challenge however is that of being as innovative and entrepreneurial as possible within the ambit of budgetary limitations and ambiguous expectations from the politicians and the public. The opportunity that faces the public manager is that of experimenting with newer and developing innovation to achieve effective policies. The fifth demand is “managing ethical complexities.” Public administration is now embroiled within a global ethical governance framework that is enhanced by digital technologies and the need for accountability and transparency. The public manager therefore faces pressure from politicians, citizens, global innovations, and so on. The challenge is that of how to manage the public service ethically while facing enormous scrutiny from multiple publics with competing value sets. The opportunity comes from leading ethically in ways that achieve bureaucratic legitimacy for the state. The sixth demand comes from “managing short versus long time horizons.” This situates the public manager within the need to respond to the need for short-term goals by politicians and long-term planning for overall institutional resilience. The opportunity is that of deploying scenario-building techniques and technologies to anticipate future challenges. The last demand is “managing cross-sectoral collaboration.” This is demanded by the new governance space that involves new and multiple stakeholders and non-state actors. The public manager needs to mediate this space to achieve extensive buy-in and ownership of ideas and policies, generate financial assistances and expertise, and tap into innovative ideas. The dilemma is how to balance this partnership while managing trust and power relations.

    In Reinventing Government: How the Entrepreneurial Spirit is Transforming the Public Sector (1992), David Osborne and Teed Gaebler make the critical case that government can follow the logic of performance that have transformed capitalist corporation into performing better and achieving more efficient productivity result. And to make government work more efficiently and productively, the authors argue that government needs to be reinvented through the sweeping away of all bureaucratic bottlenecks that had made government too cumbersome to achieve democratic governance. An entrepreneurial government, as they call it, envisions some broad social goals and objectives, put in place performance management systems that strategize about these objectives, and employ people to sign performance contract to achieve the goals. Osborne and Gaebler envision the responsibility of government as that of steering and not rowing; government’s responsibility is not to deliver services, but to articulate strategies that will enable the service delivery function to be outsourced to private contractors. Reinventing Government follows up on the managerial revolution brought about by the new public management and the objective of making government more flexible, lean and effective for the sake of performance. It demands that the public manager must be more than a thermostatic administrator who is merely gauging the institutional temperature of the public service. She must be more of a leader; a manager who anticipate challenges and coaxes the public service into more entrepreneurial and innovative performances.

    In the 2007 book, The End of Government…As We Know It: Making Public Policy Work, Elaine Kamarck takes on the thread of the need to rethink how government business should be pursued for better result. The end of government as we know it is the end of the idea of government circumscribed by a bureaucracy that encumbers government from performing. It is the end of the traditional Weberian framework of government and its deadweights of hierarchies and red tapes. In the post-bureaucratic state, argues Kamarck, government needs to get tools that will facilitate the right connection between policy design and implementation. These tools are categorized into three: reinvented government, government by network and government by market. All three are meant to get the public sector to work in ways that involve externalities and outsourcing modalities that enable government to achieve efficient performance. In its 2011 publication, The Future of Government, the World Economic Forum provides more recent contents that sum the institutional reform objective of bringing the idea of government up to the requirement of the twenty-first century. What the managerial revolution demands is that government must be FAST—flatter, agile, streamlined and tech-enabled. The traditional structure of the bureaucracy, being rigid, inward-looking and founded on outdated competencies, must be modernized in ways that make it more collaborative, transparent, flexible and participatory. In other words, government and its public service must reflect the demands articulated by van der Wal in The 21st Century Public Manager.

    The key issue that links all the preceding publication is that of public value that the new public service must create as a response to citizens’ informed demands. This is the focus of Mark H. Moore’s Creating Public Value (1995). In the book, Moore “sets out a philosophy of public management—an idea of what we citizens should expect of public managers, the ethical responsibilities they assume in taking offices, and what constitutes virtue in the execution of their offices.” Within the new managerial imagination, the public manager is more than an administrator who is supposed to look downward in terms of “the reliable control of organizational operations; she is rather meant to look outwards “towards the achievements of valuable results” or upwards “towards renegotiated policy mandates.” A public manager therefore becomes an explorer who is concerned with discovering, defining and producing public value.

    These preceding books and publications sum up the global dimension of the materials that ground the postcolonial public managers and the public servants, especially within the Nigerian public service system, within the demands of public administration as a universal endeavor concerned with what the government does and the paradigms, trajectories of discourses and methodologies by which government can become more efficient and more productive. However, this global managerial imagination must be reckoned within the context of the of the inherited public service system Britain bequeathed to Nigeria. In my inaugural lecture, Big Bad Bureaucracy: Reinventing the Bureaucracy as a New Public Service in Nigeria (2018), I took all these preceding books, as well as my many years as a critical insider in the dysfunctional pubic service system in Nigeria seriously. The publication therefore becomes a critical leeway into how the Nigerian civil service system, founded on the traditional Weberian institution, works in stimulating what I have called bureau-pathologies that have compromised the search for a workable developmental state in Nigeria, post-independence. And how an insider perspective could enable a proper understanding of what ails the system, what needed to be done and how to go about reinventing the government from an approach that is not just universal, like Osborne and Gaebler’s, or Kamarck’s or Moore’s; but one that is rooted in contextual administrative dynamics. This provides a situational context by which public managers in Nigeria could begin to relate to what these non-Nigerian administrative theorists are saying about the nature of government and the reinvented mandates of the public manager.

    This therefore makes even more fundamental the administrative memoir as a cogent introduction to how Nigerian public managers and public servants navigated the dysfunctionality of the postcolonial system while striving for a more efficient and optimal public service that will instigate developmental planning and democratic governance. Two of such memoirs are crucial, in my reckoning: Chief Simeon Adebo’s Our Unforgettable Years (1984) and Tunji Olaopa’s The Unending Quest for Reform (2023). Simeon Adebo represents a critical administrative figure in the emergence and consolidation of the public service and public administration discourse in Nigeria. He was one of the founding pioneers that ushered in what has been called the golden age of public administration in Nigeria. Indeed, his administrative commitment in the old western region led to the formulation of the Awolowo-Adebo paradigm of the politics-administration dichotomy, one of the defining dichotomies around which public administration emerged. Adebo’s public service reform efforts constitute a key framework for rethinking the institutional rehabilitating and reinvention of the civil service system in Nigeria.  On the other hand, The Unending Quest for Reform articulates a challenging reaction to the bureau-pathologies that ate up the civil service system after the pioneering efforts of Adebo and his cohorts unfortunately went into critical debilitation. The Unending Quest for Reform serves the function of outlining what I consider a philosophy of institutional reform founded on many years of not only participating in the dysfunction of the civil service system, but also researching its root causes and administrative and political trajectories from pre-independence to date.

    I am recommending these books—of course there are more—as the first level of challenging the intellectual acumen of any public manager who is willing to place herself within the VUCA and postcolonial environments of the public service in Nigeria, and dare to be critical sufficiently to become a significant part of the reinvention of the new public service as a world class institution for making democratic governance productive for Nigerians. It is best to end this reflection about public administration discourse and the books public servants could start reading with Pablo Neruda, the Chilean poet-diplomat and politician: “The books that help you most are those which make you think that most. The hardest way of learning is that of easy reading; but a great book that comes from a great thinker is a ship of thought, deep freighted with truth and beauty.”

    • Olaopa is a Professor of Public Administration & Chairman, Federal Civil Service Commission, Abuja               
  • Dar Es Salaam declaration and Tinubu’s quest to give Nigerian stable electricity

    Dar Es Salaam declaration and Tinubu’s quest to give Nigerian stable electricity

    • By Dada Olusegun

    Nigeria’s President, Bola Ahmed Tinubu left Abuja for Dar es Salaam, Tanzania on January 26th to attend the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit. His mission to Tanzania was straightforward – to further galvanise efforts, multilateral support and investments aimed at increasing electricity access to Nigerians. The Misson 300 initiative itself is aimed at expanding electricity access to 300 million people throughout Sub-Saharan Africa by 2030.

    Why is the Mission 300 Initiative important to Nigeria?

    To start with, Africa currently has over 600 million people who lack access to electricity, which is close to half of the population in the continent. Alarmingly, this figure represents 83% of the global electricity access deficit. Nigeria on its own has around 86 million people without access to electricity, making it the country with the highest number of people in the world without electricity access, followed closely by DR Congo. Therefore, any initiative whether global or regional with the objective to increase access to electricity to those without access needs to feature Nigeria.

    That Nigeria has this huge number of people without access to electricity is down to several systemic challenges bedevilling the power sector in Nigeria which revolve around grossly inadequate investment in the sector over several decades. However, President Bola Tinubu since his assumption of office in 2023 has stepped up efforts to ensure that the barriers holding down the power sector are gradually dismantled to pave the way for increased investments into the electricity value chain.

    Today, the federal government has put in place a legal framework known as the Electricity Act 2023 which has paved the way for the decentralisation of the power sector, allowing subnational governments to participate more in the electricity market regulation. Also, cost reflective tariffs have been applied to targeted consumers, which has made it more attractive for the private sector to invest more in the sector. The immediate result has been a drastic improvement in power supply to major load centres across the country.

    The Tinubu administration is also accelerating the implementation of the Siemens deal with phase 1 of the deal about to commence following the completion of the pilot phase. Both the pilot phase and phase 1 of the Siemens deal revolve around improving the wheeling capacity of the TCN and ensuring grid stability. This is essential for increased access to electricity by Nigerians. However, only the Siemens deal cannot in itself expand electricity access to unelectrified communities across the country. This is where the Mission 300 Initiative becomes very crucial to Nigeria’s power solution mix.

    What does Mission 300 offer Nigeria’s power sector?

    The Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit was not just a gathering of leaders of the participating countries but a critical platform for collaboration and commitment to unite efforts of countries and development partners to confront one of Africa’s most pressing challenges – access to energy. Heads of State from 12 African countries were part of the Dar es Salaam declaration which include Nigeria, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mauritania, Niger, Senegal, Tanzania, and Zambia.

    These countries together account for 301.7 million people without electricity representing around 50% of the global total. This is why international multilateral organisations such as the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank as well as donors/partners such as the Rockefeller Foundation decided to embark on this Mission 300 Initiative. The Dar es Salaam summit therefore provided a platform for African governments, the World Bank, AfDB, donor agencies and private sector players in the power sector to cement a powerful partnership that will deliver access to electricity to 300 million people in 2030.

    As part of Nigeria’s push to increase access to electricity for its citizens, President Tinubu at the summit listed some of the programmes for which funding approvals have already been secured by Nigeria from the World Bank Group and the AfDB. They include the following:

    1. $1.1 billion AfDB financing, which is expected to provide electricity for an additional 5 million people in Nigeria by the end of 2026.

    2. A $200 million commitment of AfDB in the Nigeria Electrification Project to provide electricity for 500,000 people by the end of 2025.

    3. A planned $700 million investment by the AfDB in the Nigeria Desert to Power programme.

    4. A planned $500 million facility by the AfDB to Nigeria for the Nigeria-Grid Battery Energy Storage System, which will provide electricity for an additional two million people.

    5. $750 million support from the World Bank for expanding Nigeria’s distributed energy access via mini-grids and standalone solar systems that will provide access to power to 16.2 million people.

    At the Tanzania Summit, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) equally announced that it has committed $70 million in private sector funding to five Nigerian Renewable Electricity Service Companies (RESCOs) under the Nigeria Distributed Access Through Renewable Energy Scale-Up (DARES) programme.

    Read Also: Ebonyi Reps member begs Tinubu to free IPOB leader Kanu

    Cumulatively, these financing commitments by the AfDB, the World Bank Group and IFC will result in access to electricity for at least 30 million Nigerians who currently lack access. This would be a very significant milestone in Nigeria’s quest to achieve universal access to electricity for all Nigerians by the end of this decade.

    Tinubu Unveiled Nigeria’s National Energy Compact

    During the Mission 300 Africa Energy Summit in Tanzania, President Bola Tinubu through the Minister of Power presented Nigeria’s National Energy Compact, underscoring the commitment of the Nigerian government to provide reliable, affordable and sustainable electricity to all of Nigeria’s unelectrified population by 2030. The Compact contained Nigeria’s Declaration of Commitment to the Mission 300 objectives, an overview of Nigeria’s energy sector highlighting the current status and challenges as well as a list of ongoing and committed projects in the electricity sector in Nigeria.

    A look at Annex 1 in the Compact shows 11 ongoing/committed projects being financed by Development Partners including the World Bank, AfDB, European Union and USAID. They include:

    1. Nigeria Power Sector Recovery Operations with a funding commitment of $1.5 billion from the World Bank.

    2. Nigeria Distribution Sector Recovery Program with a funding commitment of $500 million from the World Bank.

    3. The Electricity Transmission Project with $486 million in funding from the World Bank.

    4. Nigeria Energy Access and Clean Energy Transition Program funded by the World Bank with $5 million.

    5. Nigeria Electrification Project with $350 million funding from the World Bank.

    6. Nigeria Distributed Access Through Renewable Energy Scale-up with $750 million expected World Bank funding and $1.1 billion from the private sector. This particular project alone is expected to extend new electricity access via mini-grids and standalone solar systems to 16.2 million and improved access via interconnected mini-grids to about 1.3 million people.

    7. $200 million funding from AfDB for the Nigeria Electrification Project.

    8. $252 million in funding from the AfDB for phase 1 of the Nigeria Transmission Expansion Plan.

    9. The Nigeria Power Sector Program with $109 million in funding from USAID.

    10. The Empower Nigeria project to be funded by USAID with $75 million.

    11. The EU Solar for Health Program is expected to provide electricity connections to about 250 healthcare centres in Nigeria by the end of 2028.

    Apart from these ongoing/committed projects, the Nigeria Energy Compact also revealed a lot about where our electricity value chain currently stands. This is very crucial when it comes to planning reforms and setting targets and shows how serious President Bola Tinubu is to solving the electricity question. Below are some of Nigeria’s current reality in the electricity value chain:

    1. Nigeria has a grid generation installed capacity of 13,625MW out of which around 5,800MW is available.

    2. On average, 75% of this available grid generation capacity comes from thermal sources (gas) while 24.3% is from hydro with only 0.3% coming from solar. The energy transition objective of the Tinubu administration is to increase the amount of grid electricity generated from renewable sources especially hydro to at least 50% of total generation. This is where the Mambilla hydropower project comes in.

    3. In the transmission segment, Nigeria has 5,530km of 330KV transmission lines and 6,800km of 132KV transmission lines. Nigeria’s 330KV substations have a combined available transfer capacity of 10,994MVA while the 132KV substations have a combined available transfer capacity of 15,360MVA.

    4. In the distribution network, the total medium voltage lines in Nigeria is 12,300km while the low voltage lines that supply electricity to most end users are 224,838km in total.

    5. The average end-user tariff per kWh in Nigeria is N69/kWh.

    6. An estimated $1.5 billion was expended as an electricity subsidy in 2024 due to the absence of full cost-reflectivity in the electricity pricing. In 2025 however, the projected electricity subsidy spending is $600 million.

    7. There are 5.84 million metered electricity customers and 7.32 million unmetered customers.

    From the foregoing realities highlighted in the Compact, it is easier for the Nigerian government to make a correct diagnosis of the challenges preventing universal access to electricity in Nigeria and plan ways to bridge that gap. Liquidity issues have always been the major bottleneck in the power sector, which is in part due to the absence of cost-reflective tariffs across the board and partly due to the non-Metering of millions of electricity consumers leading to revenue loss. During a presentation on behalf of Nigeria, the Chief Technical Adviser to the Minister of Power, Adedayo Olowoniyi highlighted ongoing efforts to increase liquidity in the system through migrating more customers to Band A and fast-tracking Metering of all electricity customers to ensure better collection of revenue by the Discos.

    It is also on the back of these data sets that President Bola Tinubu announced during the summit that Nigeria will require an investment of $23.2 billion for last-mile electrification, including contributions from the public and private sectors. These targeted investments are not entirely for national grid electrification projects, a substantial portion involves off-grid solutions such as standalone solar projects that deliver affordable and renewable energy to many isolated rural communities in the north as well as mini-grids to serve some urban centres.

    One major thing that President Bola Tinubu’s trip to Tanzania has succeeded in doing is that for the first time in our recent history, it is crystal clear that Nigeria is vigorously pursuing a comprehensive mix of reforms and solutions to tackle our electricity quagmire and making the environment in the power sector more attractive to private sector-led investments. Crucially, development partners like the World Bank and the Africa Development Bank are also showing greater enthusiasm and willingness to finance many power projects in Nigeria. This has not always been so!

    • Dada is Special Assistant to President Tinubu on Digital Media
  • At 60: Is Fayemi slowing down or revving up?

    At 60: Is Fayemi slowing down or revving up?

    • By Segun Dipe

    All journeys have secret destinations for which the traveler is unaware. -Martin Buber_.

    Indeed, life has been kind to Dr John Kayode Fayemi, CON. The democracy in Nigeria is favourable to him too, as he clocks 60 years.

    The two-term governor of Ekiti State (2000-2014 and 2018-2022 respectively) was adequately compensated for the forefront role he played in wresting power from under the jackboots of the military dictators and restoring democracy back to Nigeria. His was a voice that counted in the pro-democracy years and his voice has not stopped counting still.

    Or so it seems. Not that the journey was smooth for him though. He won an election but was denied the victory for three and half gruesome years until the judiciary, which he put his trust in eventually paid off for him.

    He also was shoved out in a controversial election, four years later, only to return four years after and consolidated on the governorship position for the party, All Progressives Congress, APC, culminating in his handing over power to a successor from the same party for the first time in the history of Ekiti State.

    The second term of Dr Fayemi as governor was not only eventfull but peaked superbly.

    The Nigeria Governors’ Forum, NGF will not forget him for it, for that was the time Fayemi became the chairman and changed the face of the forum for good. Before the Fayemi chairmanship, the forum was the punching bag of the country’s critic.

    It was seen as the lap dog of the federal government and the bastion of political corruption in Nigeria.

    Fayemi changed all that for good, making the forum to engage in advocacy and setting a clear agenda to chart an independent path from that of the federal government.

    And as if to compensate him for changing the face of the NGF, Fayemi emerged the President of the Forum of Regions of Africa, FORAF, in September 2022, about a month he was to hand over the baton of governorship of Ekiti to his successor in office, Gov. Biodun Abayomi Oyebanji.

    The Forum brought together for the first time the Presidents of regions, counties and federal states of more than 20 African countries that have a second level of decentralised territorial government, including Nigeria, South Africa, Burkina Faso, Cameroon, Côte d’Ivoire, Kenya, Madagascar, Mali, Niger, etc.

    Turning 60 after having crossed such a reasonable threshold of success should therefore be a big deal.

    Read Also: Ekiti 2026: Fayemi endorses Oyebanji for second term

    It should be a momentous occasion that deserves to be celebrated with heartfelt words and back-patting amidst pomps and pageantry. It should be a time for deep reflection too.

    But, I bet, the likes of Fayemi will not see such as a reclining time.

    He won’t see it as a big deal or time to slow down.

    To him, 60 is a number that must be accounted for, just the way of other numbers.

    Be assured that Dr. Fayemi will prioritise a lecture on national discourse to be delivered in his honour more than clinking of glasses.

    After all, that is what he had devoted his quality years to, and it shouldn’t stop abruptly.

    Fayemi will trust the partying, jollification and social do to the organisational ability of his bosom wife and fellow traveller through the Odyssey of life.

    That is the motherly Erelu Bisi Adeleye-Fayemi.

    For Fayemi, the only thing that will count as people share the day with him is new experience.

    He has too much still in his heart and head for the country Nigeria, the continent of Africa and the entire globe to want to see 60 as his resting year.

    He is convinced he has not poured out enough regarding national development, he has not written half the books he intends to write.

    He still wants to storm life with more intellectual disposition.

    He is still busy searching for that yet unsaid words that he must say for things to turn around 360° positively for the betterment of his environment, especially his country Nigeria.

    In the words of Arthur Ashe, success is a journey, not a destination.

    The doing is often more important than the outcome.

    So, to answer the question as to whether Fayemi will be slowing down or revving up as he clocks 60 years, which is often associated with retirement and senior citizenship, we may need to compare him with a vehicle.

    Slowing down a vehicle involves braking, which converts kinetic energy into heat energy.

    Revving up a vehicle’s engine increases its speed while the car is stationary.

    In other words, whichever way Dr. Fayemi has chosen to celebrate his 60th sojourning years on Planet Earth, his energy remains intact and cannot wane even a bit.

    May he continue to find grace to fulfil his dreams of giving his best to life.

    Happy Birthday, Dr. John Kayode Fayemi, CON.

    May the lines continue to fall for you in pleasant places.

  • Climate Change: The global response to Trump’s climate stance

    Climate Change: The global response to Trump’s climate stance

    • By Adebayo Adeleye

    The election of Donald Trump as President of the United States has sparked widespread concern about the future of climate action. In this article, we’ll explore the trends around climate change during Trump’s presidency. Donald Trump’s first term presidency marked a significant shift in the United States’ stance on climate change. As a global leader, the US’s decisions on climate policy have far-reaching implications for the rest of the world. Trump’s stance on climate change has been well-documented, with him previously calling it a “hoax”.

    Trump’s administration took a decidedly anti-climate action stance, rolling back several key policies aimed at reducing greenhouse gas emissions. These included the cancellation of Barack Obama’s Climate Action Plan, the repeal of the Clean Power Plan, and the withdrawal from the Paris Agreement. However, despite these efforts, the impact of these rollbacks was limited by constitutional, regulatory, and political constraints.

    Due to the reduced commitment by the U.S to the Paris Agreement, global greenhouse gas emissions continued to rise during Trump’s presidency. The International Energy Agency (IEA) reported that carbon emissions from energy production increased by 1.7% in 2018, the largest increase in seven years. The IEA attributed this increase to growing energy demand and a lack of progress in transitioning to cleaner energy sources.

    But how has the rest of the world responded to his position on climate change?

    International Cooperation and Commitment: Despite Trump’s withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, many countries have reaffirmed their commitment to the accord. The European Union, China, and other nations have pledged to continue working towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions and transitioning to renewable energy sources. This commitment was evident at the COP29 climate conference in Baku, where representatives from nearly 200 countries gathered to discuss climate action.

    Leadership Vacuum and Opportunities: The Trump administration’s withdrawal from climate leadership has created a vacuum that other countries are eager to fill. China, in particular, has emerged as a key player in global climate politics, with its investments in renewable energy and green technology. Africa, too, has seen an opportunity to step up and fill the void left by the US presidency, with many African nations investing in renewable energy and sustainable development.

    Read Also: Climate change: ‘Why we’re empowering young champions’

    Climate Action at the Subnational Level: While the Trump administration has rolled back climate regulations, many US states and cities have continued to take action on climate change. California, for example, has set ambitious targets to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and has implemented policies to achieve them. This subnational action on climate change has helped to mitigate the impact of the Trump administration’s policies.

    Growth of Renewable Energy: On a positive note, the growth of renewable energy continued unabated during Trump’s presidency. In the US, wind and solar power capacity increased by 12% and 22%, respectively, in 2018. Globally, renewable energy capacity grew by 7% in 2018, with solar energy accounting for 55% of new capacity additions.

    The response of the rest of the world to Trump’s position on climate change has been clear: despite the US withdrawal from climate leadership, the global community remains committed to addressing the climate crisis. As experts have noted, “the climate crisis doesn’t care who is in the White House”. The world will continue to work towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions and transitioning to renewable energy sources, with or without US leadership.

    Conclusion: In conclusion, though Trump’s presidency has marked a significant setback for global climate action, notwithstanding the international community remained committed to addressing climate change. The growth of renewable energy and the continued commitment to the Paris Agreement are positive trends that suggest a more sustainable future is possible. As the world moves forward, it is essential to build on these trends and work towards a low-carbon future.

    Dr. Adebayo Matthew, Adeleye (Ph.D., Ibadan) Researcher on Environmental Pollution and Control

    badeleye@gmail.com  +234 803 525 6450

  • El-Rufai, Amaechi and the loose cannons of Nigeria’s politics

    El-Rufai, Amaechi and the loose cannons of Nigeria’s politics

    Nasir Ahmad el-Rufai and Chibuike Rotimi Amaechi, two influential figures in Nigerian politics, have been making headlines with their bold comments and actions. Their unconventional approach has sparked debate about whether they’re reckless loose cannons or calculated strategists. As Nigeria navigates its intricate political landscape, El-Rufai, Amaechi, and other key players will undoubtedly influence the country’s future.

    El-Rufai and Amaechi recent actions suggest opportunistic tendencies, raising important questions. With the government barely two years old, their intervention seems premature. Rather than a midterm review, their actions lack critical thinking and strategic analysis. As former governors and Federal Ministers, they are expected to offer a viable alternative solution and a roadmap to address Nigeria’s socioeconomic challenges.

    It’s a paradox that El-Rufai and Amaechi personify the contradictions of the Nigerian state, a fact that speaks volumes about the country’s complexities. Take, for instance, as gentlemen of significant means, they can afford to engage research assistants, pay consultants, or even establish think tanks. That they have failed to do so is not only an injustice to the country but also diminishes their own standing. Even in the best of times – and we are clearly not in the best of times – critical thinking and in-depth analysis are essential for guiding and guarding any government. This is what seasoned players like the former British Prime Minister Gordon Brown, former Presidents Barack Obama of the United States of America and Nelson Mandela of South Africa,, among others, in many countries of the world, are doing.

    Sadly, the state of our political discourse today is reflected in the petulance of El-Rufai and Amaechi. They exemplify a diminished polity where vituperation and divisive rhetoric have supplanted thoughtful analysis and in-depth evaluation. This is certainly unhelpful in view of the ongoing trade wars unleashed by the actions of President Donald Trump. The world is now in very turbulent waters and Nigerians have to navigate the unfolding drama. Scenario planning has to be done on the effects of what is going on beyond our shores and the Nigerian economy.

    Read Also: Amaechi, three others don’t want Tinubu’s government to succeed, Arewa youths allege

    Chief Obafemi Awolowo, Anthony Enahoro, Maitama Sule and Aminu Kano provided insightful, dissenting views that enriched public discourse during their time. Unfortunately, today’s political landscape is marred by the petulant outbursts of the likes of El-Rufai and Amaechi, which have replaced thoughtful analysis with vitriolic attacks. This trend is particularly concerning amidst the global economic uncertainty sparked by President Donald Trump’s trade wars. As the world navigates these turbulent times, Nigeria must develop strategic plans to mitigate the impact of external factors on its economy. Unfortunately, El-Rufai and Amaechi’s self-indulgence is unhelpful and must be discouraged.

    El-Rufai in particular has a history of making bold and sometimes divisive comments. For instance, his 2012 tweet threatened anyone who challenged the Fulani, an ethnic group, and his 2019 statement warned election observers who interfered with Nigeria’s election would be sent back in “body bags”, sparking outrage. Given his tendency to speak his mind, it’s surprising that El-Rufai accepted the president’s offer of a ministerial appointment. This raises questions about his true intentions: did he genuinely support Tinubu’s government, or would he have resigned if his nomination had been confirmed?

    Amaechi’s candid admission that the fear of poverty motivated him to join politics after graduating in 1987, and has kept him in the game, offers a revealing insight into the drivers of those in power. This revelation is particularly concerning, as it underscores the deep-seated dysfunction within Nigeria’s political system. In reality, politics should be a vocation, not a career.

    However, in Nigeria, politics has become a career path due to the country’s limited opportunities for economic advancement. This stunted political economy has led to a situation where individuals view politics as a means of personal gain rather than a calling to serve. Consequently, those who approach politics as a career often have limited expertise and a narrow perspective, which can hinder their effectiveness as administrators.

    The first generation of politicians, including Awolowo, Bode Thomas, Fani Kayode, Drs. M.A. Majekodunmi, Omotayo Omitowoju and Michael I. Oparah, brought a unique perspective to politics, having established themselves in their respective professions before entering public service. This background was evident in their thoughtful approach and impactful contributions.

    On the contrary, the 1966 coup marked a turning point, as many politicians returned to their pre-politics careers. Unfortunately, today’s political landscape is dominated by one-dimensional politicians lacking diverse career experiences and management expertise, with their policies and decisions twisting and turning like a barber’s chair, which is detrimental to Nigeria’s progress.

    Life, as the saying goes, is a complex chemistry experiment, and humans are the lab rats, constantly seeking the right mix of ingredients for a stable and fulfilling existence. In this laboratory, the ruling elite act as master chemists, manipulating power, privilege and ideology to maintain their grip on the state. They use propaganda, repression and allied wrong channels or tactics to preserve the status quo. The tragedy of Nigerian politics lies in the fact their statements often come across as provocative and overly broad. This approach can be alienating and unhelpful in finding solutions to the country’s challenges. Furthermore, it has led a situation where most of those who claim to be leading us “misappropriate, misapply, mislead and misdirect the electorate”.

    So, what’s the alternative chemistry of life? It’s a mixture of active citizenship and collective action. It’s a formula that recognizes the inherent value of every human being, regardless of his or her background, identity or socioeconomic status. It’s a chemistry that’s messy, unpredictable and sometimes explosive – but it’s also the only way to create a truly just and equitable society.

    Well, a time like this demands advice for the Bola Tinubu-led administration. To foster growth, the government should consult widely with individuals outside its echo chamber. This approach is reminiscent of former US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s strategy during the New Deal era in the 1930s. When the New Deal wasn’t yielding the desired results, Roosevelt sought multiple lenses, bringing in contrarians and individuals with opposing views. Although their insights were sometimes disagreeable, they proved invaluable and refreshing.

    A notable example of innovative policymaking is the establishment of the Small Businesses Administration, which inspired our own Small and Medium Enterprises Development Agency of Nigeria (SMEDAN). Interestingly, the idea for this game-changing initiative originated from a Letter to the Editor published in The Washington Post, written by an unknown lawyer from a small town. The letter highlighted the devastating impact of economic policies on small businesses nationwide. Recognizing the merit of the suggestions, the administration acted upon them, earning widespread acclaim and support for the government.

    The Tinubu administration can draw valuable lessons from the experience of Konrad Adenauer, Germany’s post-war Chancellor. Adenauer’s approach of actively seeking out contrarian views helped shape Germany’s remarkable economic recovery after World War II and transformed the country into Europe’s largest and most stable economic success story. Similarly, the Tinubu administration would do well to avoid the pitfalls of groupthink and a variety of viewpoints, rather than risking “imprisonment in an echo chamber” that can stifle progress.

    Effective time management and planning are also essential qualities of successful leaders. Again, Lee Kuan Yew’s ability to prioritize and implement policies drove Singapore’s success, while Mandela’s skillful time management enabled him to achieve great things despite adversity. In contrast, the failures of Saddam Hussein and Robert Mugabe to prioritize their countries’ needs and manage their time effectively led to widespread suffering and ultimately, their downfall.

    May the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world, grant us peace in Nigeria!