Category: Editorial

• By Dan Abubakar

Daily, we are faced with sundry manifestations of the gross impunity that rule the land in nearly every facet of governance and in the interaction of citizens with their institutions and even with one another. 

The deterioration has long been coming to a head such that the more brazen the flouting of basic rules and abuse of common decency, the greater the likelihood of getting away with it.

Indeed, so far have we descended the slippery slope of condoning – and being ruled by – criminality that it takes a very brave soul indeed to insist on things being done properly.

Like Mrs Maimuna Chionuma. After a quarter century of service at Union Homes Savings and Loans, she had her appointment as company secretary summarily terminated on March 20.  There was no board to approve this step as is required in her case being the Company Secretary duly appointed by a board. Even after having her appointment terminated precipitately, she was given a written warning not to divulge or disclose information pertaining to the company, not because she was bound by an oath (non-existent) to keep company secrets.  She was “threatened” with both civil and criminal actions against her, including reporting her to the Nigerian Bar Association, and that she could be summoned at any time to answer queries. All of which in its true sense is tantamount to a ‘gagging order.’

 For good measure, her persecutors – operatives of Aso Savings and Loans who had failed to consummate their takeover of Union Homes but had somehow browbeaten the regulatory authorities into believing otherwise – petitioned the police hierarchy and the DSS in Abuja that the lone Mrs Chionuma was planning to kill them!

 But in reality, she and her family were being trailed, with strange movements around her home, and she persistently received strange calls from unknown numbers even at odd hours of the day or night. As has become the case in Nigeria, money is at the root of the evil. 

What is the story? The Lagos State government, after a protracted legal case involving the demolition of shops and other facilities, agreed to pay N2.5 billion compensation to Union Homes and two other parties for the said demolition of their properties. The money rather than go to Union Homes through the agreed Trust Account provided in the consent judgement, was intercepted and illegally diverted by the operatives of Aso Savings and Loans who had failed to consummate their takeover of Union Homes and was never a party to the legal action that resulted in the compensation being awarded.

Why did the Lagos State government dole out such money to a body that was not party to the settlement? The Handling Solicitor, upon getting information that the compensation sum had been paid out, sent a petition to the Lagos State government demanding the reason for their paying the compensation to a third party. The Lagos State government quickly reached out to Aso requesting them to officially acknowledge receipt of the said compensation.

Realising the grave implications of their action, the Aso operatives insisted that Union Homes acknowledge receipt of the money and directed the Company Secretary of Union Homes to do so, a request which the Company secretary demurred since no such funds ever came to the coffers of the distressed institution. 

Rather than pay down depositors who are being owed about N23 billion, and serving and retired staffers eking out a miserable existence, 50% of the compensation in the sum of N1.250 billion, was said to have been paid to “political people” (presumably politicians who it was claimed facilitated the payment of the compensation by the Lagos State government). Another N75 million was said to have been paid as fees to consultants for supervising the sharing of the money to the “political people.” 

It gets curiouser and curiouser. From what was left, the powers that be at Aso decided to sequester N126 million as “reimbursement to Aso for legal fees.”  Magically, names of lawyers who were not in any court record as having participated in the legal process that culminated in the compensation being paid, suddenly appeared as beneficiaries.

No wonder the gag order on Mrs Chionuma. No wonder the perpetrators of what appears to be a brazen heist took the further step of petitioning the Police hierarchy in Abuja and the DSS alleging that Mrs Chionuma was planning to blackmail and kill them! 

She honoured their invitation to Abuja where she stated her case in detail to the consternation of the interlocutors at the two institutions who were evidently shocked at the chutzpah of the petitioners and therefore refused to act on the expectation to have her detained.

Earlier in the year – in what is now obviously a calculated move to intimidate – one of the principal figures in this episode tried to warn off Mrs Chionuma thus: “You can get away with anything in Nigeria. It depends on the language you speak, who you know and your sex.” And of course, on disposable cash to spread around the press, crooked cops and other enforcers.

One major question leaps out in this sordid saga. Where were the regulatory authorities, notably the CBN, SEC and NDIC? 

When Aso made a bid for Union Homes in 2015, the whole transaction (Transaction Implementation Agreement – TIA) was supposed to have been consummated within 90 days. To date that has not been done and which meant Union Homes and Aso remain two separate legal entities. But somehow Aso continued to successfully browbeat the regulatory authorities into believing that Union Homes had been subsumed under Aso.

Many of the ingredients that have brought Nigeria prostrate are present in this tale: corruption, abuse of office, flagrant flouting of rules, intimidation.

When the few abusers of our commonwealth engage in such impunity, the society suffers. Institutions are eroded, values are debased, systems fail and banditry results. In the case of Union Homes, many retired staffers who could not claim any benefits have suffered untold hardships, some have died. So have depositors to whom Mrs Chionuma and her colleagues were paying whatever little came in, thus bringing down the exposure from N29 billion in 2015/16 to about N23 billion as at 2022.

The devastated state of Nigeria today, with bandits in the bush and bandits in the corporate world, is a result of the moral failing of people in a position to say no. And unless there is a critical mass ready to do so, we will continue to have failed institutions and hucksters as leaders.

Sir: The alarm by the World Food Programme (WFP) that about two million children in the North-Eastern part of Nigeria are estimated to suffer from acute malnutrition, and cases have quadrupled to 700,000, gives cause for concern and must be heeded by the relevant authorities.
Northern Nigeria has the highest number of poor people in the country. It is the reason Nigeria is seen as the poverty capital of the world. Out of 133 million Nigerians living in multi-dimensional poverty, 90 million poor Nigerians are in the north. Sadly, there is a lot of hypocrisy among the political, traditional, and religious leaders in the region in seeking redress to this growing menace.
The problem of malnutrition in the North-East is so bad that we now read of cases of women who abandoned their infants to die, rather than watch them die of hunger. A case in point is the story of a woman in an Internally Displaced Persons (IDP) camp in Borno State. The IDP, Aishatu Muhammad, a heartbroken woman, had dumped her twin daughters because she had five children, and due to the dire symptoms of malnutrition, she had assumed they were dead and her motherly instinct could not hold on to the ‘corpses’ of her twins. Luckily, an 86-year-old kola nut seller had picked the babies to hospital where they were fed and cleaned up and seen to be alive.
Cases of malnutrition aren’t limited to the North-East alone. It encompasses the entire Northern Nigeria.  While it is true that this ugly phenomenon has been exacerbated by an insurgency that has raged for 14 years, it is equally true that there has been a lack of concerted effort by the leaders of the region at all levels to nip this monster in the bud.
Child marriages are a causative factor of this plague of malnutrition. No child-mother can be in a position economically to feed her child nutritious food. How can a child take care of another child successfully? Another causative factor is the failure of the various state governments in the region to educate the masses on the importance of family planning.
Malnutrition is a challenge requiring short, medium, and long-term solutions. Governments in the North-East should collaborate with NGOs and other global agencies to find solutions to malnutrition in their domains. They should stop behaving like the proverbial ostrich that buries its head in the sand hoping that the problem of malnutrition would suddenly vanish without any effort on their part.
•Peter Ovie Akus,  
akuspeter@gmail.com

• This is the only explanation for a man raping his woman friend’s eight-year-old daughter

It is an increasingly prevalent and familiar tale that illustrates the alarming rate of moral turpitude and ethical degeneration across the length and breadth of the Nigerian society. Hardly a day goes by now without an account on the news of the most repulsive acts of moral depravity that assault human decency, including rape of both elderly women and underaged girls, ritual murder for occult and pecuniary reasons and gruesome, utterly mindless and barbaric killings that defy reason.

In a recent occurrence of one of these acts that demonstrates the moral void in which Nigeria daily descends ever more steeply, a woman and her eight-year-old daughter have tested positive to HIV after the mother’s boyfriend, one Jude Ajeigbe, also known as Ijiegbe, reportedly raped the minor in their house in Delta State.

As a member of the Alegber community in Uvwie Local Government Area of Delta State told the police and the media, the suspect, who is a married man, is a boyfriend to the mother and had been squatting with both mother and daughter in their house. Unknown to the woman, Ajeigbe, who reportedly hails from Anambra State, had been having carnal knowledge of the little girl. Each time the mother went out for her daily rounds of hawking pap, the boyfriend would bath the little girl, have sex with her and threaten to kill her if anyone got to know of his nefarious act.

After some time, however, the woman began to notice unfamiliar changes in the girl’s behaviour in addition to odious discharges from her body. After intense questioning, the girl confessed that her mother’s boyfriend had raped her severally at various times. When confronted, the suspect fled the house and has since been declared wanted by the Delta State Police Command.

In the first place, it is difficult to fathom the depth of carelessness and irresponsibility of the woman. As a mother, how could she have left her vulnerable child to the predation of a man who is married but had left his family to hibernate in another woman’s house? If she had given the boyfriend shelter for the financial support he was giving her, it is unlikely that she would be engaged in the menial job of hawking pap daily while the man idled away in the house and took undue sexual advantage of her daughter.

In any case, it is hardly surprising that a woman who readily harboured a married man in her house without presumably caring about his abandonment of his family would be so careless as regards the security and safety of her daughter. What kind of moral example was she setting for the girl? Indeed, as a mother, she ought to have noticed psychological and physiological changes in the little girl immediately the boyfriend began sleeping with her without giving him the opportunity to repeatedly defile the minor before being discovered.

As it is now, most unfortunately, both the mother and daughter have tested positive for HIV while the boyfriend is on the run. Even when and if he is eventually apprehended as will hopefully be the case, he will be liable before the law for having carnal knowledge of a minor, but can it be proven conclusively that he was responsible for infecting mother and daughter with the virus? Suppose it is a situation for which both the mother and her boyfriend are responsible, with the little girl as an innocent victim?

The kind of sexual promiscuity embodied in this scenario is no doubt responsible for the high rate of sexually transmitted diseases in our society, not least the dreaded HIV/AIDS. One lesson from this incident is that, contrary to widespread perception, HIV/AIDS still poses a serious threat to public health in the country. From all indications, both the relevant health authorities at all levels and the general public have become complacent about the disease and abandoned all precautions such as use of condoms during sex and avoiding serial sexual partners once the initially high death rates from the infection began to decline as research on vaccines and treatments progressed. This is a wake-up call. HIV/AIDS is still alive and thriving and we must rediscover the discipline and restraint that the onset of the disease imposed on society.

We commend the human rights activist, Kelvin Ejumale, who made an entry of the incident with the police and has been following up on the search for the culprit after the matter was reported to him. We plead with the police to ensure that the suspect is apprehended wherever he is and prosecuted. We urge that priority be accorded to making HIV treatment regime available to both mother and child. The little girl in particular must not be deprived of her bright future as a result of this tragic experience.

• INEC’s ad hoc staff and others engaged for elections should be paid promptl

If truly a labourer deserves his wages, then there cannot be any justification for not paying the 3,138 Customs personnel who took part in the last general elections, about seven weeks after. The elections ended on March 18. The officers included customs assistants, assistant inspectors of customs, inspectors of customs, assistant superintendents of customs, deputy superintendents of customs, superintendents of customs and chief superintendents of customs, that were deployed nationwide to assist the Nigeria Police in the maintenance of peace and security during the elections. The list of the officers was contained in a document signed by M. Abba-Kura, acting Deputy Comptroller-General (E, I&I), for the Comptroller-General of Customs, dated February 8, 2023 and titled: ‘Re: Forwarding List of Officers Deployed for 2023 General Election Duties.’
A deputy superintendent of customs deployed to Kano State expressed dissatisfaction with the delay in payment of the allowances. “We still do not know what happened to our election allowances. It is almost two months now but we have not received any amount, and I can confidently tell you I have not heard of any customs officer that has received the allowance,” he said.
Spokesman of the Nigeria Customs Service, Abdullahi Aliyu Maiwada, confirmed the non-payment of election allowances to the officers across the country. He said efforts were being made to get the officers paid as soon as it is practically possible.
We are unhappy with this development.
All employees or labourers deserve to be paid their wages even before their sweat dries up. That is immediately after finishing their work. It is about two months since the elections were concluded, yet, some of the people who participated in making the process hitch-free are yet to be paid.
Ordinarily, the business of safeguarding the internal peace and security in the country is that of the Nigeria Police Force (NPF). But then, there is an acute shortage of policemen generally in the country. With about 370,000 officers and men, the country is grossly under-policed. The number falls far short of the recommendation of  the United Nations one police officer for every 450 citizens.
It was this manpower shortage in the police force that informed the deployment of other security agents to assist the force during the elections. For rendering such selfless service, they deserve to be paid their wages promptly. To delay the allowance as in this case is to discourage such personnel and this is bad for the future. When called upon next time for what ordinarily is a patriotic duty at election times, they would not be able to serve as diligently as they should.
We wonder why this is becoming a regular pattern when security agents serve on national assignments. Soldiers have had to protest non-payment of their allowances after engagements, policemen too complain regularly over such matters.
With specific regard to elections, this is not the first time that those who served the Independent National Electoral Commission (INEC) would have payment of their allowances delayed. National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) members who served as the commission’s ad hoc staff during elections had also experienced similar fate in the past. Reports also had it that some personnel of the Nigeria Immigration Service (NIS) who made similar complaints of non-payment of their allowance in March got paid only last month.
This should not be so.
After all, INEC already knew the number of such personnel it would require long before the elections. The commission ought to have made provision for them such that they would be paid immediately after concluding their assignments. So, what exactly is the problem? Is it that the cash is not available, or what? At least Godwin Emefiele, governor of the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN) assured INEC even during the Naira redesign and cash swap that witnessed serious cash flow problems in the country, that INEC should rest assured that it would have enough cash for the elections.
The customs officers’ case is further compounded by the fact that they claim not to know how much exactly they would be paid for the service. If this is true, it is also bad. Granted that the personnel involved should see the job as a patriotic duty to the country that they should cheerfully participate in even if with only a token of appreciation, their duties and expectations from the commission for the assignment ought to have been clearly spelt out at the point of engagement. To have done otherwise is not only unfair to the personnel concerned, it is also bad for accountability.
We appeal to the electoral commission to sort out this problem immediately. And it should not be for the customs personnel alone. If there are others who have not been paid for similar service to the commission, it should ensure that they are all paid forthwith. The beauty of such exercise is to get paid promptly to incentivise the participants and others who might be called upon to help in the process sometime in the future..

• This is a challenge requiring short, medium and long term solutions

The dethroned Emir of Kano and a former governor of Nigeria’s apex band, Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, who is equally the Spiritual Leader in the Tijanniya Sufi Order of Nigeria has been a strong advocate of the need to develop the human capital in the region, as a  catalyst for development. The Northern region of Nigeria has the highest number of poor people in the country and in a way is a main reason Nigeria is being seen as the poverty capital of the world.

Of the 133 million Nigerians living in multi-dimensional poverty, the North-West has 45.5m, North-East (20.5m) and North-central (20.2m). So, the Northern region has the lion’s share of 90 million out of 133 million poor Nigerians. We are as outraged as anyone who understands the impact of poverty on development. We understand that technology and all forms of global innovation have changed the world, but we also know that behind the global leap is the power of the human being that must be empowered for more and sustainable goals.

So, when the World Food Programme (WFP) raised the alarm that about two million children in the North-East part of Nigeria are projected to suffer acute malnutrition and cases of acute severe malnutrition have quadrupled to about 700,000, we must be cautious. This situation is dire and we feel that political, traditional and religious leaders in the region must be on red alert and map out urgent strategies to reverse the very sad trend.

One of the triggers of this tragic story was the story of a woman in an Internally displaced  (IDP) camp in Borno State, a state that has seen years of Boko Haram and all forms of insurgency attacks that have greatly impacted the socio-economic lives of the people and that of neighbouring states.  The IDP, Aishatu Muhammad, a heartbroken woman, had dumped her twin daughters because she had five children and due to the dire symptoms of malnutrition, she had assumed they were dead and her motherly instinct could not hold on to the ‘corpses’ of her twins. Luckily, an 86-year-old kola nut seller had picked the babies to hospital where they were fed and cleaned up and seen to be alive.

This is a metaphor for the whole of the Northern region. There is a level of planlessness that results in the situation where as many as two million children are faced with acute malnutrition. While we understand that the insurgency had displaced many families and driven some from their farms, there are other fundamental flaws in the development plan of not just the governors of the region but the Federal Government as well.

Child-marriages are very common in the North and no child-mother can be economically in a position to feed her children nutriciously if she survives pregnancy and labour. A child cannot mother another child and that is why most of them cannot even identify nutritious foods for growing children. Secondly, the governments never make efforts to re-orientate the people and teach families about planned reproductive health. In a culture where one man has an average of two wives who are often not economically empowered, it’s often difficult to provide for the resultant multiple children, especially without government support.

The North-East problem seems to be metamorphosing into the Niger Delta militancy problem where the society is producing too many embittered and socially traumatised children that turn out rebelling for the lack they grew with. There is the human instinct of survival and malnourished children are either mentally retarded or socially traumatised and as such form easy recruits for militancy or insurgency gangs. Part of parental grooming is the provision of materials and love in secure environment. Raising malnourished kids is a human bakery for social misfits when and if they survive.

The issues of sexual violence resulting from the Boko Haram attacks and other forms of insurgencies have heightened sexual violence on minors and adult women and children produced under this circumstance are often not in secure family environment and they strive to survive and not necessarily to contribute to development.

We therefore recommend that the governments of the concerned states should urgently collaborate with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and other global agencies like WFP to immediately find a solution to the malnourished children’s problem. They need assistance in the short term so they can grow into functional and productive humans that would guarantee our future, while the governments plan for medium and long term solutions. Health is wealth.

• Sunken societal morality underpins a brazen trend

Operatives of the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC) have apprehended some internet fraudsters in Enugu zone, including the proprietor of a ‘Yahoo Yahoo’ school and his students. ‘Yahoo yahoo’ is a Nigerian lingo for cybercrimes that hobble the digital space, with perpetrators having incurred a negative image on Nigeria before the international community.

A statement by the anti-graft agency early last week said no fewer than 18 suspected cyber fraudsters were nabbed by agents of the Enugu zonal command from different locations within the state. Among those arrested in a sting operation on May 1 were Chigozie Philips, who is the alleged founder of Holy Family School in Abakpa, Enugu State, where prospective cybercriminals were being trained.  Thirteen other suspects, who were his trainees, were also arrested. The EFCC statement said 20 mobile phones and two laptops were among items recovered from the persons arrested. “The suspects have made useful statements and will be charged to court as soon as investigation is concluded,” the statement by agency spokesperson Wilson Uwujaren added.

The arrests in Enugu came against the backdrop of similar exploits in recent history by the EFCC. About mid-last year, the anti-graft agency tackled down a 24-year-old proprietor of a cybercrimes academy in Lokogoma axis of the Federal Capital Territory, Abuja, along with 16 of his trainees aged between 16 and 27 years. Two cars (a Lexus Rx 350 and Toyota Highlander), laptops, smart phones and charms were among items recovered from them. Not long before that, EFCC staged a similar exploit in Eket, Akwa Ibom State, where 23 suspects including operators and trainees of a cyber fraud school were arrested by its operatives. The suspects aged between 19 and 35 years were undergoing training in various aspects of the internet fraud such as love scam, online trading scam and identity theft, among others.

The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC), sometime last year, reported that cybercrime remains one of the dangers of digital transformation in Nigeria and across the globe. According to the regulatory agency, developmental and socio-economic opportunities posed by a digitally literate population are enormous; but there are also severe risks entailed, especially with a youth unemployment rate estimated at about 45 percent by the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS). “We report that cybercrime alone, one of such risks, contributes to 0.08 percent of the (gross domestic product) loss at about $500million. Tax evasion, terrorism, and health and safety violations are other risks associated with an increasingly digitally literate, mobile dependent economy,” the commission said in its ‘Deployment of a Device Management System (DMS)’ document uploaded on its website. Other reports showed that yearly loss to cybercrime globally hit $6trillion at the end of 2021.

The domestic instrument Nigeria has in fighting the menace is the Cybercrime Act 2015, a law that designates certain computers, systems, networks and information infrastructure as critical national information infrastructure and prescribes the death penalty for extreme levels of violation. The law, for instance, prescribes various terms of imprisonment for internet fraudsters who hack computer systems. The Act also stipulates various terms of imprisonment for identity theft, cyberstalking and cyberbullying, cybersquatting, racist and xenophobic postings. The Cybercrime Act permits network operators to keep traffic data and subscriber information without necessarily violating individual privacy. It also prescribes lawful interception of electronic communication, among others. The provisions of the law, however, have not by themselves served a deterrence to cybercriminals as their rank appears to be swelling, to the point of being systematised with ‘yahoo yahoo’ schools.

It is unfortunate that some people prefer to promote cyber fraud academies where they could have established legitimate Information Technology (IT) institutions. This is sheer misapplication of entrepreneurial drive powered by digital skills. And the paradox of the latest burst by the EFCC is almost choking: ‘Holy Family School’ as name for a cybercrime academy! But it is also obvious that the trend is energised by how society idolises wealth, particularly illicit wealth. Two Nigerians – Obiwanne Okeke popularly known as Invictus Obi, and Ramon Olorunwa Abbas aka Hushpuppi – pulled the biggest internet heists in 2019 and 2020, respectively, and until tackled down by security operatives of other countries, they commanded cult following among relations and acquittances in their homeland and role-modelled for some youths. Societal morality has sunk so low that some mothers were in recent times reported staging a demonstration to get their children arrested for alleged internet fraud by security agents released. And it is the same factor that propels the ritualist dimension of cybercrime known as ‘Yahoo plus.’

There is need for drastic reset of the societal value system to elevate integrity and hard work above easy wealth. Besides, news of arrest of cyber fraud suspects isn’t enough; they must be brought relentlessly to justice to dissuade emulators.

Sir: It was quite shocking to read in The Guardian newspaper of April 25, 2023 that Nigeria spends as much as N2.04 trillion annually to combat malaria, but despite the colossal resources thousands of Nigerians are still dying of malaria.

Nigeria suffers the world’s greatest burden of malaria with approximately 51 million cases and 207,000 deaths reported yearly. Malaria remains a significant burden in Nigeria, particularly concerning pregnant women and children under the age of 5 years.

It could be deduced from the above that Malaria is not only a public health challenge, its direct and indirect impact on the economy cannot be overemphasised considering the health care expenditure as well as the attendant impact like waning productivity occasioned by illness and death. It also affects foreign investment and tourism significantly.

Some researchers have also corroborated the above exposition that malaria is not only a public health challenge, that its consequence on the economy is too distinctive to be ignored. In the Nigerian communities where malaria is endemic, the impacts are loss of resources, time, health of household members and, in worst cases, death. The researchers stressed further that 97% of Nigerians live under the risk of malaria and 76% in high transmission areas; 50% of the population estimated to have at least an episode of malaria yearly.

Malaria is caused by a parasite called Plasmodium. Anopheles mosquito is the vector that carries the Plasmodium parasite. The egg larva that metamorphosed to mosquito is found in waterlogged areas, gutters and broken bottles or in cans.

Some social thinkers have posited that the first stage of insanity is doing the same things the same ways over the years and expecting different results. If over the years colossal resources have been expended in combating malaria without commensurate results, is it not high time we re-strategised in our approach of intervention from curative to preventive for a better result?

It is an established fact that various mass housing initiatives to provide decent houses to Nigerians have always been a drop in the ocean or more effective in rhetoric than in practice. To this end, emphasis should be more on a preventive approach that factors the kind of habitation or environment that Nigerians live in. It is evident that poverty is a major factor in malaria prevention, and poor habitation is a function of poverty.

The more urban an area is, the lower the cases of malaria. Over 70% of Nigerians are poorly sheltered and as such many reside in waterlogged areas with blocked drainages. These are veritable sources of larva that eventually metamorphose into mosquitos.

On the above premise, if N500 billion i.e., about half of the N2.04 trillion is expended annually on construction of culverts and gutters in all communities nation-wide, it is expected that malaria cases would be reduced considerably.

The state and local governments should complement the Federal Government by being involved in development control. Their involvement in assisting and ensuring that individuals build standard gutters and drainage systems around their habitation would go a long way in reducing cases of malaria in the country.

The defunct sanitary inspectorate system should be resuscitated as well in all local government areas to ensure that Nigerians keep their environment clean.

With this preventive approach, there would be no place for anopheles mosquitoes to thrive and malaria cases would be reduced to a tolerable and inconsequential level.

•Remi Adeleke,

Suleja, Niger State

As soon as ex-president Olusegun Obasanjo of the Peoples Democratic Party (PDP) won Nigeria’s 1999 presidential election, he took charge of the levers of power, influencing and determining the direction of the emergent government and the concomitant politicking that would define the shape and texture of governance.

Obasanjo had a clear idea of what he wanted.  He predetermined the outcomes of the contests for the positions of presiding officers of the National Assembly because he was interested in who became the Senate President and the Speaker of the House of Representatives. 

The choice of the senate president was particularly much more engaging than that of the speaker.  Dr Chuba Okadigbo had emerged as the natural choice of senators-elect of the ruling PDP for the position of senate president.  In fact, in the pre-consultative meetings ahead of the inauguration of the National Assembly on June 3, 1999, the flamboyant politician from Oyi in Anambra State had been endorsed at the historic Agura Hotels, Abuja, meeting by the 66 senators-elect of the PDP as their candidate for the senate presidency.

Okadigbo looked good to clinch the seat.  But Obasanjo had a different plan which he was determined to push through.  He wanted a candidate who was not as independent-minded as Okadigbo; and, against the run of play, he propped up Evan(s) Enwerem, aka “mature”, from Imo State, as his pick for the position.  The retired general threw everything into the mix because the emergence of Enwerem instead of Okadigbo mattered more to him than any other consideration. 

 The number three position in the country was a big deal and whoever stepped in must be loyal and subservient to him. Obasanjo moved into the camp of the opposition AD-APP senators and effectively cornered all 43 senators-elect.  That was the first strategic step he took and thereafter moved into the PDP caucus in the senate to deplete their numbers. 

By the time the dust of the hotly contested race settled on June 3, 1999, on the floor of the Senate, the tide had turned against Okadigbo who had appeared surefooted that he was going to emerge as the senate president. Obasanjo had deployed intimidating presidential powers of patronage in the Senate to reverse the pre-election calculations and configuration in favour of Enwerem who received 66 votes (43 votes from the AD-APP caucus and 23 from the 66-member PDP caucus, whose endorsement Okadigbo had secured before the inauguration of the Senate) on the floor of the Senate as against Okadigbo’s 43 votes to emerge as the senate president.

The emergence of Enwerem unsettled not only the Senate but also the Fourth National Assembly because Obasanjo had replicated the same stunt that he pulled in the Senate in the House of Representatives where he had successfully pushed through the candidature of Salisu Buhari as Speaker.  Obasanjo ensured that the senate president and the speaker were his men although both Enwerem and Buhari lost their seats some months later due to perjury. 

 While the losses caused a permanent seismic shift in the House of Representatives where an independent-minded Ghali Umar Na’Abba emerged as Buhari’s successor and successfully finished his course, it was a game of musical chairs in the Senate as three senate presidents were turned over between 1999 and 2003, namely Enwerem, Okadigbo who succeeded him (Enwerem) and Anyim Pius Anyim who succeeded Okadigbo when he (Okadigbo) was removed by a coalition of opposition senators funded by Obasanjo’s presidency.

Although, I cannot specifically implicate the point of departure in the romance between Obasanjo’s presidency and Anyim’s senate presidency, one thing that remains a fact of history was that due to the strain in relationship, Anyim (an Ebonyi State senator) decided not to seek re-election to the Senate. He bowed out with the fourth senate. 

 Obasanjo had thus moved into the fifth national assembly to influence the emergence of Adolphus Wabara as senate president, who unfortunately lost his seat to some high-octane conspiracy by some southeast senators who were in bed with Obasanjo over the plot for possible tenure extension (third term agenda for Obasanjo).  Wabara was reasonably suspected to be interested in running for the presidency of Nigeria after his senate presidency.  He was implicated in a N50-million-bribe-for budget scandal for which Obasanjo, as president, made a national broadcast aired live on some television and radio stations. 

But unfortunately for Obasanjo, the man who succeeded Wabara, Senator Ken Nnamani, was an independent-minded character who espoused and expounded the imperativeness of legislative due process in the conduct of senate business especially the senate consideration of the proposed bill for tenure elongation (third term agenda) under the Obasanjo presidency.  Nnamani presided over the death of the proposed tenure elongation (third term) which Obasanjo was looking forward to profiting from.  Nnamani, like Anyim in 2003, decided not to seek re-election in 2007 because Obasanjo, who was smarting from the death of the third term agenda, was not going to allow him to return. 

The late President Umaru Yar’Adua, initially in the shadows of Obasanjo, inherited those Obasanjo facilitated their emergence. President Goodluck Jonathan maintained the status quo in the Senate with David Mark in 2011. He could not weigh in to reinforce support for the PDP anointed candidate, Mulikat Adeola, to emerge as speaker. She was defeated by Aminu Waziri Tambuwal in a grand conspiratorial alliance that fed on the support of opposition members in the House.

Fast forward to 2023. President-elect Bola Ahmed Tinubu matters in the ongoing scramble for the National Assembly presiding officers’ positions.  Precedents of presidential interest in the fostering of synergy with trusted loyalists or party faithful abound in historical contexts. Only President Muhammadu Buhari appeared then to be half-hearted about insisting on producing his men as senate president and speaker.  Recall the 2015 saga that saw Bukola Saraki and Yakubu Dogara emerge as senate president and speaker respectively.  Both were not the anointed or endorsed candidates of the party. 

Tinubu has demonstrated his strategic nature and mobilisational prowess in his presidency enterprise.  Such disposition ramifies his politics, and it is not going to be lacking this time around in the search for a senate president that he believes is reliable enough to synergise with him for his mandate deliverables.

And this is why Tinubu matters in the ongoing frenzy over the presiding officers’ race.  His endorsement is being sought. The party ‘s National Working Committee (NWC) last week could not settle the issue of zoning and announced it was going to consult with Tinubu as the president-elect to get his buy-in because at the end of the day, the buck stops with him as the President and Leader of the party.  This, indeed, is why Tinubu matters.

Tinubu knows what he wants and how to get it.  It may be convenient for some of those jostling for positions to drop his name; that is part of politics. Whereas, ordinarily, it is out of place to openly canvass support for any candidate in deference to the autonomy of the Legislature, Tinubu is, without a doubt, interested in who becomes the senate president and who becomes the speaker.  He has his head and heart in the enterprise. Although credible feelers have since resolved the possible zoning of the senate president’s position in favour of the South-South, what perhaps remains tentative and is liable to change is the candidate for the number three position: will it be Godswill Akpabio or Adams Oshiomhole who have consistently been mentioned in sundry reviews?  Again, this is where Tinubu matters.

It is in the place of the president-elect to decide who he thinks has the capacity, the mental and intellectual discipline, shared principles and values, historically deep political connection, and most importantly, reliability and loyalty to him over the years in the critical choice of who the cap fits.

These and other allied considerations should resolve Tinubu’s quiet support for either Akpabio or Oshiomhole.  Once that resolution is achieved, Tinubu knows what to do to covertly push through his preferred candidate.  This, indeed, is why the Jagaban Borgu matters in this entire rat race.  

•Ojeifo,  ojwonderngr@yahoo.com

Sir: The cry for justice by Mrs Oluwabukola Atobiloye over her husband, Inspector Taiye Atobiloye of the Oke-Onigbin Divisional Headquarters, Kwara State, who died in police custody, while on special assignment at Zone 8 Headquarters, Lokoja, which covers Kogi and Kwara states, deserves thorough investigation.

There are two sides to this tale. Mrs Atobiloye claimed her husband was killed by his colleagues, after he was extorted by senior officers, while trying to alter his posting for a special assignment, a posting that had originally been rejected by the officer who was initially assigned to it.

The police claimed the late inspector was picked up drunk and detained for dereliction of duty. While in custody, he became sick and was taken to the hospital, where he died.

It is commendable that the Inspector General of Police (IGP), Usman Alkali Baba, has ordered an investigation into the matter. To ensure impartiality, it is advisable that the investigation be carried out by police officers from other zonal commands. Using officers from Zone 8 Command to investigate this matter would definitely lead to conflict of interest and allegations of bias. 

The neglect of a sick person in custody is callous and inhuman. It beggars belief, especially when the deceased allegedly presented medical records to prove why he was unfit for the assignment and wanted a redeployment. That he was held incommunicado without access to his family members or a doctor even after he had started showing signs of ill-health, is the height of man’s inhumanity to man.

This issue has, yet again, brought to the fore the need for reforms in the Nigerian Police. There is a need to investigate the causes of bribery for posting, promotion, and other forms of preference. And how to put a stop to this ugly trend.

Also, the welfare of officers needs to be taken care of when they are posted on special assignment or essential duty. This should include adequate accommodation and prompt payment of allowances.

Refurbishment of cells where detainees are held has become imperative to prevent avoidable deaths. If the police can be this cruel to one of their own, what they would do to the common man is better imagined than experienced.

•Peter Ovie Akus,

akuspeter@gmail.com

Sir: We are writing to remind the governor of Lagos State, Mr Babajide Sanwo-Olu,  to urgently come to our aid at Isawo, Igboolomu and other communities in Ikorodu by completing the first phase of Isawo Road Project. 

The major problem of this road is the perennial overflow of Oke Afa river during the rainy season.

We made this call about this time last year by which time we had thought that the state government was going to at least complete the bridge over the river. But this was not done.

With the advent of the rains, which the Meteorological Agency has warned would be much, we are appealing to Governor Sanwo-Olu to kindly mobilise the contractor, HITECH, back to work and save the people of the various communities from this harrowing and very dangerous experience of wading through the flood that at times reaches the thighs. We cannot afford to wait until human lives are lost.

It is important to point out that the good citizens of the communities delivered and overwhelmingly voted for the All Progressives Congress party which culminated in the mandate for the second term of Mr Governor.

We believe that the listening and considerate governor will reciprocate this gesture by getting the contractor to, at least, as a matter of urgency, complete the bridge over Oke Afa river to ameliorate the suffering of the people and avert unwholesome incident that may arise should the current situation persist.

We are earnestly waiting for the intervention of the governor.

•Michael Adeyemi,

mikade83@yahoo.com