Methodist Church of Nigeria Prelate Samuel Kanu-Uche regained his freedom early last week, some 24 hours after he was kidnapped in Abia State along with two other principals of his church. He was abducted penultimate Sunday on Enugu-Port Harcourt Expressway, Umunneochi council area of the state, together with his chaplain, Very Rev. Abidemi Shittu, and Bishop of Owerri Rt. Rev. Dennis Mark.

At a press conference in Lagos on Tuesday, the clergyman made known that his release, along with that of other abductees, was secured upon his church paying N100million ransom to the abductors. Prelate Kanu-Uche recalled that he had a 4p.m. flight to catch and his team had set out for the airport at about 2p.m., but ran into an ambush by an eight-man gang of kidnappers. “As we were descending to Ileru in Abia State, they came out from the bush and divided themselves into three groups…They fired shots at our vehicle and eventually abducted three of us; the communication man of the church and the driver escaped. They took us into the bush and tortured us,” he said.

According to the prelate, the abductees were led on a trek of up to 15 kilometers into the bush by the kidnappers whose leader was about 35 years old. “Eventually at 11p.m., they said we should negotiate and each of us should pay N50million, making N150million.” He added that when he tried to reduce the ransom, the hoodlums threatened to shoot him. But they eventually agreed to peg the ransom at N100million, upon which he reached out to leaders of the church and his wife to raise the money by all means. The prelate stated that military personnel were located close to where the hoodlums operated and insinuated their complicity – a charge that has been rebuffed by the Army. “They (the kidnappers) pointed their guns at us, threatened that if we involved the DSS, Police or Army, they would kill us. They said further down was a gully containing seven decomposing bodies whose heads they had cut off. We ourselves perceived the odour of the bodies,” he recalled inter alia, saying the Methodist Church shortly after sent in the ransom raised by members.

Of course, it was unhelpful that ransom was paid, as that could incentivise kidnappers to further exploits. But the prelate’s narrative highlighted the lame disposition of the state security machinery in rescuing abductees, forcing them to help themselves by paying their way out of captivity. It was bad enough that the state failed in securing the environment sufficiently to avert kidnappings – in this case, concerning the head of a religious organisation having millions of members. It was worse that nearly 24 hours after the crime, the security machinery was not activated to track down the kidnappers and rescue the hostages.

Scenarios as this unavoidably suggest impotency of the state and condemnation of victims to self-help – a factor that makes the idea of criminalising ransom payment without commensurate guarantee of a secure environment, which is currently in the legislative mill, a ridiculous idea. Hostages of the recent Kaduna-Abuja rail service attack remain in terrorists’ captivity about 70 days on, with no indication their rescue by the state is imminent and relations of those hostages in deep agony because the terrorists are not negotiating with them and have insisted on dealing only with government. If they had the choice, many of the affected families would likely opt for paying their relations’ way out of captivity.

And sometimes, it isn’t very obvious why the hoodlums are difficult to track down. Ignore for the moment the obvious failure of proactive intelligence. Where kidnappers used the phone lines of victims to contact their relations – with security data like the National Identification Number (NIN) attached – it is curious why such calls could not be geolocated and the hoodlums swiftly pounced upon. There is a critical gap in the security set-up that needs to be plugged.

The International Monetary Fund (IMF) in its latest Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Economic Outlook report, would again highlight the elements that have become recurrent as to be only too familiar; yet nonetheless underscore the grave tragedy that has come to define the so-called largest economy on the continent. These are the broad issues of the national revenue, and, the management of the national debt – which the IMF aptly framed as the albatross of debt service, low revenue and fuel subsidy, but are more appropriately the derivatives of the crisis of governance – poor governance.

The summary as captured by IMF latest Sub-Saharan Africa Regional Economic Outlook report presented last week is that the country may be spending 100 per cent of its revenue on debt servicing by 2026. Currently, it spends 89 per cent of its revenue on debt. Added to this grim reality is low revenue, which the IMF’s Resident Representative for Nigeria, Ari Aisen, described as an ‘existential issue’ for Nigeria. He specifically mentioned the nation’s inability to take advantage of the current global high oil prices to build reserves; and then of course, the fuel subsidy payments, which at the current N500 billion monthly level is projected to hit a record N6 trillion by the end of the year. All of the above, he surmised, threatens to push the economy to cliff.

To be sure, in none of the above can Nigerians be fairly accused of either playing the ostrich or feigning indifference. Take for instance the issue of the fuel subsidy now said to constitute an albatross on the economy. Long before the problem was allowed to metastasise, and perhaps long before the IMF woke up to that realisation, Nigerians are on record to have spoken loud and clear on the need not just for the government to fix the nation’s four refineries but also to expand the refining capacity; ditto the ancillary infrastructure that serviced the national fuel distribution system on which the nation had heavily invested.

Of course, successive administrations, for reasons best known to them, chose to do nothing until the ensuing disruption and subsequent collapse of the entire system left the space open to rentier fuel merchants and transporters to run the show. Clearly, if we expected the Muhammadu Buhari administration with its promise of a new broom to cleanse the sector to make a difference, things would appear to have gotten worse with the subsidy burden growing in leaps and bounds in the aftermath of the recovery of oil prices. Now, the administration needs a whopping N6 trillion to subsidise the price of fuel in this year’s budget alone. But sadly, it is not just the burden of subsidy that is proving too high to bear; the massive, industrial-scale theft of crude, whose cost to the treasury, according to the Nigerian Upstream Regulatory Commission (NUPRC) is put at $3.27 billion annually has, under the Buhari administration, also proven nigh impossible to crack, hence the embarrassing situation in which OPEC’s supposed fifth largest oil producer is unable to meet its modest 1.8 million barrels per day quota.

We do understand where the IMF is coming from. Unfortunately, raising the alarm on issues that are at best symptoms of problems that are deeper and are of a more fundamental nature, which the IMF routinely does, merely begs the issue. Now that it has spoken, it seems about time it also learns to pay attention to the concerns of Nigerians.

To begin with, will there ever be an end to the fuel price spiral after the subsidy removal, given that the twin factors of high oil prices and shrinking naira value at the heart of the costs are beyond Nigeria’s control? Will this not further compound the woes of businesses at a time the cost of energy and other operating costs are already at a choking point?  What about the impact on inflation, unemployment and ultimately the level of poverty? And then of course the other grim possibility – recession – already a major issue in the more developed economies said to be inextricably linked to the high oil prices. Did the IMF factor this in too?

These issues, far from being academic, are some of the concerns that Nigerians have spoken about; needless to state that the issues are such that would require far more than the scare-mongering statistics of the IMF to assuage. In the circumstance, we can only urge the Federal Government to tread with utmost caution.

We are worried that the profit earnings of leading banks in the country do not reflect the state of Nigeria’s economy. While the economy grew at about 3.11 percent in the first quarter of 2022, leading banks in the country, according to the Vanguard Newspaper report have about 24.7 percent and 18.6 percent growth in revenue and profits, respectively, within the same period. Yet, the banks’ financial wellbeing is supposed to reflect the economic health of the nation.

Perhaps the banks are more interested in profiteering from the economic challenges facing the country than helping the nation’s economic development. The banks reviewed by the report include First Bank (FBN Holdings Plc), Zenith Bank Plc, United Bank for Africa (UBA) Plc, Guaranty Trust Holdings (GTCO) Plc, Stanbic IBTC Holdings Plc, Access Holdings Plc, Fidelity Bank Plc, Union Bank of Nigeria (UBN) Plc, Wema Bank Plc, Jaiz Bank Plc, Sterling Bank Plc, FCMB Group Plc and Ecobank Transnational Incorporated (ETI) Unity Bank Plc.

According to the report, the banks recorded a combined N371.9 billion in pre-tax, an 18.6 percent increase, compared to over N313.5 billion posted in first quarter of 2021. Comparatively, the Nigerian economy, according the National Bureau of Statistics grew at 0.51 percent in the first quarter of 2021, and 5.01 percent in the second quarter. In the entire 2021, the national economy grew at 3.40 percent, which was the best since 2014.

While it will be unfair to blame only the banks for the poor growth rate of the economy, it is strange that while the banks’ profits are growing astronomically, the nation’s economy is doddering. We consider it an abuse of the economic intermediation role of the banks, for them to be mercantilist, without development in their philosophy. Ordinarily, their growth rate is supposed to come from the return on loan facilities given to customers, but rather, they keep their monies in their vaults, and seek duplicitous means to earn income from customers.

Without engaging in economic activities, banks levy customers all manner of charges, which the Central Bank frowns at sometimes. It is because the banks make huge profits from such distortions that they are not interested in giving loan for real economic activities, which bear elements of risk. The banks engage in such excess and fraudulent charges because they know that most customers would not follow the tedious process of getting redress either from the courts or the Central Bank.

It is because the commercial banks are not willing to play their role that the Central Bank engages in all manner of interventions, to make loans available for economic operators. Of course, the apex bank, not being well positioned to engage in direct lending to retail customers, still relies on the unwilling banks to give out the loans and recover them. The result has been huge gaps in the performance of those loans, since the monies are not owned by the intermediary banks.

Again in their unwholesome determination to earn higher profits, most banks engage temporary staff to do the work of permanent staff. Disregarding the huge risks involved in such unfair business practice, the banks’ only interest is increase in the bottom-line. It is also sad that despite the huge earnings in profits, the banks’ Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) is pathetically disappointing. The huge profits ordinarily should reflect in scholarships, research grants, community-based projects, but instead, the reverse is the case.

If the nation’s economy is to grow as the banks’ earnings are doing, the government must use policy measures to force the banks to direct their attention to the real sector. Such a policy will also benefit the banks in the long run, as they cannot survive in isolation.

The story of Nigerian politics is not only that of failure to raise the level of the governance and the moral architecture of the people. But they also do it with brazen indifference. And we saw that in the just-concluded primaries of the People’s Democratic Party (PDP), and how the partisans of the party cried over what has been added into the language of our society: monetisation. Not that it is new. But that the political society has managed to raise the bar of infamy.

Its effect has spread to the larger society. Manufacturers have complained that the new cycle of politicking is damaging the value of the Naira because the politicians are mopping up foreign currencies. The Nigerian currency has never had a good time in the past five decades. We have witnessed its descent, sometimes slowly, sometimes precipitously. But since its decline began, which was first announced in the 1980’s as a fall from parity with the dollar to four Naira to the American currency, it has never known a real pirouette. What politicians are doing in this season is to preside over an unprecedented collapse. In the parallel market, otherwise known as black market, it now converts for at least N610 to a dollar.

They have gone to the banks and collected all that they could muster. They had always left there when there is none left, and collected from the bureaux de change or BDCs. When neither works, they go to the black market. In any direction, the currency is taking a beating. But it is the Nigerian fortune that is taking a beating.

“Most BDC operators have been under intense pressure from some of the political aspirants who have been using their fronts to buy up forex from every channel possible, including the black market,” commented an operator who spoke to this newspaper.

There were problems with the disparity between the official exchange rate and the parallel market, and some unscrupulous persons have been buying from the official quarters and selling to the parallel and, by that, they have created a parallel economy.

The runup to the PDP primaries in the centre and the other primaries of the major parties, including the All Progressives Congress (APC), at the governorship and legislative levels, were not innocent of this sordid trend. To snap up national offices, the governorship aspirants flew from state to state, met party chieftains and brokered with delegates. Brokering was not about selling any agenda, or about the charm of ideas. It was more of the seduction of the pocket. The delegates fell like whores, and they celebrated their new status as the tainted brides of democracy.

It is a paradox that politicians are amassing in political parties as platforms to sell their visions to Nigerians. One of the visions is to soften the blow of the harsh times. Yet what the fall of the Naira portends is not flattering to dinner tables. It is sad because we have gone through this story before. In the last political cycle, we witnessed the fall of the Naira, and when the campaigns heated up, the opposition and the ruling parties promised to save the currency. The only thing they saved was their private prosperity. The average Nigerian continued to suffer the fall of their standards of living. The costs of major food items have jumped steeply, including rice, tomatoes, yams, pepper, cooking oil, et al. Indeed, the price of bread is not only the consumers’ nightmare, it has become the baker’s worry. The ingredients are now too scarce for the baker to keep down the price.

The politician buys up forex to win elections in an act of corruption that ultimately damages the common citizen.

Nigerians who are disillusioned over the corruption scandals rocking the office of the Accountant-General of the Federation (AGF) and some ex-governors would oppose the proposed nine percent  tax on phone calls for healthcare. They would argue that the political elites harness such resources and go ahead to embezzle them. They would point at the failures of similar fit-for-purpose taxes like the TETFUND for tertiary education, and toll-gate and petroleum taxes to fix the roads, which have not achieved the purposes they were set up for.

Section 26(1)(c) of the National Health Insurance Authority Law, signed into law by President Muhammadu Buhari, provides the source of money for the Vulnerable Group Fund to include “telecommunications tax, not less than one kobo per second of GSM calls”. The law defines the vulnerable group as children under five, pregnant women, the aged, physically and mentally challenged persons, and the indigent “as may be defined from time to time”.

According to experts, considering the volume of calls made by Nigerians, the new telecommunication law will generate about N90.49bn. That is a huge sum, which if well utilised will alleviate the health access for the vulnerable members of the society. So, we support the proposed taxation, knowing that if it is well managed, it could alleviate the embarrassing state of public health care in Nigeria. Like other Nigerians, we consider it embarrassing that citizens affected by serious ailments have to go begging in the public media before they can get some succour.

Such embarrassing helplessness affects even those who were considered welloff in the past. There are also many who suffer from ailments which require huge resources to either cure or manage, like cancer, and such persons, even if rich, become vulnerable after few months of expensive treatment. There is also the need for resources to rehabilitate the poor health infrastructure across the country.

While regrettably, past investments by present and previous governments have not yielded much result, it is absolutely necessary that the secondary and tertiary public health facilities are rehabilitated, since most Nigerians cannot afford private hospitals when afflicted by certain types of ailment. So, such a tax, if well harnessed, will enable the vulnerable pay for health treatment which in turn will aid the equipping of hospitals across the country.

The proposed tax can also stem the outflow of scarce foreign exchange. For as long as our local health facility is in poor shape, privileged Nigerians in public and private sectors would continue to pile pressure on the foreign exchange, in their desperation to access foreign medical treatment. The ordinary Nigerians suffer a double whammy, when public officials neglect local hospitals and take from the scarce national resources to travel abroad to treat themselves.

Furthermore, the poor state of health facilities encourage brain drain that is further depleting the human resource in public health. With poor medical infrastructure, highly trained medical personnel seek professional fulfilment outside the country. If access by the vulnerable is enhanced and the medical infrastructure is improved, Nigeria may return to the era where Africans and non-Africans come to Nigeria for medical tourism.

Of course a healthy nation is a wealthy nation. If the vulnerable citizens could have easier access, then the majority would be in good health of mind and body. Such a healthy population would improve the gross domestic product and that would impact on security and other challenges currently facing the country. An improved access would also affect child mortality rate and life expectancy.

Indeed, the overall impact of such taxation for the vulnerable members of the society cannot be quantified. Even the telecommunication operators who oppose the taxation would be satiated if the harnessed resources are used to achieve the desired result.

Edo State legislative history continues to take a bad turn, not only for how we as a country define democracy, but to what odds we pursue our ends. For a long time, the nation focused on the misnomer of governor who would not let the legislature work because of a chamber that he would not build. As the last term of the state lawmakers comes to an end, about half of those elected would not perform their constitutional roles because of a chief executive who acts like an entitled royal in a democracy.

But a new chapter inked that story into infamy when a faction of the governor’s party, the People’s Democratic Party, (PDP) held its own primaries. A team of the vigilante group of Edo State and the police arrested three journalists who showed up to cover the political event. The arrested journalists included Deborah Coker of the News Agency of Nigeria (NAN), Sunny Inarumen of African Independent Television (AIT) and Osamuyi Ogbomo, a cameraman with the Independent Television.

According to Inarumen, “we were in the venue of the primary election when armed men entered the place and started shooting and forced us into their vehicle and drove us to the police station. They were asking us why we went to cover an illegal gathering.”

The security folks called the factional primaries illegal, and so it was wrong for the journalists to document it for history.

This is so wrong. In the first case, it is not the duty of the police or any vigilante group to dabble into partisan quarrels. There is no legal authority that justifies arresting a journalist for covering an event, whether legal or illegal. Even if an event is illegal, it is legal for a journalist to cover it. It is news, and even more so if it is illegal.

As it is said in the profession, if it bleeds, it is news. When it is routine, it makes little value even to the reader.

In fact, if it is illegal, the reporter puts all the facts they can muster to the armoury of the law enforcement agent with which to prosecute the culprits. When there are no facts, there are no cases, and even the violator can go free.

Again, there is no evidence that what the state vigilante and police regarded as illegal was actually illegal because there was no court pronouncement to that effect. In fact, when the parallel primaries of Governor Godwin Obaseki and Dan Orbih took place, reports had it that the Orbih faction, which the security men called illegal, had PDP logos on their ballot while Obaseki’s faction performed theirs on mere pieces of paper.

For the security men to arrest the journalists was an act of impunity and abuse of their uniforms and sacred offices.

They were whisked from the venue near Airport Gate to Oko Central Police station. It was a primary for the Edo south senatorial district. They were eventually released but the officers damaged the journalists psychologically and did that under the cover of the law. Obaseki’s faction held theirs at the Ogbe Stadium unperturbed by the law.

Governor Obaseki has not issued a statement to condemn the arrests. Neither has he even shown any empathy to the professionals working as citizens under him. It is therefore unacceptable that a man whose duty is to secure his citizens would allow such impunity under his watch.

Few would be wrong to deduce that Governor Obaseki accepted the primaries with a wink and a nod since he was at ease when three innocent professionals languished under detention.

Another incident of airport security breach occurred penultimate week when a mangled human corpse was found on Runway 18R of the Murtala Muhammed International Airport (MMIA) in Lagos. The discovery necessitated a temporary shutdown of the runway, which serves international flights and domestic flights at night, to clear off the human remains. During the shutdown that lasted some two and half hours, international flights were prevented from landing or taking off from the international terminal.

Reports said airport operations staff found the remains of a man around the cargo area. The identity of the man could not be ascertained  and there were suspicions he may have been knocked down by the wingspan or undercarriage of an aircraft taking off or landing on the runway. Other sources speculated he could be a stowaway, but it was generally agreed it was premature to draw any conclusion ahead of investigation by relevant authorities. A team of officials of the Federal Airports Authority of Nigeria (FAAN) and the Nigeria Police evacuated the corpse from the runway while the temporary shutdown lasted. Security operatives drawn from the police, Department of State Service (DSS) and Aviation Security (AVSEC) were said to be investigating the man’s identity and how he got into the highly restricted area of the airport.

Airport authorities confirmed that the human remains were discovered during routine runway inspection by FAAN personnel. The agency’s acting General Manager, Corporate Affairs, Mrs. Faithful Hope-Ivbaze, said security agencies were seeking information that would reveal the identity of the dead man found on Runway 18R/36L penultimate Thursday, 19th May. She explained in a statement that a motorised cleaner employed to carry out “derruberization and sweeping of the runway” discovered the remains at about 0106hours, and escalated the situation to relevant departments. “As a result, between 0110 and 0343hours, the runway was temporarily closed to allow for immediate evacuation of the remains. Flight operations resumed at 0343 hours. Investigations are ongoing, and a report will be issued accordingly,” the statement added.

Aviation security experts berated the security lapse that allowed for repeated encroachment on restricted areas of the Lagos airport by intruders. Since no organisation operating at the airport reported any of their personnel missing, it was likely the dead man was an intruder, not airport worker. In any event, it shouldn’t be difficult to identify a worker if he was wearing his agency’s uniform and On-Duty-Card as required. So, the security puzzle was how an intruder got into the airport’s restricted area.

And it wasn’t that the incident was a one-off thing. Late in December, last year, an accident was averted at the airside of the Murtala Muhammed Airport in Lagos when a speeding vehicle had near-collision with a Dana Air plane taxiing to take off on Runway 18L. That incident occurred barely one week after a landing Max Air jet almost rammed into a malfunctioning car being tested on  Runway 18L. In December 2019, there was pandemonium when an unidentified man sneaked into the airside of the airport and climbed onto a moving Air Peace plane. The man was arrested by security operatives who were alerted by the pilot of a private jet coming behind the Air Peace plane. Some six months earlier, a man later identified to be Nigerien found his way into the Lagos airport and climbed onto a Port Harcourt-bound Azman Airlines plane. The police said he could neither speak nor understand English Language, and were probing how he gained access to the restricted airport area.

We made the point before, and it bears restating that porosity of airport facilities compromises the safety of public aviation regarding which Nigeria has been quite lucky in recent years. No effort should be spared to ensure airtight airport security, to keep air travellers safe. There is routine inspection of runways, but it is doubtful there is as well routine surveillance, which is the proactive dimension. Besides, lessons from investigations of past incidents must be factored in to proactively prevent further breaches.