Category: Natural Health

Nigeria is in a state of agriculture emergency, but many Nigerians do not know what this really means. Since agriculture is about food, and since the right kinds of food and drink is the foundation of sound health, and radiant health is life, and emergency declaration over the agriculture sector means an opportunity is on the way to not only produce enough food at affordable prices, but to also remove killer foods from our dining tables.

The health of the average Nigerian is in a sorry state. The World Health Organisation (WHO), the Nigerian Medical Association (NMA) and the Nigerian Heart Foundation (NHF) say about 80 million of Nigeria’s 220 million population are suffering from diet-related hypertension. Only about 27 million of them are receiving treatment in hospitals. Many of the remainder may not even know they are hypertensive until they suffer from heart failure or heart attack, kidney failure or stroke, all of which are risk factors in hypertension. This disease often ravages the body without warning signals.

Read Also: ECOWAS signs $1.034m agreements to promote youth agriculture

Health experts have been warning over the years that more people are coming down with them because their daily diet is loaded with cholesterol-rich foods, such as red meat,  unhealthy fats, sodium, proteins that are hard to digest, high calories…and very low in minerals such as calcium, magnesium and phosphorus, selenium and potassium, and fresh fruits and vegetables. That is why this column is devoted to agriculture models which can give Nigerians an abundance of two farm products which can safeguard their health against these killer diseases.

One of them is rabbit meat. The other is papaya, better known as pawpaw. The rabbit is about 30 per cent protein. Its protein is healthier than the ones obtainable from red meat, chicken, turkey or fish because it is much easier to digest and absorb. The rabbit is very low on sodium compared with these other animals. It has little or no cholesterol which makes it a good friend of the heart and blood vessels. It provides other healthier fats better than red meat, chicken and fish.

The rabbit offers more calcium, magnesium and phosphorus which are required for strong and healthy bones, and selenium , necessary for the immunity. The rabbit brings to the dining table  higher amounts of niacin(vitamin B3) and vitamin B12. Niacin is important for the conversion of fats to energy, while vitamin B12 is crucial for the building of healthy red blood cells. A deficiency of vitamin B12, even when the red blood count is in the right number, may cause megaloblastic anaemia , a condition of mis shaping red blood cells which cannot absorb and transport the right amounts of oxygen through out the body.

As for pawpaw, which I propose the agriculture emergency should make almost as common place in Nigeria as cassava (garri) or rice and beans and bread, I will speak in the next column.

All that many Nigerians know for now is that food prices are so high that they cannot afford more than one full meal everyday. Even then, the quality is so poor that the daily diet has begun to damage health and shorten life. Public dietary health education is very poor from elementary school right up to the university. Only time will tell if the Agriculture emergency of the President will address this, and how far it would. Many Nigerians still LIVE TO EAT and not EAT TO LIVE.

So, what are the contents of the President’s AGRICULTURE EMERGENCY DIRECTION, and what are the action plans this column would like to see in it?

THE EMERGENCY

There is no push over plan in President Bola Ahmed Tinubu’s response to rising prices of food. But two areas appeal to me most.

 The first is that some areas in our forests would be cleared up to grow food crops. On paper, this is exciting because, at the end of the first cropping season, the plan should bring to our dining tables more food at cheaper prices and create more jobs in the economy.

The second is that seasonal farming is not acceptable to President TINUBU who believes all-year or all-season farming is the dependable solution to insufficient food production.

There are other titbits in his food emergency plan. One of them is the return to the system of marketing boards which will be uptakers of farm produce. Another is that food crop spoilage between the farms and the markets, estimated at about sixty percent, will be addressed through improved road networks, better haulage systems and storage in silos.

These ideas are not new. So, they may end up as mere rhetorics unless they are situated within a formidable, protecting structural framework.The idea of opening up the forests for food production began as farm settlements, arguably, in Chief Obafemi Awolowo’s Western Region. Chief Awolowo had data on how many children were in primary and secondary schools for what number of years, knew how many places were going to be available for them for higher education and planned to keep some of them who would not proceed beyond secondary school busy in farm settlements.

The farm settlements were mini-farming villages or towns where the lucky residents learned different forms of modern agriculture, sold their food stuff to uptakers and were enticed with such perks as salaries for their upkeep, free motorcycles for  transportation within and outside the settlements.Thus, the settlements provided more food and jobs which discouraged migration to  urban areas which became minimally crime prone.

Food storage in silos dates from, perhaps,  the days  slave boy Joseph interpreted for the Pharoah of Egypt his dream of seven lean cows which swallowed seven fat cows. That literally translated into food crop savings in the years of plenty for release in the years of shortages to maintain supply and price equilibrium.

Before I proceed,  I would like to narrate the dream of a young man from Edo State in which I was involved but whose name I have forgotten. He ran in an election against either Nduka Obaigbena, founding Chairman/Editor in Chief of This day newspapers and ARISE TELEVISION, or Ibrochukwu Okoli, Founding Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Newbreed weekly magazine. I was either Editor or Editor-in-Chief/Director of Publications of The Guardian newspaper. This young man licked the wounds of his election defeat and decided to set up a non-governmental organisation (NGO) which he called FARM NIGERIA. He invited me to come on board, and I accepted the invitation because what he was trying to do appealed to me.

What he wanted to do was to use the NGO to produce between 50 billion and 100billion rabbits every year in Nigeria for home consumption and for export. This will not only supply healthy, cholesterol-free meat on the dining tables, it would also provide jobs in rural areas, thereby preventing the drift of population from villages into cities which are not prepared for the social explosions.

His dream appealed to me for a number of reasons. I was a student of Areoyebola in ‘O level Economics and had planned to study agricultural economics at the then University of Ife (Now Obafemi Awolowo University) or at the University of Ibadan (UI). I had also been a regular visitor to the facilities of the Nigerian Institute of Oceanography and Marine Research (NIOMR) on Ahmadu Bello Way, Victoria Island, Lagos. My classmate at Olivet Baptist High School, Oyo, Dr Rasak GRA Akande, was NIOMR Director-General. I visited him at work almost every weekend to learn about all sorts of fish and, especially the home stead  crayfish fishing. We ate a lot of crayfish in Nigeria today, especially since fish like Titus, sardine, albacore, sole etc became too expensive. I sometimes wonder if NIOMR would not have helped to prevent fish protein shortage in Nigeria today.

The idea of the young man I was speaking about was:

1) FARM NIGERIA will set up pilot rabbit farms in each of the 774 local government areas of Nigeria, starting off with about 1,000 rabbits in every local government area. A host community will provide the land. A higher institution with a school of agriculture nearest to the project will provide education for the pilot rabbit farmers.The pilot rabbit farmers will each start off with no fewer than 1,000 rabbits. Part of the feed will include cassava peels which are either fed to goats or thrown away as waste in many communities. FARM NIGERIA will help to produce other feed input. FARM NIGERIA will be sole uptakers for the rabbit output in all 774 local government areas in Nigeria. It will set up a company which would dress the slain animals and package them for the Nigerian home market and for export. The proceeds will be shared among the farmers, the higher institutions, the communities and FARM NIGERIA.

2) FARM NIGERIA was to encourage every senator and every House of Representatives member to replicate the pilot project in his or her constituency. We can imagine from this idea how many rabbits, farmers and communities will be involved. How much more animal protein, free of cholesterol, would have been available on the dining table and how much prosperity in terms of money this project would have ushered in throughout the country. It may have created a new rabbit cuisine culture which may have driven away the culture of eating cow meat.

Pushing cows out of Nigeria to where they came from, this country would have been saving a lot of foreign exchange everyday. In Lagos alone, about 100,000 cows, each of which cost about N400,000 on the average, are slaughtered everyday. This means that, for cow meat, Lagos mega city may be spending about N40 billion every day or N1.2 trillion every month. In one year, this will translates to about N12.2 trillion every year.

My mathematics is not good enough to convert these figures into words! If this figure of foreign exchange emigration for Nigeria is coming from one Nigerian city alone. We can imagine how much in scarce foreign currency Nigeria is losing to supposedly poorer countries with smaller populations which are capitalising on our taste buds. Can we not retrain the Nigerian pallate for such smaller animals as rabbit, chicken, snail, goats, all of which we can farm on arable land and in forest plantation farms?

Social engineering and re-engineering, as President Tinubu envisages in the Agriculture Emergency Plan, are the business of a forward-looking  government. This is the message of the young man and his Farm Nigeria NGO I am presenting. I wander beyong his message to wonder if we would have had foreign cows eating up our crops and farmlands and had our farmers kidnapped and killed, causing food shortages, rising food prices, an impossible famine if we had not indulged our palate with cow meat and allowed foreigners to pounce on us and devour us in our land.

3) That young man’s effort appealed to SAMUEL OGBEMUDIA, the revolutionary military governor of the then Bendel State (Today’s Edo and Delta states), who later became a civilian chairman of Nigeria Railway Corporation(NRC). It was at the first meeting of FARM NIGERIA I attended in Lagos that I first met Samuel OGBEMUDIA as chairman of FARM NIGERIA Board of Trustees or Board of Directors.

4)The young man also negotiated with former president Shehu Shagari to become the LIFE PATRON of FARM NIGERIA. The young man and I went to meet former President Shagari at the Nicon Noga Hilton Hotel in Abuja where he was recuperating after his recovery at a foreign hospital from dementia. Our travel to Abuja was historic. We hardly found an hotel to check into. The People’s Democratic Party (PDP) was holding a National convention in which Abubakar Rimi, the stormy former governor of Kano State, and former Vice-President Alex Ekweme had built forces to give Obasanjo a show down. They failed. The young man and I got to know what transpired at Eagles Square when Ekweme suddenly popped in and joined three of us. It was my first time of meeting with him as well.

Ekweme was vice president under president Shagari in the National Party of Nigeria(NPN). The bottom line on our mission to Abuja was to get former President Shagari to become the life patron of FARM NIGERIA and to use his influence to persuade the National Assembly, state governments and state assemblies to replicate in their domain the dream of FARM NIGERIA. Without any doubt, Nigeria may have been producing more than 200 billion rabbits every month by now had this dream succeeded. It probably failed because there was no stabilising and protective structural framework to host it.

The plan was for every senator and every representative to replicate the LGA project in his or her constituency. If the plan went well, it may percolate to governors and local government chairmen. Outside governors and local government chairmen, who will only be a bandwagon effect, this would mean injecting 109 projects from senators into 360 from representatives to 774 in the LGAs to produce 1,243 projects nationwide.

At the rate of 1,000 seed rabbits per project, this would yield 1, 243,000 seed rabbits nationwide. Rabbits are fertile and prolific small animals when it comes to reproduction. If we assume half of the 1,243,000 are females, the project may set off with about 600,000 female rabbits nationwide. A female rabbit may reproduce every month or 12 times in one year, producing an average of 10 baby rabbits per litter. If, for the sake of the prevention of cruelty to animals, the 600,000 female rabbits are “crossed” with the males only six times in one year, and if no more than five rabbit babies are expected per litter, the expectation would be 600,000x 6×5 babies or 18,000,000 in the first year. This is a very conservative yield because rabbits come to table and reproductive maturity within the first three months of their lives.

This means we can have mature rabbits increasing the national rabbit farms population in two sets before the end of the first year. If we are modest and prefer to ignore this and wait for the harvest from the second year on, we may have on our hands, using the old conservative criteria, nine million new female rabbits yielding 30 baby rabbits should oblige 270 million rabbits).

Again, about half of the rabbit farms population is not captured in this calculation. If we proceed to the third year on old criteria using 135million female rabbits, we may arrive at 4,050, 000,000 in the third year alone. This is still a very conservative figure. By the third or fourth year, given the possibility that private rabbit farms may have sprung up, it is possible to talk of double digits billion rabbit farms population in Nigeria. The output will be upscaled if, persuaded from empirical evidence, the governor’s and local government chairmen add their own quotas, and private enterprises buy into the revolution, we may be talking of about 50-100,000,000,000 or more rabbits year if the revolution catches on very well. Please forgive me and  touch up my figures if they are diminutive or jumpy.  I do not have a head for figures.

Several jobs will emerge from this rabbit farming revolution. The project will generate rabbit farmers jobs, use of cassava peel for rabbit feed. School children will scout the bushes for grass and plant  feed. Factories will produce compounded feed. Rabbit skin will be available for the tannery industry for bag and shoe leather among others. The food processing industry , like the food malls, will come alive. On the dining table, cheaper protein food with safe and low cholesterol levels will be available.

We need not scream that senators and representatives are earning humongous salaries and allowances if they deploy or focus their constituency allowances for one year on a recyclable single project such as this nationwide, rather than defocus it on a myriad of projects which are not synergical and, therefore cannot foam for us to easily sight and feel their impact.

The idea of farming rabbits was a gift I received from the draconian Gen. Sanni Abacha Administration when he shut for one year The Guardian on which I was the Director of Publications/Editor-in-Chief. Today, 39 years after,  I still keep as momentos those cages which produced my backyard rabbits in those days.

The rabbit is not my pet baby now. I have mentioned my adventure into rabbit farming to inspire technocrats of the agriculture revolution which President Bola Tinubu says he would like to ignite. I would like to see the revolution touch the papaya (pawpaw) fruit as well. 

About two weeks ago, I made the following proposals to some senior citizens of Nigeria as violence, insecurity, fear and social paralysis escalated in the Southeast region where some armed groups have been demanding secession of the region from Nigeria.

  Literally speaking, the armed groups have taken power from the five governors of the region. They have a name by which the Southeast region, as a country, will be internationally known…BIAFRA.

  Interestingly, this was the name given to the Eastern Region of Nigeria when it made a secession bid in 1967 under Lt.- Col. Chukwuemeka Odumegwu OJUKWU. Nigeria’s rejection of its dismemberment by BIAFRA led to the 1967-70 NIGERIA-BIAFRA civil war. Fifty-three years after the war ended, Nigeria and “BIAFRA” are again at each other’s throats.

Labour Party Presidential candidate PETER OBI, who is saying in court that he, and not President Bola TINUBU, won the February 2023 Presidential Election, says armed bandits, and not armed groups fighting for Biafra are behind violence in the Southeast.

  About two days after he spoke, Ohaneze, the influential Igbo cultural organisation which articulates and protects interests of the Southeast region in the Nigerian polity, declared that a Biafran war had begun in the region, demanded that the Federal Government rush in troops to quell it, and then it placed a $50,000 booty on the arrest of Simon Ekpa, who, from Finland, directs the violence in Igboland.

The original title of the following proposals was: A FEASIBLE ANSWER TO IGBO FREEDOM QUESTION … INDEPENDENT REFERENDUM IN THE SOUTHEAST.

Life in Igboland must be more nightmarish for indigens and other residents of the five states of Anambra, Enugu, Ebonyin, Imo and Abia than we who live in comfort zone states can imagine. These states are probably no better than prison onclaves in which two governments contest for power. One government is official. It derives its authority from Nigeria. The other government is illegal under Nigerian law, but it is, nevertheless, as effective, if not more effective than the official government run by constitutional governents. This unofficial government has been nicknamed UNGUN known men. It derives this nickname from the corruption of UNKNOWN GUN MEN, which the police always say cause mayhem anywhere in Nigeria when they cannot track trigger-happy hoodlums

From the relatively peaceful states of the Southwest and the Southsouth, and from the states of the Northwest, Northeast and Northcentral, grappling with kidnapping, banditry, terrorism, it is as though the Southeastern states of Igboland is a huge movie screen where the scenes are constantly changing from melodramatic to everyday tragedy. The nation has lived with the SIT-AT-HOME-ON-MONDAY order of the guerilla fighters for the REPUBLIC OF BIAFRA.

The residents fear the guerillas and obey them. Federal soldiers and police brought in to overpower the guerillas have been unable to effectively do the job. They are handcuffed by history. That history is the Nigerian civil war (1967-1970), also called the Biafran war  in which the  Igbo suffered enormous human and material devastation.

Running over the Southeast again to forcibly quell yet another Biafran secessionist movement about 56 years after the first one would almost amount to genocide on the part of Nigeria. Every Igbo man and woman will naturally rise in the defence of Igbo land and the result may be more calamitous than the carnage of the Biafran war of 1967-1970. Now, the guerillas have gone one more step forward to claim authority in the Southeastern states. They have extended their SIT-AT-HOME ORDER from only Mondays to one week, perhaps, in every month. Trade, business, industry have been damaged under the Monday hammer.

Sick persons have died at home because they cannot be taken to hospital. Income is crashing. Some Ibo people are migrating to comfort zone states. Cross River, Rivers, Akwa Ibom, Edo, Delta and the Southwest states, especially Lagos, are their goals.This is creating immigrant pressure and population swells on the budgets of these states. Igbo land has a huge population crisis caused by many factors. One of the factors is that the land mass is small and has not, even if it can, ably supported the ever-growing population.

Another factor is ancestral land holding culture which is not keeping pace with modern land demand and land use dynamics. Thus, the average Igbo man and woman feel imprisoned at home and love to emigrate to other parts of Nigeria and even overseas, where he or she, unrestrained, can spread his or her unfettered wings and find fufilment.There should be nothing wrong about this if, in their new settlements, it will not just be a question of time before the migrants and the natives begin to clash over land ownership, as been experienced in the Southwest, especially in Lagos State.

The unknown gun men question does not appear to have anything to do with business, commerce and industry. It is a pressure for inclusion in  Federal Government architecture. But it is not true that the Southeast has always been excluded from Federal Government architecture. In a large portion of Nigerian history, it is the Western region and, later, the Southwest that has been an exclusion victim. The Eastern region, and later the Southeast, has been the junior partner in North and East coalition governments.

But whenever the Southwest has moved nearer central government or taken charge of it, there has been an uproar in the Southeast. In the anti-Southwest administration of president Olusegun Obasanjo and in the anti-Southwest administration of Ebele Azikwe Jonathan, the Southeast flowered and fruited exceedingly. Only in the immediate past administration of President Muhammadu Buhari, which was fragantly pro-North and anti-Southeast can a barricade be said to have been really set against the Southeast. Even then, the Buhari administration looked upon the Southeast with favour in respect of the SECOND NIGER BRIDGE which Obasanjo and Jonathan denied it. The TINUBU Administration is still bringing many birds from its pockets. So, no one can tell as yet which is for which region. Notably, his policies so far have been nationalistic.

New Scene

What is worrying about new developments in Igbo land is that the five governors seem to have no authority over the freedom fighters in their states. One governor said he would revoke the licences of citizen companies which obey the freedom fighters. I guess this include banks, petrol stations, retail markets etc. Soon, after he said this, the freedom fighters went to a public school, which opened, got the poor children and their teachers  to lay on the ground and flogged them before sending them home.

In a retail market, they opened gunfire for several minutes. The traders fled without their cash takings or wares. The message is clear: Will the children like to return to school, even if their parents ask them to? Will the traders like to remain in the state where they cannot eke a living? Which parent will send a child to school when the unknown gunmen say they should not come to school?

If I live in the Southeast, I will obey them. My decision will be based on the natural philosophy that THE End OF OBEDIENCE IS PROTECTION, OR PROTECTION IS THE BEGINNING OF OBEDIENCE. Who doesn’t obey armed robbers in the house he or she built from his or her sweat when there is no state presence to protect him or her against them. In this scenario, the Southeast may lapse deeper into newer levels of BIAFRA agitation which may find sympathy in other regions.

This morning (July 8, 2023), radio stations and newspapers broke the news that SUNDAY IGBOHO was set to return to Nigeria from Cote d’voire. He needs no elaborate introduction beyond the reminder that he is one of the leaders of YORUBA NATION agitation. Can this ignite sympathy in the Southsouth? Is the Southeast a keg of gun powder that needs to be urgently diffused, but peacefully? If the Southeast continues to burn, will hospitals not close down? Will civil servants go to work? Will the citizens not flee to other states? Will the freedom fighters, having held the Nigerian state down in those five states, not wish to try their luck in other states? Are there no agitators in other states who can take a cue from them? Wasn’t this how the Boko Haram assault gradually began?

A Solution

Before we have a national crisis, National Security Adviser NUHU RIBADU and the President may wish to do a little review of this Igbo problem and give it a simple but effective solution suggested below.

Question: What are the freedom fighters asking for?

Answer: They want Nnamdi Kanu, their leader, released from custody. He is in state custody and on trial for allegedly instigating violence nationwide and, for jumping bail while on trial. Even while still in custody, his spokespersons say he sends messages of solidarity to the freedom fighters. So, it isn’t clear if releasing Kanu would solve the problem in Igbo land. Igbo political, business/industry and cultural leaders say it would. Who can vow it would? Who can make international undertakings to indemnify havocs to peace and public order which releasing him may cause?

This would include morale damage to the  police and armed forces which have lost men and resources in the conflict. The announcement, also today, that about 2,000 Boko Haram suspects are about to go on trial before eight judges in Niger State suggests that the TINUBU Administration is taking National Security more seriously than the Buhari administration and is, therefore, unlikely to resolve the Nnamdi Kanu matter on emotional and political grounds. The message should be clear: What is sauce for the goose should be sauce for the gander as well.

2) Has the renewed offensive of freedom fighting foreclosed a political solution, chief of which is the release of Nnamdi Kanu? Will his release bring normalcy to the Southeast or cause disruptions to public order in other Nigerian regions?

Literally speaking, the United Nations (UN) will take over Igbo land in a time frame to develop the referendum and conduct it, after which the results will be announced simultaneously in Igbo land and on the floor of the general assembly of the UN. I believe this process will guarantee transparency and peace.

The picture of it I see before my inner gaze is like that of a woman whose child fell into a well and, on account of this, emotionally wishes to jump into the well and end her life as well. The more everyone tries to prevent her from doing this, the more she agitatingly fights them off. But when someone says everyone should leave her to jump in after her child, and she became free to do so. This agitated woman suddenly cools off, controls her emotions, faces reality, backs away from the well and accepts her fate.This is how a referendum in Igbo land for or against BIAFRA may end.

3) If the government alone cannot solve the Igbo question, can it let the Igbo themselves resolve it through an internationally well-supervised plebiscite, which may involve withdrawal of Nigerian troops and police from the Southeast and their replacement with United Nations forces, the bills of which both the Nigerian State and the southern Eastern states will share? It is important that, in a referendum such as this, the Nigerian government is not involved in the referendum process and in the decision of the Igbo people.

4) The foregoing is based on the right of the freedom of association. Scotland has recently narrowly lost two plebicites to quit the United Kingdom of Great Britain. Senegal and Gambia peacefully dissociated. The CHEZS and the SLOVAKS peacefully withdrew from Czechoslovakia. The USSR peacefully dissolved itself. Pakistan and Bangladesh came out of a larger India. Eritrea found its way out of Ethiopia.

Nigeria is not yet one nation. It is too heterogenous to so easily as we imagine become one. Our founding fathers Chief Obafemi Awolowo and Sir Ahmadu Bello knew this when at conferences in Nigeria and London, expressed their people’s wishes for a loose federation.

Dr Nnamdi Azikwe demanded a strong federation in which the constituent three regions would hardly be able to exit if it so desired. Ahmadu Bello and Awolowo won the battle in the 1960 and 1963 constitutions. This constitutions gave each region the right to have its regional anthem, constitution, police, local governments, flag and to send its representatives abroad as diplomats, among other freedoms.

Believing they could win the federal elections, the Igbo, through Azikwe, preferred a stronger federation which would accomodate better the bubbling energies in the East. The January 1966 coup offered Major-General J.T.U. Aguyi Ironsi, an Igbo, the opportunity to crash the loose federation and enact a strong federation on its ruins with the UNIFICATION DECREE.

Northern soldiers toppled him six months later and the North began to enjoy the fruits of a stronger federation which Ironsi brought to the Eastern Region. That is why and how the East and the West came under Northern domination for several decades. Maybe the TINUBU Administration which the East and a part of  the North are challenging, would decentralise Nigeria again.

5) Meanwhile, the TINUBU Administration may wish to seriously consider a plebiscite in the Southeast internationally run and supervised with minimum or no Nigerian involvement. The way things are going, the Igbo cannot solve their problem. They will not trust Nigeria to solve it for them without being partial. A country or a state is not the creation of Mother Nature. The natural nation is spiritually, culturally and linguistically homogenous and bounded by nature.

Lord Lugard and colonial Britain threw away these cautions which we can re-institute. Lions and leopards do not live together in the forest. Whales and salmon and crayfish live in different waters. Sea water fish cannot survive in fresh water and vice versa. Birds of a feather flock together. So, why are we lumped up? So, how come heterogenous peoples are lumped together in an iron cast federation with no leg room and breathing space for many of them? Only dissociation of the federating units in dismemberment of the state or a loosened federation can solve this man-made horror! Proponents for and against a Biafran state should be given an equal opportunity to campaign their positions. If the pro-Biafra group wins, so be it.

What do other Nigerians stand to lose. Terms of settlement would quite naturally include what happens to Igbo property in the different parts of Nigeria. Foreign nationals cannot own other countries where their nationals are mere hewers of wood and drawers of water. Igbo businesses, too, would have to comply with good business practice standards in other parts of Nigeria.

The exit of BIAFRA should lead to a review of the terms of the Nigerian federation among the remaining federating units  to give them more freedoms from the centre. The possibility of an exited BIAFRA returning to Nigeria may be considered in terms of settlement should the pro-Biafra group win.But if the anti-BIAFRA group wins, the freedom fighters should unconditionally sheathe their swords. The terms of settlement may grant them amnesty for havocs they wrought in the guise of freedom fighting during which they caused the death of many people, upturned the economic fortunes of many persons and caused many persons, still, irreparable emotional imbalance. Should they resort to violence after in the cause of BIAFRA or any other, the international community should be free to deal with such problem not just as a Nigerian concern but as a crime against humanity.

Is Nigeria ready for a BIAFRA PLEBISCITE in IGBOLAND? The Igbo political elite and the Igbo intelligentsia and Igbo business/industry owe their people and Nigeria and their people this opportunity for a political settlement of the firestorms in the south east. They had an opportunity over several years to tidy things up, but they didn’t , playing blame games in the open and giving flip to rebellion in the darkly back stages. For the rest of Nigeria, the golden watchword at this time is the Yoruba proverb: IGI GOGORO MAGUN MI L’OJU, OkERE LA TI NYAN.

Please grant me one minute to talk about The Key to Peace And  Happiness. I coined this title from the advice of a wise one to suffering people who did not know their condition was caused by their thoughts. The Wise One said: “Keep the hearth of your thoughts pure. By so doing, you will bring peace and happiness”. The hearth of any thought is the foundation of that thought. In my speech making days,THE KEY TO PEACE AND HAPPINESS was my favourite subject for turning upward the listener’s gaze. I reasoned that keeping the thoughts pure at this time would be a Balm of Gilead when petrol price is above the roof and instigating a riot of other prices under its canopy.

Before I proceed, please excuse another minute to quickly detour to the second of six mafia ‘wars” I mentioned last week  (June 8, 2023) were likely to follow the inaugural speech of Pesident Bola Ahmed TinubuI on May 29, 2023. This second battle field is the abrogation of the foreign currency black market.

 Currency war

To avoid the currency war, there are three options…

• Expand foreign currency earning,

• Curtail foreign currency expenditure,

• Confront the cabal or mafia which has created a black currency market out of the official currency market.

I have been imagining for more than 20 years a bone breaking “war” in this area. This may involve hundreds of thousands or millions of persons who are knee deep in “black currency” business. Government success in this” war ” should enable foreign  companies who do business with Nigeria to have easier access to foreign currency on better terms. But it will be despised by Nigerians abroad who “sow” little foreign currency into the Nigerian economy but reap “bumper harvests” from them , in the local currency, the naira. Many of them emigrated just to be able to return in a few years to take commanding heights of the economy. Of what benefit will be their suffering abroad if their home  remittances amount to little or nothing? should the US Dollar begin to exchange for, say, N250, their dependants at home, too, may not wish the naira well. What about the bank managers who round trip foreign currencies? Can we forget those young Nigerians back home who, unemployed for years, have learned to do internet businesses which pay them in foreign currency? There are several armies the President is going to do battle  with within this sector. They all want Nigeria to become better. But do they realise that Nigeria becoming better means that the naira has to be rescued from the strangulation of other currencies and that, doing so, will pull the carpet from under their feet?

About 32 years ago, I had the privilege of having lunch with Gen Aliyu Gusau (rtd) then national security adviser (NSA).

I was Editor of The Guardian newspaper. Soon, Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’adua (rtd) showed up in the room. Gen Gusau introduced us. I knew they wanted to sound me out over election- season promises of presidential candidate, one of whom was  Gen. Yar’adua. The economy was in distress and the “black market” was a major cause of it. Was he ready to take on the “black market?” If he was, would he accept my suggestions? The police and the armed forces should hatch a secret crack down plan as follows:

• Principal operational zones of the “black market ” nationwide should be pre determined

• At zero hour nationwide, security operatives should crack down on them

• Black market currency hawkers should be arrested, handcuffed and bundled into police Black Maria and other vehicles.

• Next day, they should appear in magistrates courts on holding charges, pending further investigations. They should state the sources of foreign currency found on them, and these “sources” should be immediately arrested for prosecution

•Regular and unexpected mop up operations nationwide should continue indefinitely.

• The foregoing should sanitise the banks and the currency market. But the government should expect a backlash from the unseen “hands of Esau”. These persons are the currency “black market” mafia.

Understandably, Gen. Yar’adua did not warm up to the suggestions. Who would deliberately step on the tail of the cobra in his backyard? He looked at me, flashed a pretentious smile, nodding and puffing a cigarette and coughing.  Even garrulous President Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired army general, avoided the terrain as though it were a quagmire or minesfield. His successor, the younger Yar’adua was too sick to bell the cart. President Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan avoided brinkmanship and Gen Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general, was not a  man who could look his kinsmen or friends straight in the eyes and  square up with them. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a “make or break man”. For 22 months as Governor of Lagos State, he defied the garrulous President Obasanjo who denied him of federal funds to run the state. But Tinubu found money elsewhere and Lagos State did not know a President Obasanjo existed in Abuja or in Nigeria! Was Lagos not robust enough to be a country? If it was, would it need  Obasanjo’s money outside its frontiers to survive? That is the man who, now as  President of Nigeria, has declared war on the “black currency” mafia! It is yet unclear if the suspension from office last Saturday of Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele had to do with other matters or a single market drive or both.

Yet another interesting battle brewing is in the electricity sector. President Tinubu wishes to double capacities on electricity generation, transmission and distribution in a country where capacities are crashing almost everyday (more about this next week)

The key to peace and happiness

We are back to the advice to “Keep the hearth of your thoughts pure. By so doing, you will bring peace and happiness”. The HEARTH of your thoughts is the FOUNDATION of your thought.  This message is not original to me. It is the message of a wise one about 100 years ago to suffering people. It sprang from the knowledge that you are what you think. Many people erroneously believe that thoughts are free and that it is the tongue that we should always discipline. People who think like this may not realise that the tongue merely expresses abundance of the mind and that the starting point of any action, be it the spoken word or physical action, stems from the thought. There is fleeting thoughts which, like rolling stones, may gather no moss, as the English man says. There are also serious thoughts which may gather such large amounts of moss that they may become a VOLITION, the driving motif of one’s life, or a propensity which, like one’s shadow, may be difficult to detach from. I say “difficult” because propensities may also be the easiest things to knock off our lives if we understand them for what they are, where they come from, and if we have the courage and the will to shake them off.

Many of us have the propensity for the blame game. We blame other persons for whatever befalls us. That is why the modern day priest smiles to the bank. If you listen to FM radio in Lagos from about 4.30am everyday, you may understand what I am saying. I never knew we would ever degenerate spiritually to the point that a so-called prophet would set up testimonials on radio, dictate his account number to listeners who want him to ask their Creator to expedite action on their prayers, even if they do not deserve what they are praying for. That’s not where I am heading.

In the first part of this series, I outlined the possibility of the subsidy mafia exploiting the pains of pump price deregulation to defend their interests which is above N400 billion naira  every month.

Thoughts

We humans are wired up,  as though we are radio and television receiving sets or even the cell telephone sets on which we make wireless telephone calls or send text or voice messages. When we send astronauts to the moon, we communicate with them and they with us. This idea was borrowed from the universe, from worlds higher than ours.

Read Also: Eko Electric partners institute on mental health

In the universe, there are several spheres of existence which we may call Power Centres. We may call them so because the nature or characteristic of everyone in a power centre is homogenous or similar. Thus, there is a concentration of likeness in everything everyone does there. Grumbletonians stick together. So do murderers, thieves, kidnappers etc. On earth, there is a mingling of propensities, although we may sense tendencies towards homogenuity in families, tribes and unpolluted nationalities.

When we  think, we connect with power centres homogenous with the nature of our thought. It is like when we switch on our laptops and we call out to GOOGLE, WHATSAPP or to PLANET, ZOOM, and now, OTRACKER Or O CONNECT or O VARSITY. The laptop takes us to wherever we connect with. If the network provider is not playing funny, my cell phone cannot take me away from Jide Ogundele, who is on my contact menu, when I dial his number and connect me with John Smith, who does not know I exist and who is also unknown to me. Should this happen, it means mankind or the internet service provider has not perfected an idea it borrowed from higher regions of the universe.

What I am saying in effect is that our thoughts link us with those regions of the universe we are homogenous with.

Subsidy aches

Petrol price deregulation is provoking different thoughts in all of us and, accordingly, connecting us all to different climes in the universe. There are some persons who believe the deregulation will crush them. Each time they so think, they would generate thought forms of their worries and fears and these would team up with similar, ugly thoughts generated by other persons. The combined thought forms will re-enforce one another and, together, they will be sucked up by homogeneous power centres in the universe. These power centers must be  negative power centres which, in turn, connect with the negative souls, feeding them with negative ideas about why and how they must find existence more difficult than hitherto. If they are hateful, the hate in their souls will be reinvigorated. Poor, fearful soul, a supposed Lord in the universe who has been  giving  dominion over everything, including petrol prices and paper money. The negative power centre will re-inforce the worries, ideas, fears and self-created helplessness of such negative persons through feedback. Thus, they would be trapped in the quagmire of their thoughts which, through intensification by the power centre, would become larger, stronger, self entrapping and socially disrupting. It is of such persons the Yoruba elders say:TI A BA  GUN IYAN NINU ODO, TI A BA N RO OKA NI INU EPO EPA ENI MAA YO A YO! (If we pound yam in a mortar and make eba in groundnut shell, whoever will have the stomach filled will  have it filled). So, while the negative person delimit their potentials and enlarge their physical encumbrances and psychic entanglements, positive persons will be connected to power centres which would dispense positive ideas to them. Whatever their situations, our forefathers did not diminish themselves with negative thought. They did not know about Norman Vincent Peale and his books, The Power of  Positive  Thinking  and Amazing Results of Positive Thinking, before they deducted their knowledge of survivalism from the universe based on their experiences. Why are we such indolent souls in our generation, always dependent, hardly able to find ways out of a quagmire, always playing the blame game? Do lizards, ants, birds or butterflies talk about subsidy problems?

Charles Idehor

In a long, long while, I haven’t listened to a positive interview as I did the Charles Idehor programme on Jordan FM radio in Lagos on May 4, 2023. Maybe the personalities of Gbola  Oba and Adeniyi Adesina made the difference. Gbola Oba is the son of a womanly fish seller now of blessed memory at the  Baba Oloosa Market in Mushin, Lagos. He has been the victim of kidnapping and spent several days in a forest. He supports principles, not persons or political parties. Adesina is the Editor of this newspaper, The  Nation.  Both were effervescent  and electrifying and positive, and the otherwise bellicose regular callers agreed with them. Adesina said we would never know why politicians take their decisions and challenged all of us to say our decisions are not survivalism propelled. Gbola Oba said we all needed to readjust our lives. He was spending  about N40,000 every week to entertain his friends at their Hangouts in Surulere. But since petrol prices went up , he had stuck more to his bed at the weekends. He challenged women in particular to adjust their lives. Nigerian women were spending as much as six billion U.S. dollars every year on Brazilian human hair. Indian women were cutting and selling their long hair for this market and regrowing them for more deals. To catch some of the market, says Gbola Oba, the Chinese are making artificial human hair from bamboo. The direction women are going is the direction the nation will follow. If Nigerian women are fashion spend thrifts and economy destroyers, women are no more than what men see in them and want of them.

Beyond this, neighbourhood life is what we should encourage. Children should attend schools nearest to home, to cut transport costs. Young persons should find jobs that are walking distances from home. There is no point earning N40,000 a month 30 kilometers away, which transportation and stress will erode, when a N20,000 job is next door.

Poor Charles Idehor

He spends N17,000 in these subsidy days to arrange a telephone interview with Gbola Oba and Adeniyi Adesina. The credit finished midway and he had to recharge. I wondered if he had not heard of O connect from ONPASSIVE, which I have been informing my professional colleagues about. O connect is cost saving in these times. It is a telephone conference application which can host about one million persons or more. The credit purchase is once for life because the application is self crediting. O connect is so designed because Onpassive, the newest, biggest and best internet business company in my view, shares 50 per cent of its profit with users of its applications and recharges for them from this account. Therefore, subscribers to O connect would not only earn bonuses every month from ONPASSIVE, they would never have to recharge the credit from out of their pocket once they have purchased this application.

Self confession

I admit to being negative until 1994 when Gen Sanni Abacha upset my apple cart. I was director of publications/Editor-in-chief of The Guadian newspaper. Gen Abacha shut it for one year on claims of anti-government publications. I had three school age children and a wife to look after. She worked as an academic at the Lagos State University (LASU) which was on ASUU strike, one of the longest ever, during which she earned no pay. I was on half pay, and had to sell egg, chewing stick, ice block and palm oil, largely to mallams, for survival. I was helped by the story of Bhudah, the Prince who lost his throne and became a happier and more successful person as a truck pusher and snake charmer in foreign lands. Whenever I lost a customer or two, I had sleepless nights. Then, one day, the thought occured to me that there were more than 180 million Nigerians. Why should I be unable to sleep over one or two of them? I learned to pray to be connected to persons who needed my services. Mrs. Beatrice Oloyede, one of my family friends since then, introduced me to piggery. In under one year, I raised about 300 pigs and piglets. I sold about 300 crates of eggs every week to mallams who sell bread and tea at road junctions. I bought vegetable from farms and sold them to market women. I sold honey from Obudu Town and from Ago Are, near Shaki. I began to sell herbs, starting with Patminger, Bitterleaf, Vervain and Lemon grass which I grew in the backyard of my residence. Whenever I took my children back to their boarding house at Kankon Model College, after Badagry, I picked up coconut which I sold in the Lagos Market. What did I not sell? I learned from this experience that the average Nigerian worker needed a second stream of income. Many people are inwardly immobile or are too status concious to make them explore survivalism in the informal market. My children were never sent home on account of school fees. We ate whatever we desired and to cap it all, I began to build a house before General Abacha released The Guardian newspaper from under his jack boot.

Please grant me one minute to talk about The Key to Peace And  Happiness. I coined this title from the advice of a wise one to suffering people who did not know their condition was caused by their thoughts. The Wise One said: “Keep the hearth of your thoughts pure. By so doing, you will bring peace and happiness”. The hearth of any thought is the foundation of that thought. In my speech making days,THE KEY TO PEACE AND HAPPINESS was my favourite subject for turning upward the listener’s gaze. I reasoned that keeping the thoughts pure at this time would be a Balm of Gilead when petrol price is above the roof and instigating a riot of other prices under its canopy.

Before I proceed, please excuse another minute to quickly detour to the second of six mafia ‘wars” I mentioned last week  (June 8, 2023) were likely to follow the inaugural speech of President Bola Ahmed Tinubu on May 29, 2023. This second battle field is the abrogation of the foreign currency black market.

 Currency war

To avoid the currency war, there are three options…

• Expand foreign currency earning,

• Curtail foreign currency expenditure,

• Confront the cabal or mafia which has created a black currency market out of the official currency market.

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I have been imagining for more than 20 years a bone breaking “war” in this area. This may involve hundreds of thousands or millions of persons who are knee deep in “black currency” business. Government success in this” war ” should enable foreign  companies who do business with Nigeria to have easier access to foreign currency on better terms. But it will be despised by Nigerians abroad who “sow” little foreign currency into the Nigerian economy but reap “bumper harvests” from them , in the local currency, the naira. Many of them emigrated just to be able to return in a few years to take commanding heights of the economy. Of what benefit will be their suffering abroad if their home  remittances amount to little or nothing? should the US Dollar begin to exchange for, say, N250, their dependants at home, too, may not wish the naira well. What about the bank managers who round trip foreign currencies? Can we forget those young Nigerians back home who, unemployed for years, have learned to do internet businesses which pay them in foreign currency? There are several armies the President is going to do battle  with within this sector. They all want Nigeria to become better. But do they realise that Nigeria becoming better means that the naira has to be rescued from the strangulation of other currencies and that, doing so, will pull the carpet from under their feet?

About 32 years ago, I had the privilege of having lunch with Gen Aliyu Gusau (rtd) then national security adviser (NSA).

I was Editor of The Guardian newspaper. Soon, Gen. Shehu Musa Yar’adua (rtd) showed up in the room. Gen Gusau introduced us. I knew they wanted to sound me out over election- season promises of presidential candidate, one of whom was  Gen. Yar’adua. The economy was in distress and the “black market” was a major cause of it. Was he ready to take on the “black market?” If he was, would he accept my suggestions? The police and the armed forces should hatch a secret crack down plan as follows:

• Principal operational zones of the “black market ” nationwide should be pre determined

• At zero hour nationwide, security operatives should crack down on them

• Black market currency hawkers should be arrested, handcuffed and bundled into police Black Maria and other vehicles.

• Next day, they should appear in magistrates courts on holding charges, pending further investigations. They should state the sources of foreign currency found on them, and these “sources” should be immediately arrested for prosecution

•Regular and unexpected mop up operations nationwide should continue indefinitely.

• The foregoing should sanitise the banks and the currency market. But the government should expect a backlash from the unseen “hands of Esau”. These persons are the currency “black market” mafia.

Understandably, Gen. Yar’adua did not warm up to the suggestions. Who would deliberately step on the tail of the cobra in his backyard? He looked at me, flashed a pretentious smile, nodding and puffing a cigarette and coughing.  Even garrulous President Olusegun Obasanjo, a retired army general, avoided the terrain as though it were a quagmire or minesfield. His successor, the younger Yar’adua was too sick to bell the cart. President Ebele Azikiwe Jonathan avoided brinkmanship and Gen Muhammadu Buhari, a retired general, was not a  man who could look his kinsmen or friends straight in the eyes and  square up with them. Bola Ahmed Tinubu is a “make or break man”. For 22 months as Governor of Lagos State, he defied the garrulous President Obasanjo who denied him of federal funds to run the state. But Tinubu found money elsewhere and Lagos State did not know a President Obasanjo existed in Abuja or in Nigeria! Was Lagos not robust enough to be a country? If it was, would it need  Obasanjo’s money outside its frontiers to survive? That is the man who, now as  President of Nigeria, has declared war on the “black currency” mafia! It is yet unclear if the suspension from office last Saturday of Central Bank Governor Godwin Emefiele had to do with other matters or a single market drive or both.

Yet another interesting battle brewing is in the electricity sector. President Tinubu wishes to double capacities on electricity generation, transmission and distribution in a country where capacities are crashing almost everyday (more about this next week)

The key to peace and happiness

We are back to the advice to “Keep the hearth of your thoughts pure. By so doing, you will bring peace and happiness”. The HEARTH of your thoughts is the FOUNDATION of your thought.  This message is not original to me. It is the message of a wise one about 100 years ago to suffering people. It sprang from the knowledge that you are what you think. Many people erroneously believe that thoughts are free and that it is the tongue that we should always discipline. People who think like this may not realise that the tongue merely expresses abundance of the mind and that the starting point of any action, be it the spoken word or physical action, stems from the thought. There is fleeting thoughts which, like rolling stones, may gather no moss, as the English man says. There are also serious thoughts which may gather such large amounts of moss that they may become a VOLITION, the driving motif of one’s life, or a propensity which, like one’s shadow, may be difficult to detach from. I say “difficult” because propensities may also be the easiest things to knock off our lives if we understand them for what they are, where they come from, and if we have the courage and the will to shake them off.

Many of us have the propensity for the blame game. We blame other persons for whatever befalls us. That is why the modern day priest smiles to the bank. If you listen to FM radio in Lagos from about 4.30am everyday, you may understand what I am saying. I never knew we would ever degenerate spiritually to the point that a so-called prophet would set up testimonials on radio, dictate his account number to listeners who want him to ask their Creator to expedite action on their prayers, even if they do not deserve what they are praying for. That’s not where I am heading.

In the first part of this series, I outlined the possibility of the subsidy mafia exploiting the pains of pump price deregulation to defend their interests which is above N400 billion naira  every month.

Thoughts

We humans are wired up,  as though we are radio and television receiving sets or even the cell telephone sets on which we make wireless telephone calls or send text or voice messages. When we send astronauts to the moon, we communicate with them and they with us. This idea was borrowed from the universe, from worlds higher than ours.

In the universe, there are several spheres of existence which we may call Power Centres. We may call them so because the nature or characteristic of everyone in a power centre is homogenous or similar. Thus, there is a concentration of likeness in everything everyone does there. Grumbletonians stick together. So do murderers, thieves, kidnappers etc. On earth, there is a mingling of propensities, although we may sense tendencies towards homogenuity in families, tribes and unpolluted nationalities.

When we  think, we connect with power centres homogenous with the nature of our thought. It is like when we switch on our laptops and we call out to GOOGLE, WHATSAPP or to PLANET, ZOOM, and now, OTRACKER Or O CONNECT or O VARSITY. The laptop takes us to wherever we connect with. If the network provider is not playing funny, my cell phone cannot take me away from Jide Ogundele, who is on my contact menu, when I dial his number and connect me with John Smith, who does not know I exist and who is also unknown to me. Should this happen, it means mankind or the internet service provider has not perfected an idea it borrowed from higher regions of the universe.

What I am saying in effect is that our thoughts link us with those regions of the universe we are homogenous with.

Subsidy aches

Petrol price deregulation is provoking different thoughts in all of us and, accordingly, connecting us all to different climes in the universe. There are some persons who believe the deregulation will crush them. Each time they so think, they would generate thought forms of their worries and fears and these would team up with similar, ugly thoughts generated by other persons. The combined thought forms will re-enforce one another and, together, they will be sucked up by homogeneous power centres in the universe. These power centers must be  negative power centres which, in turn, connect with the negative souls, feeding them with negative ideas about why and how they must find existence more difficult than hitherto. If they are hateful, the hate in their souls will be reinvigorated. Poor, fearful soul, a supposed Lord in the universe who has been  giving  dominion over everything, including petrol prices and paper money. The negative power centre will re-inforce the worries, ideas, fears and self-created helplessness of such negative persons through feedback. Thus, they would be trapped in the quagmire of their thoughts which, through intensification by the power centre, would become larger, stronger, self entrapping and socially disrupting. It is of such persons the Yoruba elders say:TI A BA  GUN IYAN NINU ODO, TI A BA N RO OKA NI INU EPO EPA ENI MAA YO A YO! (If we pound yam in a mortar and make eba in groundnut shell, whoever will have the stomach filled will  have it filled). So, while the negative person delimit their potentials and enlarge their physical encumbrances and psychic entanglements, positive persons will be connected to power centres which would dispense positive ideas to them. Whatever their situations, our forefathers did not diminish themselves with negative thought. They did not know about Norman Vincent Peale and his books, The Power of  Positive  Thinking  and Amazing Results of Positive Thinking, before they deducted their knowledge of survivalism from the universe based on their experiences. Why are we such indolent souls in our generation, always dependent, hardly able to find ways out of a quagmire, always playing the blame game? Do lizards, ants, birds or butterflies talk about subsidy problems?

Charles Idehor

In a long, long while, I haven’t listened to a positive interview as I did the Charles Idehor programme on Jordan FM radio in Lagos on May 4, 2023. Maybe the personalities of Gbola  Oba and Adeniyi Adesina made the difference. Gbola Oba is the son of a womanly fish seller now of blessed memory at the  Baba Oloosa Market in Mushin, Lagos. He has been the victim of kidnapping and spent several days in a forest. He supports principles, not persons or political parties. Adesina is the Editor of this newspaper, The  Nation.  Both were effervescent  and electrifying and positive, and the otherwise bellicose regular callers agreed with them. Adesina said we would never know why politicians take their decisions and challenged all of us to say our decisions are not survivalism propelled. Gbola Oba said we all needed to readjust our lives. He was spending  about N40,000 every week to entertain his friends at their Hangouts in Surulere. But since petrol prices went up , he had stuck more to his bed at the weekends. He challenged women in particular to adjust their lives. Nigerian women were spending as much as six billion U.S. dollars every year on Brazilian human hair. Indian women were cutting and selling their long hair for this market and regrowing them for more deals. To catch some of the market, says Gbola Oba, the Chinese are making artificial human hair from bamboo. The direction women are going is the direction the nation will follow. If Nigerian women are fashion spend thrifts and economy destroyers, women are no more than what men see in them and want of them.

Beyond this, neighbourhood life is what we should encourage. Children should attend schools nearest to home, to cut transport costs. Young persons should find jobs that are walking distances from home. There is no point earning N40,000 a month 30 kilometers away, which transportation and stress will erode, when a N20,000 job is next door.

Poor Charles Idehor

He spends N17,000 in these subsidy days to arrange a telephone interview with Gbola Oba and Adeniyi Adesina. The credit finished midway and he had to recharge. I wondered if he had not heard of O connect from ONPASSIVE, which I have been informing my professional colleagues about. O connect is cost saving in these times. It is a telephone conference application which can host about one million persons or more. The credit purchase is once for life because the application is self crediting. O connect is so designed because Onpassive, the newest, biggest and best internet business company in my view, shares 50 per cent of its profit with users of its applications and recharges for them from this account. Therefore, subscribers to O connect would not only earn bonuses every month from ONPASSIVE, they would never have to recharge the credit from out of their pocket once they have purchased this application.

Self confession

I admit to being negative until 1994 when Gen Sanni Abacha upset my apple cart. I was director of publications/Editor-in-chief of The Guadian newspaper. Gen Abacha shut it for one year on claims of anti-government publications. I had three school age children and a wife to look after. She worked as an academic at the Lagos State University (LASU) which was on ASUU strike, one of the longest ever, during which she earned no pay. I was on half pay, and had to sell egg, chewing stick, ice block and palm oil, largely to mallams, for survival. I was helped by the story of Bhudah, the Prince who lost his throne and became a happier and more successful person as a truck pusher and snake charmer in foreign lands. Whenever I lost a customer or two, I had sleepless nights. Then, one day, the thought occured to me that there were more than 180 million Nigerians. Why should I be unable to sleep over one or two of them? I learned to pray to be connected to persons who needed my services. Mrs. Beatrice Oloyede, one of my family friends since then, introduced me to piggery. In under one year, I raised about 300 pigs and piglets. I sold about 300 crates of eggs every week to mallams who sell bread and tea at road junctions. I bought vegetable from farms and sold them to market women. I sold honey from Obudu Town and from Ago Are, near Shaki. I began to sell herbs, starting with Patminger, Bitterleaf, Vervain and Lemon grass which I grew in the backyard of my residence. Whenever I took my children back to their boarding house at Kankon Model College, after Badagry, I picked up coconut which I sold in the Lagos Market. What did I not sell? I learned from this experience that the average Nigerian worker needed a second stream of income. Many people are inwardly immobile or are too status concious to make them explore survivalism in the informal market. My children were never sent home on account of school fees. We ate whatever we desired and to cap it all, I began to build a house before General Abacha released The Guardian newspaper from under his jack boot.

How well prepared are we for six bone-breaking battles in Nigeria’s economy between President Bola Tinubu and business mafias who are sucking the country and us dry? We said in 2015 and 2019 that we wanted change. But that change never came as we expected because President Muhammadu Buhari either didn’t know what change was all about or he was too weak or afraid to wage wars in the economy against mafias that were strangulating the country. That was why many Nigerans were thrilled that President Bola Ahmed Tinubu declared six bone-breaking “wars” in his inaugural speech on May 29, 2023. They saw him as a brave man who knew his way around the economy and who will not give up any battle until, to quote Williams Shakespeare, ” The hurly burly is over, (and) the battle is won and lost”.   

Soon, I will outline the “wars”, President Tinubu has declared on troublesome mafias in the economy. I believe the “friendly fires” will be temporary, like the pains of a woman in labour in the labour room and that the end of each battle, like the arrival of a new baby, a bundle of miracle and joy, will bring beautiful, broad smiles on our faces. Meanwhile, we will have to guard our health, because tearing away from the past, like tearing away from an attachment, is not an easy experience. How well we would survive it all will depend on our capacities for adaptation to changing and adverse situations. In nature, all animals adapt to changing environments. We all know the chameleon does this well. The bat cannot fly during the day because sunlight is too bright for its eyes. So, it adapts to night life. I study the snails in the snail cage in my small house garden. When the sun is scorching, they either  cover themselves  with a protective secretion which calcifies, bouncing back the hot race, or burrow into the soil to hibernate until  weather conditions become more favourable. If I wet their habitation or rain falls upon it, they come out of their hiding places and carry on with their lives. Human beings have a higher capacity for adaptation and, worldwide, Nigerians have become well known as one of the most adaptive humans on our earth. Do we not leave a country well bathed in tropical sunshine for terribly cold countries and, nevertheless, adroitly and beautifully survive?

Before I come to the outlines, I wish to advise that all of us, including the president himself, pay more than passing attention to our health. Bitterness over the changing environment in which we live will not solve our problems. It may give us headaches, sleepless nights, hypertension, heart and blood vessel diseases, stroke, heart failure, fear, anxiety and even depression. Do not be suprised if sudden deaths at this time are related to pathological hatred for the man in the driver’s seat, that is the president and whatever are the achievements in the economy he is making. When you hear some people speak, you easily recognise that they have not woken from the slumber of the elections and do not realise or believe we have a new president. President Tinubu will be under severe work pressure. Nerve wracking will be the several meetings he will have to hold in the first 100 days of his administration to properly establish the vision and to guard the sail. The soup plate receives the soup in its bowel, not on its buttocks, a Yoruba adage says. This will make him need brain and nerve food supplements. He will need to avoid heavy meals because they will drain more blood to the stomach and intestine and leave less for the brain, the eyes, the ears and the nerves which will be under severe pressure at this time. I do not know what his diet is like. He and his chef may wish to advise themselves of what astronauts eat in space, where no cooking is done, and they return to the earth often fresher and as energetic as  they left it.

Read Also: Subsidy: Use fund to boost health, power

Mafia wars

I anticipate six mafia wars in the economy.

1)The subsidy mafia may exploit temporary hardships to forment trouble that will get the President off its back, and return the nation to subsidy days. Already, the Nigerian Labour Congress (NLC) has brought a bird out of its pocket. Time will tell on which side it stands. The President has explained his own vision. What is the NLC vision for generating income to service national debts, raise salaries and wages, while economic development is simultaneously funded. Or is it merely rabble rousing, playing to the gallery? Is the NLC unaware of the Petroleum Industry Act ( PIA) which forbids subsidy? Where was the NLC when former President Mohammadu Buhari was signing the Petroleum Industry Bill ( PIB) into law?  Why is it now crying wolf when the law is running its course? Does the NLC want President  Tinubu to break the law? What the NLC should do is give us its own counter plan for funding  the economy. We should  examine both and decide on which is better. In a general nationwide strike, many persons the NLC claims to be defending may die because there may be no doctors in hospitals. There may be no foodstuff in the market. There may be no money in the pockets of people who live by the daily income. Robberies may erupt. Are these and more like them what we want? Former President Obasanjo who had not left any president who succeeded him in peace must be lurking around in the shadows for a pound of President Tinubu’s flesh. Tinubu has outclassed Obasanjo as a politician on no fewer than three serious occasions. Obasanjo is unlikely to give up another fight with him. To the mafia, human blood is like water and human life like chicken life when it comes to protecting their interest, irrespective of whether the members are top dignitaries in the church or in the mosque.

2) A single foreign exchange market ordered by the President will eliminate the black market, affect its operators. At bedtime everyday and on rising in the morning, will they pray for their ouster in the economy? What about Nigerians  abroad who send token foreign currency home in exchange for humongous sums in naira with which they are striving to gain a better and stronger foothold in the economy, investing especially in real estate, the sub sector which hardly depreciates? They may not like appreciation of the naira. So will Central Bank and commercial Bank officials who round trip foreign currency to the currency black market.

3) The Chinese who export electricity generators to Nigeria, like Nigerian  businessmen in this market, including former presidents who are said to own electricity distribution companies, will not enjoy the President’s moves to double electricity production and streamline the industry

4) The Chinese and the Indians will not enjoy the President’s plans to bring back the marketing boards. They are involved  in illegal mining and export of solid minerals, and  in  purchasing  produce and other raw materials from hinterland farmers at rediculous peanut prices. The marketing boards will legally displace them and pay farmers better. The Chinese, in particular, are eyeing Africa for settlements for their excess population, and are quietly achieving this in Nigeria. They come into Nigeria, looking haggard and hungry. They do all businesses poor Nigerians do, including   sewing and selling of Yoruba agbada  and sokoto  and, in no time, begin to look robust and healthier. How will the Chinese and the Indians respond to the marketing boards?:

5) Nigeria’s security architecture will be reformed as part of “institutional reforms”.  This will involve many decisions including stoppage of the theft of crude oil for illegal export. Will the mafia like it?

6) One million jobs are coming into the digital economy for young persons. But it may derail “old cargoes” who may be unable to cope with the technology of artificial intelligence.So, one job may  come several may go.

Oil subsidy

Arguments for the abolition of oil subsidy are simple. Nigeria spends 96 percent of its national income to service its national debt. This leaves only four per cent of the national income for maintaining the economy and for developing it or making it bigger. But what can four percent of the national income do? Infrastructure are to be built. Salaries and wages are to be paid. The labour unions are asking for bigger national minimum wage. Doctors,like university teachers, soldiers and policemen, other uniformed forces, even civil servants, are asking for more pay. Children are to be kept in school. Security, of life and property, is down. Electricity failure is rampant. Hospital equipment and services are obsolete. The Nation is training doctors and losing them to other countries. Nurses and information technology folks are leaving as well. Crude oil is stolen from pipelines and shipped abroad. Where are the security forces? The crude oil refineries have been incapacitated for decades. So, we have to ship crude oil abroad at huge transport and insurance cost, refine it abroad and bring it back home . The difference in the cost of crude refined at home and the crude sent abroad and brought back is what vampires in the oil industry call subsidy, to stabilise pump price as if nothing happened. But why could the refineries not be fixed? Is it not because the ants which eat up the vegetable is right in the root stalk of the vegetable?

When former President Muhammadu Buhari was ill in a foreign hospital, former Vice President Yemi Osibajo tried to solve the national income problem before it got this bad. As acting President, he went round the country and approved modular refineries, since it appeared Nigeria was unwilling to make its old and dysfunctional refineries to work. Modular refineries held great hope for the abolition of petroleum subsidy and freeing whatever money was involved for other uses in the economy. Without elaborate refineries, the Ibos refined crude oil during the Nigerian civil war , using crude machinery. Many people were also “illegally” refining crude oil along the coast line in the Buhari days. Osibajo’s approval of the modular refineries was greeted with jubilation. But as soon as Buhari returned to Abuja, hail and hearty, he àbolished Osibajo’s approvals, perhaps under captivity of the mafias of which his wife, Aisha, once publicly warned him.

The argument over whether there is subsidy or if subsidy is a scam must be over 30 years old. Today, subsidy is estimated at about 400 billion naira every month.  I recall my days as Editor of The Guardian newspaper from (1988 ). Mr. Lade Bonuola was the Editor-in-Chief .Doctor Stanley Macebu was Managing Director and Dr Tunji Dare, Editorial Page  Editor. At different times, Dr Macebuh and Dr Dare were Chairman of the Editorial Board. A recurring decimal in the newspapper’s editorial opinion  before I left in 1999 as the Director of Publications/Editor-in- Chief  was the  question of whether subsidy existed in the pump price of petrol. The Guardian always took the position that none existed.  Whenever The Guardian lit the fire, the NNPC would attempt to douse the storm in the public place through attempts to shift opinion on its side in other newspapers. Soon, the NNPC penetrated The Guardian‘s editorial board and would have gotten away with it but for the alertness of Dr Dare. In one of his pro-subsidy campaigns, the NNPC generated an article which it forwarded to its friends and subsidy believers in many newspapers. On The Guardian, the opinion of an editorial board member may be different from that of the newspaper and was sacrosanct. This meant that the chairman of the Editorial Board or the editorial Page Editor could not reject it except on the grounds of poor grammar, potential to cause public disorder, defamation, libel or sedition potential etc. So, the NNPC article in reference could have easily sailed through The Guardian as a favourable counter opinion to the newspaper’s anti-subsidy opinion. Dr  Dare discovered that the article he was editing was a word- for-word replication of the same article he had read in other newspapers under the names of different authors. So,the NNPC had planted the article on the newspaper industry and on the Guardian. Doctor Dare threw  the article out of  The Guardian. The purpoted author was a visiting member of the  editorial board from the university of Ibadan. He protested to  the highest authorities the  spiking of his opinion article, claiming the right to be different from the newspaper. For a while, ethnicity was read into Dr Dare’s decision. But all dowse cleared when it became clear that the NNPC may have bought over the author. Accordingly, he honourably resigned his appointment .

The NNPC has not relented since then in telling the succeeding government, including  former President Buhari’s, to subsidise the pump price of petrol which, every year, runs into trillions of naira debt the government owes the NNPC. The irony here is that Nigeria’s economy depends on crude oil sales to the tune of more than 90 per cent. The NNPC sells the crude, removes its overheads and gives the rest to the government to run the economy. But when the NNPC always sells below it’s cost profile to the public using its profit as subsidy, there is nothing left to give the government. That was why the NNPCL, now a limited liability company, will announce recently that the Buhari government owes it thrillions of naira in debt. Now, what does President Bola Tinubu do in this circumstance? Carry on as usual, incurring humongous foreign debts like former President Buhari to repay old debts and manage to build some infrastructure, or courageously break the old cycle, part ways with it and restart the Nigerian economy on a healthier footing? Some critics have said he should not have announced subsidy abolition without first discussing it with stake holders. Is he expected as a general going to war to first declare to enemies of his country his intention to wage wars on them and even announce the date and time? That would be foolish. General Ibrahim Babangida as military president did that in respect of Nigeria’s naval assault on Monrovia to protect the delapitating government of Samuel Doe against invading rebel Charles Taylor. I was shocked when I heard the pre invasion alert from Mammam Yusuf, then Chief Press Secretary of the Chief of General Staff (CGS) Augustus Aikhomu during an Editors’ briefing at Doddan barracks, then the seat of power in Lagos. This was because one of the first lessons in journalism is that troop movements are never revealed. The Nigerian Navy did not land in Liberia as announced. Charles Taylor moved in ahead of the landing, captured many of the Nigerians who took refuge in the Nigerian embassy, including The Guardian’s Krees Imodibie and The Champion’s Tayo Awotusin, and killed them in reprisal for the expected invasion. Has the old style of prior discussions with the oil mafias not brought the nation on its knees thus far? Who will be told he or she is to be beheaded and would not like to do something about it?

President Tinubu must have his game plan. I believe modular refineries are coming. Former Vice President Yemi Oshibajo saw the modular refineries as a possible answer to the  subsidy suffocation. That was why, as Acting President, he approved some of them.

The battle over petroleum subsidy is the battle over who, between President Tinubu and the petroleum industry mafia, will keep N400 billion he is taken away from them every month. His inaugural speech promised institutional reforms. My understanding of this is that all institutions of state must change their ways and means to fit into a new order. The oil industry mafia returned the fire. The bottom line of this battle is: Should a few thousand Nigerians  keep this money or should the government  pump it into public projects with multiplier effects? The mafia shot itself in the foot. The president said oil subsidy will go from July. But the fuel stations began to shut down or to hoard petrol or to sell  five times above official price from  May 29 , one clear month away from July. So, the president met them on their own turf by resetting the timing to one month backwards and beating them in their own game. For the opposition parties which are still seeking relevance in the political space, the long fuel queues and the financial pain of public bus users has provided opportunities to knock the president, as if they, too, did not promise an end to petroleum subsidy during the campaigns. It is interesting, though, that the public saw through the scenarios and squarely blamed petroleum marketers for gluttony and mischief.