The custom in most African societies forbid whistling at night. Man is presumed to exercise dominion only over day. The ungodly hours are, in turn, conceded to dark creatures and fearsome principalities. So, it is thought that any unnatural sound may arouse the wrath of the gods of the night, thereby rupturing the harmony and balance of the social space.

In folklore, deviants of this ancestral norm are characterized as a curse on the community.

But to be sure, these are not to be mistaken for the loftier characters in Salman Rushdie’s magic-realist novel, Midnight Children. The magical exploits of Rushdie’s own fictive Saleem bear striking semblance with postcolonial India in turmoil. Though losing his power of telepathy after a medical procedure, Saleem instead gains a powerful sense of smell.

However, unlike the sometimes transformative magic of Rushdie’s incarnation, the midnight children in the referenced African fable revel in mischief, malice and pettiness.

In contemporary Nigeria, no one presents a more compelling parallel than All Progressive Congress. On the eve of its supposed hour of glory, the ruling party is in the news across the federation for the wrong reasons – troubles stirred by its own mutation of the metaphorical midnight children, increasingly constituting a nightmare to the nation at large.

So, even as resolute mother APC seeks to forge ahead in the communal market, her preoccupation now partly seems how to rein the wayward hands of the child on her back into the girdle, lest they scatter the merchandise on display sideways.

Nowhere is this anxiety better dramatized than Ogun where people have been forced to watch the comic folly of the Governor Ibikunle Amosun seeking to hide behind a finger. Though still wearing APC colours, it is open secret that the departing Ogun governor is funding the cases of all APM candidates at the election tribunal against APC members – from those elected into the state assembly to the governor-elect.

Still, bitterness over the defeat of his anointed (Adekunle Akinlade) by Dapo Abiodun in the last governorship polls has turned Amosun to a squirrel digging holes all over Abeokuta, curiously on the eve of his exit. And whenever he bites his own finger to ventilate that seething rage, his anger is probably compounded realizing that what hits him back instead is physical pain and that no blood drips from the swollen bite-mark.

When Abiodun’s people protested the festering plague of holes in Abeokuta, Amosun told another cheap lie to defend the first one. The man with the distinctive machete cap or “Fila-defia” (a jocular allusion to America’s Philadelphia city of highrises, “fila” being Yoruba word for hat) said he was only sprucing the state capital up ahead of the visit by President Muhammadu Buhari to commission his legacy projects, as well as prepare the grounds for the subsequent inauguration of the governor-in-waiting on May 29.

If that was the sincere intention, you would expect that drab walls be painted anew and gaping potholes filled instead. But in Amosun’s warped logic, you dig holes to make a city more alluring.

Worse, while the governor’s towncriers were busy parroting that spin last weekend in response to public outcry, they did not seem to realize that what was left unsaid showcased them in squalid lights. One, transition of this nature is supposed to be a collaboration between officials of the outgoing administration and nominees of the incoming. Instead, magisterial Amosun was said to have made public buildings and vehicles inaccessible to the committee raised by Abiodun to midwife his inauguration. Besides, not a single kobo was said to have been made available by the Amosun administration for Abiodun’s team to work with.

So desperate have matters become that Abiodun’s people have had to make contigency arrangements on some necessities. For instance, this writer reliably gathered that his team had to travel to Osun State to borrow an open-back jeep for the customary parade at the inauguration. Since Amosun has continued to hold tight to Ogun’s, insisting on deploying same for an elaborate “pull-out” ceremony he was arranging for himself on May 28.

Apart from digging craters, Amosun’s mischievous caterpillars were also reportedly deployed to either crack the soil in some communities or cannibalize the royal institutions across Ogun. In a desperate craving for public applause, the governor was also sighted performing “flag-off” rites for road projects amid dancing and praise-singing by paid drummers in a mindlessly elaborate exercise in public deceit barely a week to his departure! Of course, everyone knows that even the drivers of the emergency earthmovers would soon leave with Amosun.

While such ground-breaking event may soon be forgotten, not so with the royal gerrymandering Amosun has inflicted. No fewer than 73 chiefs who had lent themselves to Amosun as political hirelings were unilaterally upgraded to Oba status without due consultation in what is widely seen as a vicious slap on the Alake of Egbaland and the Awujale of Ijebuland. So, it is obvious that the incoming Abiodun administration will be inheriting a royal crisis.

In Zamfara, it is a case of shortlived revelry. Fumbling Governor Abdulaziz Yari would be made to realize rather too late the limit of the power of American dollars. Under him, the ruling party has made history as the one who supposedly won landslide victory at the polls but denied the trophy eventually.

The story we heard initially was that the state chapter of the ruling party failed to meet INEC’s deadline for primaries. When told this bitter truth, the deluded emperor in turn threatened to literally plunge everyone standing in his way to foisting all his stooges on Zamfara into the grave, not excluding himself.

First resorting to the sorcery of a cartel of shifty judges, Yari pushed himself over the first hurdle by securing assorted “black-market” court orders. Then, he fell for the sweet tongues of some Ponzi conmen lurking around Abuja. The whiff of American dollars in uncountable sacks apparently proved too irresistible at the party headquarters. In fact, the fixers with itchy fingers and wearing necklace made of glutton’s teeth hardly thought twice before surrendering the entire booklet of party tickets to the dollars Sheik from Gusau.

But just when Yari probably began to visualize Zamfara in his grotesque image beyond the midnight of May 28 (when his second tenure would end), came the rude shocker from Supreme Court last weekend pronouncing a regicide of sorts against all those elected on APC platform in the last general elections. In what could only have been inspired by a sense of sardonic humour, the court further slapped him with a fine of N10m (American dollars?).

With that, Yari’s earlier bluster to dispense political euthanasia freely would now seem to have partly turned a self-fulfillig prophesy.

Yari’s career bofoonery is perhaps only matched by Rochas Okorocha’s epic fawning in Imo State. For a man who rode to power eight years ago chanting “Rescue Mission”, how ironic that he himself is ending at the terminus politically wounded, his political empire in utter disarray, after a failed experiment at monarchism (“iberiberism”?).

While a sulking Okorocha would today lament a high conspiracy against him, what he would not admit is that he was actually outbidded in the sleazy bazaar camouflaged as party primaries last October, from where the rain truly began to beat him. As the popular account goes, someone supplied four times the amount of American dollars Okorocha allegedly offered to have his son-in-law made APC candidate in the governorship polls.

Now, aside the eternal shame of not having his son-in-law succeed him as governor after all the public boast, Okorocha faces additional trauma of a hostile take-over of the Douglas House with EFCC Rottweilers already barking ferociously at the gates.

In Oyo, we are listening to the bitter ending of the “Koseleri” panegyrics. When Abiola Ajimobi took over in 2011, workers jubilated. But he is leaving office amid labour strike. Being the first to win a second term democratically after a long succession of governors apparently got him so intoxicated as to arrogantly proclaim himself “the constituted authority” when some poor students heckled him for a more humane administration of their institution. Those still in doubt were taken into the literary appreciation of the term, “Koseleri” (it has never happened before).

But beaten silly in the subsequent polls and apparently afraid history might not remember him afterall, Ajimobi has embarked on perhaps the most bizarre pursuit of self-validation – a cynical attempt at self-immortalization. By not seeing any shame in rushing to name a major street after himself in Ibandan few days to his exit, Ajimobi has only ended up portraying himself as another incurably insecure megalomaniac seeking to preempt the verdict of the posterity.

In Lagos, sadly, Akinwunmi Ambode appears too traumatized, too disoriented by the loss of second term ticket last October to sustain his earlier presence of mind and finish strong. Nothing perhaps tells the tale of his diminished shadow better than the staccato of discordant tunes around his last days.

The magnificence of the new Oshodi bus interchange is, for instance, tainted by the side-talk that what President Buhari commissioned in April was a half-completed job. The allure of a section of the International Airport Road reconstructed is, in turn, smeared by the deepening squalor of the equally important Lagos-Badagry expressway. So much that last week, thousands of protesting residents of the axis poured onto the now famished road completely forsaken in the past four years.

Again, the transformation of Epe to a scenic wonder is contrasted by the continuing degradation of Apapa today. Added to that is a rather disturbing and yet undischarged allegation of squandering a staggering N49b of taxpayers’ money on the eve of Ambode’s exit from power.

Everything considered, it will, therefore, not be incorrect to say that these midnight children of APC are exiting the stage not in a blaze of glory, but with the whimper of a broken whistle.

It is perhaps a measure of the ethical pestilence ravaging the land today that Cecilia Ibru too has suddenly recovered her voice to rail and rant against beleaguered Sanusi Lamido Sanusi, the mercurial but gravely flawed emir of Kano.

Breaking a decade silence in a Punch interview at the weekend, the grandma once glorified as the “Amazon” of the nation’s banking world, would have us believe that she fell on SLS’s sword in 2009 because the then Central Bank governor saw her as “threat” to his job.

In the said interview, Madam Ibru sounded more like the victim of a Herodian persecution. Nowhere in her jeremiad was there the slightest hint of contrition or remorse after what had otherwise been conclusively established as perhaps one of the most gripping tales of corporate heist, incest and debauchery ever seen within living memory in Nigeria.

Covering herself with the sectarian shawl of “born again” all along could not deliver her from the EFCC purgatory. She, in fact, caused the holy temple monumental unease when part of the diverted funds was tracked there.

To now sound so self-righteous, Madam Ibru must be assuming the entire nation suffers collective amnesia. While we are not in a position to confirm or disprove her claims of personal vendetta, there is however no denying her guilt in helping herself to depositors’ funds in Oceanic Bank. Otherwise, why did she enter a plea bargain with EFCC then to forfeit some of the loot while retaining a generous morsel, obviously to help her cushion the trauma of a forced retirement?

Lurking further down the archipelago of ironies is the insecure Governor of Kano State, Abdullahi Ganduje. How ironic that the punitive step against the errant Kano emir was orchestrated by a supposed moral cripple now perching on a fragile gubernatorial stool.

Yes, the man presently immersed in an enterprise as portentous as balkanizing the once single sprawling Kano emirate rooted in antiquity is ironically the same Ganduje whose mandate from the last election surely hangs precariously by a thread on account of a marginal win now subject of litigation.

Yes, the same Ganduje, around whose bulging pockets a horde of purulent flies have, despite thunderous official denial and lavish deodorization, continued to buzz suggestively over alleged hefty dollar bribes from some conniving government contractors.

What then sadly makes the emerging Kano story more of a fable of villains without any hero is that Sanusi himself inadvertently dug his own political grave. The undertakers apparently arrived last week with a hurriedly contrived law creating four new districts, bringing the emirates to five in what relives the haunting memory of a similar executive coup by a vengeful Abubakar Rimi against “recalcitrant” Ado Bayero in the second republic.

To further load the dark clouds against SLS, an extant probe has also been reopened to inquire into alleged mismanagement of N6b fund belonging to the emirate in oiling a lifestyle bordering on prodigality and ostentation, contradicting the very sermon of lofty principles he likes preaching in the public arena.

But in all of this, only the incurably naive would follow the insurgency Sanusi had more or less launched from the numbing comforts of the royal chamber soon after coronation five years ago and recklessly sought to sustain against the political establishment in Kano and lately the ruling party at the centre, and still wallow in the delusion that he could have survived much longer in that career of insolence without getting hit.

First, on account of their commission and induction, royal fathers (how much more of the first-class species) are supposed to be seen more and not heard in the public arena. In case Sanusi was ever in doubt, he should by now have realized that, regardless of the romanticization to the contrary by local tradition, the republican constitution clearly designates them as subordinated to local council authorities. One, their compensation packages salaries are drawn from the council treasury. A fact now triumphalist Ganduje, who had endured the humiliation of publicly carrying cement pan on his head to seduce voters on the eve of the dicey supplementary poll, has rubbed in by saying Sanusi should be reporting to the council chairman and not the Government House in Kano.

In a post which trended in the social media shortly after the tumultuous week of long knives in Kano, someone joked that Sanusi’s flowing Agbada had thus been reduced to a waist-coat – a poignant innuendo at his trademark close-fitting three-piece suit with conspicuous bow-tie while still in the corporate world. Perhaps, what remains to be added now is that his foliage of turban too has, by the same token, been adapted to an austere handkerchief.

Obviously, Sanusi’s tragic flaw from outset was assuming he could continue his activist hobby in an institution statutorily structured to be reticent in the modern political order. Nothing in his sustained garrulity and feisty disposition on the throne suggested he ever learnt any lesson from his earlier summary dismissal as CBN governor under the Jonathan administration after making public a disclosure of missing billions of dollars in oil receipts that unmasked his then employer as nothing short of a common bandit.

True, such iconoclasm would really sound populist, even patriotic. Just like his claims sometime ago that some fat cats sitting in high places in Abuja were making a kill weekly by allegedly coaxing the CBN governor to allocate a sizable amount of dollars to them at concessionary rate which was then round-tripped in the black market at a premium. Not forgetting also his righteous indignation expressed following reports of shameless trafficking and racketeering in APC tickets for American dollars in the last convoluted primaries.

But regardless, Sanusi ought to have known that, as a “public officer” himself (since he draws salaries from public purse), there would be consequences. Populism has its own peril. Given his own unique circumstance, SLS could, therefore, only be cultivating martyrdom. With the official clipping of his wings last week, the flamboyant hell-raiser from the ancient Kanuri megapolis should have realized that it is not always granted that he who volunteers his head to crack open the communal coconut will still be in a conscious state to partake of the consequential feast.

In hindsight, it would now seem that nice as Sanusi’s activism might have appeared or sounded, the motive was nonetheless self-serving. He clearly showed too much of a partisan hand in the recklessly open flirtation with his old benefactor, Rabiu Kwankwaso of PDP, in the titanic battle for Kano’s political soul in the last general elections. So, it could then be said that the truths told were for the wrong reasons.

His loyalty to Kwankwaso was obviously in appreciation of the extraordinary role the latter played as sitting governor in 2014 in directing the process that led to his selection as emir. But like all lotteries, Sanusi should know that his stake would go down with his failed candidate in the Kano sweepstake. Quite uncharacteristically, he started sounding reconciliatory after Ganduje was declared winner like a frightened child, perhaps now sensing the ominous presence of political swordsmen at the palace gate.

No surprise then that, once news filtered in that APC won the supplementary election days after the cliffhanger of March 9, Ganduje’s supporters who had endured sleepless nights reportedly started their celebration by first smashing Sanusi’s official portrait hung in the State House.

In the final analysis, it may yet be premature to term Ganduje’s action as fait accompli. Similar step against Bayero by Rimi was eventually reversed by the succeeding administration. Should power change hands tomorrow in Kano, there is a high possibility that the new ruling party may want to undo what Ganduje has done. But ultimately, it is the traditional authority as a sacred institution that gets diminished by this game of thrones.

John Galbraith characterized the affluent society in part as the showpiece of the promise of capital in the post-industrial age. Once normalcy had been restored to America’s economic climate after the Great Depression of the 1930s on account of optimized production cementing her prestige as the wealthiest nation on earth, the acutely perceptive scholar often hailed as the “father of liberal economics in America” noted that certain indulgences would be inevitable.

It was no longer enough to just get employed to afford a roof over your head and two cars in the garage for the family; the new average American worker would also prefer a job that brings more personal fulfillment in the overarching pursuit of pleasure.

For most folks, there was a new shared sense of contentment in that the rising economic tide lifted their individual boats.

Futuristically, Galbraith then postulated that what would be expected of the state is to foster social balance by deploying fiscal and monetary policies with a view to bridging the gulf of inequalities. Of course, the policy option pursued by the presiding political party is a direct reflection of its own core values.

Against the backcloth of the recent discovery in Nigeria of a vast tribe of mute billionaires across the country with vast fortunes locked down in bank vaults (a good number with little or no visible source of income), Galbraith’s theoretical template would then sound more like a vacuous abstraction here indeed.

The shock find was enabled by technology. Working with banks and other financial institutions, the Federal Inland Revenue Service (FIRS) reported that these stinkingly rich Nigerians had always operated outside the tax net. But with BVN, it is very easy these days to track who owns what figures anywhere in the banks. The code of anonymity is thus broken.

As the story goes, several hundreds of such accounts had cumulative turn-over in billions of naira without evidence of the owners paying any form of tax.

Even on ethical grounds, the question of the affluent evading tax can never be excused. Nothing could be more provocative, more unfair to relatively less well-off ordinary workers in both public and private sectors made to part with a chunk of their wages in PAYEE (Pay As You Earn) monthly. Their plight provides a perfect illustration of the proverbial dysfunctional trap that catches small preys and lets the big ones escape.

It is, therefore, very doubtful if the nation’s proletarian class who had borne the tax burden over the years would object to any crackdown FIRS might be plotting on the secret billionaires in the times ahead.

Indeed, under Tunde Fowler, FIRS has shown more efficiency in haunting tax evaders. It probably explains why figures generated by the service has almost doubled within three years (from N3 trillion in 2016 to N4 trillion in 2017 and N5.3 trillion in 2018) at a time when the national economy was supposed to be contracting due to the severe recession of 2014/2015.

Even more significant is that the revenue has averaged a ratio of 40 percent to oil sector and 60 percent to non-oil receipts during the period, indicating the potential of the national economy beyond perennial over-reliance on the oil mineral.

Well, only those unfamiliar with the story of Lagos in the last two decades would be entirely surprised at the recent quantum leap in FIRS’ returns. The same Fowler was the architect and enforcer of the blueprint that grew Lagos’ IGR (internal generated revenue) from a paltry N600 million in 1999 to N8 billion by 2007 and N20 billion by 2015.

So, the prodigious “Lagos boy” would now seem to have found a wider canvass to express himself, deploying technology to plug leakages and cut costs.

But while Abuja would be too glad to have Fowler rake in more trillions in the years ahead to sustain its voracious consumption, the enduring challenge remains: how do we dismantle the monstrosity of a rentier system that had aided and abetted a thousand billionaires to game the system without paying tax for so long?

We cannot, in good conscience, attempt to answer this question without first addressing the issues of disincentives to local production.

Of course, among the referenced nocturnal rich would be found career middlemen and emergency briefcase contractors who exploit access to political power to make cheap money which, in turn, is warehoused as fixed deposits in banks in the mindless quest for double rents.

They become rich not necessarily by producing like Dangote. By amassing wealth without labour, they stand guilty of one of the seven deadly “social sins” identified by Mahatma Gandhi. Not paying tax only doubles the iniquity. For, in the classical definition of economics, tax is supposed to be the primary oxygen that nourishes the society.

So, the idle rich and rent-seekers are like leeches. Their lack of exertions by not engaging in the production of goods or services robs the society of the basis to levy tax, thereby denying an opportunity to foster the sort of “social balance” Galbraith mooted.

Part of Nigeria’s own distortion is graphically reflected by the revenue distribution itself. According to statistics, Lagos accounts for a whopping seventy percent of the N5.3 trillion generated by FIRS in the 2018 financial year.

To accept the foregoing figure without question is to endorse the fiction that such represents a true picture of wealth creation or potential in the country. Of course, this is not true. The other states have potentials to create wealth and add to the common pool. For those with comparable advantage in agriculture, for instance, opportunities available for processing in the value chain remain largely unexploited.

But without FIRS continuing to push the frontiers elsewhere, we will never be in a position to know what is available to tax. And without working to bring a semblance of parity to what everyone brings to the table, Lagos will continue bemoan gross injustice since it does not get seventy percent share of the tax earnings at the end of each month.

Overall, to an extent, it is however difficult to blame the secret billionaires reluctant to invest their fortune in production in an environment where critical factors like energy are not guaranteed. This affliction accounts for the rapid de-industrialization of the nation in the past four decades.

Also, the worsening security situation across the land that has forced most companies involved in field operations to factor in the cost of hiring vigilante or militia men for protection, compounds an already bad situation.

Indeed, billions of dollars sunk into the electricity sector in the last two decades is yet to deliver stable power in Nigeria, leaving a nation of 200 million population with less than 7,000 megawatts. On top of its notoriety as the biggest importer of refined petroleum products despite being the sixth largest oil producer, the country is also arguably now the largest market in the world for generator marketers on account of epileptic electricity supply.

Truth be told, there is no way goods manufactured in Nigeria can compete favorably with those imported in view of present prohibitive costs of running generators as alternate power source. Were light stable, for most entrepreneurs, production costs would be down by at least fifty percent.

Vice President Yemi Osinbajo, therefore, struck the right chord in his last Workers Day address by admitting that the deficit in the energy sector constitutes a major clog in the wheel of Buharinomics. Of course, that is putting the nuisance of nation’s rickety DISCOs today mildly.

A decade ago, part of the promise of the power sector reforms was greater efficiency. But the Jonathan administration only succeeded in making a mockery of the privatization exercise as cronyism, rather than competence, became the sole criterion for signing the power distribution franchise away. So, wheeler-dealers who knew little or nothing about even mere cable now found themselves managing the complexity of power distribution. Hence, the disaster the nation has witnessed since.

Indeed, the first critical step to re-industrializing the nation is fixing the energy sector. Only then will there be more opportunities for sales tax more than income or property tax, as Galbraith had proposed for the sustenance of the affluent society.

Some inconvenient facts are invariably being exposed by the financial headwinds currently buffeting Wempco, the premier steel company owned by the Chinese. According to reports, a raft of policy reversals by the Nigerian government plunged the import-dependent multinational into the red such that several thousands of jobs are now threatened.

But the tabloid angle to the deepening adversity is the resolution by the gasping corporate titan to offload its pearl in the hospitality sector, the Oriental Hotel (a five-star resource nestling the Lekki side of the lagoon in Lagos) for a whopping $250m (N90b) to save the entire group from sinking.

For those addicted to media gossip, that revelation must have come as a rude shock indeed. For, part of the negative profiling of Asiwaju Bola Tinubu in the last twelve years by political adversaries is the consistent retailing of the false narrative that the hotel is his. Such reading seemed reinforced by the decision of the hotel management to name one of its lounges after the former Lagos governor at take-off.

So, overall, perhaps the few objects or spaces in Lagos whose ownership have not been traced to Tinubu yet would include the notable cemeteries and the Atlantic Ocean that straddles Lagos State.

In fact, when the for-sale tag was first sighted over the towering hotel on some online platforms soon after the recent general elections, the easy conclusion of the usually resourceful gossip media was a screaming headline that Jagaban, who was co-chairman of the Buhari Campaign, had become broke ipso facto. So, one of such platforms declared with authority, even if without investigation, that he had decided to auction the pleasure castle to regain his financial breath.

Oh! Maybe Jagaban’s forebears actually descended from a remote province in China and the folks at Wempco, who have been in business in Nigeria for forty years, are his alter ego after all.

Surely, a liar’s mouth never bleeds, as they say.